That Summer: A Novel

by Lauren Willig

  It put her at a distinct disadvantage.

  “That’s very sweet of you,” said Julia cautiously. It seemed rude to ask how Natalie had gotten in, but Julia wasn’t sure she liked the idea of cousins popping in and out at will. If Natalie was a cousin. “Does your mother have a key?”

  Natalie wafted Julia’s question aside. “That kitchen door never closes properly.”

  Good to know. She’d have to find the local equivalent of Home Depot and install a bolt.

  “Besides”—Natalie leaned forward confidingly, bringing with her the slightly chemical scent of expensive shampoo—“I wasn’t going to leave you all alone in the chamber of horrors.”

  “I was thinking more House of Usher,” admitted Julia. “Are there any other lights in here?”

  “It wasn’t as bad when the foliage was trimmed,” said Nat, casting a dubious look around the hall. “There used to be some light from the windows. Not exactly cozy, is it?”

  “I don’t know. A bit of Windex, some hedge trimmers, a can of gasoline…” Hmm, she probably shouldn’t joke about arson, not to someone she didn’t know. Julia massaged her aching shoulder. “Do you live around here?”

  Nat gave an exaggerated shudder. “Hardly.” From her expression Julia gathered that her question was a social solecism. “Would you like the tour?”

  What she would really like was an hour of privacy to settle in and get her bearings. But Nat didn’t seem to be going anywhere fast. Was this normal? Julia had never had any family before, or none that she remembered. It was hard to know where the boundaries were meant to be. She and her father had adopted the New Yorkers’ creed of keeping to oneself.

  “Sure,” said Julia. “But first—a bathroom?”

  “This way.” Natalie led the way to a tiny bathroom tucked away under the stairs, just a toilet, a sink, and a mirror. The toilet was the old kind, with a wooden seat and a tank hanging from the ceiling, chain dangling down. “It’s a bit primitive, but it works. Mostly.”

  There were times when it was an advantage to be on the smaller side; Julia’s head just cleared the sloping ceiling. The wallpaper was covered with bits of verse. I have wasted time, and now time doth waste me. If you neglect time, like a wilted rose, it withers. Tempus fugit. Cheerful stuff.

  Julia made a mental note to repaper the bathroom before showing the place to prospective buyers. Constant reminders of one’s own mortality weren’t exactly bathroom fare.

  Despite Natalie’s dire predictions, the toilet flushed and the water, after a few moments, ran clear. Julia splashed her face with cold water, blotting it with a limp towel hanging from a ring in the wall. Looking up at herself in the streaked mirror, she was astounded by how normal she looked. Mid-brown hair pulled back in a ponytail, wet wisps clinging to her cheeks. Her cheeks were flushed, her eyes a little bleary from jet lag but more awake than half an hour ago. There was nothing like being scared out of your wits to wake you up.

  Looking on the bright side of things, she decided, rubbing ineffectually at a water splotch on her shirt, Natalie’s appearance had scared her other ghosts away, at least for the moment. Jet lag, she told herself. Heat and jet lag. With another person in it, the house was reduced to exactly what it was: a large, elderly establishment that had the stale smell that comes of being shut up for too long.

  Natalie wasn’t in the hallway when Julia let herself out of the bathroom.

  “Nat?” Julia looked around, trying to figure out where she might have gone.

  There were doors on either side of the front hall. A narrow hallway ran past the stairs, branching out into more hallways, more doors. From the outside, the plan of the house looked like it ought to be fairly simple, but it stretched farther back that Julia had thought, with hallways darting off at odd angles.

  She pushed open the door to her right, directly across from the bathroom, and found herself in what must have been Aunt Regina’s rumpus room. The furniture was chintz and worn; there were piles of crossword puzzles on the floor next to the couch and a surprisingly large flat-screen television standing uneasily on a table that looked too small for it. She had obviously enjoyed James Bond movies. A box set of them sat next to the DVD player, with a gap where one had been pulled out.

  It looked as though Aunt Regina had just stepped out for a moment. Her spectacles were still on the corner table, next to the lamp. There was still a tray table, one of the cheap, portable kinds, open in front of the couch, holding a placemat, an empty mug with something caked on the bottom, and no fewer than three remotes.

  Why me? Julia wanted to ask her, but Aunt Regina wasn’t there to answer. The glasses sat where they were on the side table, the lamp dark.

  It was a slightly unnerving feeling. Julia hurried across the room, pushing open one of a pair of double doors, coughing at the dust. Somehow, she didn’t think that Aunt Regina came in here much, whatever it was. The room smelled dank, and in the dim light from the study Julia could just vaguely make out windows shrouded in heavy drapes.

  The switch was one of the push kinds. Julia pressed down on it. Blinking in the sudden light from the crystal chandelier, she found herself face-to-face with a woman on the wall.

  For a second, the dark hair, the pale skin, the flowers, made Julia think of her mother, of that faded image in an old snapshot.

  But there was nothing faded about this picture. Even dimmed with dust and neglect, there was a vibrancy about the painted image that drew the eye like a magnet. It shouldn’t have. There was nothing particularly exotic about it, just a woman sitting in a garden, trees flowering all around her, roses twining as if reaching for her hand, the sun catching the gold lettering on the book that lay beside her, abandoned on the bench.

  The woman’s clothes made Julia think of the cover of her high school volume of Jane Eyre, a tight-waisted dress in a deep, dark blue, with a modest white collar and cuffs. Her dark hair was uncovered, parted in the middle, pulled down smoothly to cover her ears, then looped and knotted in the back. Just another society portrait.

  Except for her face. She was looking up, lips parted as though about to say something. The serenity of her hair and gown was belied by the turmoil in her face. She looked, realized Julia, as lost as Julia felt. The contrast between the woman’s restrained clothing, her carefully arranged hair, and the wildness in her eyes struck a powerful chord with Julia. She felt a kinship with this unknown woman, whoever she might be, with the confusion and frustration all bottled into that prim exterior.

  Whoever the artist was, he was pretty darn talented to have conveyed all that, just in the tilt of a head, the slightly parted lips, the luster of the eyes. Julia took a step forward, feeling as if, if she only got close enough, those lips might whisper secrets to her. She could practically hear the buzz of expectancy in the air around her. Even the dust motes seemed to have paused to listen.

  A door opened on the other side of the room, and the mood shattered.

  “There you are!” It was Nat, slightly breathless. “I just went to make sure I’d closed the back door. Hideous room, isn’t this? It smells like someone died.”

  FOUR

  Herne Hill, 1842

  “Arthur?” Imogen hovered in the doorway of Arthur’s study, a candle in her hand.

  The linen of her nightdress billowed around her, the fullness of the fabric seeming to emphasize the emptiness beneath. Her abdomen felt hollow without the baby who should have been rounding it.

  The first time Imogen had miscarried, she had scarcely known she was with child before she had lost it. This time, she had felt the tingling in her breasts, had seen her nipples darken and change. Her stomach had barely started to round, but she had known the child was in there all the same. She had felt it quicken, the smallest flutter of sensation, but there nonetheless.

  Until it wasn’t.

  Imogen pushed the door a little farther, stepping tentatively over the threshold into Arthur’s domain. It was less a study than a gallery, crammed with rare and precious o
bjects of beauty. The light of her candle glinted off the stained glass of the window, off the richly polished wood of the shelves and paneling, off the gold illumination in her father’s Book of Hours, which lay open on its very own stand at the far end of the room.

  Imogen seldom came here; Arthur had a way of hurrying her out again, in the nicest possible way but just as definitively for all that. Argument and entreaties alike were blunted against his smiling courtesy.

  “Arthur?” she said again, and he looked up, blinking a bit.

  “Yes, my dear?” He was still at his desk, impeccably dressed in jacket, cravat, and dark trousers. “Did you want something?”

  She wanted to turn back the clock, to their courtship in Cornwall, to the way he had looked at her then, to the promises he had made her.

  Somehow, ever since she had come to Herne Hill, nothing had gone quite as it ought. Instead of drawing closer to her, Arthur had retreated ever more into his own business, business that didn’t concern her. The door to his study was closed to her; the manuscripts he had once so vividly described to her were wrapped away in their own special casings and jealously guarded. There would be time enough for that, he had told her indulgently, once she had adjusted herself to her new life. Wouldn’t she be more comfortable in the morning room with Jane?

  Jane hadn’t wanted Imogen in the morning room any more than Arthur had wanted her in the study. The only place in which Imogen had found a welcome was in Evie’s nursery. She had persuaded Arthur to allow her to sack Evie’s worthless governess and let Imogen take on the task. Those hours with Evie, reading with her, taking her through the rudiments of French grammar and basic mathematical equations, were the only times that Imogen felt truly useful.

  It was only temporary, Imogen had told herself. Once the household was accustomed to her … once Arthur had dealt with the most pressing of his business …

  Why did it all sound more and more like an excuse? It had been three years now, and, but for Evie, Imogen still felt nearly as much a stranger at Herne Hill as the day she had arrived. More so. Then she had been wrapped in the comfort of Arthur’s love, never knowing that he would grow more distant day by day until even his visits to her room by night became a rarity rather than a commonplace.

  Didn’t he love her? He said he did; he paid her formal and flowery compliments on those occasions when their paths should chance to cross.

  So why did it feel as though he was slipping away?

  Imogen looked at Arthur, sitting behind his desk, and felt as though she were looking at a stranger. The thought filled her with a deep and nameless fear.

  Nonsense, of course, all of it. It was natural to be prone to melancholia after the loss of a child; that was what the doctor had said, prescribing a horrid draught that Imogen poured into her slop jar when the nurse wasn’t looking.

  “It is late,” Imogen said, trying to sound as though she called on her husband in his study in her nightdress every night. “Shouldn’t you come to bed?”

  To her bed. If she could feel his arms around her, perhaps she wouldn’t feel quite so alone, so lost.

  “Presently,” Arthur said, his eyes already straying back to the papers in front of him. Since she had lost the baby, he seemed to look past her rather than at her. “Presently.”

  A small painting of a Madonna and child stood on an easel on Arthur’s desk. The Madonna’s cloak was impossibly blue; the colors glowed as though it had been painted yesterday. The mother’s expression, as she gazed down at her child, felt like a personal reproach.

  Imogen took a step closer, encroaching onto forbidden territory. “You work so very hard.”

  It wasn’t a ledger open in front of him but a periodical of some sort. Arthur hastily closed it, looking up at her with a smile that was slightly strained around the edges. “Did you need something, my dear?”

  Companionship. Affection. “I had thought we might take a picnic,” she suggested. “If the weather stays fine.”

  Arthur’s brow furrowed with concern. “Should you overtax yourself with such excursions, my dear? You need your rest.”

  “I have done nothing but rest!” The words cracked out with more force than Imogen had intended. She took a deep breath, gentling her tone. “I had thought it might be … pleasant. Like our afternoons in Cornwall.”

  “Yes,” Arthur said abstractedly, fingering the edges of the papers on his desk. “Yes, that would be a capital idea—but I fear I have business in town.”

  Was it her imagination, or did he sound relieved?

  “Some other time, perhaps,” he said, and Imogen realized, sinkingly, that it wouldn’t be any other time at all, just as there was never the time to show her his manuscripts or take her to visit the collections of his friends. “Was there anything else?”

  “No,” she said in a small voice. “Nothing that signifies.”

  Unless he could tell her where she had failed him. She had tried, so very hard, to conform to whatever it was Arthur wanted her to be, wearing the dresses he chose for her, calling on the ladies he deemed suitable. But it hadn’t done any good, had it? He was sitting behind the desk, and she was standing barefoot in her nightdress, abashed and rebuffed and more alone than she had ever imagined she could be.

  Don’t you love me? she wanted to ask. But the words stuck in her throat. She wasn’t sure she wanted to know the answer.

  Arthur pushed back his desk chair, standing in a clear indication that the interview was over. “You shouldn’t be out without a shawl,” he said reproachfully. “Not when you have been so unwell.”

  “Unwell.” A bland enough euphemism for the loss of their child.

  How could he paper it over with platitudes? They had never discussed it, never grieved together; he had only patted her on the cheek and hurried from the sickroom. Away on his business, whatever that business might be. Imogen suspected it was with a comfortable chair at his club.

  The bitterness of the thought stopped her cold. Surely she shouldn’t be thinking that, not of her husband, the man whom she had pledged to love above all others.

  “Arthur—” she began, and stopped, not sure what she meant to say. She looked at him, at his bland, smiling face, the whiskers so carefully trimmed, the hair combed just so, and none of it betraying the slightest hint of any kind of emotion.

  “We don’t want you to catch your death of cold,” he said, moving her in the direction of the door.

  “No,” said Imogen blankly. “That was foolish of me.”

  “You must go directly upstairs and make sure Anna brings you a hot brick for your bed.”

  Her bed, not his.

  Arthur tapped a finger gently against her cheek. “And don’t frown so. We don’t want furrows to mar that pretty face.”

  “No,” said Imogen numbly. “Of course not.”

  She knew she should stand her ground, pour out her doubts, her unhappiness—but something told her that it wouldn’t be any use. Arthur would just squeeze her hand and ask her if she wanted Anna to fetch her medicine, or tell her that she would feel better in the morning. Arthur didn’t like displays of emotion; she had discovered that when her father died, and had bottled her grief as best she could.

  At the time, she had told herself that it was merely that no bridegroom wished to be burdened with a weeping wife in the first week of marriage. She had told herself that it was a sign of his delicacy of feeling, respecting her grief by avoiding bringing up a topic that might cause her more pain.

  Unless it wasn’t anything of the kind. Unless it was simply that Arthur didn’t care for anything that didn’t directly concern Arthur.

  Arthur ushered her gently but firmly to the door. “Good night, my love.”

  “Good night, Arthur.” Imogen’s voice sounded strange and flat to her ears, but Arthur didn’t seem to notice. She shouldn’t have expected that he would.

  The door clicked quietly shut behind her, leaving her alone in the hallway, with nothing but closed doors to all sides. She was
still holding her candle, and the flame flickered with the trembling of her hands. She felt numb, from her head to her toes, numb and cold, in a way that had nothing to do with her lack of a shawl.

  Desperately she scrambled to recall the early days of their courtship, the giddy joy of those halcyon days in her father’s garden. But even her most treasured memories felt flat and stale. When she thought of him on the bench beside her, it was always Arthur talking about Arthur: his journeys, his observations, his acquisitions.

  No, that wasn’t entirely true. She clung to the memory of the compliments he had paid her, the touch of his hand, they way he had gazed into her eyes.

  But even those memories had lost their savor. Beautiful, he had called her, and rare, but he might just as well have been speaking about her father’s book or the chalice in the hall; she had seen him handle both with as much reverence and just as nonchalantly tuck them away.

  With a sinking feeling, Imogen remembered her father’s warnings. At the time, she had dismissed them as so much croaking. She knew love when it presented itself. But was it love? Or simply infatuation? She had been so convinced that theirs was a meeting of minds, but now, three years later, she wasn’t sure she had ever known Arthur’s mind at all.

  And what she did know of it she wasn’t entirely sure she liked.

  The thought filled her with a wordless dread. Imogen pressed her eyes shut against the burning light of her candle flame. Maybe Arthur was right; maybe she was overtired.

  Or maybe she had made a horrible mistake.

  And if she had? What then? There was nowhere for her to go. Even if her relations hadn’t disowned her for marrying Arthur, she was a married woman now; under the law, she was one person with her husband, her identity subsumed in his. There was no means of dissolving the marriage short of death.

  There was a tread in the hall, and Jane appeared, holding a tray on which a pot of tea steamed.