Elizabeth Mansfield (20 page)

The women, meanwhile, were busily occupied with common pursuits: They played with the children together, took companionable walks together, sat at the fire reading novels together, and even spent hours in the workshop together, Cassie having convinced Eunice that furniture restoration made a very enjoyable pastime. The friendship progressed so well, in fact, that the two women could even engage in sharp disagreements. Robert overheard them one afternoon arguing over a painting Eunice wanted to place at the top of the stairway. “That, my dear,” Cassie declared firmly, “is the ugliest still life I’ve ever seen.”

“Ugly!” Eunice drew herself up in offense. “It’s by a student of
Kneller
!”

“I don’t care if it was by Kneller himself. The colors are muddy and the vase is all out of proportion.”

“Really, Cassie, you are quite unfair. I love the blue iris lying there beside the vase. And the drapery, here, has a very nice line.”

Cassie studied the painting, head cocked, for another moment. “The drapery may be nicely done, Eunice, I grant you that. But the rest is deucedly awkward.”

“Well,
I
like it,” Eunice insisted mulishly, “and I think it ought to be hung.”

“You may hang it if you wish, my love,” Cassie said as she marched off up the stairs, “but only in your room. I will
not
have it on the top of the stair where our eyes would have to suffer it ten times a day.”

As Eunice followed Cassie up the stairs, still arguing the merits of the painting tucked under her arm, Robert closed the door of his study, grinning. His shy little wife, he thought with some satisfaction, had come a long way. And for that matter, so had his sister. Their friendship was fertile soil that gave them both a healthy growth.

It came as no surprise, therefore, that Eunice decided not to return to London at all. She announced one night at dinner that she and her daughters had talked it over and had agreed that they would—with Cassie’s and Robert’s permission—remain for the rest of the winter right here in Lincolnshire. Robert immediately acquiesced. “We’re delighted to have you for as long as you wish,” he assured her. “Let me remind you, my dear, that before Cassie and I left London, I told you that you and the girls were welcome to make your home with us permanently, should you desire it.”

“That was a kind gesture,” Eunice responded, “but I didn’t believe, then, that I could bear being away from town. I don’t know, even now, how permanent our stay will be, but I’d certainly like to remain until spring.”

“Have you lost your mind, Eunice?” Cassie asked later, when she and Eunice had left Robert at the table with his port and were alone in the sitting room. “You
can’t
stay until spring!”

“No? Why not?” She grinned at her sister-in-law archly. “Are you tired of us already?”

“Don’t be silly. But have you forgotten
Sandy
? He probably knocks at your mother’s door daily to ask if you’ve arrived.”

Eunice’s smile faded. “Oh, yes, Sandy. With flowers in one hand and his heart in the other, isn’t that how you described him?”

Cassie peered at her friend worriedly. “Have you decided you don’t care for him? Is that why you don’t want to go home?”

“I don’t want to go home, my dear Cassie, because the girls and I are so happy here. And as for
Sandy, I’ve decided that I don’t want to decide. When one is a girl of eighteen, one feels pushed toward marriage for fear of finding herself, at twenty, left on the shelf. But when one is a twenty-eight-year-old widow, she can’t ever be called an old maid. And being left on the shelf seems much less dreadful. So the push to wedlock is less urgent. I shall, therefore, take my own good time before giving in to a second marriage.”

“Is that the reason girls get married?” Cassie couldn’t help asking. “To avoid being left on the shelf?”

“Of course it is. What other reason is there to tie oneself up at eighteen? Isn’t that why
you
married? You can’t pretend it was for love, Cassie, for you didn’t know Robbie then.”

“Ah, but I did.”

Eunice gaped at her sister-in-law. “You did? How? When? Why did you never tell me?”

“It’s a long and silly story, which I won’t tell you now, with Robert about to join us at any moment, but which you’ll undoubtedly pull out of me in all its embarrassing details before the week passes. In the end, however, the tale will only prove that love is not a much better reason for ‘giving in to marriage’ than fear of being left on the shelf. Although in your case, Eunice,” she added, patting her sister-in-law’s shoulder, “if you decide you love Sandy, I think you’ll have a very happy marriage indeed.”

“Do you?” Eunice asked earnestly.

“Yes, I do,” Cassie answered as Robert strolled in to join them, “but by all means take your own good time. Take all the time you need.”

Chapter Twenty-Five

With matters in his household in a state of relative contentment, Kittridge felt free to absent himself from it for a few days. The Duke of Bedford (a progressive landowner whose estates were both productive and profitable, and whose annual “sheep shearing” was an event that drew farmers and landowners from all over the midlands to his estate in Bedfordshire) had heard that Lord Kittridge was interested in developing his own herds and had generously invited him to Woburn Abbey to exchange ideas. With the assurance from his wife and his sister that they would do very well without him, Kittridge accepted the invitation and, early on a cold February morning, set out for Bedfordshire.

Cassie had risen at dawn to see him off. Eunice, however, being neither wife nor lover, had not felt any need to deviate from her usual habit of sleeping until midmorning. Thus, as soon as Robert left, Cassie found herself alone at the breakfast table and utterly miserable. She did not know why her husband’s departure left her feeling so bereft, for he was hardly an affectionate companion when they were together, but the feeling persisted anyway. In order to shake off her depression, she searched about in her mind for some engrossing activity to distract herself from her gloomy self-pity.

It took but a moment for the perfect solution to burst upon her brain: This was her best opportunity to make her husband’s study more habitable. She had wanted to remake the room from the first, but Robert, being in almost constant occupancy, had not permitted it. Today, however, with Robert absent, was the perfect time to start. She jumped up from the table at once and ran eagerly down the hall to the study to give it a complete examination.

Her first impression, on looking round, was that the room was much too small for its purpose. Just the few pieces of furniture it held—a one-piece secretary-and-bookcase, a chair, and a pier table under the single window—were enough to crowd the room. She would have liked to move him to a larger room, where she could fit him with a library table to sit behind, with plenty of room underneath for his long legs. But she knew he would not hear of it. He had many times insisted that this room suited him perfectly. So, with a sigh of resignation, she studied the place to see what could be done.

The fireplace took one entire wall and the window, with the pier table beneath it, another. With the bookcase-desk against the third wall and the door in the fourth, there was little she could do to rearrange the furniture. The only things that could be done were to find some way to store the maps and blueprints that were piled in untidy rolls on the pier table, cover the window with new draperies, find an interesting, masculine painting to hang over the mantel and, perhaps, to replace the secretary-bookcase with some sort of table with a larger work surface.

She looked at the high desk speculatively. It was actually a beautiful piece, the bookshelves enclosed with delicate glass doors and the whole frame topped with an inlaid arch and carved finials. It might, she thought, be the work of Daniel Langlois, a cabinetmaker of the last century whose designs she’d always admired. She would quite understand if Robert objected to its being replaced. But he must surely find the work space too cramped, and there was no possible way, underneath, for a man to stretch his legs. He would be bound to appreciate a more spacious desk, once he tried it.

To prove to herself that this desk was inadequate, she lowered the lid. As she suspected, the opened lid comprised the entire writing surface, for the area within was completely taken up with cubbyholes, all overstuffed with record books and papers. How, she wondered, could he do his work amid such a profusion of—?

Suddenly she turned quite pale. Her heart seemed to cease beating, and her blood froze in her veins. For right there, in the center cubbyhole, was a packet of square, buff-colored envelopes tied with string.
Elinor’s letters!

She shut the lid hurriedly, with the awkward nervousness of a spinster who’d opened a door and come upon a gentleman in his smalls. She had trespassed on Robert’s privacy! It was in this room that he hid when he wanted to be alone. It was in this tiny place where he stored his secrets. It was here, and here alone, that he could truly be himself. She realized, with belated shame, that she should not have come in at all without asking his permission. It was his
sanctuary
, and she had no right to invade it.

She could do nothing to alter this room now, for he must never know she’d entered! She looked quickly round once more to make sure nothing had been disturbed. And then, quite ridiculously, as if she’d accidentally invaded the chapel of an alien religious sect, she tiptoed to the door.

But with her hand on the knob, she paused. Elinor’s letters—the words and thoughts of the one woman whose character aroused her fascination more than any other in the world—lay right there within reach. She could, right at this moment, take them out and read them. No one need ever know.

But that was a
hideous
thought, she told herself. Cheap and vulgar and dishonest. And quite beneath her character. She could never permit herself to perform so dastardly an act! If coming into this
room
had seemed a dreadful invasion of her husband’s privacy, what would reading his
most private letters
be? The very
thought
was sinful … sinful to the point of sacrilege! She had to leave this room, and at once!

But she didn’t move. She knew, with a sickening certainty, that she was going to go back to the desk and read the letters. She simply
had
to. As ugly, as dishonest, as
immoral
as the act was, she was going to do it. It was as if some force beyond herself was compelling her. Trembling convulsively, she moved like a sleepwalker back to the desk. As she lowered the lid with shaking fingers, a horrid picture flashed into her mind … Bluebeard’s forbidden room, where the mutilated bodies of the six wives who’d disobeyed his stricture lay strewn about in bloody heaps. Would she, too, come to the end of this misadventure to find herself, like those other too-curious wives, a dismembered corpse?

But even that repulsive image did not stay her hand. She sat down at the desk, carefully removed the letters from their niche and undid the string. Then she gingerly removed the first letter from its envelope and, bracing herself as though expecting a blow, read it through.

It was worse than she expected. Elinor Langston, she discovered, was not the sort to exercise restraint. Every pang of loss the girl experienced was expressed in detail in the lengthy document, every tear and sigh duly noted and placed in its time and setting so that the reader—Robert—might suffer too. It was as if Elinor were trying to keep him tied to her by a rope of guilt, woven strand by strand with the threads of her pain.

The next letter contained more of the same … and the next … and the next. At a dance at the Belvedere Palace in Vienna, Elinor ached to feel his arms about her. At a concert in Salzburg, the Mozart “
was a meaningless jumble of discord
” without Robert’s presence at her side. At the Louvre in Paris, the mere viewing of a painting upset her.
“It was,”
she wrote,
“a portrait by Titian, called ‘Man with a Glove.
’
It so disconcerted me because of its likeness to you, my love, particularly about the eyes and mouth, that I burst into sobs and had to be led from the exhibit—to the consternation of Mama and Papa and the amused curiosity of everyone else—and laid on a chaise in the ladies’ retiring room until I could
come to myself.”
And after witnessing a performance of
Fidelio
at La Scala in Milan, she wrote,
“Oh, my most beloved, when I saw the lovers rewarded for their faithfulness and sent out to pursue a life of happiness, how I wished that you and I could be rewarded too. But I know it is beyond hope, and that our opera, if such were ever composed, must have a tragic end. If I were writing it, I would arrange it so that we’d be chained together somewhere in a dungeon where we would die in each other’s arms. I think I prefer that ending to this terrible, interminable, boring separation we are being made to endure!”

Cassie stared at the letters spread out before her, a wave of fury flooding over her. How could this contemptible girl dare to torture her Robert this way? she asked herself. Did she have to flaunt her self-pity in his face and make him suffer agonies of guilt?

But a second reading altered her thinking, especially the letter in which Elinor tried to face the fact of Robert’s marriage.
“Mama told me yesterday that you are wed,”
she wrote on pathetically tear-stained paper.
“I cried all night. I almost hated you, but now, after some calmer thought, I do understand. You did what you had to do. I know you cannot love the despicable creature who married you for your title and whom you married for her wealth. I know, too, that your love for me remains untarnished. I admit that the tiny flame of hope I kept in my heart, the hope that we might, somehow, find a way into each other’s arms, has flickered out, but the knowledge that our love will not die still burns brightly for me. It is that knowledge that keeps me alive.”

This last letter made it achingly clear that Elinor and Robert truly loved each other, and that they had been cruelly wrenched apart. Those were facts that Cassie had to face. In those circumstances, she asked herself, weren’t the lovers justified in feeling pain? In being sorry for themselves? Wasn’t their suffering just as pitiable as her own?