“Catherine accepted your help,” Hazel said, another remarkable detail she could see now that she understood the history.
Delores nodded. “She was nervous of me at first, but lonely too, without Leon. Duncan warmed to me quick, but he dinna remember me from all those years before, and Catherine and I decided not to tell ’im anything ’bout who I really was.”
“When did Catherine get sick?” Hazel asked. Duncan had never spoken about her illness, only that he’d been fetched at school when she’d died.
“She started gettin’ headaches ’bout a year after I came, got worse and worse. That last year, she lost sight in her one eye, and when she finally went to see Dr. Randall, he said it were a tumor in her head and there weren’t nothing she could do. That’s when she found the away school for Duncan. She dinna want him to see the end of things for her.” Delores took a deep breath and let it out. “Duncan dinna want to go, fought so hard against it until Catherine almost gave up, but the vicar stepped in and made it happen, said Duncan needed the learnin’.”
“Catherine got bad fast after Duncan weren’t there. I think she was done with livin’. She missed Leon something fierce, missed her family, missed Duncan. She drank more and more, and one morning, she dinna answer the door when I checked in on her like I did before opening the pub. I ran for the vicar, and he fetched a constable, who broke the lock on the door so we could get to her. She’d died in her sleep, poor thing, looked like an old women though she weren’t more than thirty.”
Hazel was silent, spent of ideas about how to acknowledge the woven tragedies of this tale.
Delores stared at the table and continued, “I’ve thought a hundred times to tell him all the truth about the people who’s loved him, but I can’t think of how that would help him now.” She paused for a breath. “And I ain’t never been able to forget that little boy hitting his head against the cobbles.” She shivered.
Hazel nodded, though reluctantly. How would knowing any of this help him?
“Where is Abigail now?” she asked gently.
Delores shrugged. “Three times over these last years I’ve had someone come into the pub and ask me if I got a sister up in Haven or Portsmouth or Leeds—guess she and her family moves around a fair bit. I’ll say yes, and they’ll say, ‘She said to tell ya hello if I ever came through.’ Best I can guess is someone from Manningtree told her I’d come up here. Though I know you might not understand it, and God might strike me for saying so, I’m glad to know she’s found some happiness in her life.”
She looked up at Hazel, her gaze piercing enough that Hazel felt herself growing tense. “Yer gunna leave him too,” she said, that sharpness Hazel remembered from the parlor seeping into her tone. “I know yer playin’ at somethin’, trying to get yer share and then yer gone, ain’t ya?”
Hazel swallowed the impulse to defend herself, but Delores was right. Hazel was going to leave Duncan, but not for the reasons Delores thought. She was going to leave because it had never been her intention to stay, because being here at all was only a means to an end, because their marriage was not a real marriage the way everyone thought, even Delores.
When Hazel said nothing, Delores’s eyes narrowed, and Hazel took that as her cue to end the interview. She slid herself to the edge of the bench.
“I won’t tell him any of this,” Hazel said as though it was so very magnanimous of her to protect him from his own sad history. Would she be adding to that sadness in a few months’ time? “But I appreciate you telling me the truth. It answers a lot of questions, and I admire very much all you have done for him. Thank you for that.”
“Dunna thank me, I dinna do it for you.”
Hazel felt the heat rising in her neck as she pushed up from the table.
Delores did the same, still glaring, and took a step closer. Hazel lifted her chin defiantly toward the woman who towered over her by several inches. “Yer no Catherine, and I wish I’d never told him to write to you. If I’d thought it would come to this, I never wouldah done it.”
Delores turned on her heel and headed for the back of the pub. The kitchen door banged closed, and Hazel couldn’t help but flinch.
Corinne joined Hazel and helped her slide her arms into the leather arm braces of the crutches.
As Hazel followed Corinne onto the street, she thought on Delores’s parting statement over and over until she felt sure she’d parsed what the woman had meant by it: Hazel was not Catherine, who had stuck by Duncan and done right by him no matter what. Hazel would leave Duncan when the opportunity to have a better life without him came around.
Hazel was Abigail.
Hazel made it through dinner and Duncan’s discussion topic of the rebellion against the Greek Ottoman Empire without revealing the discomfort she was feeling, but only just. As soon as Duncan began winding down from his excitement of the topic he had discussed that day with Mr. Marcum, who had a brother in Greece, she excused herself for the night. But she did not sleep easy.
The things Delores had told her swirled in her head, and though she felt sure that it would not benefit Duncan to know that his mother had abandoned their family because of her inability to care for him, or that he had a full-blooded sibling somewhere in the country, or that Delores had come back for him, it was difficult to keep these things to herself.
Would she want to know if the situation was reversed? She believed that she would, but she possessed the ability to process the complex motivations—good and bad—that had driven the choices others had made.
But this wasn’t her life. It was Duncan’s.
She had struggled all her life to make sense of the particular circumstances that had determined her life’s journey and still felt burdened by them. Could Duncan, with his literal mind and limited understanding of emotion, make any sense of it?
The thoughts tumbled and swirled in her mind. She rolled on her side, then her other side, then her stomach, and then her back again, wanting the discomfort to ebb, but when her thoughts about Duncan settled, Delores’s parting words came back, cutting like a blade: “Yer no Catherine.”
Hazel had agreed to spend this year as Duncan’s wife in order to secure her future. It was the only chance she would ever have to manage her own life. She had known going into this that the risk—and the hope of Uncle Elliott and Aunt Amelia—was that she and Duncan would decide to keep this arrangement for the rest of their lives. She could see the shimmer of that life. She lived that life, at least in part, every day, but it wasn’t real.
She had been Duncan’s wife for ten months, but she did not love him. While she knew he enjoyed her company and would likely prefer that she stay a part of his highly regimented life, he would not be the one giving up his independence if she stayed. He would not be giving up anything at all.