Prologue #3
After she gathered up her purchases, they made their way out of the shop. After the shadowed, dusty hush, the rush of noise and light in the daylight outside was startling. Jane blinked and laughed at the sudden change.
‘It’s this way,’ she said, and turned to lead the way past the rows of other bookshops and news stands.
Limestone and glass buildings stretched above their heads, carriages and horses clattered past, nannies shepherded their charges towards the parks, women in feathered hats walked by and there were carts selling roasted chestnuts and lemonade. It was all shouts, cries and laughter.
‘Not many open fields, I’m afraid,’ she said. She glanced up at him and then quickly away, dazzled by the sunlight turning his hair to gold, the glow playing on the sharp, elegant angles of his face.
‘There are days since I came here that I miss the green and the quiet, true, but there is something so energising about all this.’ She waved at all the movement and noise.
‘Something fast and urgent that makes a person want to move, to do and see everything before it’s too late. To really make something.’
Jane studied the street around them: the kaleidoscopic swirl of colour, the light gleaming on shop windows. ‘I don’t really know much else but the city, but I do see what you mean. There is so much potential in every inch of this place, so much variety. There is…is…’
‘Choice,’ he said quietly.
He looked so wistful as he studied the street around them that her heart ached for him.
She didn’t know what was trapping him in place, but she understood the feeling far too well.
‘Choice for some people, true. But I’m sure others are kept as firmly in their place as any serf in a Walter Scott novel of ye olde days.
It can be so easy to be swept away in such fast tides. Easy to sink beneath them.’
‘That is far too true.’ He studied her for a long, quiet moment as people swirled and pushed around them on the pavement.
Then he smiled down at her, a spontaneous and unguarded smile, as if she was glimpsing in him a place of real delight in the moment.
It made her smile too, made the whole day seem light and bright.
He held out his arm to her, as if she was a grand, grown-up lady, and she shyly slid her hand over his fine tweed sleeve.
She felt the flare of a heated ember as she touched him, and time slowed for a breath.
It felt so intimate, beyond any words she could think of.
They walked on through the crowd, past ladies in fine walking suits, men shouting out their wares from hand carts and shrieking children; she saw none of it.
She saw nothing but him. ‘It’s a small thing, I know, my teaching.
But even just a little knowledge, a few skills, can help a person pull themselves up a bit where they can find space to breathe.
Can see something else, something beyond, for themselves.
For girls, especially, that can seem almost impossible sometimes. ’
He nodded solemnly.
‘I think Ma, too, just wants me to marry well. Her idea of well.’
‘And what is that idea?’
‘A fine income, of course. A comfortable home, a place in respectable society.’
‘What do you consider to be “well”, Jane?’
‘I…’ She broke off with a nervous laugh. ‘No one has asked me that before.’
‘No one?’
‘I suppose Ma and Connor just think I completely agree.’
‘Yet you must consider such things, even if you don’t say it to them?’
‘Of course I do. I think I want—well, someone intelligent. A reader. A thinker.’
He looked doubtful. ‘Does anyone not think?’
‘Oh, yes, far too many people. They just do what they’ve always done, without considering why they should, or if it’s even the right thing. Haven’t you noticed?’
‘I’m afraid I have, yes. I sometimes envy them.’
‘Do you really?’ Jane said, astonished. Surely someone as clearly intelligent, as gorgeous, as Benedict could not envy anyone?
‘Yes. People like my father, they don’t see, don’t know.
They don’t notice life, with all its terribleness and its beauty.
They don’t notice other people.’ He shook his head, as if despairing of such a narrow view.
‘But what a drab life that would be. So, I suppose you and I must go on trying our hardest to do whatever we can.’
Jane nodded. They turned onto a pavement through the park, where it was quieter and softer. ‘So, you asked about my ideal husband. Intelligent, caring: that is what I want. So, it can’t be your father!’
He laughed heartily and she felt so warm and delighted at making him so merry. ‘You’d be surprised how many ladies have tried to marry him since we lost my mother.’
Jane was dubious, after all he’d said about his father. ‘A careless man who only enjoys hunting and fishing? One who must be, well, rather old? For you must be my age.’
‘He does seem quite ancient. But maybe those ladies think he has other compensations. He does have a very large house, one which could be very grand, as your mother prescribes. But whether it’s comfortable or not, that is debatable.’
‘I am certainly not against a comfortable house, or a place in society. Having friends, going to parties, those seem like pleasant things.’ In fact, she often wished for more friends, to be like the girls she sometimes saw walking in the park or wandering through shops together, whispering and laughing.
She was caught between two worlds, unable to go back to the Lower East Side, unable to move forward.
‘Do you not have friends, then?’ he asked, as if he’d read something of her thoughts.
‘Not of the sort my mother would like me to have.’ She stopped to study a fountain, a goddess spilling sparkling water from her upheld urn, looking so serene and uncaring.
‘Ma likes to read the society pages, you see—stories of people who hold masked balls and tea parties, who go to Newport in the summer. I’m afraid we won’t ever be them, no matter how hard my brother works. We’re still too…Irish.’
‘So, she wants you to marry a railroad tycoon of some sort? What in my country would be a title, I suppose.’
Jane laughed. ‘She might as well wish for the moon to be green cheese. My brother knows many other businessmen. I’d settle for one of them, if he was kind and easy to rub along with; if he let me get on with my work and would sit by the fire and read with me in the evenings.’
‘So, he must be kind, of a mild temper, intelligent, well-read, with friends and a comfortable home…’
Someone who wouldn’t make her feel so much it would destroy her to lose him.
She could never bear that. It would hurt too much.
Benedict seemed just the sort who would claim her heart and ruin everything, even if he was well-read.
‘It sounds frightfully dull when you put it like that, but yes, I could accept that.’
‘But it sounds so much less than you deserve,’ he said softly.
Jane stared up at him, her heart pounding at the way he watched her and spoke to her. The way he seemed to understand her. ‘What would you want in a spouse?’
He tilted his head in thought. ‘I would rather not marry at all, if I’m quite honest.’
Jane was surprised. Surely so many ladies chased after him, longed for him? He no doubt would have his pick back in England. ‘Why not? Doesn’t everyone…?’
‘Everyone marry? Most of us do, yes, because what choice do we have?’
And that was the real world. They had obligations to others, expectations to fulfil. ‘Not much choice, you’re right, especially for women. But for a man…’
‘Some men have even less choice. Not if we’re to do our duty to so many other people.’
She could hear a shadow in his voice. ‘And you have such a duty, I think.’
He nodded, still staring out at the park and the people laughing. ‘It was never a choice, but it’s mine nevertheless. I hope I can make it something similar to what you describe, Jane—someone kind, intelligent, caring.’
‘It sounds like less than you deserve, Benedict,’ she said gently, echoing his words to her.
He gave her a smile, so sweet, so sunny, it made her melt. ‘What do we deserve, then, Jane?’
She’d never considered that before. What did she deserve? ‘Well, love, I suppose. Everyone deserves that, to be loved for who they really are.’
‘Does that even exist beyond poems?’ He sounded so doubtful, and she wondered what was in his past that made him think love could never be achieved.
‘I’m not sure.’ Jane thought of her mother studying her father’s little charcoal portrait, the sound of her muffled sobbing at night. They had loved each other, and look what had happened: a lifetime of sadness. ‘For a few, yes. I don’t dare wish for it.’
‘How could someone not love you? Your eyes, they…’
His words broke off roughly. A heavy silence hung in the air between them, pressing down on her heart, making each breath feel slightly harder.
‘There was one young man who said he loved me,’ she admitted.
‘His name was Paul; his family lived in the same building as mine when I was younger. He was older than me, but he would follow me around. I didn’t like it. ’
It hadn’t felt like love, just…lust maybe. She hadn’t thought about Paul in a long time. He was so very different from Benedict.
‘I hope you sent him away, then, with a boxed ear.’
Jane laughed. She could never have boxed Paul Brosnahan’s ear; he was a foot taller than her and broad and burly.
But she certainly enjoyed imagining it. ‘My brother did, once he found out. Connor told him I was much too young for courtship.’ She shook her head.
‘Paul just said back in County Mayo, girls my age have at least two bairns… Ugh. But he did go away; said he would make his fortune and then Connor would beg him to marry me. Which will never happen.’