Emmeline.’
I paused, surprised, wondered how she knew. ‘Yes, ma’am.’
‘I knew you would. Even though he’s told you not to. I know you well after all this time, Grace.’ Her tone was difficult to read.
‘I’m sorry, ma’am. About Miss Emmeline.’
She nodded slightly, but she didn’t take her eyes from that distant point in the churchyard. I waited for a while, and when it seemed clear she didn’t want company, I asked if there was anything I could bring her. Tea perhaps? A book? She didn’t answer at first, appeared not to have heard. And then, seemingly out of the blue, she said, ‘You can’t read shorthand.’
It was a statement, not a question, so I did not answer.
I found out later what she meant, why she spoke to me then of shorthand. But not for many years. On that morning I was still innocent of the part my deception had played.
She shifted slightly, retracted her long bare legs closer to the chair. Still didn’t meet my eyes. ‘You may go, Grace,’ she said, her voice tinged with a coldness that made my eyes sting.
There was nothing more I could say. I nodded and left, unaware it was the last conversation I would have with her.
•
Beryl brings us to the room that was Hannah’s at the end. I wonder at first whether I’ll be able to continue. But it is different now. It has been repainted and refurnished with a Victorian suite that was not amongst the original furniture at Riverton. It is not the same bed on which Hannah’s baby was born.
Most people thought it was the baby that killed her. Just like Emmeline’s birth had killed their own mother. So sudden, they said, shaking their heads. So sad. But I knew better. It was a convenient excuse. An opportunity. True enough, it wasn’t an easy birth, but she had no will left. What happened on the lake, Robbie’s death and Emmeline’s so soon after, killed her long before the baby got itself stuck in her pelvis.
I had started in the room with her, but as the contractions came harder and faster and the baby began to force its way out, she had surrendered more and more to delusion. Had stared at me, fear and anger in her face, shouted at me to leave, that it was all my fault. It was not uncommon for birthing women to lose their grasp, the doctor explained as he bid me do as she ask, to give themselves over to fantasy.
But I couldn’t leave her, not like that. I retired from her bedside but not from the room. As she lay on the bed and the doctor started to cut, I watched from the door and I saw her face. As she laid back her head, she breathed a sigh that looked an awful lot like relief. Release. She knew that if she didn’t fight it, she could go. It would all be over.
No, it wasn’t a sudden death; she’d been dying for months.
Afterwards, I was broken. Bereft. In an odd way, I had lost myself. That is what happens when you give your life and service to another person. You’re bound to them. Without Hannah, I was without function.
I had no capacity for feeling. Was emptied, just as surely as if someone had slit me open like a dying fish and scooped out everything inside. I performed perfunctory duties, though with Hannah gone there were few enough of those. I stayed a month like that, steering myself from one interchangeable location to another. Until one day I told Teddy I was leaving.
He wanted me to stay; when I refused he begged me to reconsider, for Hannah’s sake if not for his, for her memory. She had been fond of me, didn’t I know? Would want me to be a part of her daughter’s life, of Florence’s life.
But I couldn’t. I had no heart for it. I had no heart. I was blind to Mr Hamilton’s disapproval, Mrs Townsend’s tears. Had little concept of my own future, other than to know for certain it didn’t lie at Riverton.
How indescribably frightening it would have been, leaving Riverton, leaving service, if I’d had any sensation left. Better for me that I hadn’t: fear might have triumphed over grief and tied me forever to the house on the hill. For I knew nothing of life outside service. Was panicked by independence. Wary of going places, doing the simplest things, making my own decisions.
I found a little flat in the Marble Arch, though, and proceeded to live. I took what jobs I could-cleaning, waiting tables, stitching-resisted closeness, left when people started to ask too many questions, wanted more of me than I was able to give. In such occupation, I passed a decade. Waiting, though I didn’t know it, for the next war. And for Marcus, whose birth would do what my own daughter’s could not. Return to me what had been emptied by Hannah’s death.
In the meantime, I thought little of Riverton. Of all I had lost.
Let me rephrase: I refused to think of Riverton. If I found my mind, in a quiet moment of inactivity, roaming the nursery, lingering by the stairs in Lady Ashbury’s rose garden, balancing on the rim of the Icarus fountain, I quickly sought occupation.
But I did wonder about that little baby, Florence. My half-niece, I suppose. She was a pretty little thing. Hannah’s blonde hair but not her eyes. Big, brown eyes, they were. Perhaps they changed as she grew. That can happen. But I suspect they stayed brown, like her father’s. For she was Robbie’s daughter, wasn’t she?
I have given it quite some thought over the years. It is possible, of course, that despite Hannah’s failure to fall pregnant to Teddy all those years, she fell swiftly and unexpectedly in 1924. Stranger things have happened. But at the same time, isn’t it too convenient an explanation? Teddy and Hannah shared a bed infrequently in the latter years of their marriage, but Teddy had been anxious for a child at the beginning. For Hannah not to fall suggests, doesn’t it, that there was a problem with one of them? And as she proved with Florence, Hannah was able to conceive.
Isn’t it more likely then that Florence’s father was not Teddy? That she was conceived on the lake? That after months of being apart, when Hannah and Robbie met that night, in the near- finished summer house, they were unable to resist? The timing, after all, was right. Deborah certainly thought so. She took one look at those big dark eyes and her lips tightened. She knew.
Whether it was she who told Teddy, I don’t know. Perhaps he worked it out for himself. Whatever the case, Florence didn’t stay long at Riverton. Teddy could hardly be expected to keep her: a constant reminder of his cuckolding. The Luxtons all agreed it was best he put the whole sorry affair behind him. Settle down to running Riverton Manor, staging his political comeback.
I heard they sent Florence to America, that Jemima agreed to take her as sister to Gytha. She had always longed for more than one. Hannah would’ve been pleased, I think; would’ve preferred to imagine her daughter growing up a Hartford than a Luxton.
The tour ends and we are delivered to the entrance hall. Despite Beryl’s keen encouragement, Ursula and I bypass the gift shop.
I wait again on the iron seat while Ursula fetches the car. ‘I won’t be long,’ she promises. I tell her not to worry, my memories will keep me company.
‘Come again soon?’ Mr Hamilton says from the doorway.
‘No,’ I say. ‘I don’t think so, Mr Hamilton.’
He seems to understand, smiles briefly. ‘I’ll tell Mrs Townsend you said goodbye.’
I nod and he disappears, dissolves like watercolour into a dusty streak of sunlight.
Ursula helps me into the car. She has bought a bottle of water from a machine in the ticket booth and opens it for me when I am buckled into my seat. ‘Here you are,’ she says, feeding a straw into the spout and wrapping my hands around its cold sides.
She starts the engine and we drive slowly out of the car park. I am aware, vaguely, as we enter the dark leafy tunnel of the driveway, that it’s the last time I will take this particular journey, but I don’t look back.
