Susan Speers (4 page)

“What dishes were served?” She was unreservedly greedy for such a waif. “What was pudding?”

Though I described in detail viands that had stuck in my anxious throat, Daisy did not let up.

“Were there candles? Sweetmeats? An erpergne?”

Her final question never varied. “How can you sit with him, Clarissa, week after week?” She too feared his forbidding manner, yet she watched my face with a shrewdness beyond her years.

“Father wishes it.” I replied. Because it will bring Jeremy home to me, my heart cried within me. Because I will know my mother.

Daisy never asked about my mother, despite her inquisitive nature. I’m glad she didn’t ask because I wouldn’t have given up even one of my precious pearls of knowledge.

During our next dinner, while the wind whipped freezing rain through Hethering’s forests, Father paused in his measured consumption of a trifle runny with raspberry sauce and clotted cream.

 “You have honored our bargain, Clarissa,” he said. You have been decorous and obedient.”

I held my breath.

“Jeremy will return.”

I willed all expression from my face and my voice. “Thank you, Father.”

“For the holidays.”

Jeremy’s school was a day’s journey south of Hethering. North bound trains arrived at our country station both morning and afternoon. I watched the clock and peered down from our school room windows as often as I dared.

“Are your brothers home on holiday?” I asked Daisy.

“Vicarage life interests you?” she drawled, scrubbing her brush on a cake of watercolor paint. Fine hairs detached and sank into the tinted mud. “Or is it school holidays in general?” her pointed face was sly.

“Lessons are finished,” Miss Prinn interrupted. “Marguerite, I must ask you to take better care of your brushes.

“I’m sorry, Miss Prinn.” Daisy’s pretty contrition meant little. She would do it again.

“Your brother Blaise will call for you.”

I cleaned Daisy’s brushes with extra care. Blaise was home? Why hadn’t Daisy told me? Where was Jeremy? I put my forehead against the chilly windowpane. No sign of my Jem.

One empty day followed another. Daisy introduced Blaise. He was a stocky, spotty boy, with a soft, spoiled mouth, but he was home with his family.

Miss Prinn and I sat alone in the quiet schoolroom. The weather was too wild to visit Willow. Fat raindrops hissed on the hearth fire.

I heard a knock at the door. “Come in,” I moved books and papers aside for the tea tray as the door swung open.

It was Jeremy.

We could only stare at each other. I drank in every detail too long denied. He’d grown tall as a sapling and very thin. His dark hair was wet from rain and his black eyes were brilliant with the tears I felt sting my own. His muddy coat and boots were obscured by a glow of pure happiness.

Miss Prinn brushed her hand over her eyes. “Welcome home, Jeremy.” She went into the anteroom and shut the door.

In the blink of an eye we were together, his head bent against mine, my heart too full to speak.

“Clarry,” his voice was rougher, deeper. “I know your good behavior brought me here. I would thank you with all my heart, but I cannot. I gave it away.”

I looked up at him. I didn’t understand.

He smiled into my eyes. “You have it. You have my heart.”

I found my voice, “You can thank me. Because I gave you mine.”

He held my hands fast. “My train arrived early. I wanted my first sight of you — I wanted no prying eyes. If I run, I’ll be back at the station for the official welcome party.” He put my right hand against his heart, and then he kissed it. With a groan he pushed me away and ran from the room.

I stumbled to the window, but he was gone in the darkening gloom. I touched my hand to my lips.

“Be careful, Clarry.” When had Miss Prinn come back into the schoolroom? “Your father won’t want an early suitor,” she said softly. “Even Jeremy.”

*****

I greeted my cousin again in the great hall, Father by my side, and Uncle Paul beside Jeremy. We had to be circumspect. Miss Prinn’s warning rang in my ears.

I wore my blue sash, which made Jemmy’s eyes gleam until a sharp look from Father made him look away. Uncle Paul’s face held no expression.

At dinner I restricted myself to “please” and “thank you” and “yes, Father”. I only looked at Jemmy when Father announced he had won a mathematics prize and was honored for a brilliant piece of Greek translation.

Uncle Paul said nothing, as reserved as ever, as if he denied the son that would inherit what he himself never could. How many resentments lay beneath his sepulchral calm?

I felt fierce pity for my Jem who had never known his mother and would never have his father.
I will be father and mother to you
, I vowed. I smiled into his eyes with unadulterated pride, and his pale face flushed.

Father was not pleased. “Perhaps, Clarissa, you think Jeremy should be honored for his Latin writings as well?” Father’s tone was bland but the look in his pale eyes lashed me. Did he know about our secret letter? I had hidden it in one of Belle’s tiny shoes.

“The Greek translation was a minor writing, called
πύργος
.” Jeremy said.

“Well done.” Father’s voice was icy, but he let Jem turn the subject. Father didn’t read Greek, I remembered. He had said so when he ended my lessons. Jeremy knew that, too. He had continued my lessons in secret.
Πύργος
meant ‘
tower
’. Jem wanted us to meet there.

From my downcast eyes, I saw Jem place five bits of grape stem in a careful arrangement on his plate. We would meet at the tower folly at dawn.

While Father pared an apple with meticulous motions of his very sharp knife, I used the screen of the table linen to undo the silk forget-me-not pinned to my sash.

I left the dining room accompanied by my father, my uncle close behind us. Jeremy followed his father, but at the edge of my vision I saw him bend to find the token that fell unnoticed from my waist.

The next morning, we sat together at the top of the rise that held the tower. Jemmy brought one of our ancient costume capes, and we huddled beneath it, his arm around my shoulder, his face buried in my unbound hair.

“I dreamed of this happiness,” he murmured, “every night and every morning. I vowed I would hold you again, know your warmth and the wonderful smell of your hair.”

“Here we are,” I said, “in spite of them all.”

“You will always bring me home,” he said. “I love you, Clarry.”

“I love you, too.” I was shy and could only whisper my pledge.

A brilliant sun rose over Hethering’s mist shrouded fields and gardens and woodland. Jem and I began to dream together.

*****

For the short time he was home, Jemmy and I lived in a happy country. We took care not to be seen in each other’s company. Daisy stayed at home with her family and Miss Prinn excused me from lessons after luncheon. I would walk to Willow’s cottage for an hour of tutelage at our embroidery. Then Jem would call for me and we would spend happy hours walking the estate grounds, fortified by a picnic tea packed for us by dear Miss Juniot. Jem and Willow came to terms. She smiled on our happiness and he was gentle and mannerly with her.

Christmas dinner was quiet. Jeremy and I exchanged unexceptional gifts: his to me was a slim volume of botanical drawings; I gave him a handkerchief embroidered with his initials. Later at our tower folly, he annotated each drawing in jade green ink and I embellished his handkerchief with a riotous border of forget-me-nots.

We shared an uncomfortable holiday tea with Daisy and her brothers.

Her elder brother, Clifton, had stiff manners and an unhappy face. “How many acres is this property?” he asked. Jeremy, offended, would not reply.

“Are there any more cream cakes?” Blaise’s chin bore unattractive evidence of his gluttony.

“Your gardens are lovely,” Daisy simpered to Jeremy.

He left off his examination of a lithograph showing Hethering’s eighteenth century boundaries to examine the winter landscape through frost rimed windowpanes. “Which ones?” he demanded. “Which ones do you like?”

“Well, ah, the ones with flowers, of course.” Her smile faltered, and he turned away.

“A waste of precious time” Jem pronounced after the party. We spent the next hour chasing each other over frozen garden paths, clearing the fug of boredom from our spirits while the fresh air cleared our lungs of hearth smoke.

Daisy returned to the classroom, bored with family life. “You will miss dear Jeremy,” she suggested, spinning the globe with careless swats.

More than you miss your brothers, I thought, rescuing the wobbling orb. “Jeremy will return.”

“If you behave,” she retorted, then took her seat as Miss Prinn looked up.

Jeremy’s departure came too soon. We planned for it, but it held a wicked sting nonetheless.

“I’ll be back, Clarry,” his voice was muffled against my shoulder as we sat together for the last time.

“I will see to it.” My words had more confidence than I.

Father was pleased with our restraint and relented to allow us monthly letters. We knew they would be read by him and by Jeremy’s school masters.

“When I write ‘tower’, Jemmy told me, “know that I refer to the height of my regard for you.”

“When I write ‘embroidery’ or ‘stitch’,” I improvised, “know that I miss you.”

“Take care of my heart,” he begged. “and I’ll guard yours with my life.”

Jemmy’s train left that night. We said our goodbyes on the tower hill, just after twilight dulled the bleak land around us.

I was quieter in my renewed grief, but suffered just as keenly. I grew thinner, despite my attention to my plate, and dark circles appeared under my eyes.

Miss Prinn arrived early one morning. Daisy was always tardy and I was happy to have a private interlude with my dear teacher.

“I have a project in mind for you, Clarissa,” she said. “Your painting has improved until I wonder I can guide you further. Your maps are exemplary in detail and illustration.” She paused by the window and looked out over the sleeping gardens. “You must begin a new series of maps of Hethering. Few know its acres as you do.”

Jeremy knows them better, I thought. He feels their loss every day.

Miss Prinn’s fine grey eyes studied my face. “Of course you will want to make at least two copies of each map,” she advised. “An official copy for your Father. Perhaps he will want them kept in the library.” I caught my breath. My work in our library? She did have a good opinion of my progress.

Miss Prinn smiled. “Of course you will make copies.” I smiled too.

I began to map our formal gardens, the first ones I walked with Jeremy. An official copy was submitted for Father’s review. He did not mention or return them.

I made at least three copies of each map. I put one in the wooden box beneath Belle’s spreading silk skirts. The other provided stationery for my monthly letter to Jeremy, map on one side, confidences written on the other. His replies referenced church towers, clock towers and London’s Tower Bridge.

Daisy observed my efforts with nonchalant indifference.

“I wonder at your devotion to Hethering,” she said, nearly overturning the inkwell on one of my drawings. For a graceful girl, she was remarkably clumsy when one of my possessions could be damaged. “You won’t live here forever.”

I said nothing, but she may have detected the smugness in my silence. “Everyone knows that.” Her dulcet tones turned petulant. “Everyone.”

I ignored her. My chin rose.

Daisy and I became companions of a sort, but we were never truly friends. I was fortunate to have Nurse and Miss Prinn, Willow and Miss Juniot. I came to know her brothers a little better every year. Clifton was never congenial, he wore his family’s disappointment like an invisible hand held to his brow, but he was a straightforward boy and tried to be pleasant. Blaise was a sneak, greedy and insincere.

Jeremy’s years at school passed in long stretches of quiet work and longing, broken by brief periods of pure happiness when he came home for holidays. He grew into a tall, handsome man. Four years younger, I was still a girl. He wrote brilliant exams, and headed off to university to study landscape architecture and diplomacy, an interest he discovered while a citizen of the world my father denied me.

*****

As I grew into womanhood, I worried Jeremy would outgrow me. I fretted more and more that his world was larger than mine. He would grow bored and forsake me for a sophisticated beauty.

Another sorrow pressed my heart. Willow’s health failed, and she was often in bed. I tried to make her smile with silly fairy stories while I coaxed her to drink some tea and eat a bit.

One afternoon, she clutched my hand. “Don’t let them take your Jemmy away. They took Léon.” She drifted off into uneasy sleep.

“My sister was Willow’s companion when she was a young lady,” Miss Juniot explained. “They traveled in France. Willow found a friend, the younger son of a prominent family. He knew Willow’s difficulties, but he adored her. The parents parted them despite their happiness. They both suffered. Not long after, he drowned. They called it a boating accident.”

Miss Juniot pursed her lips. “Willow never mentions Léon. Sometimes she calls his name in her sleep.”

On the days Willow rallied, she stitched in frantic haste on a roll of linen she hid from me. “It’s a secret,” she said, with a wan facsimile of the mischievous smile I loved. I tried not to peek, but grew anxious as she completed the border. What would rally her when it was done?

Nothing. She found no further happiness. Willow was clever, if damaged. She undid the complicated lock on her bedroom window. They found her body floating in the pond, her cinnamon hair drifting in its indigo waters.

I remembered her words about Jeremy. “If you lose him, find him. I lost my Léon, I’ll find him one day.”