I almost choked on my toast.
“But now that I have seen,” he went on, “firsthand, the way you care for your mother and our daughter, well, I suppose I shall have to revise that assessment.”
“Thank you, Richard,” I said, trying to convey through a politeness of tone that his opinion mattered, when in fact it did not.
“Aren’t you ready?” Aunt Helen asked, coming downstairs twenty minutes later in a beautiful dress of ice blue silk.
“Yes,” I said, dabbing my mouth with the napkin. “I just need to gather up Emma.”
“But aren’t you going to change into something smarter?”
I looked down at what I was wearing: an old dress from a few seasons back, originally bronze in color, now faded to an unexceptional brown through repeated laundering. It had been laundered so much because I wore it so often these days, since I never minded if Emma spit up on it.
“We are only going to the park,” I said. “This will be fine.”
I was in a hurry to finally get Emma outdoors.
. . . . .
The day was an extraordinarily vivid one: the colors vibrant, the song of birds, the promise of flowers on the gentle breeze.
It seemed that all of London was in the park that day.
And they were all thrilled to meet Emma.
I was so proud of her. But when Aunt Helen lifted her out of her perambulator so that Mary Williams might get a closer look, I confess to a frisson of jealousy: not that Emma was the center of attention, but that it was Aunt Helen showing her off, rather than me.
“Where is Emma’s nanny?” Mrs. Williams asked after having made the appropriate appreciative noises over Emma.
“Oh,” Aunt Helen said, entranced with the baby in her own arms, as though meeting her for the first time all over again. “We dismissed her.”
We dismissed three! I thought.
“She was not working out,” Aunt Helen added vaguely.
“But this is most irregular. You must have a nanny for your baby!” Mrs. Williams insisted, as though to raise one’s baby oneself were some sort of crime against the Crown.
“I suppose you are right,” Aunt Helen conceded the point to Mary Williams.
“We missed you at the party last week.” Mary Williams changed the subject.
“What party?” Aunt Helen asked.
“Why, the one we had on Saturday. Everyone was there.”
We weren’t, I thought.
“I must confess,” Mary Williams continued, “I was surprised when you never responded to the invitation.”
“I’m so sorry,” Aunt Helen said with a blush, “but I never saw it. I’m afraid I have been lax about reading my correspondence of late.”
This was an understatement. I knew well that on the table in the entryway at home there was a mountain of correspondence Aunt Helen had been steadfastly ignoring these past several months. Richard liked to joke that it was a good thing Aunt Helen was not responsible for paying the bills.
“Mrs. Williams?” A tinkling voice, like bells, intruded on my thoughts.
I looked up to see Minerva Clarence standing at Mrs. Williams’s elbow. Minerva had on a girlish pink satin dress that was in marked contrast to my drab brown one and her hands were wrapped around the arm of a young man: Kit.
I told myself that he was merely being kind, doing the gentlemanly thing in holding her up so that she should not fall flat on her pretty face.
“I just wanted to thank you,” Minerva went on, “for the delightful time we had at your party the other evening.”
“Oh, yes,” Kit added, looking at me. “I cannot remember the last time I laughed so much.”
“I am so glad,” Mary Williams said warmly. “It was wonderful seeing the two of you dance together—and so many dances! I must admit, I would not have thought it possible for a man who relies on a cane to dance so well!”
• Forty •
I was angry with Kit for going to Mary Williams’s party, even though I knew it was unreasonable to feel so, and further angry with him for dancing with Minerva in my absence.
I was used to being central in my world, central in Kit’s world, as Mother had been in her own before Aunt Helen came along—only in that case, I knew, it was Aunt Helen who’d had the right to feel resentment and not the reverse.
The thought of Minerva, with her pretty hair and her pretty face and her pretty voice and her pretty body and all those …sisters, dancing with Kit, my Kit—it made me want to smash something. It made me want to smash everything.
But then I thought: just because caring for Emma kept me from the social swim, was it fair of me to expect the same from him?
And Minerva. Was it fair to judge her so harshly? I saw that it was not. It was not her fault if she was everything I was not. It was not her fault if she suited Kit far better than I could ever do.
I pictured her and Kit dancing together again. It was a painful image, but it was also a beautiful one.
And Kit. He had always been my friend, my best friend, the shareholder of all my most significant and greatest memories. Shouldn’t I want the best for him? Shouldn’t I want him to be as happy as it was possible for him to be in this world?
I wrote him a letter, asked him to meet me in the middle of the night.
For once in my life, I would be a bigger person than was my wont. I would be as big as I could possibly be.
I would let go of that which I loved most.
. . . . .
Step … tap … clack.
Step … tap … clack.
The steps, as they drew closer to me, were halting, but I could see the candle advancing steadily all the same.
“I say, Lucy,” Kit said, meeting me where I waited for him, “with all these stones—the moisture that was never here before does make them slippery!—it is not so easy negotiating this tunnel as it was before I replaced my foot with a peg. Is there some reason why we couldn’t discuss whatever it is you wish to discuss aboveground?”
Despite the censoriousness implied by his emphasis, that feeling was not echoed in his eyes, which danced with all their usual joy.
Seeing him like that—so full of life, so very Kit—it made what I had come to do doubly hard.
I swallowed.
“Well,” he said, when I did not speak, his eyes still dancing a tease, “what is so very important that we must meet down here?”
I wanted to reach out, touch my fingers to that familiar face one last time, but I could not allow myself that luxury. If I let myself touch him once, I would not be able to stop.
I straightened my spine into a steel rod.
“I have decided to release you,” I announced, addressing my words to his nose, because I could not bear to look into his eyes.
“That is very generous of you.” I had the sense of his eyebrows rising in puzzlement. “But I was not aware you had bound me prisoner. Have I missed something? Is there a chapter you have read that I have not?”
I felt the blush color my cheeks.
“You know what I am—,” I started to speak, but he cut me off.
“And will you stop talking to my nose! If you are expecting an answer, you will only find sneezes there.”
“Do not mock me,” I begged him. If he no longer wanted me to talk to his nose, then I would address his ear. “I know about you dancing with Minerva.”
“And … ?”
“And I know that you are an honorable man.”
“And?”
“And I know that it has long been understood, I would imagine by just about practically everybody, that one day you and me would, that is to say you and I … or do I mean you and me … ?”
“And?”
There was real menace in that last and, causing me to feel briefly relieved that I was not a Mahdist Dervish meeting him in the desert of the Sudan and he with a bayoneted rifle in his hand.
He took a threatening step closer to me and I could hear the sound of his breathing, feel his br
eath on my face as I spoke the rest of what I had come to say in one great rush.
“You are released from your implied bond to me, and so now you are free to marry Minerva Clarence at your earliest convenience because I know that is what you want, so there is no need for you to wait any longer on my account and—”
He placed his hand on my body, pulled me to him.
“What are you doing?” I cried.
The way his fingers touched me indicated that he did indeed know what he was doing, at least on one level.
“I am trying to show you—you insane woman!—in the only way left to me, that the only woman in this world I want, for anything, is you.”
I could feel my breath shortening.
“This is a peculiar way to show it,” I said, striving to maintain a calm against the touch of his hand. “How did you learn how to do this?” I thought jealously of the military. Had there been women in the Sudan? I thought jealously of Minerva.
He kissed my face, my neck, my mouth.
He pulled away, pressed his cheek to mine. Despite the coldness rising up from the stones beneath our feet, there was sweat on that cheek.
“I have not done this firsthand before,” he said, his own breath growing shorter, “if that is what you are thinking.”
We each held fast to our candles. It is a wonder we did not set each other on fire.
“But I have always been a great reader of books,” he continued, his hand caressing my body, pulling away and making me shamelessly sink into his touch. “You would be surprised what you can learn from the mere reading of books.” He briefly considered this, shook his head. “Well, perhaps no, you specifically would not.” He kissed my mouth again, talking between kisses. “And then, too, my father taught me my responsibilities from a young age.”
His father?
“The Tyler men take their duties toward their women very seriously.”
No wonder Victoria Tyler always looked so happy!
Still …
“This is no proper proposal, sir,” I said, raising my hand to my mouth and indelicately wiping away the story of his kisses with the back of my hand.
“Is that what you want?” His tone was incredulous. “Right this minute, Lucy?”
I held firm, watched him shake his head like a wet hunting dog coming in from the rain.
“No, you are right,” he said. “Or at least it is not the proposal I intended to make when I received your letter unceremoniously summoning me here. But this is.”
Then Kit dropped to one knee, as best he could, taking my free hand with his free hand.
“Lucy Sexton, will you marry me?”
“Are you insane?”
“I may be,” he admitted, “and for all sorts of reasons.” He relinquished my hand long enough to reach up for my face, compelling me to look at him. “But I do know this: if I live to see every star burn out in the sky, should the ocean roll back its waves not to return, I shall never find another woman who will make me so happy, even in the moments when she most torments me. You are like no other person in this world. I love you, Lucy.” Tears shone in his eyes, but they were of strength, not weakness. “Marry me.”
I fell to my knees before him, set the candle to one side, took his face in my hands.
Kit. It seemed to me that everyone else I had ever known, all my life, had had some sort of duality about them, a light mixing with the dark or vice versa. Even myself. But never Kit. He had always been transparent, exactly what he was, what he said, what he did. How had I not seen this before? How had I ever doubted him?
“Do you think you could answer me tonight, Lucy?” he asked. “It is not easy maintaining this position with a bad leg.” His expression clouded, concern pushing away his bluff jocularity. “And I am beginning to worry you will say no.”
“Yes,” I said. “Yes, Kit. I will marry you.”
In the kisses that followed, his tongue traced my mouth with probing intensity. Before those kisses were through, I had occasion to remind Kit that we would need to wait until after we were married to finish what he had started earlier.
“Of course,” he said, restraining himself. “Yes, we will finish then.”
“How soon shall we marry?” I asked.
He pressed his forehead to mine, a groan of longing preceding his words. “Tomorrow would be good.”
I began to wonder if that was the real reason he was marrying me, to gain something he could not otherwise get.
He must have seen the dismay in my expression, reading, as he was so disturbingly good at, my unvoiced thoughts.
“No, Lucy,” he said firmly. “I marry you for you. Everything else is just a wonderful extra.”
• Forty-one •
My wedding day!
It was not the day following the night in the tunnel, as Kit had wanted it to be, but it was as soon as could reasonably be arranged.
“I should like to wear the wedding gown you wore on the occasion of your marriage to Father,” I told Aunt Helen the same day Kit came to the house to inform her and Richard of our intent to marry.
“Do not be ridiculous, Lucy,” had been her reply, equal parts sweet and sharp.
“What did you say?”
“I am sorry,” she quickly mollified me. “I only meant that seeing you in it would be too much of a reminder to me and that, besides, it is your day. You should have your own gown.”
At first her response puzzled me. But then it occurred to me that, perhaps, she was still jealous of Mother, perhaps was jealous of the grand wedding Mother had as opposed to the tiny one she’d had with Richard. I could understand that, at least on some level. I understood jealousy now far better than I ever had before.
With so little time before the wedding, there were not sufficient hours for Mrs. Wiggins to fashion me a whole new creation from thread and fabric to completed gown. So we bought the first white dress I found in a shop.
“Are you sure?” Aunt Helen asked. “You have not even looked at everything they have to offer.”
But I did not care what I wore—they could have clothed me in sackcloth for all I cared!—so long as I was marrying Kit, so long as he was waiting for me at the end of the aisle. Indeed, to this day, were it not for the evidence of pictures, all I would remember about the dress I wore was that it was white.
. . . . .
We know the people in our worlds, not by what they look like, but what they say, or would not say.
Father used to claim that dialogue was character.
“A writer should be able to create dialogue such that a reader can tell who is speaking which lines without ever seeing the speaker’s name attributed.” That is what Father always said.
It was my wedding day.
And it was raining. God, was it raining!
It was as though the promise of spring weather had been canceled and a storm had come up, complete with high winds and chilling rains, battering the trees and anything that stood in its way. Apparently, winter was not finished with us yet.
But I did not care.
I was seated in front of a mirror in Aunt Helen and Richard’s bedroom, still in my dressing gown, my wedding dress draped across the bed, waiting for me to wear it, as the maid fashioned my hair.
The day, happy as it was, was tinged with no small degree of sadness. I had always, when growing up, imagined Mother helping me to get ready on my wedding day, but that was not to be. Still, I contented myself that at least I had Aunt Helen with me. At least I had her.
As the maid worked, Aunt Helen fussed behind us, instructing the maid on what to do with a few stray hairs that refused to be tamed into submission, flouncing the end of the gown’s skirts as if I were already wearing it and she wanted it to be perfect.
I had never seen her all aflutter like this before.
“I just want everything to be perfect for you today, Lucy,” she said nervously.
“It will be,” I said, not even wincing when the maid accidentally stabbed me with a pin. “I
only wish Father were here.”
“Yes,” she said. “I am sure you would want that.” She addressed the maid brusquely. “Aren’t you finished yet?”
“Nearly so, madam.”
“And Aunt Helen,” I said, in reality thinking of Mother in my mind. “Today I find myself missing her too.”
“I am sure,” Aunt Helen said, placing a soft hand upon my shoulder, “your aunt would have loved to be standing by your side today.”
The first maid, having finished with my hair, went to fetch another maid to help me with my dress.
Aunt Helen wrapped her arms around herself, shivered.
“If only it weren’t raining so!” she said. “You will be soaked before you even reach the church!”
I met her eyes in the mirror, smiled my reassurance that all would be fine, no matter what happened.
Then she was behind me, one hand on my shoulder, and she was smiling too. In the mirror, I saw her open her mouth to speak.
“Your hair may be a dark cloud, but no matter what the weather, on your wedding day the sun and stars will shine,” she said with strong assurance. “Remember how I always used to say that to you whenever we played ‘The Wedding Game’?”
The Wedding Game?
It hit me instantly, like one of those bolts of lightning outside shooting down from the heavens.
Aunt Helen had never played “The Wedding Game” with me. Aunt Helen had never spoken those specific reassuring words to me before. Those words had been a very private thing between Mother and me. There was no way the woman standing with her beautiful hand upon my shoulder could possibly know about them, unless …
The first thing I experienced then was pure joy.
Mother was alive!
Those words: Your hair may be a dark cloud, but no matter what the weather, on your wedding day the sun and stars will shine. When I was younger, Mother had recited the line to me so many times it was engraved on my heart, like a talisman against bad fortune, expressive of our shared faith that good would still triumph in a world that was frequently lonely and unfair.
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