Chapter Eight A Meadowlark in May
In which a bride studies a stranger's face and finds it will not lie to her
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Graham slept, and the train rushed on through the dark.
The night wore itself thin. Dawn came up purple in the east, then streaked itself slowly with gold, and at last drew a thin band of crimson across its own gray forehead.
The faint sweetness of lily-of-the-valley still hung in the small drawing-room, and threaded itself, unnoticed, through the separate dreams of the two strangers who had, by no choice either one of them had made, become husband and wife twelve hours before.
Behind the drawn curtain of her berth, Calie stirred, and came slowly back to a waking she had learned, these last three months, to dread more than almost anything else in her days.
The weight of it always found her first thing, before her eyes had even properly opened — sat on her chest like something with actual mass, actual gravity, threatening for one terrible instant each morning to press the breath entirely out of her.
The sun cleared the horizon at last, gold above its fading purple, and its early light found the gap in the curtain and lay warm across her closed eyes, and there was no holding off the truth any longer.
She was married. It was done. The wrenching goodbyes of the night before, her mother's tears, her brother's determined cheerfulness — all of it already receding behind her, and ahead of her now only the long, dreaded unknown of a life bound to a man she had spent three months learning to fear.
How did I ever manage to go through with it, she wondered, except for how much I love them, and how much I could not bear to watch them suffer for my sake?
Slowly the fragments of the previous night came back to her — the wedding itself a blur of music and strain, and then, unaccountably, darkness; she must have fainted, though she rarely did.
She remembered opening her eyes to a ring of unfamiliar faces, and Gregory's — could it really have been Gregory's?
— wearing an expression gentler than she had ever once seen there in all the years she'd known him.
Someone had lifted her into this berth afterward.
She had swallowed something bitter from a small glass, and slept.
She found, turning the fragments over, a grudging thread of gratitude that he had not tried, last night, to force conversation on her — he had seemed so determined to, in the car on the way to the reception, and she had dreaded it fiercely.
There was nothing left to say that her letters over these last three months hadn't already said, over and over, in every desperate register she could summon.
He knew perfectly well she did not love him.
He knew she had only agreed to this for her mother's sake, and for the memory of her father, whose good name he had threatened to drag through whatever mud his considerable talent for cruelty could manufacture.
What use was there in saying any of it again?
The thing was done. Let him have his way now, and make of her whatever misery he pleased.
If he would only leave her to suffer it quietly, without the added cruelty of his tongue, she thought she could bear it.
And perhaps, she told herself, with the particular bleak comfort of the very young and the very tired, perhaps she would not have to bear it terribly long.
As the light grew stronger, some cautious curiosity got the better of her, and she lifted the edge of the curtain to look.
He lay quiet on the couch across the small room, one hand tucked beneath his cheek, the other resting flat across his chest as though guarding something precious even in sleep. He seemed hardly to be breathing at all, so deep and still was his exhaustion.
Calie let the curtain fall, startled at how near he'd been the whole night through without her knowing it, and lay back with her hand at her throat.
She would not wake him. She had, perhaps, this one small window of solitude left to her, and she meant to spend it thinking of her mother and her brother, and not of the man asleep six feet away who held, whether she liked it or not, the whole shape of her coming life in his hands.
Jefferson's warm words came back to her unbidden — he's got the honestest eyes I ever saw, Celie, I like him already — and she felt a fresh stab of something between tenderness and despair.
Of course the dear boy knew nothing. He hadn't read the letters.
He didn't know what threats had bought this wedding, what language had been used against people Jeff loved without reservation.
She shuddered at the memory even as some small, worn-out part of her was glad, fiercely glad, that her brother had been spared the knowing of it.
Her family would never learn what she had paid to keep them from ruin.
That, at least, was hers to protect, whatever else was lost.
He had made a far better impression at the wedding than she'd dared hope, she had to admit. Ten years abroad had changed him more than she'd expected. He had not, somehow, been quite so dreadful as the version of him she'd built up in her mind from those awful letters.
A sudden, unreasonable curiosity took hold of her — a wish to look at him properly, just once, and know for certain what she truly had ahead of her.
She fought it for a moment, telling herself it was foolish, even dangerous, to let him catch her studying him — but the wish won out, and she drew the curtain back again.
He lay exactly as before. His dark hair, mussed against the pillow, gave him an unexpectedly fine, almost scholarly look. It seemed impossible, studying that quiet, unguarded face, that he could be the author of those letters at all.
She searched his features for some trace of the boy she remembered — the one who'd tied her braids to her chair at family dinners, who'd slipped things down the back of her collar to make her scream, who had never once in a decade of visits to their shared uncle's house passed up a chance to humiliate her in front of company.
The memories crowded thick and ugly, and she pushed them firmly away, back to wherever memories like that were meant to stay.
Study him as she might, though, she could not find the man those letters had described anywhere in the quiet, well-formed face before her.
There was nothing coarse in it, nothing self-indulgent.
His hand, resting across his chest, was fine and clean — nothing like the stubby, bitten fingers she remembered from childhood, fingers she had once found faintly repulsive and had never quite managed to stop noticing.
How strange, she thought, that a face could lie so completely.
If she had met this man as any ordinary stranger, she would have said, on the evidence of his face alone, that here was a man of real kindness, real self-respect, real regard for the women in his life.
She would have been entirely wrong, of course — she knew that better than anyone alive — but the deception of it unsettled her all the same.
And I am his wife, she thought again, letting the strangeness of it wash back over her. How am I to bear years of this — of hating a man whose face keeps insisting, against everything I know, that I have no cause to?
She lay back at last, eyes shut, willing sleep or at least stillness to claim her again, and found, with something close to alarm, that a not-unpleasant image of his sleeping face lingered stubbornly behind her closed eyes even so.
Ephesians 4:31–32 surfaced in her memory, unwelcome and half-remembered from some childhood Sunday: "Let all bitterness, and wrath, and anger...
be put away from you: and be ye kind one to another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another.
" She pushed the verse away as firmly as she'd pushed away the memories.
Not this. Not him. Never that. Whatever peace that verse offered other people, she could not imagine it was meant for her, not after everything he had done.
The rhythm of the train and her own deep weariness pulled her back under before she could untangle the thought any further, and she slept again, while across the small room, the man she believed to be her enemy slept on undisturbed.
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Graham woke all at once, every sense alert, as the steady drum of the wheels beneath him fell suddenly silent and the particular hush of open countryside rushed in to fill the gap.
Somewhere outside, muffled voices drifted past — a brakeman's flat, unhurried complaint about a half-hour's delay, the metallic ring of a hammer at work on the undercarriage.
His hand had gone, before he was even fully awake, to the small hard shape of the gold case still resting safe against his chest.
He checked the curtain of her berth — no movement — and eased himself up, easing his shoes on with careful, silent movements, weighing whether he dared step out and see where they'd stopped without first making sure she was well. He bent close to the gap in the curtain, meaning only a glance.
Calie, eyes closed, felt the weight of his attention and held her breathing slow and even by main force of will, feigning sleep she did not actually have.
Graham looked a long moment, struck by how much color had returned to her lips since the night before, and felt something bloom quietly in his chest that he had no business feeling and made no attempt, in that unguarded moment, to talk himself out of.
Then he drew back, unlocked the door with careful quiet, and stepped out into the aisle.