by Baird Wells
James stared at her gape-mouthed. “I didn’t know such people really existed.”
“You should have.” She smiled at him through the haze of terrible memories. “You had plenty of time to make their acquaintance.”
“I did, but they were always trying to get Emily back, not send her away. Her every concern, her every idle wish, was treated as a deprivation, and the remedy was always to ‘come for a visit’.
“So that they could persuade her to stay.”
“Sometimes I wondered,” he said, gazing back at her. “If she would have been better off, happier.”
“You shouldn’t.” She dabbed away a tear with her sleeve. “Emily never wondered; she never went back.”
“And neither did you.”
“No.” She shook her head slowly and considered the implication in a way she never had before. “It was the first gangrenous limb of my relationships to be sawed off. It hurt and I was so frightened and hardened by it, but I healed from it stronger.” She hadn’t known it then, when Gregory had treated her upon returning in much the same fashion as her parents. “Gregory made it clear that Margaret was not going anywhere, which I railed against until I realized how little I was obligated to share my bed with him. I had to endure him now and then, until I got pregnant. That was a happy occasion,” she met his eyes and smiled. “I thought of how a baby would belong entirely to me, and felt unutterable joy that for nine months at least, he would keep away.”
“Pregnant?” James leaned forward and glanced her over.
“Two times. It never lasted.” She rolled her shoulders and dared a glimpse at her old grief, enough to remind her that it was still painful, and then covered it up again. “And that was fine, too. After the last one, he let me be. Maybe he wasn’t entirely heartless. He was old; I think he was too old to try and, I’ll grant, compassionate enough to spare me more anguish.”
A flush came over her when she remembered the next part, a tingling heat that ignited in her belly and spread in a tidal wave of boiling blood through her veins, drummed out by a heart suddenly much younger. She felt it in her face, in her fingers and breasts, and her head spun.
James, still sitting forward, cocked his head and one side of his mouth turned up in a confused smile. “Something happened.”
“It did,” she breathed, forcing out the words against a weightless sensation in her chest. “Jack Haddon Munroe, a Manhattan oil man. His money was so new it didn’t have folds in it, new enough to make Gregory and Simon shudder. That was fine with me because they didn’t go anywhere that Jack was invited.” She paused and drew up his oval face with its strong cheeks, his dapper moustache and fine green eyes.
“You liked him,” observed James in a level tone.
“Very much.” In the same violet-hued, breathless way she had begun to feel about someone else. “And then he made it plain he liked me even though I was married, which made me not like him for a time. I didn’t want to be Margaret and Gregory.” She pursed her lips but her smile won. “But I couldn’t dismiss him entirely, and after a while just being acquaintances felt so free. No one cared where we went or how many times we danced; none of them knew to worry.”
“And you had an affair of your own,” he said in the same flat draw.
“No! No, it wasn’t; not in that way.” She remembered a day, an afternoon in late summer when no air circulated to mix up the carriage’s heat, the cab hanging thick with a breath of roses and lilacs, and an amber sun turning their faces golden. “We rode in the park and Jack took my hand. Not in a gallant way or even the jaunty way he did when we walked. He rested his fingers over mine like a lover covering me with his body.” It was a pressure that waited to be invited along, and she felt it in her flesh even now. She had wanted him to kiss her, and he had told her he wanted the same. When she said no on principle, he said he loved her, so she’d laughed and said no again, scared of giving in. He had pulled her beside him, while they clattered slowly along the park’s rustling green border, and cradled her face. “I closed my eyes and would have let him kiss me then, but he repeated that he loved me, and declined.” She had fallen into him, body against body and her soul into his until they could never be separated. “He asked me to divorce, and to marry.”
James hung from his chair, looking as caught up in the old story’s spell as she was, a power she’d long ago forgotten it possessed.
“For almost a week I tried to tell Gregory, to explain. During dinner he would cut me off to prattle about some person he had seen out, someone I hardly knew and didn’t care about. He knew I had something on my mind, but would never let me have a word. I think it made him feel in charge, if he made me feel like what I had to say was small and unimportant. When I tried to tell him at breakfast or in the library, he would sit halfway through my first or second sentence and then huff or hmm, making it apparent he hadn’t been listening and didn’t intend to.”
She had come into the parlor and found Gregory sitting hand-in-hand with Margaret and dredged up the guts to order her out. Then she had found the fortitude to shout over Gregory by octaves until she was the louder one, and he had shut up, red-faced and huffing. “I told him I wanted a divorce.” She had declared it, drawn up straight and triumphant. “And he told me with a spray of spittle in my face that I would never have it.” She slumped, remembering how sure she’d been that everything would turn out right, and how it hadn’t, not at all. “I told him I loved Jack, and that I could wait. However long it took.”
She flinched, the snap of Gregory’s arm across her face ever fresh in her memory. “He struck me hard, so hard I skidded and burned my arm on the rug. I balled up and waited for another blow, but while I waited I only heard a hum like a throat clearing, and then a long rasp. The floorboards jarred, and when I dared to look, Gregory was writhing, grabbing at his shirt as though tearing it off.” She buried her face in her hands. “I watched until he was still. I don’t think I realized…” She met James eyes, looking for accusation or absolution. “Until he stopped moving I don’t think I knew he was dying, and that was the first I thought to shout for help. An attack of his heart, the doctor said.”
“Margaret.” James was staring past her, eyes far away.
“What?”
“When Simon first asked me to gain your confidence, he said he had a witness to your killing Gregory. The motive, but not the means. Margaret must have been listening.”
“Ooh.” Hannah balled her hands into fists. “I should have known. Simon had already summoned the police, by the time the doctor was leaving. Before Gregory’s body was taken away, Simon was trying to rewrite the will.” She sighed and hugged herself. “Already telling Jack how unfortunate it would be if he were kept in England under house arrest as an accessory, for months and months, while it all got sorted out.”
“Because Margaret had warned him,” concluded James.
She looked at him, just a shape through a flood of tears burning her eyes. “Gregory was barely cold, and Simon was already putting a taste in my mouth for revenge, so strong that I chose the house and the money, the Botticelli and stud farm, over Jack, to spite them all.”
“Hannah, why?” He was in front of her on his knees, gripping her fingers.
“I tried to tell Simon, to explain the rage that Gregory had flown into, and the fit afterward. He said I was a whore for wanting a divorce, and that I had killed my husband when he refused to give it to me.”
James groaned. “But why did you choose that moment to do something so spiteful, to give up Jack?”
“I had never tried for my own happiness. I had sacrificed it to Margaret and Gregory for so long. And the first time I asked for a bit of joy, a thing that would have been a convenience to both of us, he denied me just because he could. Because I belonged to him. And then Simon, and then Margaret –” She stopped herself when a trembling in her arms began in earnest. “I suffered them each for years, and when I could have been free, and they could have let me, they hurled more abuse ins
tead. They held me prisoner with the estate, the money, the accusations, and eventually Jack bought a ticket and sailed home. And I will repay them for that for as long as I can.”
James reached back and pulled his chair close, and climbed back into it, sitting there holding her hand and not saying a word.
“I am a murderer,” she whispered finally, the sum of what she’d become, what she’d done, dredged up after so long. “I killed myself.”
“What we are might die a hundred times in the space of one life. We can’t get those lives back,” whispered James, clearly meaning it for both of them. “But we can make something new. It isn’t the same, but I’ve been persuaded of late that it can still be wonderful.”
He held her hand without any expectations, until Margaret’s quelling rap at the door stole him away. Well after he’d gone, after light had faded beyond the window pane, Hannah turned her story, and its telling, over in her mind. She recognized that sharing it alone was significant, a beautiful bitterness she wouldn’t revisit for just anyone. More important, she decided, was its deeper lesson, a revelation that only found its way to her as she trudged rumpled and sleepy from the parlor to her bedroom. She hadn’t sacrificed for Jack, taken a risk or even compromised, and her regret over it was mighty. Hannah decided, snapping off the lamp and feeling safe with her thoughts in the darkness, that it was a mistake she wouldn’t repeat now.
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CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Late December in London did justice to all the printed color cards people sent one another at Christmastime. It had snowed during the previous night, a serious snow that had refused to be intimidated away from the rooftops and Saint Paul’s high dome by a clear sunrise. As they walked, though, James noticed that clumps of white hung along the gutters in swags, like the boughs of pine and evergreen that hung above each door and around every window. The snow had grown heavy under a persisting afternoon warmth. It sagged, weight confirmed by trickles between the cobblestones that said tomorrow all traces of an attempt at winter would be gone. The season made smells more, not less bold, in James’ opinion. Wood smoke and cloved cider, horse and roasting foods, and even the ubiquitous factory smog hung thick in the cold.
Hannah had sent a note around the afternoon before. He had anticipated its asking for an appointment and been surprised when it seduced him in five easy words: ‘Walk out with me tomorrow?’ His only two choices had been acquiescence or insanity, and so they walked.
They had traveled without purpose or direction, or much conversation, with the fretfulness of a courtship. They had recovered themselves at Waverley’s with steaming coffee, its warmth too precious for tempering with cream, and had eased its bitterness with crispy, mounded macaroons. Then they’d come east through Long Acre past the coach shops, where all the best landaus and broughams and victorias were fitted together, particularly at No. 137 where high, arched, wood-framed windows spanning the first floor revealed pride in both the product and the process.
Hannah strolled beside him, looking happy just to be there, though he’d asked twice that she let him hail a passing brown cab for the sake of her damp train and hem. But she had smiled without looking at him and shaken her head slowly, and taken in a deep breath of crisp air in a way that made his heart skip. She wore the season with as much beauty as the city; swathed in broad navy blue and silver stripes, white fur tippet with a lace collar and matching muff, and a blue bonnet that perched atop her mountain of curls against a weight of white ostrich plumes. Sharp wind kissed cheeks the color of apple skin while the glacial pools of her eyes danced over everything.
When they wandered from Long Acre over to King Street, Hannah seemed at ease, and she tugged his sleeve and spoke for the first time since the cafe. “Take me through the market?” she asked. “I could do with some candied orange peel.”
In no hurry to do more than what they were doing now, he tugged in return, drawing her across the lane and toward Covent Garden’s twin steel and glass arcades. Its thoroughfares were the common language of London society. Aproned fishmongers and crumple-hatted housewives did business, and servants ran errands or stocked their mistresses’ pantries. High society ladies and gentlemen took cover under the arcade’s short expanse in order to go from one set of fashionable shops to the other, protected from the elements. Wooden bins and stalls cut each of the passageways down its middle, while shop fronts in pine green and glossy blue oil paint formed artificial walls. Air in the gallery smelled like tobacco and cider, and musky cinnamon that made James think of pie.
Hannah pointed out one of the tiered wooden tables halfway down, where a woman in rumpled calico and a cap with lace elephant ears sat patiently as though she had come just to meet with Lady Webster. Her narrow stall boasted nuts, raw, shelled and roasted, in oblong reed baskets on the bottom shelf. On the second rung were dried apples which looked to his eye rather like ears, and red-black dried cherries, and something lighter like gooseberries. Above that stood open tins of lemon and orange peel in hard, shaved curls, and star-shaped anise and brown-husked cardamom pods. The containers occupied half the shelf, while shorter tins offered the same yellow and orange spirals, and lumps of ginger and other small treats that were frosted by sugar and sparkled under the lamps overhead.
James rocked up on his toes to make a show of taking in the wares. “No bat wings, no eye of newt?”
Their proprietress cackled, but Hannah pursed her lips, crouching to see something in a lower canister. “That’s not my sort of witchcraft, Doctor Grimshaw.”
It wasn’t, and like a green lad in the schoolyard, James couldn’t manage the words to agree with her.
Hannah asked for candied and plain orange peel, and some dried blueberries for a tisane, and some cloves. The proprietress measured each one into its own brown waxed paper envelope and bundled them together with a short length of course twine. Hannah counted out her coins, and James stowed her purchase inside his coat with a grin at her sidelong glance.
When she’d finished at the market, Hannah at last agreed that they could head back by coach, to the relief of his cold feet and his worry for her dress. Their afternoon could go on this way forever, if only the penny-inconveniences of daily life – wet shoes, grumbling stomachs, and numb fingers – could be kept at bay. They walked on as far as Great Queen Street where there was a better chance of finding transportation. After only a few busy swirls of the traffic pattern, he raised an arm and a rickety brougham dipped toward the curb, its whinnying horses rearing to a stop.
They jostled back over the short distance to Hannah’s townhouse, his hands trembling, and they sat as silent as when they’d been walking. He watched Westminster pass beyond the small window on his left, and she did likewise, head turned far enough that he could steal a glimpse of her now and then without being caught. Her slender raven brows raised and furrowed at intervals in the dim cab while she perpetually chewed her lip. When they were only a few streets from home, she drew a deep breath. James swore she nodded to herself, and then relaxed into her seat just in time for the clatter of hooves to taper into stillness. He wondered if she was acknowledging the fullness of whatever had built between them in the day’s course.
She turned and faced him, unblinking. “Will you come in?”
Society and good manners demanded that he refuse and so, of course, he accepted.
This seemed to put her more at ease, and he climbed down first to hand her out. Her breath clouded out in a white silk fog between them, and she avoided his eyes, even after he’d paid the driver and taken her arm and guided her through the gate.
He held on the step, aware that a man opening or even unlocking a woman’s door had certain connotations. When Hannah reached out her hand, he claimed her key, let them in, and shadowed her into the hall. Her house was still, as far off into the rooms as he could strain to hear. No butler came to greet them, no maid to tend her mistress, no Margaret like a spider to eye them from her web.
Hannah untied her bonnet with a long pull
and discarded it on a table beneath the wide hall mirror. James felt her eyes on him, in their reflection while he removed his overcoat. He reached into the pocket and held out her packet of spices.
“Leave them.” She claimed the bottom step and turned back, gloved fingertips pressing her temple. “Come up with me?”
He worried that her wound was still troubling her, until she smiled, reassuring and confusing him all at once. He nodded and followed her to the first-floor landing, along the deep shadows of an unlit staircase. He expected that she’d turn here, and lead them to the parlor, but she hitched her skirt and drifted up to the second floor. They rounded the polished rail and moved into jeweled light from a bank of high windows dotted with stained glass insets, to a wide, ivory, five-panel door just off the staircase’s next turn.
Hannah opened it and let him into a cozy withdrawing room. It was lit by a shaft of amber afternoon sun from a door at the back, which caught in a mirror over the mantle and revealed a narrow bookcase and a chair before the parlor stove, and little else.
Once more Hannah denied his silent expectation and didn’t stop in the sitting room or turn up a lamp. She became a silhouette in the golden doorway and then disappeared out of sight. She hadn’t asked him to follow, but she hadn’t asked him to settle in the front room, and she hadn’t made it ready for them. When a few breaths passed and she didn’t reappear, James cleared his throat and trailed her.
He stopped over the threshold, wondering at the room where he found himself and if the doorway had transported him somewhere else entirely. The bedchamber was made up of a quantity of white that went beyond virginal. Paint, wainscoting, and cornices were no bolder than waterfalls of lace drapes which exactly matched a frilled confection over the bed. Its half canopy languidly outreached an ivory wood-and-wicker headboard, though not by much. A gilt mirrored vanity claimed one whole corner, its table ruffled by buttery off-white silk, while a three-door Baroque wardrobe in creamy milk paint dominated another. Plasterwork like Parisian candy dotted high up the walls and was repeated down the white stone of the mantle, where a few scant coals still winked. In an age of red and chartreuse, of heavy velvet and clutter, there was something seductive in the chamber’s clean femininity.