Forever and Ever (28 page)

He went outside, into the rose garden. Last night’s storm had littered branches and debris over the neat paths, ripped the trellises away from the brick wall of the garden house. Everything was wrecked, ruined; the ugly brown corpses of scattered vegetation rustled and scratched in the cold remains of the wind. A thrush, puffed up for warmth, chirped a dry, forlorn song in the leafless orchard. Connor tried to remember how the garden looked last summer, tumbling and fragrant, a rainbow, almost too sweet. Sophie had taught him the names of the old roses: eglantine, damask, maiden’s blush, York and Lancaster. She would lean on his arm while they walked so slowly, pretending they were exercising her ankle—but really they’d just wanted to touch. They’d fallen in love in those weeks, here among the roses, and even though he’d been deceiving her, and suffering because of his deception, all his memories of that time were sweet and good, the best of his life.

Ivy vines, lush and fat with shiny dark leaves in summer, clung to the stones of the house like brown, bony fingers, unbearably dreary. The rain had stained the leaves and turned the gray roof slates black. Smoke from the chimneys disappeared in the smoke-colored sky. He gazed at Sophie’s bedroom window, but there was nothing to see; like every window but Jack’s, it was curtained and shuttered, dark, blind. He shivered from the cold, and the emptiness inside himself.

The sunroom door squeaked; he saw Maris in the opening. “Mr. Pendarvis,” she called. From her face and the sound of her voice, he knew it was over. He went toward the house, his feet heavy and slow, shuffling up the terrace steps like an old man.

Sophie wasn’t crying anymore. Her face was as pale as a wax candle, and her cold hand when he took it lay in his like a dead stick. He couldn’t make her talk, couldn’t reach her. She let him hold her, but it was as if she wasn’t there. He was as cold inside as she was, but they couldn’t warm each other.

But he needed to be with her, so he stayed, even when she turned away from him in her sleep. Sometime in the night the cold woke him. He reached for her, but she was gone.

Alarmed, he got up. He still had his clothes on. Out in the hall, he heard a noise. From the nursery. He found her there, sitting in the rocking chair, pale and insubstantial as a ghost. Unreal. “Sophie?” Her blank gaze went right through him, as if
he
were the ghost. “You’ll freeze in here.” He made his voice brisk, authoritative. “Come back to bed.” She didn’t move, didn’t even hear, so he bent to pick her up. She strained away, but she was too weak or disinterested to put up any fight; he lifted her easily and carried her back to the bedroom. He put her in bed and pulled the covers up to her chin, and as he was looking down at her, her wide, glassy eyes finally focused on him. She said, “I saw her.”

He thought he misheard. “What?”

Closing her eyes, she put her hands over her ears and rolled away from him. His heart was pounding. He was afraid to touch her. He took the blanket from the foot of the bed, wound it around his shoulders, sat down in the chair by the window. The room was absolutely still; he couldn’t even hear Sophie breathing. Disconnected from everything, he pounded his fist against his thigh to feel something, pain, anything. Silence, darkness, cold. The fire in the grate had died, but he didn’t get up to rebuild it. It wouldn’t have done any good.

***

Dear Papa
,

I’ve been thinking about you so much lately. Tomorrow is Christmas, and maybe that’s why. I’ve been remembering the time you gave me a sled, yellow with red runners, and it was perfect, just exactly what I wanted. It snowed on Boxing Day, and you pulled me up the carriageway hill over and over, watching me slide down, smoking your pipe. I remember how your checked coat smelled, like wet wool and tobacco, and the nubby feel of your rough mitten in my hand.

I remember you in summer, too. I picture you in the garden, pretending to drink tea from a tiny cup in the sunshine, surrounded by the dolls you gave me. I’d pretend we were married and the dolls were our children.

I miss you so much, Papa. I can’t talk to anyone. I wish you were here so I could tell you something.

It’s a secret. Only Dr. Hesselius knows, but he doesn’t count. Oh, Papa—I saw my baby. I saw her. She was small, tiny, no longer than my ring finger, and curled up like a seahorse’s tail, the color of sand. Her elbows and knees curved so gracefully, and she had fingers like blades of grass. Your ears. Her eyes were closed, and she looked dreamy, peaceful. And she was real. I touched her with my finger, moved her little arm so gently. The joint of her shoulder moved, and she was perfect, perfect. Oh, Papa, I’m crying
inside all the time, and I can’t stop. No one knows. I can’t hear what people say to me because it’s not important, nothing at all matters. There’s a hole in me where she was, just a hole. It’s as if I’ve died, too. I’m so lonely. It’s like death, this loneliness, and I can’t bear it. I can’t bear it.

***

Sophie walked out of the Christmas service when the children’s choir, under Margaret Mareton’s substitute direction, began to sing the “Cradle Hymn,” just before Reverend Morrell’s sermon. Connor stayed where he was, thinking she needed to be alone for a minute, that the lullaby had been too painful for her and she would return when it was over. But Christy climbed the pulpit steps and launched into his sermon, and after five minutes she still hadn’t come back. Jack sat beside him in the old Deene family pew—it was his first day out. The two brothers exchanged a look, then Connor got up and went to find her.

She was in the churchyard. He found her by following her footprints in the light snow, the first of the season, that lay on the hard December ground. She’d left the lych-gate open; she didn’t hear his silent approach. He saw her take something small and white from her coat pocket—a piece of paper?—and tuck it between the sere grass and the gray marble of her father’s headstone. “Sophie?”

She turned sharply, staring up at him as if she’d never seen him before. She dusted her hands and stood up, and started to walk past him.

“What are you doing?”

“Nothing.” She’d have kept going, but he stopped her with a hand on her arm. She stood still, patient, waiting for him to say whatever he had to say.

“Are you all right?”

“Yes.”

“I was worried about you. Why did you leave?”

“I needed some air.”

Her cheeks were beginning to pinken from the cold. She’d lost weight since the miscarriage; her features looked sharp, pinched, the bones too prominent under the skin. Her eyes were abstracted, and she never smiled a true smile. She shut him out with the look she wore now, and her chilly, remote manner. “Why did you come out here?” he tried again, moving in front of her so she had to look at him.

“Nothing, I told you. Some air. What does it matter?”

“It doesn’t matter. I only wanted to know.”

Her laugh was only a huff of breath. “Well, I’m out of answers, there’s nothing else to tell you.” She pulled out of his light clasp. “I’m cold. Can we go in?”

That night, they had Christmas dinner with the Vanstones. Eustace was unwontedly gentle with her, and for the first time since they’d met, Connor didn’t detest him. Even Honoria behaved well. No one talked about the baby—but then, no one ever did; it was as if it had never existed except in his and Sophie’s minds. A kind of brittle gaiety came over her as the evening wore on. It hurt him to hear her false laughter, like glass breaking, and the too-animated sound of her voice.

After she and Honoria rose from the table and went into the drawing room, Eustace leaned back in his chair and said to the wineglass he was squinting at while he turned it around in his fingers, “My niece has had a bad time of it these last weeks. A very bad time. I’ve wished there was something I could do for her, something I could say. I . . . expect you have, too.”

Connor said nothing.

“I’ve felt . . .” He cleared his throat harshly. “I’m glad you’ve been there for her, and I didn’t think I’d feel that way. To the extent that I might have misjudged you, Pendarvis, I’d like to say right now that I regret it.”

Connor lifted his eyebrows, hiding a slight smile at the phrasing. But Vanstone’s grudging apology moved him; if this was an olive branch, he would take it gratefully. “To the extent that you and I have anything in common,” he answered carefully, “I think it must be a hope for Sophie’s happiness. Because we both love her. I suppose that might be . . . the basis for some kind of friendship.”

Vanstone kept staring at his glass, his hard face never changing expression. A whole minute passed. “It might be,” he conceded at last.

Driving home in the gig, Connor tried to tell Sophie what had happened, that her uncle had made a peace offer to him and he’d accepted it. But the unnatural gaiety had disappeared, and she’d turned back into the silent, aloof Sophie he knew better. He couldn’t get a word out of her, huddled in her hooded cloak, staring down at the black ground passing under them.

At home, he said, “We have to talk.”

“I’m tired.”

“Sophie—”

“I’m tired, Con, I’m so tired. Let me go to bed.”

She looked white and exhausted, all the vivacity of an hour ago drained out of her. He took her hands, squeezing them between his to warm them. Her head was bent; her hair hid her face. He brushed it back, put his hand under her chin. Before he could kiss her she craned away, turning from him. “Good night,” she said, and went into her dressing room.

“Merry Christmas,” he said to the closed door.

***

The party association leased an office in Tavistock, and Braithwaite gave Connor a key to it. He began to go there during the days, to meet with the committeemen and work on the various articles and papers he was struggling to care a damn about. One afternoon it snowed hard, and he decided not to go home—he could sleep in a chair in the office, or on the floor for all it mattered to him. It wasn’t a blizzard, just a snow; he could have made it home if he’d tried. He found Sophie in the parlor the next day, vague and disheveled, still in her nightgown and robe; she greeted him with apathetic confusion, as if the snow and his overnight absence were just registering on her.

He’d hoped for more. In fact, he’d had some idea of shocking her with worry out of the daze of indifference that covered her like a blanket. They never touched, rarely spoke; they occupied the same house, the same bed at night, and yet they never connected, even though the pain they were in must be the same for her as it was for him—he had to believe that. But she wouldn’t let him help her, and she couldn’t help him. His best friend had deserted him.

In January she went back to the mine. He thought it was a good sign, the beginning of her recovery. She’d let herself go, stopped getting dressed or washing her hair, stopped taking care of herself—so it was a relief to see her looking fit and fashionable again, her old self. But one afternoon she didn’t come home at her usual time, and as the hour lengthened his anxiety grew. Something was wrong, he felt sure of it, even when Jack laughed and called him an old maid for worrying. After two hours, he saddled the horse and rode to Guelder at a fast gallop.

He relaxed when he saw Valentine tethered in his usual spot. Sophie wasn’t in her office, though, and when he asked, no one could say where she was. “I saw her walking toward the smelting house,” Andrewson recalled, scratching his head. “But that was a long time ago, before the cores changed.” A bal girl putting in extra time recalled seeing her heading over the crest of the hill, on the path that led to Lynton Hall. “Why’s Mrs. P. going up there, I says to Jane. She didn’t know neither, and we just went on wi’ our work. Never did see ’er come back. She must’ve, though, for she didn’t even have ’er coat on.”

He saw her half a mile from the mine, gliding ahead of him along the side of the trail, aimless-looking, lost. When he caught up to her, he saw that she was holding dead leaves in her hand, spread out from the sterns like a bouquet. “I wanted flowers for her,” she said when he asked what she was doing. “But everything’s dead. This is all I could find.” He wrapped her up in his jacket and hugged her close; she was freezing without knowing it. He rocked her, swayed with her slowly in the icy twilight. “Oh, Con,” she cried in a high, whispery gasp against his shoulder. “She doesn’t even have a grave!” He couldn’t speak; his heart was breaking.

If that day had been the crisis point, if she’d wept, if she’d broken down and turned to him for consolation, all the pain and anxiety would have been worth it. But the emotional storm passed, and soon she retreated to her silent, listless stupor, as though nothing had interrupted it. Shut out again, he felt worse this time, colder, because for a few brief moments he’d felt her heat.

After that she went to Guelder infrequently, usually on payday, because seeing the miners still gave her some kind of satisfaction. Jenks, Andrewson, and Dickon Penney made the day-to-day decisions. For the first time since her father’s death, the work of the mine went on without her.

Anne Morrell came often, but her visits didn’t cheer Sophie. Connor wondered if she was unconsciously jealous of her friend, because Anne was happy, and her family was healthy and intact. Christy was one of Sophie’s oldest and dearest friends, but even he couldn’t penetrate her lethargy. She was inconsolable.

In February, Jack moved out of the house. Connor argued with him, tried to reason with him, ended up shouting at him, but nothing could change his mind. He claimed he was well, which was nonsense. He was better, no doubt of that, but Connor knew the true reason he wanted to move out and take a room in Wyckerley was because he believed his absence could somehow make things better between him and Sophie. If he’d thought there was any chance of that, Connor would probably have helped him pack. But he feared nothing could help them now, and he was close to despair. They didn’t even sleep together anymore. He’d taken to staying up late in her father’s study, then stretching out on the creaky leather sofa with a blanket, and the nights Dash jumped up to keep him company he counted himself a lucky man. If Sophie was sick with grief, Connor was dying of loneliness. They were like two shipwrecked swimmers, unable to touch hands, each doomed to watch the other’s slow drowning.