He lifted his head. She saw, to her intense relief, that he wasn’t weeping. But his face was tragic, and she remembered she had seen it that way once before, on the first day they’d met. He had been praying on his knees at Lord D’Aubrey’s bedside—a strange sight, she’d thought at the time, almost embarrassing—and he’d looked up at her and Geoffrey with exactly the same expression of hopeless defeat.
Before she could say anything else, he said, “Anne,” with a kind of resigned wonder, and got to his feet.
His hands at his sides looked too big, almost clumsy. She wanted to reach out and take them in hers, chafe the life back into them, do something to make him better. Not allowed. She stood still and said, “What happened?”
“Were you waiting for me?” he asked, in the same wondering tone as before.
“Yes, I— What’s happened, Christy? What’s wrong?”
He took a deep breath. “Tolliver Deene is dead.”
“Oh, no.”
“There was no warning. He collapsed at the mine office late this afternoon and died a few hours later.”
Now she did take his hand, to lead him back to the bench and pull him down beside her. He put his head back against the rough bark of the tree and closed his eyes for a second, then opened them to stare up at the sky.
“How is Sophie?” she asked.
“She’s completely devastated. Completely. I . . . it’s . . .” He shook his head, as if the futility of words were something he was sick of thinking about.
“Was he conscious before he died?”
“Yes. He knew he was dying.” He brought his hands up and clasped them across his forehead, the fingers locked. “I said all the words, all the . . . words. It didn’t help.”
“I’m sure it did.”
“He was afraid. He didn’t want to die. At the end, he asked me why. I gave him the answers I knew—God’s will, too much for us to understand, going to a better place, all that—” He squeezed his eyes shut, baring his teeth. “So he stopped asking me. Out of politeness.”
Hurting for him, she sat quietly and didn’t speak.
“Then he was gone, and there was nothing I could do for Sophie either. Her heart is broken. I just—watched her. Sat with her, said . . . the words. I wanted so badly to fix it for her, make everything better. Make death go away. Reassure her that all will be well, when it certainly will not.”
He let his hands fall, uncovering all the bleakness in his face. She let the silence stretch between them for a moment, then laid her hand on his shoulder. He didn’t look at her, but he smiled absently, gratefully. “You did your best,” she heard herself say—and if she hadn’t known what he was talking about before, the terrible banality of that would have brought it home with a vengeance. But he didn’t sigh or flinch with impatience; he smiled again, tiredly, and gave her comforting hand a pat with his.
“You see?” she said earnestly. “I just said a stupid-sounding thing, but it consoled you a little. And you helped Sophie and Mr. Deene. You did, but you just can’t see it. You were there. You stayed with them, you didn’t run away, the way most people would’ve done—as I’d have done when it got too painful. ‘The family should have some privacy,’ I’d have said, but really I’d have excused myself because I couldn’t stand it. That’s what most people do, Christy, but not you.”
“Because it’s my job.”
“Yes, exactly. And you do it well. You do. There is nothing to say at those times, you can’t make it better. It isn’t answers people need anyway, it’s company. You can’t cure illness or prevent death or suffering, Christy. You can just be there, holding Sophie’s hand. That’s all you can do.”
“No, Anne,” he said gently. “I’m a minister; I’m supposed to do more than that. I’m supposed to bring hope to the hopeless. I should have a vision of God’s plan that’s so powerful, so compelling, it comforts the dying and brings them peace. I’m God’s helper on earth, his priest. I have the sacraments and I have the Bible, but unless I also have God’s spirit in me, giving me the grace to say the right words, do the right things—”
“But you do,” she insisted. “Oh, Christy, you don’t know. You can’t see it, but I can, and I’m telling you that you help everyone you meet.” He laughed at that. She took his hand in both of hers and squeezed it hard. “I watch them, I see people with you. They—light up when you come into a room. In church, they never take their eyes off you. And I’m not just talking about all those silly girls either. I mean everybody. What I can’t understand is why you don’t know that everyone loves you.”
He put his head down, pretending to examine their clasped hands. He was moved, and he was no good at dissembling; poor Christy, if he wanted to keep an emotion to himself, the best he could do was to hide his face.
“What are you thinking?” she asked when he didn’t speak.
“I’m thinking . . . that I’m supposed to say that. ‘What are you thinking?’ It’s what I say when people are quiet. To draw them out.”
She smiled. “A fine tactic,” she said softly. “I’m sure you’ve a hundred more and you don’t even know it.” He kept his head down. “Christy,” she whispered. “What are we going to do with you?”
He put his other hand over hers. A light breeze blew, fluttering the tree branches, making moon-shadows in his hair. They both fell silent, and the seconds passed, and she grew obsessively aware of their touching. The texture of Christy’s skin, the warmth of his big hands cradling her smaller ones. The naturalness of this intimacy. She wanted to lean down and rest her cheek on their joined hands. Just that. And stay that way for a long time. He moved, and the drawing away of his hands felt like a caress. But then he stood up, and it felt like an abandonment.
He didn’t go far, just to the iron sundial, inconspicuous among the gravestones. “Watch and pray,” read the inscription on the granite pedestal. “Time passeth away like a shadow.” She watched him for a while, admiring his lean, muscular grace. He was an elegant man, for all that he was a soldier of the Lord in a humble country parish. And her appreciation of him was as earthly as could be. Or did she mean earthy?
The direction of her thoughts alarmed her, and so did Christy’s continued silence. He had withdrawn from her, and she could only think that somehow, because of the innocent intimacy of what had just happened, she’d broken faith with him, reneged on her promise to be his friend and nothing more.
“So,” she said with uncertain playfulness, “am I not allowed to hold my friend’s hand when he’s in trouble?”
He turned around. From here she couldn’t see his face clearly. She held her breath, and finally he smiled. Her relief was so strong, she shivered with it. She patted the bench beside her. “Come back. I’ve decided to tell you my life story. Come, sit, I can’t tell it to you if you’re going to stand over me like—like God,” she said deliberately, and her reward was his light laugh.
He took his seat beside her again, angling his body toward hers and resting his forearm on the low back of the bench. “Are you cold?” he asked, seeing she had nothing but her shawl.
“No. Are you?”
“No.”
“Good, then you can’t use that for an excuse to leave if my life story bores you.”
He only smiled. Before, he’d have joked back, tried to make her laugh. He was guarding himself, unsure, under this new regime, of how much he could give away, how much he could take. It pained her, but she couldn’t blame him for it.
“Actually,” she said softly, “what I want to tell you is how it came about that I married Geoffrey.” He recoiled slightly, and she knew what he was thinking—that this was dangerous territory, unwise, probably indiscreet, exactly the sort of thing he ought to avoid if he was going to save himself. “I just want to tell you, that’s all,” she said hastily. “It’s not hurtful, it won’t—harm anything. Between us, I mean.”
“Tell me, then. Whatever you like. Did you meet him in England?”
She sat back. “Yes, in London. My father’s brother had just died, and we’d come here to settle his estate.” No—she wanted to start further back. “We’d been living in Venice and Padua, where my father had a new patron. And a new mistress,” she added dryly. “Somehow they always seemed to go together.”
“Your mother—?”
“Died when I was seven. She drowned in a sailing accident. My father’s family had money, but they cut him off when he married her because she was ‘unsuitable.’ Even after she died, they didn’t relent. He despised them by then; I doubt he’d have taken anything from them if they’d offered it.”
“Did you always live on the Continent?”
“We lived in Ravenna until my mother died. I still think of it as home, even though I’ve been back only once in almost eighteen years. After she died, my father and I would come to England every few years, but for the most part we lived in Italy and France, sometimes the Netherlands. Part of his idea of himself, you see, was that he was an exile.”
“Was he a good artist? I don’t know his work.”
“It was never shown here until just before he died. I can’t say if he was good or not; I can’t be objective. He wasn’t as good as he wanted to be. And he wasn’t very successful.”
“Were you poor?”
“I guess we were, sometimes. I never felt poor. His friends were all artists, so it seemed as if everybody we knew was poor.”
She paused, and after a moment Christy asked, “Were you happy?”
She studied his serious face; he was so intent on everything she said. “I didn’t have what you’d call a conventional upbringing,” she equivocated. This was an area she had intended to skirt. “My father had a lot of mistresses, and I was always . . . I was . . .”
“Jealous of them.”
“Yes.” There, that hadn’t hurt so much. “And whether or not he was any good at what he did, he was completely devoted to his art. Obsessed. And so—a noisy little girl constituted a nuisance, as you can understand. An annoyance.”
There was a longer pause, but this time Christy didn’t fill it.
“But he was proud of me too, in his way, especially after I got older. He liked to show me off. At sixteen or so, I became his hostess. His set of friends was ‘bohemian,’ which meant, as far as I could tell, that they slept with each other’s wives and made a virtue out of professional failure.”
“You’re cynical.”
“Yes, I am. Haven’t you noticed that about me before?” He sent her one of his bland looks, not encouraging her. “Anyway. When I was twenty, Uncle Donald died—my father’s brother. He had no sons, so Papa was next in line for the inheritance, which was substantial. A fortune, in fact. We came to England, and that’s when I met Geoffrey.”
“How?”
“At a party. An artists’ soiree. Yes, I know—an unlikely place for Geoffrey, but I didn’t know that then. Nor did I know that I was to be the prize in a carefully planned and very cold-blooded seduction. Before the old viscount died, how long had it been since you’d seen Geoffrey?”
“Twelve years,” he answered without hesitation. “Without a word.”
“Then you must not have known that in the interim, besides signing on to play soldier in every obscure skirmish that fired up around the globe, he spent all his money on pleasure, and all his friends’ money, and all the money he could squeeze out of his father. Which was precious little to begin with, before it dried up to nothing. In short, he was desperate.
“Unfortunately for him, his dissolute character preceded him, and he was persona non grata in respectable English drawing rooms; that cut off the usual way titled ne’er-do-wells get rich—by marrying heiresses. So he set out to try a different social milieu, a first for him—the well-to-do artistic community. A comedown, I suppose, but beggars can’t be choosers.”
Her left hand lay palm down between them on the bench. She saw Christy start to touch her, then pull away.
“My reputation preceded me, too,” she continued self-consciously. “Geoffrey knew my father had just come into a great deal of money. So I was his goal. His target.”
“What happened?”
“He pursued me. It was—unreal, overwhelming. Unlike anything I’d ever experienced. He was this—storm, and I was standing in his path, so innocent—oh, Christy, you can’t imagine how innocent I was, underneath my extremely thin veneer of worldliness.” She tried to laugh. “Or maybe it wasn’t innocence, just stupidity. Well, in any case, he swept me off my feet, as the saying goes, and proposed marriage within two weeks of our first meeting.”
“Didn’t your father object?”
“He did, yes, when he thought of it. You must understand that he was being lionized in a very small way at the time, more because he was a novelty in England—and a soon-to-be-rich novelty—than because anyone truly believed he was a brilliant artist. So his mind was on other things.” She didn’t add “as usual”; that would’ve sounded too pathetic.
“Geoffrey’s charm can be devastating when he wants it to be, as I’m sure you know, and four years ago, when he was relatively healthy and energetic, it was at its deadliest. I found it almost impossible to resist him. He didn’t seduce me—not my body, anyway. He made me believe I was the most extraordinary woman alive, that he would die if he couldn’t have me, that we were made for each other. I can hardly understand it now, how I could have believed we were suited at all, two people so radically different from each other in every conceivable way—and yet I did believe it. He was like a fire, and his almost inhuman energy burned me up.”
“So you married him.”
“He insisted; he wouldn’t have it any other way. Now I know why, but at the time I was terribly flattered. I’d have countenanced an affair—in fact, I suggested it to him, any number of times.” She searched his face for a sign that she’d shocked him but couldn’t see one. “Are you scandalized?”
“Would you like me to be?”
“It doesn’t matter to me. I don’t have to defend myself.”
“Certainly not.”
“But I could point out that I was raised in a setting where such things were commonplace, almost more so than conventional marriages.”
“Yes, that’s true,” he said mildly, and she could see she wasn’t going to get a rise out of him.
“Anyway,” she resumed. “Geoffrey wouldn’t agree to an affair; he wanted an ‘honorable marriage,’ he said, and I believed him. So we eloped. We did it in Scotland—very romantic, I thought. I was in a kind of daze the whole time, as if it was all happening to someone else.”
“Did you love him?”
She took her time answering. “I would like to think that I did. I would like to think that I didn’t give myself to someone for whom I felt only infatuation and gratitude. Twenty is not so young, and I wasn’t a child. I knew him for less than a month, and during all that time he was dissembling. How could I have loved him? I think I behaved very, very stupidly. But since I’ve paid for it many times over, I forgave myself a long time ago.”
She put her head back against the trunk of the beech tree, feeling exhausted all of a sudden. All the exhilaration she’d felt in getting this story out was gone now; it sounded sordid in her ears, and she couldn’t remember anymore why she’d wanted Christy to hear it. “Do you want to know the rest?” she asked in a flat voice. “I can tell you, it doesn’t get any better.”
“Only if you want to tell me.”
For some reason, that irritated her. She thought of saying, Why don’t you hold my hand? You held Sophie’s hand—why not mine? Aren’t I a suffering parishioner, too? An ignoble sentiment, and petty in the extreme, yet she couldn’t shake the childish wish that he would try to comfort her in some way besides listening to her.
“I’ll spee
d things along,” she said crisply. “When we returned to London a week after the wedding, I found out my father had died. I’d missed his funeral because they couldn’t find me.”
“Anne.”
That one word brought tears into her throat. She swallowed them down, appalled—she never cried. “It was a freak accident,” she rushed on, “absolutely absurd, the sort of nonsensical occurrence he’d have relished—in the abstract. He was walking past a block of flats in the Bayswater Road at six o’clock in the evening, heading for the public house on the corner. Four stories up, a woman threw a flowerpot at her husband, who happened to be standing in front of the window.”
Christy bowed his head and said, “Oh, God.”
“It’s funny, isn’t it? Geoffrey thought so, until they told him he hadn’t married an heiress after all. My father hadn’t made any legal provision for me yet—didn’t have time—so I was left without a penny. Everything went to the closest male relative, a great-nephew who lives in Canada. His name is Mordecai.”
Her hands in her lap came unclasped; she closed her eyes out of fatigue. It took an effort to finish the story. “Needless to say, the honeymoon was over. Geoffrey got drunk one night and told me the truth: he didn’t love me, he’d married me for my money, and he was leaving me because I didn’t have any. I didn’t see him again for two years.” She stood up. “Christy, I can’t talk anymore.”
After a moment of surprised silence, he said, “All right.”
“No, no, you’re supposed to argue with me! You’re supposed to find the story of my life so riveting that you can’t bear to wait for the thrilling conclusion.”
He stood up more slowly, and for the first time she saw how weary he was, too. “I do want to hear the thrilling conclusion,” he said, and the echo of her silly words in his quiet voice made her feel childish and petulant.
“It’s late,” she said somberly. “I’ve kept you too long. You must be very tired.”
To Loveand To Cherish Page 15
