The Love Note

by Joanna Davidson Politano

  “Of course. But first, there’s someone I want you to meet.” He pulled me into the music room.

  He pointed toward a cameo-like woman draped in blue silk with luscious blonde curls twisted over her shoulder, and the truth jolted me. This must be her, the fabled match. In a breath, she was before me, looking me over with flashing eyes as Gabe made the introductions. “Caroline wished to meet you.”

  “So this is Willa Duvall.” Caroline Tremaine offered a smile, her eyebrows arched. “I have to admit, she isn’t what I pictured.” The woman spoke with such calm, as one who had nothing to prove.

  I curtsied, highly aware of my plain uniform beside her robins-egg blue gown edged with fine lace. “A pleasure to meet you, Miss Tremaine. I’ve heard only good about you.”

  Her laugh was quick and sure, highlighting a well-placed beauty mark on her cheek. Even her flaws made her pretty. “What a dear little thing she is. I cannot believe we’ve never met in all your other visits to Crestwicke.”

  “Thankfully we’ve remedied that. I’ve looked forward to making your acquaintance.”

  “And I you.” She smiled. “I’m certain you know all the stories about our dear Gabe.”

  The word our rankled in an odd manner.

  Gabe frowned. “Not all.”

  She merely raised those perfect eyebrows with a knowing smile.

  I licked my lips and looked upon Gabe’s familiar face, wondering what untold stories lay buried there. What did I not know? A small, sharp sense of betrayal snaked through me, even though I tried to brush it aside. He owed me nothing.

  Except now I was intensely curious.

  “Oh Miss Tremaine!” Celeste sailed toward us and clutched the woman’s hands. “Parker told me you were here. Won’t you show me that piece on the piano again?”

  “Of course.” She glanced once more at Gabe and hurried with Celeste to the instrument that stood at an angle in the sunny windows.

  I turned to Gabe. “So that is Caroline Tremaine, the perfect match.”

  “It is.”

  “I’ve no idea why you say she wouldn’t have you. Speaking strictly on a scientific level, the slight angle of her body in your direction suggests she feels some measure of attraction to you. I saw her touch your arm, signifying familiarity.”

  “Hmm.”

  “Would she at least be accepting of your work with stallions?”

  “Her father breeds racehorses for the elite of London society.”

  “Oh.” I licked my lips. “I suppose she’d tolerate it, then.”

  “She’s the best rider I’ve ever seen. Fluid and agile atop the wildest creature. She has an uncanny ability with them.”

  Just like Gabe. “And your combined businesses . . .”

  “The result would be incredible. We’ve considered a merge at some point.”

  As had Golda, I was sure. No wonder she didn’t want her stallion-breaking anomaly wasted on a mere nurse from Brighton.

  “Now, what about that help you needed?”

  “Well, it seems your mother wishes to hold a performance. And that’s simply—” I exhaled. How did I put into words the truth of the situation?

  “Truly, a performance?” His eyes lit, then he smiled, seeing my unveiled distress. “Not to worry. You’ll not be left to plan it alone.” He leaned forward, giving my arm a squeeze. “I knew I could count on you.” His face brimmed with delight and something else—relief?

  I stepped back, speechless. Horrified. What did one say to that? Temper your excitement. Your mother actually sings like a strangled bird halfway down a cat’s throat. I opened my mouth, hoping it would fill with brilliant words, but instead the door opened and Burke strode in.

  His steps slowed as he saw us standing close and one eyebrow cocked up. “Well, now. I do hope I’m not interrupting anything.”

  “Not at all.” Gabe looked bright and alive. I was dying inside. “We were just beginning to discuss plans for Mother’s performance.”

  Burke’s eyes snapped with open amusement, his lips twitching into a wry smile as he strode into the room. “Really?” He stretched the syllables out far longer than necessary. “A performance, is it? You must have had a profound impact on her, Miss Duvall, and you are to be congratulated.”

  “Oh no, I—”

  “Come, don’t be modest. We must honor you at this little soiree, perhaps announce you as the genius behind her singing. We’ll bring you up front for applause and let everyone see you.”

  The piano music stopped, and all of them were listening. If only I could shrink into myself. “Truly, that isn’t necessary.” All I wanted was to understand what God wanted of me in all this, and a list of instructions clear as an apothecary’s mixing.

  “No, it’s brilliant.” Gabe tipped his head with such a dear smile of encouragement. “You deserve every bit of praise. You always manage to fix what’s broken.”

  Except I hadn’t. Her voice was still quite broken.

  “You could make it a dinner, a formal affair.” Caroline approached from the piano. “How many do you imagine would fit in the parlor, if the chairs were arranged in rows?”

  I blinked. Dinner? Rows?

  Burke grinned at me. “Why not rent a hall? No need to leave anyone out.”

  Oh no. Oh heavens, no. I had to stop this mess. It was like a runaway carriage without a horse. Or a brake.

  “Maybe a harvest soiree in the fall.” Gabe turned to me with a face so wretchedly hopeful. “Do you think she’d be willing?”

  I looked to the others hanging about the fringes, the staff scurrying back and forth with dinner trays. I could see the truth just beyond the surface of all their faces, the abundant awareness of what this performance would be, yet no one said anything against it. “Perhaps we should wait and see what—”

  Burke crossed his arms. “Didn’t you say she requested it? Best ask her soon, while she’s still of a mind to do it.”

  Gabe’s face melted further into gladness. “I shall ask her the first moment I see her.”

  The truth echoed in my throbbing head. This was terrible. Wretched. The reactions of her friends would devastate her. Everything would crash down if no one put a stop to it now.

  “Oh yes, do.” Caroline stepped beside him.

  “She’s ready for company, miss.” A maid approached with the demure comment, and Caroline seized on it.

  “Let’s convince her right now.” She took Gabe’s arm and led him to the door.

  The others turned to follow and one word burst from my lips: “No!” They paused and all eyes were on me in an instant. The moment of truth had come. Isn’t that what I’d promised at the outset—honesty? It was time to administer a large dose of it. “Please. We must all acknowledge the truth of this matter.” All I could see was her pale face, that delicate poise, receiving the laughing reactions of her friends, who’d think it all a farce. A grand joke.

  “Won’t you tell us what that is, Miss Duvall?” Burke stepped forward, eyes narrowing in his distinguished face.

  They all quieted, faces turned toward me as if awaiting a prognosis. Good heavens, I was the child announcing the emperor’s nakedness.

  “The truth is, the state of her larynx is such that . . . her vocal cords and her lungs have not been properly strengthened to produce auditory tones pleasing to the ear, and the entire vocal system . . . well, it is not congruent with tonal quality . . .”

  “What are you trying to say, nurse?” Burke placed a hint of irony on that last word.

  “The truth is, well . . . her voice. She cannot sing.”

  After a moment of silence, Caroline Tremaine shrugged. “Why not let her have her little amusements? Let us host her performance and clap loudly enough that she’ll feel the whole room is applauding.”

  Burke crossed his arms. “You’re suggesting we pretend her singing is as glorious as she wishes it was?” Gone was the wicked amusement that had colored his features. “Clap loud enough to drown out the stunned silence of the re
st of the audience? Invent compliments to feed her inflated pride?”

  “You needn’t pretend.” Clara’s soft voice came low and smooth as she stepped from the shadows. “When you truly love someone, you find what’s good about them and say it. It’s all a matter of where you focus.”

  Tension thickened the air.

  Caroline waved them all off. “Come now, a few harmless white lies, some sweet pleasantries—”

  “Lie to save her precious feelings?” Burke tensed. “Don’t we do enough of that around here?”

  I gripped the back of a chair. The woman was intelligent enough to glean the truth. “Please, let us figure out how—”

  “I won’t do it.” Celeste shot from her chair, silencing them all. Her shoulders trembled, the coldness in her stark face chilling. Had the atmosphere of this place finally soaked into her as well? “You’ll never make me lavish praise on that vain peacock of a woman, not even for a moment. She’s controlling. Arrogant. Self-important. Utterly domineering. Mean-spirited and brutish. Worse than any man and only half as intelligent.”

  “You don’t mean it, Celeste.” Gabe’s quiet voice failed, for once, to turn the situation. Servants paused to listen discreetly.

  “I do mean it. Look what that woman’s done to the household.” Celeste shook, face pale and eyes wide, as she stood before her family, spitting out feelings as if they’d been pressurized for years. “She’s stuffed Burke into a society marriage, made his wife feel like a leech. She has poor Essie so afraid she’s tripping over herself, and she’s chased Father from his own home. Can’t you all feel the poison she oozes into this house? It’s killing us all, and if she isn’t happy here, then so be it. Let her leave. But I will not fluff her feathers this way after all she’s done to Crestwicke. Do you like her? Or you?” She pointed to Clara, then to Essie. “Does anyone here like Golda Gresham at all?”

  The silence seemed to echo off the papered walls, strong enough to curl it at the ends. Gazes lowered.

  Burke’s voice broke the silence. “Well now, Miss Duvall, you’ve done what you promised and brought out the truth. Congratulations.”

  A distant tinkling crash somewhere above jarred the tension. The truth struck me hard and fast. Golda was above us. The fireplace. She could hear. She’d heard everything.

  I bolted up the stairs, chest burning as I burst through the double doors of her suite. No, no, no, no. Please, Father.

  She lay wilted on the rug like a fallen dove, a broken teacup on the hearth. Two gold slippers protruded from the hem of her massive skirt, and she looked white as death.

  Apoplexy?

  I dropped to my knees, felt for a pulse. Weak. Please wake up, please wake up. If those words spoken below were the last ones she heard on this earth . . .

  The old nightmare swept over me in cool, bold strokes as I dug through my bag. Our quiet cottage, the clock thunking out the seconds, Mother’s blood oozing onto my hand where she’d struck her head. She’d fallen down the stairs, onto that vase. That truly ugly, awful vase. I clutched her there on the kitchen floor, but she wilted, slowly escaping breath by breath, leaving me behind.

  No, Mama. I don’t know how to stop it. I don’t know.

  Golda’s slender body now lay wilted in my arms, heavy and helpless. This . . . this is exactly why I’d become a doctor, so it would never happen again. So I’d always know what to do when heaven began beckoning to a soul too early. I leaned over the mother of my best friend with a bottle of smelling salts and prayed he wasn’t about to experience the same wrenching pain I still couldn’t forget.

  twelve

  When watching one’s tongue in a relationship, there’s a difference, I think, between using kind words and safe ones. The first seeks to protect their love’s heart, the other only their own.

  ~A scientist’s observations on love

  After many long moments, Golda Gresham came back into the world with a delicate shudder and blinked up at me. Gabe rushed in, his body tense.

  “She’s fainted,” I said.

  “I can see that.” His voice had a hard edge.

  I set aside the smelling salts and closed my bag. “I mean to say that she’ll be all right. Other than a slight concussion from the fall, she seems unharmed.”

  Gabe’s stare held the weight of a brewing storm that communicated everything—she’d been fine before I’d opened up the door to the truth. I was, after all, supposed to be on his side. He scooped the ghostly pale woman up in his arms and settled her on the red damask settee as she clung to him. “You’re all right, Mother?”

  “I’m coming ’round. Go on, now.” She lifted a spindly white hand and placed it on his cheek. “Dear boy.” How weak she looked.

  He studied her a moment longer, then gave a nod and rose. “You have the maid find me if you need me for anything. Anything at all.”

  I followed him to the doorway, my heart thumping against my ribs. “I never intended to stir things up that way, you must believe me. I was merely speaking the truth because no one else would. She may have many talents, but she is not a singer.”

  “It’s not about her being bad or good at it, Willa. It’s never been about that.”

  “False encouragement isn’t love. It’s wrong to pretend you enjoy her singing when you don’t.”

  “I do enjoy it.” His face was dark and passionate. “I enjoy every moment of watching her light up, hearing her voice rather than her silence, being in the presence of such passion when I’ve seen her deflated. There’s far more to what a person does than whether or not it impresses other people.”

  “But her friends . . . they’ll all laugh.”

  “Not the right ones.”

  I breathed out, my mind spent and my heart depleted. Somehow if this man did not think much of me, I could do naught but share his opinion.

  “Singing fills her heart. A filled heart keeps beating, longer than it’s supposed to, and that makes it all valuable to me.”

  Her . . . heart. Her heart. Jagged pain tore through my chest. Awareness thrummed. I spun, looking with fresh eyes at the woman wilted onto her fainting couch, seeing the pallid skin, the weak rise and fall of her chest, the swollen feet she’d kept hidden beneath her hem until now.

  “You of all people, Willa, should realize how fragile and precious life is. Every life. It’s worth preserving, however we can.”

  I couldn’t speak. When Gabe slipped out, I untangled my stethoscope from my bag and settled the diaphragm gently on Golda’s rising and falling chest, moving aside the ivory cameo necklace and listening to the erratic heartbeat buried beneath finery. Hard as ice she was, yet just as easily shattered it would seem.

  I sat back on my heels with a sigh, and a sick rolling in my belly. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  She lifted those ever-elegant blue eyes to me, shifting the cameo back into place. “Why ever would I? No one can fix it.”

  “I could have helped you differently, worked on other things instead of giving you those . . . those silly singing lessons.”

  Her gaze met mine, steady and meaningful. “Nothing is truly silly.” It was a moment of rare openness, a glimpse into how she grappled with her approaching death, yet it made me feel like the vulnerable one.

  I swallowed as my heart rose into my throat. “Why do they let you go on this way when they know—”

  “They don’t know. Only Gabe.”

  Because he noticed. He listened. Words may be powerful, as I’d tried to convince him, but sometimes an absence of them was even more so. “I suppose he assumed I already knew.” As my heart began a painful realignment regarding this woman, it melted into compassion. Curiosity. “Why singing, Mrs. Gresham?”

  “You mean, why sing when I possess no talent for it?”

  “Well, I mean . . . that is—”

  “Come now, let’s speak plainly with one another. I’m ill, not deaf.”

  I traced the edges of my stethoscope. “All right then, why?”

  She turned to st
are at the empty fireplace, the silence stretching long enough to make me wonder if she was going to answer. “Because I am not ready to cease existing.” She remained poised, candle glow smoothing the lines of her face into a nearly youthful expression. “When you first learn your end is coming, it becomes obvious just how much of this life does not matter. Why decorate for Christmas? I may not live until then. Why learn something new? I shan’t be here to use it.” She inhaled, then let out a long sigh. “But then you realize there are things that matter, more than you ever thought, because they will last longer than one’s body.”

  I’d seen this before—the desperate scramble to put into place a few things that will mark a person’s existence, something besides a stone and a name in the family Bible to show who you were.

  “I’ve learned so much in life, felt so deeply, but it’ll all be lost. Everything I know and think and care about will fade away like me . . . unless I leave something behind.” She ran one finger along the spine of her red book. “I used to sing like a bird, many years ago.” Another caress of the spine, then she tossed the book into the cold hearth. “I suppose I ought to give up that notion.”

  “We must tell your family of your condition. Perhaps your children would all join together and . . .” My voice faded miserably as I remembered what she’d heard below.

  Her sad smile extended past me into the emptiness of the room. “As we both heard tonight, I have surprisingly little influence here.”

  “You have more than you’d think. Everything you say—”

  “Has made them hate me, turned them all into ruined towers of bitterness like me.”

  “And it can build those same ruins right back up. Make that your legacy.”

  She shot me a look, her gaze taking me in, assessing my meaning.

  “There’s always hope to repair what’s broken. Every breath in your body means there’s still a chance.”

  She frowned and turned away.

  “Mrs. Gresham, I need to see exactly how advanced your condition is.” When she gave a reluctant nod, I performed a more thorough examination, looking beyond the throat and voice to the deeper issues. The stethoscope told me everything I’d feared, and I wrote it down slowly in my notebook: