Silent In The Grave. Deanna Raybourn

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СКАЧАТЬ we were children together in Sussex. Our fathers’ estates had marched together, and Edward and his young cousin, Simon, had often joined in our games and theatricals and expeditions about the countryside. Like all of my sisters, I had come out into society, but I alone had held myself aloof from the few timid advances that had come my way. I suppose, having been raised on stories of knightly adventures and chivalric endeavors, I had been waiting for my very own storybook hero. But it seemed rather heroic when Edward left off of squiring some lissome beauty about the dance floor and came to sip punch with me where I sat by the potted palms. I was not like the other girls; I had no frivolous conversation or pretty tricks to win suitors. I had forthrightness and plainspoken manners. I had a good mind and a sharp tongue, and I was cruel enough to use them as weapons to keep the cads and rogues at bay. As for the young men I might have liked to partner me, I was far better at repelling than attracting. I did not swoon or carry a vinaigrette or turn squeamish at the mention of spiders. Father had raised us to scorn such feminine deceptions. Like my brothers, I wanted to talk about good books and urgent politics, new ideas and foreign places. But the young men I met did not like that. They wanted pretty dolls with silvery giggles and empty heads.

      All except Edward. He always seemed perfectly content to sit with me, or even dance with me at considerable risk to his toes. We talked for hours of things other young men would never discuss. People began to talk, linking our names in gossip, and finally, during one particularly painful waltz, Edward smiled down at me and asked me to marry him.

      I thought about it for a week. I considered hard whether or not I even wanted to marry. Father said little, but pointed me to the shelf in his library where he housed John Stuart Mill, Mary Wollstonecraft and even, shockingly, some Annie Besant. It was highly discouraging. There were few advantages to marriage for a woman. But there were fewer advantages to spinsterhood. I had already grown tired of the careful whispers behind the fans and the avid eyes that followed me. I was certain that they were saying that I was not the beauty my sisters were, that I would not marry as well as they. Those whispers and glances would follow me the rest of my life if I did not marry, speculating on what frightfulness of mine had driven away any potential suitors. I could not bear that. I was already conscious of how much we were talked about, of how amusing we were to society and how closely to the pale of respectability we walked. Only Father’s close association with the queen and the very ancientness of our lineage preserved us from becoming a complete joke. What I longed for most was normalcy—a quiet, average marriage in an unremarkable home where I could raise my perfectly normal children. That notion was more seductive to me than diamonds. And as a married woman I could travel more easily, have male friends without exciting suspicion, have my own home away from a family that was as maddening as they were delightful. A bit of quiet space to call my own, that is what marriage represented to me.

      So I accepted Edward on a chilly night early in spring. Father gave his blessing with the proviso that I spend the summer accompanying Aunt Cressida on her travels. It was the only thing he asked of me, and Edward agreed readily enough. He spent the summer with friends in Sussex while I toured the Lake District with a cranky old woman and her assorted cats. Edward and I were married that December in London. I think I was a happy bride. All I could ever remember afterward were the terrible nerves. I dropped things—my bouquet, the pen for the register—and as I came out of the church, I heard a rooster crow, very bad luck for a bride on her wedding day. For a moment I wondered if it was indeed an omen. But then I looked up into Edward’s smiling face and I realized how foolish I was. Edward was my friend, my childhood companion. He was no stranger to me. How could I fear marriage to him?

      In the end, there was nothing to fear. No great tragedies. Just the small troubles, the little tragedies that can dull a marriage and cause it to fray. We had no child, Edward’s health began to fail, we began to follow our own pursuits and spent less and less time together. Edward was pernickety, something I had noted before, but never considered in the context of our life together. It meant that things must be just so for him to be happy. The decoration of the house, the cut of my clothes, the folding of the towels, the laying of the table. I laughed at first and tried to jolly him out of it, but he grew stubborn, and after a while I realized it was easier to let him have his way. The house was kept the way he liked it, my clothes were ordered from his dead mother’s dressmaker, in colours he favored that I knew suited me not at all. But it made him happy, and I cared so little. It was easy to convince myself that these things did not matter. We had been married a few years by the time I caught a glimpse of myself in the glass and realized I did not know my own reflection. I was losing myself a bit at a time, and I did not know how to get it back. My only refuge was my study, where I kept my favorite books and furniture discarded from my father’s homes. In that room I wore an old dressing gown that Edward detested. He learned not to come there, and I learned to lock myself in when I needed to feel like Julia March again, if only for a little while. It was my little den, my nest of comforts for when I felt unruly and savage and found myself itching to rebel against the normality I had thought I wanted. I went there and calmed myself and found peace in letting him have his way yet again. I was always afraid that if I stood my ground, if I argued for scarlet gowns or purple velvet draperies, I would slip too far down the path toward the very thing I was trying to avoid. There was too much colour in being a March, and Edward, with my willing assistance, did all that he could to paint my life beige.

      I think, too, that perhaps I gave way so often because I knew that he would not live long. There was always a sense of waiting in our house, watching for the final attack, for a worsening of his symptoms, for the time when the doctor must be called and preparations made. It had made for an uneasy life, and I dreaded the idea that I should have to live it all again with Simon. True, he was not my husband, but I did love him dearly, like another brother, and to know that his time would be so short was almost more than I could bear. A year at most, the doctor had said. And so little to be done for him in the meanwhile.

      But what of afterward? I wondered as I sat in my study, contemplating my mourning. What would become of me then? The life I had fashioned for myself as Edward’s wife seemed intolerably small now. And in spite of its size, Grey House suffocated me. The air was dead as a tomb, and the rooms full of memories that I did not wish to preserve. How then to break free of them?

      The Ghoul could be persuaded to leave in search of more intimately connected bereavements. Val could simply be told to take rooms for himself or return to Father’s. Grey House would be empty, those enormous rooms echoing coldly. It was big, far too big for a childless widow. I could sell it and purchase a much smaller house, something still near to the park, but on a quieter street. Something elegant and discreet, with a tiny staff, perhaps only Aquinas and Morag, with Cook and a pair of maids and Diggory, the coachman. The battalion of maids that it took to run Grey House could be gotten new places. The footmen were a useless extravagance, they too could be given good characters and let go.

      The more I considered the idea, the more excited I became. I found myself walking the rooms of Grey House mentally cataloging what pieces I would take with me and which I would send to the auction house, or perhaps sell with the house itself. There was little I wanted. Almost every painting or piece of furniture carried Edward’s stamp. I wanted to start afresh, with new things I had chosen for myself. It would take a while to settle matters, I realized. Grey House had so many rooms, all fitted with costly furnishings. To arrange for it all to be sold and to fit out a new house could take months. Months I might spend more profitably abroad, I decided. I could shop for new pieces in Paris and Italy, taking a leisurely tour of the Continent as I went. I had been to Paris before, but never beyond, and the notion of Europe tantalized me. So many shops and museums, so much culture and beauty. Opera, paintings, books, concerts, the ideas spun me around and dizzied me. I could take as long as I liked. And to make matters simpler, my brothers Ly and Plum were still traveling in Italy, having discovered that two could live as cheaply there as one could in London. They were artists, one a poet and composer, the other a painter. They would provide me with companionship, sympathy, laughter. And when I needed to be alone, I could simply move on—Perugia, Rome, Capri, Florence—the possibilities were endless. I need not even plan my return, but simply take things as they came, wandering idly from city to city as my fancy took СКАЧАТЬ