Stars Across the Ocean

by Kimberley Freeman

  The word, Chinoiserie, sets a bell ringing in the back of my mind. ‘Would you … can we open it?’

  Andrew looks at me curiously, but his swipe card is still out and the cabinet is open a second later. I reach in and pull out the top drawer of the box.

  ‘Well, well,’ Andrew says.

  I withdraw the thin sheaf of papers, flick to the end and see that it is complete. ‘I need to get this home to Mum,’ I say.

  ‘Let me walk you to your car.’

  •

  Mum is asleep when I arrive home, and I regret leaving Andrew so swiftly. I throw myself on the couch and kick off my shoes. I can smell his aftershave on my hand, and I press my fingers against my nose for a moment, eyes closed. I still glow a little, from the wine and from his company.

  Then I gather myself and unfold the letter to read.

  CHAPTER 25

  Moineau

  —one last look behind me at Emile’s lane. I felt raw and tired, and vulnerable, as though my happiness had been left somewhere carelessly by strangers.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ my sister said, squeezing my hand. ‘We won’t tell Father about … you know.’

  I was mute as we turned towards home.

  •

  There is not much to narrate for the rest of the summer, nor much of the autumn. On my return to Hatby, I took to my room and didn’t leave it for a long time. My sister explained to Father and Mother that I had foolishly fallen in love, that I had refused Mr Shawe, but that she believed I would see sense. She told me all this, and she also told me that neither she nor Harriet had let on that I was ‘ruined’ (Harriet’s word). I certainly felt ruined, but in a different sense completely.

  I suppose you think me hopeless. Why did I not write to him? Or run away to be with him? Or use my plucky spirit and cunning rhetoric to convince my father to let me marry with my heart? There were many reasons, some to do with my breeding and some to do with my fear of my father’s opinion and my mother’s nerves, and some to do with the knowledge that I had already interfered with Emile’s life and livelihood. Now that I was back in cool, grey Yorkshire, I saw the affair in a cool, grey light. He had said all along we couldn’t be together, that we ought not fall in love. I had ignored him and made friends with his dog and left him notes and pushed myself on him again and again.

  I did not stop loving him. I have not stopped loving him.

  My agreement to marry Mr Shawe was never articulated directly by me. Somehow, it became true simply because everyone around me believed it to be true and I did not correct them. At some point, my father must have written to him and told him, because I received a long letter from Mr Shawe in late October, describing the weather in Calcutta and a boat ride he took along the river, and obliquely referring to how pleased he was that I was ‘recovered from my guilt about my sister sufficiently to accept his offer’. I tore up the letter and cast it out my window, watching the pieces fly away on the autumn breeze.

  I felt otherwise well, though I longed for some grand illness to befall me so that I could stay in my room and never have to be coaxed out for walks and shopping trips. My mother was happy to have me sit inside and practise my needlework while she told me the village business, though she told me once or twice I was growing too plump and needed a brisk walk in the park. It was the first of November when I realised, in fact, that something about my body was not quite right. I was eating hardly anything, and yet I was rounding out, especially in my breasts. I had heard enough women’s gossip in my life to send me to my calendar, and I was shocked to realise that I had not had my flower in three months.

  I stood by the calendar, which hung on the wall above the piano in our music room, and I counted the days over and over. Perhaps I had just forgotten. I always bled lightly; perhaps it had passed with me barely noticing, so flattened was I by losing Emile. But I knew this was not true. Cold shock held me immobile there in the music room for nearly ten minutes, until one of the servants came in to beat the rugs, and I found my way upstairs to my bed. I lay face down, eyes closed, unable to make the truth fit within my reckoning. A rough wind shook the branches outside. Winter would be here soon, and then spring, and there would be a baby. Emile’s baby. It was inescapable.

  I lay for many hours in that posture, too shocked to cry or to plan, but as the afternoon grew cold I sat up and I knew what I must do. I must tell Emile. Because this changed everything: if we were to bring a child into the world, then Father would rather we married than that I should bear a child out of wedlock. I felt flushed with excitement. I sat down to write him a letter, but then I changed my mind and decided I would go to him.

  I knew that Harriet would be highly suspicious if I turned up in Millthorne to visit her, and so I enlisted the only ally I thought I had: my sister.

  That night, I knocked on her door before bed and she opened it in her nightgown.

  ‘It’s good you came,’ she said. ‘I could use your help.’ She handed me her hairbrush and we sat together on her bed in the candlelit room and I brushed the snarls out of her hair. We sat in silence for a few minutes, but eventually she said, ‘Did you want to tell me something?’

  ‘I … yes,’ I said, brushing and brushing. Her hair was golden by the light of the candle that sat on the gleaming oak dresser.

  ‘Go on, then.’

  ‘This must be a secret.’

  ‘You know I can keep your secrets.’

  I took a deep breath, dropping my hands into my lap. She turned. ‘Go on.’

  ‘I’m carrying Emile’s child.’

  Her mouth formed an O of surprise, and she froze like that for a long time.

  ‘I need your help,’ I said.

  ‘I will do anything I can,’ she replied, grasping my hand. ‘Oh, my poor darling.’

  ‘I want to go to him and tell him, and see if he offers to marry me.’

  ‘But …’ she started, then stopped. ‘What are you thinking?’

  ‘That Father would rather have me married to a carpenter than give birth unmarried. That Mr Shawe won’t want me anyway: it’s not as though a pregnancy is easy to hide. My body will change forever.’

  She nodded slowly. ‘You may be right. But Harriet won’t let you near him.’

  ‘I won’t tell Harriet I’m coming. You and I will travel to London; we’ll tell Father we are looking in the shops, buying items for my trousseau. I will take a train and carriage directly to Emile’s house, and back on the same day. But I need you to come with me to London. For support, but also because Father barely trusts me any more.’ There was another reason. Since my return home, I had become increasingly uncomfortable leaving the house. I couldn’t explain it even to myself, but I felt vulnerable when outside, and was always glad to slip back inside and close the door behind me.

  My sister took the brush from me and put it aside, then she took me in her arms. ‘You must be brave now, pet,’ she said. ‘No matter what Emile says, or Father, or Ernest, or anyone, the baby is coming.’

  I was terrified, but at the same time I could see that my plan would work. I had seen in my sister’s expression that she thought it would too.

  •

  It took us several days to organise our journey. My sister wisely told me to wait until the day Mother’s friend Elice was returned from a trip to France, because otherwise Mother would almost certainly demand to come with us. Father sent us in his carriage to York, and the train ride was terribly slow due to some problem on the track near Doncaster. We finally made it to our hotel on Grosvenor Square at three in the afternoon. It was too late to travel further, so we looked in the shops and ate some supper in a tiny restaurant where a man played the piano with such little finesse that a small child at the next table to us began to cry. Or at least, that is the story my sister and I told ourselves for our amusement. We were both in high spirits: me because I might not be marrying Mr Shawe, and my sister for the same reason. Perhaps she did love him after all, and not just the idea of living in so many different house
s.

  That night, when we were reading in our beds, which lay next to each other in a bed chamber with the most unfortunately gloomy wallpaper, she rose and slipped into bed beside me, just as she used to do when we were small. I said nothing and nor did she. She curled around me and put her hand over my tummy and said, ‘I shall be an aunt.’

  ‘Yes. A good aunt.’

  ‘Like Harriet.’

  ‘Better than Harriet.’

  ‘I wonder if it will be a girl or a boy. If it’s a girl, will you name her after me?’

  ‘No. I think a carpenter’s daughter needs an unassuming name. Like, Rose.’

  ‘Rose. That’s pretty.’ She sighed. ‘It was easier when we were little, wasn’t it?’

  I didn’t answer. The truth was, it was easier before I had fallen in love. Up until then, I hadn’t a care in the world.

  •

  I was on the first train to Dorchester and then in a carriage to Millthorne by ten-thirty. The passing landscape was unfamiliar, now that November was here. The riot of colour and leaf was gone. The oaks were all bare, and the chestnuts on their way. The road was muddy, overflowing with leaf fall, and the hedges were the colour of copper. I asked the driver to drop me off just outside the village, so that I would not be seen by peering eyes: especially Harriet’s or the vicar’s. I walked the last little way, finding a balance between sticking to the side of the road and avoiding slipping in mud.

  When I finally reached the top of Emile’s lane, I saw a carriage parked on the road directly outside his house. It was a plain carriage, a little worse for the wear, and I experienced a horrible moment in which I thought that Emile had left Millthorne, and new residents had taken his house. But then I heard his voice, among others, and shrank back behind a hedge.

  An elderly man and woman appeared, and Emile with them. I watched and tried to listen, though their words were not distinct. Emile hugged each of them in turn and helped them into the carriage, and waved them off as the carriage began to draw towards me. Emile watched it go, and because I was not particularly well concealed, he caught a glimpse of me.

  Then the carriage passed between us, and I could see the man and the woman and wondered if they were the parents of his dead wife, whom he said lived in the next village. When the carriage was gone, Emile was still standing at the front of his house and I made my way down the lane.

  I did not know what to make of his expression. I had been expecting joy, surprise, maybe curiosity. But I did not expect fear, and for the first time since I had formed this plan, I regretted it.

  I arrived and stood before him. Marin galloped out and leapt up at me. I patted his head and pushed him gently away, and he ran excited circles around me and Emile as we faced each other.

  ‘Hello,’ I said at last.

  ‘I did not expect to see you,’ he replied.

  ‘I did not expect ever to return,’ I said. ‘I need to speak with you. May we go inside?’

  He half-turned, looking back towards the house anxiously, which immediately made me suspicious.

  ‘What is it?’ I asked.

  Then the weather conspired to intensify the situation. Rain began to spit down.

  ‘May we go inside?’ I said again, and my heart was thumping.

  Marin had already run off towards the house. Emile glanced at the sky, then turned and led the way.

  I became aware immediately that there was someone in the house. A fire glowed in the hearth, and by it in a wooden chair with a high back, sat a woman. Her eyes were closed, and she had a large round scar on the right side of her brow. She sat very still, and I could see that her limbs were withered and wasted, as though she hadn’t used them in a very long time.

  ‘Hello,’ I said, to be polite.

  She didn’t answer. I turned to Emile, who looked at me sadly.

  ‘I am sorry,’ he said.

  ‘Emile? Who is this? Who were those people leaving?’

  ‘The people in the carriage were my wife’s parents. They leave for a week in Spain. A much-earned holiday.’ He gestured towards the woman in the chair. ‘And this … this is my wife.’

  Although it was very quiet – the rain on the roof, the crackle of the fire – I remember this moment as though it were deafeningly loud, as though the world were cracking and shifting around me.

  ‘But you said …’

  ‘She is not sensible of our voices. If she can see us or hear us, she cannot understand it. We are blurred objects that move around her for no reason she can comprehend. The accident took it all away from her. She cannot feed or dress herself, she sits and sometimes her eyes are opened and sometimes closed. She is not the woman I married.’

  ‘But she is still alive. You are still married.’ I said it again, under my breath, to myself. ‘Still married.’

  ‘Her parents took her in so that I could continue to work. They expect nothing from me except kindness and, from time to time, money. Moineau, my marriage has ended in all but name. I swear to you that Eleanor is gone. This shell you see here does not know me. She does not need my love, only my kindness and care.’

  It didn’t matter what he said. The fact was he was married, and even if my fond imagination could see my Father allowing me to marry a carpenter to save the family embarrassment, it could not picture my family being comfortable with bigamy, or with Emile divorcing his catatonic wife and leaving her in the care of her parents so he could be with me.

  ‘Oh God,’ I said, tears falling. ‘I wish I hadn’t come.’

  ‘If you had written to me—’

  ‘What? You would have continued to conceal this from me?’

  ‘No. I might have … Why are you here, Moineau?’

  I shook my head. ‘It doesn’t matter. None of it matters now.’ My condition, my prospects, all of it struck me with full, awful force.

  He moved to put his arms around me, but I jumped back as though burned. ‘No. How could you embrace me in front of …’ I gestured towards Eleanor, who had opened her eyes and was staring into space with unfocused eyes. Had she once loved him as I now did? I wanted to cry for her as well. But most of all I wanted to cry for you, the little life that grew inside me, because certainly now the happy story I had told you about your mama and papa raising you happily together, would never come to pass.

  Never.

  ‘I am sorry I came,’ I said, hurrying to the door.

  ‘Wait. You can’t go out in the rain. Do you have a carriage home?’ He reached out his hand for me.

  ‘Don’t touch me. I will find my own way back. Leave me be.’ I ran out into the rain, and up the lane to the road. Then I began to walk. I was not sensible of where I was or where I was going, but on the route I began to feel terrified. Shudders of cold fear ran across me, and all the bare trees and thorny hedges and iron gates looked as though they were hostile towards me. I cannot explain it better than that. It seemed the whole, grey, wet world had decided it despised me, and I began to run, crying, stumbling through mud, my heart being torn by terror. At length, a carriage came by and a kindly gentleman leaned out and asked if I was in some trouble. I was drenched, crying, panicked, and could barely answer him. He quickly bundled me into the carriage, where his wife managed to get out of me where I was headed, and they took me to the next village.

  There I sat, in a tea room, still dripping but finally calm now I was indoors and sipping hot tea. The kindly couple had gone on their way, and I had booked a ticket on a coach to Dorchester that left in one hour. The rain ran down the windows of the tea room, and my pain became muted and less frightful. I closed my eyes and told you I was sorry, because I had no idea what would happen to you now.

  •

  By the time I arrived at the hotel in London, the sky was growing dark and I was shivering with cold, fear and shock. My sister put me in a hot bath and sat on a chair beside me as I cried and told her what had happened. She stroked my hair and spoke to me soothingly. When I had cried myself dry and the bathwater had turned tepid, s
he said to me, ‘I promise you, my dear sister, that I will take care of you. I will speak to Father and Mother on your behalf, I will make all enquiries about what we should do for your little one, and I will even stand by you while you bring the child into the world. I will not leave your side. You must leave everything to me.’

  In my addled state, with my very soul bruised, the idea of giving over my trouble to my sister to sort out was more appealing than I can give words to.

  ‘Thank you,’ I said, resting my face on her forearm. ‘Thank you.’

  •

  The frosts came to Hatby, and it became more and more difficult to rise in the morning. When I was asleep, warm and insensible, nothing could trouble me. Only when my eyes opened did the world come rushing at me.

  The morning my parents called me to speak with them, I had been up for half an hour, sitting by the window and gazing out at the silvered grass. The door opened and one of our new servants – my mother did not keep servants for long; they always disappointed her – gave a little curtsey and said Lord and Lady Breckby needed to speak to me in the library.

  I knew, of course, that this meant my sister had finally told them. She had been waiting for the right moment, she’d said. I didn’t know what this ‘right moment’ was, but I had given over the burden to her and so I trusted her with it.

  The maid helped me pull on my house dress, but I did not bother with my hair. It still hung in the long plait I wore to bed.

  The library is in the west wing of the manor, and so it required me to descend the wide stone staircase and go past the breakfast room, where I could smell bacon and coffee, and across the empty ballroom. I knocked on the door and my father’s voice said, ‘Enter,’ and then I was standing in front of his armchair, while he looked me up and down with his hard, grey gaze. Mother sat on the sofa under the window, a handkerchief pressed against her face, refusing to look at me.

  ‘Sit,’ he said, and so I sat in the other armchair. The bookshelves rose almost to the ceiling, but were largely empty of books. Mother liked to read novels, and Father had a good collection of the kind of books a gentleman of his breeding should have, but mostly the library shelves were filled with busts and figurines that required dusting every other day. It smelled like wax and lemons.