Twenty-Nine
July smelt of richred wine. It was the blackberries in the hedges, overripe and bursting, crushed under foot on the path.
She’d gathered a basket that morning, her fingertips stained purple. Small scratches still stung her knuckles as she walked from the kitchen through the garden to the line of trees that bordered the paddock.
The ground was alive and damp here under the sheltering shadow of the ancient limes where the sun couldn’t burn. The grass grew thick and lush at the tree bases, untouched by the scythe. It dragged at her hem as she passed, a big blue dragonfly skipping over her shoulder, darting into the sunlight and up, up to join the laughter that rose to the sky.
Daniel, Joseph, and Nicholas were playing cricket in the paddock, the grass cropped smooth by her father’s horse—now out, carrying him on his rounds. Two goats were assistant gardeners, sharing the paddock. They were standing in the shade of a scrubby wool-flecked hawthorn in the paddock’s far corner, eyeing the human antics with bulging eyes. YoungWilliam Shilstone was nearby, apparently gathering thistles to tempt them with. They watched him with the same mad-eyed scorn as they watched the cricketers.
Grace Shilstone was in the paddock too, laughing as she clumsily caught the ball Daniel threw to her in a gentle underarm arc. Nicholas, batting, pulled a face, not keen on this new choice of bowler. To Joseph’s delight, he’d turned out to be an excellent batter. Solid, efficient, and unflinching, no matter how Joseph or Daniel threw the ball. And Daniel had a powerful arm.
Daniel went up to Grace now, coaxing her to stand at the bowler's end of the pitch, taking her hand with a grin when she hesitated. She went with him, laughing, telling her brother he needed to worry, her aim was terrible, she might well hit his head. Nicholas shrugged. He’d faced worse.
“No one’s taking it seriously!” Joseph complained as Madelaine reached hailing distance.
“You all need to go in and wash for dinner.”
“Not until we get Nicholas out!”
“Your dinner will be cold by then. The stars will be out first.”
Joseph scowled, wrinkling his nose as the formidable batsman easily fended off Grace’s pea roll of an attempt. Grace burst out laughing at her own ineptitude, Daniel applauding, and took a bow.
Joseph’s petulance disappeared in a flash, replaced by a wide grin. “With Nicholas, we’re finally in with a chance! If we win the match on Saturday—”
“Dinner,” Madelaine repeated firmly, pushing his shoulder gently in the direction of the house. “You too, Daniel! Play again later. It’ll still be light.”
There was a little grumbling, but they all trailed after her.
At the corner of the paddock, just before the garden, was a wooden stile leading to the lane. Daniel said goodbye to Nicholasthere—to Grace. “Come after dinner?” His smile was shy now, away from the pitch. “I’ll teach you how to bowl properly. If you like.”
She smiled, agreed, and skipped away, merry as a summer’s breeze in her lilac dress.
Madelaine couldn’t tell if she returned her brother’s partiality. She couldn’t tell if his would last. It might only be calf love, after all. Most of the time that’s all it was.
Ninety times out of hundred a boy felt things for a girl, or a girl felt things for a boy, and it meant nothing beyond the first stirrings of an ancient machinery. A fledgling chick testing its wings. It was sweet and easy and pure as the morning’s dew and burnt away just as quickly.
But sometimes it didn’t. Sometimes it was a love that would last a lifetime.
There hadn’t been time on her first evening back from London to visit the churchyard. She’d gone in the morning, visited Alfred’s plaque, then walked down from the town, across the marsh and to the sea.
That had been the pattern for weeks. Churchyard, marsh, sea, then back home for chores and visiting with her mother, with her father. Dinner with the squire, dinner at the Ardinglys’, getting to know her cousins, getting to see Alfred’s parents smile and laugh.
It was good to see joy in their eyes. A decade was a long time to be without joy.
Summer came and ripened, turning baking and hot; it yellowed the grass and painted flowers all over the gardens and verges.
Nicholas and Grace and William put off their black mourning clothes and became daily visitors at the parsonage.
Children laughed and ran and grew and sang, singing hymns in the same pew where Alfred’s voice once rang; and they werehis blood, diluted, yes, but still his blood, his family, going on and growing up…
“Didn’t you once tell me he was the most alive person you knew? Wouldn’t he want you to live?”
Sebastian…Lord Cotereigh…he’d said those words, snaked them under her skin. They formed a tattoo like the sailors inked themselves with; she’d seen them on the harbour dock, men who’d been to strange places and returned to fish the Sussex seas.“You’re alive,”he’d told her.
But she didn’t feel it. Not since leaving London.
There were trees which grew on the seaward slopes, or even on the shingled gravel of the marsh itself. Twisted, stunted trees, deformed by the harshness of their life. They didn’t look like the trees which grew in walled gardens, planted in fresh, rich soil. A second love, planted in grief, planted in hardened hearts, growing in people grown cynical and tired and faithless…it would never be as tender as its first bloom.
