Caroline took a deep breath. Words clamored to be spoken, and her pulse raced. But she knew that if she confessed to having brought a child with her, this new life Bathilda was building for her would fly apart like a mirage and she would instead have to remain in this agonizing present, with no chance of a more bearable future. She would have to remain with Bathilda, or alone, for ever. Neither could she stand. Caroline knew the answer she was expected to give, and she gave it. Biting down on her tongue to silence it, she shook her head. But when she raised her left hand and worked the wedding ring free, it left a perfect white band on her skin. She kept the ring in a closed fist and later slipped it into the satin lining of her vanity case, next to the photograph of herself and William.
The white band soon faded, kept hidden under satin and kid gloves until it was wholly invisible. Caroline met Lord Calcott at a reception that Bathilda took her to the following week, and she remained obedient and demure and nearly silent as he spoke and they danced and he looked at her with a heat in his eyes that left her cold inside. He was lightly built, not tall, perhaps forty-five years old, and he walked with a slight limp. His hair and moustache were speckled with gray amidst the dark, and his fingernails were neatly manicured. His hands left damp patches on her silk gowns when he held her waist to waltz. They met twice more, at a ball and a dinner party, in rooms stuffily heated against the late autumn chill. As they danced he asked her about her family, and her favorite pastimes, and how she liked London, and the English cuisine. Later he spoke to Bathilda and enquired after Caroline’s temperament, her lack of conversation, and her income. After one such evening she accepted his proposal of marriage with a nod of her head and a smile as fleeting as winter sun. He drove her back to Knightsbridge in a smart black carriage pulled by a team of four, and his goodnight kiss roamed from her cheek to her mouth, his hands shaking with rising lust.
“Darling girl,” he whispered hoarsely, pushing up her skirts and kneeling between her legs to shove his way inside her, so abruptly that she gasped in shock. Do you see? She hurled the anguished thought out, silently, to wherever Corin had gone: Do you see what has happened because you left me?
Caroline spent Christmas of 1904 with Bathilda and Mrs. Dalgleish, and she arranged to marry Henry Calcott late in February the following year. This time her engagement was properly announced, and a picture of the happy couple, taken at a celebratory ball, was published in The Tatler. As the wedding approached Caroline began to suffer from a consuming lassitude, the taste of copper in her throat, and a sickness in the mornings that made her long for the strong, cowboy coffee that Bathilda and her cousin considered too vulgar to keep in the house. Bathilda kept a stern eye on these developments.
“It seems the wedding won’t come a day too soon,” she commented one morning, as Caroline lay in bed, too dizzy and weak to rise. When the nature of her condition dawned upon her, Caroline was stunned.
“But… but I…” was all she managed to reply to her aunt, who raised an eyebrow and ordered beef tea for her, which she could not look at without gagging. Caroline remained still for several hours, and thought and thought, and tried not to see the clear implications of her pregnancy. For she was every bit as thin as she had been in Oklahoma Territory, if not thinner; and every bit as unhappy, indeed if not more so. The only thing that had changed was the man with which she lay.
Storton Manor seemed unlovely to Caroline. It was grand, but graceless; the windows too stern to be beautiful, the stone too gray to be welcoming. The driveway had been colonized by leggy dandelions and couch grass, the paint was peeling from the front door and the chimney stack was missing several pots. Her money was much needed, Caroline realized. The staff lined up crisply to meet her, as if determined to outshine the shabbiness of the house. Housekeeper, butler, cook, parlor maid, chambermaid, scullery maid, groom. Caroline descended the carriage steps and swallowed back a threatened storm of weeping as she pictured the scruffy ranch hands who had lined up for her presentation to her first marital home. And you left them, she accused herself. You just left them all without a word. She smiled and nodded for each as Henry introduced them, and they in turn bobbed a curtsy to her, or made a short bow, muttering Lady Calcott in lowered voices. She took hold of her real name, Caroline Massey, and squeezed it tightly in her heart.
Later, walking around the broad sweep of the grounds, Caroline began to feel a little better; the snowstorm pieces of herself began to settle, just softly, into a kind of order. The air of the English countryside had a sweetness, a kind of soft greenness to it, even at the far end of winter. No clamor of city streets, horses, carts, or people; no empty prairie wind, or coyotes crying, or mile after unbroken mile of horizon. She was neither too hot, nor too cold. She could see the rooftops and smoke plumes of the village through the naked trees around the house, and it soothed her to know that within a moment’s walk there were lives, being lived. A swathe of bright daffodils lit up the far end of the lawn, and Caroline walked slowly through them, her hem brushing them flat and then springing them free again. She meditated on the emptiness of her mind, on the hollow feeling she couldn’t shake, but she allowed herself to think, just for a moment, that she was safe and could bear it all.
Henry Calcott was a lusty man, so Caroline suffered his conjugal attentions every night in the first few weeks of their wedded life. She was passive and turned her face away from him, amazed at how different lovemaking felt when undertaken with a person for whom she felt nothing. Her mind and senses completely free of passion, Caroline noticed the wet sounds enjoined by the meeting of their bodies; the fleshy, slightly fetid smell; the way her husband fought for breath, and the way his eyes crossed as he neared his climax. She tried to keep her face neutral and not let her distaste show.
Workmen appeared at Storton Manor and began to tidy the grounds and make repairs to the house, both inside and out.
“Will you be all right, if I go up to town? The men shan’t bother you?” Henry asked Caroline at breakfast, three weeks after her arrival at the manor.
“Of course they won’t bother me,” she replied calmly.
“You are more than welcome to come to town with me…”
“No, no, you go. I prefer to remain here and get better acquainted with… with the house, and…”
“Very well, very well. I’ll only be a week, I should think. Just a few matters of business to attend to,” Henry smiled, returning to the morning’s papers. Caroline turned to look out of the window at the overcast day. Matters of business, she repeated to herself. At one London ball, a thin-faced girl with platinum hair had whispered to her that Henry Calcott loved a game of poker, even though he almost always lost. Caroline did not mind as long as his habit took him to London every few weeks, and left her well alone.
The second day after his departure was a day of steady rain that hung a wet curtain around the house. The view from the window was of grays and browns and muted greens, a sludgy smear of countryside blurring through the glass. Caroline sat close to the fire in the drawing room, reading an overblown romance by a woman called Elinor Glyn. Her eyes skimmed the text and her thoughts were on the child inside her: why she could not tell how she felt about it; when she should tell Henry; and why she had not done so already. This last answer at least she knew-because it was unbearably bitter, to have to give Henry Calcott the news she had yearned, fruitlessly, to give Corin. The parlormaid, a timid girl called Estelle, interrupted her reverie with a quiet knock.