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St. John
You met Rosamond the day she came home from school, all finished and correct: the very day.
You were at Vale Hall, hectoring Mr Oliver — calmly — for more funds for the village school, and you were winning that particularly fight, of course, you were inexorable, and then you saw her, tripping down the stairs in a muslin dress. You know it was muslin because you have two sisters; you know all the fabrics, and it is pleasurable now, if trivial, to be able to remember the detail. Muslin, certainly.
Your breath caught in your throat, and your stream of words dried up, and you must have looked discomfited, out of your element, for Oliver looked at you and smirked. Not unkindly, but he’d found you out.
Is that even true — that you met her that day? Hadn’t you seen her as a child? Would it have mattered if you had? You hardly noticed anyone who wasn’t family, back then.
She wore muslin. Dark eyes within dark hair.
Not much muslin in Calcutta, and who would have known that you’d miss it? Miss the things that were pointless, that had no use, except perhaps to be beautiful. The beauties here are alien ones. They don’t resonate in your very bowels, like the moors always had.
It’s been almost ten years now. Ten years of swelter, and the confusion of tongues, and small victories set against massive failures — made glorious by He who sanctified the charge, alleluia, but no less failures for all that.
The first letter from Jane that reached you here had a portrait in miniature in it — a small reproduction of her portrait of Rosamond. You have no likenesses of your parents, your sisters. Just her. Rosamond remains your tie to that other life. Rose of the World, indeed.
She liked you. You feel tolerably sure of that. She also liked: her new bonnet, the seaside, soldiers and their red coats, novels. She read them on Sundays. You don’t know that, didn’t; it’s only a guess.
--
Rosamond
When you were young — just home from school, say — how you’d wanted to marry! How simple the wish! And yet you’d had an idea of what ‘forever’ might look like — a long white tablecloth stretching out in front of you, too far to see the end of it.
You hadn’t anticipated a marriage in miniature. Surely the first blush of young passion lasted a few years — not half the length of the wedding journey. Straight to the humdrum, the everyday, Fred never noticing any change you made to the drawing room or your hair. You might have been fully forty-two.
And then the accident, hunting at Tarley Hall, and Fred an invalid — you’d aged years, you were a proper little old woman! You hadn’t been brought up to nurse ill people, or to do anything useful. Your father had worked and he’d never wanted you to do a lick of it. You could shake the old darling sometimes, for that, even if he’d meant well.
You’d learned, of course. It wasn’t so very bad; on the contrary, you liked the responsibility. But you felt old, just the same.
Of course, in those early days you thought you’d marry Mr Rivers. Almost humiliating to remember how you’d strained every nerve to fascinate him, and with no real result! He thought you were beautiful, you supposed; he coloured under your frank gaze. There was a real pleasure in that. How you used to stroke and caress that old dog — Carlo? was it? — with your eyes on his master. You didn’t have any real idea of the effect it might have on him — just a dull whisper inside that spurred you on, and a low hum of satisfaction in your stomach if you spied a sheen of perspiration on his brow.
He must have thought you were beautiful — there’d been that day on the moors — but common, probably: his sisters were so clever, and the Riverses were gentry, as your father reminded you gruffly one evening. You’d come home looking “powerfully sad,” you remember him saying that, it was how he’d talked, and he put his hand on your hair and said “never mind” two or three times.
Poor papa. You missed him.
The Riverses were gentry, however poor, and you were a needlemaker’s granddaughter, however rich. You’d learned later, just after getting engaged to poor Fred, that St. John had proposed to little Miss Elliott, your friend the schoolmistress, but only after learning that she was a long-lost cousin or some such matter. There are some circles where birth is the only ticket-of-admission, and you’d learned not to care about them — well, to care less, at any rate.
You’d cried all night when you'd first heard about that. How odd to think of that girl you’d once been, crying like to die over a man who’d barely talk to her.
--
St. John
There had been one day — you think of it now, and often, but why? You suppose that it’s partially involuntary, much like the paroxysms of pain that wrack you now. Stretched out on the rack. It is not divine punishment. It is plain disease, older than Moses. It will be respite, and relief.
You’d come across Rosamond on the moors. She’d looked inexpressibly sad, almost drooping. There was a kind of mute appeal in her blooming face, and you felt it in every fibre.
You’d sat next to her on the ground for full thirty minutes and spoke with an affected light-heartedness, with a showy cheer, until she smiled and spoke naturally again. Such a thing you’d hardly ever done. When your sisters were sad, you generally fled. But to see Rosamond Oliver frown was a profound wrongness; you had no frame of reference for it. And you’d wanted to flatter yourself that she was upset about you. That you’d been able to penetrate past the shallows to something real and deep in her nature, the thing you told yourself (often) was not there.
Now that you’re ill, the cast and direction of your thoughts are not wholly your own, and you sometimes relive it vividly, feverishly:
Her glove, her left-hand glove, had been left unbuttoned, and without thinking you’d caught her wrist between your fingers. Why? To button her up once more? Once you’d claimed her wrist, that impulse seemed incredibly silly, and you’d frozen. Her face — your eyes flew there. She was — her eyes were enormous, and her lips were parted, and every nerve in both of you was taut and expectant, and you’d kissed her.
It had been terrible. Not the kiss — that had been like melting, like drowning, and God knew if your memories of it were anything like the real event. In the memory, time slows and stretches; you hang suspended in the moment, whereas in actuality in must have been just a brush of lips, cool against warmth.
No, but the recriminations were terrible. You’d almost wished for a Romish scourge, a hair shirt, a bed of thorns. But you had your seething brain, which tortured you for weeks just as efficiently. Because you couldn’t marry her, and the thought of her sitting, waiting at Vale Hall, for the proposal that wouldn’t come — it murdered you. You could not stay in England. It would kill you. And it might kill her, if she loved you at all, for if you stayed you might begin to hate her.
Merciful God, she had looked sad that day. And then: that tremulous expectation. As a child, as a woman, you had loved her.
You push yourself onto your elbows and the world lurches, but then steadies. A clammy sweat covers your frame; you avoid thinking about how thin you’ve become. You shamble to the writing-desk and take out a piece of paper.
You have to discard the first one because you write “My dear Miss Oliver” at the top. The next one, to “Mrs Granby,” you set aside as well.
Dear Rosamond…
--
Rosamond
Widowed at nine-and-twenty. The idea.
Your grief, in great waves, has passed over you at last, leaving behind only your sense of the ridiculous. You’d heard someone say “Widow Granby” in the church one Sunday and you’d had to go outside to laugh, in great rollicking heaves. Fred wouldn’t have minded; he’d dearly loved to laugh himself. Especially when you’d first married him, which is how you try to remember him now — at the dance where you’d met, and he’d squired you about like a princess of the realm, and his laugh rang up to the rafters.
You miss Fred very much. Missing him fills the time. You also miss the children you might have had, for the house did feel so empty!
Emptier now that you’re on this boat. S—— Place is shut up, with just Tom to look after it. Nan is in your hatbox-sized cabin, presumably fighting a losing battle to keep your linens in order.
You imagine doing this at nineteen — traveling alone, that is, on an East Indiaman. Would you have made it to the dock by yourself? Would they have let you board, with just a maid? Being a widow opens some doors. And a few years back you’d learned how to set your chin.
Then you imagine boarding as Mrs Rivers. No doubt your manner of dress would have been much plainer, to please him, and you’d have hid your smile. But in the cabin — and then you blush.
You extract from your reticule the letter, smooth it out. It’s beginning to take on a worn appearance along the creases, like the letters full of compliments Fred used to send to Vale Hall during your all-too-short courtship. Silly, then. Silly now, perhaps, because St. John’s letter contains no compliments at all, not really. Just oblique regrets. And yet when you’d read it, you’d done what you hadn’t done for an age — gone to the looking-glass, examined each lineament, patrolled your own face. He’d spoken, after all, of a likeness he’d kept.
You’d looked exhausted, in every sense. But your hair still curled against your cheek, and when you smiled, it looked like you meant it.
--
St. John
The fever gave you so many dreams of Rosamond that it takes far longer than it should to realise that she is really here. Here, in the room.
It takes you still longer to realise that you are, for the first time in months, feeling better, not worse.
You spend an entire day not speaking to Rosamond, but watching her. Rosamond rinsing out rags, or placing cool ones on your brow. Rosamond bustling about, miming orders to the boy who minds your house. Rosamond tying back her curls under cloth and setting the room to rights.
The next morning when you awake, she is still there, and it wasn’t a dream, and you clear your throat and say, not without a fusty creak, “Why are you here?”
It’s rude, but you’re ill, and Rosamond smiles indulgently. “You’re awake! I’ll see about some food. You look like a skeleton, Mr Rivers. It is most disturbing.”
You ask her every day why she is there, and every day she dodges it. A man has no moral authority when he is being nursed. You always hated it. Mary would baby you, and Diana scold, and Heaven only knew which was worse. Rosamond simply sees to things, her face unreadable as a mask.
She is in mourning; you hadn’t noticed it before.
Days later, when you are sitting up on your own, you try a different tack. “You are not as I remember you.”
She laughs at that. “I’m sorry, I am sure! I had more important things to hand than asking you what you thought of my new parasol. I believe I have one in my luggage, and I can ask Nan to dig it out for your scrutiny.”
“Parasols, bonnets, muffs. What a lot of new clothes you had,” you agree.
“And how you glowered at all of them,” she returns, solemnly. “I expect you thought me very déclassé.”
“You were charming.” You intend to continue speaking — to say something about how you were only trying to be a parson, in those days when it was still an ill-fitting robe you had to put on, but you find much to your surprise that tears are rising, painfully sharp, behind your eyes. You are still sick, more so than you thought.
“Charming,” you repeat, and fall silent.
More days pass. Rosamond bears up wonderfully under the heat. Her constitution, you remember, was always robust — more so than yours. She gives you, in shortened form, the tale of her marriage. You tell her of Calcutta — the people you taught, helped, the few that you saved, the many you lost.
“When you are quite, quite well,” she says, “you can escort me on a walk. I want to see it all. The colours!”
“How dull for you, shut up here with me.”
“Not for very much longer.”
So she will leave. Of course.
The day of the walk arrives in due course — you are not “quite, quite well,” but it will do. Rosamond exclaims like a child over all you see, like the child she once was, and your heart constricts with a sudden force, remembering, and you wish she hadn’t come, that you had died. Such exquisite pain, her hand within your arm.
When you return, you see through a half-open door the tiny room where Rosamond has been sleeping all this while — camping, more like, between nighttime watches, and your stomach twists with disgust. Why is she here? “Why are you here?” you demand.
She removes her broad-brimmed hat and looks at you squarely.
“Would you have died if I hadn’t?” she asks. Her voice is soft.
You don’t answer. Who can fathom the will of the Lord?
“If you would have died,” she continues, “that means your task is done. You’re on borrowed time, now. You can do what you like with it.” She moves closer, and lays her hand in yours. “I’ve come to bring you home, St. John.”
You open your mouth to remonstrate, and she cuts you off before a syllable escapes. “No. You haven’t thought it through yet, and if you haven’t thought about it afresh, then you’ll only say what you always say. And I certainly didn’t come for a sermon.” She dimples. “I’ve had my share.”
That night, you’re alone in your room. It seems larger when it’s clean — and, yes, empty without her, trite as it sounds.
For the first time in weeks, you kneel on the rough floor to pray. Ten years ago you would have prayed for stiffened sinews, for the Lord to harden your heart to stone as He did to Pharaoh. Now you only pray for guidance.
An hour on your knees, but Heaven is mute. You rise and go to the desk. Rosamond has laid out letters — one from Diana, one from Mary, one from Jane. Your sisters. They wrote as to one on his deathbed — in the terms of a last goodbye. It is odd to read them now, relatively hale and whole. They overflow with love, even Jane’s, in her quiet way.
They love you — yes, but all three resigned you. They knew you so well, knew you’d never turn aside from your path, take your hand from the plough. It took Rosamond to save you. Direct Rosamond, always sure-footed, open as a summer day.
--
Rosamond
The next morning St. John surprises you and Nan making breakfast. You are placing things on a tray, but you smile and begin to remove them when you see him. “How perfectly lovely! We can eat together, in chairs, like regular folk.”
“And talk, I hope?”
“And talk, I hope.”
You eat in silence for a while. His face is drawn, careworn, but you think (with a certain degree of satisfaction) that he is gaining flesh.
“Mrs Granby,” he begins. He called you Rosamond, when he was ill. An indulgence he must have allowed himself, no doubt: like a sweetmeat. “I’ve done you the courtesy of thinking through your proposal.”
“I expect you’ll know when I make a proposal,” you interrupt. Your spirits are unusually high this morning. “It will sound like this: do marry me, St. John, and help me spend my money.”
His nostrils flare, just as they once did when you taunted him with tales of your regimental suitors, and God forgive you, but you laugh. You laugh much longer than you intend. This tiny house has rendered you a little mad. You laugh at him, until he unbends a bit, and you see his thin mouth twitch.
“I do apologize,” you finally choke out.
“I cannot think of any female who has ever enjoyed so much merriment at my expense,” he says, with a tinge of wonder. “Do I not overawe you even slightly?”
“An old widow such as myself? Certainly not,” you reply. You are not straining every nerve to fascinate him now; you are being yourself, and rather enjoying it.
“In any case,” he resumes, “I really do not know what I should do. It might be irrational to stay in Calcutta after the warning I’ve had. But to return smacks of defeat, and to be sure, I have no home in England to receive me.”
“Yes, I expect Mrs Wharton and Mrs Fitzjames will be all too eager to see you sleeping in the streets,” you remark, calmly. “And as for me —“
“Do you really not see my dilemma?”
You set down the cup, out of which you have been gamely drinking an unpalatable tea-like substance. “No. It is folly to stay, and wisdom to return.”
“Wisdom?”
“I know you have never thought very highly of my mind — no, and it makes no matter,” you say, forestalling the objection he feels obligated to make. “But even an indifferent scholar such as myself can tell you are afraid to be happy.”
His eyes are cast down, and you pity him so. You go to him. You kneel. You make him look at you.
“I have been happy, St. John. So happy. And I have also been miserable. I know full well which better pleased the God who loves me.”
He looks as if he’s considering what you say in a serious light. The age of miracles is perhaps not past.
“St. John,” you say, infinitely softly, “do marry me, and help me spend my money. I have plenty of bonnets, and parasols. It is ready to do good, so much good, for the land you once loved, and do love, and will love again.”
He shoves his chair back roughly, and stands, raising you to your feet in the process. “God,” he murmurs, hoarsely. "I've been shattered."
"Come. Even so."
You stand, and wait. He looks at you, with eyes that burn you, and a trembling starts — where? You wonder, hazily. Your knees?
“Shall I be happy, now? So late?” he whispers. “Is it possible?”
You say nothing, but meet his gaze, and nod.
He crushes you to him with surprising force. Tears fill your eyes, but you arm reaches up to find his head, pull it down to yours. Shakily, hesitantly, your lips find his — oh God, you may as well be nineteen after all. You’d forgotten this — the wanting.
And when he kisses you, hard, your whole being surges upward to meet it.
And when he subsides — God be praised! — he is smiling.