Listen to the Moon (28 page)

* * *

“Are you sure you want to go in?” John asked. “We could go back to the inn and talk. I’ll get us a private room if you like.”

Sukey didn’t want to talk. She’d been talking for what felt like hours. She’d wanted to go to a real theater for as long as she could remember. They were doing a version of John’s Shakespeare play with fairies. She’d put on her best dress and she wasn’t going to let her father ruin it for her, even if she kept thinking of her sister saying,
Can I write you letters?
and hearing her own unconvincing
Things are so unsettled, I don’t know where you’d ought to send them.
The girl had looked crushed.

Her father had smiled at her as they left, Julia leaning her head trustingly on his shoulder. He’d said he was sorry to see her go, but he wasn’t really. She didn’t matter.

“I thought you were famous for tactfully ignoring it when someone was unhappy.” The joke came out sour.

John frowned. “If you mean Nick Dymond, he was my employer and I followed his wishes. And yes, I do try not to pry unnecessarily into others’ private griefs. But, Sukey, you’re my wife.”

“What does that mean, then?” she said rashly. “That my wishes don’t matter? That I haven’t got anything private of my own?” What did he want? For her to rip out her heart and put it in his hand? Well, she only had so much kindness in her and she’d already wasted it on strangers.

John’s eyes flashed. She waited, trembling, for the storm to break. It would be a relief.

But after a moment he shrugged, mouth tightening. “I apologize. If you’d prefer tactful silence, I can oblige you.”

The knowledge that she was in the wrong squirmed in her stomach like a snake. But she didn’t apologize, because then he’d talk to her again and she didn’t want that. She’d opened herself up so she could be cheerful for her sister, and now she needed to shut herself off before she bled to death—or maybe she’d closed herself off and now she couldn’t get herself open again, she didn’t know.

She’d feel better after the play, and they could go back to the inn and talk about what everyone had been wearing.

The theater was a neat brick building, not especially pretty. John held the door with a courtly air, not quite meeting her eyes. “Two tickets for the pit, if you please,” he said, and led her into…

The theater.

Sukey’s breath caught. Everything was red and pale blue and gilt, finer even than the Assembly Rooms in Lively St. Lemeston. The ceiling was painted to look as if it opened onto a summer sky, while the boxes curved and swooped about the edges of the room, with two more tiers of seats above them.

Ahead was the stage. They could see a few feet of bare planking, with a plain door to either side flanked by flat, painted columns. Everything beyond was hidden by a great red curtain that fired Sukey with curiosity.

Rows of benches filled the sloping pit. She and John were early, and took the one closest to the stage. Before them, in a strange little box set into the floor, seven men tuned two fiddles, a cello and oboe-like instruments in various sizes. The fiddle players seemed to be quarreling, continually poking each other with their bows and elbows and wincing at the sounds from each other’s instruments. Sukey watched them, and for half an hour the tightness in her chest felt like eagerness.

She didn’t look at John, but now and again, out of the corner of her eye, she saw his face turn towards her.

At last the overture began, the curtain rising grandly on a Greek sort of palace, all painted columns and marble. A string of actors and actresses came through the doors in a peculiar assortment of tunics, sandals, headdresses and fluffily draped white dresses. A craggy fellow in ermine robe and coronet—he must be the Duke of Athens—began rather pompously,

Now, fair Hippolyta, our nuptial hour

Draws on apace: four happy days bring in

Another moon; but O! methinks how slow

This old moon wanes; she lingers my desires,

Like to a step-dame, or a dowager

Long withering out a young man’s revenue.

Well, that’s rude!
thought Sukey.
You don’t look poor to me, I should think you could afford to support your mother.
That was dukes for you, she supposed.

She remembered from John’s account of the play that one of the girls eloped with her lover to escape the match her father made for her. This must be the father now, making a speech about the pretty gifts his daughter’s lover gave her. Sukey was thinking that really, they did sound cheap, when he said,

As she is mine, I may dispose of her;

Which shall be either to this gentleman,

Or to her death, according to our law.

Sukey’s entire body went stiff. He wanted his daughter
killed
if she didn’t marry the man he liked? John hadn’t mentioned that. And the duke didn’t even blink, just knabbled on to poor Hermia about how she was nothing but a form her father had stamped in wax, while the girl trembled with fear. This was supposed to be a
comedy
.

After a dozen or so scraps of song so formal and fussy they’d be no fun to sing, the curtain came down on the first scene. “What do you think?” John asked.

“That jealous
sneak
,” Sukey said furiously. “Why would Helena tell Demetrius about her friend’s elopement? If he brings her back, they’ll
kill
her.”

He looked surprised. Hadn’t they been watching the same play? “Don’t worry,” he said, smiling. “No one dies.”

The second scene was in a cottage—a neater, airier one than Sukey had ever seen, but the actors wore smocks and soft country hats. A sturdy fellow with a hammer stuck through the ties of his leather apron said, “Is all our company here?” in a thick Sussex burr, and the audience exploded into laughter.

A cocky, tall young man strutted to the center of the stage, and
he
spoke in a Sussex burr. Gales more laughter, and there hadn’t even been a joke yet.

John laughed too.

Sukey had heard people put on burrs before to be funny. She’d been hearing it all her life. Mrs. Humphrey’s boarders did it sometimes, and laughed fit to split their seams. It had never troubled her overmuch. Sometimes she thickened her burr a little herself to tell a ghost story.

But tonight, with gentlefolk in satin gowns and silk stockings guffawing in the boxes, she
seethed
. She was sure some of those actors weren’t even from Sussex. One of them had on a hat just like Larry’s when he was helping the gardener, and you could tell it was supposed to be funny. The hat was a joke all of its own.

John was laughing, his face alight. Did he think how she spoke was funny?

He’s seen the play before
, she reminded herself.
He likes the jokes
. But somehow she couldn’t laugh at a single one. Her heart was small and hard as a cherry stone, and every time John laughed, she felt further away from him.

The curtain fell again. John turned to her, clearly expecting enthusiasm.

“What’s so funny about artisans trying to act, anyway?” she burst out. “Obed Wickens from the Carpenters’ Guild plays St. George every Boxing Day, and he’s splendid. But of course actors think what they do is so important, you’d better be a gentleman before you try it.”

“We should leave,” John said. “If you’re not enjoying it, let’s leave.”

The awful, terrible truth was that she wanted to leave without him. She looked at him, handsome and familiar, and she could imagine not loving him. She could imagine looking at his face and feeling nothing. As if he were a stranger.

That girl had smiled at her as if they were sisters, and she hadn’t felt a thing, when she knew she’d ought to. What if her heart just stopped working?

She’d never felt so frightened. She nodded hurriedly, clutching at his sleeve. “Let’s go,” she said, fingers tight on the twill. “I’m so sorry, you were having fun but I want to go home.” Nothing here was home, though, and tomorrow they had to go on to Tassell Hall.

John helped her on with her pelisse while a fairy sang, the silk moth-wings tied about her head fluttering foolishly. He pushed their way to the aisle, murmuring polite apologies with as much calm self-assurance as if he cleared a path for a duchess. Sukey’s head hurt.

He asked for the private room at the inn. She pulled him down on top of her in the bed, straining to get as close as she could, to be swept away by passion. She wanted him in her, on her. But he kept saying, “You’re not ready, Sukey, I’ll hurt you. Easy, sweetheart. Relax, it’s just me.” He kissed her cheekbones beneath her closed eyes, and her jaw. His hands knew what she liked, and he did finally arouse her, make her want him. She even spent while he was inside her.

But it wasn’t like it always had been before. He was so close, his eyes on her face and his body warming hers, his cock inside her, but the more she tried to open her heart up, the more she felt as if she might as well have picked up a stranger in the taproom and let him fuck her.

He held her afterwards. She barely breathed; she’d forgotten how to do it in a natural way. If she tried, he’d notice there was something wrong with her, that she couldn’t even take in air like other people.

“I shouldn’t have done that,” he said. “I’m sorry I did.”

“I wanted you to,” she insisted.

“I know,” he said slowly. “And earlier, you wanted me to be tactfully silent. But you’re my wife, and I’d like— Please talk to me, Sukey.”

But she couldn’t. She hated the idea. She knew instinctively that it wouldn’t make her feel better, that trying to make him understand would only make him seem further away than ever. This grief was hers and she wanted, perversely, to hoard it.
It’s nothing to do with you
, she thought.
You don’t even know if you mean to keep living with me.

He stroked her hair away from her head. She held herself perfectly still so she wouldn’t jerk away. “Tell me what you’re feeling,” he said softly. “You never talk to me.”

“What do you mean? I chatter like a magpie.”

He rolled away to look up at the ceiling. “Not about yourself. I look back on the talks we’ve had, and I told you far more about myself than you ever told me.”

She knew it was true. When he’d told her all that about the Dymond boys, and getting coddled when he was ill, the best she could manage was
I had the measles once
. “I don’t feel anything,” she said. “So he’s my father. What of it? Half my friends at home don’t even know he’s alive. He’s nothing to do with me anymore.”

“I’m sorry, sweetheart. I’m sorry it wasn’t what you wanted.”

Nothing is what I wanted
, she thought.

Chapter Seventeen

“The countryside does look pretty in the snow,” Sukey said. “What a darling windmill.”

She wasn’t talking to John, however. She was talking to Abe Tomkin, the groom who’d been sent to fetch them in the wagon. She’d barely spoken to John all morning, and then with constraint.

Not that she was precisely easy with Abe. John knew her well enough by now to know when she was making polite conversation and when she was really interested. But Sukey enjoyed even polite conversation more than he did. She seemed glad to have a stranger to talk to, so as to avoid looking at John.

He didn’t understand what he’d done. He’d tried so hard to say everything right, and yet everything he said was wrong, and everything he did. Silence felt like abandoning her, but she’d said it was what she wanted. This morning while they waited for the cart, she’d even snapped at him,
Stop
watching
me!

When Mr. Dymond was miserable, he’d only ever wanted his valet to be silent. But he’d chosen a wife he could talk to. John had thought…hoped…he’d wanted to be someone Sukey could talk to, instead of who he’d always been: someone whose presence, while a necessary evil, was at least unobtrusive.

They had reached Tassell land, though they weren’t quite in the park. The winter landscape
was
pretty, now Sukey called his attention to it—canopies of bare branches giving way to snowy fields, and every so often a half-frozen millpond—but it was so familiar that John saw it without seeing it. He’d traveled this road countless times, first as a little boy helping with the parcels on market day, then as a liveried footman clinging to the back of the Tassell coach, and still later accompanying one of the Dymond boys on a trip home.

They traversed the home farm now. There was the old elm where he and the coachman’s son used to play at Robin Hood, and here was the gatehouse, where they were obliged to stop for tea with Mr. and Mrs. Halfacre, who’d known John since before he was born. Mrs. Halfacre fussed over Sukey, calling her a “pretty young thing”.

Sukey expanded gratefully under the attention, but she still didn’t really look at John. She ignored him subtly enough that the Halfacres didn’t remark it, but John knew his mother would.

He’d been looking forward to showing her off. But when he’d pictured the scene, he’d put Sukey hanging on his arm, teasing him, their happiness glaringly obvious. That must be what every delusional middle-aged man imagined when he took a beautiful young wife.

Pull yourself together,
he told himself.
She’s just upset about her father. Things were going wonderfully until this journey.
But somehow, knowing his parents were going to be looking at them made every hair-thin crack in their marriage gape and yawn in his mind.

What if she—what if everyone—thought Sukey was a pretty young thing who’d married an older man to get ahead in the world, and didn’t have the time of day for him now the ring was on her finger?

And wasn’t it true, in a way? She’d never have married him if she hadn’t been dismissed from the boarding house.

He’d been selfish to accept her change of heart. He should have told her she’d feel better in the morning and escorted her home, and talked Mrs. Pengilly into having her live in. He should have had some damned self-control, but she’d put her hand on the front of his breeches and he hadn’t been able to rush her into things fast enough.

John worried his way through tea (just enough time for the snow on their coats to melt and soak through the lining, not enough for it to dry again) and down the drive to the Hall.

Sukey gasped when they turned the corner. “It’s enormous,” she breathed. “Bigger than Wheatcroft.”

Abe snorted, having adopted wholehearted the rivalry between the Whig Tassells and Tory Wheatcrofts. “Lord Wheatcroft’s a country squire. The only place in Sussex bigger than Tassell Hall is Goodwood.”

Goodwood was the nearby seat of the Duke of Richmond. Abe was probably exaggerating, but Sukey looked suitably impressed. Certainly Tassell Hall was huge, but only when judged—as Sukey no doubt did—as a home for a single family. John saw it rather as a small fiefdom. It had grown up around the lord and his family, who spent a part of their year occupying the state apartments and filling every room with their guests, but it had a rich and active life of its own. The main house with its bay windows and Dutch gables was blank, the snow on the drive undisturbed by carriage wheels, but smoke drifted up from chimneys in the servants’ wing and the hothouses. Before John began to travel with the family at fifteen, he’d loved times like these when the servants had the house to themselves.

Abe drove them around the side and deposited them at the kitchen door, opened by Mrs. Toogood before they could reach it. John swept his mother off her feet, grinning, for the moment just happy to be home.

“Johnny! Oh, it’s so good to see you. Here, put me down before I start to cry. Are you hungry?” She kissed his cheek, smelling of charcoal and the kitchen, and John’s own eyes stung.

“We had tea with the Halfacres, thanks. Mama, this is my wife.” He drew Sukey towards him, hoping she wouldn’t push him away.

She nestled closer and held out her hand shyly. “It’s an honor, ma’am.”

“Oh, please, call me Amanda,” Mrs. Toogood said, her manner so unaffected and motherly and welcoming that John felt a rush of pride and gratitude at his mother’s superiority over other people.

“Then you shall call me Sukey,” his wife said, sounding pleased.

John prayed his mother wouldn’t say,
Oh, wouldn’t you prefer Susan? It’s so much prettier and more feminine.
She had rather a bee in her bonnet on the subject of nicknames, refusing point-blank to let anyone call her Amy.

“Come inside and let me get a good look at you.” Mrs. Toogood took John’s other arm and led them into the kitchen. John went and hung Sukey’s coat and hat by the fire in his mother’s sitting room, thinking it was time he gave her boots a thorough cleaning.

When he returned, Sukey was still gazing about the great kitchen, awestruck. John’s pride in the Hall mingled with a sort of unease. This was his home, but to her it might have been one of the wonders of the world.

And John knew the look on his mother’s face. She was, thus far, highly skeptical. His stomach lurched. He should have bought Sukey a new dress, and those boots…he loved them, but to his mother… At least he might have cleaned them.

Mrs. Toogood’s expression melted into a warm smile as Sukey turned towards her. “You must come and meet my husband, and then I’d love to give you a tour of the old pile. I show visitors about as part of my duties, you know, and I can tell you the whole history of the place.”

In the butler’s pantry, Mr. Toogood was in the midst of a careful inventory of the silverware, polishing tarnish off a fork with a pronounced look of distaste. But he took off his glasses, smiled and embraced John.

His father had been of a height with him until a few years since, when he was abruptly two or three inches shorter. It always amazed John that a human being could shrink. “Mrs. Toogood, this is my father.”

“Mr. Toogood.” Sukey bobbed a curtsey.

“So you’re the young woman who finally turned my sensible son’s head,” Mr. Toogood said with a smile. The underlying message—
so you’re the hussy who ruined his career—
was probably obvious only to John and his mother, so he tried to ignore it. “A pretty little thing you are too. Are you sure you’re not
too good
for him?”

Sukey ducked her head. “Oh, it’s more likely to be the other way round.” Her accent thickened with shyness. He saw his parents exchange glances.

“Not at all,” John said rather sharply. “My father has the right of it.”

Mr. Toogood laughed. “I should thank you. That’s probably the first time my son’s ever said
that
.”

Sukey twinkled at him. “Make the most of it, for it’s
too good
to last.” A few more tired puns were exchanged before Mrs. Toogood shepherded them out for the tour.

“I never knew you were such a punster.” John was instantly sorry he’d said it, and sorry for the edge in his voice.

“They do spring to mind now and then, with a name like yours,” Sukey said rather tightly herself.

He’d always been glad she didn’t joke about his name, but it hadn’t occurred to him that she was actively resisting temptation, to be kind. He leaned down to whisper in her ear, “You’re too good to me.”

He wanted her to smile, and she did. But the expression was uncertain, her face turning to his with wide, startled eyes. It tugged at his heart, took him by surprise, made him see her as if for the first time: how slight and angular she was, how elusive, how beautiful. How likely to melt away with one last over-the-shoulder smile.

He wanted to tug her around the corner into a library alcove and kiss her, gripping her hips hard enough to bruise—something to prove that she was a flesh-and-blood woman and that he had touched her. He wanted to tease her until she lit up.

“John?” his mother said.

“Sorry. Shall we start in the great hall?” It was strange walking with his mother and his wife. Offering his arm to both would be awkward, and he could hardly leave Sukey. But it made him feel sorry and distant, not to do what he would have always done before as a matter of course.

He kept on expecting his mother to
need
his arm, but her carriage was as brisk and graceful as it had ever been. He hoped desperately that it would last. “Tell Sukey about the inlaid floor,” he said as they entered the hall. “I love that story.”

“Well, the present earl’s grandfather had it put in. The workman was a French fellow…” John listened with half an ear, crossing to the staircase to run a hand over the handsome carved banister and down the corkscrew posts of the railing.

It came away dusty.

He looked closer. Dusting corkscrew spirals took time, and time had not been taken. There were innumerable pockets and streaks of dust, a week’s worth at least in some places. Examining the room, he saw that though the furniture was safely covered in dropcloths in the family’s absence, the tall mirrors had not been cleaned to the edges, and dust clung to the plasterwork reliefs on the walls, dulling the gilt.

He waited until the final joke of the French inlayer story. “Mother, there’s probably no need to bring Father into it yet, but you ought to speak to whoever’s been dusting in here.”

His mother’s face twisted unhappily. “Is it dusty?”

He nodded. “The plasterwork—”

His mother made an anguished sound. “Oh, Lady Tassell loves that plasterwork!”

John was taken aback. Of his parents, she’d never been the one who ranked cleanliness just above godliness in the catalog of virtues. But if she was upset, there was an easy solution. “It’s all right. I’ll take a paintbrush to it and have it clean in a trice.”

“Thank you.” She twisted her hands together. “I don’t think it’s just in here, though. Your father…well. His eyesight isn’t what it used to be, and his back and knees have been bothering him so he can’t always bend down or get at things the way he did. I think the servants take advantage.”

John couldn’t reply. He felt as if he’d been winded by a swift kick in the stomach. Everyone had warned him, but all at once it was real, and it was dreadful. His father had always been so proud, such a petty tyrant, and now he had lost the power to exact obedience. When he met his mother’s eyes, tears swam in hers.

What was he going to do?

As Mrs. Toogood led them into the enormous dining room, its long table swathed in white sheets, for a moment John saw ghosts. Gentlemen and ladies of summers past talked and laughed; silver clattered and china clinked. He remembered laying out piping-hot dishes on that table according to his father’s design, and woe betide him if Mr. Toogood’s eagle eye detected an inch’s asymmetry.

He had loved those evenings, flanking the sideboard or standing behind Lady Tassell’s chair, listening to talk of politics and the opera. “Do you remember when Mr. Sheridan thought the roast was overcooked?”

His mother sighed. “That roast was perfectly tender.”

“What happened?” Sukey asked, charmingly ready to be fascinated by the answer.

“Oh, it’s not a very interesting story. John has such a memory for trifles.” Mrs. Toogood waved it away. The animation faded from Sukey’s face for a moment before she pasted on a determined smile. John gritted his teeth and did the same. “This fireplace was preserved from the Old Hall…”

After the tour, Sukey went to help his mother with her pickles so John could be initiated into the mysteries of buttling at Tassell Hall.

“And this is where I record each social occasion for which invitations are sent, who attended, the menus and entertainment provided, and what could be improved in future.” John’s father flipped open a notebook to show him closely written pages. “I keep separate notebooks for occasions above a certain size. And here in this box is an alphabetical list of guests with their preferences and a history of their visits…”

John wondered what the women were talking about in the stillroom. He pulled the first book off the shelf and opened it at random, finding a menu card in his mother’s writing attached to the page with a bit of thread. He lifted it to read his father’s notes.

Mrs
.
L’s gravy-soup much admired; refilled tureen in kitchen. Next time, 2 tureens. Ices: 2 per guest too many, 1½ will do. Bread well handled, served warm, compliments.

The date was some two years before John’s birth. It took him a moment to recognize “Mrs. L” as his mother, before their marriage, the
Mrs.
a courtesy to a head cook.

John had seen his father’s system before, and since he left the Hall had always used a similar one when entertaining for his employers. But there could be no comparison between this and chronicling Mr. Summers’s rare dinner parties. The thought of continuing his father’s labor of love, spending hours closeted in here writing, filled him with something like dread.

His father cleared his throat emphatically. “This is important, John. Stop your woolgathering.”