The Wednesday Daughters

by Meg Waite Clayton

  “I did once,” he said. “I took the Lancaster ferry across, in a storm so fierce that we turned back even before reaching the Isle of Man. She was already in love by then, with a man more deserving of her, a journalist who wrote about the things she cared for. Irish, like her.”

  The shop was crammed with customers, and there were crowds of mice upon the biscuit canisters.

  Sally Henny-penny gets rather flustered when she tries to count out change, and she insists on being paid cash; but she is quite harmless.

  And she has laid in a remarkable assortment of bargains. There is something to please everybody.

  —FROM The Tale of Ginger and Pickles BY BEATRIX POTTER

  ON THE WAY BACK DOWNHILL FROM BRIDGE HOUSE, KEVIN AND I passed the specialty grocer with the round woman at the register. A few minutes and a few not-farthings later, we were sitting on a bench at the harbor with a bag of takeaway, the bicycle on its kickstand beside us, the last of the boats tucking their white sails into blue canvas as the sun set beyond the water and the pier and Mom’s cottage, the high chimneys of Ainsley’s End, the long stretch of woods. Kevin handed me a cup of warm mulled wine, then set his on the pavement beside our bench and removed from the bag a banana toffee pudding and a piece of something called Cumberland Rum Nicky, a sort of dried fruit and nut pie with heavy rum. At the water’s edge, a child chased ducks and geese, white gulls, a single white swan.

  “I can see how your mother would have written in this part of the world,” Kevin said. He set his hand over mine on the bench. “Couldn’t you imagine writing a novel here?”

  “It isn’t that much money, what I inherit,” I said.

  “It’s never been about the money, Hope.”

  “What would we—”

  “Your dad would have hated to think his expectations keep you from doing what you want to do.”

  I watched the bird-chaser. He would never catch a thing. Although perhaps I was wrong about that. Wormtongue’s owner had caught a lizard, and they were quick.

  “Dad loved to talk about the law with me,” I said.

  He took a bite of the pie and handed it to me. “I think we’ll call this one ‘dinner.’ ”

  “As opposed to the creamy banana thing?”

  “The ‘fruit salad,’ you mean?”

  We savored the flavor of rum and nuts and spices and watched the boy. He was about Oliver’s age, and he wore the same saggy blue jeans. His hair was the same brilliant blond as Oliver’s, the color Jamie’s had been when she was a girl, and Julie’s.

  “It’s not enough to pay off the mortgage,” I said, “much less buy the house with the double tub.”

  “We don’t need the tub, Hope. Anyway, we’ve got a fabulous slipper tub right next to a fireplace, in viewing distance of the bed.”

  The boy sprinted off after another bird. It was hard to imagine harm coming to him here, or to anyone else.

  “A tub that would need to double as a desk,” I said, thinking double as a crib but unwilling to say that, unwilling to go into Mr. McGregor’s garden.

  Kevin scooped a bite of the banana pudding. “All serious writers need their potassium,” he said as he fed it to me. “Remember that first day we rode through the Rodin sculpture garden?” he said. “I had this idea you were imagining yourself sitting there beside me, pen in hand.”

  “In the rain?”

  He laughed. “I don’t mind a little rain. Do you?”

  I looked out over the water, remembering the passage from my mother’s journal, her sitting at the lake trying to talk Beatrix Potter into removing her stockings. The last passage, my mother turning to Bea in the tub and finding me standing there. I hadn’t decoded much of her journals—it was a time-consuming process, and emotionally draining—but when I couldn’t sleep the night before, I’d done that last page, then slept with my hands wrapped around the journal as I had the first night at the cottage, as I used to sleep with Mr. Pajamas and, later, Mr. Jackson, too.

  Kevin spooned a bite of the banana dessert and fed it to me, sweet and creamy-smooth, comforting and comfortable, and we watched the boy skimming the water’s edge but not getting wet.

  “ ‘A person can’t live on seed wigs and sponge cake and butter buns,’ ” I said.

  “Can’t we?” he said.

  The boy giggled and set off after another bird, refusing to give up.

  “Maybe a sabbatical?” Kevin said. “Three months next summer. If we’re not happy here, we go back. Nothing lost.”

  A bird fluttered easily away from the boy and landed just out of reach. A woman sitting not far away—the boy’s mother; she looked so much like him—smiled.

  “What would I write, Kev?” I asked.

  “Oh, Hope,” he said, his voice softening. He dipped the plastic spoon in the banana pudding and fed me another bite before taking one himself. “Writing isn’t like that,” he said. “You don’t have to know.”

  “Unlike religion,” I said.

  He watched the boy. “Einstein believed in God,” he said finally. “Kepler. Gregor Mendel. Newton. Planck. I expect the list of scientists who believe in a god of some sort is far longer than the list of those who don’t.” He shrugged. “If I had to plan out what I’m writing before I start, I never would start. You sit down and put a word on the page, and then another. Like everything else in life, you can always change them.”

  “Until they’re published.”

  Kevin said I was one of the few people he knew who would be editing her work even after it was published. “It’s what will make you so great at it,” he said.

  I felt the small thrill of his confidence in me, the same way I had felt on that first bike ride, while everyone else was at the football game. I hadn’t worried then that I might fall off the handlebars. I hadn’t worried that it was his bicycle, that he was steering, that I was precariously perched, with no control over where we went or how fast, whether we skirted the rough spots or bumped straight through.

  “What if I can’t?” I said.

  Kevin set down the takeaway and placed a hand on my hip, like in the Rodin sculpture before we first kissed. I wondered if he could see all the ways I was not like my mother and never would be.

  “What if I can’t write?” I said, not ready to hear his answer to any of the other what-ifs.

  He took my face in his hands and kissed me and smiled. “Asha my love,” he said, “wouldn’t the bigger failure be to let your pride get in the way of your dreams?”

  The mother called to the bird-chaser in some language I didn’t recognize. He called back and ran to her almost as fast as he had run after the birds, and she knelt down to his level to wipe his nose with a tissue. She slipped his bird-empty hand in hers, and they headed toward the hut that sold tickets for the public launch. Their pale hair and pale, intertwined hands disappeared behind the ticket booth, then appeared on the other side of the hut before disappearing into a building that was an inn, and probably had been for centuries.

  “Kev,” I whispered, “I don’t know if I could bear to have people assume I’m my children’s nanny.”

  He wrapped me in his arms, and he kissed the top of my head, and he kissed it again. “I know,” he said. “I know.”

  We sat watching the light fade over the boat masts and the water and the far shore, the broken Wray Castle clock, the chimneys at Ainsley’s End. Somewhere in the distance, a bell rang the hour, gentle and warm. And when it was dark and our cups of warm wine were empty, we collected the bike and walked it together to catch the last launch back across to Wray Castle. And if anyone saw the Crier of Claife that night, it was probably our single bike light shining on the path, helping us find our way home in the lightest sprinkling of new rain.

  Thank God I have the seeing eye.

  —BEATRIX POTTER, IN A FEBRUARY 15, 1937, LETTER TO CAROLINE CLARK

  THE CLOUDS HAD STACKED RATHER THAN SCATTERED THE NEXT morning—did it ever dry out here?—by the time Robbie came to fetch us in his launch for t
he hike up to Stock Ghyll Force. Heavy drops began to fall as we arrived at the bank building that marked the hike’s start. We talked about turning back, but Aunt Kath had to leave the next day for meetings in New York, and I found I wanted her to be with me for this after all; I found myself sorry that I hadn’t asked all the Wednesday Sisters to come.

  Kevin said to Napoleon, who’d taken a liking to him, as children and dogs always did, “What’s the worst that will happen to us, Mr. Bonaparte? We’ll get a bit damp, right?”

  “Quite drenched, probably,” Graham said.

  “Washed away in a flood,” Robbie suggested, with a smile at Julie that left me wondering if the Ambleside library might need a very competent if somewhat stylish American librarian.

  “Lordy,” Aunt Kath said, “the animals will be starting to pair up, won’t they?” Meaning the rain, I think, although she might have been referring to Anna Page and Graham, who walked alongside each other, Napoleon herding them together each time they wandered apart.

  “That makes Hope and Anna Page all the more determined to push on,” Kevin said. “Neither of them can turn away from a challenge.”

  I longed to slip my hand in his, to have our fingers intertwining, but I didn’t want to drop Mom’s puzzle box. As though reading my mind, Graham asked if he might take a turn carrying Mom. “I expect she’s heavier than she looks,” he said.

  Anna Page pulled up her hood, tucking all that wild hair away, and responded in a mimic of my mother, “Heavens to Betsy, Graham, are you saying I’ve gotten fat?” We all laughed together as we set off up the road, glad of the chance to let some steam out of the emotion pot.

  “This park was created as a Victorian pleasure garden,” Graham said as we turned toward a woods, its entrance marked by an old-fashioned metal turnstile and a newer wooden gate. “Bathing was permitted in the 1880s between six and nine in the morning, and again after seven-thirty in the evening, and towels were provided. It used to cost a penny to get through the stile into the park. Now, of course, it’s free.”

  “You’re sure this doesn’t go back to your ancestors, the ancient Romans?” Anna Page said in a teasing voice.

  “I don’t— Oh, I see, you’re laughing at me!” He laughed at himself. “I do go on, don’t I? Allison used to tell me that. It comes of living too long alone.”

  He pushed through the wet turnstile, with my mother tucked under the protection of his mackintosh. Napoleon, left on the other side with the rest of us, stood alert.

  “What do you keep inside the puzzle box Mom gave you, Graham?” I asked.

  Anna Page turned away, touching a hand to Napoleon’s noble head as Graham looked back at us through the turnstile’s metal bars.

  “A lock of hair your mother gave me,” he said, “in case I wanted to do DNA testing.”

  Anything precious. Anything you wanted to keep just for yourself.

  He went to the wooden gate and lifted the latch to let Napoleon in. The rest of us circled one at a time through the turnstile, although it would have been easier to follow the dog through the open gate.

  Robbie fell in beside Graham on the path, saying, “I’ve a message for you.”

  They walked along together in silence before Graham said, “I hope you were good to her.”

  “So you’ve known, then.”

  “Not at first. Even when I heard your name the other day, I thought, no. Even when you knew all the poetry. You were a journalist.”

  Robbie nodded. “It’s the pleasure of being a boatman, idn’ it? Nobody notices you. Nobody stops long enough to judge.”

  “I suppose it’s a sad thing that I hate the water,” Graham said.

  “She never stopped loving you, you know,” Robbie said. “She would want you to know that. She’d be glad of the things you’re doing here, glad of all this beauty and wildness that you’ve made it your work to save.”

  “My work?” Graham said.

  “Ah, but isn’t it? Though surely our Cornelia would be taking the credit, saying she turned you to your calling.”

  Graham laughed. It was okay for a British gentleman to laugh, if not loudly, if not in improper circumstances. And it was easier to laugh than to cry.

  We hiked uphill alongside an enthusiastic waterway—more than a stream but not quite a river, the rain splashing up in little drops as the water rushed downhill. The path was largely slate, wet from the rain and slippery, so it was with relief that we stopped again and again at the lookouts. “This is beautiful, this is gorgeous,” we kept saying, thinking one run of water or another might be the much advertised waterfall to which the signs pointed us.

  “That’d be the weir, wouldn’t it?” Robbie said at one point.

  As the rest of us set off together, Julie and Robbie stayed back.

  “You’ll be leaving soon, with the others, then?” he asked her.

  Julie closed her eyes, listening to the wide rush of water falling from the solid rock ledge to the more turbulent streambed, the way she used to listen for the plink of Anna Page’s stones on the bedroom window. She was always the one to whisper that Anna Page was waiting for them. She wondered sometimes if she might ignore the sound of pebble on glass, but the truth was she never wanted to. The truth was she liked to be included in the midnight wanderings. She liked that Jamie wouldn’t go without her, wouldn’t leave her behind.

  In the closed-eyed darkness, two birds chirped at each other somewhere up in the trees. Robbie’s feet shifted on the leafy-wet ground. The water crashed relentlessly over the weir, leaving her wondering if it would ever run dry, or change course.

  “I had a twin sister,” she said to Robbie. “A twin born in a different year. She was the Aphrodite. Not for Halloween but for everything else.”

  She opened her eyes, inhaling the smells that seemed sharpened by the moment without sight: the fresh water and the fallen leaves, the wood bark.

  Robbie rolled his lips together, leaving them glossy, his face soft and warm, unwavering. “Was she?” He smiled slightly, listening.

  Julie looked down at the sheet of water changing levels in its busy rush, in search of the right words, the poem she ought to write. Jamie would have turned fifty this December thirty-first, she imagined saying. She died a year ago this week.

  Jamie had a son, she imagined saying. Oliver. He’s only six.

  Oliver’s dad, she imagined saying. He’s the “involved.”

  That cluster of stars, three together, the red dwarf in need of a binary system to hold him in place—none would be visible tonight.

  It was a way of sharing, she supposed, being near Oliver even if she couldn’t be with him, spending late nights with Isaac even if he never said her name. But that only eased her own grief, and maybe Isaac’s. It would never comfort Oliver. It would never bring anything but hurt for Oliver.

  Robbie touched the edge of her hair underneath her hood, his finger lingering there before trailing down her arm to her elbow, circling the bone under the plastic of her jacket with his finger. “I’ve a crown and a cushion of foam for you, Julie,” he said, “should you ever care for it.”

  She wanted to reach up and touch the roughness of his pockmarked cheek, but she didn’t. Cornelia, she imagined him thinking. Her name was Cornelia.

  “Jamie,” she said. “Her name was Jamie, but I liked to call her James.”

  Lightning flashed overhead, but if there was thunder to accompany it, I didn’t hear it over the sound of the rain and the falls as Kevin and I followed the others uphill.

  “That woman who read our horoscopes was right, you know,” Kevin said. “About us belonging together.”

  On the far bank of the river, a waterwheel turned with the force of the moving stream.

  “It’s sort of hard to imagine having kids,” I said, “but being here somehow makes it hard to imagine not having them. I … Right now I wish I could have had a child who walked here with Mom, you know?”

  He put his wet-jacketed arm around my wet-jacketed waist. �
�We don’t have to decide that right now,” he said. “We don’t ever have to decide about kids. We can let the decision make itself. And I don’t expect you to do everything, or even most things, if we do have kids. I can be the parent people mistake for the nanny.”

  In the waterlogged silence, I tried to imagine Kevin’s and my children, perhaps a daughter with Mom’s big eyes and her taste for bohemian clothing.

  “And they’ll know Mom through us,” he said. “If we decide to have children, Hope, they’ll know Mom through us. We’ll make sure they do.”

  Stock Ghyll Force was unmistakable when we first caught a glimpse of it, around a bend and through the trees: water rushing in dramatic falls through a gorge, two higher streams pooling together before falling into two lower streams that pooled again, pausing before continuing their downhill flight. The rain was letting up. We stood for a long time silently watching, the way you do with things that are too striking to capture in words. Only Napoleon remained moving, seeming to want to interpose himself between all of us and the ledge, to keep us safe.

  “There’s a large rock outcropping across the force,” Graham said. “I thought that might do. Room for us all.”

  We crossed on the wooden bridge over the falls and climbed carefully onto the outcropping. Kevin held Mom’s puzzle box for me while Graham held an umbrella over us, and I traced my finger from the baby’s halo around the edge, to the flower and the panel that was the first step to opening it. Slide, push, adjust until the mother and baby moved aside.

  “I believe the rain has stopped finally,” Graham said, setting down the umbrella.

  “Or paused,” Anna Page agreed.

  She was the first to reach into the box and take a small bit of Mom. But she didn’t keep it for herself. She took Graham’s hand, and placed the ash in his open palm, and closed his fist over it.

  A heart, when she brings it back out of surgery, Anna Page will tell you, doesn’t start beating again all at once. It stirs, and it stops, and it stirs again. Sometimes it has to be shocked into action, but it’s best to let it start on its own if you can.