‘Yes. In truth, I do. My mother has been a good many years with God, but still I feel her absence, and the lack of her advice, her… good sense and her kindness. And that of my father, of course. But I can do nothing but try to accept, and not rail against the loss. I can remember the happy times we had together, when Christopher was still with us, and I was very young.’ Young and full of feeling, not numb and quiet, as now, said the shadow inside her head; but such observations were not for sharing.
‘Rachel.’ Richard covered her hand with his, and smiled. ‘I want so much for you to be happy again. For us to be a family,’ he said.
‘I am happy,’ said Rachel, and again she felt something stir inside her, the warmth of gratitude towards him. He does truly wish to make me happy. But there was also a fleeting barb of doubt, of deceit, when she spoke. I will be happy soon, she amended, silently. When he grows to fill my heart.
‘We are alike, you and I. In our experiences… we have both lost our families, the people who raised us and loved us. I… it is hard, not to dwell in the past. The temptation to do so is very strong.’ He squeezed her fingers, and in his eyes was some desperation she didn’t yet understand. ‘But we all need somebody to share life with. To understand us, and carve a future with us. I am so happy to have found you, Rachel.’
‘And I you. But… your father…’
‘My father is lost to me,’ said Richard, curtly.
‘I’m sorry for it, Mr Weekes.’
As a wedding gift, Richard had presented Rachel with a new book by John Keats, since he knew her love of reading. One evening she asked him to read it to her, and he took the book with a look of distaste and anxiety. He did his best, but it was clear that he did not enjoy the experience. The lines of the poems were stilted, the rhythm lost; the meaning hard to follow when read as he did – as words on a page, not as the deepest thoughts of a man, rendered beautiful with language. For as long as she could, Rachel listened to ‘The Eve of Saint Agnes’ made blunt and bewildering, but Richard’s rendition was like listening to a melody played on an ill-tuned piano, and she found after a while that her jaw was clenched tight, and her eyes too, and she longed for the noise to stop. When silence fell she looked up to find Richard watching her, his expression one of defeat.
‘I fear I am not a very good reader,’ he said quietly. Rachel coloured up with guilt.
‘Oh, no! You did fine, Richard. It’s only a certain way of speaking, and comes easily with practice,’ she said.
‘Well.’ He closed the book and put it into her hands. ‘It’s hard to change the way one speaks.’
‘Oh, I didn’t mean… I meant only that reading poetry is rather more like… acting in a play, than reading straight, as from a periodical,’ she said, trying to undo any slight he might have felt.
‘A skill I’ve never had call to acquire,’ he said, a touch crossly.
‘No more have you that call now, if you do not wish it. Shall I read to you for a while, instead?’
‘As you wish, Rachel. I’m very tired.’ So Rachel opened the book and immersed herself for some minutes in the wonderful images, the strange beauty of it. She concentrated, and shaped each line as best she could, seeking to delight her husband, to prove her love of poetry well founded. But when she finished his chin had sunk onto his chest in slumber. She wondered whether to wake him and lead him up to bed, but it still seemed too forward a thing to do. So she sat in silence for a long time, with only the sifting sound of ash settling in the grate for company.
Strange and conspicuous though it made her feel, Rachel took to walking the streets of Bath alone, without an escort. But whether it was a symptom of her age, her faded looks, or the unfashionable nature of her dress, she soon began to notice looks of disapproval, appraisal, and even amusement, aimed at her as she marched along Milsom Street. She wondered if she was mistaken for a servant out on some errand for her mistress. Milsom Street was wide and airy, a parade of shops and businesses running south to north through the middle of the city, its paving stones swept cleaner than the rest. Carriages and carts and people hurried to and fro, causing a constant clatter of hooves and wheels and chatter; barrow boys and hawkers shouted their wares above it all in voices gone ragged. Some of the shops Rachel remembered from years earlier were still in business – like the milliner where her mother had bought her a new hat, trimmed with silk roses and a green velvet ribbon. One afternoon she stopped in the abbey square. Of course the vast abbey and assembly rooms and hot baths were just as she remembered them, and it struck her hard that though they had not changed, she had. She did not belong to them in the way she once had.
Her family had never been rich, but were better off than most. Her father, John Crofton, was the squire of a small estate of four farms, and had owned several hundred acres of rolling countryside where sheep and cattle grazed. The manor house where Rachel had grown up was long and low – built in the reign of Queen Elizabeth – with thick stone walls, mullioned windows and a roof that sagged between its rafters. An ancient wisteria snaked across the entire façade, producing a throng of hanging purple flowers each May and June. It was a comfortable home, well worn-in by centuries of habitation. In Rachel’s room the wooden floor sloped so pronouncedly that she and Christopher often used it in games – setting their marbles to roll across it towards a particular target. It was a house in which the children’s laughter was encouraged to ring out, and come echoing down the twisted wooden stair, never hushed or reprimanded.
John Crofton was entirely happy in the midstream where he swam. He did not fret about cozening his superiors, or waste time trying to ingratiate himself with those who held themselves lofty and aloof. Instead, John and Anne socialised with friends they were genuinely fond of, so that supper parties and teas and music evenings were merry, jovial affairs. On one occasion they were invited to dine with Sir Paul Methuen at the impossibly grand Corsham Court, which seemed the sort of place from which Rachel’s parents might emerge for ever altered, chastened or mesmerised in some way. But the Croftons returned from their evening laughing about how dull Sir Paul had been, and how preposterous the other guests had made themselves, in seeking his favour. They were not invited back again, and cared not one jot.
The two years that Rachel was away at a boarding school for young ladies, she pined for the manor house, and visited her family as often as was permitted. The three seasons that the Croftons spent in Bath introduced Rachel to a greater scale of society, and to the different fashions and foibles of city life, but the same Crofton rules applied – there was no attempt at social gain, only the pursuit of enjoyment and diversion with like-minded people. If Rachel or her parents happened to meet a young man who might be a suitable match for her, then he would be judged on his temperament, his interests and his inclination to industry, not by his name alone. She never did meet anybody there that she admired in that way, however. Handsome faces almost always turned out to be attached to vain and foolish boys. She preferred walking with her mother and friends, shopping for oddments with which they could improve a dress or a pair of shoes, or could send out as gifts; and seeing Christopher, who hated to be left behind, come bounding down the stairs upon their return.
As Rachel left the abbey square and resumed her walking, Christopher’s face came so clearly before her eyes that her steps faltered. A thin, avid face beneath a thatch of sandy blond hair, so much darker than her own. He’d had honey-brown eyes and a sharp, straight nose that the summer sun scattered with freckles. The fever that took him was brutally quick. He complained of feeling dizzy at bedtime on Monday, and was dead by sunset on Wednesday. He’d been so vibrant, so full of life and mischief, none of them could believe it had happened. They sat with his small corpse for hours, all three of them, simply staring and trying to make sense of what they saw.