by Edith Layton
“It was never your fault,” Warwick said seriously, more seriously than Julian could ever remember him. “You behaved honorably.”
“Honorably, yes. Correctly, no. I thought I’d learned from my past, but it seems I need some more past before I can announce myself fully grown. I’m off to find those little yellow birds at last, I think,” he said then, determinedly lighthearted, so determinedly that the ladies looked away with misty eyes and Arden and Warwick seemed stricken, “and conquer new worlds as well as this stranger I live with. But I’ll write, incessantly. And take it very much amiss if you don’t answer back,” he warned as he kissed each lady, and then had a private whisper for each. When they left him to the gentlemen, he hugged them hard, as well, first Warwick, and then, after he’d recovered his breath from Arden’s good-bye, he said, as they all struggled to be the grown-up gentlemen they were supposed to be, “Don’t worry. We’ll meet again, and in joy.
“But I’d like to walk alone awhile,” he said at last, “so I’ll return to the mainland on the next boat. Good-bye my friends, for now,” and turning, he walked away, never watching to see if it was a road or a path he took, for it made no matter, he could scarcely have seen it anyway, the way his eyes were blurring.
The churchyard was in a hollow of a hill that sloped away to trees and bracken before it turned, as every prospect did along the coast here on the Isle of Wight, to the open sea. So he stumbled through the thorny bushes that ringed the churchyard, careless of his fine shining Hessian boots, as he walked through a haze of tears to look out over the solitude of the sea that had taken her, so he could wonder where it would take him next. Then, standing on a tilted rise over the blue-and-bottle-green-patched waters, at last, he wept. For Roxanne, and for himself, and for the fact that he knew she had no more died for love of him than he could have for her.
When he’d done, if, he thought, trying to contain himself, he’d ever be done, he heard the other weeping. Not strange for a churchyard, except, he remembered, curiosity turning his thoughts from himself, that he was no longer in the churchyard, after all. And yet he heard someone weeping. He looked about until a flash of movement in a shallow shadow beneath a tall tree showed him the glow of a fox-brush-colored head, bent over the earth.
She was only a child, he thought as he approached her, a plump little girl in a huddle of her crushed blue dress, so deep in her misery that she didn’t hear his boots crunching over last autumn’s ragged leaves, but when he actually halted above her, she must have heard something, for she looked up.
She looked up from the brown boots to the strong legs to the jacket and then far, far above, to the face, all in shadow, save for the glowing halo of hair backlighted by the sun she faced, and so thought for a mad moment that one of the angels had come to punish her for weeping, and so she gasped and scrambled to her feet.
“Don’t grieve so,” the gentle voice said, from so far above her still, for she was not very tall, “at least not for her, she’s beyond that now, and you must go on.”
“I know,” she sniffled, “oh, I do know, and further, I know it’s a sin, but I can’t help myself, and I can’t help feeling it was my fault,” she explained, for though no angel, the gentleman was kindly-spoken, and she was well-brought-up.
“Did you know her that well?” he asked softly, seeing how the child was squinting in the full light and moving so that she could see him more easily in the dappled shade.
“Oh, dear!” she moaned then. “You’re the beautiful gentleman they were all talking about. Oh, dear, I’m so sorry,” she said, and went off into a new freshet of tears.
“Please, don’t,” he said, much discomfited, putting out a hand to touch her, realizing that as he was a stranger she might take alarm, and so withdrawing it. “I know you must have loved her very well, but don’t, you’ll be ill…”
“But I didn’t even know her,” she sobbed, “not at all. I saw her now and again, when I was young,” she said a little more calmly, fighting to pull herself together, “but no more than that. She was very pretty,” she added, trying to open her drenched handkerchief and failing, since it was so sodden and filthy with earth and tears it might never be prized open again. She accepted the one he handed her, and though it was already damp, the very scent of it, lemon and sandalwood, breathed comfort to her.
She straightened herself, and he saw she was, withal her crumpled state, not very prepossessing. For she was small and, he’d guess, far too fond of sweets. But at last, for all they were swollen and red, she’d a fine pair of eyes, large and light-filled light brown, which, he thought, she’d need, for she was also burdened with a mass of tangled curling hair of a glorious shocking shade of red.
“I’m quite all right now,” she said with curious dignity. “You might as well go on.”
“If you spoke about it, it might help you. And,” he added, smiling gently, “me, as well.”
“No,” she said, shaking her head and looking wretched, “it would only make matters worse. Because we were talking about different funerals. I think you’ll hate me,” she said miserably, “because that’s what I was weeping about.” She gestured to a newly dug mound of earth that he saw was partially covered with leaves, and that, he realized, was what she’d been crouched near.
“My dog,” she explained, flinching, as though she thought he’d strike her, “just died. She was twelve years old, and I buried her myself, and it was dreadful, for all I’d a box for her. But I know, as Nurse says and Cook says, that it’s a wickedness to weep over an animal, and how especially you must think so, having just buried…Mrs. Cobb. Please,” she said, her fine eyes entreating him even as they streamed with new and, because silent, somehow, more adult tears, “forgive me.”
“For what?” he asked. “For feeling sorrow? Don’t ask my forgiveness,” he said, “for I don’t condemn you. And what I said before is just as true. It can’t help her…ah, it was a ‘her’?” he asked, and when she nodded, he went on, “and can only harm you know.”
It was as she noted his own pale cheeks were streaked that he added, “But why do you feel responsible?”
“I was leaving soon, you see,” she answered shamefacedly, “for the mainland, and I couldn’t bring her and I worried for it, for she’d known me all her life, and I wondered what would become of her without me, for all they’d care for her, she loved me entirely, and when she died so suddenly, it was as if she did it for me. I couldn’t help but feel she was solving my problem herself, by ending herself, as though she knew…”
Then her grief overcame her, and her obvious suffering overcame his wariness, and soon he held her close and told her to hush. In a moment, she’d recovered herself and pulled away, much abashed, her face now red as her hair, and mumbled something about how she’d chosen a fine burial site, not far from where there was a peaceful churchyard, yet not so near as to be sacrilegious, and yet with a wonderful view of the sea. As she smiled tremulously over that foolishness, she led him up the slope to a clearing where they could look out over the wide waters this soft summer morning.
They stood there in silence for a moment and then she sank to sit on the grass, as he perched on an outcropping of rock nearby and she said in a small voice, “How you must detest me for weeping over a dog, when you’ve lost your fiancée.”
“Mrs. Cobb was not my fiancée,” he said softly.
She digested this in silence before she clarified, “But it’s wrong to cry over a beast, I know.”
“It’s never wrong to weep for love,” he answered.
“It’s not so much the love as the guilt, you see, that’s the worst,” she sighed.
“Oh, I know,” he breathed, staring out to the sea.
“I know it’s nonsensical,” she went on, “because dogs can’t read minds, no one can, and I never wanted her dead, only…disposed of conveniently, and so no more bother to me, or weight on my mind. Not dead! Oh, dear,” she said, scowling fiercely to banish tears.
“You can’t be pu
nished for thinking something, child,” he said, listening to himself carefully, “not even by yourself. There’s enough guilt that we earn by what we do, to bother with what we think. Nor can we always know when we look our last on each other. Someday you’ll have another pet,” he assured her.
“Someday, perhaps,” she said sadly, “but it will never be the same. You can’t love twice the same way.”
“Better yet,” he answered. “You wouldn’t want to. You’ll have learned to love much better. We learn, those of us who live on, you know. Or,” he said very softly, “I pray we do. And leaving will make it simpler. Ghosts, even beloved ones, haunt best in familiar places, and though we bring our past into our future, they’re not too comfortable there. I don’t know if that’s bad or good, but it’s so. Where will you be going?” he asked, to take her mind and his from unhappiness.
“School,” she said with such loathing in the one word he felt laughter well up in him again, but only cleared his throat as if on an interested query, and she went on glumly, “They remembered me, you see. I’ve lived here all my life”—he swallowed a smile again—“happily, with Nurse and Cook and everyone. But Mama came home on a repairing lease, and looked at me and suddenly remembered my birthday, and decided I must go to boarding school in the autumn, as if Vicar’s lessons weren’t enough. So I’m to leave for the mainland to learn to be a lady, instead of learning Latin and history.”
“Well,” he said, “think of how much more you’ll learn at school.”
“Oh, yes,” she sighed, “watercolors, deportment, and how to walk gracefully. I’ve four older sisters, sir, I know the way of it. Mama is very fashionable, and so are they. I am by far the youngest. I was lucky they’d forgot me for so long. It’ll be ghastly. I’ll never be fashionable. I’m bound to disappoint them. How much better if they let me stay on here.”
“Come,” he said as he rose, feeling ancient as he spoke the elder gentleman’s role, “you’re very young yet. In years to come you’ll be glad of their decision.”
“Perhaps in ten,” she said quietly, “for by then they’ll have given up entirely. I’m sixteen on my next birthday. Not quite so young. Oh, yes,” she said as he stared at her, assessing her again, but she was still plump and short and breastless as she was shapeless, for all that her words held wisdom and her demeanor was quaintly adult. She nodded, as though she saw precisely what he did. “There’s a history in my father’s family for late-blooming ladies, they say, but they don’t bloom regularly or too spectacularly when they do, either,” she said on a sigh. “On Mama’s side, they’re tall and willowy, and at thirteen, young gentlemen send them sonnets. You can see whom I take after. And how well I’ll fit in at school, especially so well-looking as I am, and coming so late, when everyone else is accustomed to it and has already made friends, they’ll be eager to befriend me, I should think, don’t you?” She sighed. “I wept, I think, for myself as well as for my poor dog,” she said, looking at him straightly. “just as they say we all of us do when we grieve overmuch.”
He seated himself again.
“My name is Julian Dylan, Viscount Haze1ton,” he said formally.
“I am Eliza Mary Merriman,” she answered just as correctly. “How do you do.”
“Not well, but I’ve hopes,” he answered, grinning, his handsome face looking years younger as a bit of color stole back into his pale cheeks. “I’m off from England tomorrow or the next day,” he said thoughtfully, “to the New World, I think, or wherever the wind blows sweetest. There’s a commonality between us in more than our grief then, isn’t there? We both must travel on soon. My friends, my two best ones, that is, are both lately wed, and so for all they love me they quite naturally love their new wives and families more. I’ve no other family at all. Do you think I might write to you? And you to me?”
“That’s very kind of you,” she said stiffly, growing red again, “but I hardly think you’d be interested in a schoolgirl’s banal gossip. Thank you just the same.”
“But I would be,” he said, smiling, “every banal word. Every scrap of gossip, every bit you could think of. Though I’d hope it would help you, it would profit me too by reminding me of the commonplace of home. I’m rather selfish, you know. And I think I’ll be very lonely, and not a little frightened, if you want to know the truth. It would help to keep a part of my mind in England, because I do plan to return someday. I tell you what,” he said. “I’ll come back to dance at your wedding.”
“You’ll have too much arthritis by then,” she laughed.
“No, no, he said, “you’ll grow to be a beauty.”
“Oh, yes,” she laughed again, “Overnight. Just like in all those Minerva Press novels Nurse reads in secret.”
“Yes,” he agreed, “you’ll grow tall and slender…”
“As a reed,” she encouraged him, “please. And my hair will turn lustrous and dark…”
“Just so,” he said, “and your freckles shall have faded…”
“I don’t have any,” she corrected him.
“Well, you’ll get some and then they’ll fade,” he said testily. “And then…”
They chatted and laughed for a long while about her coming transformation and his journeys and other fantasies they invented to stave off thoughts of death and other partings, before she noted the turning of the sun and then they talked all the way back to the road that led to her great white house.
“Please come to the door with me,” she begged, “or they’ll think I’ve been dreaming up stories again.”
“I will,” he promised as he began to stride toward it with her, and then he felt in his waistcoat pocket, remembering what he’d put on Roxie’s coffin when Arden had stopped him, scooping it up in one huge hand, and warning, ”The living may not bury themselves with the dead, lad,” before handing it back to him. …
“Here’s a cure for that in future,” he said, offering the ivory circlet to her, flinching slightly when he recalled its twin lying somewhere deep beneath the waves, “and to remember me with, yourself as well…no, no,” he said, as she misinterpreted his shudder, “no one else wants it, even she did not. And I’ll look lovely if my ship goes down and I wash up with a picture of me on my breast, won’t I? They’ll bury me with a mirror,” he said, thinking again how remarkable it was that he could laugh again so soon, that death now seemed the easiest thing to laugh at. “Please keep it, so that at least a part of me remains in England until I come back entirely again.”
She gazed at the small portrait and then back at him.
“You’re handsomer,” she said without thinking, and then, blushing wildly, added with a twinkle, “and just think of the friends this will win me! Thank you, my lord.”
He stayed to dazzle Nurse, and Cook, and all the housemaids, and not a few of the local tenants’ wives. And then after some light refreshment, he said he had to leave. She walked him to the end of the road near her house.
“You’ve been very kind,” she said, “and I understand, you don’t have to write, you know.”
“I do,” he said, looking down at her, small and plump and embarrassed, so oddly young and old, and so very lost. That was another commonality, he thought, one he’d never mention, “and so do you, for I’ll send you my direction when I know it. Because no matter how wide the world, or what corner I find for myself in it, if you’ve ever need of me, I’ll find a way to aid you, that’s what friendship is all about, so never doubt me. At any rate, I count on you to bring me back to England one day, you know.”
“Oh, but I’m sure you’ll find happiness elsewhere,” she protested.
“How can I?” he asked. “This is my home.”
Smiling sadly then, he bowed and walked away. And then a long way down the road, he turned and waved and called out once, “I’ll see you again—when we’ve both grown up,” and laughing, he strolled down the long road to the sea, which would take him as far as he had to go, before he could come home again.
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nbsp; For more information about Edith Layton’s life and books, please visit http://www.facebook.com/authoredithlayton.