Chapter 37
HELENA
That afternoon, Helena found Clara in the sitting room that evening, her embroidery in her lap and a cup of tea going cold beside her in the way that Clara’s tea always did, because Clara invariably forgot to drink it while she was talking.
Helena sat down across from her and told her what Frances had suggested.
Clara set down her embroidery at once.
“Yes,” she said.
“I have not agreed to anything yet.”
“You should. Frances is absolutely right.” Clara turned to face her properly. “Whatever you decide about Gideon — whatever happens between the two of you — you will never be entirely free of any of it if you cannot break with the past first. You know that is true. You have known it for some time.”
“It feels strange,” Helena said. “Going to speak to a man I did not grieve.”
“You do not need to grieve him. You were never required to and you are not required to start now.” Clara’s voice was matter-of-fact in the way that was most useful.
“But you have things to say that were never said. They have been sitting inside you for years. Whatever you think about graves and the usefulness of standing in front of them — it is not really about him. It is about putting those things down somewhere outside of yourself so that you are not the only one carrying them anymore.”
Helena was quiet.
“I will come with you,” Clara said. “And I think we should ask Benjamin.”
“Benjamin?”
“Emmett Graham will be at the estate. He always is. And you know what he is like — he will not make it easy, and he will be considerably less difficult with a gentleman present.” Clara was already thinking through the practicalities in the way she always did, efficiently and without fuss.
“Benjamin has been wanting to meet Emmett Graham since the day you told me what he said to you at Blackthorne. He will not mind at all.”
“I do not want to make a production of it,” Helena said.
“It will not be a production. It will be three people arriving at an estate so that one of them can visit a grave. That is entirely ordinary and Emmett has no grounds to refuse it.” Clara looked at her directly. “Will you go?”
Helena looked at her hands. She thought of Frances in the park, of Mary in the sitting room, of Evelyn saying plainly that she was giving herself an excuse.
She thought of all the weeks she had spent in London telling herself she was thinking things through, and how thinking things through had not moved anything at all.
“Yes,” she said. “I will go.”
Clara nodded and reached for her writing things before Helena had finished speaking.
* * *
They set off the following morning, the three of them in Lord Hampshire’s carriage with Lavinia on Helena’s lap for the first hour before she fell asleep and was transferred to Clara’s.
Benjamin sat across from them and was, as Clara had predicted, entirely pleasant about the whole arrangement.
He asked sensible questions about the estate and the layout of it and said very little about Emmett, though Helena had the impression he had rather a lot to say on that subject and was saving it.
Brighton was grey when they arrived, the sea wind cutting across the downs and pulling at their coats as the carriage turned up the lane toward the Vale estate.
The house came into view around the last bend.
Helena had not seen it in more than a year.
It looked exactly the same — well-kept, large, and wholly unwelcoming in the way it had always been, even when she had lived there.
She had never once thought of it as home.
Emmett answered the door himself.
He looked at Helena first, with the same expression she had always associated with him. That combination of contempt and calculation that his brother had worn better but that Emmett had perfected in his own fashion. Then he looked at Benjamin, and she could see him reassessing.
“I have nothing to say to you,” he said to Helena.
“We have not come to speak with you,” Benjamin said.
His tone was perfectly pleasant. He had the ease of a man who has never in his life needed to raise his voice to be taken seriously, and he wore it without effort.
“Lady Helena has come to visit her late husband’s grave.
Her daughter has come to see her father’s.
These are not requests that require your permission, and I would be very sorry indeed to have to point that out to you formally. ”
Emmett’s expression tightened. “This is my estate.”
“It is,” Helena said. She had been thinking about what she wanted to say on the drive down, and she said it now without heat, looking at him directly.
“And the Laurendale house is on it. Which, as you may recall, was left specifically to Lavinia in Huxley’s will.
I have not pursued that matter because I have had other concerns.
Whether I continue not to pursue it may depend somewhat on the next few minutes. ”
Emmett looked at her. Then at Benjamin.
“She is fully within her rights,” Benjamin confirmed. “Her daughter has a legitimate claim and Her Grace has standing to act on her behalf. We would naturally prefer to resolve this without involving anyone’s solicitor. But the choice is entirely yours.”
A silence followed. The wind came in off the sea and moved through the garden behind the house. Lavinia, on Clara’s hip, pointed at something on the garden wall.
Emmett looked at Helena with the expression she knew. The one that preceded the cutting remark, the one designed to make her feel small enough to give ground. She had spent years giving ground when she saw that expression on Huxley’s face. She looked back at him and did not move.
“The cemetery,” he said at last, “is at the far end of the east garden. I assume you remember.”
“I do,” she said. “Thank you.”
He stepped back from the door. It was not gracious but it was enough.
* * *
Clara and Benjamin took Lavinia to walk along the garden wall, and Helena went alone.
The Vale family cemetery was small and enclosed, tucked behind a row of yew trees at the eastern edge of the grounds.
She had been here once before, on the day of the burial, standing at the back of a crowd of people performing grief with varying degrees of conviction.
She had stood in the summer’s heat the year Huxley had died and felt nothing except relief, and she had been ashamed of the relief and had told herself the shame was grief and tried to make that serve. She had not been back since.
Huxley’s headstone was simple. She stood in front of it and did not speak for a long moment. The yew trees were still. The wind that had been cutting across the downs did not reach here.
“You were so charming,” she said. “When we first met. That is the thing I keep returning to. I was not naive — I was not ignoring signs because there were none to see. You were kind and generous and you looked at me as though I was someone worth looking at, and I believed you. I want you to know that I believed you completely. I was not tricked by someone I had reservations about. I was deceived by someone I genuinely thought was wonderful.”
The headstone sat in the shadow of an oak tree, and she almost felt Huxley’s desire to talk back as he always had.
“And then we were married. And it was as though everything you had been was put away somewhere, and what came out in its place was the real version of you. Who found me foolish and disappointing and not worth the effort of basic decency.” She paused.
“I know when it started to get worse. When you began to suspect that my father was not truly connected to the Earl. When you worked out that my mother had embellished our standing. You decided that I had deceived you, and so you felt entitled to punish me for it. You never asked me. You never gave me the chance to explain. You simply decided what I was and treated me accordingly for three years.”
She looked at the stone.
“You told me I was nothing so many times that I began to believe it. That is what I am most angry about. Not the grabbing or the pushing or the rest of it — though I am angry about all of that too, and I have every right to be. But the thing that did the most damage was the smaller, slower, daily work of making me feel that I did not know anything, could not do anything, was not worth listening to or consulting or including. You made me feel that I was lucky to be tolerated. And I believed it. I genuinely believed it.”
She stopped and pressed her lips together for a moment.
“It took your death for me to find out that I was wrong. It took managing on my own — the house, and the money, and Lavinia, and Mary — for me to remember that I was capable of things. That I had a mind and I knew how to use it. Your death gave me that back, and the most bitter part of that is that you took it from me in the first place.”
A sound from somewhere beyond the yew trees drew her attention Lavinia’s voice, high and cheerful, saying something to Benjamin with great conviction. The ordinary sound of it cut through the grey afternoon air.
“She is wonderful,” Helena said, more quietly.
“You would not have deserved her. I think you knew that, which was part of what made you so unpleasant about her before she was born. You needed someone to be beneath you, and she was going to be too young to know she was supposed to be impressed by you.”
She exhaled. “Gideon is not like that. He crouches down to her height. He let me adopt a pig because he thought it would amuse her and make her happy.”
She looked at the headstone. It was true.
Gideon was not Huxley. She had known this for months in her mind, argued it with herself at every turn.
But standing here, at the end of what Huxley had been and done, she felt it for the first time in a way that went all the way down. Not as a thought. As a fact.
Gideon had not deceived her. He had not hidden himself until after the wedding and revealed something else underneath.
She had seen him argue and blunder and make a fool of himself.
Get things wrong and try again. She had seen him sit on the floor with Lavinia building towers out of wooden blocks.
She had seen him learn to make daisy chains. None of that was performance.
She had been letting Huxley win. Even dead and buried. Every time she had flinched away from Gideon, every time she had retreated into the agreement and all those careful words that meant nothing, she had handed Huxley another piece of the life she was trying to build.
She was not going to do it anymore.
“Gideon has been good to both of us since almost the beginning, and I have spent weeks treating him with suspicion and fear and managed to hurt him considerably because of you.” Her voice was even.
She had not expected it to be even. “You are going to take nothing else from me. Do you hear me? Not one more thing. You have had enough.”
She stood there for another moment, listening to the yew trees and the distant sound of her daughter’s voice. Then she turned and walked back through them without looking behind her.
Clara was waiting at the garden wall. She looked at Helena’s face and seemed to find her answer there without needing to ask.
“Are you ready?” she said.
“Yes.” Helena held out her arms and Lavinia lunged into them. She held her daughter against her shoulder and felt the solid warm weight of her and breathed. “I want to go back to Blackthorne.”