Hamilton appeared at my shoulder.
‘You may go now, Grace,’ he whispered. ‘Myra and I will finish up here.’ He looked at me. ‘And do find Alfred. We can’t have one of the Master’s guests look out the window and see a servant roaming the grounds.’
Standing on the stone platform at the top of the rear stairs, I scanned the dark beyond. The moon cast a white glow, painting the grass silver and making skeletons of the briars that clung to the arbour. The scattered rosebushes, glorious by day, revealed themselves by night an awkward collection of lonely, bony old ladies.
Finally, on the far stone staircase, I saw a dark shape that couldn’t be accounted for by any of the garden’s vegetation.
I steeled myself and slipped into the night.
With each step, the wind blew colder, meaner.
I reached the top step and stood for a moment beside him, but Alfred gave no sign that he was aware of my presence.
‘Mr Hamilton sent me,’ I said cautiously. ‘You needn’t think I’m following you.’
There was no answer.
‘And you needn’t ignore me. If you don’t want to come in just tell me and I’ll go.’
He continued to gaze into the tall trees of the Long Walk.
‘Alfred!’ My voice cracked with the cold.
‘You all think I’m the same Alfred as went away,’ he said softly. ‘Folks seem to recognise me so I must look close enough to the same, but in every other respect I am a different chap, Gracie.’
I was taken aback. I had been prepared for another attack, angry entreaties to leave him alone. His voice dropped to a whisper and I had to crouch right by to hear. His bottom lip trembled, whether from the cold or something other, I wasn’t sure. ‘I see them, Grace. Not so bad in the day, but all the night, I see them and I hear them. In the drawing room, the kitchen, the village street. They call my name. But when I turn around… they’re not… they’re all…’
I sat down. The frosty night had turned the grey-stone steps to ice and through my skirt and drawers my legs grew numb.
‘It’s so cold,’ I said. ‘Come inside and I’ll make you a cup of cocoa.’
He gave no acknowledgement, continued to stare into the darkness.
‘Alfred?’ My fingertips brushed his hand and on impulse I spread my fingers over his.
‘Don’t.’ He recoiled as if struck and I knotted my hands together on my lap. My cold cheeks burned as if they’d been slapped.
‘Don’t,’ he whispered.
His eyes were clenched shut and I watched his face, wondered what it was he saw on his blackened eyeballs that made them race so frantically beneath his moon-bleached lids.
Then he turned to face me and I drew breath. It was a trick of the night, surely, but his eyes were as none I had ever looked into. Deep, dark holes that were somehow empty. He stared at me with his unseeing eyes and it seemed that he looked for something. An answer to a question he had not asked. His voice was low. ‘I thought that once I got back…’ His words floated into the night unfinished. ‘I so wanted to see you… The doctors said if I kept busy…’ There was a tight sound in his throat. A click.
The armour of his face collapsed, crumbled like a paper bag, and he began to cry. Both hands leapt to his face in a futile attempt at obfuscation. ‘No, oh no… Don’t look… please Gracie, please…’ He cried into his hands. ‘I’m such a coward-’
‘You’re not a coward,’ I said firmly.
‘Why can’t I get it out of my head? I just want it out of my head.’ He hit his palms against his temples with a ferocity that alarmed me.
‘Alfred! Stop it.’ I tried to grab his hands but he wouldn’t let them leave his face. I waited; watching as his body shook, cursing my ineptitude. Finally, he seemed to calm some. ‘Tell me what it is you see,’ I said.
He turned to me but he did not speak, and I glimpsed for a moment how I must appear to him. The yawning gulf between his experience and mine. And I knew then that there would be no telling me what he saw. I understood somehow that certain images, certain sounds, could not be shared and could not be lost. Would play out on the one man’s mind until, little by little, they recessed deeper into the folds of memory and could, for a time, be forgotten.
So I didn’t ask again. I laid my hand on the far side of his face and gently guided his head to my shoulder. Sat very still as his body shuddered next to mine.
And like that, together, we sat on the stair.
A SUITABLE HUSBAND
Hannah and Teddy were married on the first Saturday of March, 1919. It was a pretty wedding at the little church on the Riverton estate. The Luxtons would have preferred London so that more of the very important people they knew from business could have come, but Mr Frederick was insistent and he’d suffered so many blows in the months preceding that no one had much spirit for arguing. So it was. She was married from the small church in the valley, just as her grandparents and her parents had been before her.
It rained-many children, said Mrs Townsend; weeping past lovers, whispered Myra-and the wedding photographs were stained with black umbrellas. Later, when Hannah and Teddy were living in the townhouse in Grosvenor Square, a photograph sat upon the morning-room writing desk. The six of them in a line: Hannah and Teddy at centre, Simion and Estella beaming on one side, Mr Frederick and Emmeline blank-faced on the other.
You are surprised. For how could such a thing have come to pass? Hannah was so set against marriage, so full of other ambitions. And Teddy: sensible, kindly even, but certainly not the man to sweep a young woman like Hannah off her feet…
But it was not so complicated really. Such things rarely are. It was a simple case of stars aligning. Those that didn’t being nudged into place.
The morning after the dinner party, the Luxtons left for London. They had business engagements, and we all presumed-if indeed we gave it any thought at all-that it was the last we would ever see of them.
Our focus, you see, had shifted already to the next grand event. For over the coming week, a cluster of indomitable women descended upon Riverton, charged with the weighty duty of overseeing Hannah’s entrance into society. January was the zenith of country balls and the mortification of leaving things too late, being forced to share the date with another, larger ball, was unthinkable. Thus, the date had been picked-20 January-and invitations long since sent.
One morning in the early new year, I served tea to Lady Clementine and the Dowager Lady Ashbury. They were in the drawing room, side by side on the lounge, diaries open on their laps.
‘Fifty ought to do well,’ Lady Violet said. ‘There’s nothing worse than a thin dance.’
‘Except a crowded one,’ Lady Clementine said with distaste. ‘Not that it’s a problem these days.’
Lady Violet surveyed her guest list, a thread of dissatisfaction pulling her
