The Wedding of Molly O'Flaherty (10 page)

She should be buried at home
, I thought distantly as the wind ruffled the flowers little Henry had placed on top of her crypt. An English grave for one of the best and loveliest Englishwomen I’d ever known.

But there had been no time. The warm Provencal climate had dictated the practical necessities, and with Thomas currently hovering in a state of near-death himself, there’d been no one other than the town officials to make the decision. Charlotte Cecil-Coke, mother of five and pregnant with the unborn sixth, had died of cholera four days past and had been interred in the nearest Protestant cemetery the day before I’d arrived.

I’d brought the children—even tiny Silas, still less than a year old—to see their mother’s grave. Partly because I knew they needed this moment, however hard and however sad, because I had needed it when my own mother and father had died. That moment of standing in the graveyard and hearing nothing except the wind and the rustle of moving grass and the sounds of distant birds and insects, and
knowing
, knowing deep in your heart, that no other noise would come. That the silence was eternal now that our loved ones had finally passed away, and that our pain was the price of their newfound peace.

And partly, because back at the villa, their father was enduring unbearable and exhausting agony, and though I wanted them to be able to say goodbye, I also wanted to shield them from the worst of his suffering. Luckily, their nanny—a sturdy Welsh widow who’d been with them for more than a year—was here to help, even though I think she cried louder than any of the children as she laid her own flowers on Charlotte’s grave.

Me, I cried silently, but I cried the whole time we were there. Hugging Albert, who at nine, was trying his best to be manly and stoic. Holding Jane and Henry’s hands—who as the next eldest understood that their momma was never coming back. And then cradling Aurora and Silas at turns, both of whom were too young to grasp the pain of the moment.

I cried for Charlotte. I cried for the children, and for the little baby who I’d never get to meet. And most of all, I cried for Thomas. For the one goodbye I had never been prepared to face.

That night, after Bertha and I had put the sober, stunned children to bed, I went to Thomas, who like last night when I’d arrived, was sleeping.

Sweat clung to his pale skin and dark circles shadowed his eyes. A local woman had been hired to nurse him, and I sat by his bed and watched as she carefully sponged his face and adjusted his blankets. I knew that he’d been vomiting constantly since he’d contracted the illness, and a detached part of me was impressed with how clean she’d kept the bed and Thomas’s person. No doubt it was her assiduous care and attention that had kept him hanging on for this many days when it had taken Charlotte so quickly.

“The physician said most likely tonight or tomorrow,” she told me quietly in French as she built up the fire. “We can call him at any time to administer more opium, if your brother seems to be in a lot of discomfort.”

“
Merci
,” I said woodenly. I
was
grateful, for all of the kindness these strangers had shown my brother’s family in my absence. But the feeling was so small compared to the vast emptiness that yawned over the next sunrise. In a matter of hours, my brother would be dead. The man I loved and looked up to, the man I wanted to become like as I grew older. And no other thought could outweigh that. There was no distraction. No hope.

Only the heavy, all-consuming fog of imminent death.

I stared at Thomas’s handsome and drawn face, at the labored and shallow movements of his chest as he struggled to breathe. And then darkness crept into the sides of my vision as sleep mercifully claimed me.

According to the clock on the mantel, it was almost dawn when I jerked awake, my neck stiff and sore from sleeping in a chair. I rolled my head from side to side, thinking about calling the nurse in, when I noticed Thomas looking at me with half-closed lids. His eyes—a heterochromatic blend of amber and blue and green that had always made the girls around the manor swoon when we were boys—were tired and bloodshot and sunken. But they were alert, and his mouth pulled into a smile when he saw that I was awake.

“Silas,” he croaked, and I pulled my chair closer.

“Don’t try to speak,” I said gently. “The doctor said you should save your strength.”

“For what?” he said hoarsely. “It hardly takes strength to die.”

I thought I was prepared for this, or at the very least, beginning to be prepared, but the bleak candor of his words felt like a punch to the throat. How could anyone ever be ready for losing someone they loved? And how could God ask someone to be cognizant of their own imminent death, as Thomas was of his own?

“Don’t make that face at me,” Thomas said, trying to sound teasing, but sounding only weary instead. “It’s going to be fine.”

“It’s not going to be fine,” I said, swiping at my eyes in a vain effort to contain my tears. I’d cried far too much in the last few days, and only a selfish prick would force a dying person to endure the burden of someone else’s sorrow.

“It is,” Thomas said, a thready confidence woven in his words. “I will get to be with my Charlotte again. And you will be an excellent father to my kids.”

There was no hope of holding the tears back now. Instead, I laid my arms on the bed next to him and buried my face so that he couldn’t see me sob.

“You will…you will take them, right?” The uncertainty and worry in Thomas’s voice was possibly the most tragic thing I’d ever heard.

I raised my head, not bothering to wipe away the tears this time. “Of course, Thomas. I already love them as if they were my own! But you—
you
are their father. I want them to have you.
I
want to have you. Who’s going to tell me what to do if you go? Who’s going to give me advice and then forgive me when I ignore it?”

Thomas gave me the ghost of a smile. “I got a letter,” he said, his eyes a little unfocused, and my heart dropped as I wondered if the sudden change of subject had something to do with his declining health, a loss of mental acuity, perhaps. But then he tilted his head to me, and said, “From Julian. He told me about Molly.”

Molly.

“She’ll take care of you,” Thomas murmured. “Like Charlotte took care of me. She’ll give you advice just like I did, but you won’t ignore it when it comes from her.”

“No, I suppose I wouldn’t.” A bitter lump formed in my throat. In the last few days, the ceaseless chores that accompanied tragedy had kept me from dwelling on the strained way Molly and I had left each other, but now that Thomas had brought her up, I felt another layer of anxious grief settle on top of what I already felt. “We didn’t leave things well,” I said hesitantly, not wanting to derail Thomas’s hopes for me on his deathbed…but also unwilling to lie to him or myself about what the future might hold.

“What happened?” Thomas rasped.

“We can’t talk about this, not now,” I protested. “We can’t talk about my romantic life when we should be—”

“Should be what?” Thomas interrupted weakly. “Sharing our most profound truths and long-held secrets?”

I couldn’t help but laugh a little through my tears. “Yes. I thought that’s what you did. When, you know.”

“Someone is dying?” Thomas offered. He was so unflinching about this, so equanimous in the face of death, that I promised myself right then and there that I would be like this on my own deathbed. That I would somehow cultivate the serenity he exuded right now, even though I knew he had be wrestling with pain and exhaustion.

“Yes, when someone is dying,” I conceded. And then after a moment of internal debate, I decided to tell him. The entire story, from last year up until a few days again, from love to heartbreak and then love to heartbreak once more, and he listened to the whole melodramatic saga, sometimes closing his eyes, but the small noises he made in response to my story assured me that he was indeed conscious.

“And then she asked me for a day for her to figure things out. Which is so painful, because I’ve known that she’s the only person I’ll ever want to marry for a year, and if she doesn’t know that about me, does that mean that she loves me less than I love her? Or that she’ll always love her freedom more?”

Thomas made a noise that sounded suspiciously like a derisive snort.

I narrowed my eyes. “I don’t care if you’re dying, I will still fight you.”

That earned something like a real laugh from Thomas, although it was short-lived as the action seemed to bring on an intense wave of dizziness. He closed his eyes, and I noticed once again how ashen his face was, how hollow his features. Pain scissored across my heart.

“The real question is,” he whispered, his eyes still closed, “is whether you love her enough to stay with her on her terms. If you love her enough to give her whatever space and time she needs, even if she needs it until the end of your lives.”

He opened his multi-colored eyes again, meeting my gaze with the full force of thirty-some years of fraternal affection. “Silas, what is more important to you? Molly? Or your pride?”

Thomas died peacefully seven hours later, after getting to see his children one last time. The physician had the children don masks and stand against the far side of the wall, and so their goodbyes came in the form of stilted words from the older ones and confused tears from the youngest.

I hated that. I wanted them to hug him and kiss him. I wanted him, one last time, to have his bed invaded by a herd of snuggling, warm, wriggling kids. But in the end, it was me that invaded his bed after the children had left, remembering my own childhood and all the nights I had crawled into his bed after a bad dream. On those nights, with my older brother’s sensible intonations that dreams weren’t real (and also with the lamp he’d considerately light for me,) I’d fall back asleep, feeling safe and certain in the knowledge that nightmares couldn’t follow me into real life. Not with Thomas beside me.

Except for today. Except for right now.

With the Occitan sun pouring in through the window, with the sounds of the baby squealing happily elsewhere in the villa, my nightmares became living, present entities. There was no escape from Thomas’s labored breathing, no escape from the strange groans and wheezes he made as his body struggled valiantly against the inevitable.

He couldn’t talk any more, he could barely open his eyes, and so I talked for both of us, laying on my back next to him and staring at the ceiling. I talked about Coke Manor and the parents we’d both loved so dearly. I talked about the children, and the way my heart twisted whenever I thought of Molly. And every now and again, his eyes would open or his mouth would move in the facsimile of a smile, and I knew that he was hearing me, that this in some way was soothing, my voice a constant reminder that he wasn’t alone. Like he had done for me when we were children, I ushered him into sleep and darkness, and the moment that he’d finally gone, I felt it. A feeling like a hovering presence, a weight that wasn’t oppressive but that nonetheless felt strange and unnatural, and then it was gone.

The room was empty—save for me—Thomas had gone from
Thomas
to
Thomas’s body
, and after several long moments of numbness, I left the room to go tell his children—who were, in a sense, now my own.

A week passed. It felt like a year and it felt like a day, and thank God for Bertha and the servants, who kept us fed and clean while I dazedly arranged for the burial. After Thomas was interred next to Charlotte, I held off with making any official plans about returning to England. Instead, I sunk myself into the minute-by-minute life of my nieces and nephews, reading stories and playing chase and picking lavender alongside the road. It was an opiate, a salve, although the moment my mind opened up to the fact that this was now my life forever, my chest grew tight as I remembered why. Remembered those two sandstone crypts on that dusty hill.

The other danger of long hours of play or wandering and picking plants was that my mind also had time to drift to Molly O’Flaherty. To her hair and her smooth, freckled stomach and her shaking voice as she’d asked me for time to think.

Where was she now? Was she thinking about me, missing me, or was she simply grateful to have space away from me? She hadn’t written or sent any word, although I’d been here less than two weeks, and it often took longer for letters to make their way down from England.

You should write to her.

But though I thought this more than once, I never did. Or I should say, I never finished the letter, because once I had sat down to write, I couldn’t stop. I wrote pages and pages of rambling thoughts and feelings and memories, some of her and of us, and others of the brother and sister-in-law I’d just lost, and whenever I set down my pen and looked over what I had written, I knew it was an un-sendable missive. It was honest and raw and jagged and far too emotive for someone as closed off as Molly.

And then I would look around the dinner table, at the four children chattering and eating and little Silas in my lap messily squashing peas in his fist, and I would want to laugh a terrible, mirthless laugh. Molly had been afraid of getting engaged. How much more would she despise a connection with me when it came along with five children?

I remembered Thomas’s words the night before he died, when he’d asked me what was more important, being with Molly or my pride, and perhaps in another life, I would have been able to swallow my pride and open myself to being with Molly however she wanted me.

No. There was no perhaps. I would’ve. Because I loved her so desperately that I would take her any way I could have her.

But things were different now. I couldn’t marry someone who wasn’t willing to be an adoptive mother to my nieces and nephews, but also how could I ask that of any woman, much less one as skittish about commitment as Molly was?

I needed to resign myself to my new life. I would have these children who I loved like my own, but that would be it. Because Molly wouldn’t take me now, and there was no other woman I would ever want other than Molly.

And the letter grew longer. And remained unsent.

Paris was thankfully cool on the morning I boarded the train south. The journey from London to Dover, then Dover to Calais, and then Calais to Paris, had been delayed by several days of torrential rain, which made the Channel nigh impassable and the country roads wet quagmires that sucked carriage wheels deep into the muck and refused to let go. But today had—finally—dawned clear and dry, if slightly chilly, and the passage south was smooth and untroubled.

Not at all like my jumbled, fevered mind.

When I’d left Silas’s house that day, hurt that he’d left without thinking to leave me so much as a note, I’d initially set down to write him, to try to explain the myriad of conflicting feelings I felt, to convey the deep, needy love I had for him and also my burning desire to be my own woman.

But as I had tried to write it, I couldn’t articulate what I needed to say. Maybe it was because I wasn’t sure myself what I meant. Maybe it was because I had to see his face as I explained to him, I had to know that he understood.

Or maybe it was because I already missed him so much, after only one day without him, that writing a letter felt like a painfully hollow exercise. It was no substitute for what I wanted, what I needed.

How funny that we’d spent so much of our time this last year apart, but now that everything with my aborted marriage was settled, I couldn’t bear to spend another moment without him. Even though I’d told him I wasn’t ready for an engagement.

What is wrong with me?
I sounded like an insane person with my inconsistent and plaintive wailings, a disconsolate child that refused to be placated by any alternative.

So after a long, lonely night, my dreams full of Silas, I had made up my mind. I would follow him to his brother’s villa. If nothing else, it would show him that I
did
love him and I
did
need him. I went to my solicitor’s to inform him of the termination of my engagement with Hugh, which he’d already heard about. And he’d delivered some good news, at least.

“Not all of the board members are walking away,” he’d said with a smile. “A few of Cunningham’s closest are. But several of them are much more hesitant to resort to something so extreme, especially since Cunningham’s scandal has weakened whatever loyalty they may have had for him. And,” my solicitor had added with a smile, “Martjin van der Sant sent over a business contract late last night.”

“What?” I’d asked. Van der Sant had been so far out of my thoughts in the past twenty-four hours that it took me a moment to process what my solicitor was saying. “He’s still going to partner with my company?”

“There was a short note attached…apparently he was quite impressed by the personal fortitude you exhibited in protecting his daughter, even knowing that it would threaten your prospects.”

Birgit. While I didn’t doubt that he would have come to this conclusion on his own, I also suspected that his daughter had something to do with this.

So I’d signed the papers, sending a silent
thank you
to Birgit, feeling a fledgling hope about O’Flaherty Shipping, which would have a difficult winter, perhaps, but it would survive.

It would survive.

But hope had long since given way to fretful misery as I made my way down to Provence. What did it matter if my company survived if Silas didn’t want to be with me? What if the
personal matter
was just a convenient excuse he’d directed his butler to give me, and this was actually him trying to run away?

What if I got to the villa and he shut the door in my face?

It took three days for me to make it from Paris to Vaison-La-Romaine. Three agonizing days. And when I reached the hotel I’d planned on staying in, I went straight to the clerk while my things were unloaded.

“Could you tell me if there is a villa nearby rented by an English family?” I inquired in French. “Cecil-Coke would be the last name.”

The clerk responded in a French that was heavy with the southern accent of the Languedoc, and I struggled to parse out his words. “There is an English family nearby,” he affirmed, “though the gentleman there just died, I’m afraid. Cholera.”

My heart plummeted down to my feet even as my head raced to catch up. “A gentleman died? When?”

“It’s been over a week now.” The clerk thought for a moment, oblivious to my quiet panic, oblivious to the cacophony inside my head.

No. It couldn’t be Silas, he was so healthy when you saw him last.

But the timing’s right. And cholera works fast.

No. It can’t be him.

“And the gentleman’s wife died too,” the clerk finally said. “Before him. Fortunately, the children are all safe.”

God be praised! It’s not Silas!

I hated myself for the sigh of relief I heaved, because the moment I realized that it was Thomas and Charlotte who had died and that my Silas was safe, I also realized how crushed Silas would be by his brother’s death.

A personal matter.

That must have been why he rushed off without a word. Not because he was angry or hurt—though he may have also been those things—but because his world was ending hundreds of miles away. His world and the world of—how many nieces and nephews did he have? Four? Five?