The kitchen is no place for a lady, but surely I am better off here than upstairs scribbling in my diary, pacing the halls, staring into mirrors or out windows and half listening to ghosts, and waiting all the while with a worried heart for Quinn to rouse and turn his cold stare on me.
“You ought to go comfort Missus Pritchett,” Mavis had implored one afternoon, passing me on the scullery steps. I’d looked up from my task, scaling cod for a chowder, the fish lumped in my apron and the scraps pail wedged between my ankles. “You both loved Mister William. Let it draw you together instead of apart.” Her bony hand had briefly squeezed my shoulder. “You got no business down here. You go remind those Pritchetts that you’re still family.”
She was warning me. Yet I couldn’t muster the energy to tend to my aunt. The few times I had, I’d hated every moment.
“You’re lucky, you know,” she’d decreed bitterly as I arranged the silver service to her liking and poured her first cup of peppermint tea.
“How is that, Aunt?”
“You don’t know the intensity of a mother’s love.” Her eyes were baleful, her pudgy finger crooked.
“I loved him, too, Aunt Clara.” I moved away to re-swaddle the bed iron so that I wouldn’t have to look at her.
“Yes, in your own, childlike way. But not profoundly.”
It would be so easy to agree. But I despised her for discounting my grief, and it surely showed in my face. How could it not?
Next time, I let Mavis take care of the tea service, stopping in just long enough for an obsequious curtsy and to slip a brooch from the top of her dresser into my pocket. I didn’t trust myself not to hold the iron too close to her toes, or to upend her tea in her lap.
Family, indeed.
On Christmas Day, however, Mavis’s warning comes back to sting. We’ve left Quinn behind to attend church. It is my first outing since his return.
At least it’s a diversion. I feel unfamiliar to myself a secret widow in a starched black dress. I stare out the rocking carriage, with its passing convergent view of Jamaica Pond now in steely winter freeze.
Uncle Henry and Aunt Clara sit side by side and in hushed voices decide on a service for Will. It will be a sort of funeral, body or none, with selected hymns and readings. All planned for sometime after the spring thaw.
As I try to catch bits of talk, it dawns on me that Aunt Clara hasn’t once consulted my opinion on these arrangements.
As if to emphasize this point, as we turn up the churchyard gates, Aunt jerks forward, her palm outstretched. “Why, Jennie, you are still wearing your engagement ring!” she exclaims. “Of all preposterous sights. Give it here at once, before anyone in the congregation sees it on your finger.”
“Clara, dear,” says Uncle Henry. “Now is hardly the time.”
“That ring is no longer hers to wear. It is a Pritchett heirloom. Unless one is a nun, one cannot be engaged to…a spirit.”
“Yes, of course, but…” Uncle Henry lapses off, astonished, as always, by Aunt’s vile outburst but unable to find the words to refute her. He rubs the back of his head.
“Will was far too sentimental,” Aunt continues, daubing her eyes. “Any adult can see this for what it was a fickle vow from a boy too young for marriage to a girl too giddy to know better.”
“He loved me,” I whisper. “And that ring belonged to Grandmother Pritchett. Surely I can keep it?”
Nobody answers. The silence has hard corners.
Aunt Clara is wrapped head to toe in crepe so stiff she appears almost inhuman. She is a lump of coal in the corner of the carriage, her outstretched hand insistent as a beggar maid. If Will were here, we’d have been able to laugh at her. Alone, I find her quite terrifying.
The ring catches on the net of my glove and grips the bone of my finger. I wince as I pull it off. Aunt snaps the ring into her purse.
“I have Will’s favorite hymn,” I murmur in Uncle Henry’s direction.
I think of it, written out in Will’s fine script, pressed into my scrapbook with a lock of his hair. “He would have wished it sung for him. At the service.”
But Uncle will not look at me.
6.
“Then what did she do?” Rosemary’s quick breath frosts the air.
“After screaming like a banshee and running up and down the stairs? She pulled the pine garlands off the banister, ” I recall. “And she ordered the hired man to take away the Christmas tree and the ivy wreaths.” I’ve been saving up this story and am probably too satisfied with the shock in the girls’ faces, though it’s all true.
Besides, the Wortley sisters indeed, all of Brookline must have heard some version of how Aunt Clara first took the news of Will’s death.
“Mrs. Pritchett’s got a boiling-hot temper.” Flora shakes her head in dismay. “She would have been a fright to behold.”
Christmas service is over. The familiar faces in the pews, the flickering candles in the stained-glass windows, the timeworn story of the baby in his crèche, and the hot cider and gingerbread in the long room afterward have given me a small and temporary peace.
Arm in arm, Flora, Rosemary, and I now walk the pebbled pathway that winds down to the Walnut Street Cemetery. My hands hold a single poinsettia, stealthily broken off the altar arrangement, to place on Toby’s grave.
Aunt Clara and Uncle Henry linger near the vestry, consulting with Reverend Meeks, but I don’t want to hear Aunt insisting that Will’s service is given proper fanfare. Especially when Toby was buried in the same pine box he came home in and Aunt wore black for less than a month.
“Poor Mrs. Pritchett,” murmurs Rosemary. “To bury a son. Not that it isn’t deeply affecting for you, Jennie, only you’re so young and sweet. Love will find you again. But Mrs. Pritchett is past forty. She has nothing to look forward to but the grave.”
“She has venom in her yet. She took back the ring Will gave me.”
“Nooo…” Flora’s primmed face reminds me of when, in our last year at Putterham School, we’d stuck a clothespin on her nose to try to straighten it last minute, before the end-of-year class portrait.
“She wrenched it off my finger. She nearly drew blood,” I embellish. “She despises me because she thought Father was common and Mother a heathen to marry him. Aunt Clara is a hideous, beastly thing.” After all these weeks of being shut in that house, my words huff like an engine whistle pitched high and strong.