I have never felt so well, and I have you to thank, my dear Eliza—from Cornwall you have waved your fairy wand & granted me my dearest wish! For my fiancé (what thrill to write those two words—my fiancé!) may not be what you imagine. Though in most everything he is of the highest order—handsome, clever & good—in matters of finance, he is quite a poor man! (And now you will begin to intuit just why I suspect you of the gift of prophecy—) He is just as the match you invented for me in ‘The Changeling’! How did you know, dearest, that I would have my head turned by such a one!
Poor Mamma is in a state of some shock (though improved somewhat by now), indeed, she barely spoke to me for some days after I informed her of my engagement. She, of course, had her heart set on a greater match & will not see that I care not one whit for money or title. Those are her desires for me, & while I confess I once shared them, I do so no longer—how can I when my Prince has come for me and unlatched the door to my golden cage?
I ache to see you again, Eliza, & to share with you my joy. I have missed you tremendously and can hardly bear to think that once I arrive in England there will be yet another week to wait before we’re together. I will post this letter as soon as we dock in Liverpool: would that I were accompanying it directly to Blackhurst, rather than languishing in the dreary company of Mamma’s family!
I remain yours, lovingly now & evermore, cousin Rose
If she were honest, Adeline blamed herself. Had she not, after all, been present with Rose at each glittering event during their visit to New York? Had she not appointed herself chaperone at the ball given by Mr and Mrs Irving in their grand house on Fifth Avenue? Worse still, had she not given Rose a nod of encouragement when the dashing young man with dark hair and full lips made his approach and requested the pleasure of a dance?
‘Your daughter is a beauty,’ Mrs Frank Hastings had said, leaning over to whisper in Adeline’s ear as the handsome couple took to the floor. ‘Fairest of them all tonight.’
Adeline had shifted—yes, proudly—on her seat. (Was that the moment of her undoing? Had the Lord noted her hubris?) ‘Beauty equalled by her purity of heart.’
‘And Nathaniel Walker is a handsome man indeed.’
Nathaniel Walker. It was the first time she’d heard his name. ‘Walker,’ she said thoughtfully: the name had a solid ring to it, surely she’d heard tell of a family called Walker who’d made their fortune in oil? New money, but times were changing, there was no longer any shame in a match of title with treasure. ‘Who are his people?’
Did Adeline imagine the hint of barely concealed glee that briefly animated Mrs Hastings’s bland features? ‘Oh, no one of consequence.’ She raised one bald eyebrow. ‘An artist, you know, befriended, most ludicrously, by one of the younger Irving boys.’
Adeline’s smile had grown stale around the edges but still she held it. All was not yet lost, painting was a perfectly noble hobby after all . . .
‘Rumour has it,’ came Mrs Hastings’s crushing blow, ‘the Irving chappie met him on the street! Son of a pair of immigrants, Poles at that. Walker may be what he calls himself, but I doubt that’s what was written on the immigration papers. I hear tell he makes sketches for a living!’
‘Oil portraits?’
‘Oh, nothing so grand as that. Scratchy charcoal things from what I understand.’ She sucked in one cheek in an attempt to swallow her glee. ‘Quite a rise indeed. Parents are Catholics, father worked on the wharves.’
Adeline fought the urge to scream as Mrs Hastings leaned back against her gilt chair, face pinched at the edges by one of Schadenfreude’s smiles. ‘No harm in a young girl dancing with a handsome man, though, is there?’
A smooth smile to mask her panic. ‘No harm at all,’ said Adeline.
But how could she believe it when her mind had already tossed up the memory of a young girl standing atop a Cornish cliff, eyes wide and heart open as she looked upon a handsome man who appeared to promise so much? Oh, there was harm indeed for a young lady flattered by the brief attentions of a handsome man.
The week passed, and that was the best that could be said of it. Night after night, Adeline paraded Rose before an audience of suitable young gentlemen. She waited and she hoped, longing to see a spark of interest brighten her daughter’s face. But each night, disappointment. Rose had eyes only for Nathaniel, and he, it seemed, for her. Like one in the grip of dangerous hysteria, Rose was trapped and unreachable. Adeline had to fight the urge to slap her cheeks, cheeks that glowed more fervently than a delicate young woman’s cheeks had any right to.
Adeline, too, was haunted by Nathaniel Walker’s face. At each dinner, dance or reading they attended she would scan the room, seeking him out. Fear had created a template in her mind and all other faces were blurred: only his features clear. She began to see him even when he wasn’t there. She had dreams of wharves and boats and poor families. Sometimes the dreams took place in Yorkshire, and her own parents played the part of Nathaniel’s family. Oh, her poor addled brain; to think that she could be brought to this.
Then one evening the worst finally happened. They had been at a ball and the entire carriage ride home Rose was very quiet. The particular type of quiet which presages a firming of heart, a clearing of view. Like someone nursing a secret, keeping it close for a time before unleashing it to do its worst.
The horrid moment came when Rose was dressing for bed.
‘Mamma,’ she said, as she brushed her hair, ‘there’s something I wish to tell you.’ Then the words, the dreaded words. Affection . . . fate . . . forever . . .
‘You are young,’ Adeline said quickly, cutting Rose off. ‘It is understandable that you should confuse friendship with affection of another kind.’
‘It isn’t friendship alone that I feel, Mamma.’
Heat rose beneath Adeline’s skin. ‘It would be a disaster. He brings nothing—’
‘He brings himself and that’s all I need.’
Her insistence, her infuriating confidence. ‘Evidence of your naivety, my Rose, and your youth.’
‘I am not too young to know my mind, Mamma. I am eighteen now. Did you not bring me to New York so that I might meet My Fate?’
Adeline’s voice was thin. ‘This man is not your Fate.’
‘How do you know that?’
‘I am your mother.’ How feeble it sounded. ‘You are beautiful, from an important family, and yet you would settle for so little?’
Rose sighed softly, in a way that seemed to signal a close to the conversation. ‘I love him, Mamma.’
Adeline closed her eyes. Youth! What chance had the most reasonable arguments against the arrogant power of those three words? That her daughter, her precious prize, should utter them so easily, and about such a one as he!
‘And he loves me, Mamma, he told me so.’
Adeline’s heart tightened with fear. Darling girl, blinded by foolish thoughts of love. How to tell her that the hearts of men were not so easily won. If won, rarely kept.
‘You’ll see,’ Rose said. ‘I shall live happily ever after, just like in Eliza’s story. She wrote this, you know, almost as if she knew what would happen.’
Eliza! Adeline seethed. Even here, at this distance, the girl continued her menace. Her influence extended across the oceans, her ill whisperings sabotaged Rose’s future, goaded her into making the biggest mistake of her life.
Adeline pressed her lips together tightly. She hadn’t overseen Rose’s recovery from countless ailments and illnesses in order to watch her throw herself away on a poor marriage. ‘You must break it off. He will understand. He must have known it would never be allowed.’
‘We are engaged, Mamma. He has asked and I have accepted him.’
‘Break it off.’
‘I will not.’
Adeline felt her back against the wall. ‘You will be shunned from society, unwelcome in your father’s home.’
‘Then I will stay here where I am welcome. In Nathaniel’s home.’
How had it come to this? Her Rose, saying such things. Things she must have known would break her mamma’s heart. Adeline’s head was spinning, she needed to lie down.
‘I’m sorry, Mamma,’ Rose said quietly, ‘but I won’t change my mind, I can’t. Don’t ask me to.’
They didn’t speak for days after, excepting, of course, such banal social pleasantries as would have been unthinkable for either of them to ignore. Rose thought Adeline was sulking, but she was not. She was deep in thought. Adeline had always been able to bend passion towards logic.
The current equation was impossible, thus some factor must be changed. If it wasn’t going to be Rose’s mind, it would have to be the fiancé himself. He must become a man deserving of her daughter’s hand, the sort of man people spoke about with awe and, yes, with envy. And Adeline had a feeling she knew just how such a change might be effected.
In each man’s heart there lies a hole. A dark abyss of need, the filling of which takes precedence over all else. Adeline suspected that Nathaniel Walker’s hole was pride, the most dangerous pride, that of the poor man. A hunger to prove himself, to rise above his birth and make of himself a better man than his father. Even without the biography so greedily supplied by Mrs Hastings, the more Adeline saw of Nathaniel Walker the more she knew this to be true. She could see it in the way he walked, the careful shine of his shoes, the keenness of his smile and the volume of his laugh. These were the traits of a man who had come from little and glimpsed the gleaming world swirling far above his own. A man whose finery was hung upon a poor man’s skin.
Adeline knew his weakness well, for it was her own. She also knew exactly what she had to do. She must ensure that he received every advantage; she must become his greatest champion, promote his art to the best in society, ensure that his name became synonymous with portraiture of the elite. With her ringing endorsement, with his good looks and charm, not to mention Rose for a wife, he couldn’t fail to impress.
And Adeline would make sure that he never forgot who was responsible for his good fortune.
Eliza dropped the letter beside her on the bed. Rose was engaged, was going to be married. The news shouldn’t have come as such a surprise. Rose had spoken often of her hopes for the future, her desire for a husband and family, a grand house and a carriage of her own. And yet Eliza felt odd.
She opened her new notebook and ran her fingers lightly over the first page, blistered by raindrops. She drew a line with her pencil, watched absently as it switched from dark to light according to whether its base was damp or dry. She began a story, scribbled and scratched out for a time before pushing the book aside.
Finally, Eliza leaned back against her pillow. There was no denying it, she felt unusual: something sat deep within her stomach, round and heavy, sharp and bitter. She wondered whether she had taken ill. Perhaps it was the rain? Mary had often warned against staying outdoors too long.
Eliza turned her head to look at the wall, at nothing. Rose, her cousin, hers to entertain, willing co-conspirator, was to be married. With whom would Eliza share the hidden garden? Her stories? Her life? How was it that a future so vividly imagined—years stretching ahead, filled with travel and adventure and writing—could prove so suddenly, so emphatically, a chimera?
Her gaze slipped sideways to rest on the cold glass of the mirror. Eliza didn’t often glance at the looking glass and in the time that had elapsed since last she met her echo, something had gone missing. She sat up and moved closer. Appraised herself.
Realisation came fully formed. She knew just what it was she’d lost. This reflection belonged to an adult, there was no place in its angles for Sammy’s face to hide. He was gone.
And now Rose was going too. Who was this man who had stolen her dearest friend in the blink of an eyelid?
Eliza could not have felt so ill had she swallowed one of the Christmas decorations Mary made, one of the oranges spiked with cloves.
Envy, that’s what this lump was called. She envied the man who had made Rose well, who had done so easily what Eliza sought to do, who had caused her cousin’s affections to shift so swiftly and completely. Envy. Eliza whispered the sharp word and felt its poisoned barbs prick the inside of her mouth.
She turned away from the mirror and closed her eyes, willed herself to forget the letter and its awful news. She didn’t want to feel envious, to harbour this barbed lump. For Eliza knew from her fairytales the fate awaiting wicked sisters bewitched by envy.
35
The Blackhurst Hotel, 2005
Julia’s apartment was at the very top of the house, accessed via an incredibly narrow set of stairs at the end of the second floor hallway. When Cassandra left her room the sun had already begun to melt into the horizon, and the hall was now almost completely dark. She knocked and waited, tightening her grip on the neck of the bottle of wine she’d brought with her. A last-minute decision as she’d walked home with Christian through the village.
The door opened and Julia was there, wrapped in a shiny pink kimono. ‘Come, come,’ she said, gesturing for Cassandra to follow as she swept across the room. ‘I’m just titivating our dinner. Hope you like Italian!’
‘Love it,’ said Cassandra, hurrying behind.
What had once been a warren of tiny bedrooms housing an army of housemaids had been opened and reconfigured to create a large loft-style apartment. Dormer windows ran all the way along both sides and must have given incredible views across the estate during the day.
Cassandra stopped at the entrance to the kitchen. Every surface was covered with mixing bowls and measuring cups, tomato tins with their lids hanging off, gleaming pools of olive oil and lemon juice and other, mysterious ingredients. For want of somewhere to put it, she held out her offering.
‘Aren’t you a darling?’ Julia popped the cork, then plucked a lone goblet from the rack above the bench, gurgled wine into it from a theatrical height. She licked a drop of shiraz from her finger. ‘Personally, I never drink anything but gin,’ she said with a wink. ‘Keeps you youthful; it’s pure, you know.’ She handed the goblet of sinful red liquid to Cassandra and swept from the kitchen. ‘Now come on in and make yourself comfortable.’
She indicated an armchair in the centre of the room, and Cassandra sat down. Before her was a wooden chest, doubling as a coffee table, and at its centre sat a stack of old scrapbooks, each wearing a faded brown leather jacket.
A shot of excitement spread quickly through Cassandra’s body and her fingertips tingled with desire.
‘You sit and have a little flick through while I put the finishing touches to our dinner.’
Cassandra didn’t need to be told twice. She reached for the top scrapbook and ran her palm ever so lightly over its surface. The leather had lost all hint of its grain and was smooth and soft as velvet.
Inhaling her anticipation, Cassandra opened the cover and read, in a pretty and precise script: Rose Elizabeth Mountrachet Walker, 1909. She traced the words with a fingertip and felt the faint marks in the paper. Imagined the nibbed pen which had made them. Carefully, she turned the pages until she arrived at the first entry.
A new year. And one in which such tremendous events are promised. I have barely been able to concentrate since Dr Matthews arrived and gave me his verdict. I confess, the fainting spells of late had me gravely worried, and I was not the only one. I only needed glance at Mamma’s face to see anxiety writ large across her features. While Dr Matthews was examining me I lay still, eyes focused on the ceiling, forcing my mind away from fear by recalling the happiest moments of my life so far. My wedding day, of course; my trip to New York; the summer Eliza first came to Blackhurst . . . How bright such memories seem when the life they catalogue is threatened!
Afterwards, when Mamma and I sat side by side on the sofa awaiting Dr Matthews’s diagnosis, her hand reached for mine. It was cold. I glanced at her but she would not meet my eyes. It was then that I began to worry in earnest. Through all my childhood ailments, Mamma was the one to keep a positiv
e mind. I wondered why her confidence had now deserted her, what it was she had intuited that gave her cause for such concern. When Dr Matthews cleared his throat, I squeezed Mamma’s hand and waited. What he said, though, was more shocking than anything I could have dreamed.
‘You are with child. Two months gone, I’d say. God willing, you will deliver in August.’
Oh, but are there words to explain the joy those words provoked? After so long hoping, the terrible months of disappointment. A baby to love. An heir for Nathaniel, a grandchild for Mamma, a godchild for Eliza.
Cassandra’s eyes stung. To think that this baby whose conception Rose celebrated was Nell, this desperately wanted baby-in-waiting was Cassandra’s dear, displaced grandmother. Rose’s hopeful sentiments were especially moving, written as they were in ignorance of all that would come afterwards.
She flicked quickly through the journal pages, past snippets of lace and ribbon, brief notes reporting doctor’s visits, invitations to various dinners and dances around the county, until finally, in December 1909, she found what she was looking for.
She is here—I make this record a little later than expected. The past months have been more difficult than anticipated, and I have had little time or energy for writing, but all has been worth it. After so many months of hoping, long spells of illness and worry and confinement, I hold in my arms my darling child. Everything else fades away. She is perfect. Her skin so pale and creamy, her lips so pink and plump. Her eyes are a deep blue, but the doctor says that is always so and they may darken with time. Secretly I hope he is wrong. I wish for her the true Mountrachet colouring, like Father and Eliza: blue eyes and red hair. We have decided to name her Ivory. It is the colour of her skin and, as time will doubtless prove, her soul.