The Legacy (41 page)

Now, in an unfamiliar city, so tired she could barely think and with the ground still rolling beneath her feet, Caroline hefted the child higher in her arms and propped him against the smooth marble counter in the hotel lobby.

“I need a nursemaid,” she announced, with a note of panic in her voice. “My own has been laid low with some fever.” The man behind the counter, tall and thin with immaculate hair and clothing, inclined his head condescendingly at her, twitching one eyebrow at her accent. She knew she was creased and careworn, and that William smelt bad, but these facts only served to make her crosser with the hotelier.

“Very well, madam. I shall make inquiries,” he told her smoothly. Caroline nodded, and toiled up the stairs to her room. She bathed William in the porcelain bowl of the washstand, trying not to ruin the towels with the filth smearing his bottom and legs. He stopped crying as she washed him, and made small, happy noises, slapping his feet in the water. Clearing her raw throat, Caroline hummed a lullaby until he began to drowse. Her ears rang with the quiet left by his absent cries, and she held him tightly to her, still humming, forgetting everything else but the warmth of him, the trusting weight of him, as he slept. There was no more water to wash herself with, and she put William to sleep on the bed as she fruitlessly paced the corridors of the hotel in search of a maid to remove the foul water, and to ask about the possibility of a hot bath.

Later a woman came to the room, announcing herself with a quiet knock. She was plump and florid with pale, frizzy hair and grimy smears on her dress, but her eyes spoke of warmth and intelligence as she introduced herself as Mrs. Cox, and they lit up when they fell upon William.

“Is this the little chap in need of a nursemaid?” she asked. Caroline nodded and waved her forward to gather him up from the bed.

“Whereabouts in the hotel do you stay? In case I have need of you or the child?” Caroline asked.

“Oh, I’m not attached to the hotel, ma’am, although I have often been called upon to look after the young children of guests when they find themselves in unusual situations, like you, ma’am . . . I live with my own children and my husband not far from here in Roe Street. Mr. Strachen downstairs will always know where to find me, if you need him to. How long will you be needing me to watch him, ma’am?”

“I . . . I don’t know. I’m not sure yet. A couple of days, perhaps? A little longer . . . I’m not sure.” Caroline hesitated. Mrs. Cox’s face fell, but when Caroline paid in advance she smiled again, and was jouncing a startled-looking William merrily on her hip when she left with him not long afterwards. Caroline’s heart gave a sickening little lurch as William disappeared from view, but then a vast and numbing weariness pulled at her. She lay down on the bed in her dirty clothes and, with her stomach rumbling, fell instantly asleep.

The next day, wearing the cleanest, least creased clothes she could find in her bag, Caroline gave the slip of paper upon which Bathilda had written a Knightsbridge address to a cab driver and let him transport her there with all the quiet resolution of a person going with dignity to the scaffold. The house she arrived at was four storeys high and built of pale, gray stone clamped into a strict row of identical such houses with handsome, red front doors. Caroline reached for the doorbell. Her arm felt as heavy and stiff as the iron railings, and by the time her finger was near to its target it was trembling with the effort. But she rang it, and gave her name to the elderly housekeeper, who admitted her to a gloomy entrance hall.

“Please, wait here,” the housekeeper intoned, and moved away along the corridor at no great speed. Caroline stood as still as stone. She looked inside her head and found no thoughts at all. Nothing but an echoing space, hollowed out like a cracked and discarded nutshell.
Oh, Corin!
His name rushed into that space like a thunderclap. Reeling slightly, Caroline shook her head, and the emptiness returned.

Bathilda was fatter, and the hair at her temples was a brighter white, but other than that the two years since they had last met had wrought few changes upon her. She was occupying a brocaded couch with a cup of tea in her hand, and she stared at her niece in astonishment for several seconds.

“Good gracious, Caroline! I should never have known you if you weren’t announced!” she exclaimed at last, raising her eyebrows and adopting her old familiar
froideur
.

“Aunt Bathilda,” Caroline said in a quiet voice, quite tonelessly.

“Your hair is quite wild. And you’re so tanned! It’s disastrous. It does not suit you at all.”

Caroline accepted this criticism without blinking, saying nothing while Bathilda sipped her tea. She was aware of her heart beating, hard and slow, just like when they had brought Corin home from the coyote hunt. This was another kind of death, but a death all the same.

“Well, to what do I owe this honor? Where is that cow-herding husband of yours? Has he not joined you on this foreign expedition?”

“Corin is dead.” It was the first time she had said the words. The first time she had had to. Tears scalded her eyes. Bathilda absorbed this news for a moment and then she relented.

“Come and sit down, child. I’ll send for some more tea,” she commanded, in a softer tone of voice.

Bathilda soon took control of Caroline and seemed happy enough to do so now that the younger woman was meek and broken, and no longer defiant. Caroline went back to the hotel to collect her things that afternoon, and moved into a spare bedroom at the pale gray town house with the smart red door. She was introduced to the owner of the house, Bathilda’s cousin by marriage, Mrs. Dalgleish, who was thin and dry and wore a censorious look above a lipless mouth.

“Where is Sara?” Caroline asked hopefully.

Bathilda merely grunted. “The foolish girl has wed herself to a grocer. She left last year,” she said.

Caroline’s heart sank a little more. “Did she love him?” she asked wistfully. “Was she happy?”

“I really don’t know. Now, to the matter in hand,” her aunt swept on.

Bathilda took Caroline to the bank and arranged for her money to be transferred from her parents’ New York bank into an English account. She took Caroline shopping, accepting the story that all of her old clothes had been ruined on the ranch. They visited a hairdressing salon, where the rough ends and stray wisps of Caroline’s hair were trimmed and tamed and curled neatly against her head. She applied to a chemist for Sulpholine Lotion, which was wiped, stinging, over Caroline’s face and hands to bleach the tan from her skin. Fingernails were shaped and buffed, calluses worked from the skin with pumice stone. And, for the first time in over a year, Caroline’s tiny form was tied tightly into corsets once again.

“You are too thin,” Bathilda said, scrutinizing the end product of this beautification. “Was there no food, out in the wilderness?” Caroline was considering the answer to this when Bathilda continued. “Well, you are almost fit for society. You will have to remarry, of course. Two widows in this household are more than enough already. I know of just the gentleman, and he is in town now, to see the newest girls. A Baron, if you please—land-rich but cash-poor, and in need of an heir. He would make you a
lady
. . . from farmer’s wife to nobility in the space of a couple of months! What a resolution that would be!” Bathilda exclaimed, reaching out for Caroline’s shoulders and pulling them back a little straighter. “But, although he is not as young as once he was, he’s known to prefer fresh young things . . . not the world-weary widows of backwater cattlemen. It will be best if we do not mention to anyone your unfortunate first marriage. Can you do that? There’s no evidence to the contrary? Nothing you haven’t told me?” she asked, fixing Caroline with stern blue eyes.

Caroline took a deep breath. Words clamored to be spoken, and her pulse raced. But she knew that if she confessed to having brought a child with her, this new life Bathilda was building for her would fly apart like a mirage and she would instead have to remain in this agonizing present, with no chance of a more bearable future. She would have to remain with Bathilda, or alone, for ever. Neither could she stand. Caroline knew the answer she was expected to give, and she gave it. Biting down on her tongue to silence it, she shook her head. But when she raised her left hand and worked the wedding ring free, it left a perfect white band on her skin. She kept the ring in a closed fist and later slipped it into the satin lining of her vanity case, next to the photograph of herself and William.

The white band soon faded, kept hidden under satin and kid gloves until it was wholly invisible. Caroline met Lord Calcott at a reception that Bathilda took her to the following week, and she remained obedient and demure and nearly silent as he spoke and they danced and he looked at her with a heat in his eyes that left her cold inside. He was lightly built, not tall, perhaps forty-five years old, and he walked with a slight limp. His hair and moustache were speckled with gray amidst the dark, and his fingernails were neatly manicured. His hands left damp patches on her silk gowns when he held her waist to waltz. They met twice more, at a ball and a dinner party, in rooms stuffily heated against the late autumn chill. As they danced he asked her about her family, and her favorite pastimes, and how she liked London, and the English cuisine. Later he spoke to Bathilda and enquired after Caroline’s temperament, her lack of conversation, and her income. After one such evening she accepted his proposal of marriage with a nod of her head and a smile as fleeting as winter sun. He drove her back to Knightsbridge in a smart black carriage pulled by a team of four, and his goodnight kiss roamed from her cheek to her mouth, his hands shaking with rising lust.

“Darling girl,” he whispered hoarsely, pushing up her skirts and kneeling between her legs to shove his way inside her, so abruptly that she gasped in shock.
Do you see?
She hurled the anguished thought out, silently, to wherever Corin had gone:
Do you see what has happened because you left me?

C
aroline spent Christmas of 1904 with Bathilda and Mrs. Dalgleish, and she arranged to marry Henry Calcott late in February the following year. This time her engagement was properly announced, and a picture of the happy couple, taken at a celebratory ball, was published in
The Tatler
. As the wedding approached Caroline began to suffer from a consuming lassitude, the taste of copper in her throat, and a sickness in the mornings that made her long for the strong, cowboy coffee that Bathilda and her cousin considered too vulgar to keep in the house. Bathilda kept a stern eye on these developments.

“It seems the wedding won’t come a day too soon,” she commented one morning, as Caroline lay in bed, too dizzy and weak to rise. When the nature of her condition dawned upon her, Caroline was stunned.

“But . . . but I . . .” was all she managed to reply to her aunt, who raised an eyebrow and ordered beef tea for her, which she could not look at without gagging. Caroline remained still for several hours, and thought and thought, and tried not to see the clear implications of her pregnancy. For she was every bit as thin as she had been in Oklahoma Territory, if not thinner; and every bit as unhappy, indeed if not more so. The only thing that had changed was the man with which she lay.

S
torton Manor seemed unlovely to Caroline. It was grand, but graceless; the windows too stern to be beautiful, the stone too gray to be welcoming. The driveway had been colonized by leggy dandelions and couch grass, the paint was peeling from the front door and the chimney stack was missing several pots. Her money was much needed, Caroline realized. The staff lined up crisply to meet her, as if determined to outshine the shabbiness of the house. Housekeeper, butler, cook, parlor maid, chambermaid, scullery maid, groom. Caroline descended the carriage steps and swallowed back a threatened storm of weeping as she pictured the scruffy ranch hands who had lined up for her presentation to her first marital home.
And you left them
, she accused herself.
You just left them all without a word
. She smiled and nodded for each as Henry introduced them, and they in turn bobbed a curtsy to her, or made a short bow, muttering
Lady Calcott
in lowered voices. She took hold of her real name,
Caroline Massey
, and squeezed it tightly in her heart.

Later, walking around the broad sweep of the grounds, Caroline began to feel a little better; the snowstorm pieces of herself began to settle, just softly, into a kind of order. The air of the English countryside had a sweetness, a kind of soft greenness to it, even at the far end of winter. No clamor of city streets, horses, carts, or people; no empty prairie wind, or coyotes crying, or mile after unbroken mile of horizon. She was neither too hot, nor too cold. She could see the rooftops and smoke plumes of the village through the naked trees around the house, and it soothed her to know that within a moment’s walk there were lives, being lived. A swathe of bright daffodils lit up the far end of the lawn, and Caroline walked slowly through them, her hem brushing them flat and then springing them free again. She meditated on the emptiness of her mind, on the hollow feeling she couldn’t shake, but she allowed herself to think, just for a moment, that she was safe and could bear it all.