Chapter Nine 1892 #5
When the worst had passed, she let the creature out.
A thought had occurred, and she dragged a heavy album from a shelf, flipping through it until she found what she was looking for: a photograph of the Hallewells plus acquaintances assembled on the terrace, with a large crowd of people behind them.
It had been taken at the summer fête; August 1888 was written beneath it in Diana’s neat hand.
A day that had started out well and descended into chaos, when a storm had boiled up from the south: thunder and lightning and torrential rain.
The clouds were there in the picture – an ominous smudge on the horizon.
The Lords v. Louts tug o’ war had been called off, and several of the gazebos ruined – brought down by the weight of water.
Theo looked more closely at the crowd of villagers and there they were, tiny but recognisable.
Her heart clenched. Toby with his arms folded, squinting into the sunshine.
And next to him, half blurred by motion, was Kit, his face dominated by an excited grin, and his hair a mess.
Theo’s eyes swam with tears. Carefully, she took the photo out of the corners, and studied every line of Toby’s face and body – the way his eyes were thrown into shadow; the slight tilt of his mouth that was perhaps impatience, waiting for the photographer to get on with it.
Every detail choked her with longing. She pressed the picture to her chest for a moment, then got up and made for the door.
The Meriwethers’ cottage looked the same, the garden just as tidy.
There was no outward sign of the torment that had gone on within its four walls, but everybody knew about it.
It would become Hallewell lore, Theo supposed; a tale passed down by word of mouth, like those about Abrecan the Wolf.
That was how villages worked, with scant thought for those living at the centre of the story. Theo knocked at the door.
Mona had become gaunt, with hollow cheeks and lines across her forehead that aged her.
‘Miss Hallewell,’ she said, without apparent surprise or pleasure. ‘It’s a long time since we saw you.’
‘How do you do, Mrs Meriwether?’
‘Well enough.’
David was at school, so Mona was alone. Neighbours would have called around to begin with, Theo supposed.
Well-wishers, sympathisers, bringers of cake and preserves.
But perhaps those visits had dwindled after the memorial, as other people’s lives had gone back to normal.
The thought of Mona trapped in that empty house all day was wretched.
Eventually, she stepped aside and said woodenly: ‘Won’t you come in?’
The cottage was tidy, well swept and far too quiet.
‘Would you like some tea?’ Mona said.
‘Oh, no, thank you. Please don’t go to any trouble.’
Mona didn’t insist. She motioned for Theo to sit down on one of the small settees, and perched herself on the opposite one. Theo brought out the photograph and handed it over. Her pulse was ticking in the back of her throat.
‘I wanted to give you this,’ she said. ‘I remembered it just now. It’s of the fête a few years ago – the one that turned into a complete fiasco.’
Slowly, almost reluctantly, Mona looked at the picture. Then she put the knuckles of one hand to her mouth and ground them into her lips.
‘My boys,’ she murmured. ‘My beautiful boys.’
For a moment, Theo thought she’d done the right thing by bringing it. But Mona’s face, when she looked up, said different.
‘I lost them both, you know,’ she said. ‘I lost them both that day. Toby’s .
. . changed. When he comes home to visit—’ Here she had to break off, gather herself.
‘Those precious, rare times he comes to visit, he can barely look at us, for the shame he feels. When we were so thick before, the four of us . . . Everything was as it was meant to be. Not like now.’
‘But Toby wasn’t to blame!’ Theo said.
‘What does that matter? None who were to blame got punished, did they?’
Her stare was so bleak that Theo had to look away.
‘I know, deep down, that it wasn’t your fault, Theo. You were just a girl . . . A lonely girl with a head full of dreams. But I do blame you – I can’t help it!’
In the silence, the staircase creaked as the cat went up.
‘I blame myself, too,’ Theo whispered.
Mona went back to staring at the photo – a moment of a happiness that would never return. Theo got up to leave.
‘Mrs Meriwether,’ she said, a tremor in her voice. ‘Is Toby engaged? Mr Crudge mentioned someone . . . the sister of a friend. Up in Durham.’
Mona looked up, incredulity dawning. Theo felt painfully exposed but she didn’t care. The need to know was greater.
‘Is it your business at all, Miss Hallewell?’
‘No. But, please, I . . . Is he engaged?’
Mona had always been so kind; now the cold look in her eyes hurt almost as much as what she said: ‘He is.’
Theo excused herself from dinner because her head was aching, and sneaked out alone.
‘What is it, miss?’ Audrey whispered. ‘What’s happened? Can I come with you?’
‘No. Thank you. It’s nothing.’
In the failing light, Theo sat by the spring and poured her pain into a letter to Toby.
All her love for him, unchanged since childhood; how she never wanted to marry another, and was stricken to hear that he would.
How much she’d loved Kit, and how sorry she was.
Her vehement wish to travel back to that night, and keep it all from happening; to have found the courage to speak at the trial.
Page after page she wrote, resting the paper on her copy of Tennyson; a hasty scribble that would be hard to read.
She concluded with a verse that had struck her, and in some ways comforted her: I have not look’d upon you nigh, / Since that dear soul hath fall’n asleep. / Great Nature is more wise than I: / I will not tell you not to weep.
The darkness deepened beneath the trees, until the words were barely visible. Theo dropped her pen.
How foolish it seemed, all of a sudden. There was nothing wise or natural about Kit’s death.
Or Missy’s. How pathetic to steal from Tennyson – a poet Toby had never liked – to lend herself gravitas.
She saw how ridiculous it was, how ridiculous she was.
She touched the gold butterfly at her neck.
There is always hope of a reprieve. But it wasn’t true.
Toby was twenty-one, come of age, holding a degree and engaged to be married.
And what was she? An hysteric, writing scandalously inappropriate letters when he had told her in no unclear way that he blamed her, and despised her, and did not want to hear from her.
Theo was too tired to fight the despair that crashed over her. He would not read her letter. He had gone.
She fumbled about in the darkness for a rock of a suitable size, then crumpled her letter around it.
Dirtying the paper, smudging the ink. She tossed it into the deepest part of the pool, where it landed with a gulp and vanished.
The words would never be read. Not by Toby, the goddess, or anyone else.
Theo stood up to leave, then turned and threw Tennyson in as well.
After the final written papers came a few wonderful weeks during which there was nothing to do but relax by the river, go rowing, and have picnics with friends.
Toby tried not to worry. He knew the exams had gone well; there hadn’t been a single moment when he’d stalled, or been blindsided by a question.
But anything less than first-class honours would feel like failure, and it made no difference how many people told him it only really mattered if one wanted a fellowship.
He didn’t want a fellowship. He just wanted to be the best.
‘Why does it matter so?’ Lily asked him, walking side by side across Elvet Bridge one day. ‘I won’t even be awarded a degree when I finish, no matter how well I do. But it’s still worth it, isn’t it? The opportunity to learn?’
‘It is,’ Toby said. For you, he added silently. ‘I just . . . A lot of people worked very hard and . . . made sacrifices, to send me here,’ he said. ‘If I do not do the very best I can, I’ll feel that I’ve let them all down.’
That wasn’t it at all, really; but it sounded good. The real reason, he suspected, was that he had nothing else.
‘Ah. So it’s duty?’ Lily said, and he could see she didn’t believe a word of it. ‘Any advances on what you might do next?’
‘No,’ he confessed, hiding the nervous jolt that always came with that question. ‘Something will come along.’
She sighed. ‘Indeed.’
All Toby knew was that he wasn’t going back to Hallewell.
Franke-Grosvenor hired a carriage and invited Tom and Toby on a day trip out of the city, to hike across moorland swathed in yellow gorse and pink heather.
They walked for miles, then flopped down beside a stream to a lunch of pork pies and gherkins.
Toby watched cloud shadows slide silently over the distant hills, and felt his mind unfurl.
The world was still there, waiting for him. He need not be anxious about it.
He knew he needed to get on and propose to Lily, so he took her out in a punt the next day, as she had once suggested.
The river was low, and he poled them upstream with no real effort, and Lily kept her side of the bargain by draping herself very elegantly over the seat, though with her nose stuck in a book.
Cramming for her first-year exams. She seemed put out, as though the punt wasn’t all that she’d hoped for.
Or, he began to suspect, as though he wasn’t all that she’d hoped for.