The Birthright (21 page)

Nicole reached forward and pulled the door open herself, feeling less like a lady being courted than a city under siege. “It has been a pleasure making your acquaintance, Lord Harwick.”

Nicole sat and pondered the words of the Bible in her lap together with the peculiar circumstances in which she had found herself. An unexpected peace settled over her, a peace that added to the beauty of the sunrise and made her senses come alive. She breathed the soft odor of woodsmoke and burning embers from the fireplace. From beyond the windows came the sound of birdsong. She spied a squirrel racing from one tree to another. Then from beyond the stone wall that bordered the garden, she heard the metallic chuckle of a pheasant calling his mate.

A voice from behind her said, “May I join you?”

“Anne, of course. Good morning!” Nicole set her Book on the table, then stood and stretched. “How are you feeling today?”

The question seemed to throw her off balance. Anne froze there in the doorway, so Nicole walked over, took her arm, and directed her to the chair opposite her own. The settee was high-backed and stuffed with horsehair, making it as padded as a bed. Anne nestled in deep, allowing Nicole to tuck a blanket over her lap. “Do you always rise this early?” Anne asked.

“It’s my quiet time. I come here and study the Word and remind myself why I am here.” She hovered by Anne’s chair. “Can I get you anything? Some tea, perhaps?”

“In a little while.”

“Does John need tending?”

“He woke an hour ago. I fed and changed him, and he’s gone back to sleep. He won’t awaken again for a few hours. Just sit with me for a time, please.” She waited till Nicole had reseated herself to say, “I feel all I’ve done since coming here is sleep and eat and take care of John. Then sleep some more.”

“You’ve been through a hard journey.”

“It was not the voyage.” Anne’s gaze was empty. “I haven’t rested since the funeral. Not really.”

“I am so sorry about Cyril,” Nicole said, as she had so often before. “He was such a good, dear man.”

“Yes. Yes, he was. I’ve been upstairs thinking about him. Lying there for hours, thinking.” The words seemed to agitate her. Anne’s gaze scattered about the room, clearly wishing to speak of something other than her grief over Cyril. She spotted the Bible opened on the table. “What have you been reading?”

“The Psalms. But not reading—not this morning, anyway. Just looking up verses I partly remember and seeing how they fit with what I’ve been thinking lately.”

“And what is that, pray tell?”

Nicole thought for a moment. “Perhaps we should wait until you’re better.”

“Why? Or is it that you don’t want to tell me?”

“No, not at all. It’s just…” Nicole felt divided. She had been waiting for the chance to speak with Anne, but the woman seated opposite her was still so frail. “What I’ve been studying is hard to talk about without also telling you
why
it’s so important to me.”

Anne squinted as the sun cleared the horizon. She sank back further so the chair’s border shielded her eyes. “You have changed,” she said quietly.

“Yes, I suppose I have.”

“I have the feeling I could tell you anything right now, and it would not surprise you.”

Nicole heard a request beneath her words, a testing. “All right. Try me,” she said, matching Anne’s soft tone.

Without getting up, Anne shifted her chair so that her face was more in the shadows that were being thrown off by the chair and the steadily rising sun. “I was awake because I dreamed of Cyril. I’ve never done that before. Before arriving here I often thought of him in my sleep, and those simple notions were always enough to wrench me so I should wake up crying. Many such nights I wept until my heart felt torn from my body.”

Anne stopped there, watching Nicole closely. There was a measuring quality to her look. Nicole responded by folding her hands in her lap and saying nothing. No words could express the sorrow she felt, and certainly Anne was not confiding in her to receive some meaningless platitude. So Nicole sat and waited.

The response must have pleased Anne, for the hollow eyes drifted away from Nicole and over toward the fire. “Last night was different. I haven’t cried since leaving Halifax. The grief is with me always, but more tears now seem useless. Cyril has been gone from me for many months. The tears may come again, but the agony over his passing is over. I don’t know how or why this is so clear to me, but I am certain just the same.”

They sat in silence for a while, Nicole content to remain there through the whole day if necessary. Soon enough the house would begin to stir, but she had learned to speak with force if the need arose. A single word to Maisy and they would be left undisturbed. And Charles never emerged from his chambers this early. So there was no need to hurry. The silence around them seemed to carry great weight, as though there was a rightness to the waiting.

Anne became aware that her musings had drawn her far away. “Where was I?”

“You said last night was different.”

“Oh yes. Very different, indeed. In my dream I saw Cyril standing on a shore. At first I thought he was back in Nova Scotia, and the dream meant I had made a terrible mistake in coming here. But as soon as I thought this, I realized it was incorrect. Cyril was not in Nova Scotia, because the shore on which he stood was someplace I had never been.” Her voice took on the uneven cadence of one half sleeping. “He looked so calm. And so strong, untouched by the illness that ended his life. He stood there and he watched me. I felt his love and wanted desperately to go to him. Yet as I looked at him, I was on a ship moving farther and farther from the shore, out into the open sea. There was nothing I could do about it. I just stared as he grew smaller and smaller, then finally disappeared on the horizon. All I was left with was his love.”

The fire gave a faint hiss, and one of the logs cracked and sent sparks flying upward. Nicole rose and used the tongs to push the embers together. When she had returned to her seat, Anne asked, “So what do you think of my dream?”

“That it was not Cyril’s love you felt. Not
just
his love, in any case.”

The words seemed to heighten the intensity in Anne’s expression. She gazed at Nicole for a long moment and then pressed down on the arms of her chair. After rising to her feet, she said, “First I shall have the tea you offered and perhaps some breakfast. Then I want to hear what you were reluctant to tell me.”

But after breakfast, Anne went upstairs and quickly returned. “The baby’s still sleeping. Might we take a walk around the garden?”

She followed Nicole out, while marveling at the day’s gentle warmth. Where Halifax would still be lying brown and fallow, the English fields were a rich silvery green, and the flowers planted closest to the house revealed their first blooms. In the three weeks since her arrival, winter had been banished.

The house sat on a promontory, which at the back sloped gently down to a vast array of carefully tended fields. Somewhere far below there ran a broad stream, for down to her left Anne could see the sun glinting off the liquid ribbon. The cultivated and well-tended air eased Anne greatly and gave her the ability to speak words that before she could not possibly have said or even thought.

“Last night after the dream woke me up, I lay there thinking about my life since Cyril’s death. I have gone through seasons of my own now, dark as a winter night. And I’ve tried my best to run from what I have known all along. I fled into deep despair, drawn back only by my little John. On the voyage over, I worked myself to the point of exhaustion. Since getting here, though, I’ve done little but sleep.”

As she spoke Anne was keenly aware of her sister walking beside her. Nicole still possessed the same striking beauty, with her long dark auburn tresses and glowing green eyes. Yet for all her strength and energy, there was a new quietness about her. In ways Anne could not explain, she knew her sister had experienced a profound change. She had grown, deepened, and become a woman in her own right.

Anne took a deep breath and continued, “But I’ve awakened now. I’ve slept long enough and have fled as far as I can from the fact. Last night it came to me, and the knowledge is all around me. Cyril is gone and he’s not coming back. I must pick up the shattered pieces of my life and go forward.”

Anne could have supposed any number of reactions from Nicole. The stronger woman, she would have thought, would most likely want to sweep her up in a sisterly embrace, willing her own strength into Anne’s more frail form. But Nicole neither spoke nor made any movement toward her, except to look deep into Anne’s face and share the silence of confession.

And this enabled Anne to walk on calmly, though her heart remained heavy. Somehow Nicole’s example of strength helped her to finish speaking her thoughts, sharing her burdens. “My problem now is to determine
where
I belong. In other words, what’s the meaning of my life now?”

“You have John,” Nicole reminded her.

“I have many things. But I cannot see my life or the road ahead. My whole reason for living was wrapped up in Cyril, so that now there seems to be no sense to anything, save in loving my son.”

“Come, let us take a seat over here on the bench.” Nicole led her to a carved stone seat surrounded by a neatly groomed hedge. “This has become one of my favorite places. The seat faces south and catches the sun all day long, and the bushes are tall enough to shield us from almost any wind. We’re visible only from the library windows at one end of the house and from Charles’s private chambers at the other.” She offered a small smile. “You would be amazed at how much this tiny patch of privacy has come to mean.”

Once they were comfortable, Nicole went on, “You asked what I was reading in the Bible this morning. I’ve been trying to learn some lessons on my own. You’ll meet the local parson this coming Sabbath if you feel up to joining us for church. He’s a good man, but his homilies don’t challenge me. So I spend my early mornings feeding my soul with God’s Word. I confess I know so little that it’s like the fumbling motions of a blind person.”

Again there was the sense of hearing someone Anne knew intimately, yet did not know at all. Nicole’s speech had become more precise in her months here, her accent much softer. But there were other signs, too, such as the erect way she held herself and the new depths to her countenance and voice. “Tell me what you’ve been studying,” Anne said.

“It all began last summer, when I had an occasion to speak with a woman I met on the voyage over here. Since then I have spent a good deal of time thinking about the meaning of
duty
.”

Nicole waited, uncertain whether she should proceed. But Anne remained quiet, so she said, “At some level, I think I’ve always assumed that when I found my place in the world, then I should be happy. Yet in all my searching of the Scriptures, I haven’t found a single instance where God promises this. In fact, nowhere is such a thing even requested by His servants.”

Anne slid farther from Nicole, partly because she wanted to see Nicole more clearly. But also Anne suspected that these words were meant for her. Perhaps this was why she’d been awakened by the dream or even why she came to England at all. So that she could sit here in the sunlight, on this kind spring morning, and listen to these words.

“It has made me realize that all my life,” Nicole said, “I’ve measured how well I was suited to a place by how happy it made me. Only now, as I learn my way through English society, have I come to see that, although happiness is a fine thing, it comes and it goes. So long as I base my happiness upon what I have or how life suits me, it will always remain fleeting. For as soon as something changes, as soon as a cold wind blows through my life, as soon as life takes an unpleasant turn, my happiness would be gone. But is this what I want to base my life upon? No. But to just say this, that I don’t want my life centered on what comes and then quickly passes, is far easier than making this actually the way I live or the way I manage my days.”

The strain of shaping these thoughts left Nicole’s features pinched. She gave Anne’s shoulder a light pat and said, “I am sorry. I haven’t spoken of such things before. It all probably made no sense to you.”