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It was a quiet evening in Delaford. The autumn rains were sleeting down outside, but in the sitting room where Elinor spent her evenings, she felt as cosy and comfortable as she ever did. Her husband was away, but she had company all the same; the parson had walked over after dinner with some small piece of parish business and stayed until supper as, when his wife was away, he often did.
The clock ticked, the fire crackled, and Edward was a good reader of novels (if not poetry): “…yet I own I like to hear something of the preparation for a marriage, as well as of the mere wedding. I like to hear how people become happy in a rational manner, better than to be told in the huddled style of an old fairy tale—and so they were all married, and they lived very happily all the rest of their days,” he said gravely. He read the last happy words to the end and laughed at the moral. “As ever, the good end happily, the bad in sorrow, with a moral that makes as much sense as they ever do. Do you approve the tale, Mrs Brandon?”
Elinor looked up from her sewing. “I think it has a lot of contrivances to make the ending fit the author’s desires,” she said thoughtfully. “As if the characters are not trusted to find their own endings. If Marianne and I had been in a novel, she either would have died of the consumption or married Brandon out of gratitude. Instead…”
“Instead, she ran away to Scotland to be a music teacher with a dashing (fictional) husband in the army in France—somewhere or other—and an equally dashing (non-fictional) companion earning her living as a novelist. It’s too ridiculous an ending for a reader to believe—if a writer put that in, there’d be nothing for it but to have young women fall in love with gentlemen for the fine handwriting on their laundry lists or some such nonsense. And you and I, Elinor. Surely we should both have responded to our thwarted love affair with grand pining, midnight rides, and an obscure relative deeding a sum of money sufficient to marry on, my first fiancée conveniently made away with by random events that no one need feel guilty about. Instead…”
“Instead, I’m the wife of a country gentleman, and you’re an honest humble parson. Hopefully not too poor. Are you happy?”
“Happy enough,” he said briefly. “And you, with your respectable gentleman and your ready-made daughter?”
“I am,” she said. “Things turned out well for me, in the end.”
The clock ticked, and Elinor noted the minute hand creeping up to the hour of eight. “You'll have to go, dear Edward, it's getting late.”
Edward glanced at the heavy rain streaming down the window and looked at her hopefully.
“No,” Elinor said firmly. “If Brandon were here, you could have a bed for the night.”
“Brandon trusts us.”
“Brandon isn't here. And he shouldn't have to trust us.”
Edward sighed in mock regret and levered himself out of the armchair, while she rang for the footman to bring his coat. As always, when he took her hand and bowed over it, she felt a frisson of... what, she never could say, apart from, perhaps, the allure of what might have been. She bowed in return, with the gentle, unimpeachable formality of the lady of the manor to the local parson and he departed into the shower of silvery rain. She always would remember the sight of him walking away into the dark, hunching his shoulders against the wind; remember it with sorrow and with gratitude.
After she had seen to the closing of the house, Elinor, as she often did, repaired to the nursery and sat with the daughter of her heart. Beth was curled around her doll, her hair tied up in rags, and sprawling every which way, snuffling slightly. Elinor smiled and stroked the little girl’s hair. Sometimes she tried to trace under the girl’s soft childish cheeks the lines of Willoughby’s face and wonder about might-have-beens, wonder what Marianne’s own child might have looked like. Always she failed; she had not the imagination to resist too strongly the here-and-now, and perhaps was the happier for it.
She curled up in bed next to Beth as she often did when Brandon was away, for she had lost the knack of sleeping alone. She awoke suddenly in the dark, translating the muffled bangs and clatters that broke her sleep as a rider arriving in the dark of night and being admitted to the house. She sat up in the little child’s bed, blinking, wondering what had happened when Brandon came in, still in his travel dirt and his riding clothes, looking like death.
“Christopher? What has happened? Is my moth—”
He sighed and sat on the bed next to her, patted Beth’s sleeping form. “Your mother is safe, and your sisters. But there’s been an accident. In London. Mrs Ferrars, Lucy, she fell from a chaise and hurt her head. They took her to a hospital but there was little they could do for her. The people she was staying with asked me to tell her husband. Better than a letter, you see.”
“Oh,” Elinor said blankly.
Brandon looked for a moment as if he wanted to say something, then shook his head. “I must away to the parsonage. I should like to speak with him before his children wake up.”
She nodded, still frozen, “of course, yes. Tell—tell Mr Ferrars that I will be there in the morning to help with the children.”
Her husband pressed her hand and was gone. Elinor stood before the flat black sky outside her window watching the silent progress of a lone lantern down the shrubbery path to the parsonage. She hugged her shawl tight about her as the little house was lit by a solitary candle.
And she wept.
***
The funeral rites were spoken, as they must be, with solemnity and mundanity intertwined. Lucy would have approved the flowers, Elinor rather thought, and been annoyed at the fidgeting of her children decked out in hastily dyed black. Edward was very white throughout but, like a blow upon a bruise that sickens with each repeated shock until at last it is removed, the inordinate pelter of the day subsided and they were freed each to mourn in their own way.
Elinor had not, in truth, grown fond of Mrs Ferrars, but they had built for themselves a working relationship as two gentlewomen must who live so closely in a neighbourhood of interested spies. Lucy’s sharp little eyes might have implied much, but her rosebud mouth rarely spoke words that were unforgiveable and, as Colonel and Mrs Brandon had kept their dealings with Mr and Mrs Ferrars unimpeachably correct, there was nothing of significance to complain of. And Mrs Ferrars had been a hard worker who was diligent in her duties to the parish, and popular with the village children. Elinor could regret her death with a clear conscience.
The year passed down into a chilled and sodden autumn, and thence to a white winter. The little Ferrars children had been wild with grief at first, of course they had been, but as the calls of the here-and-now grew more pressing, their surprised outbursts of tears grew less frequent. Christmas and Twelfth Night were happy seasons regardless of circumstance. And that dreadful year folded itself away and bore itself anew.
Spring crept up very slowly and then all at once, and the Delaford families emerged blinking into sunnier weather. Elinor’s life was filled with the busy nothings of village life—Delaford was a smaller estate than Norland, but there was still the housekeeper to supervise, charity works to organise, little Beth to be taught her letters, correspondence with her own family and with her sister-in-law to be maintained. Here, she really did miss Lucy for she was, perforce, dragged into duties that might ordinarily fall to the clergyman’s wife if he’d had one. It was very strange, but there it was.
***
Being possessed at the age of six-and-thirty with an infant in need of both countenance and a maternal presence and, this time, unwilling to trust in paid fosterers, Colonel Brandon's proposal of marriage had always felt like the offer of a friend to a friend; the pragmatic need for a short engagement had been one they both accepted philosophically. For Elinor, love had come slowly but, while she occasionally reflected on what might have been in other circumstances, that day by day transformation of appreciation to affection was as profound as it had been gentle. Their marriage had much of comfort in it and when Brandon had returned home from settling some affairs in the north it was with some relief that they both settled into the sitting room in which they liked to spend their evenings after supper, the day’s business done, nothing left to be done but enjoy each other’s company.
Brandon had pulled out a sheaf of music from a Viennese composer he was fond of and, while she sewed, filled the room with the gentle pulse of music. She felt her mouth curl upwards. “I like that one. It always makes me think of moonlight on water.”
Brandon inclined his head, and kept playing, and Elinor went on: “If Marianne had ever actually heard you play, I think she wouldn't have thrown you over.”
He coloured, and responded in the light breathless voice he always used about things that mattered to him, head down over the keys. “It turned out for the best, in the end.”
Christopher Brandon really was a fine musician, unfashionably so, in a gentleman. He was in fact the kind of husband who would look thoughtfully at her watercolours, drop casual comments for a few months and, in the breach, considering his hints had fallen in deaf ears, arrange for a painting master to present himself at Delaford reeking of linseed and bearing primed canvasses before him as a knight into battle. In his house, one did not dabble at faux-accomplishments. You were an artist, or you were not.
“You should play more for other people,” she said finally. “I feel very selfish keeping your music all to myself.”
The quiet smile creased his face again as his fingers moved to a new melody. “The ladies must have their chance to exhibit. I had a friend in India I used to play with—he was a violinist and we used to—well, it was a very long time ago.”
"Alexander?" she hazarded, and he gave her the barest nod.
She filed away this tidbit in the commonplace book of her mind, the better to understand her husband. For Elinor was aware that she had married a palimpsest, a man whose life had laid layer upon layer of text, some visible, some bare traces present, upon the manuscript that formed the mature and reserved man she had married, whose smile was the sweeter for its rarity. She wondered again what the clean, first printing of Brandon had been like, the ardent 17-year boy trying to convince his childhood love to elope with him, full of pride and passion, bursting with zeal, and packed off in disgrace to the East India Company. Had he dashed himself heroically against the confines of his life, as Marianne had? He, too, had faced the abyss of failed hopes—had he, like Marianne, renounced the better part of himself in the quest for survival?
He set a piece of newly printed music on the piano and began to play it, picking out the new tune by sight.
“That’s pretty,” Elinor said, “it sounds a little like some of the twiddles Marianne used to make up.” She sat up suddenly, narrowing her eyes at Brandon’s mischievous grin. “Marianne has published music? She did!” She snatched away the sheet music and gazed in satisfaction at the frontispiece that declared itself to be a sonata by M. D. and was signed in a careless extravagant hand to the composer’s sister and brother.
“Not just published but a hit.” Brandon said with a pleased gleam. “I had a splendid time in Edinburgh hinting that I knew the composer.” He tapped his nose conspiratorially. “It made me very desirable at parties.”
“Oh, you,” she said. “I didn’t know you were going so far north as Scotland. How are they?”
“If I had known my affairs would take me so far north, I should have brought you with me,” he said in his deep voice. “They are both very well. Marianne is so fashionable a teacher she can overcharge; Eliza’s poems are ‘beginning to take’ as she puts it, and she has begun a novel that is to be serialised in a lady’s magazine. She was very pleased,” he added kindly, “to see your drawings of Beth.”
Elinor shook her head abruptly. “It is nothing.” He squeezed her hand.
***
“Elinor, I like your use of chiaroscuro; the flood of light really brings out the drama in the scene,” Edward said one day. “Moreover, I like the way you’ve arranged the masses of the composition to confront the viewer, calling back to the extraordinary works of the Counter Reformation.”
Elinor raised her eyebrows. They were in the airy room given over to her use as studio, and Edward was lounging in a wicker chair watching her paint, as he often did now the weather grew warmer. However: it was a very un-Edwardish thing to say.
“Brandon gave me some books to read,” he explained helpfully. “He said my aesthetic sensibilities were inadequate to appreciate your talents as an artist, and that I was an embarrassment to both himself and his sister-in-law.” She snorted, and he spread one hand over his heart in earnest supplication. “How could I refuse such a charge?”
She put her brush down and stepped back from the painting to view it as a whole. It was true that she had modelled the composition on some old religious paintings she had spent days copying in London, albeit with her own choice of theme. Penelope’s loom was pushed out into the foreground intruding on the viewer’s space like a bier, or a marriage bed; the snowy white shroud she wove on it spilled over, complicit. The reels of stolen thread were jumbled carelessly in a basket at her feet, the momentous key she had not yet turned hung on the wall, glinting with menace; in the shadowed corner a door was open, glinting eyes peering through, the erstwhile suitors of Odysseus’ wife spying on her. A village matron had come in to sit for the painting, giggling from time to time, and Elinor had been careful in how she painted the muscles of ‘Penelope’s’ hands and wrists; this was a working woman.
She liked her picture, except when she hated it.
“It’s very good,” Edward said quietly, reading her face. “Even I can see it. You two are a good match, you know, you and the old man. My two best friends are the most reserved people I know, but I’ve educated myself as to the signs. Mrs Jennings has told me at length,” he paused to think of appropriate adverbs for the garrulous and kindly old woman, “at length, how Brandon was never used to laugh before he married you. I never had a chance to see the sketch version, you understand, but there appears to be a general consensus amongst his acquaintance.”
Elinor’s mouth twitched. “You knew me in an early draft.”
“You are more settled than when I first met you,” he said, considering, “more satisfied and grown into yourself. Although,” he added in fairness, “my sister Fanny does tend to depress the spirits. You get a very cat-in-the-cream look about you when you watch Brandon, I noticed.” She coloured. “When did you decide to marry him?” Edward asked delicately. “I suppose I wonder about all the happy couples I know, what choices of theirs led to that felicity. Are you happy?”
Elinor considered her answer. “Brandon was so terribly kind to us when Marianne was ill,” she said finally, “and understand when I say my sister can be… difficult when she is unwell. We used to—forgive me—we used to share little private glances at each other: ‘Oh, that’s our Marianne; there’s our Margaret—and of course your mother, but of course we love them.’ After a little, we were having ‘and what shall we do about our Eliza?’ talks as well, as if we were a conspiracy of sense in a sea of sensibility. We were halfway—no, two thirds of the way to acting like an old married couple before ever he asked me.”
“I’ve heard worse reasons,” Edward said, quirking an eyebrow.
“He was dreadfully apologetic about you,” she went on, compelled this day to frankness. “He said there were circumstances he hadn’t quite understood when he offered you the living and that I should say if it was too much to bear.”
“I’m sorry,” Edward said simply, his pale eyes apologetic in turn.
“That wasn’t the real reason, not really…” Elinor mused, as she cleaned her brushes for the day. Edward looked inquiring. Very well, she thought, frankness. “You see, I used to get so terribly out of sorts on the days when he didn’t arrive for our walk.”
“I can’t say I’ve heard a better one,” Edward said, mischievous, and ducked as she hurled a cushion at him. Suddenly sober, he added: “I don’t blame Lucy for the choices she made, Elinor. I’ve not the right—the world is unkind to those with little connection and less money. She held to the bargain we had as she understood it. We were happy enough, as they say. Our children loved her.”
Elinor nodded, but she looked at her painting again. “I’m not one of the Penelopes of this world I think, not really. I’ve never had a taste for self-sacrifice even if doing one’s duty might appear that way sometimes. Sometimes it’s the long way around to happiness. I don’t, I don’t—I don’t think your first love can be your only, which opinion makes my sister wild, and yet here I am happily married while she is not. Happy enough is a fate worth having.”
Whatever Edward had meant to say, he was interrupted by a gang of desperados in quest of someone to admire the bird’s nest they had recently acquired, and she let him be dragged off lest the invading banditti upset her paints. There was enough candour for the day.
***
The year rolled into full summer and the quiet wound-licking season of winter was forgot, or almost so. Brandon was an interested landlord who liked to involve his bailiff and the more clever of his tenants in improvement schemes; the plans he had made in winter were coming to fruition now and he was often out in the fields to discuss and assist. Elinor was kept busy making new clothes for her ever-growing child and contributing, as the other matrons of the village were, to the two parsonage infants. When summer reached its height, she insisted that Brandon take his leave from the hay-making and escort them out to the seaside; happily, they packaged up the Ferrars children as well and drove to the little village of Bournemouth, too undeveloped yet to be really popular, and they all ran about on the beach. Elinor unbent so far as to take off her shoes and let her toes be caressed by the soft heated sand, but laughed in a great shout as Beth, Anne and James capered naked in the surf. Brandon called advice to the three children for a few minutes until, noting the isolation of the beach, he stripped down to his shirt and drawers and waded into the sea to join them, making great belly flop splashes over the shrieking children.
Elinor sat demurely under a sun umbrella with the parson, equally decorously, keeping her company. Edward nudged her. “I told you you two are a good match. Look at him.” Brandon was watching them from the sea, a brilliant grin on his face, until he was taken down by children diving on him. Edward sat up. “I’m sure he’ll be fine,” he said. The surface of the green-blue water became still, stirred only by sea foam, gentle waves, and giggling children. “Oh hell,” Edward cried, and hobbled to the sea trying to take his shoes off as he went, until a great sea monster, submarine in the depths of the ocean launched itself out of the waves and dunked him also.
***
If summer comes, can autumn be far behind? Of a Sunday, the two families had taken to spending the later hours of the day when Edward’s duties were complete by taking a cold meat dinner in the parsonage garden and, thus conjoined, enjoying the open weather.
This day boded to be one of the last of such pleasant afternoons, for there was a chill of early autumn in the air and leaves starting to turn, but no matter. The three children, desperate pirates all, had taken a captive, a mild-mannered clergyman, and were compelling him to reveal the location of treasure. Beth and Anne were sitting on their captive’s chest torturing him with vile grubby fingers; little James, bow bellied, as early walkers are, was jumping up and down shrieking. Elinor, nestled into her husband’s side with his arm around her waist and his heart beating against her back was, perhaps reproachfully, calling advice to the outlaws. “Sit on his head!” she shouted. “Tickle him until he talks!” Against her back, she could feel Brandon chuckling, and she wondered if any day could be happier than this. The only thing it wanted, she thought, was her sketch book so that she might capture it forever.
If afternoon comes, can bedtime be far behind? The three children, as close as siblings now, were packed off to bed by their nursery maids, Beth granted admittance to the Parsonage nursery on these evenings. Brandon and Elinor left Edward behind to take their regular Sunday walk up on the hills in the late afternoon light, holding hands here and there to help each other over the stiles, sometimes walking one in the front, now the other as their thoughts took them.
“I like Edward,” Brandon said, as they walked along a path of white chalk. “I like how he smiles at you. I like how you seem happy when you're around him.”
Elinor stopped cold, realising what he was saying. “Brandon.” She hurried to catch up with her husband, who had walked some small way ahead. “Brandon, there is nothing for you to worry about. There has never been impropriety, never.”
“I know,” he said, his voice light and unsupported. He threw a stick for his dog and was excessively interested in watching the pointer careen after it. “I know I can trust you both. I can trust you both and so we are having this conversation. Because I do like Edward.”
Elinor frowned, confused.
The little bitch pelted home, pleased with herself and her stick, and Brandon busied himself with some small issue with her collar. “I can say I've had more practice than most in raising children who are mine only in name. Loving a child’s mother is enough to love the child. It is for me, anyway.”
A deep, gut wrenching sorrow she had been burying under the here-and-now wracked her with a sob. “I’m sorry I haven't been able to give you children.”
He looked at her quickly and then away, his face grieved. “If I'd had any bastards that I knew about, that remark might be worth something. It isn't.” Smiling at her: “a woman wants a child of her own.”
She sobbed as any child might, as her daughter Beth might. “That's a horrible reason to put horns on yourself.”
“Not the only reason—"
“I am not wood, you know,” she said harshly, wringing her hands together. “Good practical, sensible, stolid Elinor. I know my place in the world, but I have my limits. I am not a piece of wood that you can carve to fit; not a toy, nor a cradle, nor a loom, not a key. I am not.”
Brandon stopped her mouth with a kiss, both hands clasping her face, weeping as much as she was. “Never that, my love. Never, never shall you be. It is not the only reason.” He drew back, as if he wanted to occupy himself with the dog again and had made himself stop. She could feel his breath as her breath, warm against her face. “I don’t talk much about India. The light was brighter there. It was easier to see households where—where people were making accommodations for each other. I had a friend—Alex, he took me in hand when I was a callow youth who needed a guide to stop him getting himself killed in some foolish battle. I saw other families—” His face was more openly vulnerable than she had seen in six years of marriage. “I don’t exactly know how to say this, Elinor. My darling Elinor,” he said, “but there are accommodations that are possible. There are affections that can be shared without diminishment; there can be love. That also I know, though the pale English light makes it harder to see.”
Brandon might have been clothed in the garb of a country gentleman, boots and greatcoat and pointer at his heels, but he had been less naked on their wedding night.
“Christopher,” Elinor said, her voice cracking, “you are the most generous man alive.”
He shook his head sharply. “Christopher,” she went on, willing him to look at her, to let her devour him with her eyes. “All these years, I thought I was the more loving one and I was wrong. You fooled us all.”
He sighed, and let her embrace him, her arms sliding beneath his coat to wrap around his chest, a solid form to support her in her exhaustion. She stood there, feeling the hard muscle of him and the ribbed scars of the wars in India that even now could be felt through shirt and waistcoat. They stood there on the high hill with the open sky wheeling over them, and breathed.
***
Christopher’s suggestion was an easy matter to let drop. Life was busy and such topics were easy to avoid in the double occupations of the harvest festival and a visit from Fanny Dashwood and Elinor's half-brother, John. Fanny had made remarks about seeing that her nephew and niece were grown quite wild; had indeed suggested they be transplanted to Norland where the children might enjoy a ‘mother's gentle touch’ but her heart wasn’t in it, and her proposal wore itself away on Edward's polite and repeated refusal to notice that she had said anything at all.
Calls were made and returned. As usual, Elinor, Beth and Brandon went to stay for some weeks at Barton-park so that Brandon might join Sir John for the start of the pheasant season and Elinor could visit with her mother and sister. The matter stayed dropped, and Elinor and her husband continued to live as man and wife, although she had noticed that Brandon, in his usual reticence, had left that decision to her. She missed him when he left Barton earlier than he had meant to on some urgent request from his bailiff. She missed him dreadfully.
It was a long journey back to Delaford. Beth was drowsy in the chaise as they rocked off the turnpike into the little side road that led to their estate, and the shadows were long and withering. They had left a day earlier than planned to miss the threat of rain, and even then had been bogged in bad roads along the way. Elinor was relieved when they clattered into the yard and she could hand her sleepy child over to a manservant to carry to the nursery. The nursemaid scurried after her charge and Elinor had some moments of blissful quiet while she walked about the yard stretching and rubbing the back of her neck.
Across the fields she saw two men walking towards her, hunters the pair of them, guns slung over shoulders, dogs bounding about their heels, two men indistinguishable in the dim light and clearing skies, in their shabby outdoor clothes; the low sun shining behind them. They moved easily together as men did, clapping hands on each other’s shoulders, laughing at small things they said to each other. Men and women did not touch, Elinor thought, suddenly and bitterly. They did not touch in that easy way—you might have an arm to lean on for a country walk, or brush fingers in a dance, and that was that—by the time you let a man touch you it was your wedding night or it was not, and good luck to you, for your happiness from then on was at the whim and generosity of others. She had been blessedly fortunate with Brandon she knew, for honour was a virtue he took seriously in the most difficult moments of his life, far more than the quest for a glossy reputation; informed always by his innate gentleness. But with some other man, how could you know before it was too late to change your mind? to say ‘perhaps some other day,’ to say ‘perhaps never again.’
The two men stopped to open the gate. The slighter glanced up and his face lit, impish, pleased to see her and he nudged the other. Brandon raised his face in the golden light and grinned himself, smiling brighter than the sun.
Elinor stood in the yard, waiting for her husband and her friend to come to her. She stood and knew she was smiling, and smiling, and smiling.