Reverend Lascelles had sprinkled the earth over him.
Old Mrs. Robinson had stayed in our pew in the chancery of the church, staring up at the plaque dedicated to her daughter, Jane, too overcome to stand at the open graveside.
And, one by one, on that day and over the months since, the other mourners had melted away, making my isolation complete.
“Another one of our men gave notice today,” I said as Edmund’s mother and I sat next to each other in my dressing room.
She was sewing with a steady rhythm in spite of the swelling in her bejeweled, arthritic hands, in the last of the day’s feeble light. Winter was coming, and the nights were starting to draw in.
My own work sat in my lap, forgotten. I couldn’t embroider when the weight of our futures was upon me. By Edmund’s own calculations, which Charles Thorp had found in a stark addendum to the official accounting book, we were in trouble. Even with the land I’d let this summer on the advice of my brothers-in-law, the children and I would be in dire straits within a twelvemonth. No more small sums sent to Lydia in response to her pitiful letters, no dowries for the girls, no Cambridge for Ned, and for me? Who could I turn to with father and husband gone? Must the burden, which neither of them had schooled me for, fall on me?
“Hmm?” said old Mrs. Robinson. Her eyes looked tired and less fierce than usual.
I’d nearly forgotten what I’d said to her.
“One of the laboring men,” I continued, when the thought came back to me. “He married a dairy maid and is to go to Eshelby’s farm.”
“Loyalty. No servant knows the meaning of the word nowadays,” she started to complain, but I could tell her heart wasn’t in it. She looked exhausted, weak. Maybe now was my chance to tell her.
“Mother,” I said stiffly. She’d asked me some months ago to call her that.
“Yes, Lydia?” There was a hint of wariness in her voice when she heard me obey her.
“With the farmland leased and more and more servants leaving, I have been thinking. It may be prudent for us to go too.” I managed to hold her gaze.
“Go, Lydia?” She placed her hoop on the side table. “Whatever do you mean?”
“Dismiss most of the servants, shut up the Hall. Or, better yet, let it. The girls I could send to relatives while I deal with the house, and then we could all three go visiting. Perhaps we will join my sister, Mary Evans, at Allestree Hall in Derbyshire. Ned could live with a tutor. And you could—”
“And I could what?”
“Well, you could go home.”
She drew herself up tall, ready to tear into me, but the truth had streamed across me like a beam of light. She could no longer turn Edmund against me, secure in her prior claim. And that meant there was nothing she could threaten me with.
“You seem to forget, Lydia, that Thorp Green Hall was my home, long before it was yours.”
I nearly laughed. How could I forget it? She had reminded me that I was a stranger in my own house, not a Metcalfe, or even a real Robinson, not “one of them,” since the day Edmund and I had returned from our honeymoon.
“No.” I stood. “It is no more your home than it is mine. It was your husband’s home. After that, it was my husband’s. And now it is my son’s. I have a duty to protect it, and the rest of his inheritance, until he reaches his majority.”
“And you would have me believe that your affairs are as bad as all that?” She also stood.
I nodded. It had taken me time to believe it too. At first I couldn’t fathom the truth, how the amounts Edmund had placed on horses had grown even as our investments diminished, how he hadn’t told me that affairs were bad, even when he was dying.
“When my son—” Her voice cracked. “When my son was the best son a mother could ask for, a prudent father whose only fault was being too kind, a loving husband whose weakness was being too forgiving. He spent all day in his study caring for the estate, keeping his books—”
“Loving?” I spoke over her. “My husband had a shallow pool of love. After that was spent, he passed his life locked away from us, and now he has left us with next to nothing. He failed us.” Yes. And I had never known it. I had thought him perfect. For, after all, how was I to know that he was as poor a husband as I was a wife?
“You, you.” The old woman clenched and unclenched her hands, rage radiating from her. “What have you done, Lydia? Have you frittered away all his money, sent it to your whorish daughter and to your lover?” She threw the word at me, showering me with spit.
I blushed. It was true I was still sending Branwell money from my monthly stipend and receiving a flood of poems—some intelligible, some much less so—in return. The checks were a salve to my conscience through my many sleepless nights, as well as a feeble insurance to keep him away. But what was the pittance I had given Branwell compared to what Edmund had lost?
And this had not been the only way in which her precious son had neglected me. Without Edmund here, without the hurt in his eyes, it didn’t seem so wrong at all that I had gone to Branwell’s bed. After all, Edmund had refused to make love to me. And I had not been ready to live only on memories.
“You must leave the Hall at once if you speak to me so,” I told her, very matter-of-fact, wiping the wetness from my cheek. “The children leave in two days. There is nothing to keep you here.”
“Will you send Ned back to John Eade?” she asked.
My calm seemed to have mollified her. If only I’d learned not to match fire with fire long ago.
“No,” I said. “To another tutor, a man in Somerset. It is all settled.”
“You would take my grandchildren away from me?” This was a different tactic. She was pathetic, reaching out her cupped hand to caress my face.
I flinched. “Why don’t you go to your real daughter? To the godly Thorps?” I couldn’t resist this last barb. “I hear their children are angels, at least compared to mine.”
* * *
EVEN WITH MRS. ELIZABETH Robinson turfed out, it still took some time to extricate us. We were part of the fabric of the Ouseburns. I hadn’t quite comprehended that before. The Robinsons, like the Thompsons, weren’t just employers or almsgivers. We were a symbol, a source of pride, a surety against the changing world beyond. I resented my superiors, or at least coveted what I had not—a title, a house in London, a chance to see the world. But the peasants here delighted in their betters’ triumphs and grieved our misfortunes as their own.
“All is settled, then?” Dr. Crosby reappeared around the side of the Thompson mausoleum, the grandest resting place in the graveyard surrounding the Holy Trinity, the Little Ouseburn church. He’d been running his hand across the columns that ornamented the building.
This was the hardest of my many good-byes.
“Yes,” I said, drawing my shawl a little tighter as the wind picked up. “Bessy and Mary return from visiting relations next week, and soon after, we will all decamp to Allestree Hall, to my sister.”
“Is there anything I can do? Any preparations, perhaps, for the new lodgers?” The doctor strode down the bank to walk beside me, toward the church where we’d be less exposed. His boots flattened the browning grass, which was fighting hard for survival through the winter.