‘Can you not be happy, that he wishes to move on? That he starts to forget his pain, and has a chance of happiness now?’
‘I shall never be happy to be separated from him. If that is all you came in to say, then leave me in peace and get you gone. It pleases me no end to know I will never see your face again. That face.’
‘I pray you might,’ Rachel said quietly, and Josephine frowned. ‘What I came to say is this: I know the pain of losing family. I know the loneliness of believing yourself separated from them for ever. I know how you must… suffer, now.’
‘And you delight in it?’ Josephine whispered, shaking with feeling in spite of herself.
‘I do not. Jonathan… your son knows loss and suffering too. You told me he hadn’t the strength for it, and that was why he did not heal, but you were wrong. He only needed some way to set it down, and break from it. He will always remember it, but his anger will burn itself out. I believe he will forgive you, in the end; and I will try my best on your behalf. I will try to remind him of how greatly you have suffered, and how greatly you suffer still.’
For a long time Josephine only stared at her. A tremor passed through her, a shiver of pain, or revulsion, Rachel couldn’t tell.
‘Leave me be,’ Josephine whispered.
‘It will take time – he needs time. But I will not forget, I promise you. Family is too precious a thing to set aside.’
‘I wish you had never come here. I wish that wretch Starling had never convinced me to let you in!’ Josephine spat.
‘But she did, and now all can move on. I hope… I hope one day your anger will also burn itself out, Mrs Alleyn. Or you risk that it consume you utterly. I… I will write to you, if you wish it.’
‘Mrs Weekes, I have never once got any of the things I wished for.’ With that, Josephine turned back to the window, her shoulders rigid above her straight spine, draped in inky darkness. She was a silhouette against the sunlight; a single still figure, like the drawing of a woman, all hollow inside.
‘Farewell, Mrs Alleyn,’ Rachel murmured, dropping into a curtsy that nobody saw.
Outside, Jonathan handed her up into the carriage. He frowned at her serious expression but did not ask what had passed between his betrothed and his mother. Starling sat perched on the edge of the leather bench inside, looking desperately uncomfortable, as though she ought not to have been there at all. When Sol Bradbury appeared on the servants’ stair, she swore and climbed out again, rushing over to the cook and hugging her. Once she was back and seated the coachman stirred up the horses, and Starling turned to look back at the house, craning her head out of the window. Jonathan did not look back, and neither did Rachel. He gripped her hand so tightly it was almost uncomfortable, and kept his eyes set straight ahead. Rachel felt Josephine’s sorrowful scrutiny like a cold shadow behind them.
‘We must stop in Bathampton,’ said Starling, as Lansdown Crescent passed out of view behind them. ‘I must see Bridget.’
The carriage waited at the side of the Batheaston road. Jonathan and Rachel stood on the miller’s bridge, against the parapet; looking west, downstream along the river. The sunlight on the water was blinding, the sky too bright to make out the edge of Bath. Below, along the riverbank, the lovers’ tree stood where it ever had; a little older, a little more gnarled. It trailed its long fingers in the water, and didn’t feel the chill. Rachel had imagined it as a more graceful tree, and further from the road, out of sight of passers-by. Perhaps in some secret dell somewhere. She looped her arm through Jonathan’s, and waited for him to speak.
‘I scratched out our initials. I wish I had not,’ he said, shielding his eyes with one hand. ‘I remember it now.’
‘Your initials?’
‘Mine and Alice’s. An A and a J. We made them when we were ten years old – painstakingly, I might add. It took me hours to do. When I found the note there, after she vanished… I took out my knife there and then and destroyed the carving.’
‘Richard Weekes’s note, it must have been,’ Rachel said softly. Jonathan glanced at her.
‘Would it upset you to see it?’
‘You have it? I thought it lost?’
‘So it was. I found it as I emptied my rooms. It had fallen through a split in one of the drawers of my desk, and was caught beneath it all this time.’ He handed it to her; a small square of paper, yellowed with age. She knew the writing at once, and thought of the letters Richard had written her when they were courting, all full of love and promises. That crabbed hand with each letter drawn separately, laboriously. She’d burnt them all, in one bundle and without feeling, as she’d packed up her own few things. ‘Is it his hand?’ Jonathan asked.
‘Yes.’ Rachel nodded. ‘Of course it is.’ He took the note back and looked down at it, frowning; it fluttered in his fingers.
‘One day, only,’ he said softly. ‘She went to meet him for the last time the morning before my return. I missed her by just a single day.’
He read the note once more and then let the breeze take it. The paper vanished into the sunlight; they glimpsed it further downstream – a yellow fragment, hurrying away. The breeze rattled the winter trees beside the bridge; the river made a quiet slithering sound. Behind them the sluice gates were closed, the race dry, and the mill wheel sat silent and still.
‘Your eyes are sad, love. Tell me your thoughts,’ said Jonathan. ‘Are you sorry to leave Bath behind?’
‘No. How could I be?’ Rachel smiled, tightening her arm around his. ‘I was thinking again, as I have before, how strange it was God gave me this face. Gave it to Abi and me, and also to Alice.’
‘But it is not the same face. Similar, but not the same. When I first set eyes on you, I saw Alice, but I was mad and addled then. I saw what I wanted to see. Now when I look at you, I see only Rachel.’ He reached up, brushed his thumb across her cheek. ‘It is this woman that I love, and she is very different to the girl I loved before. And I like to think it was fate, besides.’
‘Fate?’
‘Your face is the only reason we met in the first place, so it cannot be chance. It cannot be, when you are the one person who could make me… who could help me to be whole again.’
‘I like that idea.’ Rachel smiled, wryly. ‘Then my first marriage was not a catastrophe, but a means to a better end,’ she said. Jonathan grimaced.
‘Speak not of that. Speak not of him,’ he said.
‘Very well,’ Rachel agreed. ‘No more, from this day.’ She stared down in to the brilliant water, until its rushing made her dizzy. ‘We have all three of us lost a sister to this river,’ she murmured.
‘What?’
‘You, and I, and Starling. This river took Alice and Abi both, and vanished them without trace; yet it spat up Richard Weekes within hours of him entering it. Perhaps the river has a spirit that only welcomes the good of heart, and rejects the others.’ She saw Jonathan’s face darken, as it did at any mention of his blood relationship to Alice, or when Richard Weekes was named. ‘Forgive me,’ she said hurriedly. ‘I thought out loud, and should guard my words better.’
‘No, never do that,’ said Jonathan. ‘Never guard your words – promise me. There has already been far too much of that in my life. Always say what you think, and what you feel, and I will do the same. Even if you think I would rather not hear it. Promise me.’
‘Very well. I promise it,’ said Rachel. She looked up at Jonathan’s serious expression; saw the cares that still crowded him. ‘My heart had been half dead since my family died. For years, that part of me slept… but you woke it, Jonathan,’ she murmured. She put her fingertips to his mouth and felt his breath catch; he pulled her hand away and kissed her lips. A soft and silent kiss that made the sky widen and the ground seem deeper; that pushed the world away from them, because only they could know the elation it caused. When they broke apart it was not far. Jonathan curled his hand around the back of Rachel’s neck and leant his forehead to hers, with his eyes closed, serene.