Bride of the Wilderness

by Charles McCarry

  “Ah, Fanny,” she said with crumbs on her perfect lips, “I never want to move next door. If only I could go on living here with you.”

  Rose had been given a bedchamber of her own, but from the very first night she slept with Fanny, creeping into her bed after the rest of the house was asleep.

  “You smell so wonderfully different, Fanny,” Rose said. “I wish I smelled like you and had your black hair and your black eyes.”

  “They’re blue.”

  “But such a dark, dark blue, not milky English blue like mine. I wish I looked just like you.”

  Whispering through the night, she told Fanny about her two stillborn babies, about her husband Robert who had been heir to a thousand acres in Scotland. If one of Rose’s babies had been a boy, and lived, she would now be rich and living in Scotland. She believed that all her bad luck had been caused by cats. She had seen a cat before Robert was killed, a cat had appeared in the window on the night she gave birth to her first dead child, a cat had jumped onto the bed on the night that Rose was sure her other was conceived.

  “It walked on Robert’s back while he was planting his seed,” Rose said. “It looked over his shoulder into my eyes with its horrid green eyes. Of course, Robert paid no attention. He was puffing and snorting and dribbling. You’ll see what men are, Fanny, poor child.”

  Nobody had ever spoken to Fanny about the sexual act before. Rose described it in graphic terms—what it felt like, what to do to get it over with as soon as possible. She observed everything, but appeared to feel nothing.

  “She’s a very strange woman,” Fanny said to Henry. “How can Oliver love her?”

  “There’s no explaining love,” Henry said. “Be kind to her.”

  “Never fear. She leaves one no time for anything else.”

  Fanny had never played with other children, but living with Rose, she gained an idea of what it must be like. Rose played children’s games all day long—card games, singing games, games of pretend. She would pretend that she was the queen and Fanny was a lady-in-waiting.

  “What have you brought me?” she would ask in a fluting voice, and then whisper to Fanny, “You say: ‘A letter from my Lord Buckingham.’”

  “Really, Rose, I can’t say that.”

  “Why ever not? It’s a lovely game. My sisters and I played it all the time at home.”

  “Were you always the queen?”

  “We took turns. Do you want to be queen?”

  “I want to read.”

  “Read?”

  Rose would take down a book and sit by the window staring into it. She never turned the pages. Fanny noticed that she took down books in Latin and Greek as often as she chose those in English.

  “What is that book you’re reading?” Fanny asked one day.

  “One of my favorites.”

  “What is it called?”

  “Come see for yourself,” Rose said.

  It was a treatise on disease written in Latin.

  “Ah,” Fanny said, “Heroic Stanzas. I didn’t know you liked Mr. Dryden’s poems.”

  “They are my favorites,” Rose said, and Fanny realized that Rose did not know how to read.

  The game Rose liked best was dressing up. Fanny’s clothes fit her, and she adored trying them on one after the other and looking at herself in the mirror. One morning shortly before the wedding, she suddenly started talking about witchcraft.

  She loved Fanny’s mirror, a full-length, very clear one with a carved golden frame that Fanchon had brought from France. She wore a dark blue dress now, with a matching hat.

  “Your things are so lovely, Fanny,” Rose said. “But the colors are wrong for me.” She adjusted the hat. “I wish I had a mirror as big as this one,” she said. “Then I could look behind me and see who was who.”

  “Look behind you, Rose?”

  Rose held Fanny’s eyes in the glass and smiled without showing her teeth. “I can see you, Fanny, but there are some you can’t see in a looking glass. Witches don’t show in a mirror—they have no reflection.”

  Fanny didn’t believe that Rose really believed in witches; she just had some use for them that would be revealed when she trotted them out in order to get her way about something. “Have you never seen a witch in a mirror, Rose?” Fanny asked.

  Rose didn’t like the joke; a look of annoyance came and went in her face. She opened another wardrobe and looked inside. Every frock, every petticoat exhilarated her.

  “What’s this?” she cried, unfolding a bottle-green velvet dress. “It can’t be yours—it’s such a mannish color.”

  “When I was younger Father sometimes had my dresses made to match his suits, so when we went out together we were a pair,” Fanny said.

  “You went out together? Where did you go?” “Everywhere in London. The same places that we go to now.”

  “How awful for a little girl.” Rose was shaking out Fanny’s old dresses one after the other and holding them against herself. Each had a hat to go with it. “Weren’t you ever frightened to be the only child with all those men?”

  “No. And we always had Oliver along.”

  “Oliver? What did Oliver have to do with anything?” “Oliver has to do with everything. He’s my second father.”

  Rose uttered a false laugh. “No man is a father to a girl with looks like yours, Fanny. You’ll see.” She held the velvet dress against her chest and looked at herself.

  “Amazing,” she said. “You were a little woman, Fanny, not a little girl.”

  Fanny had learned that Rose liked to do and say the same things over and over again, and never seemed to remember that she had done or said them before. In the weeks that she had stayed with the Hardings, she had tried on Fanny’s dresses a dozen times. They were new to her each time.

  “Does your French maid keep your things so nicely folded and put away?” Rose asked.

  Fanny kept silent; she had answered the question many times before.

  Rose shook out one of Fanny’s petticoats, then another and another.

  “Every one of your petticoats has a little pocket in it right here,” Rose said, touching her belly. “Whatever for?”

  “Antoinette does that,” Fanny says. “The French like pockets for hiding things.”

  “What things?”

  “You could hide money in it, or jewels.”

  Rose was roguish now. This was the sort of thing she’d never let go of. “What do you hide in yours, Fanny?”

  “If I ever have any money or jewels, I’ll have a place to hide them.”

  “I don’t think I should like having a French maid,” Rose said. “There was a French maid in my husband’s family that smuggled a Catholic priest into the house in the night to baptize a newborn baby. They found them in the garret praying in Latin over the child and getting ready to sprinkle it with holy water. He may have taken it back into his priest hole with him, or stolen it for the Jesuits. That’s something to remember about the French.”

  Like most English people, Rose hated Catholics. She thought that they were all involved in secret plots to kill the king, bribe the army, cause riots.

  “The plague was caused by the French,” Rose said, tying the ribbon of a bonnet beneath her chin. “They sent a Jesuit to smuggle in a Gypsy who had plague, and that’s how it all began. The Great Fire was set by the Jesuits, too.”

  It was Friday, the day that Evans came to hear confessions. Fanny had arranged for Rose to go riding later in the afternoon, but now she tried to change the subject. It was nearly noon. Rose was a clock of appetites—she grew hungry exactly on schedule.

  “Are you hungry, Rose?” Fanny asked. “It’s past noon.” Rose shook her head. She wanted to talk about Catholics.

  “They say King Charles confessed himself a Catholic at his last hour and took the sacraments, and that it was his own brother, King James, who smuggled a priest into the palace,” Rose said. “Do you think that’s true—that the king himself was a papist?”

  “W
hich king?”

  “Both—Charles and James.”

  “Everyone says so.”

  “It must have happened to them in France when they were too small to know. Did it happen to your mother too? Was she born in France?”

  Fanny pretended not to hear.

  Rose went on. “But you were born in England, in this house. Oliver told me so. Which room were you born in?”

  “This one. It was my mother’s room. Nearly everything in it belonged to her.”

  “She was so young—as young as me when my girls were born dead,” Rose said. “The woman pays, Fanny.” Rose shivered as if Fanchon’s ghost were present. “The mirror was hers too?”

  “The mirror too, Rose.” Fanny sighed. “The mirror, the lute, the table, the wardrobe, the picture of my grandfather. I use her comb. My clothes are mine. All the rest was hers.”

  Suddenly Rose snatched the bonnet off her head and threw it to the floor. She looked at herself in the glass, and at Fanny behind her.

  “I don’t want to be married!” she cried.

  7

  A month later, on the first Tuesday after Easter, as Rose walked out of the windowless waiting room into the nave of the church of Saint Andrew by the Wardrobe, she saw that there was practically no light in the sky over London. Gusts of wind rattled the high narrow windows of the church. An hour before, floating down the Thames through the spring day with Henry and Fanny in a pleasure boat, she had seen no clouds, smelled no rain in the air. The sun shone and the birds flew overhead, instead of chirping in the trees and the eaves as they always did when a shower was approaching. But the weather had changed as soon as the music started for her wedding.

  Oliver waited at the altar, dwarfing Henry and the old curate who was going to perform the ceremony. He stood at least a foot higher than Rose’s first husband, and he had a bony jaw filled with square yellowish teeth and a great muzzle for a nose. Oliver loved fashion as much as any man with an ideal figure, and he had had new clothes cut for his wedding. His great torso was dressed in a plum-colored silk suit with matching stockings and a ruffled shirt. He wore a curly wig that hung, in the latest fashion, nearly to his waist behind and billowed over his chest in front.

  When Oliver saw Rose drifting into the nave in her pale golden dress that was nearly the color of her skin, he gripped Henry Harding’s arm as if to keep himself from leaping down to meet her. Ribbons floated round her as she walked. In a pen-and-ink drawing, Rose would have seemed less remarkable than she was in the flesh. It was her color that made everyone look at her—the flaxen hair and the lavender eyes and the voluptuous creamy complexion that were so English. She glowed as she moved through the shadowy church—like an angel, Oliver thought. He expelled his breath in a long heavy sigh. For the whole six weeks of Lent he had daydreamed of nothing but her beauty, imagining her beside him at table, beside him as he read or listened to music, beside him at the theater, beside him in bed.

  Rose wore an expression of absent annoyance, as if she had been awakened from a dream that deeply interested her by someone who had no right to touch her. This Saint Andrews was a replacement for the original church, which had been destroyed in the Great Fire of London. The gathering storm was clearly visible through the dusty windows, most of which were glazed with plain glass while the church waited for gifts of stained glass. The sun had vanished altogether now. The day grew steadily darker. As yet there was no rain, just the wind howling high up in the roof beams and mingling with the tremolo of the choir. A flash of lightning filled the windows with flickering blue light. Thunder rolled overhead and the sky opened up in a deluge of rain.

  Henry and Oliver exchanged a glance. Rose stopped walking toward the altar, turned her back on it, and ran back the way she had come. Fanny, her bridesmaid, stood in the way. Rose pushed her aside, crushing her bridal bouquet and letting it fall to the floor. Fanny picked up the bruised flowers and followed Rose through the narrow door into the waiting room. Oliver started to do the same, but the curate stopped him, closing his prayer book with a snap, and himself hurried after the bride. The guests, still chuckling over the antics of the lunatics at Bedlam, gave each other looks of delight. They were people who lived for amusement, but even at Oliver’s wedding they hadn’t expected to have a joke instead of a ceremony.

  In the musty cubicle at the back of the church, even though it had no windows, Rose could still hear the wind and the thunder. The curate came in and took Rose’s limp hand between the two of his and looked with a kindly smile into her numb face.

  “You must come back now,” he said. “Mr. Barebones and all the others are waiting.”

  Rose took her hand away from him. “I won’t be married in the rain,” she said.

  “God makes the rain,” the curate said in a stern voice. “If He sends it to you on your wedding day, He has a very good reason to do so.”

  Rose paid no attention to these words. She turned to Fanny. “I don’t understand why I didn’t smell the rain,” she said.

  This remark did not surprise Fanny, who was quite ready to believe that Rose could smell the rain in the sky before it fell. She put Rose’s bouquet back together and tied the ribbon around the stems of the flowers.

  “We can wait till it stops,” Fanny said. “Look, I’ve brought you your bouquet.”

  “There’s never before been a thunderstorm so soon after Easter,” Rose said. “Something wrong is happening again. God doesn’t want to protect me, Fanny.”

  The curate gasped. “That is blasphemy. It is superstition, madam. Many have been whipped through the streets of London for less.”

  The clergyman bowed his head, showing a circle of white hair round a leathery scalp covered with thready brown moles, and intoned a rapid request that the Lord give Rose strength to believe in His goodness and mercy and be spared the lash and the pillory.

  On hearing these terms, Rose looked upward, so as not to have to look at the curate’s moles, and listened to the storm. She thought that it was growing weaker. Soon the lightning stopped and the wind fell.

  “If there is an impediment to the marriage,” the curate said, not knowing that the storm was the impediment, “you must confess it now or burn in hell.”

  “Everything is all right now,” Rose said. “I’m ready.” She picked up her bouquet and went back into the church.

  But all during the ceremony rain scampered across the roof. Rose gave her responses in a parched voice, never looking at the clergyman or the groom. She shrank away when Oliver put the ring on her finger. Then his mouth opened and he caught Rose’s lips between his own, which were as big and as rough as a smith’s fingers, in a kiss that was like a hard pinch.

  At this moment, a snow-white cat trotted down the aisle of the church until it reached the altar. Fanny watched it in fascination. It was a large, well-fed tomcat. It gathered itself and leapt onto the altar, landing with a soft but clearly audible thump among the candlesticks.

  Rose heard the sound of the cat’s landing while Oliver was still kissing her. She smelled the powder in his wig and the morning’s ale and toast on his breath.

  It was then, as she tried to shut out the reality of Oliver by holding her breath, that she opened her eyes and saw the cat walking across the altar. It looked directly at Rose out of elongated flickering pupils like candle flames, yawned, and then jumped to the floor with another thump—it was a very heavy, soft animal—and walked slowly away down the aisle. Oliver’s raucous friends were delighted again.

  Rose tore herself out of Oliver’s arms. “Out!” she whispered. “I must get out of here!”

  Henry paid the curate for his services and went outside to make sure that the sedan chairs he had hired were waiting for the wedding party. The chairs were all lined up as ordered, with the chairmen standing ankle-deep in the mud. Though the rain had stopped, the water it had deposited ran down the streets, cutting channels in the grayish soil.

  One man was already sitting in a sedan chair on the shoulders of the carri
ers. It was Montagu, the gambler from the Cocoa Tree. He sat with one emaciated leg crossed over the other, eating nuts and flicking the shells at the front chairman’s head with his thumb. When he looked away from the chairman, who squirmed in his rags under Montagu’s weight and the sting of the broken nut shells, and rested his eyes on Henry, his expression did not change. If Montagu had spoken the words aloud, he could not have made it plainer that Henry and the chairman were the same low class of creature so far as he was concerned.

  “Harding, is it?” Montagu said. “I think you owe me a hundred guineas. I don’t suppose you’ve got it on you.”

  Henry bowed. “I hardly ever carry that much to a wedding,” he said. “But if you need it as badly as all that, you can follow me home if you like.”

  Henry got into a chair and was carried to the Thames embankment with Montagu coming along behind. There they found a boat to take them up the river to the Temple Stairs. The wedding guests, traveling in a bigger boat, had reached Henry’s house before them, and the clatter of conversation spilled out into the street. Montagu remained in his sedan chair until Henry returned with the money. He weighed the sack of coins in his hand.

  “They were wrong at the Cocoa Tree,” he said. “They all said your ship was late and you’d have no money to pay in case you lost. They also said you never lose.”

  “They seem to know little about me in the Cocoa Tree,” Henry said.

  Henry looked upward into the rain, waiting courteously for Montagu to leave. As soon as Montagu had the money, two bodyguards armed with heavy staffs moved a step or two closer to him and looked around suspiciously.

  “I rather like your house, Harding,” Montagu said. “It has a pleasant situation, so near to the Strand.”

  “It is very convenient.”

  Montagu cocked his head as a gale of laughter came through the walls. “Perhaps I’ll look in later,” he said. “Whenever you wish.”

  “It was not, I hope, your daughter who was married?” “No.”