For a while they walked in steady silence, watching Cassandra as she darted here and there beneath the naked limbs of a horse chestnut tree, filling her coat pockets with glossy nuts.
‘I am glad,’ Harriet said then. Rachel turned to look down at her diminutive friend, confused. ‘Jonathan Alleyn’s heart is good. I know this to be true. And war may change a man’s mind – change his outlook and his behaviour, change the very way he thinks, perhaps. But it cannot change a man’s heart.’
‘But perhaps, if they behave badly enough, it matters not that their heart remains what it always was. Not everything – not every deed – can be forgiven, after all.’
‘Can it not? Is that not what Christianity teaches?’
‘I don’t know.’ Rachel thought of Alice, and the way she had vanished from the world. She thought of the Portuguese girl Jonathan had spoken of, crushed beneath a rock and ravaged. ‘I don’t know,’ she said again. Harriet squeezed her hand.
‘Don’t give up on him, Mrs Weekes,’ she said softly. ‘Nobody has grown as close to him since he returned from the war as you are now. You are doing him good, I know it. And you are doing good, by your time and your… willingness to see past the wall he has built around himself.’ Rachel nodded vaguely.
‘I hear such things about him, from… others, that I hardly know what to think,’ she said.
‘You can trust my own account, I hope. I know him to be good.’
‘But, how do you know, Mrs Sutton? How are you so sure?’
‘I… I cannot say. Forgive me. Tell me, what does your husband make of your progress?’
‘He makes nothing of it. He knows nothing of it,’ said Rachel. ‘He cares only for the wage I am paid by Mrs Alleyn. He never asks me what I do there, or how I fare.’ Try as she might, Rachel couldn’t keep the unhappiness from her voice, and alongside it was something new; something like contempt. She hoped that Harriet Sutton wouldn’t hear it, but the look her friend gave her was troubled, and she didn’t speak for a good few moments.
‘The first year of marriage is a voyage of discovery,’ Harriet said eventually. ‘And perhaps it is inevitable that not all things we discover will be to our liking.’ She smiled sympathetically, and Rachel looked away. Suddenly, her own distaste for her husband shamed her.
They had reached the end of the track across Barton Fields, and waited for the men by the path that would lead back into the city, and to a coffee house where they could warm themselves. Rachel smiled warmly at Richard to disguise her true feelings. His return smile was thin and uneven, as though he tasted something sour in his mouth, and Rachel’s heart sank even further.
‘Well, I think we’ve earned something hot to drink, and perhaps something sweet to eat, to warm us, hmm?’ said Captain Sutton, sweeping his daughter into his arms and touching the tip of his long nose to hers. ‘Cassie! Your nose is like an icicle!’
‘There’s nothing so warming as having one’s family around one, I think,’ Harriet remarked to Rachel and Richard, who had linked arms without speaking to one another.
‘Quite so,’ said Rachel, but Richard spoke at the same time, and more loudly.
‘I have found little warmth in my own, lately,’ he said, then closed his mouth tightly, letting his eyes slide angrily over Rachel’s face before looking away into the mist. Rachel was mortified and didn’t know where to look. There she stood, arm in arm with her husband, their faces turned away and a wall of unspoken hard feeling between them.
Late in the evening, Rachel found herself wondering about Richard, and his habitual long absences at night. At first she had assumed he was with clients at inns or private houses, or with traders; that his frequent drunkenness was the result of toasting and sampling and the sealing of deals, or somehow otherwise linked to his business. But after his comment to the Suttons, she was no longer sure. Duncan Weekes had counselled her to be glad his son had not broken his wedding vows to her, and to forget about any prior indiscretion. But what if he does break them? She didn’t dwell on the question, since the answer was what if indeed – she could do nothing to stop him, except to expose him and try to shame him into behaving better. But even that, she found, did not interest her. She was not interested in improving him. The realisation came as a shock, and if it was true then she should also be uninterested what he got up to when he was not at home. He would say it was not her business, and he would possibly be right. But I would still know, she decided. I would know the full story of what I have wed.
Rachel wrapped up against a light rain, only heavy enough to glaze the cobbled pavement. She went from place to place with her brows furrowed and her hood drawn forward to hide her face from passers-by. She could not bring herself to enter an inn alone, but she peered in through windows, and through doors when they were thrown open by people coming and going. A cloud of talk and laughter and warmth and stink wafted out from within each time, and caused her a curious mix of revulsion and loneliness. She saw ruddy faces, and smiling eyes; she saw arguments and tears, and lovers dipping their heads together in secretive corners that the candlelight barely reached; she saw men drinking alone, staring at nothing, swallowing down mouthfuls of spirits like food. But she did not see Richard Weekes in any place she visited, and after two hours of searching she gave up, cold and oddly disappointed. Do I want him to be a reprobate, then? To excuse myself for not loving him? On the pavement she almost stepped on a man, sitting with his feet in the gutter.
‘Beg pardon, sir,’ she muttered, as the toe of her shoe got caught in his coat tails. The man swayed but made no reply, and Rachel paused. ‘Mr Weekes? Is that you?’ She bent down to see his face. There was a cut above Duncan Weekes’s right eye, which had dribbled a crusted line of blood down to his jaw; he sat with his eyes shut and his mouth slack, stinking of brandy and piss. ‘Mr Weekes – are you well? Can you hear me?’ said Rachel, more urgently. She shook his arm and his head came up, slowly, eyes opening a fraction to see what trouble he was in.
‘Rachel! How charming to see you, my dear girl. Do come in, come in. Sit by the fire and warm yourself.’ His voice was a slur, hard to understand. Rachel bit her lip anxiously.
‘We are not at home, sir. We are on the street by the Unicorn. What happened to your eye? Were you attacked?’
‘My eye?’ the old man mumbled. ‘My eye?’
‘Come, sir – you must rise. It’s far too cold a night to be sitting out like this, and we wouldn’t want you apprehended for doing so. Come, I cannot lift you, you will have to help me.’ Rachel grasped him under his arm and urged him to rise; his coat sleeve was wet through, and filthy. For a while Duncan didn’t move, and Rachel was left to tug at him futilely, but then a pair of passing young men saw her plight; they hefted Duncan to his feet with ease, grinned and tipped their hats to Rachel when she thanked them. Slowly, she coaxed Duncan Weekes to walk. ‘Let’s away to somewhere warmer, somewhere kinder,’ she murmured, as they stumbled along.
‘Forgive me, child. Forgive a foolish old drunk,’ Duncan said thickly, and then coughed; his chest sounded clotted and unwholesome. Rachel found her throat too tight to reply.
They were not too far from his lodgings, and when they reached the door Rachel patted his pockets until she found the key. His room was wholly black, and little warmer than outside. She manoeuvred Duncan onto his bed and then tried to light the fire, but found no coal or wood to do so.
‘Didn’t you buy coal, Mr Weekes? Didn’t you buy some fuel with the money I gave you?’ He only stared at her in abject apology, and Rachel understood what her money had been spent on. ‘Well, then,’ she said, helplessly. ‘Well. Blankets, then.’ She lit some candles, which gave the illusion of warmth with their yellow light; piled as many blankets as she could find on top of the old man, and fetched water and a cloth from the washstand to clean the cut on his face.