The English Wife: A Novel

by Lauren Willig

  “That I’m not St. Genevieve?” Janie swiped at her eyes. She gestured wildly at the window. “I lit a larger candle than I intended, didn’t I? So much for lighting the world. I burned it down instead.”

  Burke grasped her shoulders with both hands. “Janie. Janie. Listen to me. Look at me. That chimney would have exploded no matter what you did.”

  “But would my mother have chosen to—” She couldn’t make her lips form around the words. “She’s dead, and I can never make it better now.”

  “She killed her son.” Burke held tightly to her shoulders, holding her gaze with his own, speaking rapidly. “Can you imagine having to relive that moment, over and over? She said it herself. She took the only way out she could. Janie, it wasn’t your doing. Any of it.”

  Just a little cog on the wheel of events beyond her control. Janie choked on a laugh. “I don’t know if that makes it better or worse.”

  “What do you want me to tell you?” Burke’s voice broke, and Janie realized, with a shock, that he was on the verge of cracking. “You did what you had to do, and you had the guts to see it through. Do you want expiation? Talk to a priest.” He gave her a little shake. “You’re the strongest woman I know, Janie Van Duyvil. Don’t go wobbly on me now.”

  “Is that what you say on all your condolence calls?” quipped Janie shakily.

  Burke’s arms closed convulsively around her, squeezing her tight. “I’ve been so afraid,” he muttered into her hair. “This morning, when I learned about Lacey, I thought—”

  “I know,” murmured Janie, burrowing into his shirtfront, her arms beneath his coat, locked around his waist.

  Burke was still talking, his cheek against her brow, half in a dream. “I was so terrified that I was going to lose you, that I was never going to get a chance to tell you I love you.”

  “Love? Me?” Janie pulled back, staring at him, and saw the look of alarm cross Burke’s face as he realized what he had said. “You love me?”

  “I didn’t mean to … it’s a hell of a time to say it, isn’t it? I wasn’t going to.” He drew in a deep breath. Janie could feel it reverberating through her own lungs. His green eyes held hers, defiantly. “But it’s true. I love you. I shouldn’t and I can’t, but I do.”

  The fire cast an orange light across his skin. Janie didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. “You’re right. It is a hell of a time.” Words she never thought would come out of her mouth. But she was different now; they were all different. “Burke—”

  “Never mind.” Burke let go of her and took a step back, holding up both hands. “It’s all right. You should go to bed. I should go to bed. Different beds,” he added quickly. “This never happened. We can pretend I never said anything.”

  Janie took a step forward. “Burke?”

  Burke’s Adam’s apple bobbed up and down. “Yes?”

  “Stop talking,” said Janie, and kissed him.

  There was nothing romantic or tender about it. She kissed him desperately, kissed him with all the grief and fear and longing coursing through her. She kissed him as the fire crackled and the stones of Illyria fell. Let Rome in Tiber melt. But she wasn’t melting, she was burning, burning where the stubble on his chin grazed her palm, burning where his hands pressed against her back, all the pain and doubt burning up and away in the fire of their touch, frantic, animal, alive.

  “Ah-ah-ah-ahem.”

  The sound of a man loudly clearing his throat made them jump apart, Janie’s hand against her swollen lips, Burke running a hand through his wildly disordered hair.

  Giles Lacey swaggered into the room, lifting one of Janie’s grandmother’s precious Irish crystal goblets in a casual salute.

  “Your gorgon sent me to tell you she has rooms for us.” He swirled the ruby liquid in his glass and frowned accusingly at Janie. “That cherry brandy in the dining room is appalling stuff.”

  Janie repressed the urge to kick Mr. Lacey in the shin, if only to take the smirk off his face. “That’s because it’s not cherry brandy,” she said shortly. “It’s my grandmother’s raspberry cordial.”

  “Whatever it is, it tastes like summer pudding gone wrong.”

  “That doesn’t seem to have stopped you.” Burke kept a protective arm around Janie’s shoulder.

  “We all have different means of—hic—escape.” Lacey raised a brow at the location of Burke’s arm. “Don’t want to intrude, but … we’d best get our story straight, eh, what? Convenient, having a journalist on hand. How long does it take you to get a story out? Never mind. Don’t tell me. As I see it, you tell ’em ’bout the chimney and leave out the resht—rest. Tragic fire, et cetera, et cetera.”

  “By the rest,” said Burke slowly, “you mean Mrs. Van Duyvil’s confession.”

  “If you can call it that. Just the ramblings of an old lady, eh? Lost her mind with grief. Could happen to anyone.” Giles Lacey gestured widely, slopping raspberry cordial on the carpet. “Georgie as good as done it, didn’t she? No need to muddy the waters.”

  Burke looked at Janie, his expression troubled. “He has a point, you know. We only have your mother’s word.”

  “And her brooch.” The portrait that proved it had burned, was burning even now, but there might be sketches, copies. Copies the police would never find unless someone drew them to official attention. “A brooch is a very silent witness, isn’t it?”

  “If you wanted…,” Burke began and broke off.

  “You can’t make yourself say it.” Janie knew what he was offering her. The ability to wave a magic wand and make it all go away. But it wouldn’t, would it? Bay was still dead. And the twins deserved to know the truth. “If I wanted you to lie.”

  “Not lie, exactly. Just … leave out the bit where the old bat started raving.” Mr. Lacey winked broadly and staggered a bit with the exertion. He was, Janie realized, very drunk indeed. To Burke, he added, “You’ll be paid, of course. Sure you can make a good thing of it. Grieving mother dies in flames, murderess still missing. You know the sort of thing. Make your editor happy and get a bit on the side.”

  Janie ignored him. She turned to Burke. “Would you do that?”

  “Not for money. And not for him.” Burke jammed his hands deep in his pockets. There was honor even among journalists, he had told her once. “Is it what you want?”

  Save her mother’s reputation and destroy Burke’s soul. No, not just Burke. Annabelle and her children and Bay and everyone else who had been touched by this.

  Janie’s nails made crescents in her palms. “No,” she said fiercely. “We’ve had enough secrets and lies. The children need to know their mother wasn’t a murderess. We owe it to them. And to Annabelle.”

  “She wasn’t—” began Giles Lacey, and Janie turned on him.

  “She was Annabelle to us. She was Bay’s wife.” Janie was shaking, with reaction and fatigue and anger and goodness only knew what else. “I want the children to remember their mother with love. She loved them. They deserve that.”

  “You don’t have to bite my head off,” Giles muttered. “It was only a suggestion.”

  As an apology, Janie felt that lacked something. She advanced on Giles, one finger outstretched. “I don’t care what feuds you brought with you from England. You can take them back there with you. I’m telling the truth as I know it whether it suits you or not. And you can go … go drink raspberry cordial until your teeth rot.”

  Behind her, Burke choked on a laugh.

  Janie whirled to face him. “As for you, Mr. Burke—”

  “Yes?” he said, and his voice was so tender that any tart words Janie might have uttered faltered on her tongue.

  I love you.

  Janie met Burke’s eyes levelly. “As a good man once told me—do what you have to do and have the guts to see it through. Go back to town. Write your story. Tell the truth and shame the devil.”

  “Language,” muttered Giles Lacey and upended his glass.

  “You sound like your grandmother,” said Mrs.
Gerritt from the doorway. “She was a good woman. Nothing mealy-mouthed about her. Good hand with a piecrust, too.”

  Burke banged his elbow on the window frame. Giles Lacey dropped his glass, spraying the last few droplets of raspberry cordial across the carpet.

  “That’s enough of that,” said Mrs. Gerritt. “Are you all going to bed, or do I have to carry you up?”

  TWENTY-NINE

  New York

  February, 1899

  For three days, the papers were crammed with reports of people frozen in their homes, ice floes in Southern waters, walls of snow in the nation’s capital. Never had there been a storm like it, pummeling the country from New Orleans to Vermont.

  And on the banks of the Hudson, Illyria lay in ruins, a heap of smoldering masonry, half walls and blackened chimney, gutted window frames and sparkling shards of glass.

  Firemen and police climbed over the remains, but there was little they could do. Soot crept beneath the windowsills of the old house, tarring the woodwork, giving Janie a constant cough. The reek of smoke permeated everything.

  As soon as they were able, Janie and Anne packed up the twins and fled back to the house on Thirty-Sixth Street. Word of Alva Van Duyvil’s death had preceded them. A pile of black-bordered notes of condolence had been delivered by footmen sloshing their way through the slush in the streets, climbing over the mounds of snow that had frozen hard at the street corner, black with coal smoke.

  Only a handful of reporters ventured through the slush to wait at the gate. A death by fire, while a gratifyingly tragic capstone to a major story, was hardly front-page news compared to cattle freezing in the fields in Virginia.

  The Doom of the Van Duyvils? mused The Journal, concocting an arresting but entirely fictitious tale of dubious seventeenth-century land deals and Indian curses, but their ruminations were limited to the lower half of an inside page.

  Janie and Anne rolled up their sleeves and set about making arrangements for Mrs. Van Duyvil’s funeral. Anne was, much to Janie’s surprise, a pillar of strength in crisis. A slightly cracked and crooked pillar, but a pillar all the same, fierce in public and blunt in private.

  In its own way, that was the most helpful of all, not having to pretend with Anne. It was exhausting enough dealing with the emotions she did feel without having to pretend to the ones she didn’t. Anne bullied the rector and the undertaker, poured sherry into Mr. Tilden until he disbursed the necessary funds, and wrote response after response to the notes of condolence that piled higher every day, as every socialite and social climber, every sixteenth cousin fifteen times removed, paid their respects to the late, great Alva Van Duyvil.

  “She was mad.” That was Anne’s verdict, delivered in private, in those dark hours of the evening when the children were in bed and Janie and Anne sat together in the grim drawing room that had been her mother’s domain. “Is that the time? You can sit up if you like. I’m going to bed.”

  But was she mad? There was something comforting about Anne’s blunt summation, as if the madness were something separate from her mother, something that had taken over her hand and directed her knife. But Janie wasn’t so sure.

  It didn’t matter. It was over now. Janie tried to get her head around it all and found she couldn’t quite. The coroner’s court had met and declared a verdict of unnatural death by person or persons unknown. The press, with other, fresher stories to chase, dropped away. Giles Lacey booked passage to England. And Burke …

  Do what you have to do, Janie had told him, and he did.

  On the Wednesday following the storm, Burke’s article appeared in bold black letters on the front page of The News of the World, and the world turned upside down.

  Curiosity seekers shimmied up lampposts to try to peer through windows. Second cousins suddenly contracted mysterious illnesses that rendered them unfit to perform their duties as pallbearers.

  “Did she do it, Miss Van Duyvil? Did you see it?”

  They ran a gauntlet from the church, the police pushing back the crowds, making way for the mourners, such as they were. The pews at Trinity Church were all but empty. A few elderly relatives, who either didn’t know or didn’t care, came to pay their respects, but her mother’s court was missing. Mrs. Astor discovered another obligation, and the rest of the world followed.

  “There is some justice in the world.” Anne pushed back her veil and leaned back against the black velvet squabs as black-plumed horses carried them away from Trinity Church towards Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn. There might be no body to bury, but the formalities were being observed all the same. “Aunt Alva must have been furious to see her funeral so ill-attended. Even those upstart Vanderbilts stayed away.”

  Janie bit her lip to hide a smile. It wasn’t funny, not really. But she admired Anne’s nerve. “I wish—” she began, and stopped. Anne, while a rock when it came to dealing with grieving children, had balked all attempts to discuss what had happened at Illyria. “I wish I knew what she was thinking.”

  Her cousin looked out the window, her face sober. “I used to admire her, you know. I thought if I married Teddy, I could be what she was. Only more beautiful and brilliant, of course.” Anne looked back at her, and Janie was surprised to see a hesitancy there. “Did you mind about Teddy?”

  “I minded Mother minding,” said Janie honestly. “But other than that … no.”

  “I rather liked Teddy once.” The wistful note in Anne’s voice made Janie look at her in surprise. Anne shrugged, tossing her head so that her jet earrings danced. “Or might have, if he had given me the chance. He only married me because his mother didn’t want him to.”

  “You had that in common, then,” said Janie drily.

  Anne snorted in appreciation. “Aunt Alva would have loved to see me end my days in dreary spinsterdom, dressed in sackcloth and winding wool. It gave me such joy to disappoint her.” She glanced sideways at Janie. “She never did forgive my father for proposing to my mother instead of her.”

  “But I’d thought—”

  “That my father was a horrible parvenu with more money than taste?” Janie winced at Anne’s accurate imitation of Mrs. Van Duyvil. “He was. He was also madly attractive. Charisma, I think they call it. Your mother wanted him. My mother got him. You didn’t know?”

  Janie shook her head. “No.” Such an inadequate word. “My mother never spoke well of your father.”

  “She wouldn’t, would she?” Anne leaned back against the squabs. “She must have hated herself for wanting him. And him for not having her. And both of them for being happy without her.”

  “You’ve thought about this a great deal,” said Janie cautiously.

  Anne smiled her three-cornered smile. “I’ve had years to. It was misery living under her roof. If it hadn’t been for Bay—” She broke off, her lips tightening. Speaking rapidly, she said, “It does make you wonder about love and hate, doesn’t it? There are times when I hate Teddy so much that I wonder if I might love him. Strange, isn’t it? Maybe I’m more like Aunt Alva than I’d thought.”

  “No.” The carriage rattled past a marble monument featuring a weeping angel. “My mother—she never questioned her own motives. What she did was right, whatever it was, and what everyone else did was wrong.”

  Even when it came to murder.

  “Do you know,” said Anne as she held out her hand for the coachman to help her out of the carriage, “you are not nearly as tedious as you used to be.”

  Which, Janie knew, was as close to a declaration of affection from Anne as she was likely to get.

  They stood together, alone in the wind, as the rector gabbled the final words over Mrs. Van Duyvil, eager to be back by his own hearth. The reporters hadn’t chased them to the cemetery: even they recognized that interments were private affairs, for the family alone. Or what was left of it.

  Anne’s gloved hand groped for Janie’s. Janie held her cousin’s hand, the hills undulating around them, more like a picture in a sampler than a graveyard, but f
or the marble monuments that dotted the landscape, angels and weeping cupids and cenotaphs and gravestones. After the babble outside the church, Green-Wood felt echoingly silent. The silvery winter sunlight gave it a horrible beauty, a cold and empty beauty.

  Which was, Janie thought, not a bad metaphor for her mother. Alva Van Duyvil had lived her life for show, but there had been nothing at the heart of it. She had been as empty as her coffin, a monument without substance.

  Or maybe that was unfair. Maybe it was simply that it was easier to think of her mother as cold and empty than consumed with dark passions, love turned to hate, pride turned to snobbery.

  “It’s a relief to see her in the ground, isn’t it?” murmured Anne. “Oh, don’t look so shocked. You were thinking it.”

  “Not in so many words.”

  “In other words,” said Anne, “yes. Oh, and amen.”

  The rector closed his Book of Common Prayer with evident relief. “I am aware these are, er, difficult times,” he said, which Janie thought was a nice balance between dealing with a possible murderess and acknowledging the amounts of money said murderess had donated to the church over the years. “If there should be any way I might be of spiritual assistance…”

  Janie shook her head.

  Anne’s eyes narrowed on something past the victor. Her face transformed into a look of extreme earnestness. “How very kind of you,” she said, swaying forward, and taking the surprised rector’s arm before he could do anything about it. “Do you know, Father Chillingworth, my soul is riven—utterly riven—by these tragic events.”

  Beyond the vicar, half-hidden by an angel with breasts like bowls of custard, a man stood watching them, his dark coat blending like a shadow against the gray stone.

  “Er, yes. If you would like to make an appointment—”

  Anne bore the vicar inexorably away in the direction of his waiting conveyance. “Wouldn’t it be simpler if I were just to share your carriage back to the city? I know Janie wanted to meditate over her mother’s grave, didn’t you, Janie? So she won’t mind in the slightest if we leave her to follow, would you, Janie?”