The Dying of the Light

  The next night at dinner, Copperton said casually, “There’s a fifty-mile race on Saturday. I was thinking of taking Phaeton for the day.”

  “You will absolutely not take that horse. I am begging you. Races like that take training. They take expert riding. He’s mine. Nobody else has ever ridden him except me.”

  “Very well, my dear.”

  But the next night, “I think I really do need to take Phaeton. He can do it. Arabians were built for those races. Bred for them in the desert.”

  “Copperton. It would kill me.”

  “You’ve had your way your whole life. Sometimes you have to give in to the needs of others. Let’s not be selfish, darling.”

  “I won’t hear of it. This subject is closed.”

  Still, a few days later, she woke to a general clatter from the stables, and got to the window just in time to see the gates of the trailer close on Phaeton’s magnificent rump. It was only just barely light.

  She caught hold of the curtain to steady herself. Sometimes you just know it, and she knew this. This was the moment that changed everything. Irrevocably and forever.

  As the truck rattled down the long dirt road to the highway, she noticed that one of the rear lights was out. Maybe they’ll get stopped, she thought. But then, no, let them all go out. Let them travel in darkness. As she lost sight of the truck, she somehow knew that life as she had known it was over.

  II

  Gibby

  10

  THERE WAS AT least this to be said. She managed. She kept Saratoga running against all odds. While the wallpaper peeled, and water dripped through the kitchen ceiling into a bucket when it rained, she kept it going. Through cracks in the plaster. Buckles in the floorboards. Through hurricanes, when the river came halfway up the long lawn to the house, the old house endured because she willed it so.

  She had kept mourning as long as anybody in 1931 could have reasonably expected. Not out of love. Not that. Out of a perverse sense of duty. She was Victorian in her observance, and in her guilt. When Phaeton, the Arabian gelding who was the jewel of their stable, had shied at some imagined something at the thirty-fifth milepost of the fifty-mile endurance race and thrown the Captain, breaking his neck and killing him instantly, leaving him broken and dead on the side of the trail with no more visible wound than a small blue mark on his left temple, his little blue ribbon—the horse racing on, a harrowing sight, his leg broken, collapsing five miles past his rider, heart bursting—Diana Cooke Copperton put away her bright and diaphanous finery, the tea dresses and the furs and the hats from New York and Paris, and put on widow’s weeds. She exchanged her diamonds and pearls for jet and black bombazine, gave up her dancing, her nights of gin and vicious laughter, her tortured passion. Instead she sat still in a blue velvet slipper chair draped with black lace for six months, knitting for the poor. She sat implacable, needles clicking as she drew the yarn from the skein. Nobody could have argued with her behavior, once so scandalous. She shut herself in like Aida in the crypt, and eventually the cards and letters stopped coming and the telephone sat mute on the table in the pantry. The fatal stone had closed over her, with no Radames to share her slow and agonizing suffocation.

  She drew the curtains, rolled up the rugs, and locked the doors against the world, refusing all visitors. A quiet descended on the great house that seemed forever impenetrable, a lethargy from which it was impossible to rise. The servants put on slippers for silence and black armbands for respect; she even kept the boy at home and schooled him herself in the mausoleum the house had become, teaching him his numbers and the history of the Gallic Wars and the eloquent cavalcade of the English poets, the boy himself in black pants and jacket, hunched over his books in the darkness of the library, with its thousands of leather-bound books, looking out over the flats and marshes and scrub pines that surrounded the town of Port Royal, on the shores of the Rappahannock River, at the mouth of the Chesapeake Bay.

  Oh, how she loved that boy. He clung to her, asking again and again where his father was, and if they would still go to all those wonderful places Copperton had described to him. And she answered, “Of course, my darling. Your father wanted you to see the wonders of the world we live in. Other people, remarkable places. As soon as you’re old enough, we’ll go there, go everywhere.” He lay his head on her breast, and his quiet tears wet the black silk of her mourning clothes. She would try to give him the dream of a life Copperton had put in his head. God knows they were rich now, and no parents to watch over.

  Then Mr. Ambrose came to discuss the will, and she discovered that the Captain had left her out of his vast fortune, of which he had lost not one penny in the Crash of ’29, and allowed her just enough to live on comfortably, barely enough if, that is, she gave up the splendor of the life they had known together, the servants, the dressmakers, the wardrobe sent from Paris, the parties and the travel. She could live a modest, comfortable life, but her son, who was thirteen at the time, had become instantly the richest man in five counties.

  She never said one unkind word to Ashton about his father. After all, it must be said, he had loved the boy with a fierce and mesmerizing power. And so, with a grief so heavy she thought she would die without a wound, she stood silent as his trustees sent him away to Exeter, which was also a provision of Copperton’s will. Even this, the pleasure of raising her own son, Copperton had denied her from the grave. She could not afford to raise him as well as he could raise himself. The night before he left for school, Ashton sat on the floor in front of her in his bathrobe, fresh from the bath, his hair wet, and she brushed his hair dry, as she had done almost every night of his life. He purred like a cat when she did it, and she thought she would die of grief. She thought also she would explode with loathing for her dead husband.

  The next morning Clarence drove mother and son to the train, both in tears, and she saw Ash off, his destination pinned to his jacket in a note, and then she went home, put away her widow’s weeds, flung open the curtains, and began to fire the servants one by one, until only Priscilla and Clarence were left. She then walked down to the edge of the garden, waving good-bye to the gardeners, Paolo and Tomasso, who were packing up their tools, weeping in the peonies, burning the last of the leaves in a huge pile.

  Autumn was coming on. Locked in her tower, she would hear them, the horns blowing, the beagles with their anxious yelping, the men and women of the hunt club, passing through her land. She didn’t even lift her head.

  Her fury was murderous. Her rage was without bound. Her grief was infinite and impenetrable. Her boy. Her beautiful boy, lost now also. Oh, there would be holidays, he would come at Christmas and Easter and in the summers, but he would come increasingly as a stranger as he grew into his own world without her. Would he still want his hair brushed dry? Would he still ask her to twirl in her party dress just for him? And what party dress, now, now that the party was over?

  The house, Saratoga, was safe, at least; the Captain had made sure it was left in trust to Ashton, which meant she could live there, but as a tenant, a lodger in her own property, among the furniture and the silver with the Cooke crest, the large and fine family portraits, by Sully, by Stuart, the strings of pearls, none of it belonging to her in any real way anymore, although she bore the entire burden of maintaining it in some miraculous manner she couldn’t yet envision. The Captain had thought these things just happened, the endless details, that copper pots got polished on their own and so forth, like a gigantic flower arrangement that never wilted.

  She hated the thought of him. Had she ever loved him? Or was it mere gratitude for pulling her out of the march of the debutantes and saving her family from ruin, from loss of home and place? Perhaps she had loved him for that, but she was only nineteen and knew nothing of how quickly and violently love could turn to loathing. True, there was a fierce sexual passion, but he was her first and only, and perhaps she mistook that for love. And even that passion was a mixture of deep loathing and desperate longing.

&nbs
p; Even now, in her grief and rage, the power of his seduction and his body would cause hers to warm, and she would writhe on her bed, wanting something she didn’t know the name of. It wasn’t him, but she felt whatever it was deep in her groin. Sometimes it became unbearable, and she had to be naked, her hands had to touch her body, she had to stand in front of a mirror and watch herself doing all of this, call it whatever you will.

  Almost a year went by. On the first Saturday in October, she heard it: the familiar sounds of the Saratoga Hunt assembling, down by the boathouse. It was just after dawn. In the semidarkness of the library where she had sat up all night, half sleeping, Tennyson open on her lap unread, she heard the horns, pictured in her mind the bridles and the hot steam coming out of the horses’ nostrils, the warm trust between horse and rider, and then, at the sound of the master of hounds’ signal, off, off, off, into the bracken. She imagined herself among them, as she always was, always had been since she was a child. She felt it in her body, the dormant lushness of it all, the smells, the sounds, the power controlled through the slightest movement of the reins in her hands, the ultimate power of the horse beneath her, the saddle rubbing at exactly the right place, and she imagined herself joining the hunt to which she had belonged since she was eight, in her semiwaking dream riding naked, throwing her hat away, her hair streaming behind her, the bracken and branches of trees cutting into her arms so that blood trailed down to her hands. It was ecstasy.

  Copperton had come back to her, with his velvet and satin ribbons, with his rape night after night of her young body on the crisp sheets of the Ritz Hotel or Claridge’s, leaving her spent and alone as soon as he had taken his pleasure, gone back to his own bed, seeming never to sleep, left her with not so much as a kiss good night, the pleasure all his, left her tied for the maid to find in the morning, her lamentation, her prayer only that she be set free, but her body, throughout the night, electric, begging that he would return and take her again.

  Copperton. Why wouldn’t he leave her? She had come to hate him, and now she felt an urgent need for him almost all the time.

  When he died, there was no one to get in touch with, no next of kin they could find. He had been, before their marriage, a man of no fixed abode, and it was hopeless to look for his family, so he was buried in the Cooke plot, where they had all been buried for two hundred and fifty years, an interloper even there. His coffin was very large, and he was buried in uniform, with medals, shiny elaborate things that turned out to be mostly geegaws for accomplishments like marksmanship in summer camp. Who had she been married to? She hardly knew, and this only added to her fury. She was so grateful for the things he gave her, she hadn’t wanted to ask; she didn’t want to know.

  She heard the sound of a champagne flute breaking behind her, but she knew there was nothing there. She didn’t even turn around. Memory was creeping in. She heard the laughter of the guests as the orchestra struck up a jazzy foxtrot. So often. So many nights. So many nights Paolo and Tommaso, twins who slept in the same bed in the gardener’s cottage, had laid down the parquet dance floor at house parties where every one of the fourteen bedrooms was full, flasks on the men’s hips, sometimes syringes wrapped in silk, suitcases taken as the guests arrived, taken downstairs and unpacked, everything pressed and hung on satin hangers in closets and armoires upstairs, ready to be put on, flawless, after soothing baths and emoluments and libations before dinner.

  So, on that October morning, when she heard the huntsman’s horn, it seemed no more real than her other fantasies. She had lost track of time; one day was exactly like the next. She never bathed, unless Priscilla made her sit in the huge bath, soaped her, smoothed her skin with delicate oils, as Diana had always done, though now she never did anything unless at Priscilla’s command. Her bed seemed too far away, and she mostly spent her nights in the chair. Some nights Priscilla would order her to lie down, and she would acquiesce. Priscilla had to help her up the stairs, brush her hair for her, lay out her nightclothes, even help her into them. She just didn’t give a good goddamn.

  How much time had passed? she would wonder through her sleepless nights. Days? Months? Seasons?

  But the huntsman’s horn and the baying of the pack of hounds pulled her up short. It was fall. Copperton had died in the spring of the year before. Enough time had passed. The season was coming for the Saratoga Hunt, founded by her great-grandfather when the house’s acreage was ten, not five thousand.

  There was a knock on the door. Priscilla answered. It was the master of the hunt, Roddy Powell. He had seen Diana naked, all those years ago.

  “Good morning, Priscilla,” he said. “Will Miss Diana be joining us?”

  This, today, Diana knew, was just the first of the practice hunts. The real season didn’t begin for a month.

  Priscilla appeared in the library. Diana had heard the invitation.

  “Give him my regrets. Tell Mr. Powell I’ll be there on opening day,” Diana said.

  She heard Priscilla speaking, and some mumbling from Roddy, and then the big door closed. After a while Priscilla brought her the usual big breakfast on a tray, which she, as usual, took two bites of, and then left on a table. She went upstairs to get out her riding clothes, stored in neat boxes, wrapped in tissue. The jodhpurs; the scarlet jacket with its turquoise collar—mysteriously referred to as a hunting pink—that identified her as a member of the Saratoga Hunt; the bespoke boots. Then she unwrapped the jewel of her wardrobe, her sidesaddle riding habit, custom-made on a trip to London with her father, after Miss Porter’s. With a pang of tenderness, she remembered where all the money had gone. It had gone to her—her education, her outfitting, with all its trappings—and she had never thanked him for it. Like all eighteen-year-olds, she was so heartless and self-involved, she had no room in her heart for anybody but herself; she had accepted all the things her father provided with a carelessness that now reddened her face with shame.

  The clothes, jacket and skirt, were a flight of fancy, modeled after pictures she had seen of ladies of the peerage in the nineteenth century, all ruffles and pleats and passementerie, but all in black. A duchess in mourning for a state funeral. There was also a beaver top hat, veiled with brilliant beaded netting, that half hid her face; tulle wrapped around the brim, black fluff that flew out behind her as she rode. She hadn’t worn the outfit in ten years, but she was going to wear it now.

  THE FIRST SATURDAY in November, she was at the boathouse before dawn. She was sitting in her sidesaddle on Icarus, her most beautifully trained horse, black as sin and twice as lethal, but instantly obedient to her every move. She had made sure of that. A hunter needs to be strong, inexhaustible, and precise. She had spent months training him. Now horse and rider were one being, and she would trust him with her life. He stood, restless, his mane and tail braided immaculately, the hair intertwined with black satin ribbons, a job so fraught with danger the stable boys wouldn’t even attempt it. Only she could get near him. All around her milled her pack of hounds. Lying on the ground at her feet, asleep, was her best dog, her striker hound Bluesie. In her black clothes, her black kid gloves, she looked like a dark queen, though in fact she was nervous, and the dogs and the horse sensed it. Icarus was a wild thing, but she trusted him completely to do exactly as she commanded him to do. He was the fastest, the best jumper. She wanted the danger, the speed, the flight when they hit the fences and brooks, never knowing what was on the other side, ditch or brook, jumping into the unknown.

  She wanted a taste of danger. The smells, the skittish horse, the cold black morning—it felt like sex, and she wanted sex.

  Her days of mourning had passed while she sat in the darkened house, reading Tennyson, dreaming of Copperton inside her, hating him, needing him. She ached for the feeling of the pommel of the saddle, its force and thrust, the scars and scrapes of Copperton’s love.

  Other horses appeared out of the fog, and the hounds. The men tipped their caps, impressed by her imperial look, more impressed by her magnificent jumper.
The master of the hunt arrived, and the rattle and buzz in the air grew and grew, palpable—a camaraderie she had missed for all those months, as everybody sipped from the flasks that had been built into their scarlet jackets. Dogs were underfoot everywhere, and the children on their ponies, so sweet, so eager.

  The veil over her face almost hid her from view, but they all knew who she was. They had been riding together for thirty years, welcoming her into the juniors as a wildcat ten-year-old on her crazy little pony. People greeted her, sometimes holding out a gloved hand as they tried to control their overwrought horses at the same time.

  Then the huntsman led the dogs out, the horses, barely restrained, following. At last the dogs caught the scent. They were baying and barking, crazy to be running free and fast across the landscape toward their prey, but knowing not to move until the horn blew, and then it did, and they flew off, followed by the thundering wildness of forty horses, Icarus, unbound, leaping to the front, wild already, almost throwing her with every long stride, the reins loose in her hands, giving him his head, Icarus going faster and faster as though insane with speed.

  How happy she was! She felt nothing except the speed and the tight muscles of the horse, the black flanks and withers, sweating already, the fence approaching, her head up, her body erect on the horse so that it looked as though she were leaning backward, every muscle of her body in tune with the horse, black on black flying over field and through bracken and jumping the sagging fences and the brooks.