Shaking my head, I back away from him, toward the door. “I’ll come and visit again, just as soon as I can, with our own doctor. And I’ll bring you some books, too. They’d be good company for you.”
“Don’t want ’em. Can’t read ’em. Fran, stay awhile. Smoke a pipe with me. I’ve got a whole raft of Durham tobacco under my mattress. Please, Fran?”
No, no, no. I shake my head, I can’t bear to hear anymore. Tomorrow I’ll send someone with a crock of soup and blankets, and a note for Doctor Perkins. But I can’t stay here a moment longer.
Nate continues to entreat me. “Please, Frances, darling? Won’t you please?”
“I’m so sorry… so sorry.” Head tucked, I hurry from the room and close the door. Nate’s voice follows me down the stairs and echoes in my ears, even after I’ve escaped the tavern, and Wigs’s gimlet stare, and have headed back out into the night.
14.
Coming home I’m nearly found out. Luckily the noise is thunderous, and I scamper behind a tree as the carriage clatters past and turns up into our drive.
Uncle Henry, who had been away on business in Scarsdale, must have decided not to stay the night. Now everyone will be waked, and my absence surely will be discovered.
As I approach the house, I see the hired man in his work clothes. I know he’d returned from the tavern only moments before I’d heard his whistle up ahead of me on the road, and I’d walked well behind him, out of sight. I creep up along the edge of the lawn, darting from tree to tree. One of the boys is unstrapping Uncle Henry’s valise from the back, and Mrs. Sullivan is stationed at the door, quiet as a post. Her folded hands waiting to see if Uncle wants her to cook him a late supper before he goes to bed.
Such unrelenting drudgery, the lives of the servants.
Aunt Clara is nowhere in sight. For this, I breathe a calming sigh as I slip around the side of the house in order to enter through the back. If Aunt were awake she’d expect everyone to rouse and tend to her. Which would have made it quite impossible for me to sneak into the house and then pretend I’d been here all night.
Through the pantry, silent at the boot jack, I steal in stockinged feet up the back stairs, where I overhear Uncle Henry in the foyer requesting a sausage pie and brandy in the library. But I am battened down safe in my attic room before he has taken the second flight of stairs.
At last. My heart is knocking in my chest. I build up the fire from its embers and unfold Will’s letter, which I read on my hands and knees by the scant heat.
Even before I begin, I can see that it’s been written under hardship and duress. Will’s letters tremble and slant backward confusedly. What’s more, the paper is water damaged, the last passages a wash of ink.
When I am finished, I close my eyes, which burn with the effort of reading this final, agonized missive from the grave. Wherever Will’s body is buried, too much of my heart is there, too.
“It doesn’t matter, William,” I whisper. “None of it matters anymore. For I will always love you, no matter what this war forced you to become. Always and ever, dear heart.”
For what else could I say? What else could I ever possibly say about a senseless death and a war that I do not understand?
15.
My dreams are bursts and jolts. I see the bloody steel blade of a bayonet. I hear the drum beat to the sound of soldier’s boots and feel cold earth, cold hands, a chain, choking me.
I awake into a glare of morning and the sound of a voice.
“Saints above, Miss, what’s done you in drink a bottle of your uncle’s spirits last night?”
I sit up, wheezing for breath, my fingers stroking my neck, reassuring myself that it’s not broken as my bleary eyes find Mavis staring down on me.
“You think I’m drunk?” I ask faintly, as the horrible dream ebbs away.
Her grin is teasing. “How else could you sleep through breakfast and all this arguing?”
Sunshine streams through my window. It’s rare for me to oversleep, particularly now, on this lumpy horsehair mattress. “Arguing about what?” But I hear it. My bedroom door is ajar, and the voices below are angry. Quinn and Aunt Clara. When I stand, my sore muscles resist. “What about?” I repeat.
“Everything!” Mavis enthuses. “It’s been more delicious than toffee cake. Oh, has Mister Quinn been giving her an earful. It started as something to do with the dressmaker’s bill. Old Mister Pritchett will never raise his voice about Missus Pritchett’s wastefulness, but it seems Mister Quinn’s taken her to task.”
I can’t resist. I clamber to the banister, the better to hear the voices pitching back and forth below. Quinn’s tenor is clear and flat, barely raised at all. “…drowning in costs…well over our annual… damn fripperies… and pay for the household expenditures!”
And while Aunt squeaks like a mouse defending her cheese, her words are mysterious. “If you would only assert yourself…you are paralyzed…to make a decision one way or another…”
A decision about what? But next comes the slamming of doors, another of Aunt’s childish gestures, and now their conversation is muted.
Mavis clears her throat. “Speaking of household particulars and it’s awkward to ask of you, Miss Jennie but Missus Sullivan sent me up to see if you’ll lend an extra pair of hands. It’s brass and silver day. She says t’would only be ’bout an hour or two.”
“Of course.” Closer to four or five hours, but I don’t mention this.
“It’s another reason Mister Quinn’s upset.” Mavis’s eyes glint with gossip. “There isn’t enough in the ledger to hire more than one day girl. Missus Sullivan spoke with your uncle last night. He said hired girls had been pre-considered in the annual household budget and what a donkey laugh that was. There isn’t been a household budget in months, anyway. Missus Pritchett spent the whole lot on clothes and gimcracks like fancy sun parasols and watering cans from London, England.”
Mavis can’t disguise her annoyance. I sense that Uncle Henry’s fumbling inattention has been a topic of servants’ talk before. “Quinn mentioned you, too, Miss. He says you’re in need of new boots.”
I color, surprised that Quinn would have noticed. It lifts my heart that he did.
“And he said you’ve got no position here,” Mavis adds, more quietly. “He didn’t say it unkind, Jennie. But he said it.”