The Widow's Fire

by Paul Butler

  “Of course, Anne, I did hear a rumour but imagined it was a mistake.” Realizing that more curiosity would be natural, I added, “What was the cause, then, of his sudden departure?”

  The fire crackled again. Anne looked into the flames. “I asked Nurse Rooke whether you had heard of Captain Mason’s departure. She said you had. I suspect you know the reasons as well as I.” She turned her gaze back to me, her dark eyes reflecting the orange light. “When you withheld information about Mr. Elliot, Adeline, you had a reasonable explanation, so I thought at the time. We were married already in your eyes and therefore it would have been like speaking ill of a husband to his wife. It had been quite noble and I had admired you for it, but, if you remember, we agreed afterwards that in general friends should reveal to each other such information as might save one or the other from disaster.”

  “I see.” I leaned back a little. “You are angry with me. I understand now.” Somehow, Anne knew I was acquainted with Captain Wentworth’s secret. Who could have told her this? I envisioned a map of Bath with the point of a needle hovering above it. The point swooped upon Plato’s hut. Of course, the African must have implicated me as the agent of Captain Wentworth’s misfortunes. I had been right that Plato was too dangerous to survive. But all was far from lost. What credence could be given to the word of a former slave? The Captain believed in my good intentions, so surely Anne would ultimately follow. “You think I should have told you about poor Captain Wentworth’s difficulties?” I said.

  She had not denied her anger though she looked calm and attentive. “But, my dear, how could such a thing be communicated? He begged me to help and so I did so for the sake of you both.”

  “By telling him to invite Captain Mason to the wedding.”

  “I thought it prudent, Anne, yes, for the cold light of day to shine upon those things that would otherwise lie in shadow.”

  She shifted in her seat and seemed to think about this for a moment. “I believe, Adeline, you are in possession of a letter from Captain Mason himself.”

  My heart quickened and the burn came back to my cheek. Was this the kind of detail Plato would have told her? I wasn’t sure how he would even know. The Red Sea closed in again. My soldiers were calling for help. “I have something in safekeeping, yes. It is in a very special place.”

  “May I know where, Adeline? I need to destroy it.”

  “Oh, Anne, do you think such a thing wise? It is evidence.”

  “Evidence of what, Adeline?”

  “Of Captain Mason’s inconstancy, of the fevered state of his mind.”

  Anne picked the hands from her lap and laid them down again. “The only purpose I can see for keeping such a communication is for the harm it might cause should it ever become visible to the wrong set eyes. May I ask again, Adeline, where is this letter?”

  I smiled now. All evasions had come to an end. Dear, sweet Anne, delicate of frame, made a fearsome adversary, after all. She had brought me out into the open. “I am sorry, Anne. I cannot tell you that.”

  “You cannot?” she jolted forward as though trying a lock and finding it would not give.

  “It would be doing you no favours, my dear, as the reasons for keeping it are as I stated. Safeguarding such documents is, after all, my main livelihood.”

  “Your livelihood?” Her eyes were alive with thought.

  “Of course. One does not question why a lawyer keeps a copy of one’s will or the deed to one’s house. Yet they do so and are paid some reasonable recompense for providing their clients with peace of mind.”

  “I see.” Anne rose and looked around the room — from the fire, to the window, to my bedroom door. I thought at first she was looking for a likely hiding place for the letter. But she could hardly have meant to ransack my rooms. I wondered if she was merely letting me know she was seeing it all properly for the first time. “I understand now,” she said. “Poverty and hardship, I imagine, can do strange things to people, although they are so often believed to be good for the soul.” She looked down at me and I must say I was surprised at the lack of contempt in her expression. “But I would think, Adeline, you are no longer quite poor.”

  “Indeed, these rooms do not reflect the degree of my success.”

  “So why do you live here? You told me you rent from Nurse Rooke’s sister.”

  “It is not altogether a lie, Anne. We are like sisters, Nurse Rooke and I. I rent from myself.”

  Without turning her back to me, Anne had moved away from her chair and stood within reach of the door. “You own the building?”

  “Indeed, Anne, I have looked after my interests well. But I must ask you, my old friend, who told you of my involvement?”

  She shook her head but only slightly as though bothered by the flapping of a moth. “Captain Wentworth, of course, Adeline — who else but the man I am engaged to marry.” Her hand touched the doorknob.

  “But you are not…” I paused. I was of two minds about asking. I would find out soon in any case, but as she had turned back to me, I decided to continue. “You are not still going to marry him?”

  She made that same curious gesture as before, as though a moth were in her ear and she wished to shake it loose without causing it too much disturbance. “You know, Adeline,” she said, “I find this whole episode has revealed to me something about both Frederick and myself.” Her hand dropped from the door handle and she turned more completely to face me. “I had seen a man of great spirit and courage, a man of action who risked his life and was entrusted with the lives of others. He was confident and erudite in company and I fell for him more completely than I had eight years before. But, Adeline, here is the curious thing.” Her dark eyes fixed me with their calm determination; I could have believed we were still friends from the tone of her voice and her earnest way of expressing herself. “It was all just a little too good to be true. He had given me reasons to admire him — his looks, his manners, his accomplishments. But love, a complete love, needs more than admiration. We often end up caring for our husbands, as you know, Adeline. So we know in advance that love must expand to include pity and tenderness. We know it will have to withstand frustration and anger, that disappointment will come and so must forgiveness. Usually, I imagine, it takes years to encounter all these emotions. But I have come across them all already. I have encountered his foolishness and his pride in not trusting where he should have done, and in trusting where he should not. I have seen him struggle with these mistakes. Now I am confident about married life. Now I can help my future husband as well as admire him.” She waited for a moment longer. “Goodbye, Adeline.” She turned, opened the door and left. I listened to her footfalls on the landing, heard a muted conversation between her and Nurse Rooke and then, after a lingering pause, the soft footfalls began to descend.

  There had been finality about that goodbye, and while I could not be surprised about that, she and I both knew it could not really be final. Nevertheless, I understood her. She likely believed that her speech, sincere and rather noble as it had been, would move me to reconsider holding the letter over her and Captain Wentworth. Part of me would have liked nothing better than to oblige her. She was a creature as deserving of happiness as any I have known. But I was a businesswoman and my vocation always came first.

  It was with both a proprietary feeling and a mild regret then that I slipped from my chair and kneeled by the hearth to remove the bricks. The heat from the fire lapped me like the tongue of a friendly dog as I pulled out the strong-box, slipped out the key and turned the lock. This letter still promised so much. I had read it through many times over the last few days, each time amazed at the treasure of incriminating details it contained. It was the richest seam in any rock-face and I sighed in pleasure as I opened the lid expecting to see Oliver Mason’s thick bonded paper snuggled in the centre of the box.

  But the letter was not there.

  You may have
been here before, dear reader, at a point in your own life story when something happens that seems quite inexplicable. This made no sense at all to me. Anne was no magician; she could not have reached with invisible hands through brick. She could not have unpicked locks to which others held the key. And other than Anne, the only people to have been in the room since the letter and the strong-box left my hands were myself, of course, and Nurse Rooke.

  I thought of that muted exchange between Nurse Rooke and Anne a moment ago and the silence before the sound of footsteps had resumed. What had Nurse Rooke communicated to justify her confidential tones and the pause that followed? I looked into the fire, remembering the leap of a single tall flame and the presence of paper that Nurse Rooke must had added with the log. A dark corner now poked out from under the glowing wood. Curling upwards, it shed its motes like blackened snow.

  It seemed I had lost, after all, and that you, dear reader, may have some version of that happy ending that you feared had eluded you. But so be it. My craft is for self-advancement and excitement. It does not match the symmetry required for joy. Adieu then, my companion in ambition, as the fire hisses and the heat hurts my eyes. The season will change as it must. The days will lengthen and welcome in the sun. But fall and then winter will come again, and with them, the darkening night. These things always will return. And so, you can be assured, will I.

  28. CAPTAIN WENTWORTH

  FROST STILL LAY ON THE GROUND in patches and my foot slid as Anne spoke. I thought I had misheard her. “Perhaps if we forgive Captain Mason,” I thought she had said, “we can forgive ourselves.”

  She nuzzled in closer to me, then I felt the warmth of her arm within mine. I turned to her. Perhaps I had caught her meaning correctly after all.

  “Forgive?” I repeated.

  “Certainly.”

  She pulled me gently so ease us back into walking. The stone tower of Kellynch church rose into a crisp blue sky. Two black birds, either crows or ravens, fluttered in a circle around it and then disappeared. Tomorrow would be the wedding and I still could not shake the feeling that this marriage would take place because neither Anne nor I had acted with enough decision to prevent it. Although she had tried to assure me otherwise, I still felt that I had trapped her.

  “Frederick,” she said, “there are more ways to be faithful or faithless than through acts which are either chaste or unchaste.“ She had come to her mother’s gravestone and so naturally paused. I removed my hat. “Remember how I turned my back on our love eight years ago? Remember the reasons?”

  She tugged me gently into motion again. I nodded at the question, and her dark eyes glanced up at me. “Money and rank, Frederick. I allowed myself to be persuaded that these things were of more consequence than our natural affinity, and my faithlessness cursed us. You might even say it has caused every trouble we have encountered since.”

  We had been circling the church, and this was perhaps our fourth time around. On the eastern horizon there rose a white cumulous through which the early morning sun sent celestial beams. “Unkind though he has been to us, Frederick,” Anne continued, “we must see Captain Mason’s act as a kind of ideal.”

  “An ideal?”

  “Of a kind,” she said. “He clearly saw no purpose or self-interest beyond love. He required fidelity and exacted revenge when it was not given.”

  I stared straight ahead but could sense she was watching my expression closely. “It is my great fear, Anne…” I said, coming to a halt, “it is my fear he may still consider himself wronged and add to the revenge he has already exacted.”

  “And if he does,” she said, “we will face it together.”

  She had made a statement like this before and it had unmanned me. Through her confrontation with Mrs. Smith, Anne had discovered that the nature of the peril was less than it had been; Nurse Rooke had assured Anne that she had burned Oliver’s letter.

  While I should have been thankful for Anne’s sense and understanding and her ability to divine degrees of danger, each part of the episode only increased my own sense of helplessness. Anne’s actions were always associated with solutions; mine merely deepened an existing problem. I was a creature of the sea, confounded entirely by the most basic rules for self-preservation beyond the roll and tumble of the tides.

  She seemed to sense the channel of my thoughts and swayed towards me as we resumed our circular walk. “If there is another war, Frederick, you will be called into action. Hundreds, if not thousands, of wives will face a future of uncertainty as their husbands take to the sea. How is this danger different?”

  “It is different, Anne. A man who dies in battle is a hero. The navy looks after his widow.”

  We had come full circle once more and approached the grave of Anne’s mother. “We should look around us more, Frederick.” I turned to see the direction of her gaze. She was indicating the scattering of gravestones around us. Some, like the late Lady Elliot’s, were upright and circled by iron fences. Others were crooked and chipped by subsidence, weather, and age. “Every soul commemorated here had secret fears as well as joys.” She moved away for a moment, touching the spikes of her mother’s perimeter fencing. “But who would gladly separate the fear from the joy when the existence of one relies upon the other? We must take both in life. This is what I believe, Frederick. And I am prepared to act upon it.”

  She came back to me. “We do not have to talk about Oliver Mason. We will likely never hear from him again. But one thing you should remember. He sought to kill our love. He aimed the arrow and shot.” Her dark eyes looked up at me intently, a hand touching the buttons of my jacket. I raised my own hand and took her fingers in mine. “He both found his target and missed. How often in life does that happen?”

  In time I would find words enough to answer her faith with a fervour and passion of my own. But for the moment, listening was enough. We began to wander idly around the stones, the first tender crocuses sprouting at our feet. From a distance you might have observed two lovers, no longer quite young, no longer quite unsullied, but once the ground was entirely free of frost and last year’s briars and tangles, they would be two lovers nevertheless.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  I am very grateful to Luciana Ricciutelli, Editor-in-Chief of Inanna Publications, for her enthusiasm and faith, and to Renée Knapp, Publicist and Marketing Manager, who has worked with such energy while publicizing this work. To everyone involved in the production and publication, I am very appreciative.

  I would like to thank my spouse, Maura Hanrahan, for her enormous encouragement and advice, and my daughter Jemma Butler who is a constant source of inspiration.

  Photo credit: Paul Daly

  Paul Butler is the author of ten novels. His work has appeared on the judges’ lists of Canada Reads, the Newfoundland and Labrador Book Awards shortlists, and he was on the Relit Longlist for three consecutive years. Between 2003 and 2008 he won in the annual Government of Newfoundland and Labrador Arts and Letters Awards four times and was subsequently invited to be first literary representative and then chair of the Arts and Letters Committee. Butler has written extensively for national newspapers and magazines over the years including features for Canada’s History (The Beaver), book reviews for the Globe and Mail, and pieces for Canadian Geographic. As a writing coach he has worked through several Canadian universities and writing organizations. His roster of clients includes prize-winning novelists who continue to use his services on a regular basis. He presently lives in Lethbridge, Alberta. His website is www.paulbutlernovelist.wordpress.com.

 

 

 
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