Will Milner didn’t look up at her, but blinked, pushed my arm aside, and marched from the house.
Bessy had disappeared, but I hurried up the stairs anyway, with my precious letter pressed against my chest.
How dare she send that poor boy away? Didn’t she know how rare it was to find a man who would chase after you? And all the way to Derbyshire? Imagine.
But it was my sister, Mary, who met me when I reached the landing. “This way,” she said, her voice curt.
She steered me into her parlor. Nonplussed, I let her guide me. Could she be interfering again? I didn’t need her help in scolding Bessy. This was my lecture to deliver.
Bessy wasn’t in her aunt’s parlor. Instead, William Evans was waiting for us by the window, with his back to the door, gazing out across his grounds. The trees were only just visible now through the gloom.
“Bessy has just rejected an offer of marriage from Mr. Milner,” said my sister, still hanging on to my arm as if she were afraid to free me.
The pair of them would have me in handcuffs next.
“She was always a silly, unthinking girl,” I said, but I didn’t pull away. I would show them both that I could be calm, that I still had it in me to be rational. “Will Milner shouldn’t mind what she says.”
“And she did so on my advice,” William Evans said, turning.
“On your advice? But I—” It was better to invoke my dead husband’s name than to try to convince my brother-in-law with my own opinions. “Edmund thought an alliance with the Milners most suitable.”
I escaped my sister’s grip. My arm had stiffened, held viselike by hers. I shook it hard to dispel the numbness.
“Your horizons are limited, Lydia,” said William, ignoring the reference to Edmund. “Bessy can do better.”
“Better?” I repeated. “Why, how many young men do you think my daughter knows? And have you seen how she conducts herself? She’d be lucky to have another such offer.”
“We can help you there, Lyddy.” My sister nodded with her eyes stretched wide, as if she were afraid to blink. “William has so many connections in politics and in business. The Jessops, for instance, have a son.”
“I don’t know any Jessops.”
“They own an ironworks,” said William. “It does a fine trade.”
“And they are very well regarded socially,” Mary said, as if in contradiction to this first statement, although she still started her sentence with an “and.”
How dare they? We’d been here barely a month, and here they were auctioning off my daughter to the most convenient bidder, using her for their own mercantile and political ends.
“It was not your place to advise my daughter, William,” I said, ignoring my sister and holding his gaze. “I am grateful, of course, for all you have given us. But this. There is precious little else I can do for her—for them—now. For God’s sake give me this.”
I was shaking, although I didn’t know why. It had always been difficult for me to distinguish between anger and sadness. The man was unbearable. How had I come to be the one beseeching, rather than admonishing, him?
“Lydia, your judgment is impaired.” William Evans strode back to the window and tugged the curtains shut, hemming us in.
“Impaired by what?”
He didn’t reply.
“And what do you two know of raising girls or marrying them off?” I pressed on.
Mary flinched beside me. She’d always wanted a daughter but had only had the one son, Thomas, in the end. And birthing him had almost killed her.
“Edmund wanted Bessy to—” I started.
“Edmund asked me to use my discretion when it came to his children,” said my brother-in-law. “He knew that you could not be trusted.”
“Please, William!” Mary interjected. There was fear in her voice. She didn’t want him to say whatever it was that was coming next.
“Go on,” I said, not shying away from him. “And why exactly did he say I could not be trusted?”
“You know why,” he said, without inflection. His eyes roamed across the letter I held, but my fingers obscured the seal.
“I have no idea—” I started.
“Oh, Lyddy, William, please,” Mary cried. She rang the tasseled bell cord as if tea would fix this, or at least as if the presence of another person would delay the fatal blow.
“Edmund left a letter for us,” William said. His wife’s protests wouldn’t halt him now.
“Us?” It was as if I yearned for the pain of hearing the explanation.
“A letter addressed to Charles Thorp and to me.”
The pounding of my heart was too loud, drowning out my thoughts. But I held a weapon neither of them knew: a letter from a great, powerful, and titled man. There was still a chance. Maybe, just maybe, Sir Edward Scott was going to save me.
“I didn’t believe what he wrote at first,” William Evans said. “A tutor? The man was practically your servant and young enough to be your son. But I questioned your staff, and that woman Sewell confirmed it. You have lost all right to be your daughters’ compass. You should be grateful we let you set foot in our home. I only did so for Mary and for my nieces’ sake.”
“Lyddy, no!” Mary called out as I retreated to the door (I could no longer face them). “William only lost his temper. He didn’t mean it.”
“Oh, but he did, Mary,” I said, holding up my hand to signal that she should not touch me. “And he is right. We won’t stay longer than a few more days. Only let me make alternative arrangements. Once we are gone, I have no intention of coming back to this Godforsaken place again.”
I strode out of her rooms and slammed the door.
“Mama, are you angry?” Bessy had emerged onto the landing.
“Not now, Bessy,” I said.
I had to open Sir Edward’s letter. It was our only hope.
“Oh, but Mama, I couldn’t marry Will Milner.” My daughter took a tentative step toward me—her dimpled arm outstretched. “I didn’t love him as I should.”
“Loving your husband is overrated.”
I inched my finger under the crisp corner of the page. My body was craving an answer, his answer; the wax was melting under my nail. But I couldn’t open it in front of my daughter. I couldn’t have her see my agony if Sir Edward too rebuffed me.
“You think it’s enough, then? That Will Milner loves me even if I don’t him?” Doubt had crept back into Bessy’s voice. Her eyes flitted toward the stairwell.
Yes. I would have said “yes” before—before Branwell, before I’d felt the cracks that marble your body when you’re daubed in plaster and set upon a shaking pedestal.
I didn’t reply.
“Only I want both, Mama,” Bessy said. “I want a love that is even, as Lydia has with Henry—”
“Your sister will die a pauper, and now you may well too.”
Bessy’s face crumpled. She flew into the room where the girls had been sleeping to sob out her heart on her younger sister’s shoulder.
Still no noise from the parlor behind me. Maybe my sister didn’t need words to converse with her husband. Maybe she enjoyed what I’d only ever dreamed of—the perfectly matched duet, like those flutists in Scarborough, albeit one that was born of shared smugness and superiority. Maybe that, or perhaps they were both silent, listening for what I would do.
I pulled myself along by the banister and sat on the cold top step. There was dust in the corner where the stair met the wall. I would never have allowed that in my house.
My fingers were shaking so much that in my speed, I tore the paper as I opened it. The ragged scar ran right through Sir Edward’s letter.
8th April 1847
Great Barr Hall
My dear Mrs. Robinson (or may I address you as “Cousin Lydia”?),
Pray forgive me for ignoring the instructions in your second letter and for my slow reply to your first. Business kept me from Great Barr Hall for some days.
If you will allow me to m
ake such a presumptive statement, your present situation appears to be intolerable. And I should very much like to provide a solution to your dilemma.
In the strongest terms, I beg you and your daughters to come and visit us, for as long as is convenient for you. My wife shares my wishes, although she is confined to the sickroom. You need only name the day of your arrival.
Come, cousin. We will not “unwoman” you (a curious turn of phrase but a good one, I think).
Yours truly,
Edward Scott
Freedom and with it the sweet salve of flirtation. For that was there, wasn’t it, imbuing each word Sir Edward had written with the fizz of a newly lit match?
I would be magnanimous with my sister once we’d been catapulted into a world above hers. I would write her letters, just as before, trading gossip and pleasantries, but without the pretense that there was anything of that childish love left in our hearts. The girls and I would go from Allestree to Great Barr Hall.
And when I arrived there—
But no. Flirtation was one thing but, what with Edmund and Branwell, I might as well have lived through a hundred loves, each more painful than the last. Sir Edward might be saving me, but I would not abdicate my power. I could not allow myself to make the same mistakes again.
* * *
NOTHING COULD HAVE BEEN a greater contrast to our arrival at Allestree Hall than our departure. Sir Edward had sent (imagine it!) his very own carriage to collect us. Maids peeked from behind curtains to stare at the livery. The Evanses’ grooms inspected every inch of the horses, nodding to each other.
I floated from the house and bid my sister and her husband good-bye with only a perfunctory kiss on her cheek and a pat of his shoulder. “I will do what I can to win you an invitation to Great Barr Hall,” I told them. “But I wouldn’t want to petition such dear, generous friends so soon.”
“Don’t trouble yourself,” said William Evans, turning to go back inside.
My sister held her jaw so rigid she could not speak.
“I will miss you, Auntie!”
“We will write.”
The girls clung to Aunt Mary and said their good-byes with a predictable show of cloying emotion. They had been complaining and weeping for days at the prospect of leaving “Auntie and Uncle.”
Yet all that stopped when they saw the plush seats and sheer size of the carriage’s interior.
“Sir Edward must be so rich,” said Bessy with the low whistle she had learned from her years frequenting the stables.
Little Mary even blushed when William Allison, a man she had known since her infancy, handed her up.
It was easy to be taken aback by the coachman’s transformation. His hair was combed, and he wore a fine uniform now he was in the Scotts’ employ. He’d given up his wooden pipe for one that might even have been ivory, and his gold buttons winked in the sun as he closed the door behind us.
The amazement on my daughters’ faces, as they sat opposite me, acted as a mirror to my own. I, a woman of forty-six, indulged in the daydreams of a girl of sixteen as we sped through the undulating English countryside. This was my pumpkin coach. I was being whisked away to the ball. But when midnight fell, the dream wouldn’t evaporate. I would have another day and another and another to enjoy this luxury. This must be the delicious freedom men feel when they enter adulthood.
And Great Barr Hall? At the sight of it, my spirit soared even higher. It was everything I had dreamed about when I was a child, acting as my cousin’s bridesmaid, and more. It didn’t appear to be a house so much as a castle, complete with turrets and lancet windows. The Gothic, sanitized; the romantic, made practical. The estate would be the perfect setting for my happy ending, which felt so close now. Except, of course, for the wife upstairs.
* * *
OUR ROOMS WERE LARGE and well appointed, and scores of servants bobbed to me at every turn. Within a week, Sir Edward hosted a dinner so rich it put to shame all other meals I had tasted for years—a dinner held in honor of our arrival.
“You have the appearance of a woman who is looking for something, cousin.” Sir Edward brought his cigar to his mouth and puffed. “I hope we don’t disappoint you.”
He and the other gentlemen, a handful of middle-aged local dignitaries, had just rejoined us in the drawing room. The ladies were few—Bessy, Mary, and me, along with one of the men’s wives, who was snoozing in an armchair.
“We?” I laughed but stopped mid-peal. Sir Edward might consider me rude and think I was referring to his wife’s conspicuous absence, when she was the only pretense for kinship between us.
I had not seen Lady Scott, the mysterious wife in the attic, in the few days we’d been at Great Barr Hall. The army of servants was always talking about her in whispers, as if they were in a library or crypt, and carrying heaped trays of food to her room before toting them, just as full, back downstairs a few hours later.
“I couldn’t think of being disappointed,” I said, hiding behind my fan. “Being here at Great Barr Hall, this welcome, all of it. It is wonderful. I am so grateful to you—to both of you. My daughters and I owe you so much.”
Sir Edward smiled at my earnest expression of gratitude. Could he guess that he’d always been at the center of my rendition of an age-old fantasy? That his name had been writ large on the pages of my youthful imagination and folded into the very fabric of my being?
He tapped ash into the bowl on the side table between us. It was Irish crystal and cast stunted rainbows on the dark wood tabletop. “Can I tell you a secret, cousin?” he asked, leaning closer.
My eyes stung at the smell of smoke, the unapologetic masculinity of it.
“Of course.” I lowered my fan so he wouldn’t see it shaking.
“Great Barr is a bore,” he said. “There. I’ve said it.”
“No!” I cried, thinking he was joking and trying to make the merriment dance in my eyes, as Lydia would have had she been here in place of her moping sisters.
“Look around you,” he said.
A retired lieutenant colonel was pontificating on politics to the remaining gentleman. The only other lady was still asleep, her chins resting on her lace collar. And Bessy was thumping away at the pianoforte as Mary turned the pages, often at the wrong moment.
I laughed, but pulled myself up when I saw his face. He was serious.
“This isn’t living.” He extinguished his cigar and glanced toward Bessy as she struck another false note. “My sons are away. My wife is ill, as she has been these God knows how many years.”
“My husband was also unwell for some time.” My gaze dropped to the fan on my lap.
“Oh?”
I looked up and caught the slight raise of Sir Edward’s eyebrows.
“I thought Edmund Robinson’s illness was sudden?” he said.
“Yes.” I paused, feeling as if he’d caught me in a lie. “That is, for a time, to the outside world he appeared himself, but I knew otherwise. After all, I was his wife.”
And am his wife yet.
I became aware of my wedding ring, as warm as my skin. I had worn it so long it might as well have been a part of me.
Sir Edward scanned my face, seemed to come to some conclusion, and smiled. “Perhaps, Cousin Lydia, you can bring some life to this place, you and your daughters?” he said, his voice soft. The darkness that had come into his eyes had ebbed away. “Although I hope you don’t mind my saying that Miss Bessy’s playing leaves something to be desired.”
“Say no more.” I jumped up, desperate to please him. “I will displace her.”
The rest of the evening wasn’t long. How could it be with such tiresome company? But for me, it was intoxicating. I played as I hadn’t for a long time, basking in Sir Edward’s admiration, even if, for politeness’s sake, he couldn’t devote himself absolutely to listening to me but had to enter into conversation with his dull guests.
At Thorp Green Hall in those months after Edmund’s burial, I’d played out only my soul’s m
isery but here there was something else, something bright and hopeful. And as the music ran through me, Lady Scott retreated to where she had always been: in the shadowy recesses. She was an obstacle only as substantial as the thoughts you gave to it.
I was still humming the final tune—a waltz—by the time I was in my rooms. I dismissed my cousin Catherine’s maid—a real French maid who braided my hair with dexterity and skill, even if she didn’t stroke my forehead and caress my shoulders as Marshall had—as soon as I was in my nightgown. And I went through the rest of those mechanical steps that precede slumber alone. I tugged at my ring and set it on the dressing table. It teetered and rattled like a spinning top.
What was this? A letter? I hadn’t noticed it before, perched between my perfume bottles. The hand was unfamiliar and, from the postmark, I could see that the missive had been redirected from Allestree Hall. I opened it, trying to remember the scent of Sir Edward’s cigars, deeper, richer, than Edmund’s.
16th April 1847
Aldborough
Mrs. Robinson,
My sister, Ann, went to God this morning. She spoke of you to the last.
Sending my gratitude for your kind treatment of her,
Jane Atkinson
I could have screamed. Marshall, my Marshall. And just when I’d felt the first stirrings of joy inside me at last. Was this mercy? Was this God’s love, which Reverend Lascelles had promised me? If He existed, it seemed God was determined never to allow me another day’s happiness.
8th June 1847
Manchester
Dear Mrs. Robinson,
My wife was delivered of a healthy boy yesterday, 7th June 1847, weighing a round eight pounds. Her labor was mercifully short and mother and baby are both well and resting. Lydia bids me send you, and her sisters, her love.
We plan to christen our son “Henry Edmund,” uniting my name with your late husband’s. It is our hope that, harsh as Mr. Robinson’s treatment was toward his daughter on account of our union, soon our families may come closer together in honor of his memory.
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