To Love and to Cherish (16 page)

“No. Are you?”

“No.”

“Good, then you can’t use that for an excuse to leave if my life story bores you.”

He only smiled. Before, he’d have joked back, tried to make
her
laugh. He was guarding himself, unsure, under this new regime, of how much he could give away, how much he could take. It pained her, but she couldn’t blame him for it.

“Actually,” she said softly, “what I want to tell you is how it came about that I married Geoffrey.” He recoiled slightly, and she knew what he was thinking—that this was dangerous territory, unwise, probably indiscreet, exactly the sort of thing he ought to avoid if he was going to save himself. “I just want to tell you, that’s all,” she said hastily. “It’s not hurtful, it won’t—harm anything. Between us, I mean.”

“Tell me, then. Whatever you like. Did you meet him in England?”

She sat back. “Yes, in London. My father’s brother had just died, and we’d come here to settle his estate.” No—she wanted to start further back. “We’d been living in Venice and Padua, where my father had a new patron. And a new mistress,” she added dryly. “Somehow they always seemed to go together.”

“Your mother—?”

“Died when I was seven. She drowned in a sailing accident. My father’s family had money, but they cut him off when he married her because she was ‘unsuitable.’ Even after she died, they didn’t relent. He despised them by then; I doubt he’d have taken anything from them if they’d offered it.”

“Did you always live on the Continent?”

“We lived in Ravenna until my mother died. I still think of it as home, even though I’ve been back only once in almost eighteen years. After she died, my father and I would come to England every few years, but for the most part we lived in Italy and France, sometimes the Netherlands. Part of his idea of himself, you see, was that he was an exile.”

“Was he a good artist? I don’t know his work.”

“It was never shown here until just before he died. I can’t say if he was good or not; I can’t be objective. He wasn’t as good as he wanted to be. And he wasn’t very successful.”

“Were you poor?”

“I guess we were, sometimes. I never felt poor. His friends were all artists, so it seemed as if everybody we knew was poor.”

She paused, and after a moment Christy asked, “Were you happy?”

She studied his serious face; he was so intent on everything she said. “I didn’t have what you’d call a conventional upbringing,” she equivocated. This was an area she had intended to skirt. “My father had a lot of mistresses, and I was always . . . I was . . .”

“Jealous of them.”

“Yes.” There, that hadn’t hurt so much. “And whether or not he was any good at what he did, he was completely devoted to his art. Obsessed. And so—a noisy little girl constituted a nuisance, as you can understand. An annoyance.”

There was a longer pause, but this time Christy didn’t fill it.

“But he was proud of me too, in his way, especially after I got older. He liked to show me off. At sixteen or so, I became his hostess. His set of friends was ‘bohemian,’ which meant, as far as I could tell, that they slept with each other’s wives and made a virtue out of professional failure.”

“You’re cynical.”

“Yes, I am. Haven’t you noticed that about me before?” He sent her one of his bland looks, not encouraging her. “Anyway. When I was twenty, Uncle Donald died—my father’s brother. He had no sons, so Papa was next in line for the inheritance, which was substantial. A fortune, in fact. We came to England, and that’s when I met Geoffrey.”

“How?”

“At a party. An artists’ soiree. Yes, I know—an unlikely place for Geoffrey, but I didn’t know that then. Nor did I know that I was to be the prize in a carefully planned and very cold-blooded seduction. Before the old viscount died, how long had it been since you’d seen Geoffrey?”

“Twelve years,” he answered without hesitation. “Without a word.”

“Then you must not have known that in the interim, besides signing on to play soldier in every obscure skirmish that fired up around the globe, he spent all his money on pleasure, and all his friends’ money, and all the money he could squeeze out of his father. Which was precious little to begin with, before it dried up to nothing. In short, he was desperate.

“Unfortunately for him, his dissolute character preceded him, and he was persona non grata in respectable English drawing rooms; that cut off the usual way titled ne’er-do-wells get rich—by marrying heiresses. So he set out to try a different social milieu, a first for him—the well-to-do artistic community. A comedown, I suppose, but beggars can’t be choosers.”

Her left hand lay palm down between them on the bench. She saw Christy start to touch her, then pull away.

“My reputation preceded me, too,” she continued self-consciously. “Geoffrey knew my father had just come into a great deal of money. So I was his goal. His target.”

“What happened?”

“He pursued me. It was—unreal, overwhelming. Unlike anything I’d ever experienced. He was this—
storm
, and I was standing in his path, so innocent—oh, Christy, you can’t imagine how innocent I was, underneath my extremely thin veneer of worldliness.” She tried to laugh. “Or maybe it wasn’t innocence, just stupidity. Well, in any case, he swept me off my feet, as the saying goes, and proposed marriage within two weeks of our first meeting.”

“Didn’t your father object?”

“He did, yes, when he thought of it. You must understand that he was being lionized in a very small way at the time, more because he was a novelty in England—and a soon-to-be-
rich
novelty—than because anyone truly believed he was a brilliant artist. So his mind was on other things.” She didn’t add “as usual”; that would’ve sounded too pathetic.

“Geoffrey’s charm can be devastating when he wants it to be, as I’m sure you know, and four years ago, when he was relatively healthy and energetic, it was at its deadliest. I found it almost impossible to resist him. He didn’t seduce me—not my body, anyway. He made me believe I was the most extraordinary woman alive, that he would die if he couldn’t have me, that we were made for each other. I can hardly understand it now, how I could have believed we were suited at all, two people so radically different from each other in every conceivable way—and yet I did believe it. He was like a fire, and his almost inhuman energy burned me up.”

“So you married him.”

“He insisted; he wouldn’t have it any other way. Now I know why, but at the time I was terribly flattered. I’d have countenanced an affair—in fact, I suggested it to him, any number of times.” She searched his face for a sign that she’d shocked him but couldn’t see one. “Are you scandalized?”

“Would you like me to be?”

“It doesn’t matter to me. I don’t have to defend myself.”

“Certainly not.”

“But I could point out that I was raised in a setting where such things were commonplace, almost more so than conventional marriages.”

“Yes, that’s true,” he said mildly, and she could see she wasn’t going to get a rise out of him.

“Anyway,” she resumed. “Geoffrey wouldn’t agree to an affair; he wanted an ‘honorable marriage,’ he said, and I believed him. So we eloped. We did it in Scotland—very romantic, I thought. I was in a kind of daze the whole time, as if it was all happening to someone else.”

“Did you love him?”

She took her time answering. “I would like to think that I did. I would like to think that I didn’t give myself to someone for whom I felt only infatuation and gratitude. Twenty is not so young, and I wasn’t a child. I knew him for less than a month, and during all that time he was dissembling. How could I have loved him? I think I behaved very, very stupidly. But since I’ve paid for it many times over, I forgave myself a long time ago.”

She put her head back against the trunk of the beech tree, feeling exhausted all of a sudden. All the exhilaration she’d felt in getting this story out was gone now; it sounded sordid in her ears, and she couldn’t remember anymore why she’d wanted Christy to hear it. “Do you want to know the rest?” she asked in a flat voice. “I can tell you, it doesn’t get any better.”

“Only if you want to tell me.”

For some reason, that irritated her. She thought of saying,
Why don’t you hold my hand? You held Sophie’s hand—why not mine? Aren’t I a suffering parishioner, too?
An ignoble sentiment, and petty in the extreme, yet she couldn’t shake the childish wish that he would try to comfort her in some way besides listening to her.

“I’ll speed things along,” she said crisply. “When we returned to London a week after the wedding, I found out my father had died. I’d missed his funeral because they couldn’t find me.”

“Anne.”

That one word brought tears into her throat. She swallowed them down, appalled—she
never
cried. “It was a freak accident,” she rushed on, “absolutely absurd, the sort of nonsensical occurrence he’d have relished—in the abstract. He was walking past a block of flats in the Bayswater Road at six o’clock in the evening, heading for the public house on the corner. Four stories up, a woman threw a flowerpot at her husband, who happened to be standing in front of the window.”

Christy bowed his head and said, “Oh, God.”

“It’s funny, isn’t it? Geoffrey thought so, until they told him he hadn’t married an heiress after all. My father hadn’t made any legal provision for me yet—didn’t have time—so I was left without a penny. Everything went to the closest male relative, a great-nephew who lives in Canada. His name is Mordecai.”

Her hands in her lap came unclasped; she closed her eyes out of fatigue. It took an effort to finish the story. “Needless to say, the honeymoon was over. Geoffrey got drunk one night and told me the truth: he didn’t love me, he’d married me for my money, and he was leaving me because I didn’t have any. I didn’t see him again for two years.” She stood up. “Christy, I can’t talk anymore.”

After a moment of surprised silence, he said, “All right.”

“No, no, you’re supposed to argue with me! You’re supposed to find the story of my life so riveting that you can’t bear to wait for the thrilling conclusion.”

He stood up more slowly, and for the first time she saw how weary he was, too. “I do want to hear the thrilling conclusion,” he said, and the echo of her silly words in his quiet voice made her feel childish and petulant.

“It’s late,” she said somberly. “I’ve kept you too long. You must be very tired.”

“It doesn’t matter.”

Her shawl slipped out of her hands as she was about to put it on. Christy bent and picked it up, brushing away a dead oak leaf that caught on the fringe. She turned slightly when he moved to help her with the shawl, and for a second his arm lay lightly across her shoulders. She came up to his chin, she noticed absently. When he moved away from her—sharply, too quickly—he took his body’s warmth with him. For the second time that night she felt abandoned.

“Let me walk home with you, Anne.”

“No. Thank you. It’s not necessary.”

“It’s very late, you shouldn’t be out by yourself.”

“Nothing will happen to me. Anyway, everyone’s asleep but us.”

“I don’t like you going home alone this late.”

They argued for a little longer, but she wouldn’t give in. “I’ve imposed on you long enough tonight, Christy. I don’t even know why I told you all that.”

“I’m glad you told me. Do you regret it?”

“What I regret is my own selfishness. You were the one who needed a friendly ear tonight, and for some reason I decided to burden you even more with my problems.”

“You haven’t burdened me, you know that.”

“Ah, but that’s your attitude to everyone, all of us sheep in your flock, Reverend Morrell. You ought to guard yourself better. We’re heavy, and we’ll take advantage of you. If you’re not careful, we’ll bear you down to the ground.” She said it as a joke, but she could see the simple truth in it as soon as it was out. Christy would bear anything that was asked of him, and he would always think of himself last.

“I’ve been no help to you at all,” he protested. Before she could argue, he said, “I’ll keep the promise I made to you before, Anne, but I’m not easy with it. If you ever truly needed help, spiritual guidance of any kind, even the simplest counsel, I’m afraid that—under the circumstances—I’m the last man who could give it to you.”

“Or the first,” she shot back. The words “under the circumstances” caught her up, seemed to vibrate in the air between them. She wanted to explore “the circumstances,” she realized, and immediately felt guilty. “Don’t distress yourself. As it happens, I’m the last
woman
who will ever require spiritual guidance, from you or anyone else. So you have nothing to reproach yourself with. Now, good night. I won’t keep you standing here another minute. Thanks for your patience with me.”

“Anne—”

“And your
friendship
.” She was talking too fast, saying these odd, brisk-sounding things out of a fear that he would reconsider the arrangement they’d agreed upon and abandon her for real and for good. She backed away from him before he could frame a reply, hurrying toward the gate. “Will I see you again next Friday?” Even in her own ears, her voice sounded ludicrously unconcerned, just as if everything didn’t depend on his answer.

He kept her waiting, her hand poised on the iron latch of the gate, for an eternity. At last he said, “Yes,” just as the clock on the church tower began to strike midnight. Under the deep, pealing tones, he didn’t hear her whisper fervently,
“Thank God.”

XI

C
HRISTY FLEXED HIS
stiff shoulders, rubbed his tired eyes, and checked off another chore on his list: “Advent sermon.” That still left “Curtis baptism; dean’s visit—tell Ludd; see Weedies; thank Capt. C.; deal with Nineways.” And the list didn’t even include tutoring the Wooten boys in an hour, and after that, supervising the tricky negotiations he’d planned between Sophie Deene and her uncle, Mayor Vanstone, under the guise of a friendly dinner at the vicarage. Sophie was her father’s sole heir, but she wouldn’t attain her majority for nine months. Eustace wanted control of Guelder mine in the interim, and Sophie was just as determined to keep it for herself. Christy’s job would be to work out a compromise.

In the hour between now and the Wootens’ arrival, he could write a note to Captain Carnock, expressing appreciation for his generous offer of his own farm laborers next fall during the glebe harvest. Or he could think up a tactful way to handle Warden Nineways’ latest lunatic suggestion, that churchgoers caught sleeping during service be required to recite the compline afterward to as many parishioners as cared to stay and hear it. Or he could consult with his housekeeper on meals and accommodations for the rural dean, who was paying a two-day visit to the parish next week. But instead of tackling any of those tasks, he got up from his desk and wandered over to the window that looked out on the rainswept churchyard.

Anne had a third-floor sitting room at Lynton Hall. She liked to write letters or read there and look out the windows at the trees and fields, the distant village. She might be there now, feeling as melancholy as he, watching slow raindrops slide down the steamy glass. She could see the spire of the church from her window, she’d once told him. She might be looking at it now through the November mist. She might be thinking of him.

He’d given up trying not to think of her. There were ways in which he was a strong man, but that kind of willpower was beyond him. Sometimes he thought that if he had just held firm to his decision not to see her anymore, he might have gotten over her by now—at least enough to function normally again. Enough to concentrate for ten consecutive minutes without thinking about her. But then again, maybe not.

He loved her. She was married to his friend, and it didn’t matter at all. He had meditated and prayed for hours, and nothing had changed. He loved her.

Where was God’s will in this calamity? Was it a test? What could the purpose be except to make him miserable? What would his father have done in this situation?

That was the most useless question of all, because it was impossible, inconceivable that his father would have gotten himself into this predicament in the first place. Christy hadn’t asked for it, God knew, but here he was anyway, all alone, with no friend or mentor to confide in. For once he was making up the rules as he went along, not following in his father’s saintly, time-tested footsteps.

He thought of the night he’d finally realized it was hopeless, that there was no use fighting any longer, or calling what he felt for Anne something more antiseptic and permissible—admiration, for example, or affection. It had happened on the night of the harvest home. She’d worn a blue gown with a crimson scarf tied around the waist. Gold rings in her ears and a jet medallion at her breast. She’d served ale from a stone jug to the laborer-guests herself and passed platters of food and baskets of bread, trifles, and fruit and cream-topped confections. Her hair had been neat and tidy, confined by combs at the start of the evening—but by the end it was free, and her face was lightly sheened with perspiration, and her rich, low laughter had grown easy to provoke. She’d looked like a well-bred gypsy to him; if there had been a bonfire in the courtyard and she’d danced around it, he wouldn’t have batted an eye.

Until that precise moment, his feelings for her had been—relative to what they were now—innocent, if only because they’d been so confused. But that night she had shone too brightly, he couldn’t blind himself any longer to what had been before his eyes all along. He loved her, and he wanted her. When she had asked him to stay longer, just the two of them, alone in her house—he ran away. He had no choice.

Had it been a mistake to tell her the truth? At the time, it had seemed the honorable thing to do—but what good had it done? No sooner had he confessed that he cared for her than he’d let her talk him out of his high-minded resolution to stop seeing her. The problem was his, not hers, he told himself, and besides, he still had a responsibility to her as her minister.

How she would laugh at that! Laugh harder if she knew he believed her soul was any of his business. But for him, it would be a sin to abandon her completely because his humanity had gotten in the way of his clerical duties. And that was the truth—not a handy excuse to keep seeing her. He was sure of that, because he knew exactly how painful it was to be with her.

For Anne’s part, he knew she would keep her word. She called herself an agnostic, but her honor was sacred to her; and in addition, she had no temptation to be anything but honorable.

No temptation? None at all? That wasn’t quite the truth. She was not completely indifferent to him. And that was at once the sweetest and the most dangerous aspect of the whole affair. He couldn’t let himself dwell on that forbidden delight, because behind that door lurked the devil at work. That was brazen seduction.

He rested his forehead against the cold windowpane and prayed for strength.

Presently he heard footsteps in the corridor. Five o’clock already? But it wasn’t the Wooten boys who crowded into his study a moment later. It was William Holyoake.

“Vicar, thank God you’re here.” Rain sluiced off the hat in his hand and puddled around his boots where he stood. His homely face, red from the cold, looked pinched and worried.

“What is it?” Christy asked anxiously. “Is something wrong at the Hall?”

“Aye.”

“Is it Anne?”

“No, she’s all right. She’s at Vanstone’s havin’ tea wi’ the ladies.”

“What, then?”

“Look here.” He reached inside his coat and withdrew a folded envelope. “A sojer from the regiment at Yelverton brought it just now. ’Tis from the War Office. I know what it says, for the sojer told me. His lordship’s dead.”

***

Christy waited under a black umbrella at the edge of the green, forty feet from the front gate of the mayor’s handsome, two-story Tudor house. He and Holyoake had agreed that Anne ought not to be told about Geoffrey immediately—not at Honoria Vanstone’s tea party. So William’s job was to tell her there was trouble and get her out of the house; later, at the rectory, it would be Christy’s job to tell her the truth.

The rain had emptied the street and shuttered the windows of the houses. John Swan’s smithy smoked in the distance, and the door to the George and Dragon stood ajar, as usual; otherwise, even the shops looked abandoned. What would the villagers’ reaction be, Christy wondered, when they learned their new lord was gone, barely seven months after they’d lost the old one? A troubled time was coming, and they would look to him for stability.

He looked up and saw Anne hurrying through the Vanstones’ gate, Holyoake behind her. Christy stepped out from under the dripping trees. She stopped dead when she saw him, said something sharp to William. The bailiff shook his head, miserable. She started off again, ignoring the arm he held out to her. She wore her hooded cape over a dark dress; she’d come on foot, William had told him, for at three o’clock the day had been fair. Tall and slim, and graceful even dodging the puddles in her half-boots, she made Christy’s heart hurt, and not with ministerial compassion. God help him, he loved her, and at this moment his mind could hold only one fact: she was free.

He met her in the middle of the street.

“Christy, what’s happened? William won’t tell me!”

He reached for her elbow. “Let’s go to the vicarage; I’ll tell you there.”

“No.” Dread stiffened her facial features. She stepped back. “Tell me now.”

He and Holyoake eyed each other uneasily. William could have excused himself now, and Christy wouldn’t have blamed him. But the bailiff didn’t desert him; he stood stolid and foursquare in the street, ready to do his duty.

But the hard job was Christy’s, as usual. As it should be. He girded himself for it. “It’s bad news. A letter’s come from the Secretary of War.”

“Geoffrey.” She put her fist over her mouth.

He nodded. “It happened on the fourteenth of this month. There was a violent storm off Balaklava while he was on a hospital ship in the harbor. Thirty vessels went down. He was lost.”

Tears flooded her eyes. She covered her face with her hands. Christy and Holyoake groped for their handkerchiefs and held them, clumsy, halfway between themselves and her. They exchanged grim looks—masculine comfort for each other—while Anne stood still and quiet, her hood and her white fingers hiding her face. A gust of wind blew a cold slice of rain sideways, and she tottered.

Christy said, “Come,” and took hold of her arm. “Come home with me, Anne. There’s a fire there. We can get warm.” She looked at him. He nodded, holding her misty, unanchored gaze. “Let’s go home,” he repeated.

Her mouth made the word “home.” She nodded back.

The two men fell in on either side of her, both grasping the stem of Christy’s umbrella to shield her, and set off across the wet village green for home.

***

“Here, drink this, Anne.”

She took the cup and saucer from him and put them on her lap, transferring her dry-eyed and apparently fascinated gaze from the flames crackling in the fireplace grate to the milky-brown liquid in the teacup.

“Drink it,” he reminded her.

She took a sip, grimaced, and closed her eyes. “I think I’ve drunk more tea in the last six months than in all the rest of my life.”

Christy smiled, encouraged by the remark—by the fact that she was talking at all—and sat down in the chair next to hers. He rested his elbows on his knees and clasped his hands together, frowning at his shoes and searching for the right words. “Anne,” he began slowly, “the death of someone we’ve loved, especially when it comes unexpectedly, often seems arbitrary, even cruel if we—”

“Don’t.” She didn’t open her eyes; her mouth made a straight, thin line. “Christy, for God’s sake.”

“You don’t want to talk about it? All right, then we—”

“I don’t want your Christian comfort. If Geoffrey’s death strikes me as arbitrary and cruel, don’t worry about me blaming God for it because I don’t believe in God. And don’t you
dare
tell me he’s in a better place.”

He nodded agreeably. She couldn’t see the nod, because she wouldn’t open her eyes, so he said, “Very well, no Christian comfort. Let’s talk about how you are.”

“How do you think I am?”

“Why don’t you tell me?”

“I’d really rather not.”

He nodded again, not as agreeably. He picked up the poker and banged at the charred logs, sending a cloud of sparks up the chimney.

Anne put her undrunk tea on the table beside her chair. “I’m sorry. It’s just that I don’t know what I feel, except numb.”

“That’s natural.”

“I suppose.”

“You can’t believe it yet. I can’t either. It’s hard to grieve when it’s not real to you.” She didn’t answer. “If you like, I’ll take care of all the arrangements for the memorial service.”

“Memorial service,” she said dully. She dropped her head into her hand. “Do whatever you like, I don’t care.”

He waited a moment before saying, “You might want to think about what the village needs. What the people have a right to expect. They’ve lost their squire again; they’re bound to feel anxious, uprooted, worried about the future.”

“Yes, yes, all right. But Geoffrey wasn’t a good squire—how could they miss him?”

“It’s the continuity that’s been upset. Geoffrey wasn’t a conscientious leader, it’s true. Neither was Edward. But at least their presence provided some sense of stability, and in the absence of anything else, sometimes that’s all that holds a community together.”

“You hold it together.” He sighed, and she said quickly, “Do whatever you like, Christy, give Geoffrey the biggest funeral they’ve ever seen—I tell you I don’t care. I can’t stay here any longer.”

At first he thought she meant here, in this room. When the truth struck him, he felt a coldness seeping through the pores of his skin. “What do you mean?” he said carefully. “Where will you go?”

She shook her head, shrugged, shook her head again.

“This is your home now.”

“Of course it’s not. I’ve never been accepted here.”

“That’s not true. You’re—”

“There’s a cousin somewhere, Sebastian Verlaine. He’ll inherit the title. The estate too, I suppose.” She got up from her chair with quick, jerky movements and went closer to the fire. He watched her press her fingertips to the edge of the mantel in random, repetitive patterns, staring straight ahead at nothing. Her face in profile looked sharp against the dark wood, her nostrils thin and pinched. While he watched, her cheeks slowly bloomed with hot color; she opened her mouth to breathe quietly—so he wouldn’t know she was crying. Then she turned her head away.

He stood up and, after an indecisive second, went to her side. He laid his hand on her back, between her shoulder blades. “Anne—”

“I don’t—I don’t want—”

“I know. No Christian comfort.” He moved his hand to her far shoulder and squeezed it softly. She was shaking, swallowing repeatedly to keep back the tears. “It’s all right,” he whispered—the most useless, unwarranted piece of consolation he knew. “It’s all right, Anne. It’s all right.”

Shuddering, she turned and came into his arms, and let him go on saying it.

***

28 November

A letter from Geoffrey came today. He wrote it on board the hospital ship in the Black Sea. The date is 10 November—four days before the storm that killed him. He writes of his brave exploits in the battle at Inkerman, where he was wounded in the thigh and the shoulder. They might decorate him for valor, he says.

29 November

Dreamt of Ravenna last night. I was a child again, and my mother was teaching me to swim. Woke up sobbing.