Promise Me This (23 page)

“It’s all right, Annie. It’s all right now. Everything will be all right,” the woman crooned as if to reassure herself as much as Annie.

It was a lie, Annie knew. Things would never be all right. But just for a minute, for a few minutes, until she could catch her breath, Annie resolved that she would believe the laughing, tearful woman with the strong arms and the resolute voice.

“Call me Connie.” The girl plopped before her looking glass, pulled tortoiseshell combs from her long chestnut plaits, and began to brush. “One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine . . .”

“Mrs. Sprague—I mean, your mother—said I should call you Constance,” Annie responded, standing in the center of the room, feeling stupidly out of place.

Connie sighed dramatically. “Only in front of Mother and Father—to humor them. Mother and Father are so old—older than any of the other girls’ parents—and their ideas are terribly old-fashioned. None of my friends call me Constance. It’s so . . . so stuffy.” She stopped brushing and inclined her head significantly. “You do want to be my friend, don’t you?”

“Yes,” Annie mumbled, shrugging. “I suppose.” But she did not know what she wanted. She only knew that she would allow herself to be cued and would reply with whatever lines seemed necessary.

“Good.” Connie resumed her brushing. “Tomorrow we shall stroll through St. James. Father insists. He said the fresh air will do us both good. And then we are to take a carriage ride round the park. It seems entirely too warm for all of that to me—even Mother agrees—but he insists.” She tossed her brush onto her dressing table at last and stood. “One thing you will learn about Father is that when he gets a bee in his bowler, nothing stands in his way.”

Mr. Sprague knocked and spoke through the closed door from the hallway. “Lamps out, girls. Ten o’clock. Sleep well.”

“See what I mean?” Connie whispered, then called more loudly, “Yes, Father!”

Annie folded her wrapper across the foot of the bed and climbed beneath the eiderdown. She turned her back on Connie. Never in her memory had Annie shared a room, let alone a bed, except for those few weeks in the dormitory in Southampton.

A sister was something she’d never thought to wish for. She’d wanted only Owen, needed only Owen. But there was something—not quite comforting, but something in knowing another human body lay alive and breathing close by—that helped stave off the pull of darkness. Annie sighed quietly. She could not decipher what that something was.

Annie had not walked or driven through St. James’s Park since Owen had moved to Southampton over a year ago. Never had she taken formal tea in a grand hotel, never heard the magnificent choir in St. Paul’s Cathedral, never attended evensong in Westminster Abbey, where she could not help but weep for the beauty of the young boys’ voices. She’d never gone to a professional dressmaker’s shop to choose fabric of her liking nor to a milliner’s to model hat after hat, never had her hair coiffed by a lady’s maid. First her mother, then Aunt Eleanor had made each decision about her simple wardrobe, her toilette, her rare comings and goings.

But in the weeks she spent with the Spragues, Annie did all those things with Connie and her mother. And after each outing, Mrs. Sprague arranged a treat to top the day—vanilla ice in a sweetshop or apple tart smothered in hot custard in a corner tea shop. Once they sat on the grassy bank of the Thames, just to picnic and watch the young men punt.

Annie began to think of herself as something of a puppy—one that Mrs. Sprague seemed intent on training. But training for what, and why she would bother, Annie could not decide, nor did she have heart to ponder the question thoroughly. She determined to plod along dutifully, knowing that, however sad she still felt inside, however impossible it was to summon the enthusiasm Mrs. Sprague determined she exhibit, this arrangement was better than suffocating in Hargrave House with Aunt Eleanor. Remembrance of her aunt sent shudders through her limbs.

One bleak morning just after a soaking rain, the three stopped in a nearly deserted Trafalgar Square, where Mrs. Sprague repeated, with all the deliberation of a tour guide, the history of Admiral Lord Nelson, who regally commanded the square from his stone column. Annie sighed, having heard tales of the admiral since she was a child, and Connie rolled her eyes. “Mother, we know,” she whispered. “We read the empire’s history every year! Can’t we feed the birds? Just this once?”

Mrs. Sprague ignored her daughter’s impudence. “You say that every time we come, Constance. It simply is not a proper pastime for young ladies of your standing.”

“But it is such fun,” Connie coaxed. “You did it as a child outside St. Paul’s—you told me! You loved it, Mother! You know you want to do it too!”

Her mother, determined disapproval lurking about the corners of her mouth, placed a coin in each girl’s palm.

“Come on!” Connie dragged Annie behind her.

“Walk, girls; please walk!” Mrs. Sprague insisted.

Connie pointedly slowed until they’d purchased packets of corn from a crippled peddler woman crouched on the curb.

“You must stand very still,” Connie instructed, pulling Annie back into the midst of the square. “Spread your arms wide, hold your head high, and don’t twitch.”

Annie did as she was told. She felt silly standing like a human letter T and wondered if Connie meant to have a laugh at her expense. But not a minute passed before the cooing pigeons dropped, one by one, onto Annie’s arms and shoulders, even atop her summer straw hat, happy to perch while Connie fed them from her hand.

“They tickle,” Annie whispered, surprised. “Their little feet tickle my arms right through my shirtwaist!” She felt her eyes open wide. Mirth pulled at her lips, lifting their corners, until she hiccuped, then laughed aloud—the first spontaneous joyful sound to erupt from her throat in weeks.

So startling was the merriment, so infectious was her sudden awakening that Mrs. Sprague and Connie began to chuckle. All three giggled. Their giggles burst until their eyes filled. When Connie spewed an unladylike snort into the sudden late-morning sunshine, the flock of pigeons, startled and clearly insulted by such an indignity, rose in a gray-white beating of wings by tens and twenties, a great whooshing orchestra, into the sky. Annie laughed and laughed until she cried.

Owen’s July birthday came at last. For once Mrs. Sprague made no plans for the girls. Annie spent the morning at Bunhill Fields cemetery, tending the graves of her parents and Owen.

At least on her parents’ graves, the flowers she and Owen had planted were blooming—as blue as the blue of her eyes, just as Owen had promised. But to Annie, Owen’s grave looked sad and empty beside their lavish bouquets.

“In the spring, Owen, I promise. Just as soon as Mother and Father’s flowers have gone to seed, I shall gather every tiny one, and in the spring I will plant them for you. By your next birthday your spot will be a garden too.” She stood. “I’ll not forget.”

She passed the afternoon alone in the Spragues’ back garden, rereading Owen’s journal—the last months of the last year of his life. It was a family tradition—a new book begun on each birthday. She wished there were more and wondered what had become of all the journals of his life. They had each kept them since they were taught to read and write. Owen had written his entries daily—more faithfully than she had ever done.

Perhaps, Annie thought, all those books, those precious accounts of his precious days, lay at the bottom of the sea amid
Titanic
’s wreckage, or perhaps Owen had at some time sacrificed the words of his life in a huge bonfire. Annie could imagine Owen offering his journal’s fertile ashes as a gift to the roses he loved.

By the time she finished reading, the sun had crossed the sky. Owen’s birthday was nearly past, and Annie loved her brother again, all the more. When she’d first read of Lucy Snape, she’d felt indignant that Owen had kept such an important secret from her and miffed that he held another girl—a woman—in higher esteem than his sister.

But now Annie wondered if Owen had found Lucy before the ship went down, if he’d told Lucy of his affection for her. She pitied Lucy Snape for not living, for never knowing the love her brother could have offered her.

In her compassion for Lucy and in reading again of Owen’s concern for and brotherly claim on Michael Dunnagan, Annie found she despised the boy stowaway a little less. If Owen loved him, owned him as a brother and friend, if he had secured his future within their family, then perhaps, Annie thought, she should not altogether hate him. How she could do that without entirely forgiving Michael, she did not know.

Upon discovery of the treasure stitched inside the pockets of Owen’s coat, Daniel planted every slip and root he could salvage. He planted a third of the seeds, storing the rest as security for another spring. But the fields that Owen had planned and drawn while aboard
Titanic
, the paths and routes and outlines for the gardens, Daniel undertook with a will that bowled Michael’s brain. By August they began to see the slim promise of their plantings.

“Another lean winter, but we’ll manage with what we’ve got,” Daniel pronounced. “We’ll begin working next year’s ground and building the structures for Owen’s plans now—every minute we can spare.” He wiped his brow. “The lad was a genius. We’ll follow in his wake.”

It was almost like working for Owen—not that Daniel himself was like Owen, but because they were laying the wooden and stone structures and plowing the fields of Owen’s dreams.

Some nights, as Michael lay on his cot inhaling the stars and honeysuckle through his bedroom window, he could feel Owen’s excitement growing inside himself. The beating of his heart was Owen’s beating heart, as though Owen lived inside his chest. Michael could not explain that, dared not try. But he felt Owen walking before him, behind him, beside him.

The sun and rain and occasional picnic trips to the nearby seaside strengthened Michael’s lungs, his limbs, and his purpose. The earthy smell of the black and sandy New Jersey soil as it sifted through his fingers surged through Michael’s nostrils and skin—by every means a tonic.

And Maggie’s kitchen garden, ripe with variegated greens, bright-orange peppers, brilliant-red radishes, and finally glossy tomatoes, became for him an artist’s tryst with the soil, the sun, and the sky.