by Heather Webb
Somewhere over Africa, 1980
THE SMELL OF stale smoke has seeped into the nubby seats of the chairs on the plane. There is pink chewing gum in the ashtray, congealed until it has become immovable, part of the decoration, a bright splash of color against the dulled metal.
My family has prevailed upon me to take the trip. Annabelle has stocked my bag with bottles of water and custard crèmes, her concession to the exigencies of travel; Pamela contributed a pile of glossy fashion magazines that recount the scandals of persons of whom I have no knowledge and offer advice on the application of paint and powder I would never wear. But she means well, so I flip through them all the same, wondering at the tendency of the young to find the most unflattering garments possible and refer to it as style.
Henry provided me my return ticket, with a date set two weeks hence. He didn’t quite meet my eyes as he murmured, “Once you’ve gone all that way . . .”
What he means is that he wants me out of the way for the next meeting of the board.
But I didn’t argue. Tickets can be changed. And there’s a benefit to the element of surprise. I learned that during my marriage.
Nicholas was always best managed on a long leash.
I lean my head back against the seat rest and try to ignore the movie on the screen in the front, little airplanes whizzing about an improbable futuristic world, up in the stars and all built of reinforced concrete. I used to enjoy Jules Verne and H. G. Wells, back in the time before the war, when the future was something rich and strange, but their futures—and mine—never looked quite like that.
The little airplanes in which they whiz about remind me of Nicholas’s. That Moth he treasured so, until it came to grief near Dagoretti field. He took me up in it once, but I was too busy clutching the sides to enjoy the view.
“You have your feet on the ground,” he told me, with resignation. “You and . . .”
He didn’t say the name. He didn’t need to.
After that, I stayed home and saw to the seedlings while Nicholas managed the charter business, flying rich industrialists and bored heiresses around Africa.
The Aviator in the Iron Mask, the papers called him.
It wasn’t iron, of course. That would have been impossible. Instead, it was tin, the very finest of its kind, hiding the ruin of the left side of his face. The way he wore it, though, gave him a certain dash and panache; his unwillingness to remove it, even in bed, made the papers in two continents.
“Are you married, or do you live in Kenya?” That was the way the saying went, in those years after the war.
We’d been like so many flocking out to British East Africa in 1919, Nicholas and I. Find peace in an untainted paradise, they’d told us. Plant coffee and make your fortune. Endless opportunities. That was the rhetoric of it, but, like so many others, we weren’t running toward; we were running away.
His talisman, Nicholas called me. His lucky charm. He credited me with saving him, and perhaps I had, in a topsy-turvy way, if only by taking him away. Away from Carrington, away from England. In Kenya, it didn’t matter that he had only half a face; no one had known him as he had once been. The Aviator in the Iron Mask rose phoenixlike from the ashes of the Nicholas Frobisher that had been.
Every now and again, I would torture myself with wondering. Wondering how it might have been different if I had stayed in England. I find myself rewriting the script, changing the words, erasing the last sixty years and replacing them with—what?
Where do I stop the reel and start it playing again?
Carrington, 1915
GOOD-BYE, MOUSE.”
The train station was crowded with other women seeing their men off, their faces obscured by coal smoke and tears. A band was playing. Not a very good one. The horn was tinny and the drum was out of tune. As a send-off, it left something to be desired, but it was no matter. They would be home by Christmas, everyone knew that. Or if not Christmas, certainly by Easter.
In my imaginings, this was the moment when Nicholas, glorious Nicholas, would sweep me up in his arms, kiss me with the sort of fervor reserved for the books that Daphne hid beneath the sheets in the airing cupboard, and vow that he was coming home to me, only me.
In reality, I received a chuck under the chin and a rumple of my carefully pinned hair. “Don’t sniffle, mouse. I’ll be home before you’ve had a chance to miss me.”
“I’m not sniffling,” I protested, although perhaps I was, just a bit, although whether at the prospect of Nicholas going off to war or that casual, hurtful “mouse,” I wasn’t quite sure.
I’d been in love with Nicholas from the day I’d walked through the door of Carrington House as a nine-year-old orphan; I’d been in love from the moment he’d grabbed my hand and pulled me out to play. I’d loved him through tumbling out of trees and into brooks; I’d loved him through scoldings from Nanny and bed without supper. I loved him without reason and without hope and never more than now, as I saw him before me in uniform, the epitome of every brave soldier who had ever sought that bubble reputation in the cannon’s mouth—or however it was that the bard put it.
Why had I thought today would be any different? ’Twere all one / That I should love a bright particular star / And think to wed it, he is so above me.
Shakespeare might well have written that line for me.
“You—you look very dashing,” I ventured.
Nicholas’s teeth flashed in a grin. “That’s the point of it, you know. Well, that, and to give the Hun a jolly good thrashing. What do you say, Ned?”
I hadn’t realized that Edward was standing there until Nicholas addressed him, just over my left shoulder. Twisting, I saw Edward grimace, rubbing his forehead as though the band of his cap pained him. “I would rather stay here.”
“And miss all the fun?” Nicholas winked at Ivy, the upstairs maid, dressed in her best and lurking in the general vicinity. I studiously looked the other way. I’d seen them kissing in the gazebo the previous summer.
From the way Edward’s brow darkened, he’d seen them, too. “Someone needs to mind the farm.”
“You have the turnips, I’ll have the glory. What do you say, mouse?”
That I wished he wouldn’t call me mouse. “I’ll make you parcels.”
“Cakes from Fuller’s and hampers from Fortnum,” said Nicholas. “And tea what is tea as Mrs. Potter likes to say. Ah, don’t cry now, Mrs. P.”
“He thinks it’s a picnic,” said Edward in a low voice.
It was impossible that anything bad might ever touch Nicholas. He was the prince from a fairy tale, impervious to swords and spells alike. “You’ll be there to keep him safe.” With an effort, I tore my attention from Nicholas and looked up at Edward. “Shouldn’t you be saying your farewells to Pansy?”
They weren’t officially engaged, not yet, but we all knew it was a matter of time. Pansy’s family had made their fortune in banking and were determined to prove their country bona fides by being duller than anyone else. Their tweeds were always just a bit baggier, their hats a bit more like porkpies. It was a love match, as such matches are: Pansy loved the idea of being Lady Frobisher and Edward loved the idea of being able to finally repair the roof, which was sagging ominously over the unused rooms of the East Wing. As a farm, Carrington Cross paid its way, but only just. There wasn’t much left over for leading. Or, for that matter, for Fortnum’s hampers.
I could see Pansy at the other end of the platform, taking a proper lady-of-the-manor interest in the departing tenantry, her lilac frock blending nicely with the coal smoke.
Edward glanced over at her and away again. He looked down at me, two deep furrows between his eyes. They were rather nice eyes, somewhere between gray and blue. Not the sort of color the poets would write sonnets about, but comfortable, like time-faded drapes. “You’ll see to Carrington for me?”
“I tho
ught you had Keeley for that.” Keeley had been at Carrington forever, a gamekeeper turned general factotum.
“I do, but . . . he’s getting on. And he’s never been much for accounts.”
I gave Edward’s hand a quick squeeze. “I’ll make sure the numbers tally.” I could hear Nicholas’s laugh down the platform, but I couldn’t see who he was speaking to. “Don’t fret.”
“Thank you.” It was the fact that Edward was still holding my hand that caught my attention. I looked up at him and found him looking at me, his face serious. “You’re the only one I trust to see to it properly.”
From Edward, that meant a great deal. “Thank you,” I said, around a lump in my throat that had nothing to do with the coal smoke. “I’ll do my best.”
“You always do,” he said, and leaned down and brushed his lips—not across my lips, but against my cheek. Only my cheek.
Why, then, did it feel like something more?
The whistle was blowing, the boys were jumping on board, the train was leaving. I could see Edward taking a formal leave of Pansy, Nicholas pinching Ivy’s cheek, babies wailing, women waving, the band playing on.
And I stood there, one gloved hand against my cheek, and watched them as they went until—
“Come along,” said Pansy briskly, “I’ll drop you at Carrington,” and she led me back to her father’s motorcar.
London, 1980
THERE IS A young woman with a sign waiting for me at Heathrow.
I hadn’t expected that. I am even more surprised when she greets me, in transatlantic tones, “Aunt Camilla?”
Not a paid driver, then. But I would have known that anyway, from the hair. Frobisher hair, inherited from one of the long-ago Saxon ancestors who dug in their tent posts on a particular plot in Hampshire and refused to budge from it. Dynasties might rise and fall, civil wars might be fought, but fair-haired Frobishers clung close to their own. On Nicholas and Daphne it had shone golden; on Edward it had been tow. This girl wore her long blond hair twisted into a casual bun with something thrust through it, but it had that same straw-colored quality as Edward’s.
His granddaughter?
I feel it like a sharp pain. I shouldn’t. But I do.
I hobble forward painfully. My limbs are stiff from the long flight, that’s all. I’m not usually so infirm. I want to tell her that, but it would seem to protest too much, so I say, formally, “I am afraid you have the advantage of me.”
The girl sticks out a hand, American-style. “Amanda Merrill.”
“And you are . . .”
“Emma’s daughter.” That means nothing to me. I have deliberately kept myself from Carrington and all it contains. Edward might have a dozen daughters, each named Emma or Esmerelda. But I nod as though I know and follow her through the terminal, past a confusion of shops hawking magazines and scarves, duty-free gin and scarlet lipsticks. I have time enough to examine all of it; the pace my grand-niece sets would shame an industrious snail.
There is nothing more humiliating than the solicitousness of youth.
“You needn’t fuss over me,” I tell her, as she helps me into the car, earnestly inquiring into the state of my creaky limbs.
Don’t fuss over me.
It’s Edward’s voice in my ear, an echo from sixty-odd years ago.
Don’t fuss over me, he snapped, as I rushed forward to help him up the steps, my hair pulled back untidily beneath a kerchief, my breeches tucked into my boots. My nails were brown with dirt; they were always brown, no matter how I scrubbed at them. The soil left a stain. What’s a leg more or less?
They’d fitted Edward with a prosthesis in France, but he hadn’t got the knack of it yet; he lurched dangerously as he tried to climb the three stairs to the entrance of Carrington. There were a pair of crutches, but he’d left them in the trap, an ancient governess cart I’d used to pick him up at the station. I could see from the sweat on his brow how much it was costing him to ignore those crutches.
He had lost his leg at Cambrai; had lain in a wagon with a field dressing clumsily wrapped around the bloody stump, shaking with shock, while the bells rang in the church in Carrington village and we had all celebrated, happy for any victory, however small, not knowing yet that that small victory would be lost and the casualty lists come in with the names of our own. It wasn’t until two weeks later that we’d heard, and it was only now, in April, that we were getting Edward home, after a long convalescence in a hospital somewhere in France.
He hadn’t told us how close he’d come to dying, but it was easy enough to read through the lines.
I had always thought of Edward as solid, the English countryside personified, but he’d grown thin, so painfully thin, and his whole body trembled with the effort as he lurched into the familiar hall, with the wood paneling that was meant to be saved from rot by Pansy’s money—if Pansy would still have a man with one leg.
Pansy hadn’t come to the station, but she had a good excuse for that; she had taken a course in nursing and volunteered at the local hospital.
I didn’t ask Edward where matters stood between them.
Catching himself on the high back of a Jacobean chair, he said, with difficulty, Where’s Daphne?
London. In all our letters, I hadn’t told him, hadn’t wanted to tell him. Edward didn’t need more worries. She wanted to train as a nurse.
Edward glanced out the window at the lawn, plowed up to make room for carrots and cabbages. It was a piecemeal affair. There were so few of us, just the women, left at home. How could I ask the wives of Edward’s tenant farmers for help, when they had work enough maintaining their own? So I did the best I could, digging, planting, harvesting. I’d been banned from the kitchen end of things by Mrs. Potter after a spectacular explosion that heralded the destruction of most of the following autumn’s jelly.
You mean she wanted a holiday in London, he said grimly.
It’s hardly a holiday. I couldn’t dispute Edward’s assessment of his sister’s motives—Daphne had always yearned after London—but she had stuck the course. Blood and bandages suited her. She’s working hard.
So are you. I could see Edward looking at my hands, at my ragged nails, the calluses on my palms, and quickly stuck them behind my back, wishing I’d thought to put on gloves. You shouldn’t have to do it all on your own.
Maybe it was his haggard appearance, but there was an intensity that hadn’t been there before. Or maybe it always had, and I had never noticed. Never noticed because there was always Nicholas, stealing the sunshine.
Hastily, breathlessly, I said, Have you—have you heard anything of Nicholas?
And I watched the light fade from Edward’s face as he gave a slight shrug, which nearly unbalanced him, and said, All right, I think. Is that the gong for lunch?
It wasn’t the gong, of course. We’d abandoned the gong, with so much else. A phantom sound from the past, like the phantom limb that I could tell, over the following months, still pained Edward. There was no question of his going back to the front. He’d dug in, pushing himself further than he ought, overseeing planting, taking his turn at the plow, staying up late trying to make the numbers in the ledgers tally.
His leg wasn’t the only phantom presence among us. There was Nicholas, whose letters had grown longer, which ought to have been satisfying, but was instead disconcerting. He’d begun to fantasize about what he might do after the war, and those fantasies became ever stranger. Open a nightclub in London, find the fabled Mountains of the Moon, set off to sea in a pea-green boat.
What is Nicholas writing you? Edward would ask, half-glancing over my shoulder, but I could no more tell him than he would tell me what he found to say to Pansy every week, when her parents’ motor would pick him up and carry him to Belleview, their unimaginatively named manor, for supper.
Dreams, I told him. Fancies and dr
eams.
“Did you know that the family were originally recusants?”
“What?” I’ve been woken from a half doze. Dreams. Fancies and dreams. I hadn’t been aware that I was sleeping. I was merely—how does it go?—resting my eyes. That’s the danger of resting one’s eyes. It takes so little to drift back into a past that is, increasingly, more real than the present.
“That’s why it’s called Carrington Cross,” says Amanda confidingly, as I try to remember what she’s talking about. Oh, yes. Recusants. The word comes out of long-ago lessons. Secret Catholics in the reign of Elizabeth I. “For Carrying the Cross. At least, that’s what some of the sources say.”
Carrington had certainly been Edward’s cross to bear. Mine, too, during that last year of the war. We’d worked together, the two of us, trying to keep it going.
Was that when I’d fallen in love with him?
Amanda is still talking, something about her M.Phil. “—that’s how we saved the house. By converting. James I gave us a baronetcy and confirmed our ownership of the land. After that, the Frobishers became model Calvinists.”
It’s you, Millie. It was always you.
But in the end, it hadn’t been.
“Oh, yes,” I say drily. “The Frobishers always do what they need to do to save Carrington.”
We’ve reached the gates, which were one of Cousin Violet’s additions. She always did like the idea of keeping people out. Like my mother, she came from a thoroughly respectable middle-class professional family. My mother was a vicar’s daughter; Cousin Violet was the child of a doctor. My mother ran off with an actor. Cousin Violet married a baronet and spent the rest of her life turning herself into the lady of the manor.
I wonder what she would make of her American great-granddaughter, so casually speaking of “we” and “us.” Or, for that matter, of me. I’ve worn a Chanel suit and the diamond brooch that Nicholas inherited from Cousin Violet. Just because.
I may have left in disgrace, but I’m not going to return that way.
The trees look just as I remember, an alley of oaks, their branches now bare, just as they were that November long ago. It was a cold, wet November—or maybe it’s just the recollection of how it all turned out that makes me remember it as cold and wet. Maybe it wasn’t cold and wet at all. Maybe I’m a butterfly dreaming of being a philosopher. Memory plays tricks. Sometimes I suspect myself of remembering things as they ought to have been, rather than as they were.