Chapter 37
Chapter Thirty-Seven
“Did you have a good Christmas?” Genevieve asked hesitantly as they sat in front of the fire, watching the embers burn low. Dawn was not far away.
“I did. My first true Christmas in this era was very memorable.”
Genevieve sat up, arrested. “Your first—! You should have said something! We would have—” She broke off. He hadn’t said anything because of her.
“I remember Christmas,” he told her. “But I have not celebrated it the way we do now—certainly not with trees and kissing boughs.”
“But you enjoyed it?”
“I did.” He kissed her hand. “I have something else for you—though that isn’t precisely true. It is a gift, but not mine. I hoped it would make you happy, but I don’t know.”
“More? My goodness, what is it?” Genevieve asked, mystified.
“It’s upstairs. Come and see.”
He led her to their rooms and said, “Wait a moment,” before disappearing. Genevieve reached for the buttons on her shoes and had nearly all of them undone by the time Kendrick returned with a large trunk on his shoulder. He softly closed the door and set it on the floor.
She straightened in confusion. “You got me an old trunk?”
Kendrick pressed a small, brass key into her hand. “Your friend Hetty kept it for you.”
She looked at the key in her hand. She seemed to hear the words from far away. “Hetty?” she whispered. “You—You went to Oxford?”
“Yes. When I told you I was delivering the invitations, I was—but I took a little detour. Your friend Hetty kept house for your father until he died, and she and her husband inherited the house. They have several children, two named Ezra and Jenny.”
Her knees went out from under her, but she barely noticed Kendrick scooping her up and placing her on the bed. “Hetty?” she said again, helplessly.
Her husband put an arm around her. “Yes. She has never forgotten what you did for her. I went to see if I could find anything of your father’s that you might have as a keepsake because you had said you felt so unsettled in that part of your life. But I got luckier than I expected.”
“These are…my things?”
“I don’t know. I didn’t open the trunk. But it is everything your father kept for you and wanted you to have. They told me so.”
Genevieve closed her hand around the key, feeling the metal cut into her hand. She couldn’t speak for a long time. The burn of tears stung her eyes and throat, but none fell.
“Did I overstep, sweetheart?”
She shook her head. “Why are you so good to me?”
“Am I not supposed to be? I thought a man treasured that which was most precious to him.”
I think I love this man, Genevieve thought, staring up at him through a haze of tears. How was he everything she had hoped and dreamed of all those long years ago? “Will you open it?” she croaked, handing him the key.
He took it and knelt on the rug to turn the key in the lock.
Genevieve sank to the floor by his side, and because of his steady presence found the courage to open the lid.
Pushing aside layers of tissue and sachets to keep the contents fresh, Genevieve peered into the trunk, recognizing the jewelry box she had been given as a child—not that she had had many jewels, but it had been a convenient place to keep her trinkets and a few necklaces and bracelets that she’d owned.
And below that was the lovely cedar box that had been her mother’s.
Her father had given it to her upon her mother’s passing, but she’d always kept the contents separate.
The next layer consisted of clothing—her favorites, though now sadly out of date, and other personal belongings.
A few pieces of embroidery, stitched for Genevieve’s one-day trousseau.
A shawl she remembered had been her mother’s. And then below that—
“Oh,” Genevieve whispered. “Books.” She lifted them out. They were all her father’s works—her personal copies, worn and thumbed, but a few appeared new. She looked closer.
The Adventures of Dunstan, an Anglo-Saxon Boy. Bold Amice, Wise Amice. The Dragon of Langsey Isle. The Chapel at Canterbury, Or, In the Days of King Harold.
They were all attributed as Mr. Anglesy’s Stories for Children.
“I know these stories,” she whispered, thumbing through Bold Amice, Wise Amice. “He told them to me at night, but after Mother died, he never made them into novels…but he finished them? They’re children’s books?” She turned to the dedication pages.
For Jenny, be brave and bold and never give up.
For Jenny, nowhere in the wide world is too far to come home.
For Jenny, you are my most precious work.
For Jenny, for no other reason than I love you.
Genevieve covered her face with her hands and just breathed. He did not hate me. He did not resent me.
Kendrick pressed a handkerchief into her hand.
After sniffing into the handkerchief, she stacked the books carefully. She looked around for her favorite, Wynnflaed’s Knight. As she picked it up, she saw the edge of an envelope sticking out above the pages.
The book fell open to the place where the envelope lay. Inscribed in her father’s scholar handwriting that she would know anywhere, it read, “Jenny.”
Oh, God, she thought.
Everything she had begged for. Everything she feared.
Kendrick’s arm wrapped around her shoulders as she, with horribly shaking hands, freed the sheets of paper from the envelope.
My dearest, best beloved, only daughter Jenny,
It is hard to believe I have not laid eyes on you for nearly nineteen years.
The year turns colder, and my chest once again battles every cough and sniffle the winter provokes.
I ask the Lord for what I have requested every Christmas—that I will see you again—but I write this letter to leave with Hetty and Arthur in case the Lord in His wisdom allows me to see your mother again first.
People have tried to tell me you eloped with some man, or left for parts unknown, or worse—been shamed somehow and do not want to return.
I have never believed them. You had opportunities to marry—I would not have minded, Jenny—but you insisted on staying and running the house.
You believed I needed looking after. You always wanted to look after people, Jenny.
I never believed you would have left without a word.
I cling to the belief that something kept you from coming home.
You knew that there was nothing you could do that would have ever made me turn you away.
I look to Anglo-Saxon quotes for the familiar comfort they have always afforded me, but they had no hope in death.
“Unknown to them was the Wielder of Glory, High King of the World,” as the Beowulf poet says.
And maybe that is why I have loved them so—they see so imperfectly through a glass darkly, but we who have hope can see the glimmer of what is more, both in their tales, as the Beowulf poet draws out, and in our own stories.
I will admit to the temptation of Job, when his so-called friends told him to curse God and die. But what will that profit me? Then I am like the Geats, who believed death was the end, that only men’s glory and great deeds would endure after one surrendered to the dark.
No, I will not. God has shown Himself to be ever present in my grief.
He brought your friend Hetty to keep house for me, and I felt pleased I could help her support her family, and she reminded me of you.
And then I found kinship with Arthur, a Methodist and another scholar at heart, and he began taking dinner with me for company—and to flirt with Hetty. Blessings in the midst of sorrow.
No, I will not be cursing God. I increasingly turn to His words in these years.
And what I lean on as the years have crept forward is that no word from God will ever fail.
And has He not said, “I am the resurrection, and the life: he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live: and whosoever liveth and believeth in me shall never die”?
Whether you have departed this life—or if one day I will see you again in the land of the living—or if you will read this letter after I am gone, I hold to this. Whether you have gone before me to see your mother, or whether I will meet her before you—I believe that no word from God will ever fail.
I will see you again, Jenny.
Your loving Papa
The letter crumpled in her hands as she pressed her face to Kendrick’s shoulder and cried.
Through bloody tears, Genevieve reread the words in her father’s hand again.
And again.
And again.
The most amazing, unlooked-for Christmas gift, full of hope that one day she would read these words. Even as they smote her heart, they found all the hopes smashed by Laurent and Cuthbert and twenty years of darkness and held them up to the light.
This night had begun to put all her broken pieces back together.
And Kendrick had done this for her?
“How did you know where to go?” she asked, pulling off her gloves and wiping her face with them.
“Elspeth told me your address.”
“And you saw Hetty? You really went all that way?”
“I did. She misses you. Maybe at some point, we can go and see her again in a way that won’t jeopardize the Ossuary’s secrets.”
Genevieve pressed her lips together to keep them from trembling. “But you couldn’t have known…”
“No, I didn’t, but I hoped there would be something left behind I could bring back to you.”
“Why?” she whispered, looking up at him through the blood crusting on her lashes.
He reached out and wiped the tears away with his thumbs. “I wanted you to have a good Christmas.”
Genevieve ran her bare fingers over the letter, straightening out the crease she’d made in the paper. She carefully slipped it into the book. Her voice cracked. “How can I ever repay you for this?”
Kendrick frowned in confusion. “There is no ledger between you and me. You are my wife, Jenny. If I was able, why shouldn’t I have done it? What is too much for the woman to whom I have pledged myself?”
I do not deserve this man who gives me so much, she thought. The events of the night felt as though they had cracked her heart right open, freeing all that she had been holding on to for twenty years. She reached up to touch his face. “No one has ever loved me like this.”
Kendrick went still under her hand.
“You don’t think the word fits?” she asked, throat suddenly tight.
“No, it does fit.” He clasped her hands and kissed them. “You woke me up, Genevieve, when I didn’t even know I was walking through this world asleep. You are my wife. My home. My only love. But I declared myself through actions rather than words because of your hurts—your fears.”
All the worries and fears she had stored up inside melted away under the joy of his declaration.
She recalled what he had said in the weeks before, about standing before a window on a dark street, watching those inside participate in the rhythms of life.
And she had wondered how she could usher him in.
The answer had been before her all the time. “For the first time in twenty years, I’m not scared anymore. Because I love you.” She opened her arms to him. “I love you. Come in from the cold, Kendrick.”
He dipped his head and kissed her, and Genevieve was finally home.