To Love and to Cherish (3 page)

“So! Tell me the news of my beloved old home. Holyoake’s still the bailey, is he?” Geoffrey reached again for the bottle.

“No, he died several years ago. Do you remember William, his son? He’s the bailiff now. He’s a good man, a hard worker; I think you’ll—”

“Excellent, then I can turn everything over to him.”

Christy frowned. “Then you don’t intend to stay?”

“Good God, no. Not for long, anyway. I’ve applied for a new army commission—didn’t I tell you? The worst mistake of my life was selling my captaincy last year. Well—” he grinned at his wife “—almost the worst. Should’ve borrowed the money I needed instead. Ah, but that’s all water under the bridge. Do you know what the Royal Commission wants for a lieutenant colonelcy in the Foot Guards these days? Nine thousand pounds—and that’s only the regulation fee; the real cost is closer to thirteen thousand. If dear Father has left me anything at all, I’ll be able to pay the thieves in Mayfair off, and with luck I should be on a ship sailing to the Black Sea within the month.”

This time Christy couldn’t hide his amazement. “You mean—to fight? You’d go as a
soldier
?”

“What the hell do you think I’d go as, a nurse?”

“But you—” He broke off awkwardly. “I beg your pardon. It’s just that I thought perhaps you’d been ill.”

“Oh, really? Do I look ill?” Belligerence flashed in his fierce black eyes. But he smoothed his hair back with one hand, and afterward it was as if he’d smoothed away his anger, too. “Actually, I’ve had a flare-up of an old plague of mine—malaria; got it in Basutoland in ’fifty-one, fighting the bloody natives. But I’m fine now, tip-top. Dear Anne takes such wonderful care of me, my bad spells never last long. Do they, sweeting?”

Everything Geoffrey said to his wife sounded like a subtle insult. Christy could feel the tension between them, volatile as a sparking fuse. He kept searching for a sign, a glimmer of the old Geoffrey in this gaunt, sardonic stranger, but twelve years had erased every one. His brittle geniality was a mask, and under it lay something dark and unwholesome.

As for Geoffrey’s wife, Christy wanted to stare at her until she made sense to him, fit into some category of womanhood he could check off and set aside, a mystery solved. She was lovely—but that was obvious; a quality much more arresting than beauty simmered under her apparently unlimited composure. It drew him in spite of the faint mockery in her eyes—he was sure now that it was mockery—whenever she intercepted his curious glance.

Geoffrey had collapsed on the sofa again, shoulders hunched, staring down into his drink; it was as if a light inside had gone out, so total was his withdrawal. Christy had to speak twice to get his attention. “I said I’ll make the arrangements for your father’s burial if you like, Geoffrey.”

“Yes, do,” he said carelessly. “Oh, are you leaving?” Christy had picked up his hat. “Don’t go.” He stood up, animated again, almost urgent. “Stay, can’t you?”

He hesitated. “Yes, all right. For a little while, if you want me to.”

“Good! Have a drink, then, for God’s sake. Let’s tie one on, Christy, just like old times. Remember the night my father was away in Tavistock, and you and I drank up all the gin the stable-boy had hidden in his tack? I’ve never seen anybody so drunk as you were that night. You wanted to ride that bay horse you had—what was his name?”

Christy grinned, abashed. “Piper.”

“Piper! You wanted to bring him in the house and see if he’d eat supper with us at the dining room table. Ha! Remember? Here, drink your drink.”

Geoffrey tried to press the glass into his hand, but Christy set it down and reached again for his hat. “I’m sorry, I have to go.”

“What? But why?”

“I’ve got a meeting with the vestry and the churchwarden that I’ve put off twice already. They’ll be waiting for me at the rectory. After that, I have Evening Prayers.”

“But you just said you’d stay!”

“I thought you might need me,” he explained, feeling awkward again. “That is . . . in my professional capacity.”

“Oh, you thought—” Geoffrey threw back his head and roared with laughter. “You thought I needed
spiritual comfort
!”

Christy felt his face getting warm. He couldn’t look at Mrs. Verlaine this time, but he imagined her steady, measuring gaze on him; she was probably marveling over her discovery of a quaint, amusing specimen of English country life she’d only read about in books until now.

“I’ll speak to Dr. Hesselius on my way home,” he said, trying not to sound stiff. “There are some women in the parish who will take care of everything as far as your father’s—body is concerned, so you needn’t concern yourself about that.”

“Oh,” said Geoffrey, pretending dismay, “I’ve offended you. I’m sorry, truly I am.”

“No, not at all.” At that moment he realized Geoffrey was drunk. Mrs. Verlaine had turned her back on them and was staring out the window, apparently not listening anymore.

“Come to dinner tomorrow night,” Geoffrey said impulsively. “There’s a cook here, isn’t there? Or Anne could make us something, she’s wonderfully handy that way, aren’t you, love?”

“I’m sorry,” Christy said quickly, “I already have an engagement.”

“Oh, have you?” Unaccountably, Geoffrey sounded hurt. “Another time, then.”

Christy put his hand out to shake. “Come and see me at the vicarage.”

“See you at the vicarage?” He repeated it blankly, as if he’d forgotten what they were talking about. Then his eyes cleared. “Yes, I’ll do that! That’ll be a treat, won’t it? Like old times again, only it’ll be
you
in your father’s study, behind that enormous desk, won’t it? You can offer me canary wine, the way he used to with his visitors.” His face was unnaturally alive now, his voice too loud. He threw his arm around Christy’s shoulders and started to walk him out the door.

Christy held back. Anne had turned around. He said formally, “It was a pleasure meeting you, Lady D’Aubrey.”

His formality seemed to amuse her. “Thank you for coming, Reverend Morrell. It was kind of you. I hope—”

“Oh, say,” Geoffrey interrupted, “you don’t expect Anne to go around visiting sick cottagers now, do you? Wife of the lord and all that?” He laughed. “But, darling, what fun! Lady Bountiful of Wyckerley. Oh, it’s
perfect
. I’ve wondered for years what your true calling might be, and now it seems you’ve found it!”

Her cheeks pinkened; that and the deliberate relaxing of her clenched hands at her waist were the only signs of emotion, but Christy felt disproportionately relieved: at last, the beautiful Lady D’Aubrey had given a little of herself away. She recovered instantly and said good-bye to him in a cool, controlled voice. He made her a short bow while Geoffrey snickered—laughing at both of them now, he suspected. She turned away quickly; the last he saw of her, she was reaching for his untouched sherry glass and drinking down the contents without stopping. Afterward she shuddered, as if she’d drunk poison.

III

Lynton Great Hall

7 April 1854

Geoffrey buried his father today. Buried, not mourned; I saw satisfaction in his eyes, but no grief. I thought of my father, and how little he truly cared for me. I always knew it, and yet I loved him with a blind, uncritical passion that amazes me now. Who was that girl? Where has all that fervor gone? Burned up along with my other childish wants and needs. It’s unimaginable now, that I could have felt things so strongly.

Although I can guess, I don’t really know why Geoffrey hated Edward Verlaine so bitterly. He won’t tell me—something else that’s none of my business. The old man wouldn’t give him money, that I know. I finally threw away the note he sent to me after that first endless winter, when Geoffrey had disappeared and I was four pounds and six shillings away from being thrown out of the flat in Holborn. I remember what he said, though: “Do not write to me again, Mrs. Verlaine. Geoffrey’s financial problems ceased to concern me years ago, and his marital ones never did. I think you must be a very foolish girl; otherwise you would not have made your bed anywhere near my son’s. Since you have, I wish you luck lying in it. But I doubt that you’ll survive, much less prosper. Certainly you’ll get no help from me.”

A very foolish girl indeed, especially if foolishness is measured by credulity and optimism. By that yardstick, I’ve become quite a wise woman in my old age.

The turnout for Lord D’Aubrey’s funeral was, to say the very least, light. Most of the people who came weren’t there to mourn the old viscount, I suspect, but to gape at the new one. Mrs. Fruit did the lion’s share of the weeping, enough for a whole congregation. But I mustn’t make a joke of her; her grief is genuine, and no less painful, I’m sure, for being limited exclusively to herself. The Archangel (Reverend Morrell; Geoffrey’s nickname for his friend has stuck with me, because the man truly does resemble Michael or Gabriel in a Renaissance painting, or even more, one of Blake’s copper etchings)—the Archangel presided over the funeral service, and when it was time for the eulogy, he skirted the knotty problem of finding enough nice things to say of the deceased to fill up half an hour or so by talking about the English tradition of community reverence for great country squires in general, riot this particular community’s for this particular squire. The little ceremony in the churchyard might have been touching, except that Geoffrey’s impatience was too obvious by then and the reverend had to make short work of his “ashes to ashes” speech. When it was over, he kindly invited us to take tea with him at the vicarage. By then there were no other mourners. Clearly Geoffrey wanted something stronger than tea, so he sent me home alone in the carriage. For all I know, he and the Archangel are swilling brandy and soda at this very moment, while they wax nostalgic over old times.

But I don’t think so. Reverend Morrell—Christian; what an apt name. Was his calling ordained from birth?—will have no part of Geoffrey’s macabre toasts and refuses to laugh at his bitter jests. I thought English clergymen toadied to the gentry, but so far this one does not. Impossible to imagine them as friends, companions. Did they go fishing together? Loll in hayricks and swap boyish dreams? Snicker over the charms of the village maidens and exchange exaggerated tales of manly conquests? Geoffrey would swagger, and lie, and seduce. But the Archangel? Easier to see him striding about the countryside performing muscular but unpretentious good works. Fording a swollen stream to save a drowning lamb, perhaps. Yes, I can picture it.

My new home is a stone manor house with a river running past it, barely fifty yards from the front door. I’m quite taken with the river, which is called the Wyck and flows right through the village alongside the main street, spanned at intervals by old Roman stone bridges—lovely arches; I’d love to paint them. The house has a courtyard that’s gone to seed, a dozen outbuildings in bad repair. The terraced gardens were beautiful once, it’s easy to see, dropping down steeply behind the house and meeting open parkland; but now they’re a wilderness of vines and tangles, and they make me feel tired just to look at them, outside my sitting room window.

I call it my sitting room. It’s not; my proper sitting room is downstairs, a staid affair with flocked wallpaper and too much furniture. But this is my refuge and my sanctuary, the sort of room I longed for in Battersea Road, because there wasn’t even any turning-around room in that dreadful flat. Lynton Great Hall has thirty-nine rooms, more or less. My sitting room is a half-garret on the third floor, miles from the servants’ bedrooms, accessible only from a set of narrow, dangerous steps leading up from the never-used gallery. There’s a fireplace, thank God, but I would hide myself away up here without it, summer or winter, because I’m safe here. (I feel safe, I should say—I shall see how safe I am.) I sit in my soft leather chair with my writing desk in my lap, scribbling or reading, sketching sometimes. The world is literally at my feet, for the windows—two of them, south– and west-facing—start nearly at the floor. If not for the trees, I wonder if I could see the south Devon coast on clear days. I’ve brought all my books up and set them on the mantelshelf. (The viscount’s library was a great disappointment; apparently he stopped reading anything new around 1825.) I can’t bring myself to ring for the girl if I want tea, or the post, or a clean handkerchief; six flights of steps to and from the basement kitchen are too much even for a viscountess to ask. This is a drawback, but I put up with it willingly in exchange for my safe solitude.

But sometimes my solitude . . . no, I won’t write that.

The lawyer came yesterday. Hedley is his name, a dry old stick of a man very much out of Dickens’s
Bleak House
. His news was mixed. There’s money in the estate, perhaps quite a lot, but old D’Aubrey put it in so many different trusts and accounts that it’s going to take some time before Geoffrey can get his hands on it. Hence, much ranting and storming about last night. I think of the time, not so long ago, when Geoffrey’s rages terrified me. But terror numbs eventually. Now I listen and watch as if from behind a thick stone battlement, uncaring, although not always unscathed.

So, I suppose we are rich. It’s what he’s always wanted. Too late to make him happy, though, I think. What will it make me? Not happy. I cannot see a picture of myself here in this place in six months’ time, or a year from now. Cannot imagine it.

Geoffrey will go off to fight in the war in the Crimea now that he’s got the price of admission, or soon will have. But I wonder if they will let him fight this time. He’s much stronger, but he still looks bad. Why does he crave it, the fighting and the killing? It’s something I have never understood. But perhaps I make it more complicated than it really is.

9 April

Geoffrey took Christy Morrell to his first brothel. It was thirteen years ago, in Devonport, and the girl’s name was Crystal. Or so she said. Geoffrey delighted in telling me this, I can’t think why.

Exhausted today. Mrs. Fruit is worse than no housekeeper at all, a hundred times worse. Geoffrey says to let her go, but I can’t. Won’t. She’s outlived all her people—there is no place for her to go except the charity home. My throat hurts from shouting at her, which I can hardly bear to do anyway; regardless of the circumstances, one ought not to shout at feeble old ladies. Even when she hears me, she has a truly remarkable way of botching the instruction. I asked her to fetch the housemaid (a surly, disagreeable woman called Violet; already we loathe each other) to help me take down the bed hangings in Geoffrey’s room and shake the dust from them outside. No one came; I struggled along by myself until, at last, the parlor maid arrived (Susan, a sweet-natured Irish girl who makes me laugh), armed with her hearth-box full of brushes and blacking, ready to clean all the fireplaces!

I wasn’t born to give orders to servants, I think. Certainly I’ve had no practice at it. We had maids sometimes in Italy and France, Papa and I, but I was too young to tell them what to do with any effectiveness.

I like William Holyoake. “The bailey,” they call him here, which means bailiff; the estate agent, in other words. He’s six feet tall, strong as a boulder, and he doesn’t speak unless he has something to say. Geoffrey would never admit it, but I think he’s intimidated by him. When Mr. Holyoake finished telling us everything Edward Verlaine neglected and all the repairs, improvements, and investments that must be made to Lynton Hall Farm immediately to stave off disaster, I was intimidated, too. What would he do if he knew that the new lord of the manor has no intention of becoming a good, strong squire, a man the people of Wyckerley could rely on to pull them out of the trough of neglect that was his father’s legacy?

Meanwhile, I try to cope with the legacy of this house. Thirty-nine rooms! What shall I do with thirty-nine rooms? Old D’Aubrey’s answer was to shut most of them up. I like the simplicity of that solution, but not the results: dry rot, mildew, and damp; mice, rats, and spiders; dust, cobwebs, and ghosts. (This last is only a surmise; but how could a stone manor house built four centuries ago not have ghosts?) Every trembling, uncarpeted floor creaks like an old man’s bones, and no two corners meet plumb. Drafts blow from everywhere, without regard for conventional origins like windows and doors. The plaster is crumbling, the wallpaper peeling. All the fireplaces smoke. The windows are old-fashioned casements, hard to crank open, often painted shut; the glazing in them is so old, the world outside ripples and rolls like waves on the ocean.

For all its flaws and inconveniences, I can’t help liking the house, though. The furnishings are fairly atrocious, with such things as stuffed animals in glass globes in the hall, a case of stuffed hummingbirds in the library—so cheery—and gilt-framed engravings of Lord Nelson and the Duke of Wellington gracing the dining room. But there are unexpected delights: a curtained alcove in the musty library, for instance, complete with a soft, cushioned bench and a bow window with a view of the hump-backed bridge over the river; balconies and little porches everywhere, most too rickety-looking to hazard, but one, off the center hall overlooking the parkland west of the house, perfect for watching the sunset; and of course my little sitting room under the eaves, snug and cozy, with sweeping views of pastures, sheep fences, and hedgerows, narrow clay-colored lanes arched over with trees, the stone spire of All Saints Church rising black and tall from a gap in distant oaks. Except for Ravenna when I was a little girl, the longest I have ever lived in one place was two and a half years—in Rouen, when Papa had a patron in the Comte de Beauvais. I can only imagine what “home” feels like, therefore. Could it be this tolerant fondness I’ve acquired for Lynton Hall, the sort of charitable, forgiving affection one feels for an eccentric relative? I won’t set too much store by these pulls at my heartstrings, however. I can never see myself putting down roots, here or anywhere. I think I wasn’t meant to have a home.

How lugubrious that sounds. I’m weary. I’ll bank the fire and go down to bed now, and hope I don’t meet my husband in my new house.

11 April

Heard my first bit of village gossip today: all the unmarried ladies are mad for the Archangel, and regularly bombard him with cakes and scones, mufflers and gloves, slippers, pressed flowers, bookmarkers, antimacassars—anything they can think of to bring home to him the pitiful meagerness of his lonely domestic circumstances. Two sisters, Chloe and Cora Swan, daughters of the blacksmith, are the fiercest competitors, but the mayor’s daughter, Miss Honoria Vanstone, is no slouch, and not a few interested observers have put their money on her (figuratively speaking, one assumes). My informants were Mrs. and Miss Weedie, elderly mother and middle-aged daughter, genteel ladies of Wyckerley, who paid an old-fashioned call on me this afternoon. All the above gossip was couched in the most respectful and discreet terms, of course, but one reads between the lines and draws one’s own conclusions. I was welcomed to the neighborhood by these two ladies with much kindness and not a little awe (the latter most amusing and disconcerting), not to mention a large jar of pickled eggs—“with biscuits and tea, a great boon to the digestion.” Once their timidity began to wear off, we had quite a jolly chat. At the end of the allotted twenty minutes, they invited Geoffrey and me to tea after church next Sunday. I was vague.
Must
I go to church? How seriously am I to take my new role of lady of the manor? Geoffrey offers no guidance; it’s all a joke to him. I suppose it’s a joke to me as well—and yet, the Weedies’ kindness to me was real, and for a few minutes I did not feel as if I were in disguise . . .

A little money has come from the lawyer, four hundred pounds or so, I think. Geoffrey took it and went away this morning, to Exeter to buy a horse. So now I am alone. I can never decide which is worse—being alone, or being alone with my husband.

13 April

This is not a tragedy, this is only the beginning of a night. But on evenings like this I understand perfectly what drives people to drink. Everything is heightened, sharper, exaggerated, as the time crawls by. At six o’clock, the night to come seems endless, and unhealthy thoughts fester in the mind. Who will speak to me? Will I write a letter? Would William Holyoake sit down and talk with me for ten minutes, for an hour? But I don’t ask him to; as dreadful as this solitude is tonight, I can’t bear the thought of speaking to another living soul. But—then again—I must hear a human voice, or see a face, or watch someone walk across the courtyard. I must get out of my own mind.

No. I can’t speak to anyone, I’m utterly unfit for conversation. They would think me odder than I am, even mad. Well, perhaps I am. Maybe this is how it starts. If I must go on and on like this forever, I would rather be mad. My life is becoming a desolation. I’m in an absolute hunger for warmth, sympathy, some small kindness.

I’m afraid of losing my hold on the here and now, of sliding farther and farther away from the commerce of my daily life and ending in some dark room, screaming. Absurd! Oh, but I long for a drug that would make me sleep now, deeply and dreamlessly, until dawn. Morning birds, rude sunshine, everything full and unexperienced—then I would have my courage back. But now I fear this dusk, these dark thoughts, dying, death, my end. Oh, God, what shall I do?