The Heiress
Page 27
Now there is only one face I seek among the breezes and the shadows, and I know where I shall find her. Sensitive as a well-trained horse to its mistress’s bidding, the river turns gently and deposits me among the thick spreading roots of the ancient oak tree at the heart of Rosings’s woods. I am able to stand here, and shake off the clinging gold-brown willow leaves, and clamber onto the woodland floor, which smells of vegetable decay and the secrets of birds and voles and beetles.
I can see the edge of her wide skirt around the trunk, and I can hear the soft swish of a turning page. I round the bend and stop, drinking in the sight of her, which quenches me as if I had been wandering a desert land and not floating in a river. She looks just as I remember her, the orange of her hair dulled by time, her lips ridged with vertical lines and her hands spotted not just with freckles, but with age. She wears her favorite gown, gray silk with a narrow stripe of sapphire blue running through the fabric, the pale under-sleeves covered in delicate whitework. Her shoulders curve with the years, years that ought not allow her to kneel with such apparent ease among the wide lumps of the oak’s roots, the layers of her crinoline, petticoats, and the skirt of her gown spread around her like a silken puddle.
Indeed, before her death, it had already been several years since we had sat here together; our knees and backs could no longer manage.
This was our tree; our place. An irony, for until I returned to Kent, these woods held nothing but the nameless, formless terrors of children’s stories for me; and then there was Eliza, whose distaste for the wildness of the true outdoors—rather than the carefully cultivated outdoors of parks and gardens—she had not exaggerated.
But she indulged me in my relish for untamed growing things once she came to Kent; and, too, we needed a place to escape together. For no matter how discreet the servants nor how stout the locks on our chamber doors, there was something delicious about making space for ourselves, for the shape and heft of us, in the greater world, even if only we, and local fauna, knew we had done so.
She sets aside her book when I clear my throat, marking her place with a scrap of blue ribbon. Her face, when she looks into mine, is unsurprised, her smile broad and calmly glad. It transforms her web of wrinkles into a wreath of welcome. Patting the hump of tree root that we used to lovingly call the tree’s settee, she says, “Sit awhile, love.”
I arrange myself as best I can, given the width and breadth of my skirt and petticoats. I told her almost daily during our life together how I loved her softness, and she pulls me against it now. We listen to the hum of forest insects, the calling conversations of chaffinches and nuthatches, the branches of the oak rubbing against the intersecting branches of a nearby ash in creaking affection. We listen to each other’s breathing, hers calm and even as it was before her illness, mine rattling in my chest like dice in a cup. Eliza does not remark on the alarming sound of it, only tightens her arm around my shoulders.
I should ask her whether the preachers in their tall pulpits are right about the nature of heaven; but I do not. Cowardice, once again. I never did manage to achieve anything like true feeling for the God of the prayer books, only ever finding something like a union with the Divine in the music and words of my fellow humans, and in the quiet lives of my other fellow creatures, both those whose roots run through the earth and those who scamper across it or wing their way through the sky. But I fear such a union is merely the product of my own imagination.
In my imagination, heaven looks like home. Eliza got there first, and so this time it is I who will make the long walk up the lane toward the great house, a little afraid, a little tired. And it is she who shall meet me there in the lane, surprised in her daily routine to find me standing there, looking up at the house’s highest window; she who will run to me and enfold me in her arms; she who will murmur words of welcome and weep hot glad tears, as I once did when it was she who followed me.
The river has crept up between the tree roots, filling in the bark’s deep crevices. It dampens the hem of my gown, tugging like a child’s hands, insistent that I come along with it. I am slipping away before I know it is happening, my cheek falling from Eliza’s shoulder. “Oh, Frank,” she says, and grasps my hand until she can hold on no longer; and then she releases me.
I wake now to two people speaking together. Their words are all but meaningless, but I know both their voices—my Welsh maid’s musical, George’s deep and boggy. I listen to them for a time, their whispers rising and falling.
Eliza had not been jesting about not being fond of children; nor had she been wrong about loving her own anyway. And George was as much Eliza’s as mine, as Darcy’s and Elizabeth’s. I do not know whether George suspected the true depth of our affection for one another, but he loved us both as almost-mothers. Knowing that he is here now, as he was here when she died, I feel a small snap, as of a frayed rope mooring a boat to its dock. Like the freed boat, I bob and drift, unhurried but still moving steadily away.
Slowly, over the whispers of their human voices, I become aware of another voice, ragged and choking. It is the same weeping voice I heard before, but it is coming, I realize now, from the walls, the windows. Saltwater eddies under the wallpaper, pools on the floor. My eyes open, blink against the firelight; but the room remains blurred, as if I am looking at it through a windowpane that runs with rain. My lips, dry as bones, crack as I smile. Rosings Park has been silent for me for forty years, though I never lost the habit of listening for it. I lift my fingertips from the bed and hope it understands the gesture as I mean it—that if I could, I would run my hands over every inch of wall and floor, in greeting and farewell.
“Quiet for decades,” I say, still smiling, though my voice is dry and cracked as my lips, “and now all you can do is weep?”
Acknowledgments
I need to thank several people whose advice and help were invaluable while I was writing. Natalie Jenner, thank you for your careful beta-read, and for pointing out that George deserved an extra scene. Laurel Ann Nattress, thank you for your thoughtful comments on my early draft. Thank you to Dr. Julian North for sharing your expertise on laudanum addiction. Rebecca Howe, thank you for the many (many) late-night texts encouraging me to keep going when I was stuck.
To my incredible agent, Jennifer Weltz: thank you for being the advocate you are, and for helping me prune that out-of-control first draft. Thank you to the entire team working behind the scenes at William Morrow—we authors, and our books, owe so much to your hard work. In particular, thank you to Shelly Perron, copyeditor extraordinaire; and to my editor, Rachel Kahan, for your enthusiasm for Anne’s story from the very beginning.
And finally, thank you to my husband, Stuart Campbell. You wrangled our children, listened patiently to half-finished passages, and let me moan about edits. I (really, truly) could never have gotten this book written without you.
About the Author
MOLLY GREELEY earned her bachelor’s degree in English, with a creative writing emphasis, from Michigan State University, where she was the recipient of the Louis B. Sudler Prize in the Arts for Creative Writing. She lives with her husband and three children in Traverse City, Michigan.
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Copyright
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
the heiress. Copyright © 2021 by Molly Greeley. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any informa
tion storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
first edition
Cover design by Elsie Lyons
Cover images © Sybille Sterk/Arcangel (flowers and leaves); © Anatolii Riabokon/Alamy Stock Vector (bottle); © Snusmumr/iStock/Getty Images (portrait); © Kanunnikov Pavlo/Shutterstock (frame); © Michal Chmurski/Shutterstock (texture)
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data has been applied for.
Digital Edition JANUARY 2021 ISBN: 978-0-06-303202-6
Print ISBN: 978-0-06-303200-2
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