Mrs. Graves was silent. They walked past beds of dormant weeds that had yet to be cleared and an old wooden beehive, the residents of which had long ago left for better blossoms elsewhere.
“Your own garden, my dear, have you given any thoughts to it?”
Millie exhaled in relief—and gratitude—at her mother’s acceptance. “Yes, I’ve thought about it. But I’ve yet to set anything into motion.”
Mrs. Graves twined her arm with Millie’s. “Don’t forget it come spring.”
Millie looked toward her empty house. “Will it make me happy?”
“That I cannot answer, my love. But it will give you something to do and something to look forward to—as well as a place of your own.” Mrs. Graves set her gloved hand briefly against Millie’s cheek. “It may not equal happiness, but it is not a bad place to start.”
F itz returned on a Sunday afternoon.
The servants had the day off; the house was silent. He went through the correspondence that had accumulated for him. A letter from Colonel Clements caught his attention: The Clementses planned to visit him after Christmas.
He immediately went in search of his wife.
She was not in the house. He looked in the gardens, the stables, and near the badly choked trout stream—no sign of her. Finally, as he approached the house from the north side, he heard the sounds of demolition.
But it was Sunday. The village men were at their pub; no one worked.
He rounded a wall. His wife, hatless, in a sack of a dress and a brown cloak, stood in a room that had now become detached from the rest of the house, wielding one of the smaller sledgehammers, going after a fireplace. She’d broken through the facade of the mantel and now swung the sledgehammer at the bricks underneath.
The door was already gone. He knocked on the window frame.
She spun around. “Oh, you came back.”
“What are you doing?”
“Well, when you did it, you seemed to enjoy yourself. So I thought I’d have a go at it.”
Sometimes he forgot that he was not the only unhappy spouse in this marriage. That she too wanted to smash things.
“You are going to give yourself blisters.”
“Not yet.”
She swung the sledgehammer again and dislodged several bricks. She also managed to dislodge a lock of hair from her chignon, which was too old a style on a seventeen-year-old girl, even if she was a married ladyship.
He took off his overcoat and picked up a bigger sledgehammer. “Need some help?”
She glanced at him, surprised. “Why not?”
They settled into a steady rhythm. For a girl who’d never done anything more strenuous than lifting a teacup, she was quite handy with her sledgehammer—and strong. They each swung in turn at the fireplace, and she kept up with him strike for strike.
When all that remained of the fireplace was a pile of bricks, they were both panting. She placed her hand over her heart, her cheeks brightly flushed. “Well, that was good.”
He tossed aside his sledgehammer. “Is there anything to eat?”
“We’ve a sponge cake and a beef pie in the larder.”
They made their way together to the kitchen, where several stock pots sat simmering. He filled a pot with water, stoked the fire, and set it to boil. She, meanwhile, found some plates and silverware, and located the sponge cake and the beef pie.
“Missing your fellow?” he asked after he’d finished his portion of the beef pie.
She raised an eyebrow in question.
“That was why you were wrecking the fireplace, wasn’t it?”
She shrugged. “Maybe.”
He felt a pang of sympathy for her. He could always find someone willing to give him a few hours of oblivion. How did she cope?
“How was London?” she asked. “Did you enjoy it?”
He caught an undertone in her words. Goodness, she knew precisely what he’d been up to in London. The girl was not as prim as he’d made her out to be. “It was all right.”
“Good,” she said. “I’m glad.”
He caught something else to her tone. “Are you?”
She looked directly at him, all maidenly innocence again. “Why wouldn’t I want you to have a good time?”
He had no answer for that. So he gave her Colonel Clements’s letter. “The colonel is coming to visit.”
She scanned the letter. To her credit, she didn’t turn a hair. “Well, we’d better annihilate some more of the north wing after tea, ought we not?”
R eady?” Fitz asked, as the brougham carrying Colonel and Mrs. Clements pulled into view.
Lady Fitzhugh nodded. She had on her most somber dress, her hair in a chignon again—this time Fitz approved. They were two minors going up against a formidable man and this was no time for her to look her age.
“Are you ready?” she murmured.
“I must confess: I’m rather looking forward to this.”
“I came, I saw, I smashed,” she said drily.
“Precisely.”
The carriage came to a stop before the house. As the drive had been repaved after the building of the north wing to show it off during the approach, the colonel would have already seen its absence.
And indeed, before they could utter a welcome, the colonel barked, “What happened to the manor, Fitz?”
“Colonel,” said Fitz, “Mrs. Clements, so delighted you could join us.”
“What a lovely brooch, Mrs. Clements,” chirped his wife. “Please, come in.”
Colonel Clements was not so easily distracted. “You will answer my question. What happened to the manor?” he bellowed as they entered the manor.
Fitz felt himself perspiring. “We are in the midst of repairs still, sir. Please excuse the state of the house.”
“Repairs? Half of the manor is gone.”
“Sometimes repairs involve unanticipated results.”
“Such results are unacceptable. You will rebuild the north wing.”
“Of course we will put the manor to rights. But that is not what we are about to do tonight,” said Lady Fitzhugh, with a confidence and a skill that belied her years. “Tea, Mrs. Clements?”
Colonel Clements would not let the subject drop. “I cannot believe you countenanced this destruction of your home, Lady Fitzhugh.”
Fitz sucked in a breath. To pretend Colonel Clements was overreacting was one thing, to be subject to his direct ire, quite another. Lady Fitzhugh, however, was not the least bit intimidated. “Countenanced it, sir? No, I encouraged it. It was my idea.”
She didn’t just have audacity. She had enormous balls.
Colonel Clements sputtered. “Explain yourself, young lady.”
“Had the north wing been better built, Lord Fitzhugh and I would have endeavored to rehabilitate it. However, it was ill conceived and badly executed. Even if we restored it today, we still must keep restoring it forevermore, committing infinite outlays of funds so that it does not once again fall into disrepair. And since no one is possessed of infinite funds, we chose to have a more modest house that is within our means of upkeep.
“The other choice is to someday sell my future firstborn son on the marriage mart. And that I absolutely refuse to even contemplate. Lord Fitzhugh had to submit to such a fate; that was enough. It will not happen again, not while I have a breath left.”
Her tone was eminently reasonable and she maintained a friendly smile throughout. But there was no mistaking the underlying vehemence of her words. Colonel Clements was rendered momentarily speechless. And Fitz—it began to dawn on him that he had married no ordinary girl.
Tea was brought in. Lady Fitzhugh poured for everyone.
“This is excellent tea, Lady Fitzhugh,” said Mrs. Clements.
“This is utter heresy.” Colonel Clements found his voice. “The house is entailed. You cannot—”
“Colonel, you will not upset our hosts. Why don’t you have some of this lovely sandwich?” said Mrs. Clements firmly. “Now, Lady
Fitzhugh, tell me how you are finding Somerset.”
And that was that.
At the end of tea, with the Clementses shown up to their room to change for dinner, Fitz approached his wife and squeezed her hand. “Well done, old girl.”
She looked at him, surprised by his gesture. Then she smiled—she was a pretty girl after all, with nice, even teeth. “You did very well yourself. Now make sure you are amenable to everything the colonel says for the rest of their visit.”
He nodded, understanding her perfectly. “I will be most abjectly agreeable.”
N ot all the north wing was smashed. Much of it was carefully preserved: The glass panes of the conservatory were earmarked for the rebuilding of the greenhouses, the stones of the wall for a later restoration of the kitchen, and the roof tiles for the chicken coop, the dovecote, and the mushroom house.
More curiously, however, Lord Fitzhugh had left a fifteen-foot-long section of wall standing. When Millie asked him why the wall had not been knocked down along with everything else, he’d said lightly, “For those days when we are again in the mood to smash something.”
The first of such days came a week after the first anniversary of their marriage, which passed unremarked.
She heard the sound of the sledgehammer from her sitting room, early in the morning. The answer to her question was found in the Times. Miss Pelham’s mother had announced the betrothal of her daughter to a Captain Englewood. The name was somewhat familiar. She dug up the guest list from her wedding and there was a clan of Englewoods. Captain Englewood, it seemed, was either an Eton classmate of Lord Fitzhugh’s or the elder brother of a classmate.
At noon she took a sandwich and a flask of tea to him. In his shirtsleeves, he sat on an empty windowsill, his head resting against the frame of the wall, Alice in his hand.
“I’m sorry,” she said. It hurt her to see him in pain.
He shrugged. “It was always going to happen.”
“But you would have preferred that it happened later—or not at all.”
“I won’t deny there is a part of me that never wants to let go of her. But I don’t wish her to go through life alone; it would be far better for her to marry. If only the thought of it didn’t make me so—”
He looked up at the sky. “I haven’t kept up with her news—when we married, I resolved to remove myself from her life entirely. So I don’t know the circumstances surrounding her engagement. On the one hand, I’m worried—terrified—that she said yes to Captain Englewood simply because she could no longer stand to be alone. On the other hand, she could be in love with him and he could very well turn out to be a wonderful husband to her. And does this thought make me glad? Not at all. If she is miserable, I am miserable. If she’s happy, I’ll still be here, taking a sledgehammer to a wall.”
Millie didn’t know what to do. Or what to say. Tears welled in her eyes and she let them fall. What was the point of not crying? His pain and her own seemed one strangely whole entity: a longing for what could not be regained, or gained in the first place.
She wiped away her tears before he could see them.
“Anyway,” he said, “thank you for my lunch. I’m sure you have much to do around the house.”
In other words, he wished to be alone now.
“I can—I can do those things tomorrow,” she ventured.
He shook his head slightly. “It’s very kind of you, but it’s hot and dusty out here.”
“Right,” she said. “I’ll go back inside, then, where it’s much nicer.”
He did not look at her. He had eyes only for Alice, his beloved Alice.
When would she remember that their pain was not the same? That while she would welcome any opportunity to be close to him, even if it was to hear of his love for another woman, he, on the other hand, sometimes simply could not bear the sight of her.
That although occasionally she proved herself an ally, always she was—and always she would be—the personification of all the forces that had kept him from the happiness that should have been his.
M illie resolved to fall out of love with her husband.
She didn’t know why she didn’t think of it earlier. Somehow, when she’d fallen in love, she’d accepted it as a chronic condition, something that must be endured for as long as she lived.
Such could not be true. She must recognize this: There was nothing special about her love. She was simply an ordinary young girl, dazzled by the good looks of an equally young man. What was her love but a desire to possess him? What was his love but a similar drive to own Miss Pelham body and soul?
Some things in life were truly difficult. Finding the source of the Nile, for example. Or exploring the South Pole. But falling out of love with a man who never looked at her twice, why should that prove an insurmountable challenge?
A lice was not quite right. It was September. She should be gorging herself, putting on weight in readiness for her long hibernation, but her appetite was poor. Fitz tempted her with seeds, berries, nuts of all descriptions. He took her on long walks and searched for aphids and other small insects she might find interesting. He had the gardeners germinate various plants so she might have fresh leaf buds, a delicacy she hadn’t enjoyed since spring.
Nothing had any effect. She ate poorly and spent the rest of her waking hours in varying degrees of listlessness, her eyes dim, her breathing labored.
She was getting old. But he’d counted on her to have at least another year in her, twelve more months of gentle snoozing and happy snacking, three hundred sixty-five more days for him to grow accustomed to the fact that she could not live forever.
Not so soon, not with Isabelle’s wedding breathing down his neck. There was no long engagement, as he’d secretly hoped; the nuptials would take place before the end of Captain Englewood’s home leave. The honeymoon would be spent in France and Italy, en route to India, where Captain Englewood was posted.
Fitz would have married her when he was Captain Fitzhugh, on home leave from his regiment in India. And they would have passed through France and Italy on their way to their new life together, completely wrapped in each other, completely thrilled to be married at last.
She was doing her level best to claim the life for which they’d planned—without him.
He still had her letters, the photograph with the entire gang, and the various small presents she’d pressed into his hands over the years. But those were static things, representing only certain moments of the past, whereas Alice was a living, breathing embodiment of all that they were and all that they’d hoped to be. As long as Alice lived, a part of their connection remained unbroken, time and distance be damned.
But without Alice, beautiful Alice…
All around him, life went on. The finishing touches were being put to the restored manor: new floors laid, new wallpapers hung, and shiny, blue enamel commodes installed one by one. His wife seemed to have terribly ambitious plans for the flower garden: Thickets and brambles were cleared; Peruvian guano arrived by the railcar-ful, along with enormous sacks of bulbs, for those first splashes of color in spring.
Sometimes he’d see her in a wide-brimmed hat, conferring with the gardeners, consulting the master plan in her hand as they measured out new flower beds to be built and new paths laid.
And despite his panic, he would gather up Alice and head down to his study, to meet with his steward, his architect, and his foreman; receive his tenants and mediate their problems; and write his weekly report to Colonel Clements on the discharge of his numerous responsibilities.
He was becoming like his wife in some ways: the stoicism, the determination to carry on no matter what.
Alice, however, could no longer carry on.
“I always thought you’d pass away in your sleep,” he told her, adjusting the bed of soft cotton batting he’d made for her. “And it would be so easy you wouldn’t even know it.”
She wheezed another arduous breath. Her eyes were closed. One of her little feet twitched from time
to time, but otherwise she’d become too weak to move.
“I want to have you in my pocket all of my days. And I’ll wager you want the same. I’ll wager you wish you were just having a hard time falling asleep, that when you wake up, it will be spring again and you’ll be strong and healthy and ready to eat your weight. But we can none of us have everything we want, can we?
“You are going to a beautiful place, where it is always spring. I won’t be there, but I’ll remember you from here. And I’ll think of you surrounded by fresh buds and hazelnuts—hungry again, young again.”
She stopped breathing.
He wept, tears falling unchecked. “Good-bye, Alice. Good-bye.”
A n invitation to Isabelle Pelham’s wedding came for the Fitzhughs, but neither Millie nor Lord Fitzhugh attended.
Or rather, Millie assumed her husband did not attend. She was home alone in the country and he off somewhere. She had not asked about his whereabouts. In fact, she did not even keep count of how long he’d been gone—except to know that it had been more than seven days and less than ten.
He came back two days after the wedding. She expected to hear the sledgehammer again. But through her open window came only the sound of the wind, and of the grounds staff as they went about their duties.
Her curiosity outweighed her resolve not to care. She slipped into a room that overlooked the ruined wall. He stood before the wall, still in his traveling clothes, one hand braced against it. Then slowly, he began to walk, his palm sliding across the wall, as if he were a student of archaeology, examining the ruins of Pompeii for the first time.
She went on her afternoon constitutional. When she came back, he was still there, leaning against the stonework, a cigarette dangling between his fingertips.
He raised his chin in acknowledgment of her approach. Somehow the pensive, wistful expression on his face told her everything.
“You went to the wedding,” she said, without further preamble.
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