That Summer: A Novel (7 page)

Nonsense, of course, all of it. It was natural to be prone to melancholia after the loss of a child; that was what the doctor had said, prescribing a horrid draught that Imogen poured into her slop jar when the nurse wasn’t looking.

“It is late,” Imogen said, trying to sound as though she called on her husband in his study in her nightdress every night. “Shouldn’t you come to bed?”

To her bed. If she could feel his arms around her, perhaps she wouldn’t feel quite so alone, so lost.

“Presently,” Arthur said, his eyes already straying back to the papers in front of him. Since she had lost the baby, he seemed to look past her rather than at her. “Presently.”

A small painting of a Madonna and child stood on an easel on Arthur’s desk. The Madonna’s cloak was impossibly blue; the colors glowed as though it had been painted yesterday. The mother’s expression, as she gazed down at her child, felt like a personal reproach.

Imogen took a step closer, encroaching onto forbidden territory. “You work so very hard.”

It wasn’t a ledger open in front of him but a periodical of some sort. Arthur hastily closed it, looking up at her with a smile that was slightly strained around the edges. “Did you need something, my dear?”

Companionship. Affection. “I had thought we might take a picnic,” she suggested. “If the weather stays fine.”

Arthur’s brow furrowed with concern. “Should you overtax yourself with such excursions, my dear? You need your rest.”

“I have done nothing but rest!” The words cracked out with more force than Imogen had intended. She took a deep breath, gentling her tone. “I had thought it might be … pleasant. Like our afternoons in Cornwall.”

“Yes,” Arthur said abstractedly, fingering the edges of the papers on his desk. “Yes, that would be a capital idea—but I fear I have business in town.”

Was it her imagination, or did he sound relieved?

“Some other time, perhaps,” he said, and Imogen realized, sinkingly, that it wouldn’t be any other time at all, just as there was never the time to show her his manuscripts or take her to visit the collections of his friends. “Was there anything else?”

“No,” she said in a small voice. “Nothing that signifies.”

Unless he could tell her where she had failed him. She had tried, so very hard, to conform to whatever it was Arthur wanted her to be, wearing the dresses he chose for her, calling on the ladies he deemed suitable. But it hadn’t done any good, had it? He was sitting behind the desk, and she was standing barefoot in her nightdress, abashed and rebuffed and more alone than she had ever imagined she could be.

Don’t you love me?
she wanted to ask. But the words stuck in her throat. She wasn’t sure she wanted to know the answer.

Arthur pushed back his desk chair, standing in a clear indication that the interview was over. “You shouldn’t be out without a shawl,” he said reproachfully. “Not when you have been so unwell.”

“Unwell.” A bland enough euphemism for the loss of their child.

How could he paper it over with platitudes? They had never discussed it, never grieved together; he had only patted her on the cheek and hurried from the sickroom. Away on his business, whatever that business might be. Imogen suspected it was with a comfortable chair at his club.

The bitterness of the thought stopped her cold. Surely she shouldn’t be thinking that, not of her husband, the man whom she had pledged to love above all others.

“Arthur—” she began, and stopped, not sure what she meant to say. She looked at him, at his bland, smiling face, the whiskers so carefully trimmed, the hair combed just so, and none of it betraying the slightest hint of any kind of emotion.

“We don’t want you to catch your death of cold,” he said, moving her in the direction of the door.

“No,” said Imogen blankly. “That was foolish of me.”

“You must go directly upstairs and make sure Anna brings you a hot brick for your bed.”

Her bed, not his.

Arthur tapped a finger gently against her cheek. “And don’t frown so. We don’t want furrows to mar that pretty face.”

“No,” said Imogen numbly. “Of course not.”

She knew she should stand her ground, pour out her doubts, her unhappiness—but something told her that it wouldn’t be any use. Arthur would just squeeze her hand and ask her if she wanted Anna to fetch her medicine, or tell her that she would feel better in the morning. Arthur didn’t like displays of emotion; she had discovered that when her father died, and had bottled her grief as best she could.

At the time, she had told herself that it was merely that no bridegroom wished to be burdened with a weeping wife in the first week of marriage. She had told herself that it was a sign of his delicacy of feeling, respecting her grief by avoiding bringing up a topic that might cause her more pain.

Unless it wasn’t anything of the kind. Unless it was simply that Arthur didn’t care for anything that didn’t directly concern Arthur.

Arthur ushered her gently but firmly to the door. “Good night, my love.”

“Good night, Arthur.” Imogen’s voice sounded strange and flat to her ears, but Arthur didn’t seem to notice. She shouldn’t have expected that he would.

The door clicked quietly shut behind her, leaving her alone in the hallway, with nothing but closed doors to all sides. She was still holding her candle, and the flame flickered with the trembling of her hands. She felt numb, from her head to her toes, numb and cold, in a way that had nothing to do with her lack of a shawl.

Desperately she scrambled to recall the early days of their courtship, the giddy joy of those halcyon days in her father’s garden. But even her most treasured memories felt flat and stale. When she thought of him on the bench beside her, it was always Arthur talking about Arthur: his journeys, his observations, his acquisitions.

No, that wasn’t entirely true. She clung to the memory of the compliments he had paid her, the touch of his hand, they way he had gazed into her eyes.

But even those memories had lost their savor. Beautiful, he had called her, and rare, but he might just as well have been speaking about her father’s book or the chalice in the hall; she had seen him handle both with as much reverence and just as nonchalantly tuck them away.

With a sinking feeling, Imogen remembered her father’s warnings. At the time, she had dismissed them as so much croaking. She knew love when it presented itself. But was it love? Or simply infatuation? She had been so convinced that theirs was a meeting of minds, but now, three years later, she wasn’t sure she had ever known Arthur’s mind at all.

And what she did know of it she wasn’t entirely sure she liked.

The thought filled her with a wordless dread. Imogen pressed her eyes shut against the burning light of her candle flame. Maybe Arthur was right; maybe she was overtired.

Or maybe she had made a horrible mistake.

And if she had? What then? There was nowhere for her to go. Even if her relations hadn’t disowned her for marrying Arthur, she was a married woman now; under the law, she was one person with her husband, her identity subsumed in his. There was no means of dissolving the marriage short of death.

There was a tread in the hall, and Jane appeared, holding a tray on which a pot of tea steamed.

“Arthur is working,” Imogen managed. Some remnant of pride prompted her to add, “I don’t believe he wishes to be disturbed.”

Jane gave her a pitying look. “You should be in bed,” she said, and calmly opened the study door.

Imogen only heard Arthur’s words of appreciation: “Tea! Just what I was wanting!” before the door closed behind Jane, leaving Imogen on the wrong side.

Herne Hill, 2009

“What a horrid place.” Natalie’s cut-glass tones cut through the atmosphere in the room, reducing it to just a room, old and unused.

“It
is
a little dank,” admitted Julia. Or a lot dank. The dust had clotted and clumped into a brownish haze. She wondered how the portrait would look after a cleaning, whether brightening the colors would somehow brighten the mood of it. She doubted it. It wasn’t anything in the palette but something in the woman’s face.

“A little?” Natalie raised her perfectly manicured brows. “I don’t think anyone’s been in here since before Thatcher. Aunt Regina always used the other room, back there.”

“Yes, I saw it,” said Julia absently. She pointed to the fireplace. “That portrait—who is she?”

“Goodness, that
hair
.” Natalie stood back to squint at the painting with a practiced gallery goer’s stare. “Was she auditioning for a spot as Princess Leia?”

“That was the look at the time.” Julia prowled around the base of the painting, looking for a plaque, a date, a signature. The curved and gilded frame was stubbornly uninformative. “Mid-nineteenth century?”

“I shouldn’t be surprised,” said Natalie noncommittally.

The woman had smooth wings of hair parted in the middle and coiled on the side and a dress with a high-buttoned basque.

“Eighteen-forties, maybe?” Catching Natalie looking at her, Julia shrugged and said brusquely, “It’s the hair and the dress. Who do you think she is?”

“An ancestress, I imagine. Otherwise I doubt she’d be on the wall. One of the ancestrals was a collector of sorts, but anything good was sold off ages ago. At least, that’s what my mother says.”

There was a slight edge to Natalie’s voice when she mentioned her mother. Or maybe the edge had more to do with the family treasures being sold.

“Your mother was my mother’s cousin?” said Julia, trying to get the family tree into order. She remembered what her father had said, back in New York. “Caroline?”

“Yes.” Natalie didn’t seem interested in pursuing that line of discussion. She nodded to a portrait on the far wall. “Do you think that’s your portrait’s father on the wall over there?”

On the far wall, over a faded sofa upholstered in rose and cream silk, hung a portrait of a man whose features were muffled in an exuberant display of facial hair, from bristling sideburns to even more prominent whiskers. The ginger of his hair was liberally streaked with gray and the buttons of his jacket strained over his waistcoat in proper prosperous middle-class Victorian fashion.

He had been painted in his study, or in the artist’s fantastical re-creation of one, with his hand resting on a stand on which a vividly colored Book of Hours lay open, the pages looking as though someone had just turned them. Julia would have wagered money that it had been painted by a different artist; the draftsmanship was impeccable, but there was something mannered and flat about it. If there was any character in the man’s face, she couldn’t find it.

Julia glanced back at the woman, her smooth face and haggard eyes.

“Or her husband,” said Julia. “They married them young back then.”

“What do you mean, ‘back then’?” asked Nat, dropping onto a droopy, silk-upholstered sofa. A cloud of dust rose into the air, and she batted at it, coughing. “Half of my friends are dating fifty-year-olds. My mother says—” She broke off, lips compressing.

Julia perched on the edge of a chair that seemed to have fared slightly better in the dust department. “Trust me, the New York dating scene isn’t much better.”

“Are you seeing anyone?” asked Natalie.

“I’m between men at the moment.” Technically true, if slightly misleading. She had gone on a few dates since losing her job, mostly at the instigation of her college roommate, but none of them seemed to last long. “What about you?”

Natalie shrugged her thin shoulders, looking down at her pricy shoes. “A few contenders, no one in particular at the moment. Frittering away my time, Mum calls it. As if it were that easy!”

Julia kept her voice dry. “Mothers do say the most charmingly helpful things, don’t they?”

Not that she would know.

It had been the right thing to say. Natalie’s face broke into a genuine smile. “God, yes.” Impulsively she leaned forward. “Would you like to go get something to eat? There are a handful of places not far from here—and we could get out of this wretched house.”

At the mention of food, Julia’s stomach growled loudly. “I think the last time I ate was somewhere over the North Sea.”

Natalie hauled herself up from the couch, shaking dust off her extremities. “It’s not exactly an oasis of civilization, but we should be able to find something to feed you.” Glancing back over her shoulder, she made a wry face. “If I’m being honest, this house gives me the willies!”

Julia rescued her shoulder bag from where she’d dumped it in the front hall, then, on second thought, dug out her wallet instead. No point in lugging everything out with her. This was, after all, home base for the next few weeks.

Sticking her wallet in her jeans pocket, she looked up at her cousin. “The willies?”

Natalie shrugged. “Just—you know. Shall we go?”

She already had one hand on the doorknob. Julia glanced back over her shoulder through the open doors of the drawing room, at the beautiful, tortured face of the woman in the portrait. She’d take another look later. Without Natalie.

“Sure,” Julia said, and dug Aunt Regina’s keys out of her pocket. “Let’s get some dinner.”

FIVE

Herne Hill, 1849

Arthur hadn’t told her that there would guests for dinner.

Imogen paused in the doorway of the drawing room, her skirts belling gently around her legs. The sound of voices alerted her even before she approached, male voices, raised in spirited conversation, interspersed by Evie’s high, lilting laugh, a little too high and a little too lilting. Male company wasn’t something they had often, not in the quiet house on Herne Hill.

It was Evie who saw Imogen first, her pretty young face lighting up. Breaking off her conversation, she raised a hand in greeting to Imogen, and the two men to whom she had been speaking turned with her. One was tall and fair, with a carefully maintained mustache. He was dressed in the height of fashion in a tight-waisted frock coat and a waistcoat of a dull but expensive fabric. The other was shorter, with long, waving locks, a buff coat, and a cravat knotted in a tight bow at the neck, the very caricature of an artist.