“He’s my step-brother. Father’s worn out several wives.”
I didn’t know whether to smile at his insouciance or offer my sympathies. “I’ll leave you to it.”
“Will you be at Leighton House tonight?” He was kind enough to look away from the misery that must have washed across my face. Leighton House was Jeremy’s home. An informal supper party was planned.
“I’ll be there,” I managed.
“I look forward to it.” A bright splash of notes ended our conversation.
Leighton House had a smaller piano in its parlor, and Chase played for us after dinner. Despite his proficiency with Chopin and Bach, he had an affinity for Tin Pan Alley tunes and entertained us. He asked for a volunteer and chose me, even though I didn’t offer.
“Sit beside me,” he placed a chair next to his piano stool. “When I pause, you sing ‘Just like me’.” He sang the simple phrase. Across the room, Jeremy glowered.
I smiled. “All right.”
Chase began to play and sing:
I want to meet a girl
“Just like me,” I sang.
Who’ll give my heart a whirl
“Just like me,” I sang again.
She has to be a beauty
“Just like me,” I sang and blushed.
She’ll make me do my duty
“Just like me,” Daisy laughed, but without rancor.
She’ll have a heart of gold
“Just like me.” Chase had a wonderful smile.
Together we’ll grow old
“Just like me.”
The song ended with a flourish of notes and a joke on me, but the tune was so enticing, I laughed with the others and smiled at Chase, grateful for his relieving the pressure on my heart.
“Where did you find that song?” I asked, ignoring Jeremy’s angry face and Caroline’s anxious one.
“I wrote it,” he said.
*****
I took a long walk in the morning to fix every part of Hethering in my mind. Jeremy and Caroline’s party was that night, I’d leave for London and the Ledbetters’ home the day after. When I returned to the hall, I found Dickon Scard in earnest conversation with our butler.
“I’m so glad you returned,” he said, taking a leaf from my hair. “I didn’t want to miss you.”
I knew my smile was wide and delighted. “I thought you were in London.”
“Visiting my Mum,” he said.
“You saw Jeremy’s announcement in the Times. You came to support me.”
“I saw the announcement,” he said. “I came to see you. Fancy another walk so soon?”
“Let’s visit Willow.”
We walked to her cottage and sat on a little bench by the pond. His stories of London made me laugh. He’d been to Italy, and recommended the food and the art, in that order.
“When you come home,” he said. “When you’re independent, you must come to London.”
“And visit you?”
“That’s a beginning,” he said, smiling.
I took a sideways look at him. Was he flirting? I still saw the fresh faced boy with brown eyes and a crooked smile, but his city polish and the intelligence in his face transformed him.
He walked me back to Hethering, and we paused on the steps.
“Thank you,” I said.
“London,” he replied.
Jeremy was waiting for me in the hall. He followed me to the blue salon. “That friendship should have ended long ago.” His disdain stung me.
“Oh, it’s easy for you to give up ‘childish things’,” I retorted.
“It isn’t easy, how can you think that? I’ll see the follies in ruins before I share them with anyone but you.” His voice broke and and I heard my Jem at last. It hurt me to look up at him. His love and his sorrow changed the adult planes of his face into the boy I loved.
“Jemmy.” I touched his arm. He stared at my hand as if it were my body pressed to his. His longing ignited my own and we came close to abandoning reason, to take what we wanted more than anything. We were as close in spirit as we had ever been.
Then, bit by bit, I felt him withdraw. The adult lines of his profile returned, he was a stranger to me again.
“It isn’t easy for me,” he whispered, “to do as I’m told.”
“As if marriage was required to inherit Hethering,” I said. Jeremy looked at me, his face set. “Oh God,” I said. “It is, isn’t it? That evil man. How can he be my father?”
“The last hurdle,” he said, “to do what you said you wanted. I save Hethering.”
I sat down suddenly. Our shining plan had come to this?
“Caroline is a good person,” Jeremy said. “She understands.”
I’d seen Caroline bloom in his company. She did more than understand.
Chapter Twelve
Italy was a dream of beauty and warmth. If I couldn’t forget my unhappiness, I could lay down its burden for a time. The wonderful food sustained me, the wonderful art inspired me. My heretofore reluctant pupils and I spent days sketching and painting en plein air. I taught them the rudiments of embroidery. Darsie made small, neat stitches in conventional designs. Marcie snarled her silks with impatient hands, but her comical thread pictures delighted me.
In Pisa I hesitated over a postcard of the leaning tower. I could send it to Jeremy unsigned. I could send him a signal that I thought of him with every breath, but what was the point? More misery for him? More hopeless waiting for me?
I returned to Hethering for Jeremy’s wedding. That was the price for my summer in Italy. My father wanted no gossip about my absence from the ceremony.
Daisy sat beside me and held my hand. I breathed in and out. Just before the moment I dreaded, the moment Jeremy would walk back up the aisle beside Caroline, the moment we would look into each other’s eyes, Daisy spilled my handbag on the stone floor. It distracted me and when I looked up, the newlyweds had passed us by.
“Are you angry?” Daisy whispered.
“I’m grateful,” I said. Ever since Daisy had fallen in love with her American, she was a different person altogether. Kinder, sensitive. Perhaps we could be friends.
Daisy and the Gordon brothers put me at the center of their merry group. I laughed and smiled and joked and kept track of every minute that passed. How soon could I leave?
“Will you dance at my wedding, Clarry?” Jeremy was standing next to me.
“Of course,” I said, then realized my mistake. He meant now. He meant with him. Chase Gordon raised his eyebrows and stepped aside.
We donned social smiles and stepped into the dance with decorum, but the touch of his hand burned into the small of my back and the feel of his shoulder under my glove consumed me. We ignored the curious, knowing glances. We were well behaved without, on fire within.
“What do you think our lives will be, Clarry?” I heard the pleading note in his voice, but I fixed my eyes on his chest.
“We’ll have useful lives,” I told him with a calm I did not feel. “We’ll be content, and we’ll have a measure of happiness — in time.”
“You’re a fool, Clarry,” he said, as the music came to an end. I wouldn’t look up at his face and he bent his head to look deep into my eyes. “Don’t you know that my only happiness is you? That your only happiness is me?”
I turned my face away. Then I saw shock in Caroline’s eyes. She’d come forward to greet me. She’d heard every word Jeremy said. I wept that night. I wonder if she did too.
*****
June and July passed under a dull haze of grief. Mrs. Pickety had a new baby, Joseph. I embroidered an entire layette for him. I liked to sit by her side and admire her infant, though I must confess, he slept through most of it. I taught a little class in watercolors for the village school. My pupils were sweet and undemanding.
In August, Daisy came by Hethering with an invitation.
“Ronald’s father is taking a cottage by the sea for the month. Mother is going and Blaise and Clifton. Ch
ase will be there too.”
I packed and left without consulting Father. I think he was glad to have me gone. Uncle Paul had suffered a stroke and Jeremy would arrive soon.
Landsdowne Cottage was a mansion almost as large as Hethering. When I entered its great hall behind Daisy and her family I heard piano music coming from a distant room. I met Chase on the croquet lawn several hours later and felt, if not happiness, then a healing balm on my spirits. He waved his mallet at me and the fun began.
The cottage had its own gardens shaped by the salt air and sea spray. I spent mornings sketching and exploring them. There were no follies, but a series of funny statues, worn to caricatures by the salt. One day it rained in sheets and I couldn’t face a drenching. I found a bench outside the room where Chase was practicing and worked a christening gown for Joseph.
After a while the music stopped and Chase emerged, smiling when he saw me. “I wondered why I played so well,” he said. “Come on, there’s a comfortable chair inside.”
The rain lasted three days, and I finished Joseph’s gown listening to Chase perfect a Chopin nocturne.
“Do you play, Clarry?” he asked and looked surprised when I said no, not at all. Most girls my age played at least a little.
“Father didn’t wish it,” I said. “My mother was an accomplished musician and it reminded him.”
“Come sit by me,” he said. “Today is your first lesson.”
He taught me the rudiments and supervised my short practices. I loved it. Partly because he made it so much fun, partly because something within me knew the hand positions, knew the sound of the scales. I didn’t shirk the boring parts, I loved it all.
“Promise me you’ll find a real teacher Clarry,” he said. “You’re a natural.”
Toward the end of our three week stay, I received two letters forwarded from Hethering. The first was from Evadne Ledbetter. Her husband had left the Foreign Office and decided to work with cultural institutes in Paris and St. Petersburg. They would spend the winter in France and the summer in Russia. Marcie and Darsie would go too, and they invited me to join them. There would be an official governess, I was invited as a companion.
“Of course,” Evadne wrote, “I’d never object to you supervising their watercolor studies or embroidery.”
*****
I didn’t want to ask Father for travel funds, so I smiled with surprise and delight when Miss Caleph sent a cheque in a triumphant letter. She’d sold her book of fairy tales and the illustrator used my maps as inspiration.
I returned to Hethering and sat with Uncle Paul every afternoon. His stroke had deprived him of speech and movement. He slept heavily. When he woke, he looked so fearful I was glad when he drifted off again.
“Jeremy and Caroline will be here on Friday,” Father broke our usual silence at dinner.
“I’m leaving for Paris with the Ledbetters before that,” I said. “I’ll be abroad for a year.”
He nodded. “Mrs. Ledbetter wrote for my permission. When you return,” he said, “when you’re twenty-one will be time enough to decide your future.”
At twenty-one, I resolved, my father would have no further voice in my future. I had a year’s respite to chart my life’s course.
I enjoyed the winter in Paris. With the money from Miss Caleph, I engaged a piano teacher, Monsieur Bec-Fin, from the Sorbonne. I believe he took on an adult beginner as a curiosity, but he soon admired my industry. I practiced every hour I could.
“I wish you would continue with me, Mademoiselle,” he said as the Ledbetter household made preparations to leave for St. Petersburg. “I have many pupils with greater technique but few with such feeling for the music.”
I buried my excess of feeling in the music. It was April in Paris, the city was filled with lovers and it was hard for me to be alone. I took walk after walk, searching the beautiful streets, but for what?
For Jeremy, I realized as soon as I saw the Temple d’Amour, Madison’s inspiration for the fifth folly at Hethering. I was searching for Jeremy and I would never find him. I sat down on a bench, dropped my face into my hands and wept. Darsie led the governess, Mademoiselle Caron, a discreet distance away, and Marcie sat down beside me.
“Look,” she said, putting her handkerchief in my hand. “I embroidered this.”
Instead of a flower or her initials, there was a bad tempered frog spitting out a fly.
I was laughing and crying at the same time, when she spoke to me in a mature manner incongruous for her youth.
“Mummy says you’ve had a disappointment,” she said. “Mummy says you wanted to marry your cousin.”
“My Father forbade it.” I told her.
“But why? Cousins marry all the time.”
“He wanted Jeremy to marry someone else.” She was too young for the ugly truth.
“Jeremy Marchmont,” she said. “That’s his name isn’t it?”
“He’s married now,” I told her. “It’s best we don’t communicate. But I haven’t learned yet how to go on without him. If I could just —”
“See him, visit him,” she nodded. “That’s only fair.”
“It’s a silly dream, Father will never allow it,” I said. “I must try harder to get on alone.”
Chapter Thirteen
On our way to St. Petersburg we stopped our journey in the country near Geneva, Switzerland. We were guests of the Ledbetters’ friends, Ralph and Eva Speck, connections from the Foreign Office.
“You’ll enjoy their gardens, Clarissa,” Evadne Ledbetter told me.
“There’s a smashing summerhouse smack in the center,” Marcie said, her eyes dancing with mischief.
“We like to bring our dolls there,” Darsie added.
We arrived at the beautiful villa with little time to dress for dinner. Evadne had a headache from travelling, so I descended the stair on Mr. Ledbetter’s arm and took my place at the long dinner table with more than a dozen guests.
When I opened my heavy linen dinner napkin and looked up I realized the extent of Marcie’s mischief. Jeremy sat opposite me, his black eyes shining brighter than his blinding white shirtfront.
We stared at each other for a moment I wanted to last forever. He was thin as a knife blade with new shadows under his eyes and hollows in his face. We were both stunned into silence, but I knew he felt the same joy that rose in my breast. I fear I wore the twin of his heartbreaking smile on my own lips. The air between us quivered with happiness. He breathed “Clarry” like a prayer.
My right hand twitched, tipping my wineglass, but the gentleman beside me rescued it. I tore my eyes from Jemmy, and remembered my manners long enough to say a breathless “Thank you” as our first course appeared.
“I’m Henry Putnam.” The man had a pleasant face, no longer young. “And you, I believe are Clarissa Marchmont. What an extraordinary coincidence.”
Did he look at Jeremy? I had to be very careful. In the candlelight and shadows I couldn’t see Caroline, but she must be seated nearby.
“I’m travelling with the Ledbetters,” I said, hoping to distract Mr. Putnam from connecting me to Jem. “I’m a family friend, a schoolmate of their daughters.”
“Ah, Miss Marcie and Miss Darsie,” Henry Putnam said, while I sneaked a quick look at Jeremy, in dutiful conversation with an elderly lady. “The Ledbetter twins and our hosts’ children have been friends from the cradle.”
So Marcie asked her friends to invite Jeremy. Perhaps I should have been furious with her, but I could only be grateful.
My untouched soup was removed for the fish course and I turned to my left, finding a foppish young man who spoke no English. The rest of dinner was a whirligig of polite conversation, speaking looks at Jeremy, and fruitless efforts to communicate with a flirtatious boy whose peeks at my décolletage went a step, no, a leap, beyond impertinence. Had I eaten anything I’m sure I’d have been sick.
Jeremy ate nothing, though his wine glass was filled again and again. My throat was closed to food, althou
gh I sipped more wine than I was used to.
“Have young ladies stopped eating altogether?” Mr. Putnam asked me as I declined an exquisite pastry robed in Swiss chocolate.
“I’m just tired from the journey.”
“And yet you look so happy.” He had a kind face.
“It’s beautiful here. I’m told the gardens are exceptional.”
“Yes, particularly the white garden in moonlight,” he said.
“And the summerhouse,” I said in a loud voice. “Marcie told me about the summerhouse.”
*****
A huge moon hung in the sky. It turned the white flowers into snowdrifts and lit gravel paths into glowing avenues. I paced up and down their lengths determined to avoid a furtive appearance. I’d been told of these wonders, I had the right to explore them.
Ahead of me, the white painted summerhouse had the beautiful lines of the Taj Mahal. It was a folly itself, it held folly within.
I opened the door and walked into wonderland. Moonlight fell in latticed patterns on potted palms and furnishings covered in blue and silver striped silk. I looked for Jeremy but heard him instead, moving behind me to lock the door.
“Clarry.” I felt his breath on the nape of my neck and I turned into his embrace.
I wept as I had in Paris, but this time the tears healed me. Jem and I sat together on an upholstered bench. He kept one arm tight around my waist as the other found his handkerchief. In the moonlight, I saw my blue embroidered forget-me-nots.
“I made a terrible mistake, Clarry,” he said. “I listened to your father, I listened to Caro and her brother, I listened to you. I should have obeyed my heart instead.
“Yes,” I said, “we were fools. Nothing is worth this life without you.”
“Do you know I breathe better when you are with me. I see better, I hear better.” He nudged my nose with his. “I heard you say ‘summerhouse’ as if you shouted it.”
“I did shout it.” My head was against his heart. “Where is Caroline?” I would never call her his wife.
“She’s in England with her family.” Jeremy looked away from me. “She knows our marriage was wrong. She won’t stay with me.”
Susan Speers Page 6