Susan Speers (8 page)

The rain lasted three days, and I finished Joseph’s gown listening to Chase perfect a Chopin nocturne.

“Do you play, Clarry?” he asked and looked surprised when I said no, not at all. Most girls my age played at least a little.

“Father didn’t wish it,” I said. “My mother was an accomplished musician and it reminded him.”

“Come sit by me,” he said. “Today is your first lesson.”

He taught me the rudiments and supervised my short practices. I loved it. Partly because he made it so much fun, partly because something within me knew the hand positions, knew the sound of the scales. I didn’t shirk the boring parts, I loved it all.

“Promise me you’ll find a real teacher Clarry,” he said. “You’re a natural.”

Toward the end of our three week stay, I received two letters forwarded from Hethering. The first was from Evadne Ledbetter. Her husband had left the Foreign Office and decided to work with cultural institutes in Paris and St. Petersburg. They would spend the winter in France and the summer in Russia. Marcie and Darsie would go too, and they invited me to join them. There would be an official governess, I was invited as a companion.

“Of course,” Evadne wrote, “I’d never object to you supervising their watercolor studies or embroidery.”

*****

I didn’t want to ask Father for travel funds, so I smiled with surprise and delight when Miss Caleph sent a cheque in a triumphant letter. She’d sold her book of fairy tales and the illustrator used my maps as inspiration.

I returned to Hethering and sat with Uncle Paul every afternoon. His stroke had deprived him of speech and movement. He slept heavily. When he woke, he looked so fearful I was glad when he drifted off again.

“Jeremy and Caroline will be here on Friday,” Father broke our usual silence at dinner.

“I’m leaving for Paris with the Ledbetters before that,” I said. “I’ll be abroad for a year.”

He nodded. “Mrs. Ledbetter wrote for my permission. When you return,” he said, “when you’re twenty-one will be time enough to decide your future.”

At twenty-one, I resolved, my father would have no further voice in my future. I had a year’s respite to chart my life’s course.

I enjoyed the winter in Paris. With the money from Miss Caleph, I engaged a piano teacher, Monsieur Bec-Fin, from the Sorbonne. I believe he took on an adult beginner as a curiosity, but he soon admired my industry. I practiced every hour I could.

“I wish you would continue with me, Mademoiselle,” he said as the Ledbetter household made preparations to leave for St. Petersburg. “I have many pupils with greater technique but few with such feeling for the music.”

I buried my excess of feeling in the music. It was April in Paris, the city was filled with lovers and it was hard for me to be alone. I took walk after walk, searching the beautiful streets, but for what?

For Jeremy, I realized as soon as I saw the Temple d’Amour, Madison’s inspiration for the fifth folly at Hethering. I was searching for Jeremy and I would never find him. I sat down on a bench, dropped my face into my hands and wept. Darsie led the governess, Mademoiselle Caron, a discreet distance away, and Marcie sat down beside me.

“Look,” she said, putting her handkerchief in my hand. “I embroidered this.”

Instead of a flower or her initials, there was a bad tempered frog spitting out a fly.

I was laughing and crying at the same time, when she spoke to me in a mature manner incongruous for her youth.

“Mummy says you’ve had a disappointment,” she said. “Mummy says you wanted to marry your cousin.”

“My Father forbade it.” I told her.

“But why? Cousins marry all the time.”

“He wanted Jeremy to marry someone else.” She was too young for the ugly truth.

“Jeremy Marchmont,” she said. “That’s his name isn’t it?”

“He’s married now,” I told her. “It’s best we don’t communicate. But I haven’t learned yet how to go on without him. If I could just —”

“See him, visit him,” she nodded. “That’s only fair.”

“It’s a silly dream, Father will never allow it,” I said. “I must try harder to get on alone.”

On our way to St. Petersburg we stopped our journey in the country near Geneva, Switzerland. We were guests of the Ledbetters’ friends, Ralph and Eva Speck, connections from the Foreign Office.

“You’ll enjoy their gardens, Clarissa,” Evadne Ledbetter told me.

“There’s a smashing summerhouse smack in the center,” Marcie said, her eyes dancing with mischief.

“We like to bring our dolls there,” Darsie added.

We arrived at the beautiful villa with little time to dress for dinner. Evadne had a headache from travelling, so I descended the stair on Mr. Ledbetter’s arm and took my place at the long dinner table with more than a dozen guests.

When I opened my heavy linen dinner napkin and looked up I realized the extent of Marcie’s mischief. Jeremy sat opposite me, his black eyes shining brighter than his blinding white shirtfront.

We stared at each other for a moment I wanted to last forever. He was thin as a knife blade with new shadows under his eyes and hollows in his face. We were both stunned into silence, but I knew he felt the same joy that rose in my breast. I fear I wore the twin of his heartbreaking smile on my own lips. The air between us quivered with happiness. He breathed “Clarry” like a prayer.

My right hand twitched, tipping my wineglass, but the gentleman beside me rescued it. I tore my eyes from Jemmy, and remembered my manners long enough to say a breathless “Thank you” as our first course appeared.

“I’m Henry Putnam.” The man had a pleasant face, no longer young. “And you, I believe are Clarissa Marchmont. What an extraordinary coincidence.”

Did he look at Jeremy? I had to be very careful. In the candlelight and shadows I couldn’t see Caroline, but she must be seated nearby.

“I’m travelling with the Ledbetters,” I said, hoping to distract Mr. Putnam from connecting me to Jem. “I’m a family friend, a schoolmate of their daughters.”

“Ah, Miss Marcie and Miss Darsie,” Henry Putnam said, while I sneaked a quick look at Jeremy, in dutiful conversation with an elderly lady. “The Ledbetter twins and our hosts’ children have been friends from the cradle.”

So Marcie asked her friends to invite Jeremy. Perhaps I should have been furious with her, but I could only be grateful.

My untouched soup was removed for the fish course and I turned to my left, finding a foppish young man who spoke no English. The rest of dinner was a whirligig of polite conversation, speaking looks at Jeremy, and fruitless efforts to communicate with a flirtatious boy whose peeks at my décolletage went a step, no, a leap, beyond impertinence. Had I eaten anything I’m sure I’d have been sick.

Jeremy ate nothing, though his wine glass was filled again and again. My throat was closed to food, although I sipped more wine than I was used to.

“Have young ladies stopped eating altogether?” Mr. Putnam asked me as I declined an exquisite pastry robed in Swiss chocolate.

“I’m just tired from the journey.”

“And yet you look so happy.” He had a kind face.

“It’s beautiful here. I’m told the gardens are exceptional.”

“Yes, particularly the white garden in moonlight,” he said.

“And the summerhouse,” I said in a loud voice. “Marcie told me about the summerhouse.”

*****

A huge moon hung in the sky. It turned the white flowers into snowdrifts and lit gravel paths into glowing avenues. I paced up and down their lengths determined to avoid a furtive appearance. I’d been told of these wonders, I had the right to explore them.

Ahead of me, the white painted summerhouse had the beautiful lines of the Taj Mahal. It was a folly itself, it held folly within.

I opened the door and walked into wonderland. Moonlight fell in latticed patterns on potted palms and furnishings covered in blue and silver striped silk. I looked for Jeremy but heard him instead, moving behind me to lock the door.

“Clarry.” I felt his breath on the nape of my neck and I turned into his embrace.

I wept as I had in Paris, but this time the tears healed me. Jem and I sat together on an upholstered bench. He kept one arm tight around my waist as the other found his handkerchief. In the moonlight, I saw my blue embroidered forget-me-nots.

“I made a terrible mistake, Clarry,” he said. “I listened to your father, I listened to Caro and her brother, I listened to you. I should have obeyed my heart instead.

“Yes,” I said, “we were fools. Nothing is worth this life without you.”

“Do you know I breathe better when you are with me. I see better, I hear better.” He nudged my nose with his. “I heard you say ‘summerhouse’ as if you shouted it.”

“I did shout it.” My head was against his heart. “Where is Caroline?” I would never call her his wife.

“She’s in England with her family.” Jeremy looked away from me. “She knows our marriage was wrong. She won’t stay with me.”

I was sorry Caroline had been drawn into our trouble.

“I listened to my friends, too. Why did I? They told me one woman is the same as another in the dark of the marriage bed. My heart said no. Why did I think my body would be different?”

“What happened?” I hoped their marriage had failed, that their marriage bed was cold.

“It was near impossible to be her husband.” Jeremy dragged each word forward. “In the end it was sordid. I preferred failure to bitter success.”

“I don’t understand.”

“I was unfaithful to you, Clarry. I was unfaithful to you with my wife.”

We knew now our bond transcended laws of nature and man. Now I hated Caroline for stealing any moment of his love, rightfully mine.

“I’ll leave in the morning, Clarry, before your name is linked to mine.” His voice, strong with purpose, belonged to the Jeremy I remembered. “I’ll return to England, to Caroline, and arrange an annulment. When you’re twenty-one, we’ll marry and begin our life together.”

“And continue our life together.” I moved to kiss his cheek, but found his mouth instead.

Our years of separation vanished. He kissed me as if he would die without our connection and I kissed him back, just as desperate, inflaming his desire. This time he ignored the bounds of my clothing. I helped his eager fingers with the fastenings. He opened his formal evening shirt to my searching hands. In the moonlight his body was everything I ever imagined.

We found a chaise screened by foliage and loved each other until I became his true wife in a glorious rush of sensation. All past and future doubts were swept away. Jeremy lay quiet afterward, at peace at last. He held me tight against him and I put my head to his chest to hear his heartbeat slow.

“This is what they speak of,” he said softly, and bent his head down to mine.

“Who?” I asked between lingering kisses.

“The poets, the drunks, the Song of Solomon,” he said. “This is what love is meant to be. Thank God to find it at last. To die without knowing such bliss, to die without loving you, would haunt me through eternity. Thank you, Clarry, for loving me.”

“I will love you, Jemmy,” I said. “No matter what, I will love you always.”

“And I the same,” he said. “We’ll face our future together.”

*

Early the next morning, minutes after I was safe in my room, a dressing gown pulled over my ruined clothes, Marcie knocked at my door. “Did I do the right thing? Are you angry with me?”

I allowed myself one brilliant smile and she shrieked with happiness and relief. She was puzzled to learn Jeremy left at daybreak, but my serenity calmed her anxieties.

“What will happen?” She asked me at lunch.

“Everything good, I think.” Evadne looked at us with a curious frown and we said no more.

*****

The Ledbetters leased a luxurious mansion in St. Petersburg, filled with exotic furnishings and appointments, but I noticed little of them. My absentmindedness became a family jest. My friends might have worried, except I seemed happier than they had ever known me. Jeremy’s swift departure from the Speck’s villa kept them from realizing why my sadness was gone.

Bit by bit, however, as the days passed and I had no word from England, I began to wonder if Marcie had been mistaken in her kind meddling. Missing Jeremy held new torment. My arms ached to hold his strong body, my lips burned for his.

My monthly courses were delayed. I ascribed this to the stress of travel, but there was a tiny pulse of hope in my heart. I longed for Jeremy’s baby in defiance of nature or society’s strictures.

I was sitting at tea with Marcie and Darsie and their mother when the butler brought me a cable from England, from Jeremy. I opened it at once, unable to delay the few minutes that would have brought me privacy.

“It cannot be.”

Those three words devastated me, but I fought for composure.

“All is well at Hethering?” Evadne asked. “Is your father ill?”

“My father is as strong as ever,” I said. “But I’m needed at home.”

The girls cried out their protests and I pretended to reconsider. “I won’t leave until the end of the month,” I promised. By the time I reached England, my twenty-first birthday would be weeks away.

The next day my courses began, as if my body chose to weep when I would not. My resolve didn’t falter. Jeremy and I loved each other. We belonged to each other. I would return to England. I would return to Jeremy. We were invincible when we stood together.

A family friend of the Ledbetters chaperoned my journey home. Mrs. Mulberry and I were cordial but exchanged no confidences. When we left the boat after crossing the channel, I thought for a moment I saw Henry Putnam in a group of businessmen on the docks, but when I looked a second time he was gone.

The newspapers screamed of war in Europe and I worried all was changed at Hethering, but life at home maintained its smooth regime. The gardens were at their peak. I walked up and down the paths and sat for hours in the rose garden with a sketch pad in my lap. I believed if I breathed enough sweet scented air I would conjure Jeremy out of the ether and he would return to love me.