by Jaima Fixsen
Mary laughed and tucked her hand into the crook of his arm. “I suppose I should be relieved your scruples haven’t entirely deserted you—yes, I know a lecture is coming and I understand why you feel it’s wrong, but I’m not convinced I owe my family obedience—hear me out, please.”
She explained. “They’ve no affection for me,” she finished. “Or my mother either. So it doesn’t really matter what I’ve done or what I choose in the future. I can’t disappoint more than I have already.”
Her face was so carefully untroubled Neil ached. He knew number fourteen wasn’t a happy house. She had few liberties, but this was worse than he expected. The secretiveness, though, didn’t make sense. “He wouldn’t tell you of your mother? Nothing at all?”
She shook her head. “If it weren’t that they’d be offended by my drawings, I expect they’d be glad to be rid of me. As it is, they prefer more conventional methods of disposal.”
“Mr. Daviess?” He’d need a look at that gentleman, if only to see what it was that made him so repugnant to her.
“I am a burden to them. It’s become quite clear. If I wished to oblige I’d do my best to marry. It would be an escape of sorts, but I’m sure you understand why it’s one I’d rather not take.”
Neil nodded. She must not be compelled to such measures, not if he could do anything about it.
“It’s also not what I would chose,” she went on. “Not now. Working for Samuel and Mr. Barnes will eventually let me make a life of my own. There’s no other way I can do it.”
Neil laid his hand over hers, tightening his hold on the slender, sensitive fingers. Mary was dressed in a coat thick enough to ward off the cold, and their brisk pace would keep her warm even if she weren’t. But there were other kinds of cold. The loneliness she described…no wonder she was numb. If they were anywhere else, he’d hold her, not just her hand, for it seemed too small of a comfort.
When he brought Mary back to her aunt, he spoke more sharply than usual, rough from imagining telling her relations just what he thought of them. Foregoing his dinner, Neil went out to walk the streets of Bath again, his hands dug deep in his pockets.
Twenty-Eight
20th March 1832
Dear Mrs. Chin,
I hope this letter finds you well, and that I’m not imposing with this correspondence. Only I miss you and think of you and your glass house often. As the days get warmer, I wonder what you are planting, and if you are persisting with Shakespeare. If Benjamin has read you all the tragedies, I recommend the sonnets.
I got a volume of them from the circulating library here in Bath just the other day, and I think you’d like them. I’ve read several already and think them quite beautiful, no matter what Mr. Murray chooses to say. In case you did not know, he is also come to Bath to look in on me for Samuel. He has been here a fortnight already and says he will stay, as the old bridge is now demolished and he has taken leave from his firm to consider projects in other parts of the globe. He will probably end up somewhere splendid, while I stay here and wind wool for Aunt.
Still, I am happier than I can say to be back at work on my cartoons. Mr. Murray teases, but he is excellent company, and now I can see why you enjoyed his calls. I suppose he realizes I am not quite a child any more. Next autumn, I will astonish him with the news that I am twenty, but until then…
Once the flowers come up here I will send you drawings of them, but for now I can only send one of the Sufferers of Bath. Aunt Yates is the second in line waiting to be pummelled with magnets or some such thing at a famous doctor’s clinic. Papa doesn’t mind her going, but I suspect he thinks the man is a charlatan. He didn’t respond at all to her enthusiasm in his letter. So far I haven’t had to endure the patented tractors myself, but I am careful not to catch cold. The elder Miss Shaw did, and her mother made her go every day for a week. She says it improves her complexion.
I wish you will share the secret of yours, for it is always lovely. I threw out a spot yesterday, and Mr. Murray was unkind enough to notice. He smiled when he saw me trying to hide it behind the ties of my bonnet though, so I don’t think it was very ugly. But I have seen you distilling rose water, and wonder if perhaps—well, I don’t suppose it matters much what I look like. I’ll stop rambling. I am getting letters at the Bath post office if you care to write.
Best wishes, and hopes this letter finds you in good health,
Mary Buchanan
Twenty-Nine
A letter came from Papa confirming he knew Mr. Murray.
Bit of a fussy kind of wart, but gentlemanly, he’d written. I’ve confirmed he worked in the same firm as Mr. Rennie.
It was more approbation Aunt Yates needed. She made no objections to Mary spending time with him. Of course Mr. Murray wasn’t pleased to learn her father considered him a wart.
“At least I don’t have the manners and temper of a zebra,” he retorted. When they spoke of her father, his face tended to go quite savage. He collected himself as they turned the corner out of sight of Canning’s Hotel. “Have you anything to post?”
She had letters for Samuel and Mr. Barnes tucked away in her reticule, as well as another drawing. Mary hoped it was good enough. She wasn’t sure Mr. Barnes would agree to publish her drawings on their own, and it would be impossible to collaborate with Samuel at this distance.
“Don’t worry,” Neil told her. “Samuel will do his utmost to urge Mr. Barnes to accept.”
At the post office Mary collected a letter from Mrs. Chin and one from Samuel.
“Just notes or do you think he has any personal news?” Neil asked, watching her closely.
Mary broke the seal of Samuel’s letter and perused the single sheet, her cheeks pink. “Notes. Mostly.” This week he closed with Fondly yours, Samuel. It seemed significant. It held more affection, surely, than the Yours fondly, he’d written before.
Conscious she was neglecting Neil, Mary folded the letter away and took his arm so they could talk better as they walked. She’d hoped to drive again today, but Aunt was worried about the weather, two successive warm days being insufficient to convince her winter was loosening her grasp. “Next week may we visit the ruins at Hungerford again?” Mary asked.
“I doubt your aunt will let me take you that far on my own, and I think our last excursion quite exhausted her,” Neil said.
“She says so,” Mary said darkly. “But she stayed up until one playing loo with Mrs. Shaw.”
Neil laughed. “I’ll be on my guard. She won’t lure me to the card table.”
“No, but she has plenty of other victims.” Mary sighed as they turned into the gardens. “I don’t think she’ll ever want to leave Bath.”
“Bored so soon?”
“Not with you.” Mary bumped him with her elbow and told him not to be absurd. The young green shoots beneath the trees were showing blue blossoms today. “But we are so far from London and right now, while everything is happening—”
He squeezed her arm. “No revolutions yet, please. At least wait until the Lords have voted.”
“Very well.” She couldn’t help smiling. He smiled back, but it wasn’t long before a frown settled on him. “What’s the matter?” When he tried to shrug the question away she said, “You can tell me.”
“I can’t help worrying. If there is a revolution—”
“It won’t come to that,” Mary promised. He had as much reason to fear those horrors as Samuel, but—
“I wish I could be so sure,” he said.
“You worry because of what happened to your sister?” Mary asked, her voice low.
The lines of disquiet on his face bent and changed. “I worry because I’ve a modicum of common sense. Why—what does Elspeth have to do with it?”
Mary dropped her eyes to the gravel path. “I don’t know. You looked sad. Like you did the night you told me—”
“I wasn’t thinking of her,” he said. “If you must know, I was thinking about Samuel.”
The pathway carried t
hem around a bend before Mary spoke again. “I think you are wrong, you know. He loves her. When he told me how she died—”
“What could you know about it?” Neil said, and Mary had to look at the budding branches instead of his eyes. She was trespassing.
“I said they had a fine marriage. It just wasn’t what she’d hoped.”
She should accept that and turn the conversation someplace else. Except—“How do you know?”
He shrugged and softened, the anger leaving his eyes. “A hundred little things. You’d laugh to hear them all, but you can’t help knowing your family—for us at least.”
They were treading dangerously close to her own mire. Mary braced herself, but sensing her reluctance Neil veered away.
“She was about as old as you when she fell in love with Samuel.” He smiled at nothing, though his eyes rested on the trees.
Mary kept silent, waiting for him to go on. He might have another scold, but she was curious.
“Neither of us were long out of school, but I was bound for the Pont et Chaussées and he for London. Samuel had never visited me in Edinburgh before. Usually he invited me to Kent for the holidays. I was embarrassed for him to meet my family—loud and boisterous and so different from his own. But he was my only real friend, and my father said if Samuel was the man I said he was there was no fear of him turning up his nose. He didn’t, of course. What happened was worse. Elspeth fell madly in love with him. Mortifying for Samuel and me, but I honestly think she couldn’t help it. When he was nearby she was incandescent. Father and I twitted her mercilessly about it. Samuel was very patient with her, though he said to me she’d grow out of it.”
“I suppose he affects many ladies that way.” It was embarrassing to admit, especially because in her own mind her interest in Samuel had always been special.
“You have no idea.” Neil smiled ruefully. “The thing is, he hardly notices. It’s always been his studies or rowing or reform, though that one stuck and became his life’s work. He quarrelled terribly about it with his father.”
“Samuel’s father doesn’t favour reform?”
“Didn’t. Finally threw him out over it, but Samuel didn’t mind. He lived in grimy attics and wrote for six months, and when he turned twenty-one he inherited an independence from his mother, but that’s beside the point. He’d met my family and sparked a passion in Elspeth. I made a great joke of it, but I didn’t know she’d started writing him. She was stubborn you see, young and bright and determined as anything. The next spring I asked Samuel if he cared to come north with me again, more in jest than in earnest. I said we could put a bag over his head to spare him from Elspeth.
“Samuel told me to leave off. That I was hurting her. And then he said something about my father that I hadn’t even heard from him yet, and I realized she must have been writing him. He admitted it, of course, and I apologized, utterly mortified. Elspeth was on the green side of eighteen, so perhaps allowances could be made so long as she stopped it at once. I steamed all the way home and denounced her with all the fury I could muster, and she paid me back in kind. Neither of us budged for a year. She was the most nonsensical romantic, keeping a book he’d given her under her pillow and going about with her head in the clouds. In the end, the one who bent was Samuel.
“He proposed. I was furious. Said she was too young, that her devotion was immature and embarrassing, but Elspeth said she loved Samuel and always would. I told Samuel he couldn’t marry her as a favour to me, but he said that wasn’t it, though he did dislike seeing us at odds with each other. He said he’d as soon marry her as anyone, that it would make both of them happy, that she was a dear thing and he didn’t want to hurt either of us. Fine things, all of them, but he didn’t say he loved her.”
Some time ago, Mary had moved her gaze to the neatly clipped grass. Parts of Neil’s recital made her uncomfortable. That bit about keeping things under pillows, for instance… She swallowed. “Is that—”
“The marriage wasn’t the disaster I’d foretold,” Neil said. “They were both good sorts and entirely considerate of each other. But Elspeth started out worshipping him and whatever he felt for her wasn’t equal to it. She had to adjust. She became quieter, self-contained, more focused on her painting. By the second year of her marriage her work wasn’t merely good any more. It breathed. With Samuel she was gentle and undemanding, but even if nothing is outright wrong I imagine there’s a terrible sadness when life isn’t what you’d hoped.”
He wasn’t describing the romance of her novels, but Mary didn’t trust those anymore. “It doesn’t sound so terrible to me,” Mary said quietly. It was certainly enough with which to be happy. “I’d be content knowing I had a man’s good regard.”
He stopped and stared at her. “Good regard?”
“It’s nothing to sneer at,” Mary said. “It’s more than I’ve ever had.” Except now Samuel was fondly hers. That had to at least equal good regard.
Neil opened his mouth to object, but Mary forestalled him. “Don’t. You have a family that loves you. You wouldn’t understand.” A mistake. She didn’t want to be pitied, and she could feel him looking at her.
They walked round a pond in silence, Mary intent on the reflection of the water. She could feel the weight of unsaid words building up inside him. “Very well. Say it,” she told him.
“That’s why I worry for you. On so little experience how can you decide what will make you complete? You’ve been too much alone.”
That was the way out. Mary saw it, clear as the path before her feet. She smiled at him, only partly from relief. “Well, I’m not now, am I? Have I told you how glad I am you’ve come?”
“Not today,” he said, a hint of an answering smile playing at the corners of his mouth.
“I am.” Mary tried to let him know how much she meant it with her eyes, until she found his gaze too difficult to hold. Before she turned too warm and flustered, she looked away. “Thank you for coming to Bath.”
Thirty
By the end of the month, Neil thought there might be something to Bath waters after all. Otherwise it was hard to account for it. Mary was growing on him. No. It seemed, impossibly, he was growing on her. She brightened in his company, grumbling about the time he spent away, watching with narrowed eyes as he filled her in on his wasted afternoon with an acquaintance from his school days.
“How interesting.”
“It wasn’t,” he assured her. He’d rather have walked with her. Pretty girls were always better company.
Then another letter came from Samuel. They collected it when they stopped at the post office, and Neil was forced to admit once more that her face didn’t light like that for him. He said nothing, but it weighed on him. He found himself watching her more than he liked, and brooding over her admission that she’d be content with Samuel’s good regard. When he wasn’t mulling over her unhappy situation with her family, that is. No wonder she’d embraced politics. It was refreshingly simple compared to the rest.
To be safe, a good portion of his time was also devoted to Mrs. Yates. Together they sampled the physicians and their cures. Sometimes Mary trudged along, but more often she stayed in with her sketchbook. After a session at the vapour baths and daily appointments with the masseuse, Neil pronounced his lumbago cured. He didn’t want to be prodded with magnets or dosed with the latest invigorating tonic, in spite of Mrs. Yates’s glowing recommendation.
Mrs. Yates was also improving. Even Mary admitted it, though she credited it to her aunt’s liking for cards. Neil used this to his advantage, monopolizing Mary at the evening assemblies. She’d avoided dancing at first, not having learned the steps, but after an afternoon’s practice in the private parlour she let him lead her onto the floor. She was light on her feet, bright-eyed and flushed, and soon it was an accepted thing for him to squire her in the evenings while Mrs. Yates won shillings from Mrs. Shaw. The lure of the card room held, and Neil and Mary danced as much as they pleased, took supper together, and conspi
red in the corners. So long as they collected Mrs. Yates on time, there was no one to complain.
“I’ve forgotten the pleasures of a good game of whist,” Mrs. Yates said, towards the close of one such evening. Accepting Neil’s hand, she rose from the table and her ‘quiet little game.’ She looked considerably happier than the other players. One fluffy lady looked stunned and even her partner, a stout clergyman, wilted with relief as she went. “He wasn’t a bad player, though not perfect in his recollection of the discards,” she whispered to Neil. “Of course I’d never play for anything more than trivial stakes.”
Neil threw an amused look at Mary, reliving their laughter as they’d galloped breathlessly through a Scotch reel. One of her curls had fallen, snaking along her shoulder.
“I’m surprised I haven’t forgotten the rules,” Mrs. Yates said. “Loo is one thing, but whist another, and it’s many years since I’ve played. Not once since my marriage with Mr. Yates. I married young, you know.”
“Your skill hasn’t forsaken you,” Neil said and helped her into the sedan chair waiting to carry her home. He and Mary would walk alongside.
“How old were you?” Mary asked.
Her aunt sighed. “Just seventeen. And a widow before I was twenty. But it was for the best, for how could I have supported your papa in his hour of need if I’d had a family of my own?”
“This was when my mother died?” Mary asked.
“Yes, it was about that time.” But Mrs. Yates’s smile was false, and she launched into a retelling of the second trick when her partner had neglected to play trumps. “Disastrous. If I hadn’t chanced my ace we’d never have carried it. I had to kick him quite sharply under the table.”
Neil could tell Mary wasn’t following the story. The pleased glow she’d worn throughout their dances was gone. “What did befall Miss Buchanan’s mother?” Neil asked, hoping he’d have more luck at getting details. “It must have been a cruel loss.”