by Tracy Rees
I have given up a great deal to come here, I reflect, kneeling on the window seat, shivering and gazing down over the silent street. It was always easy to follow Aurelia’s wishes when I had nothing of my own. It is quite another now that I have – had – beloved friends with whom to pass my days. And more than that! A gambolling hound, a conservatory, a river and a garden (even if they weren’t precisely mine). And hope. From those first shivering February mornings in Twickenham, I felt hope. That is what is most starkly missing here. Mrs Riverthorpe strikes me as too jaded to see hope as anything but a nuisance. I believe she would give short shrift to love, too.
I creep reluctantly into a bed that is almost clammy with cold and stare into the dark, wondering why on earth Aurelia should send me here. The most likely explanation I can conjure is that it is to acquaint me with Frederic Meredith. I vow that I will ask Mrs Riverthorpe if she knows him as soon as I next see her. I remain more puzzled than ever about his role in Aurelia’s story now that I know about Robin. As my eyelids droop, I think about what I know of him. A gentleman – of course. Handsome – of course. Wonderful dancer. A man about whom she wrote extensively for more than two months, then mentioned two, maybe three times throughout the rest of her life. I shake my head tiredly.
If you wanted to create an enigma, Aurelia, you have done it.
It seems almost foolish to close my eyes and give myself up to sleep in such an unsettling atmosphere. I try hard to remember that I am seventeen years old and do not believe in ghosts or vampires.
Chapter Forty-Three
Bath. I arrived on a Wednesday and by Friday morning I am thoroughly miserable. I have been trying to embrace my new position and explore my surroundings in an appreciative state of mind. I am trying. But now I miss the Wisters as much as Aurelia and Mulberry Lodge vastly more than I have ever missed Hatville. I am lost in Bath.
Standing dutifully before the abbey in the rain, I stare at the carvings of the men climbing the ladder to heaven, one toilsome rung at a time. I feel a certain comradeship with them. At least they do not have to contend with Aurelia’s treasure hunt.
Yesterday, tired, irritable and eager to escape the house, I sallied forth to explore the city. As a courtesy I consulted with Mrs Riverthorpe, lest I disgrace her by wandering unchaperoned. She merely hooted at me and did not deign to reply. So I went out alone and was stared at a great deal. As a result I observed a decidedly defiant tilt to my head whenever I caught sight of myself in the glamorous, glittering shop windows.
Then, yesterday afternoon, I dutifully attended the card party. It was as tedious and tense as the dinner, with a guest list as carelessly assembled. When it was over and the guests had gone, I broached the subject of the ball with Mrs Riverthorpe. I told her that I wished to be excused. I was at a ball just recently, in Richmond, I explained, which left me with no desire to brave another so soon.
She would not hear of it. A Richmond ball is not a Bath ball, she decreed. No one comes to Bath in order not to go to balls. If I don’t want to go to a second one I don’t have to, but she won’t hear of me not going to one. And I had better not wear something so tasteful.
Then I asked her if she knows Mr Frederic Meredith, but Mrs Riverthorpe claims never to have heard of him. I should have liked to ask her then whether she might know something of the purpose of the treasure hunt but I had worn out her scant patience with me. She blew off to a supper before I had the chance.
*
Today I have come out again early, not because I am hungry for more of Bath but because I do not want to spend all day in the house waiting for the ball. By midday I am jaded and drenched, besides. I have admired Royal Crescent. I have stood overlooking Crescent Fields. When I think of how I might have spent a rainy day at Mulberry Lodge, I want to weep.
I have wandered all the way to the river and am studying the weir and rushing water with waning interest when brisk footsteps splash past me along the pavement. Then they slow, and return.
‘Excuse me, madam.’
My heart sinks. Have I left myself open to an ungentlemanly approach by wandering around alone? I turn and squint through the curtain of drops that stream from my bonnet.
The blurred figure tips his hat.
‘I do not wish to offend or alarm you, madam, but are you quite all right? Seeing you standing there alone in the rain, I merely wished to enquire. Might I offer any assistance?’
Something about his voice is familiar. I put up my hand to stem the cascade; an icy rivulet streams into my sleeve. I stumble, not from the wet but from amazement. Henry Mead reaches out a hand to steady me, then snatches it back at once.
‘Beg pardon, madam. Are you unwell?’
‘Why, Henry!’ I exclaim. ‘Whatever are you doing here? How are you?’
It is horribly apparent that he does not remember me. I am astonished at the leap of my heart when I see him – and the corresponding plunge when I realize he has forgotten our meeting. I certainly have not been so present in his thoughts since as he has in mine. It is hardly as though I am a memorable sort of a person.
He looks embarrassed. ‘Excuse me, madam, I –’
‘Oh, please don’t apologize, Mr Mead.’ I am mortified at having greeted him like an old friend when of course he is nothing of the sort. ‘Why on earth should you remember me? We met just the once, at your grandfather’s, some months ago. It was only that it was welcome to find a familiar face here in Bath, you see, and –’
‘Amy? Amy Snow? Is that really you?’
Now he is peering towards me through the rain and I suddenly, joyfully realize he has not forgotten me, he simply did not recognize me!
‘You look completely different! Why, I did not expect to see you here! What brings you to Bath? And why are you standing on a bridge all alone in the pouring rain?’
He is shaking his head and shaking my hand and grinning the mischievous grin I remember so well. I find myself grinning too, though I am sure that is another unladylike behaviour to add to my repertoire.
We are both blinking raindrops and struggling to withstand the torrents so he suggests a coffee house and I gratefully accept. Why should I worry? Mrs Riverthorpe doesn’t care what I do and I do not expect to impress Bath society in any case. I want to be warm and dry and avoid Hades House. I want to talk to Henry.
Chapter Forty-Four
Henry offers me his arm and we hurry back into town, past elegant shops and fuggy public houses glimpsed through a smear of rain. Near the ancient Roman baths, Henry ducks through a narrow doorway, pulling me after him. I find myself in a long, warm room shaped like a letter box, where I am greeted by the snaking, swirling smell of coffee, thick as fog. We find seats in a mullioned window, the rain making fantastical the swirls in the glass, steam veiling the city. I remove my bonnet and with it my own personal waterfall.
‘Ah, now I see you!’ beams Henry, looking more delighted than I could have thought possible. ‘Amy, it is so good to meet you again. I confess I was saddened not to be able to further our acquaintance back in . . . January, wasn’t it? But you were on confidential business, so what could I do? I confess further, my grandfather ordered me not to bother you for a contact address. And now, here you are!’
A waiter brings coffee in a tall silver samovar. He pours the dark, steaming liquid into cream china cups translucent as petals and I wait until he has bowed and withdrawn to look up at Henry and say, ‘You were? Saddened, I mean.’
‘Well, of course! We had a fine night of it in Holborn, did we not? A warm friendship was born, I think. Unless the pleasure was all mine and the confidential business was a fabrication to escape a feckless idiot who ruined your dinner by talking nonsense all night.’
‘Oh, no! That is to say, yes, it was a fine night, and I wish I could have stayed to see you and Mr Crumm again.’
‘I’m relieved to hear it. Then let’s have a toast. To friendship! And to chance meetings in unexpected places!’ He raises his cup, which looks tiny in his large hand
. I smile and chink mine against it. I know I am staring at him but I can’t quite believe that he is sitting opposite me, after all this time. He is real! Solid and rain-spattered and real.
‘How is your situation now, Amy? Are you at liberty to talk about it, or should I stop asking questions? I am not nosy, only interminably curious. Do tell me to stop talking if you need to.’
I feel myself stiffen at the mention of the quest, then I shrug. For those few minutes I had forgotten all about it. ‘The truth is I am no freer, Henry. My time and purpose are still dictated by the same departed friend. I am afraid I am not at liberty to explain the details, though I should like to, very much. You may ask me all the questions you wish, only there may be many I cannot answer.’
He reaches across the table and touches my hand briefly, sympathetically. I feel like the china cup, dainty and small under his touch. ‘I see. But are you well? How long have you been here? Is everything . . . um . . .?’
He takes his hand away and gives a vague gesture somewhere along the lines of querying whether my life makes any sense at all. I experience a great desire to stroke his cheek. I take a sip of coffee instead.
‘Thank you, I am well, certainly, and I have found more happiness in the last months than I ever hoped I might.’ I look around the coffee shop. I have never been inside one before. I like the steamy air and the brisk, purposeful flit of the waiters. ‘I have been in Twickenham, amongst the dearest people. I was very sorry to leave. I came here on Wednesday and I am feeling the wrench very sorely. I have somewhere rather grand to stay in Bath and it is a very desirable city of course, only . . . I . . . I find that it . . . well, to be honest, I dislike it intensely.’
‘But how can that be? It’s Bath, my dear!’ he gasps. But already I can see he is teasing me. ‘No, no, I know precisely what you mean. There is something about being told that one absolutely must love a place that makes it impossible to love a place – that makes one quite determined not to love the place – true?’
‘Yes! And Henry, it is an extremely fashionable place, and I am by no means a fashionable person. It is beautiful, certainly, but the reasons people come here, to see and be seen, to dance, to flirt . . . well, those things are all very well in amenable company, but I am without friends here and besides, deep in my heart I long for a quieter life.’
‘Yet you appear to lead anything but that,’ comments Henry, leaning back in his seat and regarding me. ‘Mysterious business, travelling alone from one place to the next. It is not the usual thing for a young lady.’
‘Yes, I assure you, there is nothing usual about my circumstance.’
‘Furthermore I’m not sure you can claim to be an unfashionable person. To be sure, in London you were not –’
It is my turn to tease. ‘What? How can you say such an ungallant thing!’
‘Ungallant it may be, but ’tis true. Whereas now, well, no wonder that I didn’t recognize you on the bridge. Very fine dress, very large bonnet, your little face quite swallowed up in it. You cut a very different figure now, you know.’ He grins and stretches his long legs out beneath the table. They bump against mine, and he pulls them back again hurriedly, sitting up straight again. ‘Sorry, Amy!’
‘Well, the thoughts in my head are the same, no matter the size of the bonnet that’s wrapped around it,’ I rush on, hoping to distract him from my flaming face. ‘Aurelia arranged . . . many things for me. I am better dressed than I have ever been, but there is still much about me with which society can still find fault. I cannot deny that it is pleasant to dress well and not be looked down upon in the street, but as for becoming a great lady, at the heart of a social whirl, that is not what concerns me.’
‘What does concern you?’
‘Being true to Aurelia, carrying out her wishes, doing what I must do.’
‘But . . . what about yourself?’
I frown and a comfortable silence springs up between us while I think how I can explain it to him. The door behind us opens with a bright jingling of bells. One patron is trying to leave while another enters. My chair is bumped; the tables are rather close together. Henry leaps up but the customer apologizes most kindly and moves on. ‘I am fine, Henry,’ I smile and he subsides again.
I clasp my hands before me on the table and continue. ‘I can hardly think beyond Aurelia; her business determines where I go and when. When I reach the end of this . . . business . . . I know I will need to fill in that blank. I will need to decide where to settle and in what manner to live. I have fortune enough that I do not need to work, and yet I am not a lady, not by birth. I have no wish to constantly pretend to be one, nor do I wish a life of lonely idleness. Having no family of my own . . . well, I will have a great deal to think of, once Aurelia’s work is done.’ I shrug again, knowing that what I have said is inadequate, but I hardly know what else to tell him – unless I tell him everything.
Henry leans towards me and looks as if he too is thinking carefully of what to say next.
‘Your loyalty is inspiring. I can see that you loved Aurelia very much. But does it sometimes feel . . . heavy, carrying out her wishes in the dark like this?’
I sigh. ‘It is both blessing and curse.’ I pause and Henry watches me patiently. ‘While I am thus occupied, I cannot make my own decisions, nor carve out my own way, and that is heavy, yes. When I meet kind friends, I am not free to stay with them. Of course, it is Aurelia who has enabled me to meet them in the first place! But then, I still feel rather lost without her and I am not yet confident, Henry, that a happy future awaits me. Now I am like . . . a carriage. Alone I might flounder but Aurelia’s wishes are the horse that pulls me on.’
‘I understand. A purpose is a valuable thing. Perhaps soon you may feel that you are both carriage and horse.’
‘Perhaps. But what about you, Henry? What brings you to Bath?’
Henry stirs his coffee and nibbles a biscuit. Silver grains of sugar fall on his sleeve and he brushes them off. ‘Oh, the usual reasons, to see and be seen, to dance, to flirt . . .’
I feel a little crestfallen until I realize he is teasing again.
‘Actually, I have been sent away in disgrace. Well, disgrace is a strong word. I have been sent away to reflect upon the error of my ways.’
‘Oh! And . . . well . . . are they fruitful reflections?’
He looks out of the window at the rain and the murky street, then turns back to me. ‘Honestly, they’ve turned up little I didn’t already know. Just that I am a drifter with no motivation and no direction. I’ve left my studies, Amy. You remember I was chafing against them when we met? I resumed them shortly afterwards and I was refreshed from the break. I applied myself stoutly to the books, really I did! My tutor was highly pleased with me – for close on two whole weeks! And then it came over me again – that suffocating sense of life unfolding outside my study and I missing out on the parade. My brain stopped working, Amy.’ He throws up his hands in surrender. ‘It refused to digest one more femur or bacterium.’
‘Did it? Well then, what else could you do? Why did you choose medicine, Henry?’
‘Well, I wanted to help people. I love learning, I hate to see suffering. Medicine seemed an obvious way to address all these things. But instead I found I could not learn, I saw no people, except for in disassembled parts – a skull here, a scapula there, and I was suffering! The goal still seems noble to me, but the path to reach it was not one I could tread for one more minute.’ He shudders at the memory. ‘Now this raises an important question for me and for my father. Does my inability to do what I must for a predetermined period in order to reach a worthy goal mean that I have no character?’
‘I see . . . well . . . so you are in Bath to ponder the case.’ I avoid answering the question for I cannot tell a man his own character. He does not seem feckless or ignoble to me, but I am aware that I may be influenced by his curling hair and tall figure, and by his eyes. (They are of the very darkest, most gleaming brown and currently have a tiny silver ra
indrop trembling on his uptilted black lashes.) But even I know that hair and figure are not the substance of a man, nor even dark and rain-lit eyes.
‘I believe my family think it is youthful high spirits which prevent me from working, Amy,’ he laughs, in a way that suggests he can’t imagine where they’d get such an impression. ‘But I do not think parties and young ladies are the answer for me, although I hold nothing against either. I don’t want to squander time,’ he assures me earnestly, settling his elbows on the table and hunching over them. ‘I squandered plenty as a young dasher. I already wish I had a settled purpose . . . It’s just that I don’t know what it is.’
Because he is leaning forward and I am leaning forward we are very close. I am flushed with the thrill of sharing sympathetic confidences and I cannot pull away from him; I do not want to. I want to convey so much to him – that I feel privileged he would confide in me so honestly, that I admire his determination to find a course in life that feels right, that I think he has the loveliest eyes that I have ever seen . . . My heart is beating very hard.
‘Perhaps some more coffee?’ asks Henry suddenly, breaking the spell and raising an arm to a waiter before I can reply. I sit up properly again and look around to compose myself. The coffee shop is more crowded than ever and the door jingles again, announcing yet another customer. My chair is jostled once more. I look up to reassure the jostler but she appears unconcerned. I startle and duck my head almost completely beneath the table, as if my boot laces are in urgent need of adjustment.
‘Amy? Hello? Amy?’ I hear Henry’s voice above me and reluctantly sit up again. I glance to my left but the newcomer is halfway across the long rectangular room. Her perfectly straight back and sweeping skirts are gliding away from me, but still, she is here and I cannot stay.
‘Are you quite well, Amy?’ asks Henry, leaning over the table.
