Chapter Twenty-Three
When all the landowners had planted hawthorn hedges, the primary intention—making use of the bramble’s thick growth and thorns and impenetrability—was to keep people out.
But, as I hurried along the muddy lanes between the village and Bramley, I could not help but appreciate how the vegetation also offered seclusion.
Sludge covered my shoes and water ruined my hems. On such a day, when any puddle could hide a pothole that might break a horse’s ankle, no one else was traveling.
I was completely alone—the haw-covered branches providing a thorny echo chamber for my every thought.
I had initially been disappointed at the prospect of Simeon and my stepdaughter—the sight of Elin and the prince on the dance floor as slippery and loathsome as a slug of milk gone sour.
Naturally, I had championed my own daughters for the position.
And, naturally, I had been thrilled when Simeon had shown interest in Rosamund.
But our family knew how to endure. Rosie’s tears would dry.
And my personal feelings were of little matter.
No matter to Sigrid’s superior smile, either.
No matter to Otto’s condescension. No matter to Simeon’s choice.
And, because it was necessary, no matter to Rosie’s tears.
We would make an advantage out of this wedding, and, if I had my way, we would polish and burnish and finagle until even the slightest advantage turned to a golden opportunity.
By the time I arrived at Bramley, my feet were soaked through, but I was in high spirits.
As the house came into view, I pictured it fixed up and overflowing with guests.
Light glowing in each of the mullioned windows.
The library filled with books once more.
Feet pattering up and down the back stairs.
Smoke at each one of the chimneys. Companions for Lucy—a bird in every chamber of the mews.
Each improvement so fractional from what was in front of me, it was impossible not to believe in the possibility of fruition.
The front door swung in and Wenthelen hurried out, hesitating for a moment at the mud, and then rushing forward once more. “Thank goodness you’re back!”
“I am fine,” I assured her.
“M’lady—” She caught sight of my hems and clicked her tongue at them. “Oh, you’re a sight.”
“The engagement is confirmed,” I continued, as she came to my side. “I’ve sent Alice into the city for more help.”
“I’ve been waiting—you see—after—” She abruptly turned and tried to keep pace as I marched toward the entrance. She was flustered and breathless.
I tried to slow so that she might keep up with me. “I do hope Alice finds someone. You’ll have to ready rooms. We must give them good rooms at least, and food, which we will have to sort out.”
“M’lady,” Wenthelen repeated, panting. She came to a stop. “You see—well—that is the problem.”
I paused and turned back to her. “We’ll thin the soups and slice the roasts into thinner pieces. Whatever we must do, we shall.”
“Not the soups. The rooms. M’lady, you see, the rain this morning was—at long last—too much.”
I sighed and marched forward once more. “No one will go upstairs to see the leak.”
“But,” Wenthelen called. “But!”
I slowed and turned. “But?”
She exhaled, her great chest heaving. “Well, you might as well see for yourself.”
The roof had caved in. There was no longer just a leak: A large support beam had softened and splintered into two and the rooftop it held up had, in its entirety, fallen into the upper floor of the west wing.
Wenthelen showed me: oversized splinters and rotten planks and scattered wood shakes.
A pile of rubble composed of decades of dust and dirt.
Initially speechless, I had wandered through the debris, the weakened floorboards creaking beneath my feet.
The rooms were not ones we used, but the damage was withering.
A film of plaster dust was in the air, and covered, more thickly, the evidence of the breakage: beams fractured as though broken bones, crown molding jutting out in pieces.
A bent chandelier sprouted from the pile, as though—as it were—the world had turned upside down.
Standing close to the refuse, I could see straight up into the gray sky above.
Bramley Hall was not endless. On my first afternoon, so many years before, Robert had completed an efficient tour: the great hall, the gallery, the bedrooms in the east, the old tower.
The upper floors of the west wing were where his first wife had kept her chambers, alongside Elin’s peach nursery.
Both had long ago been emptied. But, that first day, he had clicked through each chamber, softly explaining the details that Henry would have put last. Robert murmured about dour paintings in a room that had a view of the treetops.
He fingered some decorative ornamentation and ignored the amount of light the windows let through.
He was wan and eager to see me pleased. But I had been pleased—with the views and the windows, yes, but more so with the thick-framed paintings, the heaviness of the ornamentation, the weight of the years of prestige that coated the halls.
I craved, by then, more than views and light.
I wanted solidity. And Robert, with this home, had provided me the security I’d sought.
The walls were built from brick and stone.
I didn’t love Bramley; I clung to it, the way a beggar grabbed for a tossed coin.
And I clung to it still, all these years later.
With all its debt and depreciation, its sags and unbecoming bulges, Bramley might have spelled my destruction.
But Bramley, too, was the grand stage I so badly needed: It assured, it bolstered, it asserted—with all the force of a mighty building, all the visual pageantry it could muster—the right of its occupants to want more and to want better.
What was a performance without a stage? Staring at the rubble, I felt as though I had been holding the roof myself for all the years since Robert’s death.
As though, in its falling, my own body had failed.
With an anguished crack of my wrists, I had allowed the sky to fall upon us.
“Well, at least no one was hurt,” Elin said at supper that evening.
Prior to the afternoon’s catastrophe, Wenthelen had prepared a celebration feast for her engagement.
Cheese pie and blanched almonds and persimmons instead of our usual pottage and stew.
Despite our shock—Rosie had not emerged from her room that day—and the dust that covered the halls, I had insisted we all sit together to eat.
“Obviously,” Mathilde responded from her seat at the table. A quick look from me and she added: “And for that we must be grateful.”
“She’s right,” Wenthelen said. “Someone could have been hurt.”
“But they weren’t,” I contested. “We don’t use the upper side of the wing, for the very reason of all the leaks.
The rooms were uninhabitable, therefore uninhabited when the eaves collapsed.
” I looked up at the ceiling of the great hall, which was covered in a painted motif of apples on trees.
We sat directly beneath the pile of rubble, and, if you looked closely, you could see a stain was growing above the dining table.
“But—” Mathilde protested.
“You are right,” I spoke over her, tearing another piece of cheat bread from the loaf on the table. “We must be grateful.”
Rosie—who had sat through most of the meal with silent forbearance—stared down at her plate.
For all my blustering, I was inclined to join her.
No one had been hurt, but, from the rear of the house, anyone standing on the lawn might see: There was a yawning mouth, a gaping hole, through which you could observe a mess of rubble and dust. It was so much more than the blemish of overgrown hedges and graying whitewash: The hole was a festering sore, the weeping kind of wound that, if not properly tended to, would become fatal.
I was glad Alice was not there, for the moment, at least, to say I told you so. But Mathilde, hungrily finishing her tart, seemed more than happy to assume the role. “This could jeopardize everything,” she announced to the table.
“I do not understand why a hole in the roof jeopardizes anything!” cried Elin. “Accidents happen. People are not punished for them.” She nodded to herself—not defending me, I realized, but rather, asserting the stability of her own future.
“The hole is from years of neglect, and it cannot just be hidden,” Mathilde said. “We have no means to fix it.”
“The prince is not marrying Elin for her house.” I glanced at Rosie, who still had not looked up from her plate.
“No, but we live in it. What happens after the wedding? The hole will not be fixed on its own and we cannot afford to fix it. And that is if it isn’t seen before!”
“You cannot see the hole from the front drive. You cannot see the hole from right here.” I knocked on the tabletop.
I had carefully traced the route: You could ride or walk all the way up the drive and get through the front door without seeing the destruction.
All one had to do was keep guests from going to the west wing, or anywhere near the back of the house.
“We will need to keep it out of sight. Until the wedding. We’ll have to discourage any visitors. ”
“No.” Elin cleared her throat and then dabbed at her lips with a napkin. “No, we must prepare for that eventuality. Simeon told me he is coming for dinner the day after tomorrow.”
I stared at her, feeling, suddenly, less hungry. “You are telling us this now?”
“Now is when I am seeing you.”
I turned to Wenthelen. “We will need meat.”
Wenthelen frowned. “Perhaps woodcock?”
“And something sweet. A marmalade? We must prepare.”
“Breast of veal in white broth,” Wenthelen mused. “Or mutton with salt-and-vinegar sauce.”
“How,” Mathilde interjected, “would we get veal or mutton?”