by Paul Butler
26. CAPTAIN WENTWORTH
THE SUN HAD COME OUT to mock me. As a drowning man is said to see visions of faces most beloved — wife, mother, children — and hear sounds most fondly remembered — the crackle of the hearth and the laughter of his children — so I, surrounded by the sun-honeyed gravestones, experienced echoes and murmurs from the dimmest corners of my memory. I saw Anne as she had been at nineteen, dress rippling in the breeze as she ran toward me. I heard her laughter — effortless, musical, and unaffected — as I, a raw officer with more enthusiasm than propriety, handed her a bluebell plucked from a wood surrounding the Kellynch lawn. I felt again the excitement as her natural shyness gave way to an exuberance more heady and flowing than a mountain stream.
Anne had not come, of course. And why would she? Perhaps it was a small mercy, after all. What could I possibly say to her if she appeared? A breeze, warmer and kinder than of late — another cruel irony — clattered together the naked twigs above my head. I had thought to sit sequestered from the world, from any passing acquaintances. But this bench, more withdrawn from the path than the others, still left me very exposed. Nature in the final days of winter offers little solace or reprieve to the would-be hermit. I was no less conspicuous than an actor upon a stage, and if each passing bonnet from the road caused a jolt in my heart while I awaited the moment when the face beneath it would come fully into view, then these same ladies — four or five of them by now — had a more than adequate impression that the man in the cemetery was watching them with what must have seemed an insolent curiosity. I had seen three confirmed glances in my direction and at least two of them were followed by a blush of a most uncomfortable kind.
It was not a lady who caught my eye next, but a dark-skinned man holding a child to his chest. It was Plato, out of livery. But more than his clothes were altered. It was possible I saw everything through my own recent experience but the face that had always seemed alive with confidence now seemed puffy with lack of sleep and extreme emotion. His eyes, usually alert with mischief, were grave. In his hand there shook with each step the petals of several dried roses. He was making his way along a row of gravestones and came to a stop at the grave I knew to belong to Fanny Harville. He sat the child down on the perimeter stone and held her lightly at the shoulders so she would not fall.
A sense of indignation juddered inside my chest. Loyalty to my friend, Harville, and to his dear sister should not allow such a desecration. Yet what began as a drumroll of defiance and a prelude to action died away quickly. I had problems of my own, after all, too many problems to waste time and energy remonstrating with a servant for Harville’s sake. It was a mean thought, but my heart had never quite recovered every part of our old friendship. Moreover, some dim instinct warned me that I no longer knew enough of the world to issue challenges or judgements.
I watched him lower the stalk of one dried flower into the child’s tiny fingers, and then, his hand over hers, they flicked the rose in unison into the centre of the gravesite’s rectangle. A quiet sentimental laugh escaped me and I felt the warmth of new tears forming. Plato repeated the action with a second rose. The child jiggled on the low wall beside him as though building up for the throw. She turned and looked at him with dark, trusting eyes and when the second rose was lofted further and closer to the headstone than the first, she gave a squeal of delight and clapped her hands.
Why should I question it, I thought, when Harville had refused to tell where the child’s mother resided? I remembered the edge of impatience that had quickly threatened to turn into rage when I had asked him at Mrs. Smith’s request. And then I thought about Harville’s walking stick, the blood wiped quickly away. Though I had scarcely made the connection at the time — more urgent thoughts and worries plagued me — I had noticed the mark on Plato’s forehead. Suddenly, watching the two of them toss another rose, I felt certain Plato must have tried to ask the question directly and been rewarded with a blow from my friend’s cane.
No, Plato and the child should honour the dead as they saw fit. Strange enough the sight may be, but these were strange times, and who was I to question them? I wondered what kindness, though, Fanny Harville must have performed — for Plato, his niece or perhaps the mother, Elsie — to deserve this joyful show of posthumous love.
The child squealed again as the rose hit the gravestone itself. Plato moved in close to her ear and whispered something. At this precise moment I realized someone, a woman, was standing beside my bench. Tilting my head slightly, without attempting to look at her, I confirmed a first ghost-like impression that she wore Anne Elliot’s mauve cloak, cream dress, and bonnet. I caught the sound of her breath and without a word she moved closer and sat down beside me.
“You came,” I said, sure now, from her fragrance and from long familiarity of her movements, that it was indeed Anne. I was still afraid to look at her.
“I was told that if I did not come your life would be over.”
I glanced at her now. Her eyes, dark and rather sorrowful, were on me; there was hurt and sorrow in her expression but no shying away. Only the hands restless on her lap revealed any sense of agitation.
So this is what Nurse Rooke meant when she told me she knew how to put it to Anne. She had threatened suicide on my behalf. I shook my head in denial but then stopped. Perhaps it was not so very far from the truth. I would lose Anne. The wedding would be cancelled. How could that happen without knowledge of the truth leaking out to all and sundry? The world would be too small to keep me then.
“As of this moment we are still officially betrothed.” The finality in Anne’s tone made my entrails wither. “I must have answers. In any case, I would certainly not hide from you.”
I exhaled, head ducking as though struck from the side. She understood my present shame, I thought, one among so many now: I did wish to hide. Her courage was an irony given our sexes and my profession.
“I must ask,” she said, just as steadfast as before, just as attentive to any change in my features, “how commonplace is the act I witnessed last night?”
A crow cawed from the branches above us and then fluttered down. With its giant wings twitching, it stared at us. I could not think of an immediate response, so she continued: “You must allow, you have me at a disadvantage. I know so little … my sex generally … knows so little of the affairs of men in private, and men at sea spend so much time in each other’s company, so much more time with each other than they would ever spend with a woman.” She stopped now, gave way to a sigh. “But is this normal?” she said. The exasperation in her voice was quite new to me and curiously child-like in its helplessness. “Frederick, do all men behave like this? Captain Harville and Captain Benwick, Admiral Croft, for instance?” Her eyes, tired from lack of sleep, blinked rapidly.
The crow flapped its wings twice and scuttled farther from us. Here was an opportunity of a kind, something that might get me partially off the hook, but I determined not to be too ruthless with the reputations of my friends. I decided to tell the truth as I believed it. “I don’t think it is very commonplace. Harville, Admiral Croft, and Benwick know nothing about Mason and would be horrified, I have no doubt, if they were made aware of the truth. It is a capital offense, Anne, and every year there are a number of hangings both inside and outside the Royal Navy.” I caught Anne’s look. She had become suddenly alarmed at the mention of the penalty.
“And yet,” she said, her voice uneven, perhaps fearful on my behalf, “the very fact that the act is proscribed by law and so many offenders processed and sentenced so severely…” the hands on her lap twitched, “surely points to it being quite common.” Anne looked at me as though wishing for confirmation.
I gave half a shrug, felt a shiver run through me despite the warmth of the breeze.
“But I don’t understand why I was called to witness it,” she said. “Even if it were common, even if it does go on all the time, I know I was not supposed to know.
And yet, for some reason, I was told to come and brought to the very room.”
“It was Oliver’s doing,” I said, watching as the crow pecked at something on the ground. “He wanted to punish me. He wanted to punish me for finding you, for planning to marry.” I chose the words with care, saying nothing more nor less than the facts, keeping lee side of Mason’s declarations of love, skirting around the implications regarding what I myself may once have said to help bring them about.
I was aware also of the need to avoid phrases that made the wedding day sound like an event upon which I still counted. I was on a knife-edge in this respect; at the same time I had to make sure to steer as clear from statements that placed the planned nuptials in the past tense. She had come, after all. Even if she meant to break off the engagement, still the most likely course by far, she wasn’t quite certain yet. I must not make up her mind.
“How he must hate us,” Anne said quietly.
“He hates me,” I said.
“But such extremes of behaviour, such treachery, such lurching towards revenge … surely this is not the usual way for men to behave.”
Again there was appeal in her eyes when I dared to look. “No,” I said, “it is highly unusual.”
“And yet,” Anne paused before continuing. “And yet, it makes no sense. You invited him as head groomsman.”
“I was persuaded to do that.” My gaze lifted from the crow to Plato as I spoke. He picked the child from the wall and hoisted her onto his hip then waved goodbye to Fanny Harville’s grave talking gently to the child as he did so. The child raised a starfish hand and waved along with her uncle.
“Persuaded?” she echoed, even more puzzled. Her tired brow showed the lines of confusion. She seemed once more as she had done all those weeks ago, before Lyme, before Bath, when I had seen her again after seven and a half years. Something careworn and resigned hung about her like an old blanket.
“My instincts were against it,” I told her. “I was told there were rumours about us, in the past, and that having him in plain sight, acknowledged as a friend at my wedding, that this was the best way to nullify any remaining threat.”
“Told by whom, Frederick?” She asked. “Who persuaded you of these things? You said your friends would have been horrified. It couldn’t be them. Who else could have had such knowledge?”
There was a disbelieving strain in her voice now. My story was like an equation that didn’t work out. But she still wanted to believe me. I could see that. Only when a barrage of questions replaces a simple sentence such as “who told you?” does one know that the questioner is giving the subject time to dig themselves out of a hole. And, of course, the whole thing was even more of a contradiction than it presently seemed to Anne; I had a secret, safe from my most reliable friends but known by a confidante of a few weeks’ acquaintanceship. It was absurd, as well as unseemly, that I must now tell Anne the identity of my helper. I watched Plato’s back as he disappeared beyond the trees lining the road, delaying as long as I could before delivering the news, weighing how she might take it. I could see two possibilities, one the polar opposite of the other. First she might feel a burning shame and resentment that her own trusted, long-time friend knew of a danger of which she was unaware. Second she might collapse into a kind of gratitude that of all people to whom she might be bound together in this grim adventure, it would be this woman who might be deemed a sister in trust and affection. The bare twigs waved after the departure of Plato and the child. I could delay no longer. “It is your friend, Adeline Smith,” I answered, “Mrs. Smith told me of the rumour. She advised me to invite Mason.”
Anne stared at me, her mouth open but not for issuing words. A breeze circled our bench, playing with a dark tress falling from under her bonnet. At last she whispered, “Adeline knew all this.”
“From the beginning.”
“And she did not tell me.”
“She meant to protect you from it.”
She turned and stared, apparently, at the stub of a tree base a short distance ahead. I heard her breathe, once then twice. “I need you to tell me everything about these circumstances, Frederick, from the beginning, from the first mention of the rumour, to the last.”
A new determination had come into her face and I had the curious sensation I had been here before with Mrs. Smith. Anne’s face, like her friend’s, carried a wealth of knowledge beyond my own — the subtle and intricate business of human intercourse. Mrs. Smith had described herself as an admiral, and it had, to some extent, seemed justified. But now I wondered if I knew only one such woman.
27. MRS. SMITH
I HAD BEEN RE-READING OLIVER MASON’S letter, basking in the glow of its extraordinarily compromising quality, when Nurse Rooke’s knock came. I lodged the letter in the centre of the strong-box, above some other less notable but still useful messages — an affidavit from one of Lord Asham’s chambermaids and a love letter from a maharaja addressed to a minor noblewoman.
“Come!” I said.
Nurse Rooke entered in a dither of anxiety. “It is Miss Anne Elliot, Miss Smith, she is about to enter the building.”
“Quickly then.” I lifted the strong-box towards her and indicated the hearth bricks. “See to this and then wait for the door.” Turning to the window, I picked up my cross-stitch. I began from where I had left off, threading the last part of a fox’s black nose.
Nurse Rooke scraped the bricks back into position. “Should I put another log on the fire too, Mrs. Smith?”
“Of course, yes.”
The log hit the fire with a thump and a sizzle. I awaited Anne’s knock.
Although I had asked Nurse Rooke to invite Anne to tea, I had in truth ceased to expect her almost as soon as I had given the order. Part of the sadness weighing upon me, in fact, was the mortal wound delivered to my sweet Anne’s heart. After the horrors she must have been through, I had expected a confinement of at least several days. But somehow, I realized now, her arrival was only half a surprise. Always she had possessed that sense of quiet resolution that can carry women and men through trials that might fell a more obviously robust personality.
After only a few moments, a tapping came at the door. I laid aside my cross-stitch, but so the light would fall on it as I was quite proud of my progress. The country idyll with the thatched cottage and the geese now revealed the fox, fully formed and beautiful in its detail, lurking behind the undergrowth.
Nurse Rooke handed me the strong-box key, beat down her apron and crossed the room. The door opened to Anne and the change in her was obvious. Her cheeks seemed hollow and her colour was gone.
“Good afternoon, Nurse Rooke,” she said, and she took a moment before passing over the threshold. “How are you, Adeline?” She managed a smile but the effort was obvious. Nurse Rooke slipped out of the same door with a quick curtsy.
I held out my hands and looked at Anne warmly. “What news, my dear friend? How go the wedding plans?”
Too distracted to notice my outstretched hands, Anne moved to the armchair opposite mine and lowered herself into it. “Oh, we are dealing with details and niggles, so many of them.”
The fire sent up a single tall flame that devoured some paper that Nurse Rooke must have added along with the new log. It is rare for me to feel a genuine sense of foreboding, but something within me cringed. Anne should be more distraught, more defeated than she was, and she should certainly be confiding in me, her dearest and oldest friend here in Bath. We were alone here together. This was an opportunity for her to break down and unburden herself but she’d started evasively. How could the wedding go ahead as planned? How could they even see each other again? I wondered also whether she’d really not noticed I had stretched my arms towards her in greeting, or whether she’d actually chosen to ignore them.
I felt suddenly like the pharaoh as the two walls of the parted Red Sea came together again to drown his army. Stil
l, I knew not to panic. So I fixed her with my kindest and most sympathetic of gazes. She perhaps needed proof of support before she could confide in me as of old. “Tell me, Anne, is everything truly as you would wish it? You look — forgive me for saying so — you look rather tired.”
She had met my sympathetic gaze directly, rather too directly, I thought. “Well, Adeline, you do know what Lysander said about the course of true love.” She paused, eyes still on me.
I tried to smile but a tension had come into my face.
“You will, perhaps, have heard,” Anne continued, “that Captain Mason, who was to be Frederick’s chief groomsman, left suddenly last night.”
“No,” I said immediately. “You quite astonish me. Captain Wentworth had mentioned the young man to me. He had told me how much he was looking forward to Captain Mason’s arrival.”
All the while I spoke, Anne’s gaze never left me. My words had become rocks I was pushing uphill. I wished I had chosen a shorter speech.
“Come now, Adeline!” she said. Her eyes smiled with a hint of scorn. “How could you not hear of such a thing? All our acquaintances are abuzz with the news already and I know you and Nurse Rooke are the first, not the last, to hear what goes on.”
My face burned — a new sensation for me. Of all the people Anne Elliot was the last I would have thought capable of causing me embarrassment. And this was doubly shaming; I felt like a lioness savaged by a foal.