A Haven on Orchard Lane

by Lawana Blackwell

  She was pink and downy, with studious green eyes, a shock of dark hair, and long, elegant fingers. Charlotte named her after Rosalind in As You Like It. Newspapers played to the public’s appetite for morbid sentiment, running accounts of the brave young widow left to carry on after such tragedy. Theatre Royal offered her a lead part in The Lady of Lyons. Seven evening performances and six matinees weekly left little time for mothering. When eight-month-old Rosalind wept for the nursemaid every time Charlotte attempted to hold her, she sent both to live with her late mother’s sister in Coventry. She sent letters, gifts, and cheques, and buried her guilt over infrequent visits by throwing herself into her career.

  When Rosalind was twenty and had just begun teaching, Charlotte received a heartbreaking letter asking for no further contact. Now that I am a grown woman and can support myself, we may stop this mother-daughter charade.

  After two letters Charlotte sent to her were returned, unopened, she wrote to her aunt to ask permission to set up a legacy in her name. Aunt Vesta, past seventy, agreed. The two thousand pounds emptied Charlotte’s account, but she made good wages and believed there were enough years ahead to save for old age.

  At Aunt Vesta’s funeral three years later, Rosalind was civil but not warm.

  But what could Charlotte have expected?

  If I could but live those years over, she thought, tearing up again.

  Time was a steep downhill path, and regrets were the stones that cut one’s feet near the bottom.

  7

  Waterloo Bridge Station was thick with humanity: porters wheeling trolleys of luggage; anxious mothers holding the hands of restless children; harassed fathers encumbered with satchels, rugs, and hatboxes; voices shouting farewells and admonitions over the whistle of the London and South Western Railway express locomotive.

  After turning her mother’s trunk over to a porter, Rosalind hurried to the bench near the refreshment room. Her mother sat staring at her gloved hands, camel coat over the blue poplin gown the hospital had stored, and the narrow-brimmed hat with half veil that Rosalind had purchased.

  “It’s time to board, Mother,” she leaned to say.

  Her mother turned her face up to her, eyes hidden by the veil, but tension obvious in her frown and clasped hands. “I cannot do this.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I’m fatigued. Please take me back to the hospital.”

  “That’s impossible.” Rosalind looked over at the waiting train. “Come, Mother. Everything will be fine.”

  Her mother labored to her feet. Rosalind switched her valise to her left hand so that she could take her arm. They wove their way through the crowd. The front-facing seats of three second-class compartments were filled. In the fourth, a young man and woman and a girl upward of two had claimed, incredibly, the rear-facing seat.

  The final boarding whistle shrieked while Rosalind considered seeking another compartment. Small children tended not to travel well, in her experience. But forward-facing seats filled quickly, and she was in no mood to gamble. The child’s behavior could go one of two ways, but nausea was a certainty. Chiding herself for not waiting closer to the tracks, she assisted her mother up the step and settled beside her.

  The train had no sooner hissed out of the station than the girl began moving from one window to another.

  “Look, look, look!”

  Rosalind attempted to focus upon the passing cottages of Wimbledon and Surbiton, the fir-tree forests and undulating chalk country, while her boots were stepped upon and her nerves as taut as harp strings. Attempts the mother and father made to restrain the child brought on ear-splitting shrieks. At length, both sank back into their seats with weary eyes and apologetic smiles.

  Perhaps I was meant to be a spinster after all, Rosalind thought.

  Into an hour, the child’s chattering was shrill, her activity frantic. Just as Rosalind was at the end of her tether, the tot climbed into the space between her parents and fell asleep. She slept all the way to Salisbury Station, looking like an angel, no less, lashes resting upon rosy cheeks.

  “Are you all right?” she asked her mother on the station’s wooden platform as they waited to change trains.

  Her mother gave her as much of a blank look as the veil would allow. “Um . . .”

  “The wee wild child.”

  “I’m sorry. I didn’t notice.”

  What were you thinking of? came to Rosalind’s mind. But to press would be to imply that she cared. She motioned toward the redbrick station house. “Let’s have sandwiches.”

  One hour later, they shared a carriage to themselves on the train bound for Port Stilwell. Rosalind removed her pattens, propped stocking feet upon the facing seat, and sighed with contentment. Now that she could command a window to herself, she watched the succession of valleys threaded by streams and flanked by wooded hills, hamlets of color-washed cottages, and red plowed fields hemmed in by hedgerows.

  “Have you ever been to Port Stilwell?” her mother asked.

  “I have not,” Rosalind replied.

  Silence. Then, “What’s it like, I wonder?”

  Rosalind gave her an aggrieved look. Why don’t you wait and discover for yourself?

  “I’m sorry,” her mother said.

  The sadness in her tone pricked Rosalind’s conscience in spite of herself. Softening her voice, she said, “It’s a fishing town on the Devon coast.”

  That it was one hundred and thirty miles from Cheltenham was its biggest draw.

  “I see.”

  It seemed the appropriate time to inform her. “I’ve let the rooms under ‘Kent.’ You may wish to use that name as well.”

  “Very well.”

  Resentment took over again, and she could not resist adding, “After all, what’s one more name change?”

  Her mother stared at her hands. The dart had found its mark, but the victory felt hollow.

  She has no right to make you feel guilty, Rosalind reminded herself.

  After a few stilted moments, though, she said with some degree of gentleness, “In other words, they won’t know your identity unless you decide to inform them.”

  “Never,” her mother said hoarsely.

  They sat in silence until the train crawled into a little wayside station.

  “Well, this is it,” Rosalind said.

  She exited the compartment and looked southward. Port Stilwell lay in a valley, guarded by hills that folded one upon the other and faded into the clouds. Past thatched cob and stone cottages, a shingle beach glistened in the wide gap between silvery gray cliffs, and beyond, blue waters.

  She turned to the open compartment. “Mother?”

  Her mother stepped onto the platform.

  Three fellow passengers traded greetings with a man with grizzled cheeks, bowed with age but apparently hale and strong. He approached Rosalind and her mother, touched the brim of his cloth cap, and said with a slight burr of the tongue, “I’m Septimus White. Mrs. Hooper had me fetch you. I’m married to her cousin.”

  “Thank you for coming, Mr. White,” Rosalind said. “My mother has a trunk.”

  “Aye. I supposed.”

  He led them to a wagon hitched to two dray horses. A dark-haired boy of about sixteen gave them a shy smile.

  “Mr. Plummer is who carries people from the station, but he’s down at the guildhall, working the election,” Mr. White said. “My grandson Amos and I have just the fish wagon. ’Tis a mite gamy, but we spread a canvas and put in a bench for ye to sit on.”

  Amos helped the porter heft up the trunk, set a footstool on the ground, and hopped into the bed to offer Rosalind’s mother an arm. With Mr. White’s added assistance, she stepped up to the bench and moved to make room for Rosalind.

  Herring gulls filled the air with discordant screams, but it was a strangely welcoming sound to Rosalind’s ears. As the wagon trundled through the countryside, the coal smoke of the train faded, replaced by the overwhelming odor of fish. The horses picked up thei
r pace. Rosalind gripped the bench to steady herself, and felt a loose bit of something. Fingernail?

  She brought it before her eyes, squinted at a scale. Naturally, considering what this wagon delivered. Curiosity made her shift sideways and raise the cloth. Several scales were caught in knife scars in the weathered oak.

  In silence, her mother watched, as if too intimidated to ask.

  “This is not a bench,” Rosalind said. “It’s a table for cleaning fish.”

  Her mother shifted to the other side to look.

  “It’s at least scrubbed clean,” Rosalind went on.

  “Give or take some scales,” her mother observed, squinting at one clinging to a fingertip.

  “I would rather give them, if it’s all the same.”

  Her mother chuckled, and Rosalind could not help but smile.

  “Thank you,” her mother said, wiping her eyes beneath the veil.

  For what? Rosalind thought. The shared humor? Taking her from London?

  She sobered. What an unburdening it would be just to forgive. And biblical. But so hard to put into practice when the offending party had yet to confess the wrong. When the offending party seemed oblivious to the wrong.

  Rosalind turned away to concentrate on their surroundings. They were moving southward, toward the sea, passing thatched cottages with prim little gardens and fishing nets hanging out to dry. Blue jerseys fluttered like flags from wash lines.

  Minutes later, the wagon turned left past a pillar-box and started up a gentle hill. Cottages gave way to rows of stunted trees with spindly bare limbs.

  “Apples,” Mother murmured.

  “Is that what they are?”

  “The blossoms will smell heavenly, come spring,” she said. Whether to cheer her or herself, Rosalind did not know her well enough to tell.

  Just past the orchards, the lane ended at a two-storey, half-timbered cottage of striking yellow cob walls, with a thatched roof and small porch.

  A block of cheese wrapped in twine, Rosalind thought.

  Red pansies sprouted from window boxes and lined a stone walk to the wicket gate.

  “The advertisement said ‘tucked-away cottage in seaside Port Stilwell,’” Rosalind muttered. “It quite left out the part that you could quarantine smallpox patients.”

  “I’m glad for the seclusion,” her mother said, pushing her veil back over her hat. “But is it too dear?”

  “It’s reasonable.”

  Mr. White tied the reins, and he and his grandson hopped down to help them from the wagon. There was a slight stir from within the cottage; then the door opened and a tall woman stepped across the porch and up the stone path.

  “Welcome!” she cried, face wreathed in smiles. “Welcome, Mrs. and Miss Kent! I’m Aurora Hooper. I trust your journey was agreeable?”

  Rosalind winced inwardly at Mother’s not seeming to notice the proffered hand. She offered her own to Mrs. Hooper. “Quite, thank you.”

  “Very good!” The woman’s soot-colored hair was gathered and ironed into corkscrews above her ears as was stylish twenty years ago. They bounced as she spoke, which was incessantly. Her small eyes, like shiny blue marbles, darted back and forth until they rested upon Mother’s face.

  “Have we met before, Mrs. Kent?”

  Rosalind held her breath.

  “I don’t believe so,” Mother murmured.

  Mrs. Hooper angled her head. “Are you quite certain? One of Thomas Cook’s exotic tours, perchance?”

  “My mother seems to have one of those faces,” Rosalind said. “Your cottage is quite colorful.”

  Mrs. Hooper gave a lusty laugh. “Just wait until you see inside.”

  Leaving the men to the trunk, she led them across the porch and into a hall with a narrow staircase, coat rack, and carved walnut mirror. A door was set into each side. She opened the one to the right and led them into a parlor redolent of beeswax and old wood.

  A Louis XIV sofa in burgundy velvet, a settee in gold brocade, an overstuffed chair in multicolored paisley, two walnut armchairs upholstered in green silk, side tables, and a tea table were arranged around a patterned rug of reds, greens, blues, and browns. A low fire snapped in a stone fireplace to their right. Against one sage green wall sat a pianoforte, near a checkered draughts table and two wooden chairs.

  “A pianoforte?” Mother said.

  “Do you play?” Rosalind asked before thinking.

  Mrs. Hooper continued as if she had not heard. “My husband and I enjoyed collecting things from our travels.” Walls were covered with plates and platters: blue delft windmills, green dragons, Asian gardens, Bavarian children, pink landscapes, peacocks, roses, and even one commemorating Queen Victoria’s coronation.

  Through a wide arched doorway, a dining room was visible with wooden table and chairs, sideboard, and a glass-fronted cabinet filled with china.

  “Quite nice,” Rosalind said, for the whole effect was cheerful.

  “My dear Vincent was keen on colors; the bolder, the better.” Mrs. Hooper’s mouth was smallish for her round face, but her smile exposed long white teeth. “That’s why the drapery shop did—does—so well. He passed on two years ago, God rest his soul.”

  There was no opportunity for condolences, for she carried on without seeming to draw breath, “I pray you don’t mind solitude.”

  “I don’t mind,” Mother said quickly.

  Mrs. Hooper smiled at her. “Vincent liked people but desired peace and quiet at the end of the day. I moved above the shop a year ago. Got weary of trudging the mile to and fro, being apart from town life. My grandchildren pop in for sweets, and I take meals at my son’s restaurant. But an empty house doesn’t age well. I’ll need this place when I’m no longer able to keep shop. Mr. and Mrs. Knight were my first and only lodgers. They stayed nine months whilst he designed and built the latest cobble winch.”

  Cobble winch?

  Rosalind had no opportunity to ask, because Mrs. Hooper went on.

  “I’m afraid we have no books, but there is a lending library in town.” She shrugged. “I donated my Vincent’s collection before deciding to take in lodgers. Doesn’t it always go that way? You toss something out and then find a need for it! Have you grandchildren, Mrs. Kent?”

  “I’m not married,” Rosalind said before her mother could reply.

  “There’s a pity,” Mrs. Hooper said, giving her a wink. “But that will change in due course. Once word gets out of a new girl, the locals will swarm like wasps about jam cake. I daresay our fishermen are not as fussy as them gents up in London.”

  “Mrs. Hooper, I’m not looking for—”

  She held up a silencing finger. “Yes, yes, dear. Just bear in mind what I’ve always said . . . every year past twenty, a girl’s chances of finding a husband are halved.”

  “I’m twenty-seven.”

  Rosalind may as well have said “I have the plague” for the shock in Mrs. Hooper’s face.

  “Do not give up hope, child! There is still time!”

  Not according to your arithmetic, Rosalind thought, restraining a smile.

  Her mother’s numb expression tightened. Softly, evenly, she said, “My daughter aspires to be more than bait for local fishermen. And any Londoner would be honored to—”

  “Mother.” Rosalind touched her sleeve, heartened at being defended so.

  She abandoned you, she reminded herself.

  “But of course,” Mrs. Hooper said with hand upon bosom. “Far be it from me to suggest otherwise.”

  Mr. White leaned his head through the door. “Aurora . . . the trunk?”

  “Well, Septimus, bring it!”

  We haven’t seen the rooms, Rosalind opened her mouth to say, then closed it. Unless they were uninhabitable, which was unlikely, she had no choice. What was she to do? Bring her mother back to school with her?

  Besides, in a hurry to get the thing done, she had telegraphed Cheltenham after visiting the agency, asking that her own trunk be delivered.

 
“I must nip back to the shop,” Mrs. Hooper said. “My housekeeper will attend you.” She raised her face to trill, “Mrs. Deamer!”

  Footfalls sounded from the entry hall. “Now, you must say naught of prison or prisoners . . .”

  “Why would—” Rosalind attempted.

  “. . . larceny or stealing. Anything such as that.”

  “You have a criminal in your employ?”

  “Not Mrs. Deamer.” Face flush with excitement, Mrs. Hooper hurried on with a softer voice. “But when her husband was Lord Mayor of Plymouth—”

  The door opened, and a woman entered wearing a white apron over a dress of fine blue broadcloth with small white flowers.

  “Ah, Mrs. Deamer,” Mrs. Hooper said with a conspiratorial glance at Rosalind and her mother. “Please show Mrs. and Miss Kent their rooms. Must fly.”

  Thus she did, leaving Rosalind with overwhelming relief that this woman did not reside here.

  Her mother’s expression betrayed the same. Not that she gave a whit, Rosalind reminded herself. And not that she herself expected to spend much time here.

  “Welcome to Port Stilwell,” Mrs. Deamer said.

  She was about forty, with charcoal-colored hair combed from a pronounced widow’s peak into a chignon. Thin dark brows and sparse lashes contrasted oddly with eyes the color of weak tea. Her saving grace was flawless skin and a fine nose, though over thin lips. Rosalind, who preached good posture to her students, appreciated that Mrs. Deamer’s was especially erect.

  They followed her back into the hall and upstairs to a landing with a linen cupboard against a back wall, and two doors on either side. Mrs. Deamer went to the right and opened the door to a decent-sized bedroom, papered in a rosebud pattern and furnished with a bed, chest, wardrobe, washstand, and a long mirror. Open curtains, rug, and counterpane were of the same cheerful colors as the parlor.

  Lovely, Rosalind thought.

  In the second bedchamber, Mrs. Deamer went over to a window set in the south wall, with a cushioned seat below and a small half-moon table to the side. “The view is better from this room.”

  Rosalind and her mother joined her. Past treetops and rooftops, in the long gaps between cliffs, the water was dappled with shafts of light and color: blue, green, and even dashes of mauve and brown.