Lady in Waiting: A Novel (37 page)

“I thought you went to Brooklyn to deliver a saucer.” Wilson nodded to the bag on the table.

I pulled the books out and positioned them so he could see their spines. “I did. And then I had an appointment. And then I went to a bookstore.”

He set his hot dog down, and I watched him scrutinize the titles. “I told you so,” he said a second or two later.

“Told me what?”

“That there is nothing at the academic level about Jane Grey’s personal life.”

“Wilson. There’s bound to be
some
truth in these books,” I said defensively.

Wilson picked up the first one. “This one is fiction.”

“Historical fiction.”

He picked up the next one. “So is this one.”

“They’re
historical
fiction.”

“Fiction.”

He reached for the third.

“That one is written by a very well-known and respected historian,” I said.

He pointed to the subtitle. “It’s about the effect of Jane Grey’s reign on the English Reformation. I doubt there is much in here about her love life.”

“There are two whole chapters on her marital prospects.”

“And how they affected the English Reformation, no doubt. I really don’t think you will find anything in here about a ring, especially a ring that no one else has ever mentioned.”

He reached for the fourth. A six-hundred-page volume on the Tudors. “This one looks like a very well-written book, actually.” He studied the back cover. “Two Oxford professors wrote it.”

“There you go. At the academic level. Just like you said.”

“Yes, but of all the Tudor monarchs, Jane Grey’s was the shortest of very short reigns.”

“I know that.”

“Do they give her even her own chapter in here?”

My hands flew to my hips. “Were you this much of a kill-joy with your students when they had new ideas?”

He cocked his head. “I am a historian. Something is either historical fact or it’s not. History is not like science where you make a hypothesis and set out to prove it is true. You start with historical record, you analyze it, and you question everything for which there is no record. It’s as simple as that.”

I took the Tudor book from him. “I don’t see why you are so against this, Wilson.”

He picked up his hot dog. “I don’t see why you are so for it.” He pointed to the last book on the pile. “That’s a book on canoeing.”

I snatched it from the pile as Stacy walked toward us. “This is for something different.”

“What are all the books for?” Stacy asked.

“Jane’s a scientist,” Wilson quipped.

“Oh! Books on Lady Jane Grey. Cool!” Stacy ignored Wilson’s comment and turned to me. “Hey! I got an e-mail back from one of my history profs at NYU. Well, not from him actually, but from his assistant. He knows a gal who did her doctoral dissertation on the female
Tudor monarchy. He met her last fall at a symposium or something. He said she specifically mentioned having spent considerable time studying Jane Grey’s life.”

“Well, of course she would. There were only three female Tudor monarchs. Jane being one of them.” Wilson tossed a catsup-stained napkin into the trash.

Stacy was only momentarily taken aback by Wilson’s interruption. “Anyway. He gave me her e-mail address. I bet she’d know if Jane Grey had been given a ring. Or if she
might’ve
been given a ring.” This last sentence she directed to Wilson.

She handed me a slip of paper with a name and an e-mail address.

Claire Abbot. A professor at the University of New Hampshire.

New Hampshire.

“This guy said she’s really nice and quite passionate about Tudor history,” Stacy continued. “And she’s already published a book for children on the kings and queens of England.”

Wilson laughed at this. “I wonder if she had trouble with the illustrations and all those beheadings.”

When Stacy and I didn’t laugh in return, he mumbled, “Sorry.”

Stacy turned back to me. “You should e-mail her. I bet she’d talk to you.”

A customer walked in, and Wilson eagerly offered to wait on her. He walked away.

“I think I will.” I put the slip of paper inside the canoeing book so that I wouldn’t lose it.

“Canoeing?” Stacy peered at the cover of the book in my hands. “I thought you didn’t like the water.”

I told her usually I didn’t.

But I was choosing to see if I might learn to like it.

Leslie didn’t quite know what to say when I told her the real reason Brad left New York was to get away from the woman he feared he was falling in love with.

“Do you believe him?” Leslie asked.

“That that’s why he left?”

“That he didn’t sleep with her.”

The thing was, I did. I did believe him.

“Sounds like you want to forgive him,” she said.

In my mind, I saw my mother with her back to me, telling me you don’t give up on the people you love. Not even when they walk away from you. Not even when they hurt you.

“I guess I do.”

“Won’t that be kind of hard?”

“But isn’t wanting to half of it?”

“I suppose. But what if that’s not what he wants?” Leslie asked. “What if he doesn’t want you to forgive him?”

I leaned back on the cushions of my couch as the setting sun turned my living room amber. “I can’t control what he wants and what he doesn’t. I can’t make him happy with me if he doesn’t want to be.”

We were both quiet for a moment.

“So what are you going to do?” Leslie finally said.

“Actually, it was Mom who helped me figure that out.”

“Get out of town.”

“I’m serious. I think maybe Mom’s resilience comes from a place she has never shown us. We think her tough exterior comes from her arrogant and meddlesome ways, but I’m wondering now if it comes from another place altogether.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

I didn’t elaborate. It seemed a private thing, what I witnessed with my mother. “I want to stand by Brad, Les. I want to support him and be his best friend. He’s having a really hard time. I’m going to let him mend, let him have his space, and let him think. But I am not going to let him go.”

As soon as I said this to my sister, I realized I was happy with the choice I’d made to find out what it meant to love someone without physical conditions. I felt brave for the first time in a long time.

“But what if, in the end, he wants to let
you
go?” Leslie’s tone was tenuous.

I tested my new resolve. “I am not giving up on him.” I hadn’t really answered her question, and we both knew it. But she let it go.

“So. You have a plan for how you’re going to do all those things?” Leslie asked. “I mean the supporting, standing by stuff, since you live in two different states?”

“Well, for starters, I am going canoeing on Saturday.”

“You? On a canoe?”

“I signed up with an instructor today who has guaranteed I will learn to enjoy the water. He’s also a fisherman who is going to show me how to set a line and unhook a fish and sit for hours on end waiting for a bite. Brad feels very at home on the water. I’ve never thought about how much.”

Leslie was silent, and for a second, I wondered if our call had been dropped. “I don’t get it,” she finally said. “You just said you aren’t responsible for Brad’s happiness. And yet you’re going to learn how to canoe. Something he loves. You hate the water.”

“But I don’t want to hate it anymore, Les. I don’t want to be afraid of it anymore. I’m not doing this for him. I’m doing it for me. I don’t want there to be fear in between Brad and me. Not even this little one.”

My sister said nothing.

I continued, “And I’m looking into going back to school and planning a trip to Nova Scotia in the fall. I’ve always wanted to go there. I am going to stay busy learning how to be me, and I’m not going to ask Brad when he’s coming home.”

When I said the word “home,” a light seemed to click on in my head, and the glint was brilliant. I couldn’t believe I didn’t see this before.

Home for Brad would not be Manhattan.

If we were going to reinvent our marriage, I was probably the one who was going to have to pack my things.

And move to New Hampshire.

T
he plan to be there for somebody who isn’t there turned out to be harder to implement than I thought. The first time I called Brad was three days after the phone conversation with Leslie. He answered, spoke politely with me, answered my questions about how his week was going, how the job was, if he’d been fishing, if he’d be able to go to Connor’s track meet that weekend. Ten minutes into the conversation, he asked me if there was something I needed. I think it threw him off when I said I just called to see how he was. I then told him I was looking at graduate programs, that I was thinking of getting my master’s, maybe in history. He grew silent when I started talking about me. I think he wished I had been angry with him. Dr. Kirtland told me Brad might not be emotionally ready for forgiveness from me; that it could make him feel worse, not better, and keep him attached to the distance between us. Guilt was made bearable by anger from the offended. A peace offering from me messed with that.

When I called the second time, just to chat, I prepared for the call by having a list of things to talk about that would keep the conversation moving. Did he see that PBS was airing a biographical film on Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen, the Nobel prize–winning doctor who discovered the x-ray? Did he want me to share with him the simple recipe I found for making
rouladen?
Did he hear that our friends Noel and Kate were expecting their first grandchild?

He seemed to relax somewhat as we talked, but I still sensed unease. The third time I called, I told him I’d been reading books on Lady Jane Grey, since I was convinced, for no other reason than sentimentality, that the ring he’d noticed on my hand when I flew to New Hampshire was Jane Grey’s betrothal ring. He listened to the story of how I found it, the fact that my name was inside, and the sad details of Jane’s life.

“So why again do you think it’s hers?” he asked, not unkindly.

“I don’t really have a valid reason for thinking it. I just do. It’s a beautiful ring. Someone with a lot of money had to buy it. It’s from the mid-sixteenth century—her time period. And it has her first name engraved inside.”

“Couldn’t it belong to someone else who had been named Jane?”

“Yes,” I had said. “Yes, it could.”

“But you don’t think so?”

“I really want it to be hers.”

“How come?”

It took me several seconds to piece together an answer for him. It was the first time he had asked anything about how I felt.

“I’d like to think that even though she was denied the chance to choose her own destiny, there was someone who loved her. Someone in secret. Someone not mentioned in the history books. And that she loved this person, and that the ring and their love had to be kept hidden.”

“Sounds like the plot for a fairy tale.”

I laughed. “I like fairy tales.”

And though I wanted to, I did not add, “and happily-ever-after endings.”

I didn’t tell him that I’d booked a plane ticket to Nova Scotia for early October or that I’d been out on a canoe and that I’d learned to handle bait, cast a line, and remove a hook. Or that on my third time on the lake, I had begun to realize deep waters are intensely blue, sapphirelike.
Majestic. Not easily disturbed. The very antithesis of shallow and superficial. Worthy of my awe.

The bit about the canoe needed to come up naturally, somehow. Otherwise he would think I was trying to make him happy.

And I was not.

I was trying to make me happy.