Phillip
came toward her and bowed modestly. “Hunting? Well, ma’m, I do love to ride,
but I’m afraid it’s all a little too chaotic for my nerves—the hounds and all,
the chase. It’s a fine sport for those with a thicker skin,” he laughed easily.
“However, I have done a bit of hunting in my own way already this morning.”
“Oh?”
“Is anyone by chance missing a
snake?”
Agnes’s eyes widened and she caught her breath.
“One found its way to my room and we had quite a bit of
sport between ourselves when I insisted that he remove himself from the
comfortable armchair that I needed to put on my boots.”
Agnes was white, her hand over her
mouth. “What happened? He didn’t bite you, did he?”
“Oh, no. I finally convinced him
that my laundry sack was a cozier place and in he went with just a little
assistance.”
“He is there now?”
“Oh, yes, quite safe and sound.
Looks like one of your black rat snakes if I had to guess—not dangerous, unless
you are a rat or a vole or some such thing.”
“Lord Phillip, I am so grateful. It
got into the house yesterday and I’ve been worried sick. You were very brave to
trap it.”
“Quite easy, really. I had a good
deal of practice in India.
The place swarms with snakes, so one has to get used to taking the upper hand
with them.”
“Well, then, after such an
adventure, I hope you would join me for some breakfast on the terrace,” Agnes
offered. She had barely taken a bite of her meal before Wilbur’s entrance, and
her plate was still full. Phillip smiled his consent, and Isaiah carried their
breakfast out to the terrace. Swiftly with a white napkin he wiped off the
water, twigs, and leaves the storm had deposited on the table and chairs.
Phillip held a chair and Agnes took
her place. She felt strangely self-conscious as she spread plum preserves over
her toast. What is wrong with me, she wondered. She added a spoon of sugar to
her tea, forgetting that she had already put one in. She was keenly aware that
the dark coral color she had chosen to wear that morning did not flatter her as
much as some others. She had not felt this prickly nervousness for years, and
she did not welcome it. After all, she was a mature woman in her fourth decade.
She had entertained a number of suitors and knew how to master her emotions,
whatever they might be.
However, none of those men had borne
any resemblance, in body or in manner, to the one sitting across from her now.
There had been the railroad tycoon twenty years her senior with a penchant for
singing off-key whenever a piano was played. There was the handsome but
exceptionally dull army captain from Virginia
who wanted her to move south with him to his family’s tobacco plantation. There
was the shy and thoughtful heir to a lumber fortune who kissed her once and, in
great confusion and embarrassment, fled to St. Louis. Then there was M. She no longer
thought of him even by his full name, because it pulled up in her mind his image,
complete and seeringly vivid, and she did not want to remember.
“I feel I must apologize not only
for the snake in your bedroom but also for my cousin,” Agnes began. “That was a
terribly rude display, but not exceptional for Wilbur.”
“Do you think he dislikes me, or
does he just hate God?” Phillip asked.
Agnes looked up, surprised by the
directness of the question. “Oh, I don’t know anyone he does like,” she
returned. “But God is certainly near the top of his list of villains. I can’t
say whether Wilbur hates Him or just finds the whole idea of a deity unbearably
silly, along with all us poor souls who believe in Him.”
“Well, if you enjoy doing any number
of things that God has forbidden, it’s essential to shove Him into the category
of the ridiculous. Then you can carry on quite freely. It’s a popular
practice.”
Phillip raised his coffee to his
nose, smelled it, then took a sip. He proceeded to do the same with his eggs.
“Do you always smell your food
before you eat it?” Agnes asked.
“Usually,” he replied. “If you don’t
smell it you only get half the benefit, don’t you think? The smell of eggs with
ham, of fresh coffee, well buttered toast, that’s a great part of the pleasure.
If you just tear ahead swallowing everything in front of you, well, it’s all
over too quickly.”
“You make a good point,” Agnes
conceded. “I will be careful to remember it.”
Phillip looked at her earnestly—just
a degree more than the way he looked at everyone—and saw that she was not
laughing. “Thank you. I’ve gotten rather used to being ridiculed for ideas like
that one.”
“Well, don’t let that concern you,”
Agnes reassured him. “You simply have a fresher outlook than most of us. It is
a terrible rudeness as well as an ignorance to laugh at an idea simply because
you are not used to it or you don’t understand it. People given to ridicule
rarely learn anything of importance.”
“Very true!” agreed Phillip, raising
his eyebrows and sniffing his toast. “Which explains why—I don’t know if you
agree—most people are quite unconscious of many ordinary truths that surround
them.” Phillip went on to explain how it does not occur to such people to
observe things and then base their conduct on those observations. Instead they
follow along in the stream of what everyone else is doing and talking about and
wind up with very little first-hand knowledge. Then, to reinforce this poverty,
they laugh off the practices of any friend engaged in objective investigation
and discount his conclusions. “However,” he drank off some coffee, “if those
same investigations and conclusions appeared in print these same people would
be declaring them brave and brilliant and would spend at least a week trying to
apply them in their own lives.”
Agnes laughed. “You are quite the
student of human nature, Lord Phillip.”
“People are endlessly fascinating,
and you will never run out of depths to plumb no matter how long you study
them.”
Agnes poured herself more tea and
wondered how many observations he was making about her. “I understand you have
returned from India
very recently,” she resumed. He did not reply, but watched a sparrow hop
forward to grab a crumb of fallen bread. “How did it strike you?”
“India?” Phillip held his fork and
knife still and looked at his plate. “That question could require a very large
answer. Most people don’t have room for it. What size answer would you like?”
he asked, looking at her.
Agnes paused as well. What a
question, she thought. Who is this man? Is he rude or something else
altogether? He demanded honesty from the very start. He did not allow a person
the usual slow ascent; no, one immediately faced a steep climb, searching for
footholds and making each step count.
“If need be, I can be free until
dinner,” she replied.
“Hah!” he laughed. “never have I
been so indulged. I would not keep you that long, however. I might run out of
things to describe by tea time.”
“Somehow I doubt that.”
Phillip glanced at her and saw again
that she was not laughing. The baying of dogs being freed to lead the hunt made
him snap his head around toward the stables, where the smartly dressed hunting
party launched their mounts across the wet field. They both watched until the
riders disappeared behind a gentle rise, the dogs’ cries dying in the distance.
“Hot,” he suddenly announced,
returning to his plate. “So colorful it hurt.” Then Phillip described to Agnes
the masses of dark-skinned, shirtless men, the gaggles of women in brilliant
saris, the marketplace’s bags of orange and yellow spices, the violently green
fields, the piercing blue sky. At times he longed for the refuge of a cool New England wood full of browns and muted greens, with soft
beds of pine needles underfoot rather than dirt baked to a rocky hardness. But
then the rain would come and they would all be standing in water up to their
ankles for weeks, and then he longed for sun and dry land and clean clothing.
“I understand that you went as a
missionary. What brought you back?” Agnes asked.
Phillip leaned back in his chair,
having finished his food, and stretched out one leg. Agnes could not help
noticing the outline of muscle beneath the gray pants. “There are two answers,”
he confided, dabbing off his moustache. “The one my father tells people and the
more honest one. With you, I somehow feel like starting with the latter.” He
looked at her keenly, and his eyes sparkled like a man’s do when he is about to
take a risk and embraces it.
“You honor me,” said Agnes, looking
down to cut her last slice of meat. “I myself feel that anything short of
honesty is usually a waste of everyone’s time.”
“I agree—when you are dealing with
people of substance, that is. Which, of course, you are, Miss Somerset.”
Agnes laughed. “You’ve hardly had
time to find that out, have you?”
“Not at all. My father has told me
much about you. He esteems you very much. And I have observed quite a bit
during these two days that tells me he is correct in his opinion.”
Agnes cleared her throat and sat
back. “Well, then, why did you leave India?”
Phillip put down his napkin and rose
to his feet. “I will tell you. Shall we meet, say, just after tea, on the bench
in the topiary? I’m afraid I have an appointment just now—Ned has offered to
show me his butterfly and nest collections.”
Sitting up straight, Agnes considered
her schedule. “I will be delighted to rendezvous after tea to hear the answer.
Nothing could keep me from it.”
His
Lordship bowed, laid down his napkin, and ran off across the lawn.
Agnes sat for several minutes,
feeling her heart pound. Above her, a giant elm bent its wet branches over the
terrace, letting occasional drops splash onto the dirty dishes. A fresh breeze
blew from the north and stirred the fine hair around her face as she mused. On
the west lawn, Fettles was overseeing the establishment of the croquet course,
pointing out necessary adjustments and pacing off to check the distance between
wickets. Through the open doors behind her, Agnes heard dishes being cleared
and the quiet laughter of the kitchen staff as they hurried to make way for
lunch preparations.
Agnes reviewed the conversation that
had just transpired and concluded that the Duke’s son was a singular character whom
she was not sure she liked. Was he the most mature man she had ever met, or the
most childish? Spearing the last of her breakfast, she rose and went inside.
Chapter 11
Lunch in
the dining room that day was a small affair. The hunting party was still out, eating
from hampers on the field of battle. Wilbur and Eleanor had gone to town after
persuading the Duke and Lord Phillip to accompany them. (The Duke never hunted
due to a violent allergy to poison ivy, which he unfailingly stumbled into
whenever he strayed from manicured paths.) Nothing buoyed the Wilbur Browns so
much as mixing with English aristocracy, even its displaced members. No tonic
could impart to them the same glow, and the two were nearly giddy as they
hunted for their necessaries in the small shops of Chesterton. Of course, no
suitable merchandise was to be found anywhere in that provincial city, but even
this frustration could not dim the couple’s spirits, and they bravely remarked
to the Duke that they “knew how to make do.” The group took lunch in the dining
room of Chesterton’s best inn, which came highly recommended by the dry goods
merchant and the drugstore owner alike. “This should prove interesting,” Wilbur
winked at the Duke as they entered the clean but somewhat shabby dining room set
with limp tablecloths and sturdy dishes. The Duke returned from this outing
thoroughly drained, but Phillip beamed, having tucked away in his mind a myriad
of new observations regarding a known type, the toadying critic.
In the meantime, a carriage bearing
the last guest arrived at Brookside while
Agnes shared a cold lunch with her guests in the dining room. Hearing voices
out front, she excused herself and flew to the door. A young woman stepped down
gingerly from a carriage and, with much relief, enfolded her aunt in her arms.
The pleasure of being on solid ground almost overwhelmed the unsteady traveler.
Agnes took her niece’s face in her hands. “You are paler than ever, you poor
little thing.”
The exhausted young lady was the
daughter of Agnes’s sister Elizabeth. Stella favored the redheaded strain that
ran through their line. Her skin was like a doll’s, perfect and nearly
translucent, but with pale freckles sprinkled across her nose, a nose that
seemed just the slightest bit too large for her small face. A generous mouth,
large eyes of faded blue fringed with tawny lashes, and thick red-orange hair lent Stella
a dramatic look more powerful than beauty.
“I’m fine,” Stella assured her aunt.
“It’s just my condition. I had not realized how difficult all the motion would
be.”
Agnes felt a wave of guilt and
selfishness roll over her for urging this budding mother to make the trip from Chicago. “I am so sorry,”
she groaned, putting an arm around Stella’s waist and leading her up the steps.
“I am a selfish and ignorant woman. I will try to make it up to you while you
are here. How long will you stay?”
“Two weeks, if you’ll have me.”
“Oh, not nearly long enough!” cried
Agnes, and she led Stella upstairs after ordering that tea and toast be brought
up. At the top of the stairs, she led her to a door and softly pushed it open.
Stella gasped, forgetting her fatigue. “The mosaic room!” Years slid away and
she was eight years old again, kneeling on the hearth, tracing the patterns of
the Italian tiles. She remembered the Christmas she proudly gave her little
paintings as gifts to her admiring family. “I like to think that my painting
career started right here in this room,” she smiled, unpinning her hat.
Tea arrived, and Agnes offered to
let Stella rest, but her niece insisted that she stay. Agnes opened Stella’s trunk and began hanging
dresses in the old German wardrobe that seemed alive with its profusion of
roses and birds cut deeply into the dark wood. Stella sat before a matching
mirror and refastened her hair.
This is how Vera found them as she
strode into the room with barely a knock. Stella jumped to her feet and was
about to grab her great-aunt in a hug when she stopped short. Vera had brought
back from the hunt a generous covering of burrs, and dried mud besmeared her
riding pants and jacket. She explained matter-of-factly that one of the hounds
wandered into a briar patch and could not figure his way out, so she had
volunteered to work her way in and lead him back, losing her footing more than
once on the muddy slope.
“Frederick of course wanted to go in my place,
but as I was the smallest person in the party it only made sense for me to do
it,” Vera explained. “It was really the highlight of the whole outing, besides
Mr. McMeed dismounting and chasing the fox on foot when he had completely lost
confidence in the dogs.”
“Did you catch the fox?” Stella
asked.
“We had him cornered nicely, but
Mrs. McMeed went into such a wail about how darling he was and what about his
family somewhere, so no one could shoot.”
“Did anyone explain that I brought
that fox in expressly for the hunt?” asked Agnes. “That he was raised for this
purpose and had no one waiting at home?”
“It would have been useless. Mrs.
McMeed was too overwrought. I don’t know what she imagined a hunt was all
about.” After kissing Stella carefully, Vera excused herself to change.
Alone again, Agnes fell to asking
Stella question after question about her life in Chicago, her daily routine,
her health, and her husband William. She noticed that her niece’s voice stuck a
bit in places and made her doubt the exclamations about how fine life was.
Agnes leaned back in her chair and studied the face before her.
“What’s wrong, Stella?”
After a short silence the young
woman walked to the window. The afternoon sun turned her hair to flame and made
her squint as she looked out across the brilliant lawns and gay flowerbeds.
“It’s so beautiful here, Aunt Agnes.
I already know that I won’t want to leave.”
“And I know that I won’t want you to
go. But I sense that your wish to stay will have more to it than just your love
of Brookside. Stella—you don’t need to pretend
about anything with me.”
Stella stared outside as though
looking for the words somewhere just out of view. She worked her hands, sliding
one over the other. Agnes waited. A squirrel scolded from a limb just outside
the window and distant laughter drifted in from somewhere. Both women became
aware of a world busy with itself as they occupied this little room,
concentrated upon one life. Stella drew a breath. “I feel sometimes like I am .
. . disappearing.”
Haltingly she let out the story of
the past two years in disjointed pieces interrupted by frequent reflection and
apology. William was an excellent husband. Her mother had been right about him,
and he worked hard to advance their fortunes. But sometimes it seemed too much,
staying ten to twelve hours a day at his business in the stockyards checking on
a rumor of disease or meeting with railroad men about shipments or dining
privately with investors. But it was not as though she found herself with
nothing to do in his absence—quite the contrary. She had been catapulted into a
world of dinner parties and teas and ladies’ clubs and supervision of a
household. Although she had watched her mother perform these duties, she found
that she was unprepared for the rigors of seemingly endless social obligation.
At every turn she had a dozen questions and her mother was not there to answer
any.
Stella recalled how she was the girl
with her hair always coming undone and her hands dirty, a girl to be found
either high in the branches of an apple tree or standing at an improvised easel
painting a wildly colored landscape. Now she never ran, never painted. With the
baby coming, time would be scarcer still. Some mornings, when she sat down at
her little desk to answer a small pile of invitations and inquiries, she
imagined packing a bag and disappearing, just for a while, to a place where she
could breathe and stretch her legs and sketch the countryside.
“Do you feel that William loves
you?” Agnes asked.
“Oh, yes, I know he does. He
apologizes all the time for being gone so much and says it won’t last forever.
But he is ambitious, Agnes. That’s something that drew me to him, I think, that
energy. For a time it was directed toward me, though, and now . . . “
Stella went to her bag and took out
an envelope whose worn edges showed that it had been opened and closed many
times. From it she drew a paper heart printed with dark roses and trimmed in a
thin green ribbon that laced its way around the edge. She handed it to Agnes,
who took it carefully and read:
Let me Dwell in the light of thine
eyes,
Let me find a sweet home in thy
heart!
For my soul like a wild bird flies,
To linger wherever thou art—
As night gives place to the day,
And darkness before the sun flies,
So my sorrows will all melt away,
When I live in the light of thine
eyes.
“This was his valentine to me two
years ago, four months before our wedding. And this year . . .” Stella stood
with her palms up, empty. “I know I am being selfish, but I can’t help it—this
isn’t what I wanted, this isn’t what I thought married life would be.”
“What did you picture?”
She had pictured happiness—a river
of happiness that they would float down, each day more blissful and refreshing
than the last. He would cover her with kisses each morning and she would spend
the day painting pictures for him to praise when he returned in the evening,
pulling her into his arms and whispering how much he had missed her. They would
go to dinners and balls and be admired as the couple most in love. Children
would come along to be purred over and taken on picnics every weekend. They
would pack the happy brood into a buggy
and bump along under leafy trees, past exuberant spring meadows, drunk with
the richness of loving family life. Stella smiled with embarrassment and sank
into a chair across from her aunt.
Agnes cocked her head. “In this
tableau there are no runny noses or soggy picnics or clothes that smell like
the stockyard?”
“Naturally!”
“Stella, you know that I am not
laughing at you.” She handed back the precious valentine. “I think you might
simply need a rest. Can you stay with us a while?”
Stella stared at the paper heart.
She would write to William and see. Maybe she could. She did not admit to her
aunt that she had brought along in the bottom of her trunk a small set of
paints and brushes and far too many sheets of heavy paper for just a two-week
visit.
To be continued . . .
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