by John Kerr
He found Cecilia resting in bed. With Mrs Clark’s help, she’d managed to change into a fresh nightgown, wash her face and comb out her hair. ‘Good morning, Cecilia,’ he said. ‘I understand you had a difficult night.’ She merely nodded as Gully placed a hand at her wrist and checked her pulse. ‘Let’s take your temperature,’ he said, removing a thermometer from his bag and placing it in her mouth. Removing it after several minutes, he held it up and said, ‘Ninety-nine point eight. Are you in any pain?’
‘A little,’ she said, gently placing a hand over her abdomen.
‘Pardon me, madam,’ said Gully to Mrs Clark, ‘while I examine her.’ Once he had concluded his pelvic examination, Gully removed his stethoscope and looked Cecilia in the eye. ‘The fever you’re running,’ he said in a calm voice, ‘is consistent with a low-grade post-operative infection. The nausea in the night was likely the result of the anaesthetic. You’re feeling better now?’
‘Yes,’ she said softly. ‘I’d like something to eat.’
‘The good news,’ continued Gully, ‘is that there’s no sign of haemorrhage. The important thing, my dear, is to fight the infection, with plenty of rest and wholesome food and drink.’ Turning to Mrs Clark, who was standing at the foot of the bed with a severe expression, he said, ‘She may start with a breakfast of unsweetened tea with dry toast and a boiled egg. Later on she may have consommé.’ Mrs Clark nodded. ‘You must take her temperature each hour,’ he continued. ‘Send for me at once if it rises above 100° or if she becomes sick again.’ He leaned down, kissed Cecilia on the forehead, and said, ‘I’m leaving now, but I’ll be nearby. You should try to rest.’ He turned for a moment to the inscrutable Mrs Clark and then let himself out.
In the days that followed, Mrs Clark was constantly at Cecilia’s side, serving her meals in bed, helping her to bathe and change clothes and, when the fever subsided at last and she regained much of her strength, to take strolls in the orchard, filled with ripening apples. The name of Doctor Gully was almost never mentioned, except when Mrs Clark reported that he had dropped in each morning, asked to see Cecilia, and had been firmly told that she was recuperating in a satisfactory fashion and did not wish to be disturbed. Late one afternoon, almost a week following the ‘procedure’, Cecilia, clad in an elaborately embroidered blue silk robe with matching slippers, was enjoying tea with Mrs Clark in the drawing-room. ‘I’ve made up my mind,’ said Cecilia betweens bites of scone, ‘to speak to James.’
‘I see,’ said Mrs Clark. ‘And what do you intend to tell him?’
‘That I do not wish to see him again.’ The faintest suggestion of a smile curled Mrs Clark’s lips. ‘I’m determined to regain my reputation,’ said Cecilia. ‘I mustn’t have anything further to do with him.’ Mrs Clark took a sip of tea and nodded. ‘Please send Griffiths to the doctor’s cottage with the message I desire to see him.’
Having been turned away on each of his previous attempts to visit Cecilia, Gully was taken aback by the invitation delivered by the coachman and made the five-minute walk with something like foreboding. Entering the mansion, he was escorted by the parlourmaid to the drawing-room, where he found Cecilia seated in one of the rosewood armchairs. Rather than rise to greet him, she extended her hand and allowed him to kiss it. ‘Hallo, darling,’ he said with a smile.
‘Hallo, James. Thank you for coming.’
‘Of course.’ He settled on the settee beside her. ‘You’re looking well,’ he said, noticing that the rosy colour had returned to her complexion.
‘I’m feeling much better.’
‘I came earlier, to look in on you—’
‘I was in no condition to receive visitors.’
‘But as your physician—’
‘James … let’s not quarrel.’
‘All right, dear. Is there something you wished to tell me?’
‘Yes. I’ve made the decision …’ She paused to clear her throat and brush back a strand of hair from her face. ‘The decision to end our affair.’
‘I see,’ said Gully softly. ‘As I feared.’
‘You see,’ said Cecilia calmly, ‘under the present circumstances, with all the talk, we can ill afford to be seen—’
‘I know.’
‘—in public.’ She reached over and placed a hand on his. ‘You understand.’
‘Yes, I understand,’ he said with a grim expression. He looked in her eyes and said, ‘I had hoped to marry you. Or at least to continue to see you in private.’
‘Oh, James, who knows how long that wife of yours will continue living? I can’t go on like this. My good friend insists that I—’
‘Your good friend?’
‘Yes; Janie. Mrs Clark. She insists that I must enter society with persons of my own age, and standing.’
Gully shook his head and stared at the geometrical pattern of the Persian carpet. Looking up at Cecilia, he said, ‘It was a mistake from the very beginning. An old man like me, falling in love with someone less than half my age. I should never have—’
‘Don’t say it,’ said Cecilia, giving his hand a squeeze. ‘You saved me from a terrible predicament. You taught me that I could be happy and be free. Why, you’re the finest man I’ve ever known, and I shall always love you.’
Reflecting that it was Cecilia who insisted that he move from Malvern to Balham, that he take his own lodgings, and that he accompany her on the ill-fated outing to Throckmorton’s, he said, ‘I’m sorry. I don’t know what more there is for me to say. Of course, I shall respect your decision.’
‘What will you do?’ she asked, rising from her chair. ‘Return to Malvern?’
‘I’m not sure,’ he replied, as he rose stiffly from the settee. ‘Goodbye, darling,’ he said, leaning over to kiss her.
‘Goodbye, James.’
Gully turned and walked slowly toward the hall, eyed wistfully by Cecilia, standing with her hands on the back of the chair, and by Mrs Clark, concealed in the shadows of the adjoining dining-room.
Chapter Eight
MRS JANE CLARK, the highly efficient keeper of the household, supervising a large staff of maids, cooks, gardeners, and stablemen, though Cecilia’s constant companion she remained something of a mystery. What adjectives would Cecilia have chosen to describe her? Loyal, capable, discreet, reticent; though others would have been less charitable: severe, humourless, even malevolent. Though little was known of her past, her references had been excellent, and Cecilia had gradually educed the salient details of her life story: that she was of indeterminate middle age, a widow, the mother of a son and daughter in school in the south of England, that her childhood had been spent unhappily in Liverpool, and that she had lived with her late husband for a number of years in Jamaica. Now that Dr Gully had passed out of Cecilia’s orbit, Mrs Clark occupied an increasingly central place in the life of the vain, self-indulgent, wealthy young widow.
‘Ahh,’ murmured Cecilia, sinking up to her chin in the steaming hot water of her claw-foot bath. She closed her eyes and inhaled the pleasant bouquet of the expensive French bath crystals. Sponging her neck and shoulders, she stirred the surface of the sudsy water with her toes, and said, ‘Read me another poem, Janie.’
‘Very well,’ said Mrs Clark, seated on a stool just outside the tiled enclosure of Cecilia’s bath. She turned to the fly page of the blue volume, an anthology of Elizabethan verse, and glanced at the inscription: To Cecilia with much love, James. ‘Shall I read a sonnet?’ she asked.
‘Yes,’ said Cecilia. ‘The one that begins with … . “sweet silent thought”.’
Locating the poem, Mrs Clark read:
‘When to the sessions of sweet silent thought
I summon up remembrance of things past,
I sigh the lack of many a thing I sought
And with old woe new wail my dear time’s waste.’
‘Old woe … new wail,’ said Cecilia. ‘That’s very good.’
‘Yes,’ said Mrs Clark, ‘Shakespeare was quite clever with words.’
Grasping the sides of the bath, Cecilia lifted herself up and said, ‘Bring me a towel, dear.’
Putting the book aside, Mrs Clark took a thick towel from the rack and handed it to Cecilia who stood dripping on the tiles, her soft skin a healthy pink. She ran the towel over her face, shoulders, and arms, untroubled by nudity before another woman after her weeks of communal bathing at the hydro, and said, ‘There’s nothing more refreshing than a good, hot soak.’
Mrs Clark made no comment, but watched Cecilia with a detached, critical expression. ‘You should eat more, Cissie,’ she said at length. ‘You’re too thin.’
‘I prefer to be thin,’ said Cecilia, dropping the towel on the floor and walking past Mrs Clark into her boudoir. ‘It’s the new fashion. I think I must have some new clothes to match.’ After a few minutes she emerged from her dressing-room, wearing a sleeveless cotton bodice and frilly knickers that reached below her knees, and sat before the mirror. ‘After you’ve done up my hair,’ she said, as she powdered her cheeks, ‘tell the cook I’m ready for breakfast. And then I’m taking the 10.40 into the city.’
In the months since Cecilia had severed her relationship with Gully, her efforts to re-enter polite society had availed her little. Though the gossip surrounding her scandalous affair had died away, and she was no longer treated as a pariah in the village, her mother and father would not consent to see her and she had no friends, apart, of course, from Mrs Clark. Much to Cecilia’s surprise, Gully continued to divide his time between Orwell Lodge, his cottage in Balham, and the hydro, presumably, she considered, in the hope that she would relent and see him again. On one occasion she had passed him on the pavement in town, though he merely tipped his hat as she waved and drove by in the carriage. Living alone in the large house, surrounded by servants, without a single invitation to tea or dinner, or even to meet an acquaintance over lunch, Cecilia grew increasingly withdrawn and melancholy as autumn gave way to the cold, dark, and damp of December and the approach of Christmas and its society balls and dances, where she would be unwelcome. Fearing that Cecilia would fall deeper into despair, and in her despair turn back to Gully, Mrs Clark intruded on her one evening at supper, seated alone at the long dining-room table with a bowl of soup and carafe of wine. ‘May I join you, Cissie?’ she said as she drew back a chair.
‘Of course. Would you care for a glass of Madeira?’ Cecilia summoned a servant with a small silver bell, who promptly returned with another wineglass.
‘Do you recall,’ said Mrs Clark as Cecilia poured each of them a glass of the garnet-coloured wine, ‘that my late husband was employed in Jamaica?’
‘You’ve mentioned it.’
‘He was the supervisor of a large coffee plantation—’
‘Doctor Gully was brought up on a Jamaica coffee plantation,’ interjected Cecilia.
‘Yes,’ said Mrs Clark. ‘On one occasion we conversed about our experiences in the colony. At all events, the plantation owner who employed my husband is a wealthy man named Cranbrook. Sir Harry Cranbrook.’ Cecilia sipped her wine and dabbed at her lips with her napkin. ‘I made his acquaintance, of course,’ continued Mrs Clark, ‘and his wife. As one does with fellow Britishers on an island populated by black Africans.’
‘So I imagine,’ said Cecilia, taking a spoonful of soup.
‘The Cranbrooks have a very fine house in London,’ continued Mrs Clark, ‘on Palace Green, in Kensington.’
‘Good heavens,’ said Cecilia. ‘On Palace Green? Very fine indeed.’
‘Yes,’ added Mrs Clark with a smile. ‘And Sir Harry has a stepson by the name of Charles, a barrister in the Temple, whom I’m told is very well bred and quite handsome.’
‘I see,’ said Cecilia, helping herself to more Madeira.
‘A young man of your age,’ said Mrs Clark. ‘And a bachelor. With your permission,’ she concluded, ‘I can arrange a social call on the Cranbrooks. I should like you to meet them.’
‘You’re such a dear, Janie,’ said Cecilia, running a finger nervously along the edge of the soutache on her sleeve. ‘Of course you have my permission.’
After the hectic social calendar of the Christmas season, Mrs Clark’s efforts to arrange a visit to the Cranbrook home finally met with success: an invitation to tea, early in the new year. At Victoria Station, the two women shared a hansom cab, passing along the streets of Belgravia and Knightsbridge to Kensington Road on a clear, cold January day. With a fur over their laps, Cecilia pointed out familiar sights along their route: the imposing town house she’d once shared with Captain Castello, the art gallery on the Brompton Road where she’d acquired her Gainsborough, and the broad expanse of Hyde Park, blanketed in snow. Turning on Palace Green, they rode past Kensington Palace in a clattering of hoofs on cobblestones and arrived at the imposing Cranbrook mansion punctually at half past three. Before exiting the hansom, Cecilia looked Mrs Clark in the eye and said, ‘I appreciate what you’re trying to do.’ Mrs Clark responded with a thin smile. ‘To help restore my reputation,’ said Cecilia. Mrs Clark nodded.
‘Mind your step, ladies,’ said the driver, opening the door and extending a gloved hand. ‘It’s a bit icy.’
Cecilia stood at the tall iron gate and studied the brick and stone façade of the house, one of the grandest in London, with a flutter in her chest. Mrs Clark held open the gate and escorted Cecilia up the walk to the varnished mahogany door, the bell of which was answered by a butler in a black cutaway and starched bib. Ushering the visitors into a sky-lit entrance hall, crowded with potted ferns and marble statuary, he said, ‘I’ll take those,’ helping Cecilia out of her dark-blue coat with the sable collar. ‘M’lord and M’lady are expecting you in the drawing-room.’
Cecilia had taken care to dress for the occasion, choosing an expensive blue gown from her dressmaker on Bond Street, with flounces at the skirt, an elaborate, diaphanous sash at her slender waist, a double row of buttons in front, long sleeves with white cuffs, and a matching blue hat. With her porcelain complexion, red lips, and auburn curls, the overall impression combined beauty with wealth and high fashion, precisely what she intended. Sir Harry and Lady Cranbrook stood with their backs to the fire blazing in the marble fireplace when Cecilia and Mrs Clark entered the high-ceilinged room, decorated with worn Persian rugs on the parquet floors and an arrangement of oil portraits of the Cranbrook ancestors hanging on the pale-green walls.
‘Come in, come in,’ said Sir Harry cheerfully. As Cecilia walked confidently up to him, he added, ‘My dear Mrs Clark. How good to see you again.’
With a slight bow, Mrs Clark said, ‘Let me introduce Miss Cecilia Henderson. Sir Harry and Lady Cranbrook.’
Extending her hand to Sir Harry, Cecilia said, ‘How do you do.’
‘My goodness, what a beautiful dress,’ remarked Lady Cranbrook, a short, stout woman with greying hair and rouged cheeks who Cecilia judged to be in her fifties.
‘Why, thank you,’ said Cecilia, confident that her clothing was the very best in the room.
‘Let’s sit,’ said Sir Harry, motioning to a grouping of armchairs and a sofa upholstered in pale-blue silk, ‘and I’ll ring for tea.’
Once they were seated, Lady Cranbrook turned to Cecilia and said, ‘Miss Henderson, I understand you live in Balham.’
‘Yes,’ said Cecilia, who sat with her hands folded in her lap, ‘after the death of my husband …’
‘Your husband?’ said Sir Harry.
‘Henderson’s my maiden name. I was married to Richard Castello.’
‘Castello?’ said Sir Harry. ‘Of the international telegraph?’
‘Yes,’ said Cecilia. ‘Richard’s father. And after my husband’s untimely death, I acquired a property in Balham adjoining Tooting Bec Common. It’s country living, really, yet close enough to the city.’
‘And,’ said Sir Harry affably, ‘you have the capable Mrs Clark to manage your affairs. Ah, here’s tea.’ Two servants appeared bearing silver trays, one with a bone china tea service
and the other with an assortment of pastries and finger sandwiches, which they carefully lowered to the butler’s tray table in front of the sofa. As the servants poured, Sir Harry, a short, sturdy man with a shiny bald pate, tufts of white hair at his temples, and a ruddy complexion, reminisced with Mrs Clark about their years in Jamaica: ‘… so dreadfully hot and humid … yet exceptionally beautiful … nothing to equal Blue Mountain coffee.’
Putting aside her teacup, Cecilia turned to Sir Harry and said, ‘Do you have family living here with you?’
‘Our daughter Martha is married,’ he said, ‘and lives with her husband in Birmingham, and our boy Charles, a barrister, has rooms in Knightsbridge and, of course, his chambers at Gray’s Inn.’
‘I see,’ said Cecilia, reaching for a scone, which she liberally smeared with clotted cream.
‘But he’s home for a visit,’ said Sir Harry amiably. ‘Tell me, Mrs Clark, are your children well?’
‘William’s in school at Brighton, and Florence – do you remember Florence?’
‘I seem to recall a small sprout of a girl.’
‘Yes, well, she’s all of fourteen now—’
‘My, my.’
‘Away at school in Tunbridge Wells.’
Munching her scone, Cecilia considered Sir Harry’s reference to Charles as ‘our boy’, deducing he regarded him as an adopted son.
‘I understand that your father,’ said Lady Cranbrook between bites of a cucumber sandwich, ‘has an estate in Oxfordshire?’
‘Yes,’ said Cecilia. ‘Buscot Park. My parents divide their time between the country and their house in Belgravia.’
‘More tea, miss?’ asked a servant.
‘Please.’ At the sound of footfalls, Cecilia turned toward the hallway just as a young man strode into the room.
‘Sorry to interrupt,’ he said. ‘Just searching for my dashed tobacco.’
