Not Quite a Husband

by Sherry Thomas

  So she packed instead—even if Leo couldn’t secure transport for them today, Surgeon-Captain Gibbs would still want his quarters back. Not that there was much to pack—they had brought little beyond the clothes on their backs. She did find one stocking of hers under the bed and a pen engraved with Leo’s name on the desk.

  When she went to put the pen in his saddlebag, she noticed for the first time that it had been slashed through on one side. She shuddered, for a moment slipping back to the terror of their desperate ride. And then it passed and she placed the pen in an interior pouch of the saddlebag where he kept his other pens.

  The inside of the bag was largely empty except for a few notebooks, and one of them too had been slashed halfway through. She picked up that particular notebook and opened it. Several sheets that had been torn from the notebook fell out.

  Those would be the letters he’d told her about. The first one was to his godfather.

  Dear Sir Robert,

  I write to inform you that I have married again. I beg that you would overlook the unusual circumstances and honor and protect Mrs. Marsden, née Bryony Asquith, with affection and esteem.

  My life has been immeasurably enriched by your presence. I regret this hasty adieu. I take with me nothing but the fondest of memories.

  Your friend and godson,

  Leo

  The next letter, to his brothers, ran more or less along the same lines, with additional good-byes to numerous nieces and nephews and two postscripts.

  P. S. Don’t be surprised at the reading of my will. I did not change it after the annulment.

  P.P.S. Will and Matthew, I apologize again for how long it took me to come around. In my affection for our father, I sided blindly with him. I cannot tell you how much it means to me that you have never taken me to task for it.

  There was another sheet of paper. Bryony hesitated. He’d told her the content of the first two letters, so presumably he would not mind her reading them. But he’d said nothing about a third letter. She was about to put it back without reading when she saw that it was addressed to her.

  Dear Bryony,

  There are many things I wish I had time to tell you, so I will say just this: These past few days have been some of the best days of my life. Because of you.

  My fervent hope is that you are safe and well as you read this letter. That you will have all the happiness I wish I could have shared with you. And that you will remember me not as a failed husband, but one who was still trying, til the very end.

  Yours always,

  Leo

  Leo’s voice drifted in from the shutters she’d left ajar. Mrs. Marsden. As soon as possible. Thank you.

  She quickly put the letters back, came to her feet, and wiped the tears from her eyes.

  “You are already done with the general?” she asked as he came in the door.

  “No, I didn’t meet him yet. But there is a cable from Callista.”

  “Callista? Here?”

  “I think you’d better read it.”

  Somehow her heart sank at his expression. She took the cable from him.

  Dear Bryony and Leo,

  I pray you are safe. I will never forgive myself if anything happened to either of you, since the bit about Father’s health was a ruse.

  But it is no longer. Last night he had a massive stroke. Doctors say that he could have another stroke any time and that would be the end of him.

  If you receive this in good health, please hurry. And please let me know as soon as possible that you are all right.

  Callista

  “Did I say I was going to kill her with my bare hands if anything happened to you? I think I am going to do it anyway,” Bryony said, grinding her teeth.

  “No, I will not have you hang for her. I will see if I can have her committed to an asylum where she belongs,” said Leo, shaking his head in exasperation. “She fooled me. When I cabled a friend in London and asked about your father’s health, the response I got was that he was indeed housebound.”

  “So you did check. I was beginning to wonder if you’d become excessively gullible.”

  “I don’t trust a word Callista says, at least not where you are concerned. When you were in Germany, she once told me that as a result of treating your own melancholia, you were severely addicted to cocaine and injected yourself at least three times a day.”

  “What?”

  “And when you were in America, she reported that you fell in love with the husband of one of your colleagues and became so miserable that you attempted suicide.”

  “She’s mad!”

  “Mad to throw us together, that is for certain.”

  “Well, shall we believe her this time?”

  “The cable was sent from Lord Elgin’s office. So Charlie had to be involved. And for Charlie to be involved, she must have gone to either Jeremy or Will. I’m inclined to believe her.”

  The addition of shock to the mix of exhaustion and excitement was getting to be too much for Bryony. She sat down, the cable in hand, and tried to read it again. But the words only swam about.

  She looked up at him. “I suppose I’ll have to go right away.”

  “Yes. The road to Nowshera is crowded and the ponies for the tonga service are overworked. They say a trip now takes twenty hours. I have been promised an escort for you. Shall I help you get ready?”

  “I’m ready,” she said slowly. “I was already packing before you came back.”

  He pulled her out of her chair and hugged her close. “I’ll miss you.”

  She hugged him back as fiercely as she dared. “Promise me you won’t do anything brave.”

  “I will be the veriest coward. And I’ll come to London as soon as I can get away from here. That is, if you haven’t already left for San Francisco or Christchurch by the time I reach England.”

  She kissed him. “No, I’ll be there. You were right. It’s time I stopped running away.”

  It was always a shock to return to London, to the visibly sooty air, the grime-streaked houses, the poverty, and the sheer density of the population. But it was also the kind of shock that wore off fast. By the time the train pulled into the station Bryony had ceased to wonder how people managed to live in such collective squalor. And as the carriage drew up before her father’s house, she no longer even smelled the pervasive stench of horse droppings along the thoroughfares.

  It was much more difficult to look upon her father’s face, the pale, papery skin, the thinning brows and lashes, the colorless and slack lips—especially slack on the side that had been paralyzed by the previous stroke—and realize that he was truly at death’s door. He’d had a second stroke mere hours before Bryony arrived. She conferred with his physician. Geoffrey Asquith was not expected to recover. He was not even expected to last more than a week. But he was still alive.

  He had been very well cared for. Her stepmother, with years of experience looking after her fragile sons, had hired two competent nurses and directed them well. Both he and the room were clean as a whistle, and one could hardly tell that there was a bedpan in use.

  “Tea?” Callista asked.

  Bryony shook her head.

  At twenty-five, Callista still retained the gamine face she’d had since she was a child, with the same wide eyes, same high cheekbones, same slightly pinched nose. She’d been there on the platform of the train station, waiting, a slender, sparkling young woman in a straw hat the green ribbons of which fluttered in the wind and the steam. And Bryony’s heart had throbbed painfully: Such an uncanny resemblance she bore to her dead mother, as if Toddy had stepped out of the careful preserves of Bryony’s memory.

  They had not said much on the carriage ride home. They were not close. They had never been close, even though they had once been the only two children in a large, rambling house.

  Bryony had tried. After Toddy’s death, she’d poured all her love into Toddy’s baby. She’d imagined them as fellow shipwrecked passengers in the same lifeboat: sisters and bes
t friends who would make their way together to safety and a new life.

  But whereas Bryony yearned for human contact, Callista shrank away from it. She did not want to be kissed or stroked or cuddled. She did not want to be sung to. And when Bryony tried to read to her, she hid under draped tables and bedsteads, her fingers stuffed into her ears.

  Bryony could not get her to talk. She could not interest Callista in any of the games and recreations that she and Toddy had enjoyed so immensely. There had even been times when Callista had turned around and scurried in the opposite direction when she’d seen Bryony coming.

  Eventually she’d learned to leave Callista alone. And accepted that there was no one else in the lifeboat with her, that she must row herself across the endless sea of her childhood, and that she would be alone too when she finally reached that far shore.

  It almost didn’t hurt very much when, at age five, Callista took instantly to both Mrs. Asquith and Mrs. Roundtree, their new governess, grew out of her shell, and became a happy, rambunctiously sociable girl.

  “Are you going to leave again soon?” asked Callista.

  “I don’t have plans yet,” Bryony answered, moving away from her father’s bed.

  “And Leo, is he coming back too?”

  “Yes, he means to settle in Cambridge.”

  Nearly a month had passed since she kissed him good-bye, a separation that was already longer than the time they’d spent together in India and growing lengthier by the day. She’d had no news from him. She inferred that he was safe, that if something had happened then she would have heard of it. But still she fretted.

  And not just about his safety.

  He had not wanted a future with her. He’d doubted her capacity to love. In the heat of battle, with their lives on the line, it had not mattered. Death, whatever its faults, simplified life as nothing else did. But with the likelihood of decades upon decades of time before them, would not the potent intimacy that had shielded them from past wounds eventually lose its power and strength against the sheer monotony and ordinariness of daily life, against everything else that had held them apart?

  She lifted a panel of the heavy curtain and looked down into the glistening street below. In India, the rain, when it came, was heavy and decisive. She’d forgotten how dithering and miserly English rain could be—a whole day of mist and drizzle and the actual precipitation might barely cover the bottom of a bucket.

  And she’d forgotten how cool it was, fires lit at the very end of August, and still she felt the damp chill rising from the floorboards.

  “Bryony,” Callista called her name.

  She turned around slowly.

  “I’m sorry,” said Callista. “I’m so sorry for everything.”

  Occasionally Bryony had nightmares, swords and darkness and Leo bleeding from a thousand cuts. She’d jerk awake, gasping, and not be able to go back to sleep for hours, her heart quaking with the knowledge of how close they’d come.

  Times like that she’d get quite angry with Callista, for her reckless fabrications. Leo could have died from the Pathans’ swords or been shot and felled, like that less fortunate sepoy standing next to him.

  It was always easier to blame someone else.

  She walked to the far side of the bed, where Callista stood with her back against the wall. She took Callista’s hands in hers, touching her sister for the first time in years, perhaps decades.

  “It’s all right,” she said.

  Three common words, a common phrase, as ordinary as sparrows and moths. Yet, as the syllables left her lips, they felt like jewels, round and brilliant. And her heart was somehow more whole, more spacious.

  She returned to her father’s side, and sat down on the chair that had been placed by the bed. Only one lamp had been lit, but its light, the color of faded brass, caught every wrinkle and sag on Geoffrey Asquith’s face. When had he become so old?

  “You have changed,” said Callista.

  Bryony raised her head.

  “When I was small, it was difficult for me to be around you,” Callista continued. “All your emotions were so intense—your anger like daggers, your unhappiness a poisoned well. Even your love had such sharp corners and dark alleys.

  “Then there were years when I thought you were sleepwalking through life, drugged with work, the way people who take too much laudanum feel nothing. But when you became engaged to Leo, the magnitude of your happiness frightened me. It felt like an overloaded apple cart—the least bump in the road might upset the whole thing.”

  Bryony almost chuckled at her description. It was quite apt, really, a cart overloaded with apples, a heart overloaded with hopes, both equally prone to overturning.

  Callista smiled. “I guess what I’m really trying to say is that you used to shatter easily. But now you’ve become less brittle.”

  Bryony brought her hands to rest on the edge of the bed—the sheets were French, as fine and soft as spun cloud. In a way, Leo had been right. She’d shattered too easily because she hadn’t known how to love anyone less perfect, thoughtful, and devoted than Toddy. But now, she thought, she was learning.

  “I hope so,” she said.

  Callista went to bed at eleven o’clock. Bryony remained by her father’s side. A quarter hour later there were footsteps in the hall. She thought it was Callista coming back, but it was her stepmother.

  Mrs. Asquith was in her mid-fifties, with the kind of finely wrought features that would still be finely wrought when she reached her seventies. She touched her husband’s forehead and briefly fussed with the counterpane. They were perfect strangers, Bryony and Mrs. Asquith, even though Mrs. Asquith had been married to Geoffrey Asquith for twenty-four years.

  By the time she came to live with Bryony and Callista, she had been worn down by her sons’ long years of illness and was herself in imperfect health. She had not made very many overtures to win over Bryony’s affection. Bryony, with the memory of the execrable governess that had been Mrs. Asquith’s hire very much fresh on her mind, had freely ignored Mrs. Asquith.

  That distance, once established, took on its own air of immutability. Like a piece of furniture that pleased no one, yet offended no one enough to remove, it remained in place, year after year.

  Mrs. Asquith straightened. She placed a thin hand against a bedpost and gazed down at her dying husband. She looked much older than Bryony remembered.

  “Are you all right, ma’am?” Bryony asked.

  “I’ll be fine in time,” said Mrs. Asquith. She lifted her eyes and looked at Bryony. “I don’t know whether I shall see much of you after your father—I don’t know how much I shall see of you in the future, so I thought I would speak to you now.

  “I understood very well at the time your father proposed to me that he needed a mother for his children and I was prepared to assume that responsibility. But then both Paul’s and Angus’s health failed—”

  She exhaled. “What I mean to say is that I did very poorly by you and your sister in those years, but especially by you. I have no defense except to say that as my sons suffered and deteriorated, it seemed to me that you and Callista were blessed with everything children could ask for: good, robust health. By the time I realized the mistake in my assumption, years had passed and—and I was never there. I’m sorry.”

  “You couldn’t have been everywhere at once, ma’am. You must not blame yourself for attending to Paul and Angus when they needed you.”

  “Yes, but you and Callista needed me too.”

  Bryony looked down at her father’s inert figure. “We have a father, ma’am. He could have bestirred himself a little more when you had to be away.”

  “Yes, he could have. He should have,” agreed Mrs. Asquith. “However, it did not occur to me to point out his failings to him, because I was so grateful that he did not take me to task for what I had failed to do.”

  She paused. “There was another occasion, however, when I did point out his failing to him. That was when he debated whether to al
low you to go to medical school. I was adamantly against the idea. I thought—I’m sorry—I thought you were being headstrong and needlessly rebellious and I was aghast that he even gave the idea due consideration. I believed it would ruin your chance at a suitable marriage and reduce the prestige of the Asquith name all at once.

  “He agonized over it. But in the end he said to me that he had not the moral authority to forbid you to go. That since he had given you so little in life, he owed you the freedom to choose your own path.”

  Mrs. Asquith bent and kissed her husband on the forehead. She did the same with Bryony.

  “I thought you should know that,” said Mrs. Asquith, before she left quietly in a swirl of trailing robes and lilac powder.

  Bryony thought she dreamed that someone was squeezing her hand. But as she lifted her head from the bed and blinked at the unfamiliar surroundings, her hand was again squeezed.

  “Father!”

  Geoffrey Asquith looked no different. His eyes remained stubbornly closed, his mouth disconcertingly slack on the side away from Bryony. She flung aside the counterpane and watched his hand.

  “Can you hear me, Father? It’s Bryony.”

  This time she saw it. His fingers, closing around hers.

  Her eyes filled with inexplicable tears. “I’m back. I came back from India.”

  He squeezed again, so she kept on talking. “It was quite an adventure. Mr. Marsden traveled a thousand miles to find me, so that I could come home to see you. Yes, that Mr. Marsden, the one who used to be your son-in-law. I would have arrived sooner, but Mr. Marsden suffered a malarial attack. And then we found ourselves in the middle of an actual war on the Indian frontier. But we are safe and I’m here now.”

  She raised his hand and held in tight. “Mr. Marsden is a staunch defender of yours, even though you once boxed him senseless over me—or perhaps because you once boxed him senseless over me. He likes your books. And he says that you love me.”