“Shall I bring him in here or the parlor?”
“It’s all right, I’ll go myself.” The knock came before he reached the hall. He hastened along, conscious of feeling as if a burden had lifted. He hadn’t seen Geoffrey in almost two weeks, not since the night at the Hall after their horse race. Every day he’d thought he would come and offer some explanation for his behavior. He hadn’t, and as the days passed, Christy had grown increasingly dejected. He’d decided to wait one more day, then confront Geoffrey himself. Thank God, now he wouldn’t have to.
He surprised a worried look on Geoffrey’s face when he opened the door, which he immediately hid behind a mask of facetious amazement. “Why, it’s the vicar himself! I say, things are getting a bit loose when you start answering the door yourself, don’t you think, Reverend? Doesn’t look right. A man of the cloth has to uphold his dignity. Send the servants, man, that’s what they’re for.”
Christy waited patiently. “Geoffrey. I was hoping you’d come,” he said when the fatuous speech was over.
He sobered instantly. “Should’ve done it sooner,” he muttered, clasping Christy’s outstretched hand. “Can I come in?”
He led him back along to the dining room. Mrs. Ludd brought more tea and then left them alone, her silent, awed manner reminding Christy that she was new to Wyckerley—only ten years or so—and hadn’t known Geoffrey as a boy; thus, his status as Lord D’Aubrey cowed her.
The morning sun poured through the open dining room windows, illuminating Geoffrey’s sharp-edged features. Sober and calm, he looked healthier than Christy had seen him since his return. There was no manic glitter in his dark eyes and his hands were steady. A sense of purpose had replaced his restlessness, the cause of which was soon explained.
“My commission’s come,” he said, smiling with satisfaction. “Only a captaincy, but I’m content. And it’s the Rifle Brigade, so there’s no question that I’ll see action.”
Christy nodded as if that pleased him, but in truth, he’d never understood Geoffrey’s enthusiasm for the military. “Congratulations. I’m glad for you; I know it’s what you’ve wanted.”
“Well, it didn’t come any too soon—or this war, either. We’re living in such revoltingly peaceful times, this will probably be my last chance to see real fighting.”
Christy couldn’t help himself. “Why do you like it?” he asked directly. “Is it because of patriotism?”
“Patriotism!” He barked out a laugh. “Don’t be an idiot.” He turned a spoon over and over on the white tablecloth. “I like it, that’s all,” he said without looking up. “I bloody well know what I’m doing. It’s the only thing I’m any good at. Maybe you won’t believe it, but there are some people who respect me for it.”
“Of course I believe it.” He waited, but Geoffrey didn’t explain himself further. “When will you go?”
“I sail on a troop transport from Southampton for the Black Sea in three weeks. All that worries me now is that the Russians might pull back across the Danube before I can get there.”
“Surely that wouldn’t be the end of it.”
“Oh, no,” he said cheerfully, “the allies won’t be content to sit back and wait for the czar to try it again. Take my word for it, they’ll try to smash the Russian fleet at Sebastopol. And I mean to be there when they do.”
“No point in telling you to be careful, I suppose.”
“I’m always careful.” A reckless gleam in his eye belied it, though.
“I’ll miss you.”
Geoffrey looked down again. “Can’t think why. Behaved like an ass the other day. Apologize.”
Christy watched him for a moment. Was it worth it to ask why he’d done it? He decided it was. “Did winning the race mean so much to you, then?”
“No,” he denied—but too quickly. “Honestly, I don’t know how it happened. I mean, I know how, but—Christy, I swear I didn’t mean to hurt you.”
“I believe you. But you did.”
“Well, I can’t take it back. Would if I could. Sometimes the devil gets into me, I guess.” He gave a short laugh, trying to make Christy join in. “I don’t know why I did it,” he said again, more softly. “Stupid. It could’ve been serious. Last thing I intended.” He grinned determinedly. “You have to forgive me, though. It’s your job!”
Christy told the truth. “I was angry with you at first. And confused, and hurt. I couldn’t understand why you’d done it. But there was never any question of forgiving you.”
Geoffrey’s face went beet-red with emotion. Embarrassed, he shoved his chair back and stood up, but before he could turn away, Christy caught a glimpse of the old Geoffrey, the staunch, true friend he’d loved since his boyhood. That image, gone so quickly, warmed him and unburdened his heart; the heaviness he’d been carrying for weeks because his oldest friend was a stranger suddenly lifted.
“Really came to ask you to look after Anne,” Geoffrey said casually, over his shoulder, moving through the house he knew almost as well as Christy did. He paused in the open front door. “God,” he breathed, and Christy looked with him past the oaks and sycamores in front of the vicarage to the quiet village green, unpopulated this morning except for a couple of mothers sunning their babies on the grass. A prosaic sight to Christy, but Geoffrey seemed taken by it. “I could almost envy you,” he said unexpectedly.
“Me?” Christy blinked in surprise. “Why?”
“You’ve got a home.”
“But you’ve—”
“I’ve got a house. And I can’t wait to get out of it.” He waved his arm. “He spoiled all this for me,” he said, his bitterness undisguised. “I couldn’t stay here without going mad. Do you remember the first time I ran away?”
Christy looked at him in surprise, thinking Geoffrey might have been reading his mind. “Yes, I remember. In fact, I was just thinking of it.” He’d have said more, but Geoffrey’s face closed up, indicating that the subject was closed. But the memory was indelible, as clear in Christy’s mind now as on the night, more than twenty years ago, when it had happened. He’d been a child of seven or eight, playing on the floor in his father’s study—his study now—on a cold, rainy evening. A loud knocking at the front door had startled him; his father had gone to answer it, with Christy at his heels.
There stood Geoffrey under the porch roof, dripping wet, rainwater indistinguishable from the tears spilling down his cheeks. Christy could no longer remember the words he’d blurted out in anger and near-hysterical desperation, but he would never forget how Geoffrey had flung himself against his father’s legs and held on like a cocklebur. He was running away from home—he hated his own father and would never go back—he wanted to live at the vicarage with the Morrells. The vicar had finally pried his clinging fingers away and taken him into his study, shutting the door behind them. Christy had lurked in the hall, quaking with fear and excitement. Eventually his mother had gone into the study, too; from the staircase, he’d strained to hear their low voices. Even now he could clearly recall the pattern of the old floral wallpaper at the bottom of the steps, the muddy trail of water Geoffrey’s boots had left on the oak floor; but exactly what else had happened on that rainy night was lost from memory.
At any rate, Geoffrey hadn’t come to live with them. And he’d changed after that. In the nine years that remained of their friendship, Christy had never seen him cry again.
“Listen, Christy, will you take care of Anne for me?”
“Take care of her?” he repeated stupidly. “But you’ll be back.”
“Whether I’m back or not, watch out for her, will you? She’s better off without me in any case, and Holyoake’s as solid as they come as far as advice and all that. But . . . she’ll be lonely. I’ve left her before, God knows, but never in the hands of anyone I could trust. Will you look after her?”
“Of course.”
“Good. G
ood.” He turned brisk. “Last request. Considering what happened before, you might want to say no to this, and I’ll understand if you do.”
“What is it?”
“Give Devil a run every once in a while. There’s no one else I’d ask but you.”
Christy looked at him for a moment, then threw back his head and laughed. After a couple of sheepish seconds, Geoffrey joined him. When they sobered, he said, “You’re a great friend, Christy. It’s not just any man I’d entrust my wife and my horse to.”
“The honor’s overwhelming.” He watched Geoffrey saunter down the flagstone path to the street. “I’ll see you before you go,” he called, and Geoffrey waved in assent. “Give my regards to your wife and your horse!”
16 June
I hardly ever dream anymore, I don’t know why. Tonight I did, though, and it woke me up. I was walking through a tall thicket of brake fern, the clear green fronds as high as my shoulders. I came to a gate leading into a meadow full of flowers. A man began to walk beside me, and his boots were golden bronze from the yellow pollen of buttercups. I don’t know who he was, though in the dream I think I knew. After a while it wasn’t a meadow anymore, it had become the hayfield Marcus Timms works as a tenant for Lynton Hall Farm, and all around us men were threshing and winnowing the wheat. We wanted to run, but the man kept my hand and we went at a slow, casual pace, always heading toward a tall hayrick at the edge of the field.
Here the dream stopped and started, stopped and started, repeating endlessly until I was nearly wild with impatience—for I knew when we got to the hayrick we would come together—make love. Someone stopped us, William Holyoake, I think, and we had to talk and talk about the harvest and the work, and some convoluted business about how much pay the itinerant workers should receive versus the parish regulars who live on the land. By now I was half-awake and forcing the dream to continue—and, as is the way of these things, it lost its innocence. But not its urgency. At last we reached our hayrick, my mysterious lover and I, and we clung to each other in the stalky, dusty pile, rolling and rolling. Our clothes disappeared. I was nothing but longing and need, I wanted him to fill me, come inside me, I wanted us to merge. It was unbearable. My own yearning jolted me completely awake, no going back this time, no forcing the conclusion. I lay in a damp tangle of sheet and nightgown, seething and boiling, actually weeping a little from the frustration.
Who was the man, I wonder? Perhaps he was no one, merely a symbol of men in general, without whom I seem to have lived my whole life, even when I’ve lived in men’s houses. I suppose dreams like this are natural for women, not too alarming. I’m not very old, after all, and I haven’t enjoyed marital relations in four years. Not since my short-lived “honeymoon.” If I lived in Italy still, perhaps I would take a lover. Here, such a thing seems unthinkably outre, even bizarre. Well, well, then I shall have to find something else to do with myself.
21 June
Nearly a month, and no word yet from Geoffrey. But that’s nothing new. I’d thought he might scribble one of his illegible notes to Christy Morrell if not to me, but the reverend says he’s received nothing. I had to look at the globe in old D’Aubrey’s musty library to learn where Varna is: in Bulgaria, on the Black Sea. To the northeast is an island—or perhaps a peninsula, I can’t be sure; the pockmarked globe is as old as the books, i.e., prehistoric—called Crimea, where Geoffrey expects the real fighting to occur. I read the newspapers to keep up. Quiet old England turns out to be a shade bloodthirsty: everyone is dying for a good old-fashioned war again, which they haven’t had since Waterloo. The enemy seems to have been picked almost at random, as far as I can tell. The residents of Wyckerley are puzzled but proud of their new viscount for going off to keep Turkey safe from Russian encroachment (a murky and remote motive to me, but perhaps I don’t understand politics) and never fail to ask me what news I’ve had from my husband. I say the mails are unreliable, which is certainly true, and change the subject.
Money, or rather, the lack of it, is becoming something of a problem. Geoffrey purchased half his commission on credit, and since the estate isn’t completely settled yet, most of the ready cash has had to go to pay off his debt to the Royal Commission. How ironic that the Viscountess D’Aubrey is at present nearly as penniless in this great rambling pile of a house as she was when she was a mere abandoned wife in Holborn. The lawyers say the situation is temporary, so I don’t worry about it overmuch. But I find it singularly unamusing that, for the second time, England’s inheritance laws are playing havoc with my life.
26 June
Every day, the beauty of this place seduces me a little more. The neighborhood abounds in gloriously picturesque walks, and even though the villagers think it not quite proper of me to tramp about on my own, unescorted and unchaperoned, I do it anyway. Not to defy their conventions, but because I can’t help myself—I’m lured out of the house by the droning of bees in the clover or the rising song of larks, and before I know it I’m walking in a red sunken lane, too narrow for two carts to pass abreast and nearly covered over with the leafy arching trees. Sometimes William Holyoake’s dog accompanies me, but if not, I’m quite alone. I missed the clean outdoors much more than I knew, living in filthy, noisy London all those years. There’s an old Roman ruin the natives call Abbeycombe, set back from the Plymouth toll road, only half a mile from here. I go there often and lose myself among the old stones, gazing up at the clouds or down at the wildflowers that spring out of the rubble. A peacefulness comes to me there; I feel as if I’m getting clean. Other times, I go to the old abandoned canal, surely the most melancholy spot in all of Devon. I’m rarely as sad as that still, lonely, lifeless place, and so it cheers me up. I’ve tried to sketch it any number of times, but I can never get it right.
The groundsman at Lynton Hall, a creaky, white-haired Scot named McCurdy, has banished me from the gardens for incompetence. Now I’m allowed to weed and nothing else. It’s true that I have no green thumb, a minor tragedy in my life since I dearly love flowers, but if I were a sturdier person I might ask Mr. McCurdy where he gets his nerve. That ruined, overgrown series of terraces behind the house is no Haddon Hall, I could tell him, no Chatsworth, no Woburn Abbey. Someone should take it in hand. Even I, the floracide, can see the gorgeous possibilities under the bronzed and matted azaleas, the thorny, tangled vines of roses and clematis and anonymous creeper. Apparently the person who takes it in hand is not going to be me. But if it’s Mr. McCurdy, I’ll eat my hat.
Inside the house, I’m not quite as useless. Mrs. Fruit grows dimmer, and her housekeeping duties devolve a little more each day upon me, by virtue of there being no one else. Even so, without the ready money just now for anything except basic improvements—the leaks in the roof, for instance, and the fireplaces that smoke—there isn’t that much to do. One lone woman doesn’t require a great deal in the way of tending, nor does she make much of a mess. I try to think up projects for the staff—cleaning the library, airing and dusting books that haven’t been opened in fifty years—but even with that, the maids have little to do by two or three in the afternoon. No one seems fazed by this idleness, so I’m left to conclude that it’s been the status quo for some time.
So. After I’ve pretended to advise Mr. Holyoake on farming, dairy, and sheep herd matters, after he’s politely pretended to weigh and accept my advice, I’m much at my leisure. I sit in the sun, I walk along the river. I sketch and write. The villagers are standoffish—although I daresay they think exactly the same about me. Everyone is courteous, but there’s an underlying servitude to their courtesy that disturbs me. “M’lady,” they call me, and the laborers actually pull at their forelocks when they greet me, like feudal serfs. At the same time, I’m too reserved (enervated?) to go visiting and calling and card-leaving, all that tedious protocol one has to endure, even in this relative backwater of society, to initiate the laborious process of friend-making. The Vanstones have called on me once, and a
stiff, unsatisfactory time was had by all. She is tiresome; he is ambitious. On the whole, I like him better. At least there’s a sharp mind operating behind the suave mayoral smoothness. He’s a handsome man in his way; hard and a bit driven, one senses, but intelligent, certainly, and probably interesting under the stiffness. But perhaps I’m too hard on Miss Vanstone (“Do call me Honoria”). She’s merely inherited her father’s ambition, after all; but because she’s a woman, her only outlets for it are husband-hunting and social-climbing. Such is often the fate of our sex.
Honoria’s cousin is a young lady named Sophie Deene, a charming, guileless, pretty girl who makes me feel like an old crone. After church last Sunday, she waited on the steps with an old school chum who was visiting from Devonport (no secrets in Wyckerley); I watched them as they stood there in the sunshine, laughing together, playfully bumping shoulders, youth and joy and innocent hope shimmering around their blond heads like auras. God, how I envied them! I went home alone, feeling sorry for myself, and spent the rest of the day wishing I were twenty again and that the last four years of my life had never happened. Not a new wish, and as fruitless as usual.
My only other visitor is Christy. He’s come three times, and invited me to tea at the rectory twice. Obviously Geoffrey asked him to take me under his wing. (An arresting image; I picture myself at the Archangel’s side, surrounded by his enormous feathery arm, warm and comforting, protecting me from harm.) But even if he only comes because Geoffrey asked him to, I look forward to his visits with impatience, and take more pleasure in his company than I dare let on. I can come closer to being myself with Reverend Morrell than with anyone else—a huge, seductive, powerful relief, and the last thing in the world I’d have expected. We talk about everything. So far he hasn’t tried to convert me, but he wants to know how I “got this way.” I tell him a little of my life story—not much, and only the happy bits—and he ponders it in his careful, thoughtful way, making no judgments. He actually prays for me. I know this because he told me so, straight out, without a blush. It gave me the queerest feeling—which I hid with a nervous, bitter laugh. What does he say to his God about me? I would love to eavesdrop on his monologues with the Lord. I don’t think it’s pity Christy feels for me, fallen woman though I am. No, not pity. For some reason, I do believe he admires me. I’ve never been the object of admiration of a man like Christian Morrell before. I don’t know what to think of it. I think of it quite a good deal. His frankness about his own life continues to disarm me. It there’s a dishonest or even a disingenuous bone in this man’s body, I’ve seen no sign of it yet. He’s not like anyone I’ve ever met. He fascinates me.
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