Susan Speers

by My Cousin Jeremy

  I nodded. “We walk for miles, every day.”

  “The estate is the factor?” His wise eyes saw too much.

  “We grew up here.”

  “Yes.” His hands made a motion as if to open a folder. “I know something of your family history. You two were prevented from marrying.”

  “We were.”

  “This wound hasn’t healed for either of you, despite your marriages to others.”

  I couldn’t hide my anger at his probing.

  “People dislike psychoanalysis, Mrs. Scard,” he said. “I’m not offended. Without your help, I would have to commit Major Marchmont to an institution. There may, however, be consequences for you. I hope you’ll call on me should the need arise.”

  *****

  At dinner Jem punished me with silence. He saw my glance at his untouched plate and narrowed his eyes.

  “Will this go in the report?”

  “It’s not that simple,” I said.

  “I was simple to trust you,” his bitter words wounded me.

  “And if you suffered pneumonia you’d want me to treat you with bread poultices and willow bark tea?”

  “It’s not the same thing.”

  “It is. It’s worse. You’re hurt, Jeremy, terribly wounded. I’d want you to do the same for me.”

  “Interfere.”

  “Yes, if you think it necessary.”

  “His questions cut like knives.” His voice grated and he took a sip of wine.

  “He said things to me I didn’t like,” I ate a piece of potato with feigned calm. Sometimes Jeremy mirrored my actions without realizing it. “I suppose it’s like surgery or foul tasting medicine.”

  “It’s far worse,” he began to eat. I was careful not to watch.

  “I’m sorry.”

  “I’m sorry, too. For all of it. You think I’m not grateful. I don’t act it, but I am.”

  “There’s no gratitude,” I said. “Not between us.”

  A pulse of intimacy hovered in the air between us. We both looked away. I daresay Jem was as glad as I of Henry’s entrance with our pudding.

  We were quiet together after dinner and through the night. I kept to the bounds of our youth, there was danger for us in adult feelings. Jeremy looked at me, his eyes soft on my face. It didn’t feel intrusive. I was glad he focused on something of this world.

  *****

  Jem began to comment on Hethering’s parkland on our walks. He saw the neglect and changes made necessary by absent groundsmen.

  “You’ve done well with limited means,” he said. “It can’t be easy.”

  One day after lunch, I’d finished my accounts and was adding detail to an illustration for Willow’s story. Jeremy’s brisk knock took me from my reverie.

  “How right you look behind that desk,” he said. “Uncle Richard would be amazed how it suits you.” He looked down at my work. “Will there be a new book?”

  “Yes,” I said. “About the day we met Willow.”

  His smile held at once nostalgia, sorrow, the shadow of her madness. “Quite a gap since your last project.”

  “I’m writing the story too.” I didn’t want to mention Belle’s book. It started a disastrous chain of events with Dickon, and Jeremy was much more involved. So much happened to us because of that day’s events: our first real kiss, the punishment of separation. I didn’t want Jeremy hurt by those painful memories.

  Jem had papers in his hand. “You’re agent here,” he said. “I come to ask permission.”

  I smiled and played along. “Permission?”

  “To build a summer house at the center of the rose garden. I found an old plan in the library — it predates Madison Marchmont.” He spread a series of drawings in front of me. “I copied it out.”

  Graceful lines echoed Hethering’s walls. It wasn’t a folly, not really.

  “I can make it fit the center bed,” Jemmy said. “We’ll have to transplant, of course, but it’s doable. What do you think?”

  “I think it’s wonderful.”

  “I can build this,” he said. “I can cut the wood, I can make the foundation.”

  “Then you must do it,” I said. To keep the eager light in his eyes I would rip out every flower in the garden.

  Chapter Forty-One

  Everything was going so well. Jeremy had new found energy. He drew and redrew the summerhouse plans. He built a scale model. He cut wood with great care. He consulted Blum for hours as they decided the best places to transplant the roses. When the weather was warm enough they moved the canes.

  We still spent nights in the library, but now I woke to hear him snoring, his head dropped folded hands. A quiet word with Henry brought a leather chaise from a dressing room to a secluded corner in the library. The next night I woke to see Jeremy sleeping supine and I closed my eyes to better rest as well.

  Stones were piled at the center of the rose garden the day I came to my study and found “Belle’s Rescue” open on my desk beside a new drawing for the foundation. Jeremy had come to me for approval, found Belle’s book and read it. I had to find him, explain somehow why our lives were laid bare for all to see.

  I ran to the library, his bedroom, our small sitting room. I ran across the lawn. He wasn’t in the rose garden. I shouted his name. Dread squeezed my heart, as I ran down the long meadow toward the Bridge of Sighs. A pelting rain began, warm as tears.

  Terror and grief overwhelmed me at the water’s edge. I could just make out Jeremy’s body floating face down. Nightmare images of Willow’s death pursued me as I dragged the oars to the skiff. I jammed my fingers forcing them into place.

  There was no time to get help. I rowed with choppy thrusts, sobbing and gasping, my face averted until the last moment. One last pull and I’d be beside him, but the force of my effort shot the oar from its broken lock.

  It struck Jeremy’s temple. I tore off my wet skirt, ready to jump in and grab his body before it sank. To my shock, he stood up, the water chest high. He was bleeding, snarling, furious.

  “Are you trying to kill me!” he shouted.

  I burst into tears. “I thought you were dead!”

  “I will be, if you keep at it.” Blood ran down his face, soaking his collar.

  “You were floating face down.” I wiped my nose on my sleeve, all of Nurse’s training forgotten.

  “Nice way to rouse me. I was diving for the maps.”

  “What maps?”

  “The ones I left behind to save Belle.”

  “For God’s sake, Jeremy!” I was shrieking like a fishwife. “It was years ago, the paper is dissolved.”

  “They were sheepskin. I remembered it when I saw your book. I thought something might be preserved.”

  “I thought you were drowning.”

  “Not until you rowed by. Some rescue. Drowning in these shallows?”

  “I had the pond dredged.”

  “And then you tested the level?”

  No. But I wouldn’t admit it.

  He pulled the boat to shore and gave me a hand out. “Tear a strip from that petticoat. Two strips, you’re bleeding too.”

  I bound his head and he bandaged my hand. He took my skirt from the boat and offered it with a gallant gesture.

  It was all too much. I began to laugh and he did too. It was painful, hysterical laughter, the kind Nurse always said would end in tears. I began to weep.

  Jeremy stopped laughing and put his arms around me, just as he had done on the day of Belle’s rescue. Then he raised my chin and kissed me.

  The rain had stopped and we were bathed in a muzzy golden light. Jeremy’s kiss opened every avenue to my heart. I swam in sensation before Dickon’s memory crushed me with guilt.

  I pushed Jeremy away. “You mustn’t,” I said, my hand over my mouth. “I can’t, I just can’t.” I ran back to the house, to the sanctuary of my bedroom.

  “Clarry wait,” Jemmy called, but he didn’t chase after me. Blum’s slow moving donkey cart lumbered between us. We were al
ready at the edge of scandal.

  *

  He found me at Dickon’s grave. I’d brought new plants to add to Dora’s careful tending. How long had I been away?

  Jeremy knelt beside me and helped clear away the turf I cut. “You loved him,” he said.

  “Yes.”

  “I tried to believe you didn’t, couldn’t love him like me.”

  “I didn’t love him the way I love you,” I said. “I failed him because he knew it.”

  “Oh, Clarry.”

  “I failed him because I lost his child.”

  Now he looked shocked. “I didn’t know about that. You miscarried?”

  “The Marchmont curse.”

  He took my hands in his and made me look at him. His face was stern. “You know better than that, Clarissa. It was shock and grief.”

  He gathered small white stones by the brook and arranged them around my plantings.

  “I never loved Caroline,” he said in a quiet voice. “I liked her, I liked her a lot, but the wrongness of our marriage ended that. From time to time I have admired her. I have never understood her.”

  “I understand her all too well,” I said. She loved him as I did, she had his child. She’d do anything to get him well, even send him to me.

  “Dickon had your love,” Jeremy said. “He had your hand in marriage, he had an honorable death. I’m alive, I’m with you and in your care, and I still envy him.”

  There was so much for us to say to each other, but I couldn’t speak it beside Dickon’s grave. I think Jeremy understood my reluctance, shared it. He rose and offered me his hand.

  “Do you still believe I can be as good and generous a man as Dickon was?” he asked me as we passed through the cemetery gate. His voice held such longing.

  “I do,” I said.

  *****

  From then on, he worked like a man possessed to finish the summer house. He wrote reams of tedious catalogue entries. He performed a thousand courtesies to make my days easier.

  “Let me,” he said one evening and took the heavy volume of Dombey and Sons from my hands. I closed my eyes to hear the velvet rumble of his voice — I had missed it so much. He conspired with Henry and folios of piano music arrived from London.

  He continued his walks with Lawrence Pickety. They came to fetch me for family suppers at the vicarage. Amalia watched over us fondly, as if we’d not journeyed far from her schoolroom.

  “Jeremy’s courting you,” she said after I’d helped settle her children, who protested, then dropped into slumber like blossoms from a stem.

  “He’s grateful,” I said. “He wants to thank me.”

  “Be careful, Clarry,” she said. “People see him well and able. They begin to talk.”

  “About us living together at Hethering,” I nodded. “I’ve thought of moving to Willow’s cottage.”

  “Even that will not serve,” she said.

  *****

  Bit by bit I began to hold back from Jeremy. He sensed this right away and moved closer and closer, never allowing space to grow between us. A fine tension hummed in our silences. I knew part of it was our increasing need for the love reawakened at the Bridge of Sighs. Part was Dickon’s memory, part our uncertain future. But there was something else unnamed and it held a menace that baffled me.

  Dr. Sachs wrote “Again I must caution, Mrs. Scard, when I only want to praise you. Major Marchmont has yet to unburden himself of his dark memories. To truly heal he must confess them to another, perhaps a doctor or a clergyman or a friend.”

  Whenever I saw Jeremy leave the house with Lawrence, I said a silent prayer that this would be the day, the hour he could speak of what still weighed him down. Surely Lawrence, his teacher, his friend, his spiritual advisor was the person best suited to hear it.

  One afternoon, Jeremy returned from their walk more exercised in temper than in body. His face was creased with harsh lines, his jacket discarded, his shirt damp with sweat.

  He glared at my study window, he knew I watched him. He went to the summer house and banged a hammer on its steps until they were finished.

  He arrived late to dinner, bathed and dressed in clean clothing. I was careful not to comment or be caught watching him. His eyes were down cast, his movements weary, though I doubted all the fight had left him.

  Dinner ended. When I rose to go, he put out his hand.

  “Will you come see my work?”

  We went out into the rose garden. The sky still held a little light, the sun had only dipped behind the trees.

  The summer house door was locked. I looked a question at Jeremy.

  “Let’s sit for a moment,” he said. We settled ourselves on the raw boards he’d just nailed into place.

  Jeremy propped his elbows on his knees and dropped his face into his hands. “I quarreled with Lawrence.”

  “You did?” How could anyone quarrel with such a kind, gentle man? Although I remember more than once Amalia remarked on his stubbornness.

  “I would have struck him,” Jeremy shocked me further, “but I managed to control myself. He expected it, though. He put his fists up. The silliness of that gesture made us laugh and we were friends again.”

  “What was the quarrel?”

  “I wanted to — to tell him something. He wouldn’t hear me. He said he wasn’t the right person, that I had only one telling in me. He said I had to tell you.”

  “Me?” I wasn’t ready to hear Jeremy’s confession, I didn’t think I’d ever be ready. I wanted to strike Lawrence Pickety myself.

  The growing darkness hid my panic.

  “Will you hear me?” Jeremy asked.

  “Yes.”

  Chapter Forty-Two

  “I was a double agent, Clarry,” Jeremy said. “Do you know what that means?”

  “Tell me.”

  “They sent me into Germany to surrender. I had friends there from before the war. Friends and other English spies hidden among them. Diplomats are a slippery lot. They train us for that.”

  “Why did they trust you?”

  “I fed them information, accurate information at first. Good men died because of it. I bartered their lives for the big show.”

  “Oh.” I felt a pain deep within me. “Was Dickon one of them?”

  “He so easily could have been. War isn’t all valor, Clarry. It’s a dirty fight. Your illusions are the first casualty.”

  Jeremy’s lips thinned. His face was flinty. “I betrayed my German friends, men I’d known from youth, men I drank with, admired, confided in.”

  “It worked.”

  “Oh, yes. Then another spy turned me in to save his own life. They executed him. They had worse in mind for me.”

  Henry had told me with tears in his eyes about the scars on Jeremy’s back.

  “Dr. Sachs said you were tortured.”

  “I told my captors so much.”

  “You can’t blame yourself.”

  “I don’t, not for that. They knew my screamed confessions were lies. They sent me down the line as a reward for some bestial brutes. They kept me in a cellar, a hole in the ground, dying men around me. They brought me up every day to be flogged. They fed me scraps to keep me alive for sport. They placed wagers on how long I’d last before begging for mercy. They beat me harder if I begged too soon.”

  “How did you bear it?” I whispered.

  “I found a place deep inside myself to go where they couldn’t follow.”

  Some things are too deep for tears. My stomach burned. My bones ached. But I knew there was more.

  “Tell the rest,” I managed to say.

  “I was with seven wounded Tommies. They had no food, only a dirty trickle of water. One by one they fell into stupors and died, their bodies left to rot among living. The rats came at night to feast.”

  I couldn’t speak but he went on.

  “One of the last men alive went mad and began to — to eat the flesh the rats had left. Another joined him.”

  Jesus Christ, I prayed, l
et me hear this. I wanted to run away from Jeremy’s words, from the look on his face in the moon’s cold light.

  “I killed him,” Jeremy said. “I beat in his head with a stone I’d saved for the guard. I strangled the other. Both Englishmen, both my brother soldiers. The last man stared at me from his stupor. ‘Traitor’ is what his eyes said. ‘Beast.’”

  “Jemmy,” I whispered.

  “It was the madness, you see. I couldn’t permit it or I would give in too.”

  He was close enough now. The look in his eyes terrified me. I spoke to bring him back. “Did you use the stone to escape?”

  “There was no chance of it with the first guards, though they were hungry too. Supply lines were cut. They were sent to the front and replaced by boys, children, Clarry.”

  “I was so weak. I’d no food or water for days. A young boy, twelve at most came down in a patched old uniform. He had a link of moldy sausage. He took out his knife to cut a piece for me. I cracked his head with the stone. I slit his throat with his own knife, took his food and clothes and escaped.”

  Here it was laid before me. What was done to him. What he did. I couldn’t take it all in, though even now his words haunt me.

  “They made me into their image,” he said. “My truest self is beast.”

  A long silence fell between us. I tried to weep, to wash away the smallest bit of this awful knowledge, but my eyes were bone dry.

  “So now you know,” he said, “what I am become.”

  I understood his self loathing. I would feel the same. In so many ways, Jeremy and I were one being and would always be so.

  But I couldn’t let him think the worst. I was the stronger one, I was the smarter one. I had not been beaten and starved until my soul hid within me.

  “What you are,” I said, “is a good soldier. What you are is a hero.”

  “You truly believe that?”

  “With everything I am.” I stared down his doubts and mine with all the strength I could muster. When my spirit flagged, I called on Dickon and Laura to have their strength bolster mine.

  “But can you love me as you did before?”