by Anne Perry
Mabel helped her dress, to a constant stream of instruction and criticism, of which she took little notice.
“There you are, ma’am,” she said at last. “You look very nice-fit to meet anyone.”
The old lady grunted and surveyed herself in her glass for the final time, straightened her lace collar and went to the bedroom door.
Who was this Samuel Ellison person? Of course she knew her husband had been married before. She had never told Caroline because Caroline had not needed to know, and it was not a matter Mariah desired to discuss with anyone. She had not known there was a son. It was perfectly possible this man was an impostor, but if he really resembled Edward so closely, then presumably he was genuine. She would know as soon as she saw him.
She opened the door and stepped out onto the landing. There was no need to be disquieted, even if the man was who he claimed to be. If he was, she would be pleasant to him, and the afternoon would pass agreeably enough. After all, he was American; she could hardly be held responsible if he was not socially desirable. She could apologize, disclaim all connection, and not invite him again.
And if he was charming, interesting, amusing, so much the better.
If he was an impostor she would ring for the butler and have him shown out abruptly. It was nothing to be ashamed of. Everyone had relatives they did not care to own. It happened even in the best families.
She went down the stairs and into the withdrawing room.
Caroline was standing by the window looking out. As the old lady came in she turned around. Caroline was very handsome for her age, one might almost say beautiful, except that she had a light in her eye and a flush to her cheek which were unbecoming in a mature woman. She should know how to behave with more discretion. And that shade of burgundy was much too rich.
“You are overdressed,” the old lady remarked critically. “He will think he has come to dinner. It is barely three o’clock in the afternoon.”
“Well, if he looks at you, he will expect baked meats,” Caroline retorted. “You seem to be dressed for a funeral.”
The old lady straightened to total rigidity. “I am a widow. As are you, or you were-until you went off and married that actor! I would have thought in deference to the fact that this man is apparently a member of our family, and his brother is dead, you might have worn something more in keeping with the occasion.” She sat down solidly in the best chair.
Caroline looked at her closely. “You never told us that Papa-in-law had been married previously.”
The old lady avoided her eyes. “It was not your concern,” she said coldly. “She was a woman of. .” For once she was uncertain. Dark memories brushed the edge of her mind, and she refused to allow them closer. “She ran away.” Her voice grew sharper. “She abandoned him. Went off with some worthless adventurer. .” That was a lie, but it was easier to believe and to understand. “Naturally we did not speak of it. No one would.” That was true.
“Edward might have wished to know he had a half brother,” Caroline said quite gently.
“No one knew,” the old lady replied, her voice steadier. That also was true. She had had no idea whatever that Alys had been with child. Edmund would not have let her go so easily if he had known. To lose a son would be altogether a different matter.
Mariah deliberately unclenched her hands. They were cold and a little clammy with tension. Memories long forgotten were stirring in her mind, shapeless pain, things denied so long they were only darkness now, no sharp edges, just the ache. Why didn’t someone arrive so she did not have to work so hard at not thinking?
There it was. A carriage outside. The footsteps across the hall, the murmur of voices. Thank heaven.
The door opened and the butler announced Mr. Samuel Ellison. He was tall, well built, and dressed in the latest cut of waistcoat and jacket, but all this was nothing to Mariah. Her breath almost stopped in her throat as she saw his face. He was so like her own son a wave of loss overtook her like a physical pain. It was not that she and Edward had been friends, or shared ideas or confidences, it was the bond of years of knowledge, of memories of childhood intimacy, the very fact that he had been part of her. And here was this man of whose existence she had been unaware until this morning, and he had the same eyes, the same shape of head, the same manner of moving.
Caroline was welcoming him in and, before Mariah was ready for it, presenting him to her.
He bowed, smiling at her, his expression full of interest as he looked at her face.
“How do you do, Mrs. Ellison. It is charming of you to receive me with almost no notice at all. But after so long, hoping to meet my English family, I simply could not wait another day.”
“How do you do, Mr. Ellison,” she replied. It was difficult to say the name, her own name, to a stranger. “I hope your stay in England will be a pleasant one.”
“It already is,” he assured her with a smile. “And becoming better all the time.”
She forced herself to make a civil reply, and they all sat down to exchange small talk of the usual innocuous and meaningless kind. However, almost immediately it took another turn. Caroline had made some trivial enquiry about Samuel’s youth, and he replied with a vivid description of New York, where apparently his mother had landed from the ship which had taken her across the Atlantic.
“Alone?” Mariah said in amazement. “However did she manage?” Perhaps it was an intrusive question. The answer may not have been one he was willing to give and it was made in disbelief as much as sympathy.
“Oh, there were many in the same circumstances,” he replied easily. “They helped one another, as I was telling Mrs. Fielding yesterday evening.” He glanced at her with a smile. “And my mother was a woman of remarkable courage, and never afraid to work hard.”
Mariah barely heard the continued conversation. Her mind was filled with thoughts of this woman she had never seen, who had been Edmund’s first wife and fled to America alone, without a friend or ally in the world, according to Samuel, and carrying Edmund’s child. Why had she gone if not with some lover? The answer to that lay like a dark and ugly threat just out of reach, but close. . far too close.
“And did you remain in New York?” Caroline enquired.
“Oh no,” Samuel replied with a wide smile. “When I was twenty, I decided to journey westward, just to go and see it, you understand?”
“And leave your poor mother?” Mariah said with some sarcasm. It gave her a ghost of pleasure to think of Alys by herself again. It served her right.
“Oh, believe me, ma’am, my mother was well able to care for herself by then,” he assured her, leaning back more comfortably in his chair. “She had a nice little business going in dressmaking, and employed several girls. She had made friends and knew a great many people. She missed me, I hope, but she did not mind when I packed up and went west, first to Pittsburgh, then up to Illinois.”
He continued with marvelous descriptions of the great plains that stretched for a thousand miles westwards to the foothills of the Rocky Mountains.
Mariah began to relax. He was merely entertaining, after all. Like most men, he loved to be the center of attention. Unlike most, he had a great gift for anecdote and a very ready sense of humor. Caroline’s face was quite flushed, and she had barely taken her eyes off him since he began.
Tea was brought, poured and passed. This was not so bad after all.
“But you returned to New York,” Caroline asked.
“I came back east when my mother was taken ill,” Samuel answered her.
“Of course.” She nodded. “Of course. You would naturally want to take care of her. She never married again?”
A curious expression crossed Samuel’s face, a mixture of pity and something which could have been anger.
Mariah felt the chill of warning shiver through her. It was not over. She wanted to say something to cut off Caroline’s intrusive enquiries, but for once she could think of nothing which would not simply make it worse.
&nbs
p; “I hope she recovered,” Caroline said earnestly. “She must still have been quite young.”
“Oh, yes,” Samuel responded with a smile. “It proved to be no more than a passing thing, thank heaven.”
“You must have been close,” Caroline said gently. “Having endured so much together.”
His face softened, and there was a great tenderness in his eyes. “We were. Much as I wished to find my English family as well, I don’t think I would ever have left America while she was alive. I never knew a person, man or woman, with more courage and strength of will to follow her own mind and be her own person, whatever it cost.”
Caroline smiled; there was a sweetness in her, almost a glow, as if the words held great value for her.
“It does cost,” she agreed, looking intently at Samuel. “One can be so uncertain, so filled with doubts and loneliness, and the way cannot always be retraced. Sometimes it is too late before you even realize what you have paid.”
Samuel looked at her with quite open appreciation, as though she had offered him a profound compliment.
“I see you understand very well, Mrs. Fielding. I believe you would have liked her, and she you. You seem to be of one mind.”
Mariah stiffened. What was he talking about? The woman had left her husband and run off to America. He was speaking as if it were some kind of a virtue. How much did he know? Surely she would never have-could never. . no woman would! The coldness hardened inside her like ice. Old memories of pain returned, things forgotten years ago, pushed into the oblivion at the edges of her mind.
She must do something, now, before it was too late.
“I suppose you were there during that miserable war?” she said abruptly. “It must have been most disagreeable.”
“That hardly begins to describe it, Mrs. Ellison,” Samuel said gravely. “Any war is dreadful, but one among people of one nation who are even known to each other, perhaps brothers, fathers and sons, is the most terrible. The violence and the hatred have a bitterness which does not fade.”
Mariah Ellison did not understand, nor wish to.
He perceived it quickly, and his expression changed. The sense of tragedy was wiped away; compassion and a wry humor replaced it.
He told them of events as he had perceived them.
“Sometimes it’s the silly things that hold you together,” he said, his voice dropping even lower. “If you’d ever been really sick with fear till your stomach knotted up like a fist, you’d understand that.”
A wave like a prickle of heat swept over Mariah’s skin as memory washed around her in a tide, old memory she’d buried years ago, followed by a chill that left her shaking as if she had swallowed ice. How dare he make her feel like this? How dare he arrive out of nowhere and awaken the past?
It was Caroline who cut across the silence and jerked her back to this pleasant, modest room with its well-worn, comfortable furnishings, the afternoon light streaming in through the windows onto the carpet.
“You speak of it with such passion we can feel something of what you know,” she said softly.
Samuel turned to look at her and moved momentarily as if he would have put out his hand to touch her, had he not remembered in time that it would be too familiar.
“What did you do after the war?” she asked. She heard the hard edge in her own voice, but it was beyond her control. “You must have made a living at something!”
Mariah wondered if he had ever married, and if not, then why, but she did not wish to detain him any longer by asking, nor did she have any desire to appear interested.
“What about your mother?” Caroline said gently, and Mariah could have kicked her.
Samuel’s face filled with a softness which changed him profoundly. For the first time the confidence was gone, and in its place one saw for a moment a more vulnerable man, one with more knowledge of his own need and the understanding that much of his strength came from another source. Mariah wanted to like him for it, and could not because she was afraid of what he was going to say.
“My mother cared for herself, ma’am,” he answered, and he could not keep the pride out of it. “And for a good many others also. She had all the courage in the world. She never thought twice about fighting for what she believed to be right-win or lose.” He lifted his chin a little. “She taught me all I know of how to face an enemy, no matter how you feel or what you fear the cost will be. I’ve often thought, in my worst moments, how I’d like to be worthy of her. I daresay there’s many a man the same.”
Mariah felt the misery tighten inside her, like an iron band, never to be escaped again. Damn him for coming! Damn Caroline for letting him. It’s easy to talk about courage and fighting when the battle is an honorable one and everybody understands. When you aren’t so ashamed you could die of it!
Was that what he was talking about? Did he guess-even know? She stared at his charming, humorous face, so like her own son’s in its features, but she could not read it. There was no one she could turn to, certainly never Caroline. She must not know, ever. All those times they had quarreled, the times over the years, even more often recently, when she had told Caroline what a fool she was. . marrying a man two-thirds her age instead of retiring decently into widowhood. It was bound to end in disaster, and she had told her that. It was no less than the truth. It would be unbearable now, unlivable with, if Caroline were to know all her long-buried darkness. She would rather be dead and respectably buried somewhere. . even beside Edmund. That was probably what they would do. It was what she had told them she wanted-what else could she say?
But one did not die merely of wanting to. She knew that well enough.
They were talking again. The noise buzzed around her like a jar full of flies.
“Was New York very different after the war?” Caroline asked. She was bent forward a little, the soft burgundy silk of her dress pulled tight across her shoulders, her face intent. She was very individual, the intelligence and will in her, the unusual shape of her mouth. The old lady had thought her beautiful in the beginning. Now they were too familiar for her to think in such terms. And beauty belonged to the young.
“Changed beyond belief,” Samuel was answering. A curious expression crossed his face, laughter in his eyes and something which could have been excitement, and both sadness and distaste in his mouth. “The war had left everything in a flux.” And he proceeded to describe its color, violence, corruption and excitement. He told of it so enthrallingly even the old lady listened, begrudging every vivid moment.
“I’m sure you could not imagine, Mrs. Ellison, being a young man recently returned from the fear and hardship of war, and the strange tragedies of victory which were far more bitter in the mouth than any of us had foreseen.”
He moved from the city life to his adventure westwards.
“The men and women who took the wagon trains through were among the finest and bravest I’ve ever known,” he said with fierce admiration. “The hardships they endured, without complaint, were enough to make you weep. And they were all sorts: Germans, Italians, Swedes and French, Spaniards, Irish and Russians, but so many from right here. I came across one group of English people who were pushing all their worldly possessions in handcarts, women walking beside, some with babes in arms, going all the way to the Salt Lake Valley. God knows how many died on the way.”
“I cannot imagine it,” Caroline said softly. “I don’t know how people have the courage.”
Caroline watched Samuel and thought of the previous evening at the theatre, and how utterly different that had been. She could see perfectly in her mind’s eye Cecily Antrim’s vivid figure illuminated on the stage, her hair like a halo in the lights, her every gesture full of passion and imprisoned despair. She wanted so much more than she had. Would that woman ever conceive of what it would be like to struggle simply to survive?
Or were the emotions much the same, only the object of the hunger different? Did one long for love, for the freedom to be yourself, unrestrained by soc
ial expectations, with the same fierceness as one hungered for religious or political freedom, and set out to walk on foot into a vast and unknown land inhabited only by an alien race who saw you as an invader?
Cecily Antrim was fighting a complex and sophisticated society in order to win the freedom to say anything she wished. Caroline felt threatened by her. Sitting here watching Samuel and less than half listening to him, she could admit that. She was used to a world where certain things were not said. It was safer. There were things she did not want to know-about others and about herself. There were emotions she did not want to think others understood. It made her naked in a dangerous way, and far too vulnerable.
Cecily Antrim was very brave. Nothing seemed to frighten her sufficiently to deter her. That was part of what Joshua admired so much; that, and her beauty. It was unique, not a prettiness at all, far too strong, too passionate and uncompromising for that. Her face had a symmetry from every angle, a balance in the smoothness of the bones, the wide, unflinching eyes. She moved with extraordinary grace. She made Caroline feel very ordinary, sort of brown and old, like a moth instead of a butterfly.
And the worst thing of all was that it was not merely physical. Cecily had such vigor and courage to fight for whatever she believed in, and Caroline was increasingly unsure of what she thought was right or wrong. She wanted to agree with Joshua that censorship was wrong. The only way to freedom and growth, to the just equality of one person’s faith with another’s, was for ideas to be expressed and questions to be asked, comfortable or not. And for laws to be changed, people’s emotions had to be awoken, and their sympathies for passions and beliefs outside their own experience.
That was what her mind told her. Deeper, woven into her being, was the conviction that there are things that should never be spoken, perhaps not even known.
