She stood on the edge of the blacktop, looked east and west, followed the road with her eyes. Thanks to the glasses, she could actually see the road twist into the distance. Which way to civilization? She went west. She bunched up her gown to jog, and tried to run, but her shoes didn’t cooperate. They had even less support than her stays. Who knew she would actually miss her harness of a sports bra and running shoes? She slowed to a walk, letting her gown fall back to her ankles.
She passed English farmland pungent with manure and grasses. A hawk circled overhead and she thought of Henry. Her thoughts always circled back to Henry. Sunshine poured down on her and she felt naked without a bonnet and, for once, she could actually use a parasol and fan. Sweat dampened her silk stockings and her lower back, so she stripped off her pelisse and gloves. Those lemons she rubbed under her underarms this morning were not exactly meant to hold up under a power walk in nineteenth-century wedding attire.
And she would feel better about all this tramping about the English countryside without knowing where she was really going if she had a cell phone. Or a portable GPS. Or at least a damn plastic water bottle. How irresponsible it was for a mother to fling herself into the countryside on the other side of the earth without even knowing where she was going? What if something happened to her and Abigail ended up getting raised by her ex? In Boston? With the fortunate Marcia Smith?
By the time she reached the top of the third hill, she didn’t have to shield her eyes from the sun, because a battalion of rain clouds had floated in. The breeze, cooler now, dampened her skin, and she could tell that it was going to rain. How could it rain on her almostwedding day? She pulled her pelisse back on even as she licked her dry lips. The sight of a church spire and slate-roofed red-brick houses in the distance helped spur her on.
Someone in a passing car tossed a white cardboard coffee cup out the window and over a hedgerow. The blacktop turned to cobblestone as she crossed what must’ve been a stone bridge from the Roman era. Normally, Chloe would’ve loved this quaint village with its cobblestoned main street and whitewashed, half-timbered cottage storefronts where cars seem oddly out of place. As she read the sign at the end of the bridge, HUNTSFORDSHIRE, she walked right into a woman pushing a jogging stroller in her workout gear and talking on her cell.
“So sorry,” the young mom said. The baby looked up at Chloe with big blue eyes.
She had to get back to Abigail. What was she doing?
“Are you quite all right?” The young mom took the cell from her ear.
Chloe nodded yes, even though she really wasn’t.
“Sorry again.” The mom pushed the stroller on.
Chloe, out of habit, curtsied. She curtsied!
The mom’s eyes narrowed and she looked Chloe up and down, navigating her precious baby around in a wide circumference as if Chloe were some kind of lunatic.
Her head throbbed with the onslaught of car engines, a train, honking horns, voices, and car radios. Raindrops fell, and umbrellas of all different sizes and colors popped up all around her.
None of the men bowed to her. The women didn’t curtsy. Nobody even looked at her, or if they did, they quickly looked away out of politeness. She was the raving lunatic homeless woman on the street.
Pelting rain dripped down her face and neck and probably by now had smudged her eyebrow liner made from candle ashes. Even in the rain, though, the aroma of scones spilled out of a bakery. She stood in front of a tearoom and coffeehouse under a dripping awning, looking at a reflection in the window of her sodden self. The antibride with a child hidden in her attic.
She pressed her hand to the window. She needed a plane ticket home, but first—coffee. It didn’t even have to be a double espresso latte, but she didn’t have any money. For the first time in a long time, she ached for a credit card, and couldn’t believe she cut up all her credit cards in a fit of rage all those years ago.
A young man sat inside the tearoom, holding a bouquet of flowers wrapped in white paper. For the first time in forever, a man with flowers didn’t make her moon over Winthrop. She smiled. They were better off, the two of them, without each other. She had left him for good reason, and now she finally felt the strength to fight him in the upcoming custody trial. She could do it—and win.
The young man in the tearoom gave Chloe a hostile glance; no doubt she looked crazy. She stepped back and the rain from the awning dripped heavily on her. He was waiting for someone, because he had a life, a real life, with real people in it. All these people had a life. She had nothing. Except for Abigail, who counted on her for everything. And as far as that went, she had blown it. She’d be coming home without the prize money. What she would be coming home with, though, was a resolve to leave the past behind—all of it—even the nineteenth century, and that was worth a lot more than a hundred grand.
She darted under a covered bus stop where an old woman sat in her green trench coat with a cloth market basket full of lettuce, tomatoes, and cucumbers. Lettuce! Green lettuce helped digestion. She craved lettuce. She’d trade the gown off her back for a chopped salad.
She sat on the bench next to the woman, wiped her glasses with her wet gloves, put them back on, and looked up the street, where, high atop a hill in the distance, Dartworth Hall stood. It would’ve made a great postcard. Hell, it probably was one and probably was sold in the shops along this street.
“I can’t believe—” she said out loud, like a homeless woman.
The old woman looked at her, then quickly looked at her watch.
“I threw it all away.”
The woman pushed back her plastic rain scarf. “Threw what away?” She eyed Chloe up and down; she was curious.
“Dartworth Hall. The prize money. Everything.”
The woman gave Chloe a tissue from her trench pocket, which only reminded Chloe of Henry and his handkerchiefs. Chloe wiped her dripping nose.
“Are you part of that film going on up there?”
Chloe nodded. “They wanted me to marry him. But I couldn’t. Even though it was just for TV. I couldn’t.”
The old woman had kind green eyes. “Marry who?”
“Why, Sebastian, of course. Sebastian Wrightman.”
The old woman looked confused. She stood up. “Who? Ah. Here’s my bus. But Dartworth Hall doesn’t belong to anyone named Sebastian.” The bus lumbered up. “Henry Wrightman is the master of Dartworth Hall.”
“What?” Chloe clenched her pelisse around her chest; her lips quivered.
The bus doors opened and the woman stepped up the first step in her black flats. “I would say it’s a good thing you didn’t marry that Sebastian—”
“Door’s closing!” the annoyed driver yelled, and the doors snapped closed.
Chloe stepped out from under the Plexiglas bus stop, into the rain, to watch the woman take her seat and wave.
She collapsed back down on the bench under the covered bus stop and buried her head in her hands. Maybe that old woman didn’t know what she was talking about. Maybe she had Alzheimer’s or dementia or some sort of addled-brain disease that Chloe was convinced she would get someday, too, if she didn’t have it already. She better start doing crossword puzzles or something—and soon. Wait a minute. Crossword. Acrostic—she opened her wedding reticule and pulled out the well-worn folded-up poem from Sebastian. The acrostic jumped out at her now:
As the sun shines high in the sky
Love blooms in my heart, I cannot lie.
Let our love grow