The Tea Rose

by Jennifer Donnelly

  She allowed herself to be swept along by the flow of people, delighted simply to watch and listen. She took in the wooden barrows – pushcarts, they were called in New York – piled high with all manner of goods, from winter fruits and vegetables to secondhand clothing, pots and pans, penny candy, stain removers, and tonics. Peddlers shouted their wares and she listened to them, entranced.

  She was wandering contentedly, her merchant’s heart excited and curious, poking her nose into every stall, examining the contents of every pushcart, when she saw him. A tall, blond lad, good-looking with a devilish grin. He was turned away from her, but she could see the side of his face. He wore a threadbare jacket, a dark cap, and a red neckerchief. His fingers poked through the ends of his gloves. It hurt her to see that they were blue from the cold. As she continued to stare, he winked at a customer, then handed the woman – with a flourish – a paper cone filled with hot chestnuts.

  The lad turned toward her and she instantly saw he wasn’t who she’d thought he was. The smile wasn’t right, nor the cheekbones exactly, nor the shape of his nose. His eyes were brown, not blue. And he was only a boy, maybe seventeen years old. The lad she was thinking of would be almost thirty by now. And he’d be running Peterson’s of Covent Garden, not peddling chestnuts. “You’re seeing things now, you daft cow,” she told herself. A combination of the darkness and not having eaten all day. She looked away, feigned interest in a used copy of Wuthering Heights at a nearby bookstall, and tried to chuckle at her own silliness. But the laughter didn’t come.

  The day she’d married Nick she’d realized, with an awful certainty, that she would never stop loving Joe Bristow. She had tried to make herself believe otherwise once with disastrous consequences. And though it was a hard thing to admit, she had done her best to accept it and go on with her life. She tried never to think of him. And when she did, she told herself that she’d made peace with what he’d done. It was mostly true. With the passage of time and the immense distance between her old life and her new one, understanding had finally replaced her anger. And her sorrow.

  Joe had been young and he’d made a terrible mistake, one that had hurt him, too. She imagined he was happy now, but that night on the Old Stairs, the night he’d told her what he’d done, his own grief had been genuine. He’d been a bright and eager lad, one who’d been held down by his father and his circumstances, and he’d let his first taste of success go to his head. The way she saw it now, he’d been seduced by more than Millie – he’d been seduced by Tommy Peterson’s power and money, by his own enormous ambition.

  Ease and wealth – these things could be hard, almost impossible, to resist. Fiona knew this to be true, for she had allowed herself to be seduced, too – by William McClane and the life of privilege he had offered her. In the weeks and months after her wedding to Nick, it had become increasingly important to her that she find it in herself to forgive Joe, for she had discovered how very painful it was to hurt someone and be so very sorry for it, and yet not be forgiven. For Will had not forgiven her.

  She winced now at the memory of their last meeting. It had occurred at Will’s apartment the day after her wedding. He’d rushed back from his trip only to find that the woman he loved, the woman who’d promised to marry him, had married someone else. He was destroyed by her betrayal and had ranted at her furiously, telling her she’d ruined his life and her own. Then, spent, he’d sat down and covered his face with his hands. Weeping with remorse, Fiona had knelt by him, trying to explain how she’d had no choice. She told him that Nick had faced prison and deportation and that she knew he’d never survive it. Will had raised his head then and said, “Obviously, Nicholas Soames means a lot more to you than I do.”

  Fiona had met his gaze. “Yes. Yes, he does,” she’d said softly. Then she’d stood up, for there was nothing more to say, and left Will’s home. It was the last time she’d seen him alone. They’d glimpsed each other in passing at theaters and restaurants and exchanged at most a curt nod, a few polite words, nothing more. Five years ago, he had married again – a woman from his circle, a widow close to his own age. From what Fiona heard, he spent more time in the country these days and left the running of his businesses to his sons, James and Edmund. Gossip columnists reported on his and his wife’s frequent trips to Washington to visit his eldest son, Will Junior, who’d become first a congressman and then a senator, and who, many said, would one day run for president.

  Fiona had suffered for hurting Will, but she knew that had she to do it all over again, she would. Nick was everything to her and she could not have borne losing him. And though theirs was not a conventional marriage, no woman ever had a more devoted husband. He gave her everything she could want from a man – kindness, humor, intelligence, respect, wise counsel. Well, she thought ruefully, paging past an illustration of Heathcliff on the wild Yorkshire moors, almost everything.

  There were nights when she tossed and turned in her huge empty bed, fretting about her business, or Seamie’s terrible grades in Latin, or Nick’s health, when she physically ached with longing for someone to hold her and make love to her. And, as she’d grown older, she found she was prone to another sort of ache, too – a sad tug deep down inside that came whenever she saw a tiny baby. She’d felt it just two weeks ago when she’d held perfect, beautiful Clara – Maddie’s new baby. Her and Nate’s fourth. She had so wanted children of her own. She and Nick had talked about it once, years ago, and he’d confessed that he desired a family with her and would’ve done his damnedest to make her pregnant if only it weren’t for his illness and his grave fear of passing it on to her.

  Early in their marriage, aware that she might be pining for the sort of physical contact he couldn’t provide, he’d encouraged her to take a lover. “Find someone, Fee,” he’d told her. “Someone you can share a romantic dinner with and a bottle of wine and your bed. You can’t spend the rest of your life like a nun. You’re far too young.”

  When, after several months, she’d produced no lover, Nick told her that according to an article on the new science of psychology he’d been reading, she was sublimating her desires. She told him she had no idea what he was talking about and doubted whether he did. He proceeded to tell her all about Sigmund Freud, a brilliant doctor from Vienna, and his startling theories on the human mind. Sublimation, he said, was when a person had desires, but couldn’t or wouldn’t act on them. The energy of these desires was then diverted to another area of the person’s life. Work, for example. Fiona had rolled her eyes at him, but he insisted that the theory explained her extraordinary success. She put all the energy she should be expending in bed into minding her business.

  “Why don’t you try that, Nick? Minding your business, that is,” she’d suggested.

  “Oh, don’t be a such a prude, Fee. If you can’t talk about sex with your own husband, then who can you talk about it with?” he’d chided.

  A pillow flung at his head finally silenced him. And despite what he might think, Fiona knew her reluctance to begin an affair with someone had nothing to do with prudery. She didn’t want a lover. She wanted to be in love. She’d had a lover in Will, a skillful one, and though her body had responded warmly to his, her heart had remained aloof. She remembered lying next to him in bed after they’d first made love, listening to him breathe as he slept, feeling more alone than she’d ever felt in her life. She wanted what she’d had with Joe. She’d met hundreds of men over the past ten years – many of whom were smart, accomplished, and handsome – many of whom had fallen in love with her. She had tried to warm to a few of them, searching their eyes for a flicker of what she’d found in Joe’s. But she’d never found it.

  “That’s a good story you’ve got there, darlin’. That Brontë lass could turn a phrase.”

  Startled, Fiona looked up to see the bookseller, a plump and none-too-clean Irishwoman, regarding her from the other side of the pushcart.

  “If I could charge for that story itself, why, I wouldn’t let it go for under a
t’ousand dollars,” the woman said, tapping the book with a grimy forefinger. “You heard me right! A t’ousand dollars! And I’d call it a bargain, too, for the two lives you got there. Why, you can’t find a man who wants to open a door for you these days, never mind one who wants to dig you up when you’re dead just to hold you again. Cathy and Heathcliff, now them was two people who knew what was what. They knew what love is. It’s a disease, sure it is! Worse than the typhoid and it’ll kill you just as quick. Best keep clear of it, I say.”

  Fiona laughed. “I couldn’t agree more.”

  The woman smiled, emboldened by her response. “There’s a few more lives in there, too – Edgar and Isabella and Hindley, but they’re pretty small ones and I’d throw them in for free … if I was selling the story, mind. But that’s the beauty of it, darlin’, it’s only the book I’m selling! A few sheets of paper, some scraps of leather to hold them together. So I can sell it cheap, you see. Dirt-cheap! For you, half a dollar.”

  Fiona squashed her inborn instinct to haggle, one that had been nurtured by her mother at the Whitechapel markets, and paid the woman her price. She herself made a very good living, and though it was expected, she would not barter with one who worked so hard for hers. She slipped the book into the briefcase she carried and turned to go home. It was after seven now and she didn’t want to keep Nick waiting any longer.

  As she started back toward West Street, her eyes were again drawn to the blond chestnut seller. He was trying to convince a group of dockers to buy his wares, but they were headed home to their suppers and had no interest. He tried to entice a pair of factory girls, and after that, a priest – all to no avail. Raggedy children clustered around him, begging for the hot nuts. Fiona noticed he slipped them one now and again, saw how a little girl held it in her bare hands to soak up its warmth before she ate it. Then, turning to search for new customers, the lad spotted her. Instantly, he turned his patter on her, smiling and flirting and telling her more than she wanted to know about chestnuts in general and his fine specimens in particular.

  “Go on, missus, try one,” he urged, tossing one chestnut and then another at her, forcing her to catch them. “There y’are, ladies and gents,” he added approvingly. “Never met a woman yet who’d didn’t want to get her hands on a hot pair of nuts.”

  The ragamuffins giggled. An older woman, her basket on her arm, winked at her. Fiona, blushing, dug in her briefcase for her wallet, scolding herself for succumbing to the charms of a handsome barrow boy yet again.

  “Will it be one batch, missus, or two?”

  “I’ll take everything you have,” she said, fishing out a bill.

  That shut him up for a few seconds. “What? All of ’em?” he finally asked.

  “Yes, all of them,” she said, eyeing his blue fingers, thinking he ought to have a proper pair of gloves.

  “Right away,” he said, picking up his scoop. He shoveled chestnuts until he had nearly a dozen paper cones filled. Fiona paid him, then handed the cones to the urchins who’d been watching the transaction longingly. “Thank you, missus!” they cried, stunned at her generosity. She smiled as they raced off with their prizes.

  When the lad turned from his till – an old cigar box – to give Fiona change from her five dollars, she was gone. He scanned the crowd for her and glimpsed her heading toward West Street. He shouted for her, but she didn’t turn around. He asked his neighbor to watch his stall, then bolted after her. She’d left nearly four dollars’ worth of change. He reached the curb just in time to see the cab she’d flagged pull into the stream of traffic. He shouted again. She looked at him from the cab’s rear window. He waved the bills at her. She turned away. The carriage picked up speed.

  The lad stared after her, puzzled as to how any woman with such a beautiful face and nice clothes and so much money to throw around could have such incredibly sad eyes.

  Chapter 60

  “Darling? What on earth are you doing?” came a voice from inside. Its languid, molded tones pulled Joe Bristow from his reverie. His memories rose like mist over a lake and vanished.

  He turned away from an open window. Across the room, a black-haired woman watched him, propped up on one elbow in her carved ebony bed.

  “Stargazing,” he replied.

  She laughed. “How whimsical. Close the window, won’t you? I’m freezing to death.” She lit a cigarette and took a deep drag, her green cat’s eyes fixed hungrily on him. She was naked except for a pair of jeweled Indian earrings. Her flawless skin, always pale, looked even whiter set against the red-and-magenta embroideries that canopied her bed. Her body was taut and lean with small breasts and slim hips. Her straight black hair just grazed her jawline. She’d had it cut – a daring move, even for her. “Come back to bed,” she purred, exhaling a plume of smoke.

  “I can’t,” Joe said, pulling the doors closed behind him. “I’ve got an early day ahead of me. Going to Camden Town to suss out the market. See if the area would support a Montague’s.” He walked across the room, gathering his clothes off the floor. He was talking too quickly. He knew he was. And the excuse he’d offered was a lame one. But he couldn’t stay. He had to get away from her before she saw it – the sadness, profound and racking – that always descended upon him after he slept with a woman he did not love.

  “Camden Town?” she asked, her eyes narrowing. “But Camden’s closer to my house than yours. It’s going to be a trip from Belgravia to Greenwich tonight and back to Camden in the morning.” She sat up. “What possesses you to live in Greenwich anyway?”

  “I like my ’ouse,” he said, slipping out of his borrowed robe. “I like my orchards. I like being near the river.”

  “No, that’s not it,” she said, her eyes roving over his body, taking in his long, muscular legs, lightly furred with blond hair; his perfect bum; the graceful flare of his back.

  “It isn’t?”

  “No. It’s because you can keep the world at arm’s length out there. And your lovers.”

  Joe started to say something placatory, but she waved his words away. He hoped she was not going to be difficult.

  Maud Selwyn Jones had invited him to her home for a late supper. To discuss business, she’d said. She was a decorator – the best in London – and he’d hired her to unify the look of his forty-five Montague’s shops and work on the interior of the new Knightsbridge flagship. She didn’t need to work – not with her money – but she said it kept her amused and angered her father, which was always fun. As well-known as she was for her decorating, she was even better known for her outrageous exploits. Trekking in Nepal. Riding a camel across Morocco. Camping with Bedouins in Arabia. Her former husband, a drunken boor by all accounts, was killed during a trip to Cairo. He’d insulted the owner of a restaurant after a meal had disappointed him and had been found in an alley two days later, stabbed. Robbers, the police had said, but no one believed them. Maud, already rich from her father’s Welsh coal money, had inherited his millions, too. She was a restless soul who loved any country as long as it wasn’t England. She especially loved the East, and – rumor had it – when she couldn’t go there, she settled for the East End. For the dark streets of Limehouse and its notorious opium dens.

  She and Joe had drunk a good deal of wine during dinner and had followed it with brandy in her drawing room. After the bottle had been emptied, she’d walked over to his chair, knelt down between his knees, and kissed his mouth. He’d enjoyed the kiss, but when it was finished, he’d tried – fumblingly – to explain that he wasn’t a very romantic bloke … that he wasn’t …

  “What?” she’d asked mockingly. “Not the marrying type? Don’t flatter yourself, darling, it’s not your heart I’m after.” Then she’d proceeded to undo his trousers and use her full, rouged lips to make him forget himself. Just for a bit. To forget the constant pain of living without Fiona. They’d gone to her bedroom and he’d tried to lose himself completely in her lovely, eager body. And he’d succeeded … for a little while. He’d even
fooled himself into believing that he’d escaped the sadness completely this time. But he hadn’t. When it was over, the pain came back twice as hard. As it always did after his lust had cooled and his body had been sated but his heart found itself cheated – found itself still broken, still empty, still full of a longing that could never be satisfied.

  “Are you certain you’d rather not stay?” Maud asked. “You can have one of the guest rooms. You don’t have to spend the night here.” After he declined again, she said, “You are the most alone man I’ve ever met, Joe. As wary and damaged as a wounded tiger.”

  He didn’t answer. Dressed now, he walked over to her bed and kissed her forehead. Then he pulled the covers over her and told her to sleep.

  “I don’t sleep, darling,” she said, leaning over her night table to light her lamp and the hookah next to it.

  Maud’s servants had all gone to bed, so Joe let himself out. As he walked toward Eccleston Street, hoping to find a hackney, the familiar sadness descended upon him like a great black bat, enveloping him in its leathery wings. He was thankful for the icy winter night, thankful to be alone. This evening had been a mistake. One he’d made before, and one he would undoubtedly make again. He’d been with women like Maud on other occasions. Women who didn’t ask for what he couldn’t give. Who made demands on his body, his time, but never his heart. Women who were walled off in some way. Guarded. Damaged.

  Damaged. How funny, he thought. That’s exactly what Maud called me.

  He smiled bitterly. He was beyond damaged. He was broken. Smashed to bloody pieces. He was alone in the world without the one person who could make him whole. And he always would be.