The Parting Glass

by Gina Marie Guadagnino

  “If only we could have gone on like that forever,” she said, her breath warm against my neck. “If only I could have had one more night with him. Oh, Ballard, if only it hadn’t all come to an end.”

  I stroked her hair, breathing in her scent, saying nothing.

  A good temper, indeed, is every thing, for you cannot expect your superiors to conform to your whims or humours, and your employers have too many concerns of their own to put up with your vexations.

  —The Duties of a Lady’s Maid

  In consequence of Charlotte’s flux and protracted illness, Augusta Walden had postponed the dinner with which the family had been engaged to Mr. Dawson. Charlotte, still not up to making calls, had spent much of the week closeted in her room, and I hovered in close attendance, grateful that her malady excused me from the sidelong glances in the kitchen. My face, mottled with bruises, eased from purple to green to yellow under Mrs. Harrison’s care. I had noticed a distinct change in the housekeeper’s demeanor as she sat with me, daubing my skin with salve. Her grim coolness melted a little, and her gentle hands seemed almost tender as she ministered to my hurts. One could not call her warm or motherly—she remained far too imposing a figure for any sentiment so familiar—but I felt far more kindness from her quarter than I had since my arrival three years ago. I suppose Johnny’s drubbing had convinced her at last of my story and my character, for, on those occasions when I did find myself in the kitchen, she often took pains to draw me into the privileged conversations it was her wont to hold with Cook and Grace Porter. They were company, at least, though without Johnny the house seemed hollow somehow. Just knowing that he was somewhere about the place, in the carriage house or the kitchen, had been a comfort to me, and, when I thought on it, I could not recall a time in my life when I was not certain that he was by.

  There had been a blacksmith, Ned Gallagher, in Donegal Town, who’d lost his leg below the knee. He wore a wooden peg, older than I was by the time I knew him, which he had been known to absently reach down and scratch before his fingers encountered the wood and, his face grown sheepish, he would withdraw his fingers slowly. “After all them years,” he’d say, a touch of wonder in his voice, “I can still feel it itching.” That was what it was like, once Johnny had gone. A missing limb I couldn’t scratch. A phantom ache.

  Determined to bury Johnny’s memory, Charlotte Walden seemed transformed overnight. There was something cool and sedate about her now, as though a fever had broken, and the mad dreams of her illness melted away into quiet convalescence. The gentle, level calm that had marked her ballroom demeanor now pervaded her hours, sleeping and waking.

  On the first day that she was at home to callers, she was visited by Prudence Graham. I was passing by the landing window when I saw her coach standing out front, odd in itself, for well I knew how lengthy Prudence’s calls to her niece could be, and the Grahams’ coachman was a familiar enough sight in our kitchen. Quietly, I slipped down the front stair to listen to their voices, muffled behind the sitting room door. What passed betwixt them I could not say, but they spoke in low and rapid tones, tension clipping their words, until finally I heard the rustle of skirts and a creak of boards as one of them rose. I backed away from the door just in time for it to burst open as Prudence Graham pushed past me and let herself quickly out the front door. I stood in the hall, looking first through the door of the sitting room, where Charlotte Walden sat, her face smeared with tears; then out the front door, watching Prudence as she ran, bonnet in hand, into the waiting door of her carriage.

  That night, Charlotte and her mother supped in and retired early, each to her separate room. Augusta Walden’s imperious composure had been ruffled by Charlotte’s malady, and in her dealings with her daughter she had adopted a manner of gracious solicitude that, if it could not be called warmly affectionate, could at least be termed kind. Charlotte, meanwhile, had grown so meek with her mother that supper, devoid of the veiled barbs that normally peppered the meal, was an altogether bland affair. We had barely finished in the kitchen when Mr. Buckley reappeared to announce the ladies’ withdrawal, and I took the back stairs two at a time, a last spoonful of pudding unswallowed in my mouth, to race to my closet next to Charlotte’s room and compose myself before I was called for.

  My mistress rang, and, taking a deep breath, I opened the door.

  Charlotte Walden sat in the tufted chair before the fire, one wrist drooping over the carved wooden arm, a wan smile on her lips. Her other hand rested gently on her stomach, over the spot from whence Johnny’s child had recently been displaced. The flames from the grate lent her lingering pallor a rosy hue, and her eyes seemed too large in her drawn face. She gestured me closer and held out her hands to me, and, eagerly, I took them, kneeling at her feet.

  “It is early yet,” she said. “I am weary, but I am not tired. They are two different things, have you noticed? Will you sit and sew with me, Ballard?”

  “Of course, miss,” I said, fetching her sewing basket before retrieving a dress in need of hemming from my closet. I drew up the footstool near to the hearth so that our feet were almost touching, and, smiling, we both bowed to our work in companionable silence.

  The fire crackled merrily, and I thought how snug, how happy we were and how content I might be if only we could go on like this, she and I, and then, when weariness overcame us, I might lie beside her and rest my fair head against her auburn and wind my arms about her. Not even to kiss or caress her, but just to have her sleeping in my arms at night, and wake to the sight of her in the morning, would have been enough. And though often, before, such thoughts had made my heart ache and race all at once, tonight the notion soothed me. I began to hum a cheery tune, and, before long, Charlotte joined in. I looked at her from beneath my lashes, the soft half smile on her face, the play of the firelight against the gleam of her hair. Her lids were lowered so I should not have known they were open at all had she not been still employed at making quick stitches, and it was no small surprise to me when she suddenly looked up and caught my eye. With a grin, a flash of mischief so rare, of late, across her face, she broke out in a robust whistle of the tune, and I looked openmouthed at her. I could not have said what shocked me more—that she would have known the air, which, cheery as it was, was a bawdy music hall number, or that she was whistling it quite tunefully. When she ended on one last trilling note, I put down my stitching in wonder.

  “Oh, well done, miss, very game!”

  She inclined her head graciously and smiled very smugly, her eyes alight for the first time in weeks. “And now that I’ve exhibited, let’s hear you have at it, Ballard.”

  I shook my head in protest. “Oh, I couldn’t, miss. For whistling maids and crowing hens are neither fit for God nor men.” We laughed, and Charlotte whistled a scrap of a hymn, and that set us to laughing all the harder.

  “Now you, Ballard, now you,” she said.

  I flushed crimson, pleased and embarrassed, wondering what tune I should choose, when everything dear about that moment was shattered with a knocking coming from within my closet door. The spell was broken, and the bright mirth that had suffused Charlotte’s face faded white as she quaveringly bade the knocker enter.

  It was a rare moment when I was ever glad to see Agnes’s broad, dull face. This moment was absolutely not one of them.

  As she entered the room, her eyes darting furtively about, as though she feared to tread in such a hallowed chamber, I saw the shadow of disappointment that flickered across Charlotte’s face, and thought it must be mirrored on my own. Of course it had not been him. How on earth could either of us have considered such a thing? Agnes, in her goddamn taint of misery, had sapped the first flush of warmth and closeness I had shared with Charlotte Walden since I helped her cast forth my brother’s child, and all the things I had allowed myself to imagine as we sewed grew dim and faded. I thought then that hope was a terrible thing, perhaps even the worst thing in the world. For hope can burn at one’s heart until it’s consumed wit
h ash, and one can cling to hope like a wasting sickness. And when hope lives long past when it should have died, there is no feeling emptier.

  Charlotte regained her composure first, all her mirth subsumed in that quiet, porcelain-cool calmness in which she had spent the past week. She regarded Agnes, who had fallen to twisting the corner of her apron in her hands, with a relative dispassion. I, on the other hand, glared at the interloper with banked fury smoldering in my eyes. How dare the chit creep up the stair and through my chamber?

  “Well?” asked Charlotte, in an impressive imitation of her mother.

  “Begging your pardon, miss,” Agnes whined nasally, “I wouldn’t dare enter for the world, but she told me I must, and so, only please don’t tell Mrs. Harrison I come into your rooms like this?”

  Charlotte looked at me, raising her eyebrows, and I lost all patience. “In God’s name, Agnes, what are you nattering about?”

  Agnes’s fingers were twined about her apron so tightly her knuckles had gone white. “Miss Graham!” she said. “She came tapping at the kitchen window, and she said I mustn’t be seen. She’s wanting to see you, Miss Walden.”

  An expression of annoyance flitted over Charlotte’s mask of calm. “Ballard,” she said. “Please see to this?” And I bustled Agnes out of the room and into my closet.

  “What are you on about?” I hissed, shutting the door. “Coming up to Miss Walden’s chamber like that! Have you gone mad?”

  “It’s Miss Graham that’s gone mad,” Agnes moaned. “Didn’t want to be announced. Wanted me to take her up the back stairs straightaway.”

  “Well, and where is she now?”

  Agnes looked down. “I couldn’t very well let her up without asking the young mistress.”

  “Agnes! Where is Miss Graham now?”

  “Bottom of the stairs,” Agnes mumbled.

  “You left Prudence Graham, the heiress Prudence Graham of the Graham diamond mines, my mistress’s aunt, Mrs. Augusta Walden’s half sister, cooling her heels at the bottom of the servants’ staircase?” I struggled to keep my voice down. “You witless ninny!”

  Agnes had by now begun to cry, and I hushed her, pushing past the wretched creature to hurry down the back stairs. Sitting on the bottom step, her ankles peeping out from beneath an evening gown and a wrap too light for the chill weather, sat the heiress of her generation.

  “Miss Graham,” I whispered, and she swiveled her head to me with a start.

  “Ah, Ballard, is that you?” she asked in an undertone.

  “Will you have the goodness to come with me, miss?” I extended my hand, helped her to rise, and led her up to my chamber. The stiff taffeta of her skirts sounded unnaturally loud as it brushed against the narrow stairwell’s walls, and I cringed at the echo of that rustling. We passed Agnes, still sniveling on the landing, before making our way into my room. I rapped gently at the door to my mistress’s chamber and opened it when we heard Charlotte softly call, “Come in.”

  Charlotte Walden was sitting in her customary chair by the fire, but she had clearly taken pains to arrange herself to her best advantage. She had draped her skirts to hang carefully over the edge of the chair, and had taken the pins out of her braid, which lay over one shoulder. She was sitting up very straight, much more formally than she had been when I left her, and she had taken up a complicated piece of embroidery—not the trimming I had left her working upon. It was artful, what she had done, all calculated to show herself as comfortable and at ease, yet accomplished and in control. She took her time looking up from her embroidery, as though her aunt was shown into her bedroom through the servants’ stair every night of the week. My neck prickled, as Charlotte Walden would not ordinarily have gone to so much trouble to convey such an image to her dearest friend and confidante.

  Prudence Graham took two steps into the room and looked back over her shoulder at me before turning to look at Charlotte. Charlotte’s face remained emotionless and still as she peered over her aunt’s shoulder to me. “That will be all, Ballard, thank you.” I closed the door as quietly as I might.

  “What’d she want, then?” Agnes asked from the doorway, and I shushed her, waving her from my room. She tripped noisily out onto the stair, wiping her nose with the back of her hand, and I put my hands on either side of the doorjamb as I fixed her with my stoniest glare.

  “You’ll tell no one of this, understand me?” I said, and she nodded. “Prudence Graham was never here. You never saw her. Do you understand?” She nodded again, sniffling. “Good. Get you down to that kitchen, then.” She turned to go. “Oh, and Agnes?” She turned back, her dim eyes expectant. “If you ever come into my chamber again, I’ll have you out on the street, see if I don’t.” I had taken her candle, and though she stared at it in my hand, wetting her lips nervously, she could not bring herself to ask for it back. I fixed her with a stony gaze, and she turned to feel her way cautiously down the dark stairs.

  Once she was gone, I stood in the doorway for a moment, deciding the safest course of action. To creep back into my closet and listen at the door was to risk the creaking floorboards and disturb the tête-à-tête in Charlotte’s room. To remain on the landing was to risk Mrs. Harrison or one of the housemaids finding me. I opted to edge my way along the wall and back into my tiny chamber, closing the door gently behind me. From here, I crawled across my bed to be closer to the sound of voices drifting from Charlotte’s room. Prudence Graham spoke in low and careful tones, and, holding my breath, I was able to make out the two girls’ conversation.

  “. . . and I would not force your confidence, Lottie, but if something has changed between us, if I have given offense, would you not tell me? For you were never wont to be so cool with me.”

  “As I told you earlier, Prudence, I have been ill, and I should think I might be allowed to recuperate in my own time without you flying at me.”

  “Good heavens, Charlotte, permit me my finer feelings. I certainly never fly at you.”

  “Yes, I suppose that’s one thing you and Mama have in common. When you needle, it’s with far more elegance than someone with my hysterical disposition.”

  “I wish you wouldn’t throw up Augusta at me, or put her words in my mouth. I can’t help having her for a sister any more than you can for a mother, and I’ll thank you to remember that it’s nothing to me if you marry or no.”

  Charlotte sniffed. “For a subject that is nothing to you, it must occupy your thoughts greatly, as you have had the indelicacy to broach it with me twice in one day. Gracious, what an uncomfortable change it must be for you to consider my matrimonial prospects superior to chattering endlessly about your precious Beethoven!”

  I could hear the rustle of taffeta as Prudence settled herself on the floor. “Lottie,” she said. “What is the trouble? Why do you speak to me this way, to wound me so? ‘Indelicacy’? As though we had never spoken of such things before, or shared the most cherished yearnings of our hearts? You have changed this past year, for never until now has your heart been hidden from me, but I have gone on with perfect faith you would confide in me in time.”

  “There is nothing to confide,” said Charlotte coldly.

  “If you must scorn my confidence, have the goodness then not to insult my intellect. I have said I will not force your confidence, but I want only to know if you are withholding our former intimacy to punish me for some offense, for I swear I do not know what I have done!” Prudence’s voice cracked.

  Charlotte hushed her. “You’ll wake the house. You’ve done nothing, Prudence, and I confide nothing because I have no wish to tell over the troubles of my heart. For my heart is troubled now, and the object that had occupied it removed. I will say no more. I have no wish to dwell on my grief.”

  “Better grief than such coldness! Grief I can help you mend.”

  “Huh. And I suppose you think Mr. Dawson the proper balm.”

  “Do you?”

  “Will you leave off about Mr. Dawson! Why does nothing else seem to occupy you
r mind?”

  “Because he has spent the entirety of your illness talking to me of you!”

  There was a brief silence, and I wished fervently that I could see Charlotte’s face as she took in this declaration. When she spoke again, however, it was in such a coldly ironical tone as to wipe away whatever emotions might have arisen. “Indeed?” she asked. “My, my Prudence, was it so terribly dull to speak of me being ill when you could have been discussing the symphony? I do apologize for depriving you of more scintillating conversation.”

  “If you think,” said Prudence, her voice wavering, “that I could dismiss your illness so callously . . .” She trailed off a moment before collecting her thoughts and beginning again. “He came to dine with us again this evening, and I might have turned the conversation to whatever I liked, but I could not deprive either of us of the chance to seek solace in our mutual concern for you. We talked of you, Lottie, because we both of us love you, do you not see?”

  Charlotte replied, “Oh, I see! You love me so well that you cannot wait until I am fully recovered before inflicting him upon me. Between you, you have decided it already, have you?”

  “What power have I to compel you, Charlotte?” Prudence asked, wounded. “I am not Augusta, dictating to you. I wish only for you to be happy, as you once were!”

  “That is impossible, now.”

  “Is it impossible to be happy with a man who thinks of nothing but you?” Prudence asked. “When we spoke this evening, he wanted nothing more than to hear if I had seen you and how you fared. He asked—” And here her voice cracked. “He asked if you had spoken of him, or if there was anything he could send you to make your convalescence more pleasant.”

  Charlotte’s laugh chilled me. “It would have been more pleasant not to have been ill in the first place. Surely even you could understand that!”

  “Even I!” said Prudence wonderingly. “I, who have expressed only love and concern for you! I, who have prayed every night you might be well! And this is how I am thanked for my solicitude.”