The Love Note

by Joanna Davidson Politano

  “Why, Father, all I’ve done is agree to take the basket as you asked.”

  Being in love afforded Rose a surprising affection for her father and a lavish amount of patience for all the tedious tasks he gave her, because now everything mattered, and the whole world was much more hopeful and colorful than it had been before. Even her surly, Bible-quoting father.

  The man grimaced like a bulldog. “Since when do you do as I ask?”

  “Everyone grows up sometime.” She flashed a smile and vanished out the door with the basket on her arm before he could ask anything else. She’d have to tread carefully, keep her feet on solid ground. If he even suspected she’d fallen in love with a man of wealth, he’d never forgive her. Her father looked down his crooked nose at all squires and landed gentry, for they lacked everything the man esteemed—long days, humility, and calloused hands that provided for one’s own family.

  Rose’s walk was filled with bold and shiny daydreams of a future with Grayson. They were interrupted by her childhood chums calling a friendly “halloo” up the path. She slightly resented the intrusion, but she greeted Dinah and Peter with politeness. “I didn’t notice you there on the path.”

  Dinah put a hand on her hip. “Someone’s finished that little romance novel she was writing, it would seem. There now, she’s even blushing. In love with your own words, are you? Too full of them to see your own two friends ’afore your face?”

  Rose grimaced. How dear these friends were—dear, yet provincial and so easily satisfied. They’d likely both marry someone within the hamlet—maybe even each other—and live out their days without ever realizing the immensity of what lay beyond these hills and stone fences.

  That story had been her only way of processing what was occurring between her and Grayson Aberdeen, and she’d agonized over it even as the true story delighted her heart. “I’ve not yet figured out the ending.”

  Dinah laughed. Peter did not. His somber gaze lifted to hers as if Dinah was not even there. “Has the girl at least realized she loves the hero yet?” Peter took Rose’s basket and fell into stride beside her. “In your last letter, you said she still didn’t know.”

  A grin overtook Rose’s face. She could not help it. “The truth finally caught up with her and she is basking in the knowledge of it.” She sighed. “The big, bright, glorious truth.”

  “Sounds as if the story’s finished then.”

  “Oh no, not at all. There’s more to happy endings than merely being in love. Why, that takes no effort at all. It’s everything that comes after that matters—fires and storms, dragons that need to be slain—before the hero can have his lady.”

  “Ah.” Peter glanced at Dinah, who’d grown sullen. “Have you any plan for how they will defeat these dragons?”

  A knot formed in Rose’s stomach, and she thought of them. Grayson’s formidable parents, the most powerful people in ten shires. Although the elder Aberdeens did not have their son’s respect, they did hold his future and his inheritance. That knowledge made Rose tremble.

  Letters flew between Rose and Grayson throughout the long winter months, warming her in his absence. The following summer she returned with such eagerness that it seemed no reality could possibly live up to her grand daydreams, but it did. In some ways, being there with him in person, feeling the warmth of his hand around hers, experiencing the energy of his kisses, exceeded her expectations. The days passed in lovely silken moments. All the world’s wisdom told her this would eventually lessen, that the heady passion that daily threatened to drown her would not—could not—last.

  But it did. Only, it turned a distinct corner. The change began one day in June when she inquired when he might tell his parents about them. Truly, the whole world should know of their affection for one another in the same way it needed more flowers and lovely art.

  His dismissive answer planted the first seed of fear, and his evasive behavior when she tried to speak of their future only watered it. Loss was inevitable, she could sense it. Just as her old nursemaid had been able to predict a coming storm, Rose knew in some unexplainable way what would happen.

  Her patience wore thin one day. “When should we tell them, on the first anniversary of our wedding? They’ll have to know sometime, if we will truly be together.”

  Silence heightened on the heels of her words, and her casually spoken “if” hovered like a menacing shadow.

  She stilled as realization settled on her, breath thin and fluttery. “You never did intend for us to marry, did you?” A tremble started deep within. “Kiss me one minute, dismiss me the next. Is that how every man of nobility treats a woman? What a weak-minded—”

  He turned on her, the passion that had fueled his kisses now breathing fire over her tender heart. “You’ve no idea what it means to have this burden on me, being an heir. I’m reminded every day of their expectations, their hopes. None of them include friendship with a mere butcher’s daughter, much less marriage to her.”

  Stunned, she’d wilted backward, his words blows to her chest. She couldn’t speak. How did one respond to such atrocities from the man whose love had fueled her for months?

  His apology was swift and sincere, setting her rocking world back upon its axis. Yet the words could not be unsaid, for even though the barbs were removed, they left holes in her heart.

  She sobbed into her pillow that night, and the next day he met her in the orchard as always, legs dangling off the rock outcropping as if he hadn’t just smashed her heart the day before. Afraid yet desperate to regain wholeness, she latched onto hope and climbed back into the romance that had brought such soaring heights of delight before.

  But that very afternoon there came another explosion between them about something else entirely. The pattern continued through the summer, these bouts of passion that pivoted so quickly between ardor and animosity.

  Heartbroken and much grown up, Rose returned to her small hamlet without any certainty about her future, or her feelings for Grayson. She had come awake to the fact that she hadn’t truly known him all this time. It was a crushing blow to realize her love—and the man who’d inspired it—might be a farce. Her friends tried to revive her spirits, and her father attempted to exorcise from her whatever sin had beset his wayward daughter.

  When she’d grown horribly pale and thin, she finally sat at her little desk to pen the letter that needed to be written. It was a clarifying and thorough missive stating her heart on matters and leaving him to make the decision. She never envisioned carrying out her romance this way, with a reversal of the roles, but it could not be helped. If he still refused to tell his parents and wed her, she would tell him the honest truth of everything, the terrible state he’d brought her to.

  I sank onto a divan nearby. “So that’s where the letter came in. You wrote to tell him how you felt and straighten out what had happened between you. But it never reached him.”

  “No, the letter I wrote Grayson that day was an entirely different one, and it was delivered as intended.” She eyed the closed door and leaned close to whisper the truth of what she’d put in that letter.

  I stifled a gasp and sat back, looking over this woman and trying to understand all the myriad pieces of her story.

  “My heart still didn’t know what to think, but he gave me a flower ring and we were married in Gretna Green at a blacksmith’s shop, with a Bible laid open on the man’s anvil. Instead of organs in the background, we had cows lowing. Rather than flower petals at our feet . . . straw. We booked a room at the King’s Head in Springfield, but we never made it there. While we supped downstairs, Lady Aberdeen stormed into the inn and snatched Grayson away, leaving me penniless and alone. I was ruined.” Her chin lifted as she relayed this low moment.

  “How could they?”

  “The Aberdeens were a law unto themselves. They ruled everything and never forgot it. No one dared stand against them to help us.”

  “So it was after all this that you sent the letter I found, then.”

&n
bsp; “Yes, but not to Grayson. There was someone else.” She gave a watery smile and closed her eyes. “Thank heavens, there was someone else.”

  “What became of this someone else?”

  She shrugged, a smile flickering over her lips. “I’d imagine he’s still sulking in his smoking room down the hall.”

  The disgrace set in soon after Rose returned home. After an especially impassioned sermon on secret sin three Sundays in a row, she shattered into a million delicate pieces before her father and told him everything.

  He kicked her out without a second thought, wholly unwilling to besmirch the house of Ellis with his daughter’s foolishness. Slipping out of town without a word, she used her last bit of change for the train. She finally arrived at the doorstep of her faithful Aunt Maisie, who saw naught but her dear girl at the door and welcomed her in.

  “A sinner, you say? Well then, we’ll be two of a kind, won’t we?”

  A wink punctuated the end of her pert response, flooding Rose with relief and a sense of safety she hadn’t felt in weeks. Besides that, she was near the Aberdeens again, and that meant there was a possibility for reconciliation.

  Once a week for several weeks, Rose climbed that steep hill to the castle, as she called it, and asked for her husband. Despite the annulment, she still thought of him so, but they turned her away. Finally they accused her of theft, just to be rid of her, and Rose fled with her aunt—who refused to leave her alone—to London. She reverted to calling herself Golda, her middle name, and went into hiding from the Aberdeens. For eight years they toiled over laundering fine clothing, mending, and tatting, bringing in money however they could and staying in an old root cellar. They survived until a cholera epidemic shut their part of the city down, and customers weren’t willing to use their services anymore. Death hung at every doorstep. Things were bleak, and she was in despair.

  At the lowest point, Golda and Maisie found themselves homeless and hungry, sneaking into a rat-infested cellar to stay warm on cold nights, but at least the Aberdeens had not found her. Finally, several years after the ruined wedding, she jumped a coal car and rode back to the coastal hamlet where she grew up, hoping to find her father softened, but nothing was the same. Her father was dead, her friends gone. More desperate than ever, she flew to her place of solace, the haunt of her childhood adventures, the one place she never failed to find peace—the ruins of an old abandoned estate near her hamlet, Crestwicke Manor. How she loved the crumbling old structure inhabited only by wildlife, its windows invaded by trees growing through it and its grand stair railing wrapped in vines that twisted eager fingers around every spindle. In her entire life, no owner had appeared at the place.

  Yet that too had changed. It was no longer a ruins, open for all to come and climb about, but had been put to use as someone’s summer estate. Walls had been cleared of all overgrown wildlife, window glass replaced, the yard tamed into neat gardens. Heartbroken, she climbed to the tower on the rise, the last remaining ruined thing at Crestwicke, and collapsed in the grass. She cried out to God, but he did not answer.

  At least, not for five or six minutes.

  A carriage came rumbling up the drive, a black-and-gold affair with four matched horses. Small children hung out the window, but they were yanked back by a woman’s arm. A family—it wasn’t just a wealthy fop who owned this place, but a family with children who lived and loved here. Bittersweet longing swept through her heart.

  Just then footsteps sounded on the stones behind her—it was a fine-looking gent with polished riding boots and a pack of yelping hounds on his heels. The man was fresh and alive, strikingly handsome with an easy gait and broad shoulders. He nearly tripped over her in the grass, and he cried out in surprise.

  She cowered, but he merely blinked at the woman sprawled in his yard. “I say, are you all right, miss?”

  She lifted her tired eyes to him and beheld a most marvelous sight—not only a kind face, but a familiar one. It was her dear childhood friend, Peter!

  He dropped to the ground and gathered her in his arms the minute he saw her face and let her weep years’ worth of tears onto his shoulder. Everything else fell away, and it was only two close friends, clinging to each other in their childhood hideaway.

  He told her it was he who bought the house when he inherited his uncle’s holdings and made good as a horse breeder. “I finally had money enough to buy any home in England, and Crestwicke was the only place I wanted.” He smoothed her hair. “It was the capsule of all my favorite memories.”

  With a kiss to her hand, he sat back and plucked a forget-me-not, twirling it before her face with a crooked smile. They’d scattered seeds as children, delighted to see these wildflowers taking over the forgotten fields, and the memory sweetened in her heart. “They’re still here. And now you are too.” He tucked it behind her ear. “A forget-me-not for the girl I never forgot.” He smoothed her mussed hair and rubbed the strands between his fingers with wonder on his face. There was deep hunger in his dark eyes as he looked her over—a craving.

  She read then in his look what she’d missed for many, many years. He was in love with her. Somewhere along the line, between the playful romps and childish arguments, adventures and trials, he’d begun to see her as a woman—a desirable one. But now . . . what had she become?

  She scrambled back, a hand to her dirty face. She’d not looked in a mirror in days, and her gown was mussed, torn, and far too big.

  He put a hand on her shoulder to stop her crab-like scramble. “Where is your husband?”

  She lowered her face, allowing her hair to curtain its heated contours. He’d heard about the elopement, of course, but not what had come of it.

  Her heart pounded. Yes, her husband. Where was her husband? The answer swelled up in her breast, suffocating the air from her lungs and constricting her chest. She couldn’t voice it. With a weary look, she merely shook her head.

  His look softened and he sighed, dropping his head to hers, his arms coming around her possessively. Protectively. He tipped her back to look at her face again, one hand smoothing hair away. “Perhaps you’d be willing to help me, then. I’m in need of a governess for my children, and no one seems to fit the bill. Would you be interested?”

  Surprise and hope burst in her heart as she looked up at the friend who’d always been there for her, and who now rescued her again. Truly, could it be that she’d been saved? Fingers over her mouth, she nodded. Tears budded in her dried-out eyes. “I—I must bring someone—”

  “Whoever you like. This house is so big, we rattle around as it is.”

  “There’s more I must tell you.”

  He shrugged with an easy smile. “If you must.”

  In the end, Golda was instated as governess to his small children, and she soon discovered Peter Gresham was a widower. His wife had fallen victim to typhoid fever after delivering their youngest child, leaving Peter alone.

  It felt so backward, being a servant to her old friend from the hamlet, and she never knew quite where she fit or how to act. He made it easy on her with his usual gracious manner, quiet voice, and lighthearted disposition. Aunt Maisie got on well with Peter, and hinted that they’d make a fine match, but Golda insisted they were merely friends.

  Yet the colorless petals of friendship peeled back to reveal layers of deep, sweet-smelling love that had never been explored. It had taken the heartache of Grayson Aberdeen to awaken such feelings, for she realized how different her old friend was—and how rare.

  Golda fell headlong in love with Peter in a matter of weeks, for exactly two reasons. The first was the way he ambled about his big mansion with the same humble, playful nature she’d so enjoyed in childhood.

  What truly sent her tumbling over the edge was watching him delight in his children. He didn’t simply tolerate or discipline them—he delighted in them, from their messes to their questions and childish noise. Nothing they did ruffled him, and she never tired of watching them romp about together. They climbed on him as
if he were a giant toy and squealed with delight as he dropped them playfully onto the horsehair sofa and chased them about.

  It was during one of these evening tussles before the fire that she collected all her feelings in that battered old heart of hers, and let them burst out all over a page of his late wife’s elegant stationery with scarlet edging. He never noticed her writing it, and she didn’t want him to. It would take courage to reveal all she felt, and she couldn’t bear to hurt again. Every man she’d ever known had broken her heart eventually, leaving her with a sense of impermanence and cynicism, of deep and constant disappointment.

  Before she could decide what to do with it, the letter became unnecessary. Golda only served as governess in that house for a few months before it became obvious to all that she would better fit the vacant role of lady of Crestwicke. “I never know which name I should use,” she’d told him once, when signing her name in his staff logbook to accept her pay. Sometimes she used Ellis, other times she wrote Aberdeen with careful, swooping letters. She hadn’t heard from them in years, but what if they still searched for her? “I’m not certain either one is . . . quite right.”

  He’d looked up, so unassuming and familiar, and blinked. “Well then, perhaps you should change it. Why not take mine?”

  After the shock, she agreed with a quiet smile, never giving voice to the true feelings that had blossomed. Little affections soon became common between them, and they enjoyed their new roles. The banns were read in church and the couple married.

  “I don’t know what I would have done if you hadn’t bought this old place. I never would have found you,” she whispered to her groom as they shared their wedding breakfast.

  He merely smiled down at his beloved bride. “Matched souls always find their way back to one another, for they seek refuge in the same place.”