by Richard Peck
I had always lined Miss Amanda’s cast-off shoes with a bit of paper, for her feet were a size larger than my own. I bent now to layer paper into the butter-soft blue calfskin shoes that I would wear when I wed the husband meant for her.
Then I thought of a scrap of verse: “Something borrowed, something blue . . . and a penny for her shoe. . . .” Suddenly the quiet, cluttered room filled with a distant voice. I froze, fearing it was Amanda’s. But it was another, an older one. The Wisewoman’s voice, as clear as on the day she’d foretold my fortune. The prophecy rang out again. And just as the Wisewoman had decreed, I’d died and come to life again beyond a mountain of ice.
She’d given me a gift—an American Indianhead penny—and told me to take it back, back where it had come from. She’d known my fate would lead me here. I had to find it. And yes, the gold chain that Gregory had given me. The chain that might betray and reveal me. My hand moved to my neck, where once the chain had lain hidden beneath the high collars of my servants’ shirtwaist. But of course the chain was gone. It must have been lost in the sea. I would simply find another penny, one to honor the bridal traditions. In a small drawer of the dresser, where a few coins lay scattered, I found another Indianhead penny and slipped it into my shoe.
A soft knock at the door, and Gregory stepped into the room. I turned and rushed into his arms, and he held me until I stopped trembling.
“Better now?” he said at last, sheltering me from fears he would not ask me about.
“Much better.”
“And better still tomorrow.”
I could only nod at that.
The next afternoon we were married in a little Brooklyn church that would have been more at home in a field on the Isle of Wight. The four of us: Gregory and I, Mrs. Forrest, and Rebecca Reed clustered before the vicar. Sir Timothy had fallen ill, so there could be no thought of the Whitwells coming to America for the wedding.
When the vicar asked if anyone knew of any impediment to our union, my heart stopped. Yet no stranger stepped from the shadows to sever the knot now being tied. I heard Gregory’s voice saying, “With this ring I thee wed.” My hand was in his, and he placed there a gold band. The church walls did not split wide and dash me to death.
But with the word and the deed of this simple ceremony, I had become a criminal. A bigamist. I had married the only man in the world I could ever love. Yet I was married already, and to quite a different man.
10
Gregory and I were at home in our new house on Montague Terrace in Brooklyn from the first day of our marriage. We lived then, like all honeymooners, to love and to forget for a little time all the darkened world beyond the glow of our love.
It was an old house in a row of brick merchants’ mansions, which Gregory, with an architect’s skill and a husband’s devotion, had made more modern and welcoming than its neighbors. The facade was repaved in limestone, silver gray, and Gregory added long windows that drew in the sun. The darker corners were lit by Tiffany lamps with shades like lily pads in silver and pale green to echo the walls. It was a house that invited joy and banished shadows. It spoke of the present, not the past.
From our back garden we looked directly out onto busy New York harbor. In the distance the Statue of Liberty raised her torch. In those star-filled summer nights great steamships began their voyages back to the world from which I’d come.
Our bedroom too looked out on this shifting scene. I stood before one of the windows on our wedding night, and the hand that bore its new wedding band grew cold with memory of that other band it had worn. And my other hand had signed two church registries, two marriage licenses within this single year.
Gregory stepped up behind me. I clung to his hands encircling my waist. I rested my head against his broad shoulder. I was in his arms, but my lies were between us. He kissed me more gently than I had ever been kissed before. But I had to speak, and now.
“I don’t come to you as a bride should come to her husband. I am not—”
He turned me in his arms and his lips stopped my whispered confession. Then he said, “You come to me just as you are. You have come back almost from the dead. Our life begins now, with that miracle. Nothing before has ever happened.”
* * *
We gave our first at-home party, a supper and dance, in that beautiful house on June 28. I stood beside Gregory at the door, and we greeted the arrivals without the intervention of a butler. I feared Gregory’s friends, what they might see in me. But I fell back on the shyness of a new bride, smiling and nodding, accepting the inevitable compliments. I willed myself to believe that all of life would be so perfect.
My dancing was not noticeably worse than that of most of my admiring partners, and I marveled at the overwhelming friendliness of Americans. They were determined to make me welcome. If I had possessed the meanest Cockney accent, they would have thought it charming. Having been told my father was a knight, they treated me with hearty deference. They left me with the fleeting impression that I could do no wrong. Every woman deserves one such night, whatever price she must pay in the morning.
* * *
The next afternoon the house still bore the signs of a successful party. Mrs. Forrest had lent me Ursula until I had time to engage my own staff. She was down in the kitchen, trying to create order there. I was alone and very much myself, performing the duties of a parlormaid.
The front doorbell rang. Tearing off my apron, I fled up to my room to return myself to some version of a leisured lady. I stepped quickly out of my cotton dress and into a tea gown. Just as I was easing into a pair of slippers, Ursula appeared in my room.
“There’s a man here to see you, Mrs. Forrest. Says he knows you and says he has something to deliver. But he isn’t wearing a uniform or nothin’ like that.”
No, he wouldn’t be, I thought. “His name?”
Ursula had forgotten to ask. But it didn’t matter. I knew who he was. “Show him into the front hall, Ursula. I’ll be down in a moment.”
In that moment I rushed to the front of the house to look down on the street. My throat closed as it had closed in the sea when I saw what stood at our door, already attracting a crowd of small boys. It was a Rolls-Royce limousine, immensely long and high, all its brightwork mirroring the sunlight. If it had been a hearse sent to bear my dead body away, I could not have felt more lost. I wished it were a hearse, come for me.
I stood at the head of the stairs as long as I dared. Long enough to know that he was standing in the hallway below. I saw the flaxen lights in his hair, alive in the dim light. I saw his heavy arms slung down at his sides, the breadth of his shoulders beneath the straining serge of the dark suit he had worn at our marriage. I began to walk down the stairs in a gown suddenly too fine. I walked blind with fear and empty of any idea. I did not know what he expected. I only knew that he was John Thorne. The only man to whom I was legally bound. My husband.
He turned and his eyes moved upward, from my slippered toe to the draped silk of my skirt to the sash at my waist. At last to my eyes. Then he moved toward me, and I put up a hand, glancing toward the back stairs. It was as imperious a gesture as Miss Amanda’s. Perhaps it was hers. I nodded toward the front drawing room, and he stepped back to let me lead him there. Would he have done the same for Miranda?
I had hardly gone beyond the entrance to the room before his rough hands seized my waist. I whirled on him. “No!” I muttered and flung his hands away. I told him to sit, and I took up a position beside the mantel.
When he spoke, his voice startled me. I’d forgotten the country burr. And I’d forgotten the heavy animal strength in his body, the weather-whipped face, the hands. . . .
“So you have nothing for me, then?” It was a soft growl, threatening, perhaps, only because I thought so.
“What is it you want?” I tried to read his eyes and couldn’t. Yet he watched me—her—like hunter’s prey, new light showing in those unexpressive eyes.
“Well, if there’s no chance of more p
rivacy than what we’ve got now, a kiss, perhaps.”
“I think not.” Would he spring on me? I knew what he had had from her. How could Amanda Whitwell, so free with herself before, stand on her dignity now?
But he was only turning a tweed cap in his hands. A sweat-stained chauffeur’s cap that spoke more eloquently than either of us.
“I’ve brought the Rolls-Royce, Sir Timothy’s gift. ’Twill show the Yanks a thing or two about what a proper automobile is all about.”
The words didn’t match the faintly thoughtful tone of his voice. He looked down at the cap in his hand. He was not the sullen rebel or the handsome brute, but more the servant than I remembered.
“Whatever we had planned,” I began, “must be considered again. Things that seemed possible when—”
“She was alive,” he interrupted. And I remained quiet, not knowing how I had meant to finish. “Things look different nearer to,” he said, and he ceased looking at me altogether. He’d looked his fill. He stared at the rug at my feet. “You’re—content here, then?”
“Yes. More content than I had thought to be.”
“And want for nothing more?”
“No. Nothing.”
He gripped his cap as if he would turn it inside out. “And yet a long, hard time I’ve had coming here,” he said.
“Not so hard a time as I,” I retorted with the spirit of both Amanda and Miranda combining.
“No,” he said. “Two weeks on an old tub out of Liverpool for me. But you fared far worse. There in the first days we thought—we feared you were both dead.”
“And if Miranda had lived and I had died . . .”
His gazed stopped me. “Miranda did live,” he said. “Amanda died.”
The stillness of the afternoon dropped like a shroud.
“You knew,” I said finally.
“I know now. I didn’t know before. When Sir Timothy told me my wife was dead in the sea, I believed him. Had no reason not to. I’ve always taken my betters at their word. You have reason to know that. I’m in this room now on the far side of the world because I’ve followed the ghost of a dead woman who’d bewitched me. But you’re that woman now. And you want nothing from me.”
“I want more from you than ever she did,” I said.
“Yes, but it will not be so easy to grant.”
We both pondered that. I was not one of his betters who might command him and he obey out of habit. He who had always lived in their thrall knew an impostor when he saw one. It would do me no good to turn on him now like a cornered vixen.
“It’s easy to see how they think—they think you’re her.”
“And yet you weren’t fooled.”
“No.” He looked away, seeming to spare me, seeming not to take notice of my stylish hair, my expensive gown.
“What gives me away? Not that it can still matter.”
“There’s not the calculation in your eye.”
“Oh, but there is. I’ve done nothing but scheme and plot and lie. I almost dare not open my mouth for fear I’ll tell the truth, or that the truth will tell itself.”
“Ah, but it’s from need,” John said. “She calculated and connived because it was her nature. I don’t speak ill of the dead. It was her nature. She was mad, and you’re not.”
“And yet you mourn her loss,” I said.
“No, lass. I mourn yours.”
The stillness descended again. He mourned me as I stood before him, yearning to live. John Thorne mourned me, and I could not grasp his meaning.
“I am your wife.” I had to force myself to say it. “And I have married another man, whom I love. I had never known real love before, and neither had he. But that is no excuse. The marriage is not legal. You are the only person who knows the truth. You must do with it what you will. If you take from me now what I have, at least I will keep the memory of it. I will not even hate you, if I can help it.”
He sat slumped in the chair, immensely weary. The strength seemed to drain from him. But he looked more a man, slumped there, than he had ever looked before. “You had as much right to marry Forrest as I had to marry you.”
“And what do we make of those two wrongs?” I believe even now that I would have agreed to anything he asked. I was wearier than he.
“Perhaps we make a pact.”
“The last woman you entered into a pact with—”
“Is dead,” he said in a hoarse whisper. “I would claim you if I could. But I claimed you before only to let you be used, and so I won’t claim you now.”
I stood motionless, not yet able to feel the warmth in this faint ray of hope.
“I took you because you were like her. . . . Would you believe me if I told you that in those few weeks we lived as man and wife, I began to think for myself? I began to know you were the better woman, and better for me? But it was too late.”
“If you had a genuine feeling for me, it will not make things easier for us now,” I said.
“Ah, the paths you and I set out on were never meant to be easy, were they?”
I waited. The afternoon light slanted lower in the room. My hus—Gregory would soon be home. But still, John and I must play out our hands. There was no other way.
When I looked up again, he was standing. His cap hung from his hand, but he did not twirl it like some bumpkin underling. “I’ll leave you to him. You deserve a fresh start—a real chance at a life for yourself. I’ll make no demands on you. You’re dead to those who knew us both. And you’ll be to your husband what . . . she couldn’t have been. You’ll have his child one day, and not mine.” His eyes flickered down to my narrow waist. He had seen that narrowness in his first glance, as I stood on the stairs.
“But still, we are married.”
“No,” he said. “I’m a widower, and the few who know me know that.”
“You’ll go back to the Isle?”
He looked up in surprise. “What’s there for me in England? No, I’ll see a bit of this country, where it’s said a man can make his own way. I’ll go west and farm or hunt or hire out by the day.” I saw the far distances in his eyes. “By the day,” he repeated, “not the night.”
He was turning to go, dissolving the last link between us. The fear that had dogged me began to fade. I was left with an emotion that was neither joy nor despair. And I couldn’t let him go without saying what was in my heart.
“Because of today,” I said, “I shall never think of you with bitterness. I shall remember you—fondly—for the rest of my life.”
He stopped, his back to me. His head dipped low. He was not a man capable of tears, I thought. And yet I shall never be quite sure. I walked behind him to the door. He slung his cap on his head.
“The Rolls,” I said. It gleamed at the curb, and he reached in his pocket for the keys. “No,” I said. “You keep it. Take it.”
He turned then, the ghost of a smile playing at his mouth. His eyes crinkled. Had I ever seen him smile before? “You’ve come a long way, lass, if you’re handing out Rolls-Royces to strange men who come to your door.” It was the only jest John Thorne and I ever shared.
“No,” he said, “I’ll make my way in this new country on my own feet. It’s a hulking great thing anyhow, that Rolls, and not much use on rough roads.” He dropped the keys into my hand and walked away. Our fingers never touched.
I watched him stride to the corner. The evening sun was bright on his back. He squared his shoulders as he went. It was a gesture I could understand. He walked in a new posture, in a new land. We had that in common. I watched him out of sight, and the tears coursed down my cheeks. Tears of joy and loss and redemption and whatever else tears are made of.
* * *
I had been Mrs. Gregory Forrest for more than a year. And by a husband’s love I was transformed far beyond my desperate attempts to transform myself. His was a world of unfurling blueprints. It was the clean smell of new lumber and fresh paint when he returned from a building site. He was inflamed and often exhausted by his
work. I shared it. Our hopes together went into the bricks and steel that rose against the sky.
Montague Terrace
November 4, 1913
My dearest Mother and Father,
If my letters have said too little over the past months, it was only to give me the pleasure of breaking happy news with some attempt at flair. On the night before last, you became grandparents.
A little grandson, with all his fingers and toes intact, and eyes a startling blue. Gregory believes they will shade to violet in time, to honor his mother.
Gregory and I have not decided on a name. But I imagine we will settle on Theodore—Ted—an American President’s name, for the first member of the Whitwell line to be American by birth.
We are all three very happy. His proud father has done over the sunniest room as the nursery, so Baby will have quite a proper suite.
I am sorry, Father, that your health doesn’t permit an ocean voyage, for I would very much like to see you with your grandson on your knee. But we shall have a trip home to Whitwell Hall as soon as Baby is old enough to be a good traveler. To share this news with you, dear Mother and Father, adds to the joy I feel today.
Your devoted
Amanda
The real Amanda would not have found much joy in Gregory’s world. I can’t believe she would have flourished in the warmth of his love as I did. And her child would not have been his, as mine was. Still, I felt the silent thrusts of guilt. That guilt was the impulse behind the letters I wrote regularly to Lady Eleanor and Sir Timothy. I composed them with great care, reaching for scraps of memory to make a changed but believable daughter. For I wanted Lady Eleanor to experience the love she deserved.
Yet I often lied in those letters, showing an eagerness to visit England that I didn’t feel. But I did not have to think of an excuse to postpone such a visit. In August of 1914 the Great War thundered out of the Balkans and erupted over Europe.