Susan Speers (7 page)

We stood, clasped together in quicksilver starlight. At last I was warm.

Then I felt hot tears on my face. “Clarry, my heart will break,” he said.

My heart was already broken. I knew who had to be strong. “Go,” I said. “At least save Hethering. The rest will follow.”

We walked back home across the parkland we loved. He kissed my lips, he kissed my hands, and then he disappeared into the night. He disappeared from my life.

On Twelfth Night, I helped dismantle the Christmas tree. I held the precious glass tower in shaking hands, my eyes blind with tears. It slipped from my fingers and shattered at my feet on the cold stone floor. I sliced my thumb grasping at its shards. I bear the scar to this day.

Brenthaven became my refuge for the next two years. I chose to stay there for holidays, and Father permitted it. I could not stop myself from embroidering my garden. Now there was a flower for every day I missed my Jemmy, for every day I mourned our love.

I didn’t see him again until I graduated and returned home for the celebration of his engagement to Caroline Fforde.

Hethering was abuzz with preparations for the festivities. I stayed in my room, embroidering an overskirt for my white silk gown. I didn’t want to look like a bride. Hundreds of blue and silver dragonflies gave the dress a changeable hue that would shimmer in candlelight.

The day I finished, I went for a walk in the rose garden and there they were. Jeremy, even taller, stood protecting Caroline from the sun. Was he telling her about the flowers? I turned to go but Caroline hailed me. “Why, Clarry, how lovely to see you again.”

I came forward, nodded to Jeremy, allowing the sun to blind me, and gave her my hand.

“Jeremy has been showing me the property. It’s so vast.”

“Yes, vast,” I repeated. I saw my future. I would be a guest at Hethering, Caroline its mistress.

“Jerry has shown me each of the four follies,” she went on. “They are exquisite, if neglected.”

‘Neglected’. ‘Jerry’. Her words cut me. Wait, did she say the
four
follies? I looked up at him startled, but he wouldn’t meet my eye. Why did he crush my heart with one hand then offer a sliver of hope with the other?

“I doubt we’ll repair them,” Jeremy said. “The time comes to put away childish things.”

“Excuse me, the sun is warm…” I turned and tried hard not to run back to Hethering. I was one of the childish things he would put away. I’d imagined the hope. He wanted the fifth folly to himself. Let him have it and let him remember me in it.

 “Jeremy, you hurt her feelings.” Now she must defend me to him?

 Rage threatened to choke me. In my sitting room I found a tiny pair of very sharp scissors. I dug row after row of complicated blossoms from my embroidered garden until at last the tears came.

The next day, Caroline came to call. I sat at the edge of my chair. I never poured the tea. She was nervous and said little. She twisted the pearl button on the wrist of her glove.

“Jerry confided in me,” she said. “I know of your disappointment. I thought, that is,
we
thought it would be easier if he married someone you knew, someone you liked.”

“Please leave me alone,” I said. Our friendship would not survive her stealing my love, my life, then patronizing me with false kindness. I would not watch them build a life together.

I began to think of a life beyond Hethering. I’d planned to teach drawing at the village school, but decided instead to accept Evadne Ledbetter’s invitation to spend the summer in Italy with Marcie and Darsie. The Ledbetters had taken a villa in the hill country near Florence.

I threw my ragged embroidery aside and wrote a letter of acceptance whose sentences would sustain me through the difficult week ahead. If Father refused me funds to escape my heartache, I would ask to be governess instead of guest.

*****

The next morning, I left Father’s study and heard a noise I associated with hazy memories and dreams. In our yellow salon, a young man sat at the grand piano. My mother was an accomplished pianist. After her death, Father couldn’t bear to hear the instrument and I’d had no music lessons.

“You’ve got to be Clarissa,” the young man said with an American’s charm and informal manners. “Daisy described you to me.” He put his head to one side. “She didn’t do you justice.”

I was hard put not to laugh at his droll voice and the cheerful impertinence in his eyes.

“I’m Chase Gordon,” he said. “Your Father kindly allows me to practice here. This is a fine instrument.”

“I wonder it’s in tune,” I said.

“It’s been well cared for,” he contradicted me. He never stopped playing as we spoke. I found the smooth ripples of sound soothing after a difficult conversation with Father.

“Chase Gordon,” I repeated. Then I remembered Daisy’s American friends were visiting the manse. Daisy teased until they were invited to Jeremy’s party.

“Are you related to Ronald Gordon?” Ronald was the handsome young man in the photograph Daisy loved to flirt with. Now she flirted with the real thing.

“He’s my step-brother. Father’s worn out several wives.”

I didn’t know whether to smile at his insouciance or offer my sympathies. “I’ll leave you to it.”

“Will you be at Leighton House tonight?” He was kind enough to look away from the misery that must have washed across my face. Leighton House was Jeremy’s home. An informal supper party was planned.

“I’ll be there,” I managed.

“I look forward to it.” A bright splash of notes ended our conversation.

Leighton House had a smaller piano in its parlor, and Chase played for us after dinner. Despite his proficiency with Chopin and Bach, he had an affinity for Tin Pan Alley tunes and entertained us. He asked for a volunteer and chose me, even though I didn’t offer.

“Sit beside me,” he placed a chair next to his piano stool. “When I pause, you sing ‘Just like me’.” He sang the simple phrase. Across the room, Jeremy glowered.

I smiled. “All right.”

Chase began to play and sing:

I want to meet a girl
“
Just like me
,” I sang.
Who’ll give my heart a whirl
“
Just like me
,” I sang again.
She has to be a beauty
“
Just like me
,” I sang and blushed.
She’ll make me do my duty
“
Just like me
,” Daisy laughed, but without rancor.
She’ll have a heart of gold
“
Just like me
.” Chase had a wonderful smile.
Together we’ll grow old
“
Just like me
.”

The song ended with a flourish of notes and a joke on me, but the tune was so enticing, I laughed with the others and smiled at Chase, grateful for his relieving the pressure on my heart.

“Where did you find that song?” I asked, ignoring Jeremy’s angry face and Caroline’s anxious one.

“I wrote it,” he said.

*****

I took a long walk in the morning to fix every part of Hethering in my mind. Jeremy and Caroline’s party was that night, I’d leave for London and the Ledbetters’ home the day after. When I returned to the hall, I found Dickon Scard in earnest conversation with our butler.

“I’m so glad you returned,” he said, taking a leaf from my hair. “I didn’t want to miss you.”

I knew my smile was wide and delighted. “I thought you were in London.”

“Visiting my Mum,” he said.

“You saw Jeremy’s announcement in the Times. You came to support me.”

“I saw the announcement,” he said. “I came to see you. Fancy another walk so soon?”

“Let’s visit Willow.”

We walked to her cottage and sat on a little bench by the pond. His stories of London made me laugh. He’d been to Italy, and recommended the food and the art, in that order.

“When you come home,” he said. “When you’re independent, you must come to London.”

“And visit you?”

“That’s a beginning,” he said, smiling.

I took a sideways look at him. Was he flirting? I still saw the fresh faced boy with brown eyes and a crooked smile, but his city polish and the intelligence in his face transformed him.

He walked me back to Hethering, and we paused on the steps.

“Thank you,” I said.

“London,” he replied.

Jeremy was waiting for me in the hall. He followed me to the blue salon. “That friendship should have ended long ago.” His disdain stung me.

“Oh, it’s easy for you to give up ‘childish things’,” I retorted.

“It isn’t easy, how can you think that? I’ll see the follies in ruins before I share them with anyone but you.” His voice broke and and I heard my Jem at last. It hurt me to look up at him. His love and his sorrow changed the adult planes of his face into the boy I loved.

“Jemmy.” I touched his arm. He stared at my hand as if it were my body pressed to his. His longing ignited my own and we came close to abandoning reason, to take what we wanted more than anything. We were as close in spirit as we had ever been.

Then, bit by bit, I felt him withdraw. The adult lines of his profile returned, he was a stranger to me again.

“It isn’t easy for me,” he whispered, “to do as I’m told.”

“As if marriage was required to inherit Hethering,” I said. Jeremy looked at me, his face set. “Oh God,” I said. “It is, isn’t it? That evil man. How can he be my father?”

“The last hurdle,” he said, “to do what you said you wanted. I save Hethering.”

I sat down suddenly. Our shining plan had come to this?

“Caroline is a good person,” Jeremy said. “She understands.”

I’d seen Caroline bloom in his company. She did more than understand.

Italy was a dream of beauty and warmth. If I couldn’t forget my unhappiness, I could lay down its burden for a time. The wonderful food sustained me, the wonderful art inspired me. My heretofore reluctant pupils and I spent days sketching and painting en plein air. I taught them the rudiments of embroidery. Darsie made small, neat stitches in conventional designs. Marcie snarled her silks with impatient hands, but her comical thread pictures delighted me.

In Pisa I hesitated over a postcard of the leaning tower. I could send it to Jeremy unsigned. I could send him a signal that I thought of him with every breath, but what was the point? More misery for him? More hopeless waiting for me?

I returned to Hethering for Jeremy’s wedding. That was the price for my summer in Italy. My father wanted no gossip about my absence from the ceremony.

Daisy sat beside me and held my hand. I breathed in and out. Just before the moment I dreaded, the moment Jeremy would walk back up the aisle beside Caroline, the moment we would look into each other’s eyes, Daisy spilled my handbag on the stone floor. It distracted me and when I looked up, the newlyweds had passed us by.

“Are you angry?” Daisy whispered.

“I’m grateful,” I said. Ever since Daisy had fallen in love with her American, she was a different person altogether. Kinder, sensitive. Perhaps we could be friends.

Daisy and the Gordon brothers put me at the center of their merry group. I laughed and smiled and joked and kept track of every minute that passed. How soon could I leave?

“Will you dance at my wedding, Clarry?” Jeremy was standing next to me.

“Of course,” I said, then realized my mistake. He meant now. He meant with him. Chase Gordon raised his eyebrows and stepped aside.

We donned social smiles and stepped into the dance with decorum, but the touch of his hand burned into the small of my back and the feel of his shoulder under my glove consumed me. We ignored the curious, knowing glances. We were well behaved without, on fire within.

“What do you think our lives will be, Clarry?” I heard the pleading note in his voice, but I fixed my eyes on his chest.

“We’ll have useful lives,” I told him with a calm I did not feel. “We’ll be content, and we’ll have a measure of happiness — in time.”

“You’re a fool, Clarry,” he said, as the music came to an end. I wouldn’t look up at his face and he bent his head to look deep into my eyes. “Don’t you know that my only happiness is you? That your only happiness is me?”

I turned my face away. Then I saw shock in Caroline’s eyes. She’d come forward to greet me. She’d heard every word Jeremy said. I wept that night. I wonder if she did too.

*****

June and July passed under a dull haze of grief. Mrs. Pickety had a new baby, Joseph. I embroidered an entire layette for him. I liked to sit by her side and admire her infant, though I must confess, he slept through most of it. I taught a little class in watercolors for the village school. My pupils were sweet and undemanding.

In August, Daisy came by Hethering with an invitation.

“Ronald’s father is taking a cottage by the sea for the month. Mother is going and Blaise and Clifton. Chase will be there too.”

I packed and left without consulting Father. I think he was glad to have me gone. Uncle Paul had suffered a stroke and Jeremy would arrive soon.

Landsdowne Cottage was a mansion almost as large as Hethering. When I entered its great hall behind Daisy and her family I heard piano music coming from a distant room. I met Chase on the croquet lawn several hours later and felt, if not happiness, then a healing balm on my spirits. He waved his mallet at me and the fun began.

The cottage had its own gardens shaped by the salt air and sea spray. I spent mornings sketching and exploring them. There were no follies, but a series of funny statues, worn to caricatures by the salt. One day it rained in sheets and I couldn’t face a drenching. I found a bench outside the room where Chase was practicing and worked a christening gown for Joseph.

After a while the music stopped and Chase emerged, smiling when he saw me. “I wondered why I played so well,” he said. “Come on, there’s a comfortable chair inside.”