Chapter Eighteen #2
None of his daughters had mentioned their last argument to him.
He wondered if Caroline had told Nate—always her closest ally—that Martin had been misusing Martha.
He suspected Sophia had told Benjamin about the will.
Yet his children avoided any difficult subject, had not even asked him how the fire began, and it all made Martin feel so much worse.
Clearly, they had no hope that they would get an honest answer from him.
Or perhaps they had no intention of giving him their absolution.
These topics were too dangerous because they were too hurtful, and so they must avoid them.
He wondered what Martha would think when she heard of the fire. She might have heard already: he had made Northfield Hall famous, sometimes infamous, in Britain, and the London newspapers must by now have the news of its ruin.
She, too, shouldn’t forgive him, and so he hoped she would turn away from the news thinking, He deserved it.
Except he also couldn’t help but want her to arrive in a carriage, just like his children had, and say, You didn’t deserve this.
“I feel so silly. I’m sad as if someone died,” Sophia said, “but it was only a building. I suppose I’m still grieving Uncle Maulvi.”
Ellen put an arm around her sister. “It was more than a building. We all have so many memories there, and now we have lost it. You’re not silly for feeling sad.”
“I’ve seen sailors bawl when their ship was retired,” Nate agreed. “It isn’t a death, exactly, but certainly, we can never go back now.”
“Nobody died,” Martin heard himself say. He wished himself silent, but instead, he growled defensively: “Do not dishonor people who have died by comparing our loss of a fancy house with the loss of life.”
Caroline glared at him. “None of us are saying it is the same thing. We are only saying we are sad. Is it dishonorable now to be sad?”
“No one was even injured.” Thank God for that—Martin didn’t know how he would face each day were he responsible for hurting someone.
“And that is a miracle, but it has no bearing on the fact that we lost our home.”
Martin snarled: “Your home? As I recall, you abandoned it to live in Thatcham.”
Caroline reared back to defend herself, but Ellen sliced a hand between them as if to break up a fight. “Really, Papa! There is no need to be churlish.”
He could not refute the charge, but neither could he contain himself. On either side of him, Patrick and Rian leaned away, as if even they knew he was not to be trusted. Lydia took their hands and, making an excuse that they needed the privy, led them from the table.
Benjamin, the peacemaker, said, “It was a terrible accident, and Papa did the best he could. We can be very thankful that no one was injured, especially since it took so long to put out the fire.”
“Yes, we can be,” Ellen agreed, giving each of her siblings her “mother” look until they all nodded obediently. “And of all of us, Papa has lost the most. As he said, he is the only one of the family still living here.”
“Then shouldn’t he be mourning this accident with the rest of us, instead of making us feel like spoiled children?” Caroline said.
Nate and Sophia both tried to speak to reel her in, but Martin barely heard them. His heart was beating too fast as his mouth opened to say: “It wasn’t an accident.”
His children stared at him—and even though they each possessed individual faces and features, in that moment, they all looked exactly like Lolly. Softly, Benjamin repeated: “It wasn’t an accident?”
“It was my fault.”
“Your fault?” Caroline echoed, her voice sharp.
The confession was beginning to sting—a sting Martin deserved. He clarified: “I started it.”
Sophia, gripping Caroline’s hand, asked with all the disapproval of the governess she had once been, “Why would you start a fire?”
“I was burning letters. I poured my rum on the fire to make it hotter, and then the next thing I knew, it began spreading across the room.” He looked at his fingers, pale and useless on the table. “I tried to stop it, but it spread so fast.”
His children were so silent that the noise of the eating laborers—all those people who trusted him wrongly!—filled his ears.
“Where did you get rum?” Ellen asked. Her voice was as thin and desperate as it had been twelve years ago when she had discovered his scheme to sell Northfield Hall linens in London.
After all, rum was a product of sugar plantations, and Martin had raised her to eschew anything touched by the sugar trade. “How often do you drink rum?”
“It was an old bottle from my father. I don’t know why I saved it all these years.
I never meant to drink it. Everyone had left.
I’ve done everything wrong. So I decided I might as well drink it and burn all the letters…
all the papers I didn’t need anymore. I wanted to burn everything.
” He couldn’t look at his children. “And that’s what I ended up doing. ”
He awaited their judgment. It would be swift, he was sure. He had raised them to know right from wrong, and everything he had just confessed was wrong.
Would they banish him from the estate? Bar him from the London townhouse? Force him to beg the hospitality of one of his parliamentary allies?
Whatever they decided, Martin would abide it. After everything he had done, he could not earn back their trust, much less expect forgiveness. The only course available to him was to accept his punishment and hope it might reshape his character in however many years he had remaining in this life.
“But, Papa,” Sophia said, “You didn’t mean to. You didn’t intend to burn down the house. You only meant to burn some papers.”
Her eyes were so wide and uncertain, like when she had been a little girl asking why the stars only came out at night. Martin replied harshly, “What did I expect when I started throwing rum in the hearth?”
“You didn’t expect this.”
“Anyone could lose control of their fire,” Ellen said. “It was an accident, Papa.”
“An accident that wouldn’t have happened if not for me.
” Martin didn’t understand why this, of all his errors, they wanted to excuse.
“I shouldn’t have been drunk. I shouldn’t have been burning my letters.
I shouldn’t have been doing…any of the things I’ve been doing.
” He turned to Benjamin and Nate, who might have remained in ignorant bliss, and confessed: “I was carrying on an affair with Mrs. Bellamy while she stayed here. And I have written a will that leaves all my fortune to a trust for Northfield Hall, instead of any money going to you and your sisters. I have failed your sisters deeply. I have failed everyone deeply. I have been too wrapped up in my own ambitions to be a proper father or even a proper politician. And, my darlings—” His eyes fell on Ellen now, that first child who had taught him what it was to be a father, and her sisters beyond, and he remembered what it was like to hold them as infants, to offer their tiny fingers a grip as they learned to walk, to watch with worry as they grew into creatures that resembled adults.
“I’m so sorry. I am sorry for every time I have failed you.
I wish I could promise to do better, but it turns out everything I touch turns to ash. ”
All week long, he had managed to put one foot in front of the other by flogging himself with the evidence of what he had wrought. Suddenly, a wave of sorrow drowned his guilt and shame, and Martin could barely breathe for the pain.
Across the table, Caroline covered her mouth with her hand.
Ellen, rising from her place on the bench, came round the table and draped her warm arm across his back. “You raised us, Papa, and we are not ash.”
“In spite of me,” he said. “Sophia needed me, and I hardly even knew it! I should have ridden overnight through the rain to get to you. Why didn’t I come when you asked me to?”
Sophia reached across the table and took one of his hands between her two soft palms. “I did not tell you how desperately I wanted your help.”
“You were accused of a felony. You shouldn’t have needed to tell me.”
“And it injured me, Papa,” she said, smiling, “but I did not turn to ash. You may make it up to me by forgiving yourself now, for I surely forgive you.”
He clung to her hand, cherished Ellen’s arm around him, and still did not believe he deserved them.
“Inspecting our recoveries yesterday, Mr. Chow pointed out a crate of things you rescued from the Hall yourself,” Nate said. “I expected to find estate records or perhaps Mama’s letters, but instead it was a rather surprising assortment from the garden drawing room.”
“I only had time to fill my arms the once.” Martin wished he could have saved Lolly’s letters or the collection of illustrated books they had used to teach the children to read—or the entire Hall.
At least Martha’s glove had been in his pocket, so he had not lost his only memento of her to his inferno.
“And you saved that terrible watercolor Sophia did of the pond?”
Martin squeezed that daughter’s hand. “Who else would think to reflect the sunset in the pond by painting the water pink?”
“I am a visionary, Nathaniel,” Sophia gloated.
“Yes, well, I can understand why you decided on the pens Ellen made you, but why keep the letter I wrote from Freetown about their record-keeping? That was surely the most boring thing I ever sent.”
“It was the first one I received after almost a year of your letters being delayed on some ship that went off course. I had begun to worry you were dead.” That episode of Martin’s life—the months of wondering if he would ever hear of Nate, much less from him, again—was seared onto his heart, and he was surprised Nate didn’t realize it.
Until, of course, he reflected that he had never told Nate about it.
“We had all begun to worry,” Caroline said, a little of the anger that she usually reserved for Martin now directed at her brother. “Most people who go to Sierra Leone die there.”