My Sweet Folly (4 page)

My sweet Folly,

If you were mine…

Searching for parlor chat—the weather has become hot again. The monsoon is still months away. My work is interesting; politics and religion. I have been learning to make scale drawings of the architecture, and collecting recipes and superstitions from the
guuruus.
Certainly I shall have a book out of this eventually. I ride out every day, but my homing elephant dependably returns me to our abode by sunset.

If you were mine, sweet Folly, I should not leave you, not for a moment, not for any rose or any riches.

Robert

Bridgend House
 

Herefordshire
 

9 May, 1806

Dear Cousin Robert,

My husband, your cousin Charles Hamilton, died suddenly of a seizure on the 6th of May. He was visiting with friends in Surry; I am told that his passing was brief and painless.

Mrs. Charles Hamilton

Bridgend House

Herefordshire
 

17 May, 1807

Dear Robert,

I have received no letter from you for a long time; perhaps it was lost. Life is much as usual here. You will know of course that your father was named Melinda’s guardian in Mr. Hamilton’s will—at first I was concerned that communication to India would make this very awkward, but Mssrs. Hawkridge and James seem to have all necessary authority to act in his place. Mr. Hamilton left both myself and his daughter comfortably off, although Melinda’s marriage portion is by no means as well-endowed as one could hope. She is, however, growing so beautiful that I have no doubt of her future. She returned from the young ladies’ academy to live at home after her father’s death, and I am pleased that we have become better friends lately.

I watched the cattle drinking in the river this morning and thought of you, sweet knight. I hope you will write again soon. If you do not, I feel that perhaps I shall do something wild and absurd, such as traveling out to Delhi to view this homing elephant for myself.

Your Folly

Red Fort

Shajahanabad, Delhi
 

10 October, 1807

My dear sweet Folly,

I am sorry. You received no letter because I have not written. I am married. All along, I have been married. Folie—I am sorry. You must not think of coming here.

Robert

ONE

Herefordshire

1812

“He is a disgrace!” Mrs. Couch said. “A disgrace to the country, I say!”

Folie, her mind having drifted to the wind-whipped apple blossoms outside the window, thought for an instant that her caller was referring to the disreputable object at which Mrs. Couch was staring in indignation. Folie sought vainly for an appropriate reply—certainly Master George Couch was a disgrace, but to agree with his vehement mother on this point seemed a trifle hazardous. Mrs. Couch was no feeble dame.

George, uncowed by his mother’s fury, turned to Folie and said confidingly, “Yes, ma’am, and his water is purple!”

“George!”
Mrs. Couch gasped, turning an interesting shade of that color herself. “You must not—
Oh!”

Folie realized that the topic was rather to do with mad old King George than His Majesty’s untidy namesake regaling himself on lemon cakes in her parlor. “That is not drawing room talk, you know, George,” she said, with a sidelong glance at the boy. “We shall all swoon.”

“Oh, I say! I should like that!” George asserted.

“Yes, and Mama would adore it, so pray do not encourage her!” Melinda said, tossing her bright honey curls back.

“I thought Mrs. Hamilton would like to know,” George said. “She’s interested in that sort of—”

“George!”
Mrs. Couch snapped.

Folie smiled. “You may tell me later, George, out behind the dustbins.”

“Mama!” Melinda said, in much the same warning tone that Mrs. Couch had used with her son.

Folie merely replied with a superior smirk. For a full ten seconds Melinda, having matured to a beautiful and demure maiden of eighteen, managed to maintain a disapproving expression. Then her perfectly straight Grecian nose twitched, and she dropped her eyes to her lap. Several faint tremors disturbed her otherwise modest bosom.

Fortunately Mrs. Couch, their primary hope for entree into Society for Melinda’s debut season, did not appear to notice this fall from grace. “It was the Prince Regent to whom I referred, George,” Mrs. Couch said firmly, and then lowered her voice to a heroic whisper. “If he should go mad like his father, I know not what we shall do!”

“The first thing,” Folie mused, “if they do lock him up, would be to make sure our Ladies’ Committee gets supervision of the church bazaar. He owns such a number of extravagant objects, I vow we could rebuild the steeple this very year on a single estate sale.”

Melinda properly ignored such disrespect toward the Prince Regent. “The papers say it is merely that he fell and sprained his ankle,” she said. “He has taken to his bed to recover.”

Mrs. Couch began to argue that this certainly proved the regent’s mind to be weak, since any sane man of his enormous bulk must know that he could not accomplish a Highland Fling with any degree of safety. Folie watched the postman wander from door to door of the village’s main street, his collar blown up against his neck and his scarf tails whipping in the spring wind. She did not expect him to cross to her door. When he did, her eyebrows lifted.

She stood up. “Now where is that Sally with more hot water for the tea? Do pardon me while I find her!”

Closing the drawing room door on Melinda’s look of inquiry, she ran down the stairs in time to find the housemaid bidding the postman good day. There were two letters in Sally’s hand, a thin one and a fat packet.

The cook, just coming up from the kitchen, gave Folie a dry look. “You make good speed on the stairs, ma’am, for a lady of your age.”

Folie stuck out her tongue.
“Just
because I am thirty today! And refused to have a great number of cakes and a party, so that you have no opportunity to tell me that I eat too many sweets for my mature widow’s digestion!”

“Perhaps there is a special birthday greeting, ma’am!” Sally said, proffering the post shyly.

“Perhaps it is! From our solicitors!” Folie gave the packet a mock grimace. “Always so attentive, dear Mssrs. Hawkridge and James.”

She looked down at the address on the letter. For an instant she held the paper between her two hands, frowning at it. Then her face grew still. She slipped the letter into her pocket, grasped the banister, and ran up the stairs. She paused at the landing and whispered, “Pray, Sally—tell Mrs. Couch that I’ve taken a blinding headache and must lie down!”

Four years and three months it had been since she had seen that particular handwriting, that blue seal, the unmistakable
Mrs. Charles Hamilton,
the distinctive curl of the F in
My dear Folly.
She sat at her desk overlooking the red tulips and peeking green leaves in the back garden, smoothing open the paper.
 

My dear Folly.

She stared at her own name for a moment. For some reason, she hardly knew what, tears blurred the letters. She sniffed and blinked, looking up at the tulips. “Really, ma’am,” she murmured reprovingly to herself.

It was nostalgia. It took her back so vividly. Four years ago, she had been just out of mourning for Charles. Good kind steady Charles, gone much too early at sixty-one. For five years before that, a married woman, she had smiled whenever she’d seen this handwriting in the post; smiled and grown as breathless as if she were falling from a high cliff, and run up the stairs to this desk just as she had today.

M
y
dear Folly,

I have left you languishing on your lilypad for a criminal length of time, princess. Can you forgive me? A dragon distracted me, just a small one, nothing to worry about, but I pursued him into an uncommonly sultry desert (you know how India is) and seem to have lost my way there. To be candid, I recall very little of it
—
I
have no sense of direction, which is a great trial for a knight errant—but in the end I seem to discover myself in England. I think there was a magic door or a key or something of that sort involved. At any rate, I am at Solinger and you and Miss Melinda are commanded to repair here directly. On the instant. I am her guardian, you know, since my father’s death. So I may command these things. And I do.