“People are hungry. Find someone hungry enough.”
Alice’s gray eyes went grayer.
“Come on, Alice,” I implored her. “Success seldom comes without a bit of risk. The nearer you draw, the more hazardous the journey.”
She turned toward me, her mouth pressed into her signature grim line. “The problem with risk,” she countered, “is it can also lead to ruin.”
I looked ahead. The rain had stopped, as if reacting to my sheer will. “I have faced ruin.” I held my head high. “If she comes again, it will only be an opportunity to meet an old friend and then send her on her way once more.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
When all the landowners had planted hawthorn hedges, the primary intention—making use of the bramble’s thick growth and thorns and impenetrability—was to keep people out. But, as I hurried along the muddy lanes between the village and Bramley, I could not help but appreciate how the vegetation also offered seclusion. Sludge covered my shoes and water ruined my hems. On such a day, when any puddle could hide a pothole that might break a horse’s ankle, no one else was traveling. I was completely alone—the haw-covered branches providing a thorny echo chamber for my every thought.
I had initially been disappointed at the prospect of Simeon and my stepdaughter—the sight of Elin and the prince on the dance floor as slippery and loathsome as a slug of milk gone sour. Naturally, I had championed my own daughters for the position. And, naturally, I had been thrilled when Simeon had shown interest in Rosamund.
But our family knew how to endure. Rosie’s tears would dry. And my personal feelings were of little matter. No matter to Sigrid’s superior smile, either. No matter to Otto’s condescension. No matter to Simeon’s choice. And, because it was necessary, no matter to Rosie’s tears. Wewould make an advantage out of this wedding, and, if I had my way, we would polish and burnish and finagle until even the slightest advantage turned to a golden opportunity.
By the time I arrived at Bramley, my feet were soaked through, but I was in high spirits. As the house came into view, I pictured it fixed up and overflowing with guests. Light glowing in each of the mullioned windows. The library filled with books once more. Feet pattering up and down the back stairs. Smoke at each one of the chimneys. Companions for Lucy—a bird in every chamber of the mews. Each improvement so fractional from what was in front of me, it was impossible not to believe in the possibility of fruition.
The front door swung in and Wenthelen hurried out, hesitating for a moment at the mud, and then rushing forward once more. “Thank goodness you’re back!”
“I am fine,” I assured her.
“M’lady—” She caught sight of my hems and clicked her tongue at them. “Oh, you’re a sight.”
“The engagement is confirmed,” I continued, as she came to my side. “I’ve sent Alice into the city for more help.”
“I’ve been waiting—you see—after—” She abruptly turned and tried to keep pace as I marched toward the entrance. She was flustered and breathless.
I tried to slow so that she might keep up with me. “I do hope Alice finds someone. You’ll have to ready rooms. We must give them good rooms at least, and food, which we will have to sort out.”
“M’lady,” Wenthelen repeated, panting. She came to a stop. “You see—well—that is the problem.”
I paused and turned back to her. “We’ll thin the soups and slice the roasts into thinner pieces. Whatever we must do, we shall.”
“Not the soups. Therooms. M’lady, you see, the rain this morning was—at long last—too much.”
I sighed and marched forward once more. “No one will go upstairs to see the leak.”
“But,” Wenthelen called. “But!”
I slowed and turned. “But?”
She exhaled, her great chest heaving. “Well, you might as well see for yourself.”
The roof had caved in. There was no longer just a leak: A large support beam had softened and splintered into two and the rooftop it held up had, in its entirety, fallen into the upper floor of the west wing. Wenthelen showed me: oversized splinters and rotten planks and scattered wood shakes. A pile of rubble composed of decades of dust and dirt.
Initially speechless, I had wandered through the debris, the weakened floorboards creaking beneath my feet. The rooms were not ones we used, but the damage was withering. A film of plaster dust was in the air, and covered, more thickly, the evidence of the breakage: beams fractured as though broken bones, crown molding jutting out in pieces. A bent chandelier sprouted from the pile, as though—as it were—the world had turned upside down. Standing close to the refuse, I could see straight up into the gray sky above.
Bramley Hall was not endless. On my first afternoon, so many years before, Robert had completed an efficient tour: the great hall, the gallery, the bedrooms in the east, the old tower. The upper floors of the west wing were where his first wife had kept her chambers, alongside Elin’s peach nursery. Both had long ago been emptied. But, that first day, he had clicked through each chamber, softly explaining the details that Henry would have put last. Robert murmured about dour paintings in a room that had a view of the treetops. He fingered some decorative ornamentation and ignored the amount of light the windows let through. He was wan and eager to see me pleased. But I had been pleased—with the views and the windows, yes, but more so with the thick-framed paintings, the heaviness of the ornamentation, the weight of the years of prestige that coated the halls. I craved, by then, morethan views and light. I wanted solidity. And Robert, with this home, had provided me the security I’d sought. The walls were built from brick and stone. I didn’t love Bramley; I clung to it, the way a beggar grabbed for a tossed coin. And I clung to it still, all these years later.
With all its debt and depreciation, its sags and unbecoming bulges, Bramley might have spelled my destruction. But Bramley, too, was the grand stage I so badly needed: It assured, it bolstered, it asserted—with all the force of a mighty building, all the visual pageantry it could muster—the right of its occupants to want more and to want better. What was a performance without a stage? Staring at the rubble, I felt as though I had been holding the roof myself for all the years since Robert’s death. As though, in its falling, my own body had failed. With an anguished crack of my wrists, I had allowed the sky to fall upon us.
“Well, at least no one was hurt,” Elin said at supper that evening.
Prior to the afternoon’s catastrophe, Wenthelen had prepared a celebration feast for her engagement. Cheese pie and blanched almonds and persimmons instead of our usual pottage and stew. Despite our shock—Rosie had not emerged from her room that day—and the dust that covered the halls, I had insisted we all sit together to eat.
“Obviously,” Mathilde responded from her seat at the table. A quick look from me and she added: “And for that we must be grateful.”
