fourteen
She did not want to go back home after the funeral. It no longer felt like home.
Was this the way her life would be from now on? Alone in this big, empty house, surrounded by her dead relatives, haunted by her dreams of a different life? No travel, no grand, free life full of cats and gossip like her aunt’s?
No swordplay, no one to call her ‘Jo’ and tell her it was just as well that she was being ‘improper’? No one to whisper secrets to under the covers on a long winter’s night? No one to console, to worry about, to bother, to delight?
How quickly life had changed.
How rich had she been at the beginning of the year, with her sisters and Papa and Laurie… and now, months later, nothing was left apart from Orchard Hall.
Of course, she wouldn’t be able to stay here forever. It now belonged to her brother, with his title. And when he took ownership of it, she would be confined to a few rooms, and would become the spinster sister, or aunt, or… someone everybody forgot about.
I am being too glum again, she thought. I can do anything I like; I am not destitute, after all. The possibilities are endless. The only thing dragging me to the abyss are my own morose thoughts. I must stop this train of thought. I must find the light.
Her writing was the light; she would keep following it, however small a light in the darkness, wherever it might lead her, and it would have to be enough.
That evening, she settled comfortably in her favorite chair and lit a fire even though it was not strictly necessary. She took her tea up in her room, and wrote into the early morning by the light of the flames. When it burned too low, she still kept writing, even though her eyes stung with darkness and smoke, and when it snuffed out, she lit a candle, and then another one, hardly noticing that she had done so afterwards.
She kept on writing.
As she wrote, she cried with a freedom she had not felt yet. The tears just dripped down her face, unstoppable, and onto the paper. She let them mix with the ink, and kept writing. She did not notice when the tears stopped; or when they started again. She kept writing, and as she wrote, she was no longer alone in a cold house that used to be her home. As she wrote, a little light sprung from the pages and grew and grew until the entire room positively burst with it.
She followed the light.
She wrote.
…
She only looked up from her desk when she heard a thump against her door.
She looked up with a groan, wrenching herself from the writing with difficulty, and lit up a fresh candle. Drawing her mother’s robe tightly around her—she always imagined it still smelled like Mama, but of course that wasn’t possible— she left the comfort of her lovely room, in search of the source of the disturbance.
She discovered her brother in the green salon, by a dying fire, deep in his cups. She had not even known he was in the house, but apparently he had shown up sometime after two o’ clock, and had just kept on drinking. The long-suffering servant Justin was keeping awake told her somberly that the viscount was refusing to eat.
Jo tried everything to take her brother’s mind off his despondent thoughts, but she realized that, with Papa gone, and those the last words he had spoken of his own son, there was little she could do to fix the pain that was tormenting her brother.
Instead, she attempted a conversation.
What better time to talk of Laurie, now, when her brother was so intoxicated, he would remember little or nothing of the conversation in a few hours?
“Laurie looked so cold at the funeral,”
she said.
“Did you not think so? So polite and distant—as if he was barely an acquaintance. And he has not been to this house once. Do you not think this odd?”
Justin poked the fire, swaying slightly. Gave no indication he had heard her.
“Do you know where he has been all these months?”
Jo pressed on.
“I know nothing about him, you see; have known nothing these past four months. Were you together in London? Or has he been abroad?
“Who, love?”
Justin asked carelessly, his tone flippant and arrogant, as if he were speaking to one of his paramours. He folded his long frame into the settee close to her, and at that moment, his whole demeanor was so disgusting, that Jo felt the seeds of an intense dislike grow within her.
She turned her face away, so that he would not see her expression go sour with distaste.
“Laurie,”
she repeated. Her brother shrugged—but at least he did not call her ‘love’ again. Then, to shock him more than anything, she added: “He proposed to me, you know.”
“Who did?”
“Laurie,”
Jo explained patiently.
“He proposed to me at Margaret’s wedding. He told me he loved me.”
“You are not serious, m’ dear. You… Did you talk to your father about it?”
Now it was ‘your father’, was it? The boy was growing more immature by the minute.
“No, but what does it matter now?”
Jo said.
“He is gone. Everyone is.”
Her brother turned to look at her with something akin to sharp pain in his eyes. Then his fa?ade of indifference came back over him, wiping any other expression clean off his face.
“I am not gone,”
he said, more softly than he had spoken to her in the last ten years.
But you are, she thought. You are always away in London, and even when you are here, you are so cold and remote you might as well be in India. And even if that weren’t true, you need more protection than you can give, God help you.
But she held her tongue, and went upstairs to bed. She was woken barely two hours later, by her maid frantically tugging on her sleeve.
“What is it, Hannah?”
“Miss, oh miss…”
The girl was crying.
“Tell me,”
Jo said, a shiver of fear running down her spine. It’s just me now, to deal with whatever is happening. There is no one else.
“Calm yourself and tell me.”
“It’s master…”
Hannah said.
“Well, the new master.”
“What has Justin done now?”
“He’s gone to duel!”
Jo threw the covers aside, groaning in disgust. Her brother was going to kill someone. Again.
Dear Beth,
On the day you died I could not stop crying. The only thing I remember from those dark hours, and the days that followed, is Teddy. Holding me up, holding me together, holding me tightly enough that I would not break.
I remember hiding my face in the crook of his neck, drenching his waistcoat with my tears. He just let me cry and cry until I was ‘all cried out’. I later found out he did not sleep for four days, worrying about me and whether I was able to sleep or crying alone in the dark.
I was not able to sleep, but I was not crying alone in the dark either.
I only cried when he was holding me—I did not feel safe to cry otherwise.
Maybe that’s why I have not cried since Papa died, except now, as I write this. But I don’t think I will ever cry again.
Because if I do, whose neck will I cry on?
Eternally yours,
Your sister