The Widow's Fire

by Paul Butler

  “You know, Mrs. Smith,” he said at last, wincing at the light streaming suddenly from one of the arched windows, “I feel as though my life changed that day in the Assembly Rooms when we first met.”

  I felt the weight of a reproach and, perhaps in the subtle pressure of my deadened arm, he sensed this. He looked at me suddenly.

  “I owe you so much. I am very well aware of it, I assure you. Yet the knowledge you gave me, as you had to, was like a jar of ink suddenly tipped over all my life’s work — my friends, my family, my beliefs. Once over-spilled, it can never be righted.”

  I allowed a gentle pressure to pass from my hand to his forearm. By the altar, Anne looked at us both and smiled, seeing, no doubt, the fronds of love and companionship extending in the flowering garden of her own happiness. “Captain,” I murmured in a confidential tone, knowing others were pressing close by, “You must understand how a single worry, which in itself can be dealt with, can also for a short time have the power to distort and warp our perceptions. And remember you are juggling so much else besides — your oncoming wedding, so many arrangements. Your spirits will rally and when they do, you will find many reasons to be joyful.”

  “I wish I could believe that Mrs. Smith.” He smiled ruefully and gazed at the ceiling once more. “I certainly believed it once, that life was a thing of beauty and symmetry, where friends are hearty and honest, and honour and openness meet their equivalent at every turn.”

  “You are thinking of your friend, Captain Harville,” I said.

  He bowed and looked down to a carved monument by his feet.

  “Even this, dear Captain, will be explained. I promise you.”

  He smiled slightly and tugged my hand in closer as Anne and Mrs. Croft approached us, oblivious, as always, of Captain Wentworth’s darkening mood. I could tell he was not convinced by my assurances and I felt the weight of responsibility upon my chest as surely as any admiral when sailing into battle. The losses I might endure were real and they were mine; I had grown very fond of Captain Wentworth and it pained me to see him suffer. The sentiment rose and almost made me want to turn back time and set him free. But every vocation has its sacrifices, I reminded myself. I had steered a course that could not be altered.

  12. CAPTAIN WENTWORTH

  THE LETTER WAS GIVEN TO ME AT BREAKFAST, a thick bonded square that made a sonorous gasp as it slid from the silver tray onto the table. Recognizing the seal — OM — and the script with my name and address, I gestured for Jenny to leave it by my place setting while I busied myself skewering a mushroom.

  Lydia Harville fluttered with the teapot raised. “Aren’t you going to open it, Frederick? It is surely some detail about next week.”

  It was an opportunity, I realized. If I left Oliver’s letter until later, it would mean opening a conversation afresh: Yes, my dear friend (my old friend?), Oliver can (can’t) make it after all. The letter arrived this morning. Yes, the same one that came at breakfast…

  A sensible man, a man of moderate valour who is thinking clearly, would open it at the table, give those pertinent facts at the time when a slight flush of surprise might be appropriate. He would get everything — the delivery of the missive, the message within, and its import to the oncoming ceremony — over with in one stroke. My eyes flitted from Lydia to Harville. Both of them were gazing at me, waiting for me to open it.

  “I’ll open it with a couple of others I forgot from yesterday that are still in my room,” I said. My face began to burn.

  Harville laughed. “What an extraordinary fellow you have become, Frederick!” he said. “You leave letters unopened for one whole day when you are to be married in only five!”

  I gave him a tight smile and picked up my teacup. Then I sighed, somewhat theatrically, to indicate my lack of ease with wedding preparations. He seemed to understand the intent as he laughed again:

  “See, Lydia! We sailors are perfectly at home during a campaign waged against an enemy, but set us on land with letters to read and write, and tables and food to organize, and we are lost.”

  Had it not been for so many urgent worries, this return of the jovial, good-natured Harville might have been heartening. But the cloud-break within me was brief and there remained between us a division like a sheet of glass. I was made to wonder whether this was my anxiety only, and whether those recent events — the blood on his stick, his moody reaction to my query over the maid — had caused permanent damage that might remain even if all my problems were to miraculously lift from my shoulders.

  And there was something I hardly dared to admit. The former slave, Plato, had ultimately been more successful than ought to have been possible when he satirized my admiration of Harville — “my friend” as he had repeated so many times. I remembered too well the meaning if not the exact words: honour, the quality I had claimed for Harville, had no weight and no substance. It was like a rainbow glimpsed on the horizon, ready to disappear the moment conditions changed.

  I had rebuffed the comments at the time, of course, and thought of them as rhetorical nonsense. But the image of Plato’s brother swinging on the gibbet had begun to haunt me nevertheless. At first this vision had been faint enough, a soft creaking in my ear at night when I closed my eyes, the dome of a head against the moonlight, a broken neck beneath. But thoughts of it seeped into my dreams, and gathered around other details suggesting Harville’s duplicity — the stick, his hurried wiping, his anger and silence over my questions about the maid. It had indeed been a shock to think that Harville might no longer trust me. But the really crushing disappointment came when I began to realize that I no longer trusted him.

  I heard voices outside and in a moment Sophia and the admiral bustled into the breakfast room, the latter rubbing his eyes as though he had failed to get enough sleep. Harville rose from his chair. My sister waved him down with a shushing sound, and I took advantage of the general commotion, enfolding Oliver’s letter in my hand and slipping it into my pocket. Then I rose. An entrance can be a natural time to affect an exit so long as one knows the newcomers well enough to be sure they will not take offence.

  “You are not leaving us, surely Frederick!” exclaimed Sophia.

  “Frederick is rushed off his feet, my dear,” laughed her husband genially. “You must make allowances for a man about to be wed, even if he is your brother.”

  And I found it surprisingly easy then to slip out of the room with a smile on my face and the letter in my pocket. By the time I was upstairs, closing my door, the paper seemed to burn through the weave of my breeches, heating my thigh.

  My stomach churned as I pulled out the letter. Two incompatible worlds were about to collide. I remembered my invitation, the way I had denied what both Oliver and I knew were the realities of the situation. Why had I decided to relay the news of my oncoming marriage as though the reader would receive it with unmitigated joy? But what other ways were available to me when any letter might so easily fall into the wrong hands?

  My fingers slid over the bonded paper and I remembered the last time I had seen Oliver. I confronted once more the bitter half smile with which he had greeted the news of my departure, the unambiguous hurt in his eye, and the all-too-obvious sense that what had happened between us had run its course as far as I was concerned, that I fully intended to return to ordinary life and ordinary expectations, to the idea that men court and marry women and seek the company of other men to shoot or fence or talk of politics.

  “There is someone else,” he had said, his pupils dilating in that odd way that had become common of late.

  “Nonsense, Oliver,” I had replied, meaning it at the time. I had met no one. But the previous day I had received news. A letter had arrived via a third party who knew where to find me that Sophia and the admiral had leased Kellynch Hall of all places. They wanted to find my whereabouts so they could invite me to stay with them. The invitation had raised a forgotten sail and rel
aunched a vessel long disused. Where is she now? murmured the winds around this unexpected movement.

  I remembered the memory of a slim figure in a white muslin dress, dark eyes smiling at me over candlelight. I recalled also the unexpected breach that followed the happiness, the stung pride and injustice. Seven years before this time a wheel had come full circle. It had spat me out into the darkness, but I had survived and prospered. Who among us does not secretly want to revisit the scene of their early defeats?

  I looked down suddenly. My hands had broken open Oliver’s seal without my knowing. A jagged gash ran through a corner of the paper. This was bad, I told myself. I was rarely alone, rarely far from a tap on my door from sister or brother-in-law. Minor signs like a torn letter might mean nothing on their own. But, if noticed, the detail would combine with others — my unexpected announcement that my head groomsman might be a man no one had met, the odd blush that accompanied my mention of him, many others of which I may not have been aware.

  I waited as my heart calmed. The letter was surely his congratulations. Why else would he write at all? He was an officer of the Royal Navy on merit, after all; he knew perfectly well what was expected from him in terms of conduct. Given the lateness of the date, his joy would be most likely accompanied by a sincere regret that his plans could not accommodate a sudden change. If this was the case, I might even quote from the letter or show it to the company here.

  I unfolded the paper with more confidence. Then I read.

  The officer of the Royal Navy disappeared, and from the uncomfortably close air of my bedroom, there emerged in his stead a boy furious and resentful. He wailed and accused his way through the looping script before me.

  Dear Frederick,

  For I call you dear despite the fact that your news grips my heart with a fist of iron — I must ask you from what nightmare your letter comes? I am sitting in my study, alone in a house that so recently rang with the laughter I knew to be music to the heavens. How could you forget so easily? How could you capitulate to the empty demands of duty and family expectation when you know life does not have to be lived this way?

  I know you too well, Frederick. “Yours in friendship and trust,” you wrote above your signature. Do you say “trust” because you are begging me not to give you away? If so, why invite me at all? Why have me present, and so prominently so, at the execution of all my love and all my hope? I detect another reason and I defy you to tell me I am wrong! You have asked for my presence so that I may persuade you to hold off from this disaster of a match. Anne Elliot? In all the many talks we have had, the soul to soul confessions of our loves, our hopes, our feelings about God and nature, about people, their fears and vices and needs, not once have you mentioned this lady’s name. How am I to seriously believe that, as you say, “there is a history of strong feeling” from you to her? This is merely a veil for those who want only to be deceived.

  So what now, dear friend? Do you expect me to come and stand by idly to watch my dream being crushed?

  I turned the leaf urgently, sensing the only comfort that might be at hand. He would refuse to come, of course. I would destroy his letter and put the whole matter down as a serious miscalculation on the part of Mrs. Smith and myself. But there was no such comfort to be had:

  I will indeed come to your wedding as your chief groomsman, as you request. I will likely arrive in Bath a day after this letter is delivered as I must attend to some business first. You will be forced to be in my company, Frederick, before you throw yourself into this ghastly ritual. I will have you look into my eyes and tell me that I mean nothing to you. I will have you tell me that you will find felicity and satisfaction in your marriage bed with this woman whose existence was never indicated to me.

  Yours in truth and honour,

  Oliver Mason

  My hand shook as I laid the letter onto the bed. I did not need to resist the temptation to rip it up; I was too physically weak for the moment to contemplate any such act. But I had the sense that the ugly scar in the paper’s corner had released a thousand furies, all of them malignant in their intent to destroy what was left of my future hopes of happiness or peace.

  I had to destroy the letter; this was my first thought. As an incriminating document, it was as potent as a knife still dripping with blood. The fire still burned behind the grate. I picked up the letter, took one step and then halted, glancing at Oliver’s script one more time. Particles of sand, stained with ink, showed like dark stars upon the paper. I thought of our nights together below the heavens.

  He was stuck, poor boy, trapped in a world that did not exist on land. Burning it would be cowardice, I thought. It would achieve nothing.

  There was one person, however, upon whose complete discretion and understanding I could depend, one person only who might have advice for me I could follow. And giving it to her now would achieve a double purpose. After all, did I really want to go to her and try and explain the damning nature of the contents? My tongue would become paralyzed at the attempt. My memory would jumble all the words. I would not do justice to the danger. No.

  I slipped the letter into my pocket. I would take it to Mrs. Smith.

  13. PLATO

  MY REFUSAL OF MONEY HAD CLEARLY trespassed against Mrs. Smith’s exacting code; days had passed since I had heard from her. You can imagine, then, the relief I felt on receiving a special commission from Mr. Dawkins. The errand proved I was still a favourite of the Assembly Room’s management and I was heartened also by the hostility I encountered from one of my colleagues when Dr. Dawkins called me from my station.

  David, at the opposite pillar, smirked at me and, moving only his hands, performed the obscene action I had seen from him many times before — a forefinger thrust into a tunnel made when the other hand does not quite close into a fist. When a passing gentleman seemed to half turn in his direction, his hands parted and he straightened himself. I did not know why he deemed this insult relevant to me and judged it to be the only sign he knew how to make without drawing attention to himself. The hostility of my peers, however, never troubled me. I was aware that envy is the most reliable emotion. Envy alone tells the truth about one’s status and its currency; under envy’s baleful gaze I was led by Mr. Dawkins into a small anteroom to meet a very elderly peer of the realm.

  Though time had shrunken his frame, the old Lord still possessed clear sky-blue eyes which took in my details — surveying my hair, skin, shoulders, the cut of my livery — as though I were some life-size ebony carving. “Yes,” he said, coming very close and gripping my sleeve.

  Mr. Dawkins smiled encouragingly at me from the doorway.

  “Yes, my boy,” the old Lord said. “This is to be a very special gift, you understand, one I fear I am too old to deliver in person.”

  I looked from the old gentleman to my employer. Perhaps seeing my confusion, Mr. Dawkins went to a sideboard and picked up a small beribboned parcel. He brought it towards his elderly client and, bowing, delivered it into his trembling hands.

  “Here,” the old gentleman said, passing the gift to me. “I wish I had your commission. She is a rare prize!”

  I had to suppress a smile at his extraordinary way of expressing devotion for his lady friend. To this goddess I made my way. My path to her home took me directly past Miss Anne Elliot’s lodgings on Camden Place and the sight of the fine porticoes and high windows set me thinking again of Captain Wentworth, Captain Harville, and Mrs. Smith’s uncharacteristic helplessness when it came to finding the simple piece of information I needed.

  Despite Mrs. Smith’s assurances, the initial hitch with Captain Wentworth had prevented any further attempt. Each time I had seen her since — and as I have noted our meetings had become alarmingly infrequent — she had insisted she return my thirty pounds. But each time I had refused, once clenching my fists when Nurse Rooke tried to place the purse into my palm, another time physically blocking my pockets,
certain that the good nurse, at her employer’s behest, meant to slip the purse into one of them. I had been right, Nurse Rooke had tried to do this and the heavy little cluster had fallen on Mrs. Smith’s rug with a thud.

  I’d felt an odd tingle of excitement at the rebellion as well as a great surprise at myself; money had fallen in my estimation for sure, but I’d had no idea it had fallen so far as to allow the single desire of finding Lucy’s mother to outweigh both the lure of coin and the dread of incurring Mrs. Smith’s displeasure.

  I’d not been alone in being shocked by myself. The purse had lain sideways on the rug, its open mouth spilling the curved edge of a sovereign. Nurse Rooke’s stared at me with the terror of a courtier who had witnessed treason.

  “You must take your payment, Plato,” Mrs. Smith had said calmly. “I dislike being in debt.”

  “I would like to relieve your debt, Mrs. Smith,” I had replied, “and as soon as you find the whereabouts of Elsie, everything is clear between us.” The statement had been too stark. I had seen that immediately, so I revised it with flattery. “Surely, Mrs. Smith, a woman of your great resources and knowledge can find more methods than one to procure the information she needs.” But it was too late. Mrs. Smith and Nurse Rooke had exchanged a look. Through an odd of nuance of shared expression and a tingle in the room’s atmosphere, I knew I’d been excluded. I had made myself distant from her, I realized, from the first moment of my request and my actions since had made the situation worse.