Chapter 58
With Henri gone, Agnes sank into a dark mood that clung to
her beneath her clothes, like an extra skin she could not peel off. The
terrible quiet made the house a tomb. Everything was so different now, as
though years had passed since summer. Light and color drained away from the
landscape outside her window, and she felt that winter was the natural state of
things—that spring, summer, and fall were passing tenants with no real claim to
the land.
In the
fountain, leaves gathered around the edges, just a few at first, then dozens,
then scores. From the window of her small study, Agnes watched Ned pull out
dripping scoopfuls in his slow, deliberate way. She hated to see the fountain
emptied. To her it signified surrender to winter, and for her sake Ned always
delayed the task until the approach of freezing weather threatened the marble
basin. He had already told her that today was the day, and this year he knew
she would feel it more than ever.
There was a
knock at the open door behind her. Ned entered, looking uncomfortable in his
town clothes and holding a small assortment of envelopes that he set down
beside her. On top lay a luxuriously printed calling card.
“The mail,
ma’m,” he managed through his whiskers. “And another card from you know who.”
Agnes picked
up the card by her fingertips and stared at it. “You would think that after
being turned away for three months straight she’d know enough to stay away.”
Agnes looked sternly at Ned. “Did she say anything?”
“Marie took
the card. She told me that she just said to convey her best wishes, like
always.”
“Viper,”
Agnes muttered, and threw the card into the trash basket beside the desk.
“Well, let’s see,” she said, picking up the pearl-handled opener, “what else we
have.”
She slit
open a long, gray envelope, unfolded the matching stationery, and began to
read. Her face darkened. “Well, well,” she said when finished. “Do you know of
any firm in town called Sutterfield Brothers?”
“Yes, ma’m,
I think they’re new. I saw their sign on Main just
today.”
“Find out
what you can about them, will you? They have sent me a letter of inquiry. It
seems someone is interested in Brookside.”
Ned’s eyes
widened slightly. “Do we know who?”
“Not for
certain, but I could make a very good guess. The first vulture circles.”
When
Ned returned from a ride to Chesterton two days later, he walked into the
kitchen with cheeks red from the cold. He found his mistress warming her hands
beside the cook fire, with both dogs drawn up as close as Dahlia would allow. Ned
set the mail down on a shelf and pulled off his gloves.
“Any
news?” asked Agnes.
Ned,
always slow to speak, took a little longer than usual to answer. A cold
stiffness gripped him from his jaw to his toes, a result of the bracing ride
home in an open buggy. Dahlia poured him a hot cup of tea, which he wrapped his
thick hands around. He breathed in the rising steam and finally looked up at
Agnes with misgiving.
“Not
sure you’ll want to know it,” he warned.
Agnes
looked at him impatiently.
“Sutterfield
Brothers are out of London.
Solicitors, real estate, all that kind of thing. They’ve got an office in the
City too. Seems a gentleman who used to be in the tea business heads this
location in Chesterton. Came back from India just this summer.”
“India?”
Agnes remarked.
“Um-hm.”
Ned slurped his hot drink. “There’s something else,” he said, staring darkly
into his cup.
“Well?”
snapped Dahlia reflexively.
“You’ll
never guess who I saw coming out of their office looking smug as a raccoon in a
root cellar.” He looked at Agnes. “Mrs. Claudia Thorne.”
Agnes
and Dahlia looked at each other.
“Well,”
said Agnes, “she was indeed my first suspect. Still,” she continued, “there’s
no way of knowing what she was doing there. You said they offer several
services. Maybe her lawyer quit just like her butler after finding out what
kind of woman she is and now she’s looking for a new one.”
“Maybe,”
mumbled Ned.
Dahlia
slashed open a squash on the cutting table. “She’s a wicked woman! I wish she
would disappear.”
Whatever
Claudia’s connection with Sutterfield Brothers, Agnes could waste no time in
responding to the firm’s inquiry. Winter was coming on and money was running
low. She would send word tomorrow that they could meet and take a look at Brookside. They absolutely needed to be out before
Christmas.
So
it was that within two days a pair of well-oiled and finely pressed gentlemen
stood in the foyer, looking about. Fettles walked them through the house
briskly, pointing out features that might escape the casual observer. It was
only through a stern act of will that the butler brought himself to perform
this task. If he let himself think about the consequence of these men
purchasing Brookside for their client, if he
pondered the scene of Miss Somerset and the remaining staff being turned out
into the cold, he would have run groaning to his little room and covered his
head with a pillow.
At
the end of their tour, Fettles showed the Sutterfield representatives into the
library, where Agnes had been unsuccessfully trying to read a book while
waiting for them. The conversation lasted only a minute. They would convey the
details of the home to their client, along with a list of the items in need of
repair or replacement. If their client was still interested, they would
communicate an offer.
This
was the first of several visits to the estate by prospective buyers or their
agents. Some were local; several were from Manhattan
and Philadelphia.
Of course, like all those who put their cherished home up for sale and must suffer
its scrutiny by strangers, Agnes was dismayed at the lackluster reaction. It
seemed that Brookside was either too large or
too small; the décor was just too outdated and would take far too much work to
redo; Greco-roman was over; the estate included too much acreage; the buyer
wanted more acreage; Chesterton was too close; Chesterton was too far. In the
end, two buyers were interested. One offered a price slightly below what Agnes
had expected to sell for. The other, offered via Sutterfield Brothers, was for
a good deal more, with the understanding that all the furnishings, save a
handful of heirloom pieces, would remain with the house.
Mr.
Rockwell was consulted and, since it was now early November, he advised Agnes
to accept the higher offer under the condition that no repairs were to be
included for that price, and the purchaser must accept the estate as is.
Besides, this offer would save them the sad task of conducting an auction.
Agnes conveyed this acceptance to Sutterfield Brothers. Within forty-eight
hours Mr. Rockwell himself arrived to negotiate the exact terms, and by the end
of the week the house was officially considered sold. Agnes had until the
fifteenth of December to vacate.
After
signing the papers, Agnes and Mr. Rockwell rode back to Brookside
from the Sutterfield offices in a cold drizzle. They were halfway home when
Agnes broke the silence.
“I
don’t seem able to grasp what I just did,” she observed, staring blankly at the
empty fields and crowds of naked trees they were passing. “I do wonder, though,
why they won’t say who the buyer is. That disturbs me very much. I’d like to
know to whom I am handing over my home.”
“You’re
quite right,” agreed the accountant, bundled thickly to his chin. “One hopes
the purchaser is a decent person who will take good care of the property and
preserve its best features. I know of an estate in Ulster County
that sold last year. Tremendous house. The buyer cut it up into a hotel. Tore
up the gardens and put in tennis courts. Dreadful shame.”
He
noticed Agnes looking at him in dismay. “No reason to think anything of the
sort will happen at Brookside,” he added. “No
reason at all.”
They
passed the rest of the trip lost in their own thoughts. The next morning, Mr.
Rockwell enjoyed a final meal in the wonderful old house, sitting with Agnes
over a steaming breakfast of eggs, coffee, hot apples, and biscuits. He had
seated himself in the chair closest to the blazing fire, apologizing for his
selfishness.
“The
cold is my enemy, dear girl,” he told Agnes, spreading Dahlia’s famous
blueberry jam over a moist biscuit. “There was a time when I flew out the door
on the bitterest day, undaunted, with hardly a scarf around my neck. Now I
can’t seem to put enough clothes on to keep off the chill. I’m almost afraid to
leave the house after October.” He turned his head stiffly, chewing slowly, and
looked out at the pale day.
Agnes smiled wryly. “So you
don’t agree with Mr. Lowell about winter: “There is a crabbed generosity about
the old cynic that you would not exchange for all the creamy concessions of
Autumn.”[1]
“Ho,
ho! Crabbed, yes; generous, I don’t see it.”
“Well,
maybe generous in that he gives us time to rest. We are supposed to stay
indoors and let the fields sleep while we read old books by the fire.”
“I
don’t doubt that was the plan,” acknowledged Mr. Rockwell, helping himself to
another spoon of eggs. “But look at us now. Our labor knows no season. We hurry
through summer and push ourselves through the paralyzing cold of winter. We
have become unnatural beasts driven by a heartless technology. There seems to
be no end to it and we cannot keep up, not in the long run. You see,” he added,
leaning toward Agnes, “I speak like an old man.”
“Not
at all,” Agnes assured him. “I wonder all the time where all our progress is
taking us.”
Mr.
Rockwell wiped his mouth. “Real progress, my girl, real progress, is that which
takes man closer to God’s plan for him. There you have it—the most profound
thing I am ever likely to say. Write it down for me, would you, and put it in a
jar.” He leaned back in his chair. “Have you decided where you will live?”
“Yes,
with Vera, at least at first. She’s getting married, you know, at Christmas.”
“To
the lucky Mr. Schmidt.”
“Yes,
and I am so glad. Well, that means they will only need one of their two
townhouses, so I might take one of them for a time.”
“A
very good plan. That will give everyone time to think. And now,” he said,
pushing back his chair and rising, “I must pack myself up like an Eskimo and be
on my way. Will you come for Thanksgiving? Mrs. Rockwell told me not to return
home unless it was with an acceptance of that invitation.”
Agnes
hugged the small man. “I am too distracted and would only spoil your holiday.
Besides, there is too much to do here in the next month to spare the time.”
Mr.
Rockwell looked at her with a mournful face. “I am so very sorry, Agnes. I
can’t say it enough.”
Thirty
minutes later, wrapped nearly to the point of immobility, Mr. Rockwell pulled
himself up into the coach, waved a last good-bye, and left Agnes to the
methodical task of bidding farewell to a hundred years of family history.
Chapter 59
We often find that joviality is
measured out to a person in inverse proportion to his competence. So it was
with the thorny clerk in the Marseilles
post office. As forbidding a man as he was, no one could accuse him of any lack
of acuity or thoroughness in the execution of his duties. He assigned the
correct postage to Rupa’s letter and tossed it into the proper bin, À
L’Étranger[2].
In the great sorting room behind him,
however, a large North African with a ready grin found himself so frequently
distracted while telling stories about his youth and asking details of his
co-workers’ love lives, that packets he handled regularly found their way into
the wrong bag, headed to some remote and unintended destination.
Two
hours after Rupa left the post office, this same Ahmed began sorting the
foreign bin into bags by country. He would take these down to the docks later
in the day, where workers would load them onto the restless ships. As he tossed
the pieces slowly into canvass bags, a moment of hilarity eclipsed his
attention long enough to let go of Rupa’s tender letter above the sack bound
for Egypt.
And so, in fulfillment of her fears, the letter found itself jostled among
hundreds of pieces it had no business associating with, thrown into the hold of
a small ship headed east, and tossed ashore at the distant port of Alexandria
some two weeks later.
We
might well wonder at the ultimate fate of a letter that has been sent in the
very opposite direction of its true destination. Carrying only enough postage
for the intended trip, how could it double back on its tracks and move on to
where it should go? And since Rupa had put no return address on the envelope,
it could not ever come back to her. A letter so far afield was destined for the
rubbish heap, or just as bad, the back of the sorting house in a barrel for
dead letters.
It
was to just such a barrel that Mahmood was directed when he asked his
supervisor what to do with the small letter with an American address on it.
Mahmood had been working in the great Alexandria
post office for only a week, having gotten the job by a stroke of luck: a
lower-level superintendent owed his uncle a favor. The same uncle had himself
hired the young man with the sweet eyes and soft heart a month earlier to help
in his produce market, but quickly found his nephew dismally unsuited to the
task. He was unable to haggle and, as a result, sold everything from carrots to
couscous for half what he should. No amount of threatening could transform the
young fellow into a shrewd salesman, and the desperate uncle got rid of him at
the first opportunity.
Dressed
proudly in his new postal uniform, a troubled Mahmood walked with the envelope to the barrel, nearly full of dusty
parcels and envelopes of every description. He stood turning it over in his
hand, studying the handwriting. It was a woman’s hand, and he imagined a dozen
desperate situations that might depend on the arrival of this letter. Mahmood
walked back to his supervisor, who would not like being asked the same question
twice, especially since he was trying to drink his afternoon tea and win an
argument with his brother-in-law over the age of the Prophet’s youngest wife.
Nevertheless, Mahmood excused himself and asked what
happens to things in the dead letter barrel. Nothing was the terse
reply. What do you want to happen to them? Would you like us to send you around
the world to deliver each one yourself? The supervisor returned to his
discourse.
Mahmood
slid the letter into his pocket and thought about it all day. When he got home
that night, he pulled it out and showed it to his wife. Maybe it’s something
important, he explained. It did not seem right to throw it aside and forget
about it. His wife, a young woman with an equally soft heart, examined the
letter and suggested they open it.
“That’s
against the rules,” Mahmood said sternly.
“Well,”
she said, thinking, “it’s probably against the rules to bring other people’s
mail home with you, isn’t it?”
Her
husband ignored the question. “Besides,” he pointed out, “you see it’s from France.
It’s probably in French or some other language we can’t read. What good will
opening it do?”
The
two left the mysterious letter on the table while they ate their simple dinner.
After clearing the dishes, his wife put it on a shelf next to the door so
Mahmood would remember to take it back to the post office in the morning.
“How
much would it cost to send it to America from here?” she asked.
“Too
much,” he answered. For three weeks the envelope lay on the shelf where the two
glanced at it each time they left the house—Mahmood hoping that inspiration
would strike on what to do with it. One evening after cleaning up from dinner,
his wife went to a small clay pot and took out some coins.
“Would
this be enough for the letter?” she asked.
Her
husband looked at the coins in her hand and the concern on her gentle face.
“You saved these?” he asked.
“You
are not angry, I hope,”
He smiled
and shook his head. The next morning Mahmood went to work early. The first
thing he did was buy enough postage to send the letter to America, which took three of the
four coins his wife had given him. Trusting no one, he personally walked the
letter to the back of the sorting house, to the outbound section, and shoved it
deep into a bag marked America.
To be continued . . .
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