“The book is by a Mr. Hoyle,” Lucian explained in his most bewildered manner, “but I don’t understand half of it. I was on my way to town to partake in a game with some very fine gentlemen who were to instruct me.” He sighed the longest sigh possible. “ ’ Tis not to be now, alas.”
“Ah, my father plays whist! And he has two friends here for dinner at this very moment!” cried Adelaide, who didn’t care if the handsome stranger was the devil himself as long as he didn’t leave. “How fortuitous!”
“Very fortuitous indeed,” Lucian replied. “Do you think it possible your father would be at leisure to suffer my company on a cold winter night? My name is Lowell—I doubt he remembers me.”
Yes, her father was at leisure. No, he did not remember.
Several hours later Weald House had passed from Sir Walter to the gardener’s son, who’d learned much during his four years away, which he’d spent in the army as well as places beyond. Suspicion was cast, but because whist was a gentleman’s game, it was conceded that cheating could not be involved. Accompanying the property deed was the hand of Adelaide, whom Lucian had shyly pressed to marry (“to avoid uprooting her from her home,” he claimed). Initially Walter refused to consider Lucian’s suit at all, but Adelaide had grown strong-willed during her long years of spinsterhood—if her father was drunk enough to gamble away her security in a card game, she’d be damned if she was going to accompany him to a spider-filled cottage on the moor.
A month later, the two were wed in a ceremony Sir Walter refused to attend. The bride wore her favorite satin gown with a fine net overlay and clutched a bouquet of anemones despite them being out of season. The groom wore the Beau Brummell tailcoat with breeches that had impressed Adelaide that first night. After the wedding, these clothes were relegated to the back of the wardrobe, along with the airs he’d acquired while away.
Lucian never touched another card deck, for he had no need—he’d won all he’d ever desired now that he’d gained Adelaide. To his delight, their marriage was all he longed for. Because she was so far above him in every way—an angel, he called her—he worshipped her in the manner he’d desired all those Sundays at church. And worship her he did: Adelaide had hair black as night; Adelaide had skin white as stars. Most miraculous of all, Adelaide loved him in return, the gardener’s son who’d managed to win her through a hand of whist. Her years alone had taught her that love given purely was worth tenfold over a per annum of two thousand pounds.
The couple spent their mornings lying on their bed bathed in light even on rainy days. Their evenings were filled with simple pleasures: hearty meals, good music—Adelaide possessed the voice of an angel—and endless conversation.
Adelaide and Lucian. Lucian and Adelaide. No one else existed in their world but the other. But even the most blissful union cannot avoid disappointment. Despite Lucian’s most assiduous worship of Adelaide, her womb remained barren of fruit. Alas, this led to the creation of Weald House’s first ghosts.
Adelaide had married the gardener’s son initially because she yearned for children—love was an unexpected consequence. Though she’d grown up surrounded by brothers and cousins, the years had called them away to places she only knew of from Sir Walter’s map book in the library: London, Edinburgh, Paris, Milan, Rome. As time passed, their letters had dwindled, leading to isolation for poor Adelaide. Yes, Sir Walter could have sent her abroad, but she was his last child at home and the image of her late, much-mourned mother, with the same long ebony hair and white hands. Until that fateful whist game, Adelaide had resigned herself to a solitary existence nursing her father’s gout. But now that she was a wife, hope rose hot and furious. A baby to suckle at her breast! A child that would reflect the devotion she bore for Lucian!
Each month her hopes were dashed when the inevitable arrived. Each month her tears were plenteous enough to water the garden Lucian had once borne responsibility for.
By the time three years of marriage had passed, Adelaide had turned ashen-cheeked, her hair shot with white.
“What am I to do for you?” Lucian asked one night—by now their shared evenings had become forlorn of song and conversation. “If you stay this way, you will die—perhaps not a death of the body, but a death of your soul. I can live without a child, but I cannot live without you.”
“I cannot live without you and a child,” Adelaide replied. And then she spoke the words that made her soul pang with fear. “There’s one thing we have yet to try, beloved. I’ve heard it whispered in the village that if you plant a rosebush under the full moon . . .”
Her words drifted into an anxious silence. After all, she was suggesting what some called superstition, and others called worse. A century earlier maids had been burned for similar charms; even now, in the enlightened year of 1812, Adelaide feared for a servant to overhear her words. But she could speak to Lucian with her eyes. And speak she did.
Lucian met her eyes. Lucian understood. After all, he’d been raised a gardener’s son.
That next full moon, Lucian didn’t plant one rosebush. He planted twenty, all of which he’d managed to cultivate from the finest stock Shropshire could yield. He gathered the bloody rags from Adelaide’s last round of courses, which he’d swiped from the laundry. He planted the rags beside each rosebush, and covered them with mulch. By then it was the end of February, and it had been a fair February too: warm and sunny yet moist with the promise of an early spring.
Lucian knew the rosebushes would flourish under such circumstances. And flourish they did: by the time the roses bore their first blood-red flowers in June, Adelaide’s stomach protruded enough that the servants gossiped she was carrying twins. They were wrong. She was carrying triplets—two boys who were strangled by their cords, and a girl. Before she breathed her last, Adelaide named her daughter Ada.
Thus were three ghosts added to Weald House’s history.
Upon receiving news of Adelaide’s death, Lucian took one look at his daughter. When he saw Ada bore her mother’s milky skin and dark hair, he knew he’d never stop mourning. He ran to the rose garden screaming until his lungs gave out. He yanked the bushes by their roots, twining their long briars about his arms, thinking all the time how these arms would never embrace his beloved again, that these hands would never caress her dear face. He welcomed the sharp sting when the first thorn punctured his flesh—pain was easier than sorrow—and then wrapped the rest about his chest and neck, twisting them tight. When his blood soaked his shirt, he trampled the soft, fragrant blossoms beneath his heels until all that remained was their perfume. He sowed handfuls of salt into the soil to ensure nothing would ever grow. And then he left, vowing never to set foot in Weald House again. Five years later, his corpse was found on the moors beneath a cluster of crows.
Before his disappearance after Adelaide’s death, Lucian wasn’t completely senseless in his grief. He’d written two letters. The first was to his solicitor in Birmingham. The second accompanied the deed for Weald House:
As of today, the Seventh of October in the Year of our Lord 1813, I am Dead of Soul and soon shall be Dead of Body. In Anticipation of this Event, I pray you honor the Claim of my Sole Descendent, my Daughter Ada to all of mine Estate. Whoever finds these Documents shall serve as her Guardian until she reaches Her Majority on the Sixth of October 1834, until which you shall be Compensated with a per annum of Two Hundred Guineas.
I pray you protect Ada well, and let her know her parents loved too well.
And so Weald House collected its fourth, but not final, ghost.
* * *
It was the scullery maid, Margaret, who found the letter and served as Ada’s first guardian. Though Ada was a scrawny infant, the sixteen-year-old Margaret did her best to provide her with a decent wet nurse and affection. The promise of wealth made Margaret senseless as a doorknob; by the time Ada reached her third birthday, the maid was found drowned in a wash bucket of suds—she’d knocked herself unconscious while dousing her hair with perfume. Ada’s
next guardian fared slightly better. Wilhelm was the elderly butler who liked children well enough but found Ada lacking in vigor—she’d turned from a scrawny infant into a puny child prone to sniffles and aches. To remedy this, Wilhelm took her for long walks on the moors no matter the weather. This led to his undoing when they were caught in a freezing sleet one January afternoon. A month later, he’d succumbed to the pneumonia that many deemed the inevitable fate of old age.
By then, Ada was eight years old—old enough to remember Wilhelm’s kindness, and that his snowy hair smelled of fried onions and tobacco—and I was barely three, for I’d just been brought to Weald House after my parents, who’d been distant cousins to Lucian, passed from cholera. Though I was too young to understand, I know Ada mourned Wilhelm as much as a child is capable. By then she’d learned the tragic history of her own parents—alas, Adelaide and Lucian were only a grave stone to be visited in the Kynnersley churchyard. However, Wilhelm had left her with more than he had taken. He had taught her to read, opening the world to her. Being of German descent, he had given her a copy of the Household Tales by the Brothers Grimm in spite of the belief that these coarse stories were not meant for children. Regardless, this book taught Ada that families were not comprised of a solitary girl with a toddler and servants in a large dark house haunted by ghosts. Wilhelm also introduced her to the classics of Ovid and Virgil, which revealed a sunlit abode to Ada beyond the moors.
By the time Ada reached her fourteenth year, I’d witnessed her go through six guardians, most of whom never lasted beyond a year. Even then she seemed hewn from stardust and sorrow. Most mornings Ada’s face was the first sight I’d see when I awakened; she’d be seated at the foot of my bed with a mug of warm milk. Though our family ties were as cousins, she insisted I address her instead as aunt. “Because I am older than you,” she explained. We’d spend rainy afternoons sewing clothes for my dolls, and evenings reading from Wilhelm’s books. She was patient. Kind. Clever. I loved her like the mother I wished I’d had.
As for Ada’s guardians, though their fates varied, each brought gifts to her, like a fairy at a christening. From Madame Clarice, the widowed piano teacher in the village, Ada discovered she took after her mother with a talent for music. (Madame Clarice was forced to return to France when Ada was twelve.) Verity the cook and her husband, Maurice, taught Ada to garden, thus leading to the resurrection of the rose garden—turned out Ada was the gardener’s granddaughter after all. (Verity and Maurice passed when Ada was fourteen after Verity poisoned the soup by mistaking one mushroom for another; luckily Ada had refused lunch because of a queasy stomach.) From Reverend Smallsworth, the rector who’d yearned for Ada’s two hundred guineas to become a missionary in India (where he promptly dropped from dysentery), Ada gained a pet sparrow. She’d discovered the baby bird beneath a rosebush one morning where it must have fallen from a nest. Smallsworth taught her how to care for it, which led to another gift for Ada: a friend.
The sparrow became Ada’s most constant companion besides myself. It remained unnamed—after all it was a feral creature, just as some claimed Ada to be—and slept on a perch beside her bed. During the day, the sparrow remained near Ada, hopping from one hand to the next. Though I was fond of it too, its loyalty was to Ada, not me. It was just as well, for soon after I turned nine, I was sent to school, leaving Ada alone at Weald House save for servants and guardians.
You must imagine Ada at this time in her life. She was beautiful, a gifted musician, and the wealthiest girl in her shire, for before his disappearance, Lucian had appointed a solicitor in Birmingham named Watkinson to manage Ada’s affairs. Because of her peculiar situation, Ada was judged in need of masculine guidance. In addition, the constitutional weakness Wilhelm had sought to remedy had intensified with age. Ada was akin to expensive porcelain, and as fragile. She spent too many days on her chaise recovering from mysterious ailments. Given how unpredictable her guardians had proven, a husband was deemed more reliable to bring structure to Ada’s life. Hence, marriage was recommended tout de suite, even before her majority was reached at twenty-one.
When Ada turned eighteen in 1831, Watkinson arrange for a portrait to be painted, a full-length oil revealing Ada at her most luminous, with her long dark hair and pale face, accompanied by her sparrow on her hand. The portrait was titled La Fille Solitaire—The Lonely Girl. I was home for school holiday while she posed; I recall the scent of linseed oil in the library, her embarrassed silences when the artist flirted with her. Afterward, I imitated the artist’s obsequious manner to make her laugh. Once the portrait was exhibited at the Royal Academy of Art, suitors arrived at Weald House as plenteous as those who called on Penelope during Odysseus’s absence. Their attentions accentuated Ada’s isolation, for she understood they only wanted her beauty and fortune, not her heart. None of these fancy gentlemen saw her for who she was: a girl who’d spent her life alone and sickly. Instead, she was a princess trapped in a house on the moors. She was to be rescued. Conquered.
Ada refused all of their proposals.
A year later, she turned nineteen. By then the frenzy over the portrait had calmed, and Watkinson again tried to find her a husband, this time arranging for a series of soirees with gentlemen who would have married her sight unseen because of her wealth. During these endless dinners with their courses of soup, fish, cheese, and empty compliments, Ada used breaks in conversation to slide beneath the table, hoping no one would note her absence. Later, she’d confide to me, “At least the soup was good.” If a suitor was forward enough to call at Weald House, Ada found other ways to resist. She’d make a show of offering tea and then free her sparrow in the drawing room, taking silent pleasure in the havoc wrought. No one returned.
And so the wealthy orphaned girl who lived in the house on the moors remained unwed and unloved by all save for myself. However, Ada was not unhappy: if longing was memory, and memory invited ghosts, she was never alone. On rainy days, she felt the presence of her mother seated beside her on the piano bench, like the benign spirit conjured by Aschenputtel’s hazel tree from Wilhelm’s book. Other times, Ada sensed her father in the rose garden, his scarred hands smoothing the soil where she’d trod. Of all her guardians, the only one who ever returned was Wilhelm, who’d been as close to a grandfather as she could have wished. She’d smell his onion-laced breath, the pungency of tobacco. And, if I am to be honest, sometimes I sensed him too.
Ada resigned herself to a life of contemplation with her music and sparrow. However, it was already too late: soon after her twentieth birthday, she was well on her way to becoming a ghost herself. Love will do that to a girl.
III.
Robert’s hand halted, unable to bear the feel of the paper against his skin. Isabelle’s words made him too aware of all he’d lost. The paper in the journal was an expensive textured stock, but he took little pleasure in it. His handwriting looked unfamiliar. Distant. The memory of his abandoned book returned. “Happy are those who dare courageously to defend what they love.” Ovid. Poetry. Sida . . .
Isabelle’s low throaty voice interrupted his reverie. “You’ve stopped writing. Is there a problem, Mr. Highstead?”
The pencil snapped in Robert’s hand.
He glanced down with a start: a thin scratch traversed his palm. Isabelle recoiled with something that would be called concern in another woman. But she wasn’t another woman—she was Isabelle Lowell.
“You should wash that,” she said, reaching for his hand. “I can ring for water.”
“It’s nothing.” He pulled away; he’d be damned if he’d reveal any weakness. Anyway, he didn’t dare say more, recalling the terms of their contract: “You are not to interrupt . . . You are only to record what I say.”
Robert pulled his cuff over the scratch and drew another pencil from his pocket. “Shall we continue, Miss Lowell?”
“Where did I leave off, Mr. Highstead?”
“You’d said ‘Love will do that to a girl.’ ”
This
time as Isabelle spoke, Robert noticed her words seemed less confident than when she’d begun.
* * *
The morning Ada fell in love with Hugh de Bonne started off as a usual day. It was a Tuesday in early March, the weather not dissimilar to that when Lucian had planted those rosebushes for her mother twenty years earlier: moist and sunny and warm. The snowdrops had already finished, but the crocuses and anemones were still plentiful.
Ada awoke in her room, which adjoined the rose garden downstairs. It was not a day I witnessed, for I was at school; regardless, I know of it as though I was there. Once she found her way to the dining room for her usual morning tea, Ada was joined by her current guardian, a plump-cheeked, high-bosomed widow bearing the unexpectedly grand name of Missus Dido, a lady from the village who’d reluctantly agreed to the position because she had married her three daughters off brilliantly; hence, she needed the guardian’s per annum to pay off their respective Seasons. After Missus Dido presented her obligatory lecture du jour about the role of a landed heiress in society (“to aid the less fortunate, to marry to improve her position”), Ada retired to the library, where her piano awaited. After three hours of ecstatic practice—her usual when she was feeling well, plus she was working on a tricky Beethoven sonata—she had more tea in the kitchen with the cook, with whom she was very fond of playing cards, especially trente et un. Finally, Ada fetched seed for her sparrow, who was beckoning to go into the rose garden.
It was the sort of day that made Ada feel as though nothing bad could ever happen, though so much already had. She inhaled the moist air, anticipating the arrival of spring, as she gathered a handful of blood-red anemones. And what a sky! It bore nary a cloud save for a grey swirl that seemed to shift according to an unfelt wind. Rain would come soon, she decided. Best to take advantage of the weather while it lasted. It was still early enough in the season that the roses remained dark-thorned and leafless.
The Lost History of Dreams Page 12
