world was always offering him lessons, if he chose to take them. One day the little infant beside him would walk down an aisle like this. Time! How it played you forward, how it filled the world with people to love, how cruel and wonderful at once it could seem. When Miss Taylor stopped at the altar he thought, for a very brief moment, that tears might come into his eyes. Soon enough he mastered himself and the ceremony began.
An hour later they were back at Everley, part of a great multitude of people who were congregated in the hall to celebrate with Mr. and Mrs. Ponsonby.
“Charlie!” called Fripp, holding a glass of champagne.
“Wish you much joy, Mr. Fripp,” said Lenox, smiling.
“There hasn’t been a turn-out like this that I can recall since the old squire’s funeral.”
“A cheery observation.”
Fripp laughed. “Try an orange, there on the sideboard, if you like. I brought them up this morning, as a present, you know.”
You could say for the village that it annihilated some distinctions of class that the metropolis enforced; there was to be a supper later only for the cousins and the likes of Emily Jasper, but this wedding breakfast saw every stripe of person come together. Lady Jane was speaking to some of the women from the cricket pavilion; Toto was fretting with a farmer’s wife about the state of the bride’s train; Dallington and Wendell were reminiscing with the veterinarian from West Buckland about Wells and his coining operation.
Perhaps it wasn’t the village, though; perhaps it was Frederick.
Finding himself alone for a moment, Lenox watched the bride and groom. He was pleased, so very pleased, that they would stay in Everley. He didn’t quite understand why. It was something to do with his mother, in truth: He had believed, before he lost anyone, that after a person died there was a process of comprehension for those left behind, a waning sense of loss. In fact all that happened was that days went on passing, whether you wished them to or not — even for the suffering the sun would rise, casting its inhuman chemistries over the earth, even for the suffering there was food, water, and what color to paint the second bedroom. The formality of a funeral was a deceit; everything that followed it was strayness, pangs, forgetting, remembering, unguided, and unnegotiable.
Then there was Parliament. Every generation no doubt considers themselves especially burdened, their souls harried and pent — certainly each finds of itself that it falls very late in history, as no doubt the Vikings did, to exist so many hundreds of years beyond the legends, or the medieval priests who knew that it had been a thousand years since the birth of Christ. Lenox was not immune from this feeling; and Everley, perhaps, while Freddie was there, represented an inoculation against it.
At about two that afternoon most of the people left, and there was a brief lull in the schedule before supper. “Shall we take Sophia for a walk?” asked Lenox.
“Isn’t it too cold?”
“It’s brightened up now, and we can bundle her up.”
To their surprise the child’s old caretaker, now Mrs. Ponsonby, overheard them and asked if she might come, too. “Everyone imagines me much busier than I am,” she said. “Mostly it has been waiting.” Then Freddie decided that he might as well come, too — there were some very fine waxberries if they walked the loop around the pond.
So they bundled the young girl, with her alert eyes, her pink cheeks, in a mountain of warm clothes, set her in her pram — sturdy enough to conquer the snow, certainly — and set out to walk the path along the pond, happily chattering about the morning, in anticipation of the goose that was being cooked for the evening.
In the library Edmund and Teddy were both reading, the father a parliamentary report, the son a manual on the azimuth compass.
When he noticed his brother outside, Edmund stood up and walked to the cold glass window, close enough that he could press his nose against it. How happy they looked!
As Edmund watched, half a smile on his face, Freddie stopped his guests’ procession under a broad-branched evergreen and began to lecture them; when he tapped the trunk knowledgably with his cane, however, a great bank of snow shifted in the tree and crashed over them.
Edmund laughed out loud. “Teddy, go and fetch a cloak to the front door for your aunt and your cousin, if you would. I think they’ll have need of it.” Indeed, the whole party had by now already begun to turn back, smiling, laughing, and, in Jane’s case, rather exasperated: making together for the warmth of home.
