by Rose Lerner
“He didn’t hurt me,” Thea mumbled. “He just touched me. It could have been a lot worse.”
Sukey nodded. “How do you feel about what happened?”
Thea shrugged.
“Was I right when I said you were sad?”
Thea hugged her knees. “I don’t know why I’m so sad.” Her voice was soft and fierce. “He’s gone, and he barely touched me, and you and Mr. Toogood are nice and there’s nothing to be so sad about. But I can’t stop.”
Sukey blinked back tears. “I’m sorry. That sounds hard.” After a long silence, she said, “You could talk to Mrs. Khaleel and Molly, if you wanted to. They might understand what happened better than I do, since they were here.”
Thea made a doubtful face. “I don’t think they want to talk about it.”
“They feel bad, like you do. Maybe they aren’t sure you want to either. From the outside, it’s hard to tell the difference between not wanting to talk and being nervous about it.”
“Have you ever been sad and not able to stop?”
“Not like that. Not so I couldn’t work. But do you know Mrs. Piper? Her daughter Betsy works at the Honey Moon.”
Thea nodded. “I’ve seen her in church. She wears that hat with the stars embroidered on it.”
“My mum told me she was that sad once. After Betsy’s little sister was born. They had the doctor in and everything. He said it was called melancholy. And she’s better now.”
“Did the doctor give her medicine?”
Sukey tried to remember. “Well, he said her circulation was sluggish and her blood thick, so he bled her. But she’d been sad longer than you. He said in the early stages, light foods, exercise and cheerful conversation help more than anything else.”
Thea rolled her eyes.
“You haven’t been going out much, even on Saturdays,” Sukey pointed out. “You didn’t go to the servants’ ball.”
Thea picked at her apron some more. Then she mumbled something.
“Beg pardon?”
“I didn’t want everyone to look at me,” she said loudly.
“Everyone? Or mostly men?”
“Men.”
“Do you think you’d feel safer if you went in to town with me?”
Thea’s eyes narrowed. “You always spend Saturdays alone. You say it’s your time away from all of us. I don’t want your pity.”
“It’s not pity when people like you. Anyway, I don’t always spend Saturdays alone. I stayed here this Saturday with John, didn’t I? And the Saturday before, I came home early.”
Thea snickered. “I know. You’re loud.”
Sukey blushed and played her trump card. “It’s not pity, because I want something in exchange.”
“What?”
“Mr. Toogood told me you like bloodthirsty songs. I collect songs, and I thought you might teach me some of your best ones.”
“Hmm. I expect I could do that.” Thea’s mouth curved slyly. “Do you know ‘Thomas the Rhymer’? There are rivers made of blood in that one.”
* * *
John heard an unfamiliar voice singing in the laundry room. Did one of the girls have a visitor? Mr. Summers didn’t permit it. He would have to get rid of her, and quickly.
He’d done some work that morning, but he’d tired himself out and was back in bed now, trying to catch up on accounts. He heaved himself up and opened the door. “He made fiddle pegs of her long finger bones,” the voice caroled, sounding a little self-conscious.
Mrs. Khaleel poked her head out of the kitchen. Seeing him, she smiled brilliantly, as if to say, Isn’t this wonderful? John blinked, puzzled.
Mr. Summers peered around the hallway corner, saw them and smiled as well, putting a finger to his lips.
“Sing it again,” Sukey said. “I want to learn the words.”
“I could write them down for you,” the voice said.
For a moment John was so shocked he couldn’t move. It was Thea.
“Mm-mm,” Sukey said sternly. “I learn better hearing it. You promised. Sing.”
Sukey had made her sing again, when John had despaired of helping her. Maybe she was a fairy after all.
He felt a pang of guilt, that he’d despaired. That he hadn’t been the one to talk to Thea. He had told Sukey he lacked the impulse to confide in others, but perhaps what he lacked was the ability to invite confidences. He’d confided in Sukey much further than she had in him—than anyone ever had.
Was he doomed, like his father, to work alone in the butler’s pantry while his wife was surrounded by her friends?
Good Lord, illness made him maudlin! He was glad for Thea. That was the main point. He wasn’t foolish enough to suppose that one song would banish months of inveterate misery. But it was a beginning.
* * *
A lovely week followed. Sukey remained determined on showering him with wifely care and affection, leaving him little notes and sprays of holly. Thea began bringing hot shaving water to the butler’s pantry, and John was sure Sukey had put her up to it. It was extra labor for Thea, for nothing, when he had always been content to use cold—but it was such a luxury not to shiver and worry about slicing off gooseflesh that he couldn’t countermand the order.
And twice they dined alone in their room, conversing with surprising ease. John found himself nearly chattering away, as if he’d been storing up thoughts apurpose to spread out before her now.
He told her about Plumtree teaching him to take out blackberry stains when he was six years old, his struggles with Nick Dymond’s dreadful smoking chimney at Oxford, scandalous house parties and the bleak months after Mr. Dymond came back from Spain.
And she told him about Mrs. Humphrey’s lodgers and learning new songs from peddlers and her friends’ misadventures in love. She didn’t talk much about her childhood, he noticed, but he remembered that a marriage blossomed at its own pace and didn’t pry.
And at night they began coupling again, now he was recovered from his cold. Some of the urgency was gone, the newness and wonder, but in its place came familiarity. John had always liked his lovers, and had known some of them a long time. But there was something about bedding his wife—no, about bedding Sukey—that seemed entirely different. Surely he would have remembered this comfort, this ease and surety. Not the kind that came from a friendly tumble, but from knowing her. From sharing with her in joy and care.
Trust, he supposed, was one word to describe it. But that didn’t seem right. Intimacy, then? Affection?
One night it was very late and they were both tired, and they looked into each other’s bleary eyes and laughed a little and went to sleep without anything more than a kiss. John lay in the dark, exhausted and fuzzy-brained, and felt terribly happy. They didn’t have to couple tonight. Because they both knew there would be tomorrow, and the day after, and the day after that.
There was another word men used to describe their feelings for their wives. After his slip of the tongue at the servants’ ball, John had not allowed himself to use it, out of some obscure sense of propriety.
He did not think the quality of his sentiments needed to change for the word to be apt. Yet there must be some reasonable interval of time, some duration of feeling, before the thing was named, even in the privacy of one’s own mind. One ought not to risk a mistake. Her father had said he loved her and her mother, and later he had left them.
Besides…
The surety and ease in bed, the confidence that she would accept his touch, and not laugh at him—it didn’t extend to this. She wouldn’t laugh, but she might be dismayed. She might draw back. She might say it was too soon, and she would be right.
They had married shortly before Christmas. Lady Day would be plenty of time to contemplate saying the word aloud.
John could only imagine how Sukey would laugh if she knew he was ordering his decl
arations by quarter days. He smiled in spite of himself.
* * *
Sukey, on her way to airing out the guest rooms, was stopped by the sound of crying. It was coming from Thea and Molly’s room. Drawing near and peering through the keyhole to see if she ought to go in, she saw Thea, her face in Molly’s lap, weeping as if her heart would break. “I felt better yesterday,” she sobbed. “And today it’s as bad as ever.”
Molly smoothed a hand over her hair. “Convalescents have good days and bad days. Everyone knows that.”
Sukey crept away, hoping Molly was right.
* * *
John left Molly’s father’s lodgings with a wretched, crawling sort of feeling. The man had agreed to think about the workhouse. He had wept, in fact, at the idea of distressing his daughter. He had been very, very drunk, at two in the afternoon. John hoped he would remember the conversation, so that John didn’t have to have it again.
Next he had knocked at the door of the neighbor who put bread in Molly’s father’s cupboard and, after some discussion, arranged with her that her husband would look in on the man each night, just to be sure he still breathed.
He stopped at the circulating library to get the first two volumes of a new novel before heading back home for a quiet evening. But as he passed through Market Square, he saw Sukey at a table by the window of a pub, sitting with…with Thea? When she loved her half-holiday of freedom from the vicarage so much? She was an angel.
He almost went on, not wanting to interrupt them, but he wanted too much to hear her voice, even for a moment. It was getting so her presence made all right with the world.
Earlier this afternoon he’d introduced her to Plumtree. She’d stayed half an hour, in which space she and Plumtree had thoroughly charmed one another, and then she’d left.
And John had been shaken to discover he was—not less at ease, precisely, after she’d gone. But he had felt, all at once, almost in a false position, as if he wore a favorite suit that still fit but no longer hung quite right. As if the man he was with Plumtree was himself, but not all of himself.
He felt more at home with Sukey than with a man he’d known all his life, who was as good as family.
That, he realized with a start, was marriage. Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave unto his wife. Sukey was his family now. He went inside.
“John,” she said a little warily. She and Thea were sprawled about, shawls and bonnets in cozy disarray, nursing the dregs of coffee cups as if they meant to do it all afternoon.
“I borrowed these from the library.” He showed her the volumes. “I’m on my way home to read them.”
She smiled, evidently relieved he wasn’t staying as well as pleased he was enjoying her gift. He nearly left at once—but he said, “Would you consider coming home early?”
Thea made an amused sound. Sukey blushed and, to judge from the girl’s reaction, kicked her under the table.
His ears burned. “I meant nothing untoward.”
Sukey hesitated, licking her lip uncertainly. “I would be delighted to spend a quiet evening at home with you,” she said at last with great dignity. Thea giggled at the word “quiet”.
John was too pleased to be much embarrassed. “I shall expect you at half past six?”
She nodded.
He arrived home, thinking to mull some cider for them, and found the door locked and a note from Mr. Summers on the hall table. Gone to use Lord Wheatcroft’s library. Will likely stay for supper. He had the house entirely to himself for the next several hours. The sad visit to Molly’s father still clung to his skin.
Honest labor cleared the mind and the heart. John had an idea.
* * *
As half-holidays went, Sukey had had very little of it to herself. She’d spent a nice half-hour with John and his friend Mr. Plumtree, a good-humored man with a tongue sharper than her own. She’d paid her usual visit to her mother, and then she’d stopped at the vicarage to collect Thea.
She’d feared regretting her kindness, but it had been a very pleasant afternoon after all, Thea being perfectly content to sit in the window at the Robin Hood without talking much, nursing a cup of coffee and watching the world go by. Now here they were, throwing snowballs at each other on their way home, two precious hours earlier than usual. She ought to regret it, but she didn’t. John was waiting for her.
“Race you,” she told Thea, and they fetched up at the back door with a thump, laughing and gasping and covered in snow.
John opened it in his shirtsleeves. “You’re early.”
“We can come back later,” she teased, and he tugged her inside and held her tight against him as he locked the door.
“Can I borrow your book?” Thea asked, kicking off her pattens. “You won’t be reading it, right?”
“It’s on the kitchen table.”
Thea vanished into the kitchen and then up the stairs.
Sukey noticed that John was frowsy and wilting a little. And the house smelled odd. “Have you been working?”
He gestured for her to follow him and slipped into the butler’s pantry. “Shut the door quickly behind you.”
Chapter Fifteen
The uncovered brazier was full of hot coals, the room so warm that Sukey was reaching for the buttons of her pelisse before she recognized the smell.
Roses, fragrant and luxurious in the heart of winter.
She breathed them in, disbelieving. Over a dozen lit candle stubs made the copper bathtub in the center of the room glow brightly and turned the steam rising from it a warm yellow.
Sukey knew that tub. They carted it up the stairs to Mr. Summers’s room once a month, along with dunnamany buckets of hot water, and he took great pleasure in soaking in it.
She drew near to it. At least twenty-five gallons of water steamed inside, smelling like roses. “For me?” She reached out to touch the water, almost nervesome.
He caught her wrist. “It might still be too hot. You were early. Let me.” He dipped a finger quickly in, and when this proved safe, submerged his hand. “Give it another five minutes.”
“I’ve never taken a real bath before.” She used a basin and sponge most days, and on Saturday nights the vicarage servants took turns filling a hip-bath before the kitchen fire. But soaking in a tub? That was for ladies and gentlemen. The labor it took to draw and haul and heat and haul again so much water, only to have to empty it out… “You shouldn’t work on your half-holiday,” she protested.
“I told you. It isn’t work when I do it for you.”
“And I told you it is.”
He stepped up behind her and unbuttoned her dress. “Imagine an artist who paints society portraits all week,” he said in her ear. “On Sunday he comes home and paints his wife. Is there really no difference?”
She let him pull her clothes over her head. He unlaced her stays so nimbly it seemed a professional skill, but he was no ladies’ maid. He’d learned it undressing women, dunnamany of them. But the way he said his wife, it sounded special. As if she was the only one.
At the ball, he’d called it doing something for love. He’d said it without fanfare, probably meaning only to make use of the expression. For love or money, people said that all the time. People said love all the time, and then they left. Why was she fussing about a stupid word?
Don’t get in that bath, she thought with sudden urgency. You’ve done without it all these years. You don’t need it.
But when he knelt to untie her garters, she let him do that too. There was a lump in her throat and her chest tingled. At first it was fear, but it turned to happiness and she couldn’t turn it back. She felt like an air balloon trying to take flight, straining at its ropes. Her throat trembled with wanting to laugh. He rolled her stockings down her legs in a manner that had nothing professional about it.
He wavered,
eyes on the triangle of hair between her legs, inches from his mouth.
Sukey wavered too, but she pulled off her shift and danced past him towards the rose-scented water. “My bath is getting cold, and so am I.” Actually, the water near scalded her cold toe when she dipped it in. But while she debated whether to pull it out again, the heat dimmed, becoming bearable.
She lowered herself into the tub, hopping with the heat. “I’ll be boiled like a lobster!” But soon the pain faded. “Oh my. I see why the vicar likes it.” The everyday words didn’t measure up to the miracle of liquid heat right up to her breasts. She slid down the back of the tub, nipples dipping beneath the surface. She’d be warm soon, warmer than she’d been all winter. She breathed in rosy steam, finally finding the courage to lift her hands from the sides of the tub. She did not, as she half feared, slip helplessly into the water and drown.
She looked at John. He was smiling and—to her surprise—watching her face, not her tits. He knelt beside the tub to remove her cap and draw the pins from her hair. Sukey grimaced. She hated washing her hair.
Because it’s always chilly! She dipped below the surface, hauling herself up sputtering a moment later, terrified of drowning. John laughed openly at her, brushing drops of water from his waistcoat.
Having wet hair felt nice, actually. She lowered herself slowly into the tub again, this time enjoying the water creeping up over her cheeks and forehead, and the way it poured down her shoulders when she sat up.
“Do you want me to stay?” he asked. “Or shall I leave you to soak?”
She could not believe it. That he’d go to so much trouble and not even expect to ogle her?
At the ball, when he offered, she’d refused to allow him to repair her dress alone. She’d thought it too great a gift to accept.
This would put her in his debt, and she didn’t know how to repay him. But maybe that only meant she ought to stretch her brains and think of a way. She’d found she liked giving him things.
Maybe there was no limit to what you could take from your spouse, if it was offered freely. Maybe some gifts were too great to turn down. “I’d like to soak on my own a little. Thank you.”
