My suited companions dropped down likewise, as regimented as a battalion.
“How do you like Great Barr Hall, Mrs. Robinson?” asked the bespectacled man on the other side of me.
Innocuous as the question was, he wasn’t the only one awaiting my answer. There were other snatches of conversation and other voices, Sir Edward’s foremost amongst them (was he, he couldn’t be, drunk?), but the energy in the room centered on me.
“How could one not like Great Barr Hall?” I said, laughing a little too hard and drinking deep of the jewel-colored wine in the glass before me.
That was what men did when alone, wasn’t it? They told jokes and attempted to outwit each other in one breath, debated the future of our country in the next. I could do the former, or at least appreciate and mirror their humor. For what man doesn’t enjoy the accompaniment of a woman’s twinkling laugh as he jests? But as for the latter—
As pleasantries and introductions gave way to more serious topics, my supremacy over the room fell away. I drank heavily, although it was Sir Edward, with the abandon of Branwell and the authority of Edmund, who called for another bottle and another and another. I pretended to understand as the gentlemen made jibes at the expense of absent friends and each other and to listen as my interlocutor made his arguments against the necessity of another Reform Bill.
Loquacious as he was tonight, Sir Edward didn’t say a word to me, so at times I had nobody to talk to at all. Then I’d crane my neck to catch the drift of the discussion opposite, leaning so low my breasts nearly skimmed the gravy in their soft black silk.
Now and then an image of the girls as they might be some years from now seemed to swim before me. There was Lydia, burdened under the weight of another pregnancy, as four poorly dressed children clung at her skirts. Bessy and Mary, married ladies now, sat with my sister, William Evans, and their immortal grandmother, all of them laughing at me, reminiscing about the time I’d thrown myself at a tutor. And the Brontë sisters were huddled together in a corner, united by a secret I could not fathom, until William Evans invited them to join the rest of the party, lifting a glass and crying, “To Charlotte!”
Soon my exclusion became unbearable. I should tap Sir Edward on the shoulder and make a wry observation. That would prompt my readmittance to the conversation. Yet the thing was, I had nothing to say. I had no opinions on anything that mattered.
Instead, I pressed my leg against Sir Edward’s. Hard. It had to be hard for me to feel him at all through my voluminous skirts. He didn’t react, in kind or otherwise. I pressed again. Could I risk moving my hand to his knee, telling him to acknowledge me in a gesture that was half reprimand and half caress?
At last, after an out-of-turn laugh of mine prompted a frown from an older gentleman opposite, I risked it. Sir Edward’s knee was bony and cool. He wasn’t burning up like I was.
A second later, his hand touched mine, but not to stroke it. He lifted my fist and deposited it back in my lap, without so much as breaking the flow of his political argument.
I went to drink again but found my glass was empty. I twisted for the footman. No sign of him. In the last few minutes, without me even noticing, our dessert plates had melted away. But everyone else still had wine. In my urge to keep up with them had I been drinking too quickly?
“Lydia,” whispered Sir Edward, just when I had given up hope that he would remember me and begun to curse him inwardly, laying that terrible charge against him that he was “just like Edmund.”
“Yes?” I smiled, but then covered my mouth with my napkin. Had the wine stained my lips and teeth?
“Don’t you think it is time for you to leave us?” he asked, softly.
He was trying to save me embarrassment, but the eyes of the other men were on me again. Of course. Why would it be any different because I was the only woman? I was no longer wanted here.
“Oh. Yes.” I scraped back my chair too violently. It screeched across the flagstone floor, putting an end to the remaining fragments of conversation. “Gentlemen,” I said, rising. “I will retire, I think, to the drawing room.”
My eyes swept around the table, alighting last on Sir Edward. He was shaking his head. “No. There is no need for you to wait up for us, Lydia,” he said.
What was he thinking, using my Christian name before them? I flushed.
“Or perhaps, to bed,” I added to the company, fighting to smile. “Good night.”
I had to battle my way back to the door, returning handshakes and acknowledging kisses planted on my knuckles, even one bestowed on my cheek. But that particular gentleman had spent years on the Continent, hadn’t he? That was the custom there. He didn’t mean any offense by it. Or had that been his friend?
The corridor was cold and dark, save for the sliver of warm light beneath the door behind me. Male voices rose and fell behind it.
This was their world, not mine. And in their world, I could only ever be on the peripheries, setting the stage and ornamenting the room, before slipping away like a servant or a shadow. That was a fact as inescapable as church on Sundays. And yet I couldn’t leave. Not yet. I couldn’t creep upstairs through the chilly, yet somehow still close, air. I couldn’t go from that animated scene to an empty bed or to Bessy, with her puppet, Mary, facing judgment from the children I had made.
I crouched by the door, brought my ear to the wood, and then lower still, to the crack below.
It took some time to distinguish between their voices as there was little variation in pitch, but after around a minute I could make them out, Sir Edward’s dominating.
Funny. I could follow the train of the conversation better when I wasn’t meant to be listening, now I was under no pressure to perform. There were even a couple of questions I would have asked my former bespectacled conversation partner had he been lecturing me.
But then Sir Edward’s voice cut across the heated debate. “Gentlemen,” he said. I imagined he was raising his glass (as large as those we’d had earlier but now filled with bloodstain-purple port). “You have not told me what you all think of my Mrs. Robinson.”
My veins turned to ice.
“She is a very fine woman,” said one. Could it be he who was too nervous before to take my hand without stuttering? “For her age,” he added.
This solicited a collective laugh.
“And keen, no doubt.” This surely was the European traveler. “You know what they say about widows!”
More laughter, this time accompanied by the arrhythmic drumming of several pairs of hands on the table. The splashes of red would dot the freshly laundered tablecloth.
“Are her daughters as lively?” said one. “Is her hair all hers?” asked another. But those questions went unanswered.
“What I want to know, Scott,” said the nervous man, buoyed no doubt by his earlier success, “is what is it like?”
“What is what like?” asked Sir Edward, all mirth gone from his voice.
Was this the limit, then? Had the guest overstepped?
“Why, what it’s like having two wives?” The man crescendoed as he delivered his punch line.
Guffawing.
“Now, now, Theodore, that’s enough,” said the master of the house, through a low chuckle.
I stumbled to my feet, my joints aching from my unnatural position and the cold, but not before I had heard another man compliment Sir Edward on his “veritable harem.”
No good comes to those who eavesdrop, I’d told Lydia when she was a small, inquisitive child. I had only myself to blame for ignoring my own lesson today.
I didn’t have a lamp or candle and so had to feel my way up the winding, uneven stairs. Great Barr Hall, of course, was Gothic to a tee, inside as well as out, and difficult to navigate in the dark. The corridors were deserted. The servants must have anticipated a night of drinking, finished their duties, and gone to bed, registering the timbre of the evening before me.
I had to breathe, resist the urge to fly back in there to berate the men or to
pack my bags, write accusing letters, weep with abandon until Sir Edward came to calm me.
However good you were, there would be men who thought you a whore or spoke of you as such in your absence. But that didn’t mean, as I’d thought for a time, that all men fell into both camps or that you had to prove them right. Sir Edward might speak of me like this to his friends, but he also kept a respectful distance from me, for now. He hadn’t repeated his overtures from that day on the lawn. Instead he deferred to my power—the power the woman ought to hold until a couple’s wedding day.
I stumbled back into my room. There now. My anger had passed.
I’d seen a sketch once, in a book of natural wonders, of a sort of lizard—a chameleon—that could melt into the foliage behind it. Yet he could also change himself to match the desert, the bark, even the sky. People like that were life’s survivors. Those who, like Branwell Brontë, clung to a fixed vision, a dream, of themselves or of others, were doomed to disappointment, hoist by their own petard.
27th January 1848
York
Lydia,
I swear you are trying to hound me, an old woman, to my grave.
First, you thrust those daughters of yours on me, and just before Christmas, when servants, without a care in the world for their mistresses’ inconvenience, insist on taking holidays. (Bessy’s table manners are appalling, by the way. However did you raise her?)
And, next, my home is set upon by a woman who claims to know me. An upstart young farmer’s wife in a dress more fashionable than it was warm or, for that matter, decent. She arrived in a fury, but at last I managed to wring from her who she was. I’ve already forgotten her name but that matters not. Prior to her marriage, and its attendant frippery, she went by “Sewell.”
Sewell, I thought. It does have a familiar ring. And then it came to me. This Harpy was once my poor lost son’s housekeeper.
No sooner had she won access to me than this woman dissolved into unconvincing tears. She confirmed who she was, simpering when she mentioned her marriage and holding out her hand to show me her little brass ring. Did she expect this to impress me?
When I advised her to state the purpose of her visit before I had her removed, she got to it. She had come to protest the dismissal of her “poor brother” at your hands. He’d received your letter a few days before and was distraught, she said, to be so ill used when he had been such a dutiful steward to my son. She evoked Edmund’s memory, expressed her condolences, and begged me to petition you on her brother’s behalf.
She understands nothing of my grief. She has not even carried a child inside her, let alone buried two. Yet my heart softened a little as she spoke of my Edmund and his goodness and how you, and you alone, had poisoned his home.
Listen here, Lydia. I need hardly tell you what I made of my visitor. But we can’t have disgruntled servants running off to new positions throughout the county, reporting your sins to all and sundry. What were you thinking in dismissing Sewell? Have you no sense? His sister may be a piece of work, but the man is unobjectionable. Didn’t I hire him myself while you were bedridden by a mere pregnancy?
I insist you write to him at once and undo his dismissal.
Ever hopeful of a change in you for the better,
I remain, your mother, in law only,
Elizabeth Robinson
29th January 1848
Great Barr Hall
Mr. Sewell,
I hereby retract my previous letter. You may keep your post as steward for as long as you like, as long as you and your insufferable sister leave my family in peace.
I remain, sir, yours very truly,
Lydia Robinson
3rd February 1848
York
Mama,
Mary and I want to come back. May we rejoin you at Great Barr Hall?
Do write to us and say that we may.
Grandmama is dreadful, perhaps worse than before.
She quite ambushed me yesterday. I went downstairs for breakfast and (horror of horrors!) Will Milner was in our apartments waiting for me. She had let him in!
He held fast my hand and argued his case, although it has been a year since I last saw him. And he would not leave until I cried.
Once he was gone, Grandmama accused me of being a flirt, screamed that I was “my mother’s daughter,” and told me I was to go without pudding for a week.
I swear I would have gone into hysterics, were Mary not there to comfort me.
Send for us, please. Or say we can go to Auntie and Uncle at Allestree Hall.
Your loving daughter,
Bessy
6th February 1848
Great Barr Hall
My dear daughters,
I am sorry to report that Lady Scott’s health has deteriorated. Sir Edward is quite unable to accommodate any more visitors at present.
You expressed a desire to leave me, and so I sent you to your grandmother. Now you appear to dislike your grandmother as much as you do me. I cannot deal with such capriciousness.
If you were to go to your Aunt Mary, you’d be sure to hate her too within a fortnight, as you do anyone who tries to curb you.
Life isn’t always pleasant. We cannot always act in accordance with our own desires.
Bessy, if your need for change is so pressing, you could always consider accepting young Milner’s persistent (if rather melodramatic) proposal. My mind on the matter remains unchanged.
With affection, I remain, very truly, your mother,
Lydia Robinson
4th April 1848
Allestree Hall
Lydia,
Your daughters, I thought you should know, arrived at Allestree Hall around a week ago, mercifully unharmed. They traveled unaccompanied by stagecoach to escape the tyrannies of their grandmother, looking like bedraggled orphans by the time they reached our doorstep.
They are welcome here. In fact, upon hearing of your proceedings at Great Barr Hall, William and I must insist that this become, for the foreseeable future, their home. Bessy and Mary are good, honest girls, with fine futures before them. Mind you do nothing to jeopardize their prospects further.
Sending prayers for your soul and for our cousin Catherine’s recovery,
I remain, your sister,
Mary Evans
CHAPTER TWENTY
I HAD RARELY GONE into the sickroom during my time at Great Barr Hall but, as fate would have it, I was the one who was with Lady Scott at the end.
We—Sir Edward and I—had thought it best when his sons hurried home for the crisis for me to appear useful and take shifts by his wife’s bedside. I was a widow who had watched my husband and daughter die. That marked me out as Death’s custodian in this house full of men.
We were lounging through the dog days of summer, but it was gloomy in Catherine’s chamber at night and in the day. I could see only a hint of sunshine at the edge of one of the heavy tapestried curtains. Otherwise the room was lit by candles and one solitary lamp, which was shaded by a black veil, as if it were sentient and already in mourning.
I sat as far from the bed as possible and tried not to look at her. To do so was to confront myself. The instinct of the living to avoid the dying coupled with my guilt that her liberation would be my salvation. But the poor woman’s breath was a constant reminder of her presence and an unwanted accompaniment to my latest novel. When my eyes slid from the page to her, the stories that her face told horrified me. She was scared. She was confused and angry. She didn’t understand who I was.
A clock somewhere down the echoing, uncarpeted landing struck three. Another hour until the nurse came to relieve me. Sir Edward and the “boys,” as he still called them, were out riding and enjoying the summer weather while I was shut up inside. For months I had lived under the rays of his near-constant attention, but now that his sons were here, the master of the house no longer needed me.
“Write some letters to while away the hours,” he’d told me that morning, kissing my cheek (he d
id that now) and assuring me he was grateful for “my service to dear Catherine.”
But whom was there to write to? I’d written to Dr. Crosby so much I feared he’d tired of me. I pictured a younger, more vivacious woman at his side, or a sandy-haired man, little more than a boy, sneaking through the side entrance of the doctor’s house to visit him at night. And I hadn’t heard from my son or my sister or my daughters—not for months.
“Edward.”
I jumped and twisted toward the door before realizing it was Lady Scott who had spoken.
This was new.
I didn’t stand but leaned toward the bed, steeling myself for blood, excrement, vomit, delirium. Anything but the unthinkable: her recovery.
“Edward,” Catherine said a little louder. This time her body was thrashing.
I put down my book and went to her. Up close, I could smell her, or, rather, each day, week, month since she’d last bathed.
Her hand grasped mine. She was still wearing her wedding ring.
“He’s not here,” I said.
The sound of my voice quieted her. Without the creaking of the bed and the dull thump of her arm against the pillow, there it was again. Her breathing.
“Stay,” she whispered, and a memory fell across me like sunlight.
“Stay,” she’d whispered once before, on Valentine’s Day many years ago when I’d acted as her sullen bridesmaid.
But she hadn’t said it to me. Why would she? I was fifteen and foolish. I’d believed that the ceremony itself was the most important moment of the wedding day. Besides, I’d been surly, for what I’d thought then to be my heart was breaking. What was I worth if this man who would be a baronet hadn’t chosen me, if I was only standing at the edges of the scene?
Yet “stay,” Catherine had said to my fellow bridesmaids, and although the rest of them must have known what she meant, we all left her anyway. We’d had our own lives to live, our futures to protect, and she had her side of the bargain she’d made for herself to fulfill.
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