The Misbegotten (7 page)

There was a small cobbled square called Abbey Green, just along from Abbeygate Street, and the lone plane tree growing there had crisp bronze edges to its leaves. The sky was overcast, and Rachel suddenly wished it was spring, not autumn. Spring would have made everything feel more promising, more like a new beginning. Later, once Richard had gone about his business, Rachel stood for a while in her new home, and wondered what to do. She knew Richard had a housekeeper, Mrs Linton, who visited on certain days, but the woman had yet to put in an appearance. She glanced around at the cobwebs high up in the stairwell, and the ground-in dirt on the floorboards, and thought that Richard had lived too long alone, and that Mrs Linton was either unfit, or had been left too much to her own devices, and grown idle. In the sudden quiet, Rachel took a steadying breath. She had never minded an empty room before, but suddenly the emptiness seemed to ring; it seemed to mirror and amplify the odd, empty feeling inside her. She shut her eyes, and tried to summon thoughts to fill it, to quell the strange and sudden panic she felt. Just then, she would even have wished Eliza Trevelyan back into her life, with all of her arrogance and scorn.

Rachel went upstairs and set about making herself a dressing table of sorts, on top of the small chest of drawers where Richard’s clothes and sundries were kept. She opened each drawer in turn, hoping to find an empty one that she could use, but all contained oddments of dress and accoutrements – worn-out gloves and stockings, boot buckles and tobacco boxes and combs with broken teeth. In the end she moved everything in the top drawer to one side, and put in a few of her own possessions. She did not have much – handkerchiefs and gloves, her sewing box, hairpins and what few beauty compounds she used: a small pot of rouge with a tiny, shell-handled brush to apply it; some heavy cream, scented with roses, for her hands; a pot of Lady Molyneux’s Liquid Bloom, which had been a present from Eliza at Christmas last.
For you sometimes appear so pale at breakfast, it’s like you’ve died in the night and not realised.
But the gift, meant as a criticism of sorts, had rather backfired on Eliza, because a few drops of the stuff rubbed into her cheeks did in fact make Rachel look lovely. She laid an old handkerchief on top of the chest and set out her hair brushes on it, and then unpacked her most treasured possession – a musical silver trinket box.

Her parents had given it to her on her sixteenth birthday, before any stain of scandal or hardship had touched the family, and the grief of losing Christopher had softened somewhat from the dagger strike of his sudden death. It had been her mother’s and her grandmother’s before it was hers; an item only as big as one of her hands, standing on little lion’s feet. The top was patterned with vines and flowers, forming a vignette around a brightly enamelled peacock; when the lid was lifted, providing the screw underneath was wound tight, it played a lullaby. The inside of the box was lined with deep blue velvet, and a lock of her mother’s tawny hair, tied with a ribbon, was pinned carefully to one side. Rachel touched it gently with her fingertips. The hair was straight, and smooth, and cold. She shut her eyes and tried to recall Anne Crofton’s face in every detail, even though she knew it was a cruel thing to do to herself, and only reiterated her mother’s absence.

Also in the music box was the only other precious thing she owned, which had also been her mother’s – a pair of pearl drop earrings with tiny diamonds on the studs. She’d hidden them in her bodice as the bailiffs had taken everything out to their wagon, past her father on the front steps, sitting with his boots unlaced and his face gone slack in shock. The bailiffs would have taken his boots too, if Rachel had not come out to stand over him, fierce as a lioness, shaming them into a retreat. She wanted to keep the box on display, but she hesitated. It seemed somehow boastful, like a deliberate attempt to show up the plainness of the room. Reluctantly, she wrapped it in its linen cloth and put it back in the drawer. Then she rose, and went to stand by the bed to watch out of the window. There was a small, foxed mirror on the wall; she positioned herself so that her reflection hovered in the corner of her eye, and at once felt a little less alone.

Richard was away from the house or ensconced amongst the barrels in the basement for much of the day, but for the first two weeks of their marriage they ate supper together every night, at the small table in the kitchen, with their food and faces lit by the yellow warmth of an oil lamp, discussing the housekeeping, the business, their hopes for the future. One evening, when Rachel had been talking about her parents, she looked up to find Richard watching her with a compassionate expression.

‘You miss them a great deal, don’t you?’ he said.

‘Yes. In truth, I do. My mother has been a good many years with God, but still I feel her absence, and the lack of her advice, her . . . good sense and her kindness. And that of my father, of course. But I can do nothing but try to accept, and not rail against the loss. I can remember the happy times we had together, when Christopher was still with us, and I was very young.’
Young and full of feeling, not numb and quiet, as now
, said the shadow inside her head; but such observations were not for sharing.

‘Rachel.’ Richard covered her hand with his, and smiled. ‘I want so much for you to be happy again. For us to be a family,’ he said.

‘I am happy,’ said Rachel, and again she felt something stir inside her, the warmth of gratitude towards him.
He does truly wish to make me happy.
But there was also a fleeting barb of doubt, of deceit, when she spoke.
I will be happy soon
, she amended, silently.
When he grows to fill my heart.

‘We are alike, you and I. In our experiences . . . we have both lost our families, the people who raised us and loved us. I . . . it is hard, not to dwell in the past. The temptation to do so is very strong.’ He squeezed her fingers, and in his eyes was some desperation she didn’t yet understand. ‘But we all need somebody to share life with. To understand us, and carve a future with us. I am so happy to have found you, Rachel.’

‘And I you. But . . . your father . . .’

‘My father is lost to me,’ said Richard, curtly.

‘I’m sorry for it, Mr Weekes.’

As a wedding gift, Richard had presented Rachel with a new book by John Keats, since he knew her love of reading. One evening she asked him to read it to her, and he took the book with a look of distaste and anxiety. He did his best, but it was clear that he did not enjoy the experience. The lines of the poems were stilted, the rhythm lost; the meaning hard to follow when read as he did – as words on a page, not as the deepest thoughts of a man, rendered beautiful with language. For as long as she could, Rachel listened to ‘The Eve of Saint Agnes’ made blunt and bewildering, but Richard’s rendition was like listening to a melody played on an ill-tuned piano, and she found after a while that her jaw was clenched tight, and her eyes too, and she longed for the noise to stop. When silence fell she looked up to find Richard watching her, his expression one of defeat.

‘I fear I am not a very good reader,’ he said quietly. Rachel coloured up with guilt.

‘Oh, no! You did fine, Richard. It’s only a certain way of speaking, and comes easily with practice,’ she said.

‘Well.’ He closed the book and put it into her hands. ‘It’s hard to change the way one speaks.’

‘Oh, I didn’t mean . . . I meant only that reading poetry is rather more like . . . acting in a play, than reading straight, as from a periodical,’ she said, trying to undo any slight he might have felt.

‘A skill I’ve never had call to acquire,’ he said, a touch crossly.

‘No more have you that call now, if you do not wish it. Shall I read to you for a while, instead?’

‘As you wish, Rachel. I’m very tired.’ So Rachel opened the book and immersed herself for some minutes in the wonderful images, the strange beauty of it. She concentrated, and shaped each line as best she could, seeking to delight her husband, to prove her love of poetry well founded. But when she finished his chin had sunk onto his chest in slumber. She wondered whether to wake him and lead him up to bed, but it still seemed too forward a thing to do. So she sat in silence for a long time, with only the sifting sound of ash settling in the grate for company.

Strange and conspicuous though it made her feel, Rachel took to walking the streets of Bath alone, without an escort. But whether it was a symptom of her age, her faded looks, or the unfashionable nature of her dress, she soon began to notice looks of disapproval, appraisal, and even amusement, aimed at her as she marched along Milsom Street. She wondered if she was mistaken for a servant out on some errand for her mistress. Milsom Street was wide and airy, a parade of shops and businesses running south to north through the middle of the city, its paving stones swept cleaner than the rest. Carriages and carts and people hurried to and fro, causing a constant clatter of hooves and wheels and chatter; barrow boys and hawkers shouted their wares above it all in voices gone ragged. Some of the shops Rachel remembered from years earlier were still in business – like the milliner where her mother had bought her a new hat, trimmed with silk roses and a green velvet ribbon. One afternoon she stopped in the abbey square. Of course the vast abbey and assembly rooms and hot baths were just as she remembered them, and it struck her hard that though they had not changed, she had. She did not belong to them in the way she once had.

Her family had never been rich, but were better off than most. Her father, John Crofton, was the squire of a small estate of four farms, and had owned several hundred acres of rolling countryside where sheep and cattle grazed. The manor house where Rachel had grown up was long and low – built in the reign of Queen Elizabeth – with thick stone walls, mullioned windows and a roof that sagged between its rafters. An ancient wisteria snaked across the entire façade, producing a throng of hanging purple flowers each May and June. It was a comfortable home, well worn-in by centuries of habitation. In Rachel’s room the wooden floor sloped so pronouncedly that she and Christopher often used it in games – setting their marbles to roll across it towards a particular target. It was a house in which the children’s laughter was encouraged to ring out, and come echoing down the twisted wooden stair, never hushed or reprimanded.

John Crofton was entirely happy in the midstream where he swam. He did not fret about cozening his superiors, or waste time trying to ingratiate himself with those who held themselves lofty and aloof. Instead, John and Anne socialised with friends they were genuinely fond of, so that supper parties and teas and music evenings were merry, jovial affairs. On one occasion they were invited to dine with Sir Paul Methuen at the impossibly grand Corsham Court, which seemed the sort of place from which Rachel’s parents might emerge for ever altered, chastened or mesmerised in some way. But the Croftons returned from their evening laughing about how dull Sir Paul had been, and how preposterous the other guests had made themselves, in seeking his favour. They were not invited back again, and cared not one jot.

The two years that Rachel was away at a boarding school for young ladies, she pined for the manor house, and visited her family as often as was permitted. The three seasons that the Croftons spent in Bath introduced Rachel to a greater scale of society, and to the different fashions and foibles of city life, but the same Crofton rules applied – there was no attempt at social gain, only the pursuit of enjoyment and diversion with like-minded people. If Rachel or her parents happened to meet a young man who might be a suitable match for her, then he would be judged on his temperament, his interests and his inclination to industry, not by his name alone. She never did meet anybody there that she admired in that way, however. Handsome faces almost always turned out to be attached to vain and foolish boys. She preferred walking with her mother and friends, shopping for oddments with which they could improve a dress or a pair of shoes, or could send out as gifts; and seeing Christopher, who hated to be left behind, come bounding down the stairs upon their return.

As Rachel left the abbey square and resumed her walking, Christopher’s face came so clearly before her eyes that her steps faltered. A thin, avid face beneath a thatch of sandy blond hair, so much darker than her own. He’d had honey-brown eyes and a sharp, straight nose that the summer sun scattered with freckles. The fever that took him was brutally quick. He complained of feeling dizzy at bedtime on Monday, and was dead by sunset on Wednesday. He’d been so vibrant, so full of life and mischief, none of them could believe it had happened. They sat with his small corpse for hours, all three of them, simply staring and trying to make sense of what they saw.

With a gasp, Rachel stopped abruptly in the street, suddenly unable to breathe. People parted around her, jostling, but none stopped to offer her any assistance. She heard a tut of disapproval, and looked up at an elegant elderly lady, who turned her face aside at once, gazing loftily away.
Who are these people?
Rachel turned off Milsom Street then, and did not return to it.

Her route led her past the Moor’s Head, where gulls wheeled above in a rare flood of sunshine, calling out their mocking cacophony. The pavement was crowded with people and tangled with their voices, but then Rachel realised with a start that one voice was calling her name – a name she was still unaccustomed to.

‘Mrs Weekes! Won’t you pause a moment?’ Rachel turned to see Duncan Weekes, now her father-in-law, crossing the street towards her on none too steady feet. She almost turned away and pretended not to see him, remembering Richard’s curt statement that his father was lost to him.
But should I blank the old man in the street, then, when he is now also my family as well?
And after two hours of walking, she couldn’t help but feel relieved to see a face she knew. Duncan Weekes’s brown coat might once have been decent, but it had worn through at the elbows, lost three buttons and had grease stains on the cuffs. His wig was as crooked as it had been the first time she saw him, and his face was ruddy, the nose a pitted ruin of broken blood vessels, knotty and purple.