A coach moving slowly up the High Street caught her eye; it was coming from the direction of the Hall, and from this distance it looked like the ancient D’Aubrey barouche. Since that couldn’t be, she kept her eye on the steadily moving vehicle, and stopped hearing what Mrs. Thoroughgood was saying to her when she recognized first the two chestnut hackneys pulling the coach and then the driver—Collie Horrocks, her own groomsman. How extraordinary. She hadn’t ordered the carriage, and yet here it was, stopping in the road at the very base of the church steps. Mrs. Fruit must’ve misheard her when she said . . . when she’d . . .
The carriage’s freshly painted green door was thrown open from the inside and a pale hand came out to turn down the step. It’s a dream, thought Anne, watching the long, tan-trousered legs swing out over the threshold. Geoffrey held on to the door when he jumped down to the ground and kept one hand on the handle, swaying a little while he scanned the crowded church steps.
Her vision dimmed. She turned jerkily, looking for Christy, and found him as if at the end of a long telescope, paper-white and staring. Around her, she heard gasps and broken-off exclamations. Geoffrey saw her. He had on a stovepipe hat. He snatched it off with a mocking flourish and made a short, shaky bow. His grin was ghastly. He threw his arms out at his sides, Christ-like, and croaked into the horrified silence, “He is risen!”
Captain Carnock saw her stagger, and caught her before she fell. His kind, worried face looming above her was the last thing she saw.
***
“Did I ever tell you, darling, about the time my father locked me in this cupboard?”
From across the room, Anne watched her husband drum his heels against the door to the low side cabinet on which he was sitting. She didn’t answer. She was trying to hold on to a delusion that if she didn’t speak to him, she could keep him from being real.
“I don’t remember how old I was; small, though, to fit in here, eh?” He gave the wood a hard smack with his boot. “Guess what my childish crime was. Come, darling, guess. You won’t play? Very well, I’ll tell you. I was impudent. Yes! Can you conceive of it? Lost to memory is the precise form my impudence took on that occasion—a facial expression, a certain tone of voice, perhaps. But I do recall the cupboard. Oh, yes, my recollection of that is quite, quite unclouded.”
Anne swallowed a sip of brandy and tried not to shudder. Odd—she was drinking, but Geoffrey wasn’t. Water; he was drinking water, glass after glass, as if he were parched, but so far no alcohol. Odd.
He got up and went toward the table in the middle of the drawing room; on the way he stumbled and almost lost his balance. “More for you, darling?” he asked while he poured another glass of water from the silver pitcher.
She stared at him in veiled horror. He’d gained weight, at least thirty pounds; his corpulent body looked sluggish and uncoordinated. His hair, once dark and sleek, had turned motley shades of gray, and grew out of his dry scalp in random patches.
When she didn’t speak, he toasted her with his glass and drank down the contents in a few noisy gulps. He was out of breath when he finished, and it took him a moment before he was able to say without panting, “Well, my love, did you miss me while I was gone?”
She passed her hand over her eyes, steeling herself for speech. “What happened to you, Geoffrey? Where have you been?”
“Which didn’t, he noted, quite answer the question,” he said with a facetious twist of his lips. “What happened? Why, you’ll hardly credit it, but I lost my memory. Amnesia, they call it. From the Greek, you know, for ‘forgetfulness.’ I’ve been in an army hospital in Hampshire for the last four months.”
“I don’t believe you.”
He shrugged. “Nevertheless, it’s—it’s true.” He leaned heavily against the table; sweat beaded suddenly on his forehead and under his nose.
“Are you sick?” she asked sharply.
“No, no.” But he went to the sofa and sank down on it heavily. “It’s nothing. Just the excitement of coming home to the arms of my loving wife.”
She couldn’t look at him anymore. His body, his voice, his face, everything about him repelled her; she felt nauseated by his very presence. “Do you want anything?” she forced herself to ask. He looked at her strangely. “I’ll ring for the maid if you want something to eat.”
“No, I don’t want anything to eat. Tell me, darling, how have you been? Tell me every little thing you’ve been doing.”
She felt like a thin sheet of glass. She wanted to scream and scream, scream the house down. But she was listless, too; bone-weary. She couldn’t summon the energy to get up and walk out of the room. Maybe they would both die here, entombed in the drawing room, done in by their own inertia.
“How’s Devil? Tell me that, at least.”
She blinked at him, as if he’d spoken in a foreign language. Far away, she heard a knock, then footsteps, voices. Violet stuck her sharp little face in the doorway, her nose twitching, avid for news. “Reverend Morrell’s here,” she announced.
Geoffrey tottered to his feet. “Christy,” he said with real pleasure, and hobbled to meet him in the center of the room. “My God, look at you.”
Christy’s blue eyes skittered over her for only an instant, long enough to make her heart contract. He looked ill. Speechless, he shook Geoffrey’s hand, trying so hard to smile.
If she stayed, she would break down. Her voice was a too-high trill. “Will you excuse me?” She got up from her chair stiffly, like an old lady. When she tried to say more, her throat closed. She looked at Christy helplessly. He couldn’t speak to her either, she saw. With her head down, she got out of the room.
“Well, well, sit down! Have a drink? Or tea, I’ll ring for it if you want.”
“No, nothing. I can’t stay, I just . . .” He trailed off, hardly knowing what he was saying. He kept seeing Anne’s ruined face, and he couldn’t string two sentences together. Why had he come here? To see her, of course. Now she was gone, and he must pretend he’d come to see Geoffrey.
“How are you?” he finally managed to say, sitting down in the chair she’d just left. Geoffrey looked ghastly, worse than ever before.
“I’ve been a little unwell.” He giggled—a terrible sound—as if conscious of the understatement; then his puffy, paste-colored face sobered. He poured out a glass of water from a pitcher on the table and carried it to the couch. “The old curse flared up again while I was out in the Crimea. Malaria, you know. Gave me a run for it this time.”
What if Christy told him he knew about the syphilis? Geoffrey might welcome that, be relieved to have it out in the open. But he couldn’t speak.
“Place looks different,” Geoffrey said, gesturing at the room with his glass. “Can’t say how exactly. Anne’s done well, better without me, I daresay. Thanks for looking after her, by the way. Mean it. Good show.”
Unable to acknowledge that, Christy said, “Has she told you about tenants from the Hall helping to cultivate the glebe lands this spring?”
“What?” He rubbed the heel of his hand against his eye socket. “Yes, something in a letter, I think. Lifetime ago. I’d forgotten.”
“We’ll talk about it later.”
“Later, right-ho. How’s Devil?”
Christy couldn’t make sense of the question. He stared uneasily, his heart pounding.
“My horse!”
“Oh, Devil, yes—I—I’ve been calling him Tandem.”
“The bloody hell you say. Do you ride him?”
“Yes, yes. Not as often as I’ve meant to, but between Collie and me we keep him in pretty good trim.”
“Good, that’s good. He’s a cracker, isn’t he?”
This was intolerable; the conversation was becoming more absurd by the second. He felt full of a sick, baffled rage. “What happened to you?” he blurted out. “We thought you were dead.”
“Yes, sorry about that. A misunderstanding.” When he smiled, Christy saw that his gums were a livid purple. The hand holding the water glass wobbled; he had to steady it with the other, and finally he set the glass down on the floor at his feet. “Listen, Christy,” he said in a rush, and the mockery in his voice was suddenly completely gone. “Do you know what happened at Inkerman?”
“Inkerman? Yes—”
“I mean, do you know what it was like? No, of course you couldn’t. It doesn’t matter what you’ve heard or what you’ve read in the newspapers, you couldn’t know what the fighting was like there, the unbelievable—the brutality of it, the beastliness. It was hand-to-hand combat at the end, and it wasn’t a battlefield, it was an abattoir.” His body was bowed in half, leaning forward, his eyes bright black with intensity.
“You were wounded, we heard.”
“Shoulder and thigh, both from the same Russian bayonet. Before he could kill me, my corporal cut his head off.” Again the chilling, high-pitched giggle. “That wasn’t—that wasn’t—that wasn’t what did it. Something happened to me. I was afraid. First time. But—not normal fear, the kind any soldier feels in the heat of battle.” He wiped his hand across the sweat on his forehead and tried to slow his words. “I mean paralysis. Not being able to move or speak. Paralysis. Do you understand?”
“Because you were ill, your disease. You were—”
“No, not because of that! That came later. This was different. After I was wounded, I knew I couldn’t go back, couldn’t fight again. I could not. And they’d have sent me back, no question of it. My wounds weren’t serious enough to get me invalided out for good.”
“The letter from the War Office said you were on a hospital ship in the harbor when the storm struck.”
He nodded quickly, over and over. “Shut the door, would you?”
Surprised, Christy got up and closed the door to the drawing room.
“No one knows this, not even Anne. It’s a secret.” Geoffrey told the rest in a fast, eerie whisper. “My ship went down in the storm, but somehow I made it to shore. I was naked—I took the clothes off one of the corpses on the beach. That’s when it hit me that nobody knew who I was! See? So I let myself be found, babbling like an infant, claiming I’d lost my memory. Everything was in chaos, you can’t believe what it was like. No one knew me—what was left of my regiment was on the other side of the peninsula. So there I was, wounded and incoherent, possibly insane. Five days later they shipped me home.”
“Home?”
“To Portsmouth. I’ve been in an army medical barracks in Fareham since December.”
Christy tried to absorb it. “But why? Why didn’t you tell them who you were? Why didn’t you come here?”
He slumped in his chair, as if telling the story had exhausted him. “Why?” he said irritably. “I’ve just told you why, weren’t you listening? Isn’t that your bloody job?” He looked down at his left hand, which was clenched in his lap like a claw. “Little bit of stiffness,” he muttered, catching Christy’s eye. “From the . . . from the wound. Say, you wouldn’t tell any of that to Anne, would you? All I said was that I’d lost my memory. She didn’t believe it, but she can’t prove otherwise.” His attempt at a playful smile crumpled. “I don’t want her to know the truth. You won’t tell her, will you, Christy?”
It took him a few seconds to be able to say, “No, I won’t tell her.”
“Ah, I knew you wouldn’t.”
Beyond the window, the setting sun was shining in Christy’s eyes. “Why did you leave Fareham?”
Geoffrey hesitated. “Actually, they asked me to leave.” He looked away. “They found out about me having malaria, you know, and told me to clear out. They think it’s catching, the bloody sods. Gave me ten pounds and a suit of clothes and wished me the best of luck.” His laugh was hideously artificial. “It was like—like leaving the Bodmin gaol after a period of penal servitude. But it was time to go. I needed . . . I needed . . .” He looked lost. “I needed to see my wife. My friends. Friend,” he amended, with a terrible wistfulness.
“What will you tell the military authorities? They still think you’re dead.” It seemed that all Christy could do was ask questions.
Geoffrey began to squeeze his left hand with his right. “I’ll tell them my memory was miraculously restored after I left hospital. Ha, ha! Like my wife, they probably won’t believe it, but do you know, I’m a wee bit past caring.”
Christy found himself on his feet, hearing himself saying, “I must go. I’ll come again, but I have to go now. Call on me anytime, if I can—if you need anything from me—” He broke off stupidly. What could Geoffrey need from him? What could he give?
Geoffrey was looking at him strangely. “Go, then,” he said, angry again. He patted the sofa cushion next to him. “I’m going to lie down, I think, have a little nap before dinner.”
Christy stopped at the door. “Shall I stop by Dr. Hesselius’s house on my way home? Ask him to come and have a look at you?”
“God, no. No more doctors. I’ve got my little pills.” He patted his waistcoat pocket. “I’m just tired, that’s all. It’s been a moving and emotional day for me. Odysseus back from his travels, don’t you know.” He uncovered his teeth again in another travesty of a grin. “The analogy breaks down, though, since my wife as Penelope leaves a certain something to be desired, don’t you agree?”
Christy went out without answering.
***
Geoffrey’s memorial marker was as far away from his father’s tombstone as the small confines of the family burial ground allowed. Last November, Anne had thought he’d have wanted it that way.
D’AUBREY
Geoffrey Edward Verlaine, 6th Viscount
B. 12 Mar. 1823 D. 5 Nov. 1854
At rest now.
At rest now. Not exactly. How he would relish the macabre irony of this stone when he saw it. She hoped she was nowhere around when that happened; most of Geoffrey’s humors depressed her, but his bitter, sardonic one laid her the lowest.
Come to me, Christy, she prayed with her eyes closed, but when she opened them he wasn’t on the gravel path, or coming over the crest of the hill from the house. The sun going down behind the dark trees looked cold and indifferent in the whitish sky; she shivered, and pulled her shawl tighter around her shoulders. Please come, Christy. She sank into a lifeless revery.
It grew colder, darker, but she didn’t stir. There was still a chance. The crunch of stones made her lift her head. She put her hands to her cheeks and rose from the chilly stone bench, feeling hope surge inside. He came toward her, through the gate she’d left open for him. But he stopped on the far side of Geoffrey’s marker and came no closer.
She felt the warm, welcoming blood drain from her face. She held out her hands, whispering, “Can’t you touch me?” He didn’t answer; his beautiful eyes were dark with misery. “My God, Christy—can’t you even touch me?”
“Anne.”
In that one word, she thought she heard pity. She turned her back on him, covering her eyes. After everything, this was the worst. Christy’s hands, suddenly holding her shoulders, were no comfort. She shrugged away, hugging herself. She hadn’t wept before. Now hot, stinging tears clogged in her throat, her chest—everywhere but her eyes, which were quite dry.
“Don’t, Anne,” he begged, touching her again. “For God’s sake.”
Her head shot up; she whirled on him. “For God’s sake? Don’t talk to me about your God, Christy. This is his punishment on us, isn’t it?”
“No, I don’t believe that.”
“I do! I loathe your God. Hateful, cruel, vengeful—”
“No.” He had her by the arms, trying to hold her still. “Anne, listen to me.”
“We sinned, Christy, and this is his retribution. Because we loved each other!”
“Stop it, you know it isn’
t true.”
“Prove it, then. Kiss me.” She grabbed at him, past caring about the anguish in his eyes or what it might cost him to touch her now. “Damn it, damn it,” she muttered, incoherent, frenzied, shaking him in her anger and frustration. His cold mouth came down, silencing her. She pressed closer, holding his head. Now the tears were blinding her. She pushed her tongue between his teeth, sharing the taste of salt, frantic to arouse him. She found his hand and pressed it to her breast, hard. His breathing grew harsh and ragged, but he stood still, not flinching, enduring it for her sake. She fumbled her own hand between them and touched him through his trousers; he came alive in her palm, and she knew a grievous victory. “Take me,” she commanded in a hoarse whisper; she was trembling so hard she could barely stand. “Take me on top of his bloody grave!”
He would have. She could see it in his eyes, feel it in the desperate clutch of his hands on her body. Even if it meant the destruction of his own soul, he was going to do it, give her what she thought she needed.
She pushed him away while she still could, holding him off, stiff-armed, shaking her head over and over. The suffering in his face cut like a dull knife. “Go away, Christy,” she ground out, empty and exhausted again. “You’re a terrible failure as a sinner, aren’t you? There’s probably a special place in hell for your kind. The petty, no-account sinners, hardly worth God’s attention.”
He shut his eyes tight. “I love you,” he said.
A sob in her throat almost strangled her. “What good does it do? There was never any hope for us, it was always a dream, a joke. I wish I’d fallen in love with someone else, not you. An ordinary man, who would run away with me now so we could be happy.” She whispered, “But you won’t, will you?”
“No,” he said, hollow-voiced. “And you wouldn’t either.”
“If you think that, then you don’t know me at all!” At that moment she believed it. “Oh, God, Christy, leave me alone. I can’t look at you anymore.” He held her gaze for one more excruciating minute. Then she was reduced to begging. “Please go. Please.” He started to speak. “Don’t tell me again that you love me! I can’t—I can’t—” She spun around, fists clenched in the air in front of her face. When she turned back, he was gone.