It was not her only project.
Late one evening, while Lenox struggled to keep his eyes open over a report on sheep farming in Northumberland, she came to his study. “Hello, dear,” he said, standing. “I thought you had gone to sleep.”
“Not by a long shot,” she said. She was holding something behind her back. “Are you busy with your reading, Charles?”
“I would pay ten pounds to the person who gave me an excuse to stop,” he said, smiling and stifling a yawn, stretching his arms out.
“Do you remember when I was so secretive at Everley? You stopped asking — which I take kindly, you know.” She smiled at him softly. “Pressure never does, with this kind of thing.”
“Of course,” he said — but in truth he had forgotten all about it, once they were out of Somerset and he had less occasion to notice her habits.
Shyly she handed him a book. “Here it is.”
He furrowed his brow and took a loose sheaf of papers from her, perhaps twenty pages of them. “The Adventure of the Lucy,” he said. There was a picture of a small gray mouse below the title, wearing a morning jacket and looking out to sea through a telescope from the taffrail of a ship. “Is it a story?” he asked, smiling with the dawning realization that it was.
“It’s nothing much,” she said and stood up, then began to fix the cushions on his sofa. “I thought I might show you — one or two other people — for Sophia, you understand, after my great tour of the children’s books left me desirous of something different.”
“Who did the drawings, Jane?”
“Oh, Molly.”
That was Edmund’s wife, who was talented with watercolors. She made compact drawings, full of detail, often rather wistful; he should have recognized them straight away. “Come sit by me as I read it,” he said. “Please.”
She laughed skeptically — would have snorted, had her upbringing been different — and said, “I couldn’t. But read it if you like.”
So he did, awake now, with a glass of whisky in hand.
Once there was a mouse named Bancroft, and you will be surprised to learn that though he was only a mouse, and at that rather a small mouse, with a kind intelligent little face, he commanded one of the finest ships to sail the seven seas. She was called the Lucy, and in all respects she was like any other ship of England — ask your father, who has probably been on one and bumped his head on the low ceiling, and he will tell you all about it — with one notable exception: There were to be no shipboard cats. It would be much more difficult to find the lost Lady Sophia, after all, if the mice of the Lucy were at all hours listening for the footsteps of an enemy.
After only these few words Lenox was charmed, and as he read on his enchantment increased. The book told the tale of this troop of mice, and in many of its particulars — its gentler particulars — it mirrored the voyage he had made, not quite a year before, to Egypt. There were differences, needless to say. The mice successfully captured a pirate ship (full of cats) and landed on an island with a solitary human being living upon it, tired of London and committed to living there until he had grown a beard all the way to his feet. Their true mission — the recapture of a mouse girl named Sophia, who had been put on the wrong ship in Portsmouth — they fulfilled on the second to last page. On the last page they all had Christmas together, in Portsmouth again.
The book was funny, slightly magical, more contemplative and less madcap than many children’s books — certainly less moralizing, too. He felt proud of her. There was no question that it was a book that could find a public. Its pages went by before you realized you were reading at all.
Yet for some reason that he could not quite explain, reading the book and looking at its drawings filled him with a bittersweet sorrow, almost too heavy to bear. It felt as if it belonged to the past, perhaps that was it — the book had a lightness of tone and spirit that their lives had once had, too, but now, in this cold winter, had lost.
So often as one looked back on life one saw a multiplicity of choices, reduced, not quite at random, to one. There were so many houses he might have taken in London; so many women he might have fallen into marriage with; so many cases he might have taken. Rarely was there a clear path, with two choices.
Here was one, however, that he had made. Reading about the Lucy reminded him that what he loved — travel, adventure, detection — he had now traded for a different kind of work.
After he had finished reading he sat and stared into the fire for some time, sipping his drink. He didn’t know how long had passed when he heard a soft knock on the door; then, of course, he leaped to his feet and congratulated his wife on her triumph.
Throughout the first week of December both Lady Jane and the governess were closeted in the upstairs drawing room, planning for the wedding. Occasionally another person would stop in — Toto, who was back in London and rather pale, but couldn’t resist talk of a wedding — and all three of them would discuss invitations, dresses, food. (The one responsibility Frederick had retained for himself was the flowers.) It was all to happen in April.
“I always say that an April wedding is loveliest, you know,” Lenox could hear Toto saying one bright morning, “though Elizabeth Wallace was married on the first of the month, in Oxford, and as far as I can gather she would have done better to marry a mule, her husband—”
“Toto!” said Jane.
“It’s true, though.”
Miss Taylor was always the person who retrieved the conversation. “The point is that I cannot wear white. I’ve been too old for that since I was twenty-two.”
“What tosh,” said Toto. “You’ll look lovely — you have just the complexion for an ivory white.” Lenox, still eavesdropping, smiled to himself. “The only question is whether you ought to be married sooner.”
“Sooner?”
“Why wait, I say?”
“Toto,” said Jane, but she ought to have known her cousin was irrepressible.
“I think a Christmas wedding would be the finest thing I ever saw.”
“Toto, you scarcely know Miss Taylor.”
“How rude you are, Jane, really I think you are — here we are, three friends — aren’t I coming to Everley to see you wed, dear heart?”
The governess laughed happily. “I should like it very much if you would.”
“See? There. Now the great virtue of a Christmas wedding …”
So, after only ten hours or so of discussion, Miss Taylor was pushed toward a writing desk to ask Frederick whether they might be married sooner than he had anticipated. He wrote back by the next post: No haste was too great for him, and he knew just the holly tree he could cut from, the true Ilex aquifolium by Everley’s lake.
CHAPTER FIFTY-THREE
In the very early hours of Christmas that year, it snowed in Plumbley.
“What a pity,” said Lady Jane when they woke to see the world white and angelic, the trees fringed with powder, Everley’s long lanes unbroken by footprints.
“What can you mean?” asked Lenox.
“Snow is so messy. I warned Toto.”
“You’re not much of a romantic, my dear.”
They dressed and ate breakfast alone, Frederick having taken his breakfast in his room, while his soon-to-be wife was staying with Toto, her chief adviser now, in the dower house, McConnell, only partially back in her good graces, nearby at Everley. At nine o’clock Lenox and Jane stepped into one of the carriages that waited along the avenue. The horses that pulled them into town were strangers, hired for the day, but Lenox had gone to see Sadie in her stable the day before. He had tried to sneak her a carrot but she turned her nose up at it, having become very spoiled, now, and snorting until she received an apple each morning.
The village had rarely looked better. The town green was a smooth white. Steps away, on the porch of St. Stephen’s, there was a great mass of black coats and top hats, people speaking to each other between the merrily green-garlanded pillars of the church.
Everyone had t
urned out, it seemed. There was Fripp, who placed a proprietary hand on Lenox’s elbow and walked him around; Millington, the blacksmith and cricket captain; fat Mr. Kempe, red from the cold; and dozens besides, all full of “Happy Christmas” and sure that the snow was a sign of good luck.
Then, too, there was someone Lenox had particularly hoped to see, Dr. Eastwood, with his newly betrothed: Lucy, the niece of Emily Jasper and Lenox’s old Plumbley friend.
The news was fresh, and so was Lucy, who looked giddy with happiness. She had the feminine beauty — there is none like it in the world, not even in the loveliest eighteen year old — that comes to a woman who has thought her time was gone and past, who has resigned herself to a life alone, and then finds herself truly in love. It was a kind of radiance beyond radiance. She ducked her head and blushed when Lenox congratulated her, her lined eyes full of joy, and held tighter to Eastwood’s arm. For his part the doctor seemed so pleased as to be a new man.
“The great virtue of getting married today is that they shall have to see very little of me.” He looked at Lucy. “We shall get married on a Monday, too, perhaps.”
Lenox looked at him quizzically. “Why is that?”
“You remember, Charles,” said Lady Jane, “Marry on Monday for health, Tuesday for wealth, Wednesday the best day of all, Thursday for crosses, Friday for losses, and Saturday for no luck at all.”
“What day did we get married, dear?”
“Can you have forgotten? It was a Saturday.”
“Then I think it a very stupid rhyme.”
“Perhaps it should be Saturday for the most luck of all,” said Lucy.
“I like that better.”
Besides the villagers, Lenox shook hands with a great many distant cousins, glad to exchange a word with them: Plans were made for suppers and luncheons in London, news of the old house in Devon was passed from mouth to mouth, and cousin Wendell, beatific and plump, said he had driven past Everley that morning when he arrived and it looked “capital, simply capital.”
Lenox felt a fondness for the man now. “When it is yours, will you keep the trees as Frederick has them?” he asked.
“Wouldn’t think of changing ’em — always liked a tree, myself, I think them a very companionable sort of person.”
Soon, by some mysterious common consent, they made their way into the church and filled the pews. Lenox and Lady Jane sat in the third row; already there was Dallington, who was staying at the King’s Arms. He had seemed slightly wan when the subject of Frederick and the governess arose in the past months, but he had always set his mouth firmly and said that he was, “Delighted for them — no, and I shall send them a cracking great hogshead of champagne for their wedding day.”
Rushing in at the last minute, having caught an early train apparently, was Edmund, accompanied by his wife, Molly, a cheery fuschia ribbon tying her hair up, and, to Lenox’s surprise and joy, their son, Teddy. He looked taller at fifteen than he had even six months earlier. He didn’t wear his midshipman’s uniform, but his bearing seemed, nevertheless, naval.
Lenox stood up, and in a church whisper, said, “My dear Teddy, you came! How long are you ashore?”
“Only two weeks. But have you heard I’m studying for lieutenant? And there’s so much to report from the Lucy. Carrow told me especially to say hello, and Cresswell said—”
The opening chords of the organ hushed him, and they crowded into a row together. Frederick, looking unflustered and with a sprig of something wintry in his buttonhole, appeared at the altar — and then the bride came in.
It was uncommon indeed for a bride past the age of twenty to wear white — indeed that color was only consecrated as the ideal twenty-four years earlier, when Victoria had worn it to marry Albert — and no doubt when she married Eastwood, Lucy would opt for gray or blue. Yet with the light of a recent snow still falling gently through the windows, the world clear and soft, it looked beautiful, looked eternal. Lenox felt a fatherly sensation as he watched the governess walk down the aisle and then thought of Sophia — and realized, with gratitude, that the world was always offering him lessons, if he chose to take them. One day the little infant beside him would walk down an aisle like this. Time! How it played you forward, how it filled the world with people to love, how cruel and wonderful at once it could seem. When Miss Taylor stopped at the altar he thought, for a very brief moment, that tears might come into his eyes. Soon enough he mastered himself and the ceremony began.
An hour later they were back at Everley, part of a great multitude of people who were congregated in the hall to celebrate with Mr. and Mrs. Ponsonby.
“Charlie!” called Fripp, holding a glass of champagne.
“Wish you much joy, Mr. Fripp,” said Lenox, smiling.
“There hasn’t been a turn-out like this that I can recall since the old squire’s funeral.”
“A cheery observation.”
Fripp laughed. “Try an orange, there on the sideboard, if you like. I brought them up this morning, as a present, you know.”
You could say for the village that it annihilated some distinctions of class that the metropolis enforced; there was to be a supper later only for the cousins and the likes of Emily Jasper, but this wedding breakfast saw every stripe of person come together. Lady Jane was speaking to some of the women from the cricket pavilion; Toto was fretting with a farmer’s wife about the state of the bride’s train; Dallington and Wendell were reminiscing with the veterinarian from West Buckland about Wells and his coining operation.
Perhaps it wasn’t the village, though; perhaps it was Frederick.
Finding himself alone for a moment, Lenox watched the bride and groom. He was pleased, so very pleased, that they would stay in Everley. He didn’t quite understand why. It was something to do with his mother, in truth: He had believed, before he lost anyone, that after a person died there was a process of comprehension for those left behind, a waning sense of loss. In fact all that happened was that days went on passing, whether you wished them to or not — even for the suffering the sun would rise, casting its inhuman chemistries over the earth, even for the suffering there was food, water, and what color to paint the second bedroom. The formality of a funeral was a deceit; everything that followed it was strayness, pangs, forgetting, remembering, unguided, and unnegotiable.
Then there was Parliament. Every generation no doubt considers themselves especially burdened, their souls harried and pent — certainly each finds of itself that it falls very late in history, as no doubt the Vikings did, to exist so many hundreds of years beyond the legends, or the medieval priests who knew that it had been a thousand years since the birth of Christ. Lenox was not immune from this feeling; and Everley, perhaps, while Freddie was there, represented an inoculation against it.
At about two that afternoon most of the people left, and there was a brief lull in the schedule before supper. “Shall we take Sophia for a walk?” asked Lenox.
“Isn’t it too cold?”
“It’s brightened up now, and we can bundle her up.”
To their surprise the child’s old caretaker, now Mrs. Ponsonby, overheard them and asked if she might come, too. “Everyone imagines me much busier than I am,” she said. “Mostly it has been waiting.” Then Freddie decided that he might as well come, too — there were some very fine waxberries if they walked the loop around the pond.
So they bundled the young girl, with her alert eyes, her pink cheeks, in a mountain of warm clothes, set her in her pram — sturdy enough to conquer the snow, certainly — and set out to walk the path along the pond, happily chattering about the morning, in anticipation of the goose that was being cooked for the evening.
In the library Edmund and Teddy were both reading, the father a parliamentary report, the son a manual on the azimuth compass.
When he noticed his brother outside, Edmund stood up and walked to the cold glass window, close enough that he could press his nose against it. How happy they looked!
As Edmund
watched, half a smile on his face, Freddie stopped his guests’ procession under a broad-branched evergreen and began to lecture them; when he tapped the trunk knowledgably with his cane, however, a great bank of snow shifted in the tree and crashed over them.
Edmund laughed out loud. “Teddy, go and fetch a cloak to the front door for your aunt and your cousin, if you would. I think they’ll have need of it.” Indeed, the whole party had by now already begun to turn back, smiling, laughing, and, in Jane’s case, rather exasperated: making together for the warmth of home.
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