If you were to go to your Aunt Mary, you’d be sure to hate her too within a fortnight, as you do anyone who tries to curb you.
Life isn’t always pleasant. We cannot always act in accordance with our own desires.
Bessy, if your need for change is so pressing, you could always consider accepting young Milner’s persistent (if rather melodramatic) proposal. My mind on the matter remains unchanged.
With affection, I remain, very truly, your mother,
Lydia Robinson
4th April 1848
Allestree Hall
Lydia,
Your daughters, I thought you should know, arrived at Allestree Hall around a week ago, mercifully unharmed. They traveled unaccompanied by stagecoach to escape the tyrannies of their grandmother, looking like bedraggled orphans by the time they reached our doorstep.
They are welcome here. In fact, upon hearing of your proceedings at Great Barr Hall, William and I must insist that this become, for the foreseeable future, their home. Bessy and Mary are good, honest girls, with fine futures before them. Mind you do nothing to jeopardize their prospects further.
Sending prayers for your soul and for our cousin Catherine’s recovery,
I remain, your sister,
Mary Evans
CHAPTER TWENTY
I HAD RARELY GONE into the sickroom during my time at Great Barr Hall but, as fate would have it, I was the one who was with Lady Scott at the end.
We—Sir Edward and I—had thought it best when his sons hurried home for the crisis for me to appear useful and take shifts by his wife’s bedside. I was a widow who had watched my husband and daughter die. That marked me out as Death’s custodian in this house full of men.
We were lounging through the dog days of summer, but it was gloomy in Catherine’s chamber at night and in the day. I could see only a hint of sunshine at the edge of one of the heavy tapestried curtains. Otherwise the room was lit by candles and one solitary lamp, which was shaded by a black veil, as if it were sentient and already in mourning.
I sat as far from the bed as possible and tried not to look at her. To do so was to confront myself. The instinct of the living to avoid the dying coupled with my guilt that her liberation would be my salvation. But the poor woman’s breath was a constant reminder of her presence and an unwanted accompaniment to my latest novel. When my eyes slid from the page to her, the stories that her face told horrified me. She was scared. She was confused and angry. She didn’t understand who I was.
A clock somewhere down the echoing, uncarpeted landing struck three. Another hour until the nurse came to relieve me. Sir Edward and the “boys,” as he still called them, were out riding and enjoying the summer weather while I was shut up inside. For months I had lived under the rays of his near-constant attention, but now that his sons were here, the master of the house no longer needed me.
“Write some letters to while away the hours,” he’d told me that morning, kissing my cheek (he did that now) and assuring me he was grateful for “my service to dear Catherine.”
But whom was there to write to? I’d written to Dr. Crosby so much I feared he’d tired of me. I pictured a younger, more vivacious woman at his side, or a sandy-haired man, little more than a boy, sneaking through the side entrance of the doctor’s house to visit him at night. And I hadn’t heard from my son or my sister or my daughters—not for months.
“Edward.”
I jumped and twisted toward the door before realizing it was Lady Scott who had spoken.
This was new.
I didn’t stand but leaned toward the bed, steeling myself for blood, excrement, vomit, delirium. Anything but the unthinkable: her recovery.
“Edward,” Catherine said a little louder. This time her body was thrashing.
I put down my book and went to her. Up close, I could smell her, or, rather, each day, week, month since she’d last bathed.
Her hand grasped mine. She was still wearing her wedding ring.
“He’s not here,” I said.
The sound of my voice quieted her. Without the creaking of the bed and the dull thump of her arm against the pillow, there it was again. Her breathing.
“Stay,” she whispered, and a memory fell across me like sunlight.
“Stay,” she’d whispered once before, on Valentine’s Day many years ago when I’d acted as her sullen bridesmaid.
But she hadn’t said it to me. Why would she? I was fifteen and foolish. I’d believed that the ceremony itself was the most important moment of the wedding day. Besides, I’d been surly, for what I’d thought then to be my heart was breaking. What was I worth if this man who would be a baronet hadn’t chosen me, if I was only standing at the edges of the scene?
Yet “stay,” Catherine had said to my fellow bridesmaids, and although the rest of them must have known what she meant, we all left her anyway. We’d had our own lives to live, our futures to protect, and she had her side of the bargain she’d made for herself to fulfill.
“Hush now,” I said, more to reassure me than her. Catherine, the ghost of what I could have been and one day still could, would, be.
The silence became terrible, like audible darkness.
The weight of it pressed on me, but the truth took some minutes to register.
Silence meant she was no longer breathing.
Lady Scott had gone.
* * *
TWO DAYS LATER, FINALLY, Sir Edward and I were alone.
Since the moment when Death had transformed Great Barr, when the nurse had found me, staring at Catherine’s cooling hand in mine, he and I had had only hasty conversations. These were a reprieve for him between dealing with undertakers and clergy, comforting the “boys,” and greeting relations. But they were sweet manna to me.
I’d been tied to the sickroom for so long I wasn’t sure what to do with myself now I had my freedom. I practiced the piano, drifting from one tune to the next, or read a few pages of the latest novel Mr. Bellerby had sent me—Jane Eyre by one Currer Bell. The topic, however, the life of a governess, held little interest for me. What did a governess, barely out of the nursery herself, know of life and love?
“Oh, Lydia,” Sir Edward said, closing the parlor door and walking over to me. “Tell me it gets easier.”
“It gets easier,” I said, mechanically.
He sat next to me on the low divan and leaned his head on my shoulder.
“Once the service is over, everyone will leave and—”
“But it does me good to have the boys here,” Sir Edward said, raising his head.
“Of course. But, I mean, we will be just us.”
He said nothing.
What if he didn’t want me now all obstacles were gone? What if I never had him to myself again? Or had never had him at all, had merely acted the part of a diversion?
“How much longer need we wait?” I blurted out.
Sir Edward cocked an eyebrow. For me, asking this was the culmination of constant and many questions, but my plea had taken him by surprise.
“Mightn’t you wait until Catherine is buried, at least, Lydia?” There was an edge in his voice.
I chose to ignore it. “But how much longer after that?”
“I hardly see any harm in waiting.” Sir Edward slid open his initialed case and started to play with a cigar, spinning it between his hands before chewing the end. I doubted he had any intention of lighting it.