by Eve Pendle
“Which train did she catch?” It was a useless question. He could follow her, run after the train like a young soldier. But what would it achieve? Everything that could be said had been said last night. There was nothing more. He had to let her go.
“The quarter to six train to London Paddington.” Clarke’s eyebrows were pinched together with concern.
Everett raised the cup to his lips and took a gulp. Scalding liquid seared his tongue and he jerked his hand away, spilling the coffee over his hand. The sting loosened his grip, and the coffee cup fell to the floor. “Fuck.” He stared at the black soaking into the silk Axminster carpet. “Fuck. It’s all ruined.”
Clarke dropped to his knees and started mopping the coffee with his towel.
“Leave it.” A carpet was the least of his problems.
“It’s not ruined,” Clarke insisted. “It’s not.”
All the servants had heard the argument. They knew what was happening, and as well as coping with the chasm Grace had left in him; he would have to reassure them all. “Clarke.”
He didn’t respond, continuing to pat the carpet uselessly.
Everett couldn’t take this. He had to move, to do something before he lost his mind. Harvest. It was harvest time. The dry weather would mean Home Farm would be bringing in hay for the cattle to eat in winter. The dusty hard work would suit his mood today. “Ask Grayling to find me an old lounge suit and light scarf for my face. Where is the hay cutting today?” He didn’t wait for a reply, and how would the butler know anyway? “I’ll go and join them. I’ll need a horse and a scythe. See to it, please.”
Clarke jumped up and hurried out of the door. Probably grateful to get away from his clearly insane master who might be about to imitate a horseman of the apocalypse. But he couldn’t go to their study and work as usual, staring as the vacant seat where Grace ought to be. A barren bed was bad enough, empty days were more than he could cope with.
His mare was ready when he walked out. It was already past six, so he headed toward the fields. Focusing on directing the mare, trying to find the harvester party, allowed him to clear his mind. The foreman looked up when he cantered into the field.
“M’lord.” He tugged his forelock, but his expression was somewhere between confused and guarded. Lords did not usually turn up in the field for harvest unless they meant to cause inconvenience.
“Could you ask one of your men to take a break and wait for the scythe that’ll be brought? I don’t wish to slow your work, but I am inclined to help today.” He would inevitably be a hindrance, but he had to do something.
The briefest of frowns brought down his eyebrows before he nodded. “Of course, m’lord.” He turned and called, “Barry!”
An older man looked around and jerked his chin upward in acknowledgement. The foreman beckoned the man and he walked over with a stiff gait. “Please lend his lordship your scythe,” he said as the man drew near.
Barry scowled. “Yes, of course.” He passed Everett the scythe, an unwieldy, knobbly wooden handle with a foot and half of blade at the end.
Everett felt its weight. From Barry’s deepening scowl, was holding it incorrectly. “Perhaps you could teach me how to use it?”
…
When they broke for luncheon, Everett’s arms ached from the mowing, and he was drenched with sweat. If he was a less liberal landowner he might have given in to the need to ban the men from singing “Green Grow the Rushes, O.” The last repeated refrain was a little too true—“ one is one and all alone, and ever more shall be so.” But he suspected some of this singing and cheer was for his benefit, and he couldn’t bring himself to be annoyed. He’d never noticed how many folk songs were about losing your true love. At least they hadn’t started singing “Scarborough Fair.” The melancholy tone might have forced him into regrettable action.
Thompson was waiting at the edge of the field and when Everett approached, he wordlessly handed over a pie.
Pork and apple, he discovered as he bit into it. He held out his hand for the bottle Thompson held, and Thompson relinquished it. He took a long draught. It was water.
“I’m not to be trusted with cider or beer?” He jerked his head toward the other men, gathered to collect their lunch, provided with flagons of cider for their trouble.
“No.” Thompson regarded him implacably.
“Jane is a bad influence on you,” Everett grumbled.
Thompson couldn’t apparently restrain his grin. “She’s right, though. Sharp tools, alcohol, earls, and heartbreak shouldn’t be combined.”
“I’m not a child.” He took a swig of water and stared at the field, almost bare now, the drying green of the tips of the grass cut to reveal patches of bright green and yellow tan below.
“No. I wouldn’t have any problem with a child playing at being a farm worker.”
“Thank you for the pie, Thompson.” He didn’t need to hear the rest of the man’s comment. He knew he had work to do, but he couldn’t accept Grace was gone and continue as normal. “I will be back later.” He walked toward Barry and the group of men.
“I’ll be tidying your study, my lord,” Thompson called after him.
…
For the fourth day in a row, Everett returned to the house exhausted, late in the evening after the sun had set. Thompson tried to tell him something as he entered.
“I’m not interested,” he snapped. He’d said the same to Clarke yesterday. “Get me some brandy.”
He went to head to the billiard room as he had on previous days. He’d woken at sunrise this morning but had no recollection of going to bed. The bed he’d shared with Grace, bringing both of them to satisfaction time after time. He didn’t want reminders of Grace. But despite his intentions, his feet guided him into their study. There it was, just as it had been before everything had died, but without Grace, her head bowed over a legal document or letter.
Except, he hadn’t left it so tidy. The piles of correspondence which Grace and he had pushed onto the floor had been neatly stacked, no doubt by sender and topic. And one letter lay in the middle of his desk apart from the others. He sank into his chair and picked up the letter Thompson had selected for him—the letter from George that had triggered this disaster. Which meant Thompson meant for him to read it. And there was the word—divorce.
The door clicked and his mother swept into the study.
“Mother.” It was past ten o’clock at night and he couldn’t even summon the energy to be surprised. The last time his mother had visited, he had sat elbow to elbow with Grace, defending their marriage. Now there was nothing left to defend.
The dowager sat in Grace’s chair and frowned at the arrangement. “This doesn’t fit.” She tapped on the bureau’s closed lid. “An earl’s study should not be cluttered. The extra furniture is quite wrong.”
He put down the letter from George and looked at her sitting in the seat that belonged to his wife. A single calming blink was all the acknowledgement Everett allowed himself to this provocation.
“To what do I owe the pleasure of your visit?” He couldn’t sum up any emotion.
“I haven’t seen you.” She settled her hands into her lap.
“It’s almost eleven o’clock.” His mother didn’t visit anyone without a good reason, especially not late in the evening. If it was a social call or an errand she wanted him to do for her, she would have waited until Everett had called on her. Presumably she’d called for him and had been waiting. That must have been what Thompson had been trying to tell him. His mother must know about Grace’s departure. A mixture of shame and anger rose like bile in his throat. He faced it. “Have you come to gloat that you were right, now that your competition has gone?”
“You quite mistake me. There is no comparison between myself and the new Lady—what should we call her? Between myself and Mrs. Grace Hetherington.”
“No.” Hearing his wife given the epithet of a divorcée invoked a bonfire in him. “She is Lady Westbury and shall remain so.�
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“That’s what I thought you would say, poor besotted fool that you are. Where is she?”
“London.” The place was an ulcer in his mouth; it hurt, but he kept touching it.
“Well, you’d better go and get her.” She looked to the window and back, as if bored. “Your little brother needs the same advice. Deliver it to him while you’re there.”
“Pardon?” Everett stared at this imposter who had taken over his mother.
She regarded him as though nothing strange had just occurred. “I thought she adored you. I was completely convinced.” Her expression as haughty as ever.
“I thought so, too.” Everett was surprised into truthfulness.
She refolded her hands in her lap. “I loved your father.” She swallowed. “But when we quarreled, and he went to London, I didn’t go after him. We were both of us too proud.”
It wasn’t quite an admission of culpability for the poor condition of Larksview, or even that his father wasn’t perfect. But his mother, always distant, had never admitted to any flaws in either herself, her husband, or her firstborn son, or even George. This glimpse, this tiny peephole into her was a revelation. She’d loved his father more than he’d loved her, and yet she still wished she’d fought harder.
“What did you argue about?” She was silent for a long time and he thought he’d pushed her too far.
“I wanted him to stop funding his previous mistress.” She looked away. “He wouldn’t renege on his promise, so he went back to her instead.”
He’d always viscerally known he wasn’t like his father and had fought against any hint of it his whole life. Never keeping a mistress had been a point of honor for him. But his father had refused to put his new wife’s needs above his previous commitments.
The insight went down his spine like a cold knife. He’d thought that because Grace had left for London, she was the one deserting him. But by putting his brother’s debt and another family’s loan ahead of Grace’s brother, however unlikely the outcome, he’d forsaken her. He had been willing to sacrifice her to his needs, without fully understanding what she needed. When they’d met, he’d assumed that because she was beautiful, what she wanted must be unimportant. But what he wanted was unimportant and Grace, herself, was the only priority.
“I have to go.” He had to get to London. He had to apologize and make up for the damage. Nothing less than bringing her brother back to her would show how he knew he’d been wrong. He had no idea how he could do that. He had little to fall back on except military training, and Grace had forbidden him from just killing Rayner as the snake deserved.
His mother turned back to him and nodded.
Despite the urge to run out of the room and go to the station immediately, his gaze hooked on his mother. He looked at her, really looked for perhaps the first time in his life. There were little lines around her eyes half hidden by the candlelight. Dressed in mourning, the dark color made her gray eyes seem even more severe, but also pained. She’d lost her favorite son. She’d lost her husband, a man she hadn’t understood and who had done her wrong, who she’d adored all the same. And after all this time, his mother had torn out this understanding from herself and gifted it to him.
His time in the army and his upbringing had always made him assume that only strong men could solve problems. He’d been thinking of physically threatening Rayner to force him to cooperate, or helping Grace to make a strong case for a lawyer to battle him in court. But a flicker of another maternal figure, somber and widowed like his mother, appeared in his mind. A woman who could solve a problem that a man, even a lord, couldn’t. Grace had said once that he had a cloak of privilege. And he did, because although Everett didn’t know the person who could get back Henry, he knew someone who could help him and who needed his help in return.
…
No one told you what the end was like. No one said how much it hurt. Sitting at a little table in the Fishers’ parlor four days after leaving Larksview, Grace was beginning to understand why Charlotte Brontë refused to write a proper ending to Villette. It saved the agony of realizing there was nothing left.
There was no happiness, no resolution. Just a dull knowledge that she had to persevere for Henry. And the ache of not having anyone who really loved her.
Two months ago, she’d sat in the Fishers’ parlor and planned what her life would be like after the six weeks was finished. She’d be an independent, nominally married lady, who had the time and resources to get her brother back. Her life now was exactly that. She’d been sure that would be enough and right for her. And yet, it was like her life was like a phenakistoscope that Everett had stopped for an instant and allowed her to see as it really was. She’d thought that the moving image was magic, but it turned out it was just a series of pictures in sequence, spun around to give the illusion of movement. Not a magic wheel, but a circle of roughly painted prints. She’d thought her life would be a lively dance, but all she could perceive now was a lonely woman no one cared for and whose chance of winning custody of her brother was hope she clung to like a rag of a handkerchief.
The solicitors had told her to be patient. She couldn’t be serene, she had nothing else to do but focus all her attention on the faint possibility of getting Henry back. Instead of rereading papers from the solicitors, she’d thought through to the next stage. She had spent hours reading court proceedings, trying to identify which of a dozen barristers she’d identified as potential men to argue her case would be suitable. A large chart lay across her little table with all the cases each barrister had won and lost. She’d visited them over the days she’d been in London. It was a good distraction. Though when they’d heard her name, there had been an undeniable drop of concern on their faces. The work of Lord Rayner, no doubt.
She wished sometimes, when thoughts seeped into her mind between the words she read like rain through a hole in an umbrella, that she hadn’t decided on an ending. She’d rather not know, like Charlotte Brontë, and live in some half-life where she’d never been as happy as she’d been with Everett, but neither been so broken as when she discovered he’d conned her.
The door opened behind her. Grace didn’t look up.
“If you don’t leave this room immediately, I will drag you out by your hair.” Caroline dropped Grace’s pelisse onto her lap.
Grace grabbed for her papers and looked up into Caroline’s mock stern face. “I can’t. I have to finish reading this.” She gestured to the court proceedings.
Caroline raised her eyebrows. “They will wait.” Stretching out her hand, she revealed Grace’s boots, the black leather polished to a shine. The wooden heels clunked together. “Put these on, and your pelisse. You need to breathe some fresh air, and no, opening a window will not do. We’re going to walk in the park.”
Grace sighed. There was no point in arguing when Caroline was like this. It would probably be healthful to walk a little. It might even raise her spirits, though she wasn’t sure she wanted that. It was right that she should feel wretched, since she’d let Henry and herself down.
They walked from the Fishers’ house to St. James’s park commenting on the weather, which was unseasonably cool but bright, turning the leaves early in the year.
“It’s cold, yes, but sunny,” Caroline protested. “Who can be sad when one sees all the yellow and red leaves in amongst the green?”
“Plenty of people.” Her, for instance, because she wasn’t sure if even a perfect day could make her smile. “To some, autumn represents the death of the summer.” But she couldn’t put any censure in her tone.
Caroline harrumphed. “You haven’t liked staying in London—no don’t deny it, goose. I cannot interest you in anything except your endless documents. I don’t believe you listened to a word of the latest installment of Our Mutual Friend, and you usually like Charles Dickens.” She looked askance at Grace. “You think I am such a dunce I will not notice my friend is miserable. Since you haven’t enjoyed any of this, you should think about wha
t you do enjoy.”
“What I enjoy is the problem.” It was over with Everett, but every time she found something interesting in the documents she was reading, a string tugged at her to tell him about it.
“Love is never a problem,” Caroline declared.
“You have clearly never been in love.” She wished she weren’t. Telling herself that she couldn’t have feelings for a man who’d betrayed her didn’t stop it being true. “Love is always a problem.”
“What did he do that is so unforgivable?” Caroline stopped in the middle of the path, heedless of the elderly couple behind forced to divert around them.
“I…” She couldn’t get the words out. It was as if telling Caroline what had happened would truly write down the ending of her story with Everett.
“Are you with child?”
“No.” In the deepest part of her soul she knew she wasn’t. At least she wouldn’t be breaking that promise. Whereas Everett… He’d broken all his promises except the one not to claim husbandly rights. Her head knew it was honorable of him to stay away, that he was not making a claim on her. He was finally adhering to their bargain, as if that was what mattered now.
“What is it, then? You have been here for days and told me nothing. You just pore over your documents and evade any attempt to inquire about what happened with Lord Westbury.”
“I’m sorry.” She wasn’t being a very good houseguest.
Caroline reached out for her. “I shouldn’t have said that. Forgive me for being so thoughtless.” She sighed. “I wish Maurice weren’t up at Cambridge. He’d know what to say.”
“I’m all right,” Grace lied and drew away. A little comfort, any easing of pressure, and she would snap like a spring released from tension. The whole story, all the wonderful and terrible details, would come out and make her a sobbing, inconsolable mess. She hadn’t wanted to burden her friend with that, changing the topic or pretending not to hear whenever she touched on the subject. Only saying nothing kept her intact.
“If you say so.” A muscle twitched in Caroline’s jaw. She turned and began walking again.
