by Heather Webb
The record was stuck in a groove. The joys of life are flying. . . . The joys of life are flying. . . .
I set down the tray before taking the needle off the record. “The war is over. Mrs. Dean from the post office rang. The announcement was made at eleven this morning.”
They said that in London there was cheering and celebrating, bonfires and dancing in the streets, but in Nicholas’s room there was only a horrible stillness. He turned his face to the wall, so I could see only the good side. “Am I expected to be happy?”
I sat tentatively on the edge of the bed. “Relieved, perhaps?”
“Why?” The savagery in his voice took me aback. When he turned, it was almost a shock to see the ridged flesh, the empty socket where his left eye had been. “I’m done for.”
I thought of all the men who were truly done for, the men who hadn’t come home. “You’re alive.”
“I’m a monster.” He looked at me straight on, giving me the full effect of his distorted face. “What am I meant to do? Set myself up as a sideshow freak? I might as well be in the grave as rot here in Carrington.”
“No one’s holding you here.”
“This is.” Nicholas waved a hand in the direction of his face. “No one will want me now.”
I took his hand and squeezed. “Don’t be absurd.”
“You wouldn’t think of marrying me, would you, Millie?” I couldn’t tell if he was joking or not. “You loved me once.”
“I love you now.” I wasn’t lying, not really. I did love him. He was in my blood, part of my childhood.
But it wasn’t the sort of love he meant and Nicholas was canny enough to know it.
“Not the same way.” His face contorted with self-loathing. “How could you? I’m a monster.”
“No more than you ever were.” I scooted closer, putting an arm around his shoulders. “Nicholas, don’t. I mean it, truly. You are everything you were before. You just need . . . a new interest. Something to do with yourself. Other than kissing the housemaids.”
“You saw that?” For a moment, Nicholas sounded almost pleased with himself. But then he flopped back against the pillows. “She won’t kiss me now, you know. She won’t even look at me. No one will.”
“Stop it,” I said, and kissed him.
I could say I kissed him because I felt sorry for him, and it was true, I did. But I would be lying if I claimed that was all there was to it. I kissed him because I had spent years daydreaming of being kissed by Nicholas, because there was a part of me that would always remember what he had been, and what he had been to me.
His mouth hadn’t been affected by the shell that had gutted his face. It was a perfectly serviceable kiss, practiced even.
But it wasn’t love, and I knew it.
I kissed Nicholas and I kissed him good-bye. In the midst of it, I fancied I could hear a metaphorical door clicking shut, closing off that old infatuation.
Carrington Cross, 1980
BEHIND AMANDA, THE door swings shut with an audible click that makes Edward start and his cane clatter to the floor.
I can hear the echo of it, the sound of a door closing.
“Are there any biscuits?” I ask Amanda.
There are biscuits on the tray. I can see her almost start to say so, but she’s bright enough to know when she’s being asked to go.
“Sure,” she says, and turns away.
I wonder if she’ll listen at the door. I would.
To Edward, I say quietly, “Whatever you saw, it wasn’t what you thought.”
“Wasn’t it? You don’t need to lie to me,” he adds, and there’s the bitter tang of wounded pride in his voice. “I knew I was second choice.”
Hoist by my own petard. How can I blame him for saying that, when I’d gone to considerable lengths to make Edward think it?
The papers had been full of our romantic elopement. We’d gone to Paris first, and from Paris to Kenya, courting flashbulbs all the way. Nicholas had been sufficiently decorated during the war—and sufficiently public before it—to generate news. Perhaps it was a craving for scandal in the wake of so much seriousness. In any event, there we were: baronet’s brother elopes with cousin, with much hemming and hawing and pointing at my waistline, or what was left of it. It was scandalous, it was romantic, it was uplifting.
Tin Face, Warm Heart!
Who doesn’t want to believe that he can still be loved despite his scars, despite his deformities? We performed a public service, Nicholas and I, even if it was half by accident, even if it was all based on a lie. But it was what people wanted to hear, what they needed to believe.
And I had needed it, too. Let Edward believe it was a love match. Let him, I had thought vengefully, enjoy his cold bed and his new roof.
Let him believe I had the choice of brothers and hadn’t chosen him.
“It was just a kiss,” I say now. “That was all. We never— It felt too much like incest.”
For me, at least. As for Nicholas, he’d never really desired me, not that way. We were partners, not lovers.
Edward shakes his head, stubborn to the last. “Nicholas told me—that you were lovers. That you had been lovers.”
I sit up straighter in my chair. “When?”
“That night.” He doesn’t need to specify which night. November 11 will always be that night. Edward looks down, shamefaced. “After I saw you—well, I confronted him about it. He told me you’d been lovers for weeks, practically since he’d come home.”
I ought to have known. That’s all I can think. I ought to have known.
I knew Nicholas. I knew Edward. I knew them both, through and through. Why hadn’t I seen it? Why hadn’t I guessed?
My lips feel numb. “Nicholas lied,” I say. “He was scared. He was afraid of being left alone.”
We’d been his pillars, Edward and I. If we’d married—Nicholas would have been the odd man out. He hadn’t wanted me for himself, not really, but he certainly hadn’t wanted me for Edward.
Edward gives his head a little shake, like a horse swatting off flies. I know how he feels. It’s rather hard to believe one thing for more than half a century and then discover it’s another. It’s enough to make one doubt one’s judgment.
I make light of it, but my hands are shaking in my lap. What scares me isn’t that I was wrong, it’s that I didn’t have the sense to know I was wrong.
We knew Nicholas. We both knew Nicholas. Why didn’t we see it at the time?
Was it because we didn’t want to?
Love is one thing, the reality of a life together another. Particularly when there are bills to be paid.
“Millie,” says Edward. And that’s all. But it’s enough. There’s a lifetime of apology in that one word.
“Cookie?” It’s the ubiquitous Amanda, with a plate of digestives. I ought to have known she was one of Daphne’s. Daphne was like that, too, as insistent as a pointer with a fallen grouse.
For a moment, it feels like we’re all there again: Daphne, trying to manage people. Edward, steady and sensible. Nicholas, his portrait looming over us, always the joker in the pack.
I don’t know whether to curse him or thank him.
“Thank you.” I take a biscuit from the tray. To Edward, I say, as casually as I can, “It is what it is. Although it does seem appropriate that Henry will follow you.”
It takes him a moment. He can’t ask right out, not with Amanda there. “Do you mean—?”
“Oh, yes.” I raise a brow, rather enjoying myself now. It’s amazing what a difference it makes, being the one who got away, rather than the woman scorned. “Henry was born in August of ’19. He has two grown girls, Annabelle and Pamela. And a little boy, Nicky.”
It was the old story. Pass the midcentury mark, lose your hair, start shagging the secretary. Annabelle a
nd Pamela were both out of university before Nicky was out of nappies. Whatever the biology of it, Henry had always been more Nicholas’s son than Edward’s.
I decide not to mention that to Edward. There’s really no need to further muddy the waters. They’re muddy enough already.
“A little boy.” Edward looks dazed and well he might. It’s not every day that one inherits a slew of descendants. I can see the family tree scrolling out in front of him. Sir Henry Frobisher, Bart. Sir Nicholas Frobisher, Bart.
The family we might have had, together.
If. And that’s the rub, isn’t it? We can blame Nicholas all we like. But deep down, I’m still not entirely sure that Edward would have married me. I might have been his only bright spot, his light in a dark world and so on, but Pansy had the money to save Carrington.
It would be nice to believe that love conquers all, but when it comes down to love or money, money has a way of winning.
Cynical? Perhaps. But I’ve had sixty-odd years to whet my sharp edges. Sixty-two years to be precise. Sixty-two years of believing that the man I loved had thrown me over to save his house.
I take a big bite out of my biscuit. “The line will go on. Henry will have Carrington. So you see, it’s all come out right in the end.”
“Except for all the time between,” says Edward quietly.
I almost ask it then. Would you have married me? But Amanda is sitting there. And the truth of it is, I would rather not know. Better to bask in the assurance of it, to know that I was loved, that—but for a misplaced moment of pity, a foolish kiss—it would have been a different ring on my finger.
When I try to think of what my life would have been with Edward, all I can see is my farm in Kenya. Which was not, for the record, at the foot of the Ngong Hills. I remember going to parties with Nicholas, feeling that thrill at knowing that I was married to the most sought-after man in the room. I’d enjoyed being the wife of the Aviator in the Iron Mask. I’d enjoyed the fuss and notoriety.
I’d enjoyed my own discreet affairs.
It wasn’t the life I would have chosen at twenty-two, but having had it, the alternative seems curiously colorless.
I love Edward, I do. But would I have loved him after a lifetime at Carrington, of worrying about the roof and the rates and a dozen kinds of rot?
My mind flits back again, to the day after the Armistice, when I might have stayed and fought—and hadn’t.
But none of that matters. We write history for our own ends. This is my chosen history now: the one in which Nicholas tricked us both, in which we have found each other again after all these years, the record set right.
“We’re here now.” I straighten the poppy in my onetime lover’s buttonhole. “Peace, at last.”
All for the Love of You
Jennifer Robson
PART ONE
Paris, France
March 1925
HER FATHER WAS dying. Dr. Sorel didn’t trouble to mince his words.
“Your father has pneumonia, Miss Fields, and there is no effective treatment.”
“I don’t understand. It was only a cold. Surely it can’t be that serious.”
“His lungs are weak, as you know, and now the infection has set in. He is dying. One day, perhaps two. It will not be long now. I am very sorry.”
Dr. Sorel’s diagnosis was shocking, of course, but it wasn’t precisely a surprise. She had seen her father diminishing over the past months, his coughing fits becoming more frequent, more severe, and though he’d insisted it was simply the damp Paris winter disagreeing with him, she hadn’t been convinced. Yet she had never quite imagined this.
Daisy sat at his bedside all that night, and for the day and night that followed. He slept nearly the entire time, rousing only when the medicine wore off and his cough stirred to life again. And then, in the wee hours near dawn, when light had begun to tug at the charcoaled fringes of night, he awoke.
His gaze was clear, unfogged by the morphia Dr. Sorel had administered, and he motioned for her to draw even closer, though her head was only inches away from his. He looked ghastly, his skin paper-thin and almost gray, and his features, in the thin light of dawn, resembled a death mask more than living human flesh.
She kissed his brow and grasped his near hand in hers, wishing it were enough to tether him to life.
“Forgive me,” he whispered. “Did it . . . out of love. Didn’t think . . . not worthy . . .”
“I don’t understand, Daddy—you did what?”
“Forgive me . . .”
“Of course I will. I love you, Daddy.”
He smiled feebly, and then he was asleep again, his expression slackening into something that almost resembled peace. Minutes passed, the space between his exhalations growing longer and longer, and though she longed for him to wake again, to see that she was there, to know that she loved him, he slipped further away with each rasping sigh.
A long-drawn whisper of escaping breath, and then . . . nothing. He was gone.
She stood, her limbs protesting after the hours she’d spent hunched at his side, and painstakingly straightened the sheets and coverlet over his still form. There was a fleck of spittle at the corner of his mouth, and she wiped it away with the same handkerchief she’d been using to blot the perspiration from his brow.
Somehow she made it across the bedchamber to the bathroom, its white tiles and gleaming chrome shockingly bright once she switched on the electric lights overhead. Standing before the sink, she splashed cold water on her face and wrists, watching with a calm sort of detachment at the funny way her hands were shaking. She smoothed back her hair, half of which had fallen out of its pins, but was too tired to do anything more.
At that moment she wanted nothing more than to crawl into bed and cry herself to sleep, but she had to take charge. For the first time in her life, she had no one to look up to for advice and support. She would have to manage on her own.
Knowing that her father wouldn’t wish anyone else to see him struggling, she had kept the servants out of his bedchamber, only occasionally opening the door to admit supplies of fresh towels and lemon water. Their butler was waiting in the hall, as she’d expected he would do, and for all she knew the poor man had been there all night. He probably hadn’t sat down the entire time.
“My father has passed away, Mr. Bishop. It was very peaceful,” she added, seeing how he struggled to contain his shock. “Could I trouble you to send a note to Dr. Sorel? I shall need his help in sorting out the formalities.”
“Yes, of course. May I fetch you anything, Miss Daisy? You haven’t eaten anything in hours.”
“No, thank you. I need to go through some papers in my father’s office now, and I’d prefer not to be disturbed.”
“Of course. I am so very sorry, Miss Daisy.”
She tried to smile, and when that failed she set a comforting arm on the butler’s sleeve, just to show him that she appreciated his kind words. Then she went downstairs to her father’s office.
It smelled rather musty inside, for it had been shut up since that first awful chest infection had laid her father low at the beginning of the winter. After switching on the lights, which only managed to enhance the layer of dust over everything, she crossed to the windows beyond his desk, folded back the interior shutters, and opened the casements.
She’d been in this room only half a dozen times before, if that, for her father hadn’t liked to be disturbed when he was working, and she’d never been brave enough to venture beyond its threshold when he was away from the house. Even now, his presence was still so strong she almost expected to blink her eyes and see him sitting at the huge double-pedestal desk, his degrees and citations adorning the wall behind him.
At length she found his will in a half-empty filing cabinet. Its terms were just as she’d expected, with her inheriting th
e entirety of his estate, apart from a few token bequests to colleagues, distant relatives, and servants. In a codicil, executed the same time as the will, he had expressed his wish to be buried in Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn, New York, next to her mother. Daisy had no idea if it was practicable or even possible to transport her father’s body such a long distance, but perhaps Dr. Sorel would be able to arrange something.
Setting aside the will, she resolved to make a list of everything that needed to be done. Lists always helped. She pulled out the desk drawer to her left, hoping to unearth some paper, but found only a sad collection of pen nibs and blotters, used-up pencils, bits of string, and, at the very back, an old envelope. That would have to do.
She took up one of the pencil ends, set the envelope on the desk before her, and was about to start writing when something, some half-felt frisson of curiosity, impelled her to take a second look. The envelope might hold a keepsake, or even an important document. It wouldn’t do to deface it for nothing.
The front of the envelope bore her father’s name and their address in Paris, but there was no return address. She pulled out the single sheet of paper inside; it was soft and worn, as if it had been read and refolded a hundred times.
November 27th, 1918
Dear Dr. Fields,
I hope you will forgive my boldness in writing to you directly, but I was so shocked by the sad news you imparted during our brief meeting today that I fear I left without properly expressing my sincere condolences on the untimely death of your daughter. I came only because I had been told that Miss Fields was ill and I was concerned for her well-being, and I apologize sincerely if my intrusion caused you any further distress.
I only knew your daughter for a short time, but in that period I came to consider her a true friend. I was a client of the Studio for Portrait Masks, and she was at my side for every moment of my visits to the studio while my mask was being fashioned. She was kindness and understanding personified. She looked upon my ruined face without pity or disgust. I shall mourn her for the rest of my life.