Beautiful, was his grudging thought.
“Why, that can’t be . . . Windsor Castle?” Daniel said, pointing off to the east.
“It is at that,” Mr. Prout said, and William thought he detected a subtle note of victory in his voice.
Sarah moved beside him and took his arm. “It’s all right, William.” When he looked at her, she smiled. “Truly it is.”
There was no guile in her expression, and William’s heart gave a little lurch. Womanhood and proper nourishment had softened the planes of her face, yet there was still the trace of the fragile waif lurking in the wide green eyes, almost translucent skin, and delicate features. She had spent over half her life in want, and he was driven by the need to protect her.
And to make her happy. Though he had never told her so, he was starting to doubt that he had the power to give her what she desired most, a child. But he could see to it that she lived in the surroundings of the heroines of her novels.
It’s not as if he ever lived here, he forced himself to reason. And a grown man shouldn’t live in the past. Why should he give Lord Holt the power to affect his family’s well-being?
He tucked a cornsilk tendril resting upon Sarah’s pinkened cheeks back into her black felt hat. “You know,” he told her. “On second thought, the one on Church Row wasn’t as large a house as we had hoped for.”
“You . . . don’t want that one either?”
“I’m afraid not. I want this one. But I also believe your father’s right. We shouldn’t make such a large commitment without praying over it until we’ve a clear answer.”
She gave him a grateful smile, even as she shook her head. “You’re saying that just for me. But I don’t think God would lead us to buy a place where it is impossible for you to be happy, William.”
“I’ll be happy.”
“How can you be sure?”
“I’ll be happy because I will choose to be happy. Trust me, Sarah.”
“Oh, William!” She seized him into an embrace, and he grinned at Daniel and Aunt Naomi over her shoulder.
Mr. Mitchell smiled at Mr. Prout. “I have the distinct impression you’ll be hearing from us again.”
****
Because of the season, moving into the Cannonhall Road house had to wait. Catherine came down for Christmas vacation, spending most of her time at study, but also endearing herself even further with the children because of her untiring agreeableness to read any book placed into her lap. Even Danny would cock his head and listen, reaching stubby fingers to help turn pages when he felt one had been dwelt upon long enough.
January lay heavy upon England. Colds and sniffles were passed about like a potato in the child’s game, and on the eighteenth the worst snowstorms in a century blew in, with easterly gales at over seventy miles per hour at Great Yarmouth and snowdrifts twelve feet deep in the Isle of Wight.
By April the snows had melted but rainstorms were frequent. Benjamin Disraeli died on the nineteenth, the eleventh anniversary of Sarah’s having come to Berkeley Square from the orphanage. William’s twenty-seventh birthday was celebrated the following Sunday.
May waltzed in on sunny breezes rife with aromas of clematis and lilac, and the servants began packing and sending nonvital household items to Hampstead. Much of Sarah’s time was spent with the Mitchells, arranging modifications in shipping schedules so that a cargo ship could be refurbished to accommodate passengers. Russian Jews, suffering brutal pogroms since the March third assassination of Czar Alexander III, were pouring into London. Many hoped to secure passage to the States, but possessed little more than the clothes upon their backs. Once she and William learned the gravity of their situations from the Rothschilds next door, they had prayed for a way to help beyond just donating money.
By the eighteenth of May, Sarah’s twenty-fifth birthday, the S.S. Dorothea had made its maiden voyage across the Atlantic with cargo more precious than Wedgwood china and Yorkshire wool, the house agency had found a buyer for the Berkeley Square house, and the last stick of furniture from the same was acclimating itself to its new Hampstead setting.
They were welcomed to their new home with such offerings as baked goods, jars of preserved figs, and baskets of gooseberries and strawberries from every neighbor on Cannonhall Road, including pensioned Admiral Kirkpatrick from next door on the west, and from the other side, the Morlands, proprietors of the Corinthian Hotel on Heath Street. All offered advice on the best places to dine and shop, the best spots on the Heath for horseback riding or picnics, and the best location for Mr. Duffy’s vegetable patch. And while some were aware of Sarah’s connection with Blake Shipping, none expressed any curiosity over Rayborn and Doyle pedigrees.
Sarah and William also had purchased some of the Kelly furniture, such as the mahogany writing table they placed at one of their bedchamber windows overlooking the Heath. But only temporarily, Sarah told William, for she had faith that it would be moved aside one day for a rocking chair.
Ten
On the sixth of June, Catherine knelt over an apple crate in which tins were packed among crinkled newspaper. They bore the labels of Droste’s Cocoa, Mackintosh’s Toffee de Luxe, Yardley Solidified Brilliantine Lavender Soaps and such, but when opened revealed biscuits of all species cradled in tissue papers—arrowroot and chocolate the size of guineas, ratafia and cinnamon like large buttons, shortbread in neat planks, and macaroons heaped like haystacks.
Just a little something to tide you over during examinations was penned in Aunt Naomi’s neat hand.
Three quick raps sounded at her door, and Milly and Peggy swept in before she could bid them enter.
“Milly said you got a—” Peggy started, then cut herself off. “Goodness!”
Catherine handed the Yardley tin up to her. While Peggy’s mother was an excellent cook, she was also a busy woman who often did alterations in the tailoring shop. She stocked up on shop-purchased treats such as Peak Frean biscuits and Cadbury chocolates to give to Peggy whenever she visited home. Milly received money for purchasing her own, so they both appreciated Aunt Naomi’s homemade thoughtfulness as much as Catherine did.
“I wish I had an Aunt Naomi,” Milly sighed, pulling apart a macaroon. She popped half into her mouth, and with a lump in her cheek said, “You have enough here for a party.”
That gave Catherine pause. While she had been invited to several informal suite parties during the year, she had never hosted one herself. She was certain Aunt Naomi wouldn’t mind her sharing the wealth. She glanced about the room. “That’s an excellent idea. Do you think there’s room for all the freshers?”
“All eighteen?” Chewing, Peggy looked about too. “Hmm . . . if we opened your bedroom door.”
“We could push the table against the wall and put all the chairs in my room,” Milly suggested. She sighed, reached into the tin again. “And I suppose there will be nothing left of these.”
“Well . . .” Catherine was having second thoughts over that one. As fun as it would be to share and soak up praise for such fine refreshments, it would also be nice to have some set aside later for intense study sessions. “I’ll set out half and buy more.” Byrde’s Fine Pastries in Cambridge supplied treats for special occasions such as Girton’s annual Old Students’ Dinner that were almost as tasty as Aunt Naomi’s.
****
After breakfast the following morning Catherine stopped by Miss Welsh’s office to ask permission to go into Cambridge.
“Mr. Willingham is off visiting family,” the vice-mistress replied after Catherine explained the nature of her mission. Whenever any student had shopping to do that involved bringing back cumbersome parcels, the grounds keeper could be pressed into delivering her in the wagon, which had benches fitted along the sides for passengers.
“I don’t mind hiring a carriage,” Catherine told her. But that still left her without a chaperone.
“Miss Sinclair mentioned needing to purchase some shoes after lunch,” the vice-mistress replied as if reading he
r mind. She pulled out a desk drawer and handed over a shilling. “Do bring me a couple of those little apricot cakes, will you?”
Miss Sinclair, a plump young woman with a hearty laugh, was the most popular resident lecturer. According to those students reading Mathematics, she treated Calculus as if it were the most exciting subject in the world. That’s the sort of schoolmistress I’d like to be, Catherine thought. Surely difficulty in keeping her mind focused was not unique to her own experience. Even her father once admitted that he would never have passed King’s College in London were it not for Uncle Daniel’s tutelage. How many children today were being unjustly accused of laziness?
“We’ll wait to take a carriage back with our packages,” Miss Sinclair said as they set out on foot for the exercise, and so that the honeysuckle-laden breezes would not be wasted. Accompanying them was Miss Berryman, a third-year student who wished to purchase a pair of gloves. She was also in the Tennis Club, and while she was pleasant enough, she was one of the very few older students who had never invited any freshers to address her by her given name—something freshers were not allowed to do without permission. She shocked Catherine by yawning with mouth uncovered during Miss Sinclair’s relating of her student days in the early seventies, when the College was moved from a rented house at Hitchin to its present location.
“As all our errands are so close together, I shall trust you both to complete yours and meet me at Fordham’s,” Miss Sinclair said when they came upon the shops of Market Street. Scents of yeast rising, cinnamon, and almond icing met Catherine inside Byrde’s. While a woman at the counter made her purchases, Catherine scanned the trays of biscuits and cakes behind the glass. The bell over the shop tinkled, and she automatically turned to look. Hugh Sedgwick entered, clad in brown tweed jacket and navy blue trousers. He blinked as if adjusting to the indoor light, then gave her a crooked smile.
“Why, good afternoon, Miss Rayborn,” he said, removing his boater hat.
“Good afternoon,” she replied with a delicate balance of casualness and breeziness. Casual, because she did not wish him to suspect for a moment how she had hoped for the sight of him at the Cambridge and London stations between terms, and breezy so he would not suspect her disappointment every time she checked the chimneypiece in the reading room once winter was behind them.
“ . . . and half of that apple cheesecake,” said the woman at the counter, while Catherine and Mr. Sedgwick stood in awkward silence.
He cleared his throat. “Congratulations on the Newnham match.”
How did you . . . ? she started to ask, then told herself it was not necessary for him to know of her membership in the Tennis Club. His statement was simply generic, based upon the fact that she was a Girton student.
“Thank you.” Because she had no idea what else to say, she added, “I wasn’t good enough to participate this time. But my friend Millicent Turner did.”
“I see. Well, there is always next year, isn’t there?”
“Yes, perhaps,” she replied, and a nervous little laugh escaped her.
His expression became glazed, like the icing on the eclairs. He looked down at the shiny leather toe caps of his ankle boots, then up at her again. “The goods are excellent here, aren’t they?”
“Oh, quite,” Catherine replied. “I’m having a little party for all the freshers before examinations.”
“Very nice. I haven’t the excuse of entertaining. I simply have a craving for scones that aren’t as dense as bricks.”
She caught herself in the middle of another nervous titter. Stop that! she ordered herself.
“What’s your pleasure, Miss?”
Catherine turned to the vacant counter, while the bell tinkled the departure of the first patron. The baker’s wife was looking expectantly at her, grey hairs dusting her brown topknot like the flour dusting her gingham apron.
“I beg your pardon,” Catherine told her, but on a whim turned to the young man behind her. “I have so much to buy, Mr. Sedgwick. Why don’t you go ahead?”
“Oh, but I couldn’t . . .”
“Please do. I’ll need another moment to decide.”
“Well, thank you,” he said, and smiled at her as he stepped up to the counter.
Catherine watched him ask the baker’s wife for a half dozen scones. When he turned with paper sack in hand, she was quick to divert her attention to the baked goods behind the glass.
“How will you get all your purchases back to Girton?” he asked.
She looked up at him, as if she had not stared at the back of his head for the past minute. How easy it was to forgive him, she thought with some annoyance. “One of our resident lecturers is just two doors down at the cobbler’s. We’ll be taking a carriage from there.” She managed to stifle the nervous laugh that time.
“What’s your pleasure, Miss?” came again from behind the counter as the bell over the door tinkled and two chatting women entered.
“I’m in the way—forgive me,” he said quickly, taking a step backwards.
“I hope you have a pleasant summer,” Catherine told him just as quickly.
“And you as well.”
She devoted her attention to the baker’s wife, pointing to trays without taking time to think. “And two dozen lemon squares.” After all, they wouldn’t be for sale if they weren’t good. As she walked toward the door with pasteboard box in her arms, she could not help but hope that Mr. Sedgwick would be out there waiting. But she wasn’t surprised when he was not. If he didn’t care enough to write, why should he care enough to wait?
****
Did I write too soon? Hugh pictured himself asking her as he turned up Sidney Street. You did say spring, didn’t you? But of course she had, for he still had her letter in the stationery chest with his correspondence from home. You could have at least sent a note that you’d changed your mind. How difficult would that have been?
It wasn’t shyness that had held him mute in the bakery, for he could not very well act on stage if such were his problem. But the setting was all wrong—the impatient baker’s wife, new customers. He had waited outside the door only for a minute before reason told him that it just wasn’t meant to be. She was probably besieged by suitors who had not squandered their first impressions by making fools of themselves on trains.
Anyway, she giggles too much, he told himself as consolation.
On Green Street he turned into Underwood’s Grocery, dimly lit because of all the placards in the windows. “A half dozen packages of Black Jack, please,” he said at the long counter, then amended his order.
“Rather, make that a dozen.” He seldom chewed gum, for it stuck to the porcelain filling of his upper right back tooth if he wasn’t careful. But on the near horizon loomed the Tripos examination, which would decide whether or not he graduated. His fingernails were bitten to the quick, so it was either gum or he just might gnaw his fingers to the bone.
“Very good, Sir,” said the grocer, a thin man of about thirty with blond hair parted in a straight center line and slick with macassar oil. He opened a wide-mouthed gallon jar and began counting packages into a small paper bag. Over his left shoulder were stacked several tins of Sedgwick Tea. The lotus blossoms on a royal blue background had not changed since Grandmother Sedgwick painted the first template forty-seven years ago. It was fortunate that she was skilled with brush and palette, for Grandfather Sedgwick could not have afforded to hire an artist during the early days of trying to carve a niche for himself in the tea market.
The brand was now ubiquitous across England, and the family business so commonplace to Hugh’s childhood memories that the sight of a Sedgwick Tea magazine advertisement or placard on the side of an omnibus or in a grocer’s window stirred little more sentiment than did the sight of trees or mailboxes—also commonplace to his childhood memories.
“Good afternoon, Mr. Sedgwick.”
The voice that came from behind him rumbled, as if the speaker’s vocal cords were lined with gravel. Hugh knew w
ho was there before turning, for that same voice had filled lecture halls with teachings of axioms and theorems and such over the past four years. Abel Billingford, Ph.D., Fellow of the Royal Society and Head of St. John’s Mathematics Department, was as thick as a tree trunk, though stooped with the weight of seventy years. Thick white curls framed his hatless head so that he resembled later portraits of Beethoven. One spotted hand curved around the ivory handle of a cane, the other clutched a small silk purse.
“Dr. Billingford,” Hugh said, snatching off his hat, although etiquette did not demand that he do so for one of the same gender in a public building. “Good afternoon, Sir.”
“And to you, Mr. Sedgwick.” The man’s faded green eyes took in the bag in the grocer’s hands. “That’s a lot of chewing gum.”
The tone was not accusatory, but just the fact that Dr. Billingford would notice and comment caused Hugh to feel as guilty as if he’d been caught purchasing opium. “Yes, Sir. A vulgar habit, I realize.” He cleared his throat, set the bakery bag on the counter, and dipped into his coat pocket for his purse. “I assure you I don’t normally buy it, but—”
“Do you know the difference between a man chewing gum and a cow chewing her cud?” Dr. Billingford asked.
“Why, no, Sir.”
The faded green eyes glinted humor. “The intelligent look on the face of the cow.”
“Heh-heh, that’s a good one, Sir,” Hugh told him over the grocer’s guffaws. He paid for his gum, pocketed his purse, and stood aside while Dr. Billingford purchased two tins of sardines. Everything within him wanted to bid the old man Good day and escape. But he stood rooted to the ground and watched the crooked fingers rake two shillings from his purse. And when the grocer handed the bag over the counter, Hugh had no choice but to step up again.
“Please allow me, Sir. And I’ll hail you a carriage.”
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