What wind
Serves to advance an honest mind.
—John Donne
“Song”
For the next several days I mooned about the house, brooding and regretting my horrid treatment of Reddy Phillips. Everything had seemed rather safe before that fateful visit to Brisbane’s rooms. The brief minutes I had spent there seemed to have unbalanced something within me, leaving me unsettled, wobbling like a child’s spinning top, and the worst of it was that I did not know why. I had behaved wretchedly, and in consequence found myself rattling around Grey House, starting every time the bell went, imagining that now Brisbane would write and something resembling normality would resume.
But the days stretched on into a week and the bell rang many times, but he did not write. In the end, I found myself in my study, taking up the books I had disarranged the day I found the Psalter. I had it still, locked snugly in a drawer beneath my costliest lace for safekeeping. But the rest of the study was still a wreck and I thought a bit of physical labor was in order. I sorted the books carefully, grouping poetry with poetry and alphabetizing novelists, rather than my usual haphazard method. The books of my childhood I gathered on the last shelf, smiling to myself as I touched them again, these treasured, yellowing friends from my youth.
Persuasion. Wuthering Heights. Jane Eyre. Pride and Prejudice.
The rest were much the same, romantic stories with dark, brooding men with mysterious pasts and scornful glances. Some of them were good novels, by proper authors. Much of it was complete rubbish. I groaned as I shoved them back onto the shelf. How many summer days had I whiled away tucked in the apple tree at Bellmont Abbey with one of these books, dreaming of the day when a darkly handsome man would sweep me away to his castle on the moor? How many winter evenings had I huddled in bed, reading by candlelight until my eyes ached just to see if all turned out happily for the beleaguered lovers?
Why on earth had my father permitted me to read such muck? It had left me with an overactive, overromantic imagination, I thought furiously. As a girl, when I had imagined my future husband, I had always thought of someone dark and masterful, lord of some crumbling estate, hopefully with a mad wife tucked away in the attic for effect. I had never looked to marry a fair man, preferring instead to dream of someone mysterious and saturnine. No one was more surprised than I when I married a man with golden curls and bright blue eyes, a slender and graceful man, with a sleepy smile and beautifully-shaped hands.
Once I married him, I ceased to think of my girlhood heroes, carefully shelving the books I had once adored. I somehow felt it disloyal to Edward to read them and spend hours conjuring thoughts of other men. Not that Edward would have minded. He never troubled about such things. I sometimes wondered if he would have cared if I had taken a real lover, someone flesh and blood to replace him. But he never said and I never had the courage to ask. And I remained faithful to him, even in literature.
This time, though, after carefully shelving the other volumes, I kept backWuthering Heightsand carried it to my room. London was no cloud-scoured moor, and I was no Cathy, but at least I could thrill to Heathcliff in the privacy of my own bedchamber. That Yorkshire moor was a far sight more entertaining than the rest of my activities. I spent many quiet hours reading to Simon or taking the Ghoul for drives in the Park. Unfortunately, Simon often fell asleep just as I was getting to the interesting bits, and the Ghoul wanted only to talk about her current bout with constipation.
The high point of my week came when the boxes from the dressmakers were delivered. Messieurs Riche had outdone themselves. The costumes I had ordered were even better than I had anticipated, so daring in their simplicity, so eye-catching in their stark purity that I felt almost naked, even when Morag fastened the last button. There was not a single ruffle or bow or rosette to draw the eye—only the pure line of severely perfect tailoring and the elegant curve of a draped bustle.
Morag stepped back and said nothing, her gingery eyebrows higher than usual.
“Say what you like,” I snapped. “I can smell your disapproval.”
Her brow puckered in surprise. “Not me. I think it suits you.”
I stared at her. Never, in all the time she had spent in my employ, had Morag ever complimented anything I had worn. The best I could hope for was a grunt of approval that I looked respectable. But open admiration was something entirely new.
“You do?” I turned, observing myself as many ways as possible in the cheval glass. “You don’t think that it is too—”
“Oh, yes. That’s why I like it,” she said seriously.
Considering Morag’s penchant for garish colours and blowsy feathers, I was not completely certain I should be pleased. But I was. Approval is pleasant, no matter from what quarter.
“But the others are just the same,” I said, waving at the boxes yet to be opened. “And this is the only black one. All the rest are colours.”
Morag shrugged. “It was a year last week, my lady. It is time enough to put off your mourning.”
I stared at her reflection in the cheval glass. “Last week? You must be joking. Edward has not been dead a year—he cannot.”
She said nothing but went to my escritoire and retrieved my diary. She opened it to the previous week and pointed.
I looked at the little boxes with their printed dates, trying to make sense of the numbers. “Good Lord,” I said finally, “it was.”
Morag continued to unpack the boxes, lifting rich violet and chocolate-brown silks from the crackling tissue.
“There is a note here. From the elder Monsieur Riche himself,” she told me. I waved at her to read on. “He says you are an appalling creature to order the gowns without allowing him to fit them personally and he will come to Grey House whenever you like to alter them. He begs that in the meantime you will not tell anyone they came from his establishment. He does not like to think that anyone will know he let them go without a perfect fitting.” She finished the note with an air of satisfaction. She had only learned to read at Aunt Hermia’s refuge and the skill was one she was rightly proud of.
I nodded absently, admiring the set of a particularly luscious bottle-green sleeve. “I will reply later. He can come tomorrow if he likes, although I don’t see why he bothers. You are just as handy with a needle as any of his soubrettes.”
Morag preened herself a bit as she laid out the rest of the gowns, but I ignored her. How could I have let Edward’s anniversary slip by unmarked? It was thoughtless and disloyal and I made a note in the book to take flowers to his grave soon. It did not seem enough, but I could not think of anything that would serve better.
I glanced again in the glass at my new reflection, but the bloom had gone off it a little.
“I will try the rest of them on later,” I told Morag, her hands full of bottle-green and claret silks.
