by Susanna Ives
He yelped.
“He said yes.” Kesseley chuckled. A chuckle! She grinned to hear the comforting sound again.
“I can always count on dear Samuel.” She curtsied and then hurried outside, her mind quickly returning to the matter of Edward and his lack of correspondence.
She eagerly shuffled through the letters.
Then again.
And again.
And one more time to make sure.
Nothing. Just the March edition of Town and Country. She turned it over and shook it. No letter from Edward fell out.
It felt like a foot had stepped on her heart and flattened it. Now another dull, useless day stretched out before her like a play seen over and over again: going through the household accounts, sewing for the Foundling orphanage, fighting with Mrs. Potts over supper, discussing her father’s mathematical theories over burnt mutton, and reading Edward’s poems by the candlelight until she fell asleep. She began to trudge home, resigned.
“Henrietta! Wait!” Kesseley ran out of the pub to catch up with her, waving a journal, faithful Samuel at his heels. “I’m in the Journal of Agriculture!”
He popped the page with his knuckle. Henrietta leaned over and read, “Increasing Turnip Yield by Addition of Ash Constituents” by the Earl of Kesseley. Why couldn’t she get any good news? Then pride in Kesseley’s eyes made her feel guilty for her jealous thought.
“Kesseley, that’s wonderful.”
“Come, let’s have a glass of ale or tea to celebrate.”
But all Henrietta wanted to do was go home, curl into a small ball under her blanket and feel sorry for herself. “Thank you, Kesseley, but I–I don’t feel so well.”
Concern leaped into his eyes, and he seized her arm. “Did you get some bad news?”
“No. I just have a headache. Congratulations again.” And she meant it. She knew from her father’s struggles what it meant to have one’s work published. She gave his hand a reassuring squeeze, then let go. “Do come by before you go. I will give you the diary. You needn’t write about your wife, perhaps just crop rotations or ideas of future articles.”
“Henrietta, wait—”
“I’m so sorry, I have to go.” She pulled away and continued home to her haven of self-pity. She could feel him watching her leave, disappointed. Guilt flopped about like a fat fish in her heart. Why did he always make her feel so awful about herself? She never wanted to disappoint him, yet inevitably she did.
Maybe she should go back and have one small cup of tea. But then he would go on and on about the minute details of ash constituents, whatever they were. She didn’t have the energy to feign interest in Kesseley’s many agricultural experiments. Not today. She would make it up to him on another occasion, she promised, trying to make herself feel better, even as she knew she had made that same promise many times before and never fulfilled it.
***
At home, Henrietta threw her bonnet on the sofa so hard it knocked off the silk irises she had sewn on to it. She sat down, put her chin on her hand and let her thoughts swing from guilt over Kesseley to anxiety about Edward.
Edward had been in London for six weeks now with no word. “He said he loved me, to be patient,” she reminded herself, remembering the evening his lips had descended upon hers. The gentle pressure, a tingle up her spine, his warm mouth tasting of cream and wine. Hushed strains of a violin and the murmur of guests had floated into the garden, breaking the quiet wintry November evening. Everything had disappeared when his lips touched hers. Years of wanting and dreaming were over, and now they would begin their lives together.
But he really should have written by now. London was full of fashionable, beautiful women who loved poetry—and handsome poets.
No! He was busy in London seeing to his late father’s estate and finishing another volume of poetry for his editor. He hadn’t the time to write, and she should think herself a selfish creature indeed to impose upon his time.
Then that little voice, the one that snickered like a childish tattler, said, you know, he never formally proposed to you.
Ugh! She slapped her forehead with the mail, trying to swat the little voice silent.
She took the mail upstairs, knocked on the library door and slipped inside the nebula of papers and books composing her father’s existence. Celestial maps and charts covered the dark paneled walls and arching windows. Haphazard piles of papers rose from the floor, making it treacherous to walk, never mind sweep. In the center of this galaxy of disorder stood her father, Walter Watson, a striking gentleman possessing a hawklike nose, wild graying curls, and eyes that seemed perpetually lost in some inner calculation. He hunched over a large table, scribbling notes, across from where his noted astronomer colleague, Mr. Pieter Van Heerlen, sat. Much more fastidious than her father, Mr. Van Heerlen had neatly stacked her father’s books and papers to one side in order to make a clean surface on which to work. He was a rather slight, fair gentleman of about five and thirty years. He possessed those intense Germanic blue eyes, further amplified by thin, round spectacles. He had come for a “mere” week’s visit over a month ago to “glance” at Mr. Watson’s work. Ever proper, he rose and stiffly bowed for Henrietta. She curtsied in reply.
“You appear flushed, Miss Henrietta. I hope you have not strained yourself.” Mr. Van Heerlen seemed to operate under the assumption that Henrietta was a delicate, shrinking flower—the kind pressed and eternally kept in a glass picture box.
Her father dismissively waved his hand. “Oh don’t worry about Henrietta. She is forever tromping about the fields with Kesseley. She wanders home covered in bugs and mud.”
Mr. Van Heerlen’s eyes narrowed with disapproval.
“That was years ago, Papa. When I was a girl,” Henrietta corrected. She didn’t want to upset Mr. Van Heerlen, for he was a very influential astronomer in the German scientific community and could establish or destroy her father’s professional reputation with one word. “I just went to get the mail.”
She kissed her father’s cheek and handed him his letters, all under Mr. Van Heerlen’s scrutinizing gaze.
Mr. Watson put down his pen and wiped his inky fingers on his vest. Henrietta cringed at the black streaks, knowing she had to oversee the laundry the next day. He looked at the address on each letter and then placed them on a pile of other unopened letters, all accounts for her to sort and balance. The last letter, however, he eagerly tore open and read, the paper trembling in his fingers.
“What is it, Papa?” she gasped, aroused from her doldrums.
“Mr. Van Heerlen! You did it! We have an appointment at the Royal Observatory!”
He handed the letter to his colleague, who read it aloud in his crisp Flemish accent.
“Dear Sirs,
I have read your appeal for an appointment. Though Mr. Van Heerlen and I have had differences of opinion in the past, I am obliged to grant my esteemed colleague an audience in the later spring…”
“This could be it, Henrietta. What your mother and I always wanted. That we weren’t wrong assuming an unfound planet explained the perturbations of Uranus’s orbit. No, they said, it’s a moon or a comet. We knew nothing could alter the orbit of a planet of such size and mass, unless it was another object of equal or greater size and mass. It just makes sense. I just wish that…” Mr. Watson’s jaw started to tremble. “I wish she could have been here.”
Henrietta wanted to hold her papa and lean her head on his chest but felt restrained by Mr. Van Heerlen’s presence. “You would have made her proud, Papa,” she whispered instead.
“Would I?” Mr. Watson covered his mouth with his hand and gazed at his papers. She could still see her mother’s old calculations among the new work. Tears formed in her father’s eyes, but he blinked them away. “We must get to work. I must not disappoint her.”
“I shall tell Mrs. Potts to set a special table for this evening,” Henrietta said, in an attempt to excuse herself.
“Yes,” Mr. Van Heerlen said a
t the same time her father cried, “No, no. We need your help.”
Her father grabbed a chair, brushed away the papers piled on it and set it beside Mr. Van Heerlen. Then he handed Henrietta an old dented pen he found under his scribbled pages.
Henrietta waited for her father’s instructions while he shuffled through his papers. Beside her, Mr. Van Heerlen twitched, fuming in silent disapproval. After a long, uncomfortable minute, she opened Town and Country, hoping the latest doings of Lady Sara would divert her self-conscious thoughts.
Henrietta, like all the village girls, kept up with the illustrious debutante. To them, Lady Sara wasn’t a duke’s daughter who had grown up in a vastly different world of luxury and social connection, but a bosom friend whom they could freely praise or censure. Henrietta had heard from an old friend who possessed a tenuous familial link to the famed beauty that Lady Sara hid a copy of The Mysterious Lord Blackraven under her mattress. In Henrietta’s mind, their mutual love for Lord Blackraven made them literary sisters at heart.
Henrietta scanned the page for Lady Sara’s name, finding only boring gossip about the Regent’s old fat uncles. Who cared for them anyway?
“Henrietta, what is the eccentricity if the minimum distance to the sun is 2,737,827,391.4477095 miles and the maximum distance is 2,822,788,999.2901435 miles?”
Henrietta asked her father to repeat the major and minor axes, while she scratched out the formula along the margins of her journal.
“0.011214269,” she said.
Mr. Van Heerlen released a low, annoyed sigh. Oblivious to his colleague’s discomfort, her father kept calling out problems to her. “So what is the distance from a center to a focus?”
She turned the page and wrote 0 then stopped. Beside her pen, Lady Sara’s perfect oval face, with her sad, dreamy eyes, was framed in a heart, linked to another heart containing a rather handsome gentleman. Lady Sara had a beau! Henrietta drew the candle, spreading light across the page. There was something familiar in the suitor’s intense gaze. She looked closer, leaning down until her nose was almost touching the page.
Edward!
“Miss Watson,” she heard Mr. Van Heerlen say, “are you well?”
She felt his tentative hand touch her shoulder.
“I don’t know! I don’t know!” she cried, gulping air as if she were drowning. She put her hands on her ears but couldn’t silence the terrible realization spinning in her head. Grabbing the journal, she flew from the chair, away from Mr. Van Heerlen’s touch, and ran down the hall to the safety of her chamber. She could hear him calling after her. She closed her door and slammed the lock in place. Then she sank to the floor and splayed the magazine upon the carpet.
Those at White’s will be disappointed to learn the headstrong Lady S-a has rejected all suitors and has fallen under the spell of a handsome gentleman poet from Norfolk. A Mr. E-d W-n. The Duke of H-n reluctantly acknowledges the ardent suitor after a foiled attempt to run to Gretna Greene. It is expected their betrothal will be announced at the end of the Season, giving time, the duke hopes, for a more qualified suitor to win her affections.
Henrietta’s body convulsed with sobs. She stumbled to her bed, rolled herself into her blanket and smothered her cries in her pillow. Years of memories slid across her mind, incoherent things: the wind swishing under their feet in the swing, a tiny emerald that fell from his pin, the poem he hid in her book. And now he would run off with Lady Sara! He couldn’t have known her for more than a few days before they made for Gretna Greene. She felt the same sense of helplessness as when she’d spent days by her mother’s deathbed, unable to make her well and unable to stop the pain.
No! She just couldn’t let go. He was as vital to her as her heart or lungs. What would be left of her if he took all her hopes away? A shriveled, old spinster living in a decrepit house, caring for her eccentric father, thinking up the courses for dinner and shooing away chickens with a broom.
She curled herself around her hurting heart. Warm tears slid down her face, wetting the sheet under her head. She rubbed her mother’s pendant. Henrietta hadn’t ached so much since the day her mother finally slipped away. She and Kesseley had quietly sat with their bare feet in the Great Ouse River and listened to its gentle trickle. A blue moth lit upon his finger. He lifted it onto her shoulder, letting its wings brush her skin.
“Kesseley,” she whispered as if he were there. “It hurts so much. She shouldn’t marry him. She is supposed to marry a duke or an—”
Then the idea came as clear as the day the numbers had leaped from Kepler’s pages and formed a perfect ellipse around the sun.
***
Kesseley dug his boot tips into the dirt of his tenant’s field as he tried to keep an upset ewe captive between his knees. He bent over her hoof, scraping the mud off with his finger and cursing to himself. You’re a sap, a fumbling, cabbage-headed sap. You can’t forget about her, can you? You should have stayed away from the village, but you couldn’t leave her alone.
“Forget her,” he said aloud.
“What’s that you say?” Simmons, his portly tenant, called from several sheep away.
“Nothing. I’m talking to myself.”
“The only intelligent conversation a man can have.”
“Aye.” The ewe bolted away from Kesseley, turned and bit into the hard bone of his shin. Hissing a quiet curse, he bent in pain while the ewe looked on with round, fearful eyes. Kesseley took a slow breath between his teeth. He’d known that fear as a small boy, terrified and huddled, waiting for his angry father’s blow. Kesseley reached out and softly scratched the thick pile between the ewe’s ears. “Calm down, my girl. Calm down,” he whispered, stroking the frightened creature until she trusted him enough to expose her favorite rubbing place below her ear. Then Kesseley raised her foot again and ran his thumb across the tough cartilage of her hoof. It crumbled like brittle straw. “Poor girl, no wonder you’re ill-tempered.” He called out to Mr. Simmons, “It’s foot rot. She needs to be separated.”
Mr. Simmons wiped his sweating, red brow. “I knew it! They probably all have it.”
Kesseley bent to look at another ewe, but stopped. Along the wooden fence, Henrietta approached, cradling a stack of books in her arms. The wind blew her blue pelisse back, exposing the outline of her trim legs and waist. Black curls fell loose from a knot on her head, falling down her back and dancing about her fair face.
Oh hell! Kesseley sucked in a large breath and wiped his hands on his coat. Whatever she wants, just refuse.
But her large dark eyes were glassy, and scarlet blotches—the ones that always came out when she cried—spotted her cheeks. Kesseley raced to her.
“Good God! What is the matter?”
Her chin began to tremble. Little teardrops rolled down her face. She tried to speak, but nothing came out, just an awful squeak.
He stood there, his arms dangling about his body, feeling as useless as when he was a small boy trying to comfort his mother as she cried over some cruel thing his father had done. Kesseley hated feeling this way, hated it all the way down to his soul. He enclosed her shoulder in his hand. She felt as delicate as baby chick feathers.
“Henrietta?” he said softly.
“I was w-wondering if I might t-talk to you?” She looked at Simmons’s wide backside leaning over an ewe. “Perhaps somewhere else.”
“Yes, of course!” Kesseley reached for her books but she held them tight, taking his arm instead. He led her along the old path they had run along every day as children, over the wooden fence and into the thicket of trees surrounding the banks of the River Ouse. Samuel scurried behind, sniffing mole holes and suspicious clumps on the path.
The afternoon sun was low, illuminating the majestic oak growing along the shores of the river. They had always met here—until that Wednesday last year in early autumn.
The oak leaves had finished their fiery show and begun to fall from the branches. He and Samuel were walking out to the fields after a morning meeting wit
h a stonemason concerning repairs to Wrenthorpe. They came upon Henrietta sitting by the banks, bundled in a brown cape, her hands around her knees. He restrained his hound and observed her from behind the oak, letting her beauty fill him. He had not seen her since last Sunday at church, which was unusual, for they seldom went that many days without speaking.
Then as if she could sense him, or smell Samuel, she turned her head. “Were you watching me?” she asked, a little stitch appearing between her brows.
He felt stupid being caught red-handed and tried to play it off as a joke. “Yes, I’m spying on you.”
Her face remained solemn.
“Do you mind if I sit down?” he asked.
She paused, then smiled the beautiful smile that caused his heart to palpitate. “Please,” she said.
He sat beside her, so close their shoulders touched. Samuel lay at his feet, scratching his neck with his hind paw.
After the normal exchange of “how are yous”, she became quiet, watching the orange and yellow fallen leaves drifting on the river’s surface. The cool, breezy weather had reddened her lips and cheeks, and sunlight reflecting off the water made her eyes sparkle like deep amber. He had been working on the words he would tell her in the coming spring. About how he had finally rescued Wrenthorpe from his father’s suffocating mountain of mortgages, and that he expected his harvest to increase even more when he began a new crop rotation technique. He believed he could properly support a wife and family. But as he gazed at her face, he realized he couldn’t wait those few months. The winter loomed too long when he could keep her warm in his arms…his bed.
“I—I want to ask you a question.” A drop of perspiration rolled down his forehead.
She smiled and raised her brow. “Yes?”
“I…that is, would you…” His mouth went dry. He couldn’t form words, he was so nervous.
In frustration, he slid his hand up the back of her neck, feeling her silken curls on his skin. Her eyes widened as he drew her to him. He reassuringly stroked her cheek with his fingers and careful to be gentle even though his body seemed to be exploding under his skin, he placed his lips on hers. She remained still, not responding to his tentative caresses. He panicked. Did she not feel anything? But then she sighed, low and soft. Her fingers tightened about his biceps and she pulled him close. Her lips returned his kisses with a growing hunger as she pressed the peaks of her breasts against his chest. “Henrietta,” he murmured, then sunk his tongue into her mouth, tasting her, plundering her. But she let out a small cry and slid away from his arms.
