That Summer: A Novel

by Lauren Willig

  Imogen sat frozen, caught by a horrible surmise. It was unthinkable. And yet—

  Arthur made a clucking noise deep in his throat. “You look chilled to the bone.” He moved towards the door. “You stay right where you are. I shall have Anna bring you some hot tea. And biscuits. I imagine you would like a biscuit.”

  Imogen couldn’t answer. Her tongue felt gummed to the back of her mouth. Arthur shook his head over her, the image of husbandly solicitude.

  Arthur paused, his hand on the knob of the door. “After all,” he said, smiling at her beatifically. “We must take better care of you now, mustn’t we?”

  London, 2009

  The bells jangled as Julia pushed open the door to Nick’s shop.

  Her opening gambit, carefully refined and rehearsed, again and again, on the Tube ride over, died on her lips as she saw that there was someone else occupying the desk at the back of the room, a woman with hair in a pencil bun and painfully trendy glasses.

  She hadn’t considered what she might do if Nick wasn’t here.

  She could always pretend to be just another browser, she supposed, make a perfunctory round of the collection, smile stiltedly at the woman at the desk, and back out into the street again. Or she could put her big-girl panties on and leave a message at the desk.

  The woman at the desk was already occupied. There was a customer with her, a middle-aged woman whose carefully groomed hair and matched accessories screamed interior decorator. At least, that was, if Helen and Julia’s father’s interior decorator was anything to go by.

  Julia sidled a little closer, pretending interest in an eighteenth-century escritoire, waiting to see if the other woman would leave.

  She was preparing to make her move when the door to the office in the back opened and Nick came out.

  “Mrs. Mottram, I have the—” He caught sight of Julia and his face hardened. He only missed a beat before turning smoothly back to the customer. “I have the clock you wanted to see. It’s in the back. Tamsin?”

  The woman at the desk looked up.

  Nick didn’t look at Julia. “Would you show Mrs. Mottram the Thomas Tompion clock?”

  “Certainly.” For a moment, she looked like she might question him, but something in Nick’s expression must have quelled discussion, because, instead, she smiled at the customer and said, “Just this way, Mrs. Mottram. We’ve kept it hidden away so you can have the first look.”

  The door to the office opened and closed again and Julia was alone in the shop with Nick. Bach played faintly in the background, something complex and fiddly.

  Julia cleared her throat. “Hi,” she said originally.

  Nick’s face might have been carved out of the same stone as the marble bust on the pedestal next to him. “Can I help you?” he said, as though he had never seen her before.

  “Um, yes.” Julia did her best to make a joke out of it, although she had never felt less like laughing. But that was what she did, deflected emotion with smart comments and wisecracks. It might not precisely have worked for her in the past, but it was all she knew. “Do you have anything with which I might flagellate myself? Something nice and scourge-like?”

  Nick folded his arms uncompromisingly across his chest. “We don’t carry anything of that sort, but there’s a shop a few streets down that should be able to oblige.”

  Julia tried to smile, but it came out unevenly. “Would that even the score?”

  Nick wasn’t playing. In a low, flat tone he said, “What do you want, Julia?”

  You.

  The word popped into her head unbidden, and she realized it was true. She wanted him to smile at her the way he had before; she wanted his easy banter, his camaraderie, that excitement that lit his eyes when he had looked up at her over his books in the V&A.

  Before she had killed it dead and made his eyes go hard and flat, as they were now.

  Julia took a deep breath, her fingers locked in a death grip on the strap of her bag. “I came to apologize.” She searched his face for some reaction, but his expression remained stony. “I had no right to speak to you as I did the other day. I—jumped to the wrong sort of conclusions.”

  “You wouldn’t be the first.” His face revealed nothing. He simply stood there. Cold. Impassive.

  It would be easier if he were blazingly angry; then, at least, she could fight with him. She forced herself to go on, saying, all in a rush, “It’s not your problem; it’s mine. If it hadn’t been Natalie and the Dietrich Bank thing, it would have been something else.” She was floundering, losing ground. As simply and directly as she could, she said, “I lashed out because I hated that you’d seen me at my weakest. And that wasn’t fair. Not when you’d been nothing but kind.”

  That wasn’t the whole of it, but at least it was a start.

  “You needn’t start the application for my canonization,” Nick said briefly. In the muted light of the shop his eyes were more green than blue. She’d been wrong, Julia realized. His studied calm was just a façade. Underneath he was angry, angrier than she’d imagined. “My actions weren’t altogether altruistic.”

  It took a moment for the meaning behind his words to kick in, and when they did Julia felt even worse than before. So she hadn’t been wrong; he had been sending her vibes. But it was all in the past tense. Over. Done.

  And she had royally screwed it up.

  Julia looked up at him, trying to muster the right words. “Nick, I—”

  “Nick?” called Tamsin from the desk. Her voice was professional, but there was a distinct edge of get yourself over here.

  “Just a minute!” he called back over his shoulder. And to Julia, “Look, this is really not a good time.”

  Now, or ever? “Fair enough. Anyway, I just wanted to make sure you knew I—well, anyway.” She hitched her bag higher on her shoulder. Years of ingrained instincts screamed at her to flee, leaving the shop bells jangling discordantly behind her. Instead, the words that came out of her mouth were, “I saw a little wine bar around the corner. I’ll be there for the next hour or so if you change your mind. Just in case.” And then, because the words, once started, wouldn’t stop, “It’s hard to make yourself trust someone when you’re convinced they’ll only hurt you. It’s—I figured you would understand that.”

  Something flickered across his face.

  “Nick?” called Tamsin.

  “Wait here,” said Nick tersely to Julia.

  She felt a little surge of hope as he strode towards the desk, conferring in low tones with Tamsin before turning back to her.

  “Here,” he said. “This belongs to you.”

  Julia looked down in confusion at the manila folder he thrust in her direction. Her hands moved automatically to close over it, even as her brain protested that this wasn’t part of the script.

  She looked searchingly at Nick, trying to fight the growing sense of unease that was stopping up the back of her throat. “What is it?”

  “Something to read over your wine,” he said, and left her standing at the front of the shop, her heart on her sleeve and a beige manila folder in her hands.

  As the impatient Mrs. Mottram pounced on Nick, Julia smiled unconvincingly at Tamsin, stuck the folder under one arm, and let herself quietly out of the shop, feeling as though she’d been wrung out and hung out to dry.

  The wine bar was just where she had seen it last, around the corner, with red-painted walls, black mirrors, and artfully scattered black-topped tables, the super-elevated kind, designed for either the very tall or the very limber. Julia hauled herself into the one of the high, straight-backed chairs and ordered herself a large glass of Malbec. Her bag strap bit into her knee. The manila folder lay on the table in front of her.

  Slowly, she opened it.

  On top were color printouts of the pictures she’d taken of Tristan and Iseult, followed by the prints of Thorne’s other four extant paintings. Under that were photocopies, black and white this time, of various letters and journal articles, all underlined
and annotated in red pen, in an angular hand that had to be Nick’s. His letters were blocky but legible.

  He’d given her his file on Gavin Thorne.

  The waiter brought Julia her wine, in a glass that looked like something Alice might have seen through the looking glass, blown up to three times normal size. Julia nodded her thanks.

  Slowly, she began paging through the file Nick had given her, her chest tightening as she read his notes in the margins, some impatient, some excited, some commands to himself. Follow up with ship’s manifest? Name on tickets? He’d set up a time line of Thorne’s life up to 1850, up to the ship taking him to New York, cross-referenced with documents. He’d found a passenger list for the ship Thorne was supposedly taking to New York and begun to cross off passengers.

  He must have put hours of work into it.

  Julia squirmed with shame and frustration, hating herself just a little bit more with every page. While he had been putting together his dossier she had been avoiding his calls, self-righteously patting herself on the back for her good judgment in assuming that there must be something wrong with anyone who was so gratuitously helpful. With anyone who seemed drawn to her.

  The wine burned like acid against the back of her palate.

  She remembered Nick, in the attic, saying, so casually, Not easy, is it? Mine walked out on us when I was seven.

  And, more fool she, she had taken him at his tone, rather than his words. His humor, his easy banter, were employed for just the same purposes hers were, and for the very same reasons. Maybe that was part of the draw—porcupine love, thought Julia, a little wildly. Two sets of prickles finding each other.

  Except that she’d gone and stabbed him in his soft spot. Because she was self-absorbed. And an idiot.

  The bells above the door jangled and Julia’s head snapped up with a velocity that made her spine crunch, but it wasn’t Nick; it was a couple, the man holding open the door for the woman, the woman laughing up at him over something he had just said. They looked so comfortable together. So happy.

  In the past, Julia would have shrugged and told herself it didn’t matter, that she didn’t want that. But she did.

  Julia took another gulp of her wine, feeling the sting of it against her tongue, her thoughts drifting to her parents. It was hard to tell what would have happened if her mother hadn’t lost control of the car that night. Had her parents’ differences been too large to solve? She didn’t know; she didn’t remember enough to tell. But her mother had been on her way back to try. She’d been willing to fight for what they had. And that, somehow, made all the difference.

  The bell rang again. Two women this time, both with shopping bags. Then a man with “blind date” written all over him. The waiters began to make the rounds with matchbooks, lighting the tiny tea candles that sat in the center of each table.

  Julia ordered a second glass. The wine bar began to fill up around her. She’d left her cell phone on the tabletop next to the folder. The screen was blank and still.

  Biting her lip, Julia opened the text screen and pulled up Nick’s number. But once there, she wasn’t sure where to go next. Come live with me and be my love only worked for the Elizabethans. Can we start over? sounded hopelessly naïve. There wasn’t any such thing as starting over, only building off one’s mistakes and trying to make the best of them.

  The wine bar was beginning to fill up. “Another round?” asked the waiter.

  Another round and she wouldn’t be able to get off her stool without stumbling. “No, just the check, please.”

  It was after eight already. Nick had probably closed up the store and gone home. Julia stared at the dossier in front of her, Nick’s notes in the margins. Something struck her as off about his time line—something she had seen in Evangeline Grantham’s diary, perhaps?—but her mind was muddled with emotion and wine, swimming with too many new ideas and revelations: Nick, her mother, Helen, everything. She had gotten, what, three hours of sleep last night? If that.

  She suspected that Nick hadn’t gotten much sleep, either.

  Taking a deep breath, Julia bundled the papers back into the folder. Then, before she could think better of it, she picked up the phone and typed, simply: “Thank you.” And then, after that: “I’m sorry.”

  Hitching her bag up over her shoulder, the file folder under her arm, she headed home to Herne Hill.

  TWENTY-SIX

  Herne Hill, 1850

  Imogen’s daughter was born in the house in Herne Hill, in the room that had so increasingly begun to feel like a prison.

  The snow had melted and the weather turned, but Imogen wasn’t allowed out into the garden; she was meant to have rest, Arthur reminded her, complete rest. The headaches from which she was suffering weren’t feigned this time but real, a dull throbbing in her temples that was with her when she woke, that made her thoughts confused and interrupted her dreams.

  Imogen protested that her head would be clearer if she were allowed out from time to time, but she was overridden and escorted gently but firmly back to her room, the windows closed, the curtains drawn. The doctor clucked over her poor color and swollen ankles and reiterated his strictures. Arthur was all solicitude, at her side to read her books in which she had no interest and to attempt to tempt her with dainty morsels she had no desire to eat.

  And then there were the draughts, brought nightly by Jane, tasting heavily of spirits of wine and and syrup of poppies. At the doctor’s orders, she was told. They sent her into an uneasy sleep haunted with fevered dreams: Gavin, struggling in the icy waters of the Thames, holding up his hands to her in supplication as Arthur leaned from the bridge above, observing the spectacle, before turning to her and commenting brightly, Well, my love, that’s all done with now, isn’t it?

  Other times, she would be walking with Gavin through a field of flowers as they had so often walked during their enchanted summer, but the sky had an odd, hectic light to it, an orange tinge, and the scent of the flowers would grow stronger and stronger, clogging her nostrils, cloying at the back of her throat, until she would find herself choking with it, gasping for breath, clawing at the fabric of her throat, and would awake, panting, alone in her room, the fire casting an orange light across the carpet, the smell of the laudanum overwhelming in the shuttered room.

  She tried pouring the solution into her slop bucket, but it was a poor, weak rebellion. There was always more to be had, and Jane stood over her as she drank, with an illusion of sympathy and a secret air of watchfulness, almost of triumph.

  In Imogen’s confinement, strange fantasies began to form. There were days that Imogen imagined that Jane was trying to poison her, that that gloating, watchful look was of the murderess waiting for her potions to take hold.

  It’s no use, Imogen wanted to tell Jane. I would have given Arthur to you gladly.

  But her head ached too much to form the words.

  Imogen developed an invalid’s cunning, feigning sleep to avoid the administration of the draught, waiting until the others had left the house to throw up the window and in hale long, deep breaths of the cool, crisp spring air. Down, far below, she could see the summerhouse, waiting for her, taunting her. Sometimes she imagined she saw Gavin there, waiting for her, a dark figure among the fresh green buds on the trees.

  It was only until her baby was born, she told herself, fighting the weakness, the lethargy, the odd slips between fantasy and reality. The drug and the loneliness and the stuffiness of the room. Once her baby was born, she would be able to build up her strength again, free from Jane’s poisonous ministrations and Arthur’s stifling solicitude. She tried, desperately, to clear her addled mind, but it was a difficult battle; even awake, she felt half-asleep, riddled with worries and nameless fears.

  Her mind took refuge in flight. Some days, she was a girl in Cornwall again, sitting with her father in his study, puzzling out the archaic handwriting of his manuscripts under his directions.

  When the pains hit her, she was up on the cliffs, watc
hing an errant seagull fly in circles above the choppy gray sea.

  “She’s wandering,” she heard Jane say to Arthur in low tones, and there was a cup set to Imogen’s lips.

  Imogen tried to turn her head, but the cup followed, and the liquid slid heavy and cloying down her throat. She coughed, weakly, and someone lifted her, pressing a handkerchief to the corners of her mouth.

  “Not much longer now,” said her husband, and in her fever and fear the words took on a sinister quality. She clawed at the sheet, trying to free herself, but Arthur took her hand and held it fast, stroking it, making noises that were meant to be soothing but took on the quality of strange incantations.

  “Away with you now,” the nurse said, and Arthur was gone, and there was the red-faced nurse with her white cap there instead, urging Imogen to push.

  The waves pulsed around her, pulling at her, but the water was full of sharp shells that wracked her with pain. She clung to the broken remnants of a boat, the sea rocking her back and forth, as the seagulls cried out all around her in their high, shrill voices.

  But that is my voice, she realized as she subsided, panting, against the pillows.

  Her brow was damp with sweat and her hair fanned limply around her face. Her throat was hoarse from crying out. She wasn’t in Cornwall at all. She was in her room in the house at Herne Hill and Gavin’s child was struggling to be born.

  “Water?” she murmured, and someone, a nurse, dribbled a few drops between her lips.

  “So you’re back with us now, are you?” said the nurse. “You were away with the fairies.”

  Imogen managed a weak smile, her lips stretched and dry. “I was dreaming.”

  And then the pain hit her again, all the worse for being awake. She clung to the sheet, wringing it between her hands, gasping for breath.

  “That’s it,” said the nurse, and then, a little ways on, “a girl.”

  A tiny, damp bundle was placed in Imogen’s arms. She looked down in wonder at the little creature, at the matted dark hair on her head, her wrinkled red face, her small, flailing limbs. Her daughter. Gavin’s daughter. Imogen could scarcely move her head, but she leaned stiffly forward and brushed her dry lips against the baby’s damp hair, trying to express without words all the love she felt for her.