by Bianca Bloom
She took a key from her ring and unlocked the top drawer. “Here you are then,” she said, handing over the books to me. “I’ll not be a minute.”
And she went out, no doubt to put her magic to work.
As I looked over the books, nothing leapt out at me. This was rare – usually I managed to find some little area where I felt the pub had been cheated, or perhaps one where expenses seemed to be running a bit too high. In all other businesses, the numbers didn’t always balance well, but Mrs. Climpson’s sturdy abacus seemed to prevent her from ever making a mathematical mistake.
When she came back in, her heavy step by the door unmistakable, I was still staring at the pages.
“What is it then,” she asked. Though she never spoke of it, I could sometimes tell that being beholden to her former barmaid was not a welcome task for her. “Is there something you’d have me change, Lady Bell?”
“Nothing,” I said, my breathing shallow. I pressed my fingertips into the rough wood of the table.
Before I could say another word, Mrs. Climpson had set a snifter full of whiskey before me. “Go on, then,” she said, sounding so much like a stern grandmother that I didn’t dare refuse her. The whiskey, hot in my throat, tasted rich and marvelous, and I realized that I’d not had a thing to eat all day.
“We’re all very sorry about Lord Bell,” she said, and I marveled that the news had apparently traveled faster than I could walk.
“Thank you, Mrs. Climpson,” I said, sitting a little straighter. “I am quite all right, I assure you.”
She only frowned at me. “You wouldn’t like to sit for a bit, then?”
I shook my head, and my bonnet tumbled into my lap. My face, no longer covered in the little veil, felt naked.
Still, it only took me a moment to pin my hat back in place and stand up.
“Well then, Mrs. Climpson,” I told her. “The books look quite well. And I can’t stay, as I’ve got to make it over to the undertakers’ before they close.”
9
I did make it to the undertakers’, and they shouldn’t really have been closed. But nobody was in, and it was locked. So I ended up standing by the door waiting for what felt like an hour. Every so often, the butcher’s wife would come over and ask whether I didn’t want to come into the shop for a bit, just so I might sit.
She was not the smartest of women, and I could not quite tell whether she was meaning to shame me into sitting about and weeping, or whether she was only curious to speak to the widow who was suddenly the biggest curiosity of the whole village.
I refused her three times, but my legs and my set face behind my veil were both starting to tire. Yet I knew I had to speak to the undertaker, as I would have to start on the funeral arrangements right away.
Finally, someone who was much better company came out to invite me to sit for a while.
Vicar Manley was an old man, though nobody was quite sure how old. There had been a little bit more white hair on his head when he married me and Lord Bell, and a little less hair when he married me and Mr. Sutherland, but I could not remember his ever looking young.
“The family has gone to visit their sick granny, I’m afraid,” he told me, gesturing to the undertakers’. “But I wish you would come in to the vicarage, my dear.”
The thought of a seat on one of his comfortable couches was heavenly, but I could not give up on the undertakers quite yet. After all, the coffin was one of the most important purchases before a funeral. “I will wait for them,” I said. “It is not yet one, and I’m sure they will be back soon. I must see them about this coffin.”
The vicar stood next to me, without speaking, for so long that I began to feel quite uneasy.
“Please come in,” he said again. “After all, we need to speak about the funeral.”
I saw that he was only doing this to get me to sit down for a while, but I nodded curtly. After all, I was going to have to take on the funeral arrangements, as Gilbert likely did not have family that would come down to the service, let alone someone else close enough to deal with such things.
We walked into the vicarage, and the smells of cinnamon and lemon made my eyes water a little bit. I’d forgotten that comforting, beautiful places like the vicar’s parlor are to be avoided when one’s emotional state is rather fragile.
He had me sitting down for tea immediately, and he wasted no time in expressing his own condolences.
“Lady Bell,” he said, his face creased with an expression of deepest sympathy, “Please allow me to assure you of how very sorry I am. Lord Bell’s passing is a great misfortune for our village, but an even greater one for your family.”
He paused for a moment, his face rife with emotion. “I know that this will be difficult for you, above all things, Lady Bell. And I hope that our humble church can provide some consolation for you after this very great loss.”
It was all that I could do not to roll my eyes. Mr. Manley was generally a very perceptive man, but it appeared that one sight of a woman in black was enough to bring out the romantic in him.
“I assure you, Mr. Manley,” I said, drawing myself up. “I am not one to enjoy this practice of running about in widow’s weeds. Just because you’re a clergyman doesn’t mean you need to pretend that all was well in the Bell household.”
He helped himself to another slice of cake, putting it delicately onto a plate.
“I would not pretend to know many things about marriage, nor would I presume to blame you, Lady Bell,” he said, taking another bite.
After he finished chewing, he told me gently, “Sometimes when a loss comes at a difficult point, that can make it all the more painful. The bereaved person may feel that she should have ‘set things right’ somehow.”
This nearly knocked the wind out of me. “Well, if you’re saying I should have had an heir, I can’t agree more wholeheartedly.”
He served me more tea, though I had hardly touched my first cup. “I’m wondering if there was anything about Lord Bell that you might miss, even if it was something from long ago.”
Indeed, this did bring a memory to me.
Gilbert, since boyhood, had been terrified of snakes. He always took a stick with him if he had to walk about outside, and he studiously avoided hot rocks where the cursed reptiles might be sunning themselves.
After we married, I knew that he thought me pretty, though he often had few words for me. We might have breakfast in silence, separate for the morning, then not meet again until lunch. In the early days, Gilbert did not openly mock the way that I had tried to sidle up to the estate manager and take on his role, but the whole thing certainly perplexed him. My husband was more likely to spend the morning hunting, or perhaps reading a novel in his study.
But whenever he ran across a snake, he came back to me. There would be some terror in his eyes, and often his hands trembled. “Marion,” he would ask me, with his normal shyness tempered by his brush with death. “You did not see any snakes? You are quite well?”
Flora and Frances were already ten years old at the time, but he never thought to ask after them. When Gilbert entered a room, the girls would leave, and vice versa. He was stiffly polite to them, though he certainly did not love them. But every time he had another fearful reptile encounter, I was reminded that he loved me very deeply.
And, disarmed, I would laugh at him, lulled into comfort for a very short while. “I am well, Gilbert,” I would tell my husband. In the first year, it took us a great while to become comfortable using each other’s first names, but in the aftermath of a snake sighting we never worried about that sort of thing.
My young husband’s fear of snakes translated into great solicitude for my well-being, which in those early days after the honeymoon more than once lead to an amorous congress.
Indeed, I had long suspected that Grace was the result of a frantic afternoon Gilbert and I spent in his bed, after he was convinced that some “hideous thing” that looked completely poisonous had been inches away from bitin
g his ankle. The fear of death always gave him unexpected vigor.
When I looked at Mr. Manley again, my eyes filled with tears, I could not help but admit that he had judged the situation well.
“I wanted to build a life with him,” I choked, taking out my handkerchief and burying my face in it as I shook my head.
Mr. Manley knew the rest without my having to say it. How Sean, the father of my twins, had loved the bottle more than he loved his family. And I, a young girl of seventeen when we married, had been blind to that until his death. He worked hardly enough to keep us in the tiny shack where we lived, and I had to go to my mother’s to eat most days in order to have the strength to feed our two tiny babies.
But I had thought that Sean fairly walked on water, until one day he had a great deal of whiskey and walked off a cliff, his battered body returned by the tide the next morning.
There followed years of poverty with my twins. I moved back into my mother’s cottage and dealt with her recriminations day in and day out, until I believed that she was right in all of her scathing complaints. I never should have married Sean, and I should have stopped his drinking, and I should have made him work more so that he’d have something more than a little shack and a debt at the pub to leave his heirs. Oh, and I certainly shouldn’t have had babies (not one, but two!) when we had no money – though I hadn’t meant to have twins, and didn’t see how I could have helped that part of it.
In fact, the birth of my adorable daughters had been fortunate. On the days when I worked my fingers to the bone at the job I had begged for in the village’s small inn, the two of them could be counted upon to entertain themselves. By the time my mother died, they were six years old, and I could leave them home each day with strict orders about tidying the house and preparing dinner for me. One daughter I might have worried about, but the twins as a pair seemed less vulnerable.
And then, just as I thought that I would never again be beautiful or happy, Lord Gilbert Bell began to pay me every attention.
At first, I thought to ignore him. My mother’s voice echoed in my head, stating that a woman who sought to marry above her station was asking for trouble.
That particular tirade usually continued with a jab like, “Those who seek to marry below their station, though, do worse.” Our family was made up of farmers, but we were not penniless. My mother had always believed that I should have married a farmer, not a fisherman like Sean.
And after my beloved Sean died, I began to agree. Perhaps a farmer would have left me a house, some money, or at the very least a pair of cows. Sean left me worse than nothing. I would never make such a mistake in marriage again.
Of course, the whole village knew that Lord Bell had no shortage of money. And that after the death of his only brother and his parents, in quick succession, he had found himself alone and lonely on a large estate.
“I don’t like this house the way it is,” he had said to me, one afternoon when I managed to pack my daughters off with a neighbor and head off for a picnic with him. It was raining, though only a little bit, so he insisted that we sit at his dining room table instead of going outside. We were to sit in expensive chairs and feast on the sandwiches and sweetmeats his cook had packed for us.
“It’s too lonely here,” he continued, slicing off a wedge of cheese. “I never have anyone to talk with, except when you visit.”
I had remained silent, wondering if he would make his intentions more clear.
“It would be different,” he said, brushing crumbs from his mustache, “If I only had a few sons.”
He gave me what he seemed to think was a meaningful look, and I only sighed. “Lord Bell,” I insisted, “If I were to live here, you would have a wife and two stepdaughters. It’s a far cry from a passel of sons.”
He only looked surprised. “Well, of course. At first, that is.”
Since the man was plainly unwilling to go into any more detail when it came to the production of children, I decided that I must be the one to speak. “Are you saying that you would like to be married, Lord Bell?”
He nodded, looking at me from his perch at the other end of the excessively long table. “Well, yes.”
It wasn’t the most romantic offer I had ever heard, but it was certainly the most lucrative one. Lord Bell was the heir to a great deal of property, and he was the landlord of most of the farmers and half the village.
This meant almost certain humiliation, though. I would be looked upon as a woman who was determined to marry a king by any means necessary, and Lord Bell would be seen as a pathetic man who was won over by a seductress and forced to bring up another man’s children.
“What would your relatives say?” I asked him, and his face clouded over.
“I’ve none to speak of, not anymore,” he said. “There are a few distant cousins of mine in London, but they never come here anymore. The same is true of my father.”
I thought about it for several minutes. There was little choice, really. I could continue to stay in the farmhouse, working at the inn, trying to take in a spot of mending every week. Hoping I could afford to keep my daughters in broken shoes and patched dresses. My beauty was already greatly faded since Sean’s death, and in the next few years it was likely to disappear entirely. My only offers from marriage had been from travelers with little hair and limited finances, and my suitors were only going to grow less attractive as the years wore on.
There wasn’t much of a choice, and Lord Bell was kind, though I did not love him. It was to be the opposite of my marriage to Sean, and I thought that the lack of romance and lust would make us a strong pair. I thought that Lord Bell would be easy for me to please, and that he would appreciate the way I had a mind for business.
Indeed, as a blushing bride at the age of twenty seven, I thought that I was infinitely wiser than I had been at seventeen years old.
Years later, I would realize that I was displaying naiveté and misguided youthful optimism. It was just of a different sort. As a girl I had thought that all I needed was a husband whom I loved passionately. As a young woman, I decided that all I needed was a wealthy husband whom I did not love.
It was not true, and my second marriage ended up being even more tragic than my first, in spite of its calm beginning.
When I recalled our wedding, which had been hastily arranged but really rather sweet, I remembered that the vicar who had married us was still sitting in front of me in the present moment, waiting for me to respond to his sympathetic words.
“You are tired, Lady Bell,” said the vicar, finally putting down his cake. It seemed that, in his distress, he had eaten an extra piece, and I could not keep myself from smiling.
“Tired, yes,” I said. “I’ve never had to deal with a funeral alone.”
He frowned. “And your mother’s funeral?”
I thought of it. “Yes, but I had all our cousins to help. There are few who would help me now. Gilbert’s funeral has to be grand, after all.”
10
The dear vicar turned out to be quite correct. I had done all that I could for that day. And though at first I thought I would never sleep, I went through my practice of inventorying every item in the great house in my head. It might have been more accurate to do so with paper and pen, but my memory contained a fairly thorough record of my property. Every time something was sold or replaced, I thought about what it had originally cost, and all of the things that we currently owned.
This never failed to soothe me. How could I worry about penury when I knew that the house contained precisely sixty two snuff boxes from my late father-in-law’s collection, three different sets of silver candlesticks, and a coin collection with a worth that had risen into the thousands of pounds? It was a calming reminder that, in spite of all my fears, I was living a charmed life.
In the morning, without the distraction of Adam’s warm arms about me, I found that I could sit down and view the entire tragedy with new eyes.
It did not hurt that the sunrise came earl
y, and so I was able to sit in the comfort of my own home and look out as the hills were bathed in gold and pink. I still had the clothes and the leisure of a grand lady, even though I was hardly the type to go hosting balls and teas. And if I were very clever, I would find a way to remain a grand lady. My husband’s death did not have to be mine. After all, he had told me of widows throwing themselves down, but it seemed that even in impoverished families, continuing one’s life was a far more common path.
I re-read the telegram from the attorneys. They were looking for the heir, a Hamilton Bell, but so far had not had any luck. They had information that he had gone abroad and would continue searching.
Well, that was certainly something. The morbid side of me was reminded that people died overseas all the time, and it might be years before their deaths were reported to English authorities. So it was truly not something that I could worry about.
I donned my best black hat, newly fitted with a long weeping veil, and prepared to begin the day. It was clear from the telegram that the lives of the Bell and Sutherland women might soon suffer a sea change, but if I did nothing but wait about for that change I would certainly go mad.
11
The months passed, and they turned into years. Flora and Frances began going to balls, but I had little time to chaperone them and would not pay for an abigail. They learned to live with the idea that they might not marry early, as there were very few local families I thought suitable for them. Each year they begged me to take them to London, or at least to Glasgow, and each year I refused. I promised that once the matter of the estate’s ownership was settled, we could all think about traveling.
Grace shot up in height, though she would never be as tall as her sisters. The girls stopped wearing mourning clothes, then I hung up my blacks for good. And I watched over all of my founts of income with an eagle eye, well aware that they could dry up at any moment.