The Memory of Lost Senses (10 page)

“Ah, so she
does
have children,” Madeline said, smiling, sounding relieved.

“Sadly, no longer. I’m afraid her children, like her husbands, are all deceased. Her grandson is the only one left . . . all she has left,” he replied, newly baritone.

“What about the count?” Cecily asked. “What happened to him?”

He shook his head. “It was another short-lived union. They were married but a brief time before he was killed.”

“
Killed?
” Cecily said, at that moment conscious only of the repetition of this word, its connotations, and Rosetta’s steady gaze.

“Killed in battle during the Franco-Prussian war, and buried there in the battlefield, at Servigny, near Metz.”

“The Franco-Prussian war. That was forty years ago.”

“Bravo, Cecily, it was indeed. Forty-one years ago, to be precise. And so our dear lady was tragically widowed once more, cruelly robbed of another husband, her children robbed of another father. At that time la comtesse,” continued the rector, warming to his theme, “divided her time between France and Italy, between her fine château nestling in the glorious Loire Valley and her home in Rome, where her aunt, the dear lady into whose care she’d been placed as a very young girl, continued to reside. And of course she also kept an apartment in Paris, off the rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré,” he added gutturally. “Paris, like Rome, is I think very dear to her heart. For thither she was sent as a child, to live with her aunt”—he paused, glancing about the table, his eyes twinkling, smiling—“who was none other than the Contessa Francesca Cansacchi di Amelia!”

Cecily looked at the others; was this a name she was meant to know?

“Gracious!” said Madeline.

“Indeed, indeed,” said the rector, lifting a napkin to his whiskers.

“Golly,” said Ethne, who’d remained silent until now. “So she’s true aristocracy.”

The rector looked at Ethne, narrowing his eyes. “Almost more than that,” he said, enigmatically.

Cecily felt her heart shiver. More than that? What did he mean? And she wanted to say, “Do tell us, please tell us more,” but for some reason, right at that moment it seemed inappropriate. The rector had stopped his story at a very specific point, and quite obviously for a reason. There was more, she realized, much more. She glanced to her mother and Madeline smiled back at her; but now with tightly sealed lips, as if to say, no more questions. Did her mother know something? she wondered. Was her mother familiar with the aunt, the Italian contessa? Did everyone know something she did not? She looked over to Ethne, who appeared more engrossed by the summer pudding in front of her. No, Ethne would not know. She turned to Mrs. Fox, seated on her left, but she too appeared more interested in fruit and cream than the unfolding roll call of European nobility. And then she couldn’t help herself.

“Is she descended from royalty, Mr. Fox?”

He smiled at Cecily, raised a finger to his face and tapped his nose.

“Well,” said Madeline, lifting her glass of watered wine, “what a life . . . what a life she has had. But it must be hard for an expatriate to settle,” she added. “She must find Bramley awfully quiet after Rome and Paris and . . . all that,” she petered out.

The rector shuffled in his chair, clearing his throat, and Cecily knew another installment was on its way.

“I believe the dear lady was ready for a change,” he began. “The daughter-in-law’s tragic demise served to propel that need for change, and here we are, with her and her beloved grandson in our midst. I think we’re honored, Mrs. Chadwick, truly honored, don’t you?”

“She must find everyone here pretty dull,” Ethne broke in, sucking raspberry seeds from her teeth. “I don’t mean that in a derogatory way, of course. I don’t think Bramley’s dull at all, I’d far rather live here than in some horrid smelly city like Rome. But why on earth did she come here?”

Hallelujah! Cecily thought, at last she’s managed to spit out one pertinent question.

“Because Temple Hill is her home,” Mrs. Fox piped up, soft and sweet, like the pudding in front of her. “It belongs to her, was built for her, I believe,” she added, glancing along the table to her husband.

“But surely it’s much too old,” Cecily said. “And it’s been standing empty for years, hasn’t it?”

“That is correct,” Mr. Fox quickly replied, silencing his wife, who was about to continue. “The place has never been lived in, certainly not in my time. Though I’ve heard tell that it was for a while rented out to a succession of tenants, and then no one. Of course, when I first arrived here, almost twenty years ago—”

“Good gracious, Mr. Fox, is it really that long?” Madeline interrupted.

Cecily sighed and Mr. Fox smiled. “Yes, indeed it is, Mrs. Chadwick. And oh, what changes I have seen in that time . . .”

Diverted, the rector began to speak about the village and surrounding area as it had once been. Cecily pushed the congealing ruby-colored mess about her plate. Had her mother changed the subject on purpose? Who in their right mind, apart from her mother, would want to hear about Bramley as it once was rather than Rome and Paris? It was beyond frustrating. All Cecily could do was wait. He’d get back to it, eventually. She knew he’d only just begun.

Bramley had always struck Cecily as an untidy, straggling sort of place. The roads passing through it rose and dipped and rose once more before heading out through tunnel-like lanes to the outlying farms, scattered cottages and huts of the parish. The village had no railway station or market, but it had carpenters, builders, blacksmiths and wheelwrights; saddlers, farriers and millers; broom makers, shoemakers, coal merchants and drapers; grocers, bakers and butchers. The surrounding heathland provided for the broomsquires and thatchers, the bees for honey, hop fields for beer, and the meadows for milk and butter and cheese. It had three public houses, a school, an undertaker and a post office. And there were regular “entertainments”: evenings of poetry, music and amateur dramatics in the village hall. The lending library was administered by the rector’s wife, Mrs. Fox, who checked and monitored exactly who was reading what each Thursday afternoon.

For hundreds of years those who had been baptized at St. Luke’s—and then, against the odds, survived infancy—had been wedded there, and later buried there. No one left, no one moved. Bramley had always been self-sufficient, able to supply and occupy its inhabitants’ hands and heads and hearts and stomachs.

In her final year at school Cecily had written about “The History and Times of Bramley.” Most of what she had learned had come from Old Meg, who may have been Young Meg, once. Meg had been the village midwife and had, she reckoned, delivered over one hundred babies and laid out almost as many corpses. But by that time Old Meg confined her activities to the reading of tea leaves—and knitting. She told Cecily that in times not so long gone by
runagates
had skulked about the mist-shrouded wilderness surrounding the village. Yes, it had been a place for fugitives then, she said; a place to hide away, a no-man’s-land people traveled through at their peril due to the vagabonds and highwaymen who preyed upon those journeying between London and the coast. She told Cecily that the unplanned ragged lines of the village probably owed something to those lawless folk and squatters, who had erected cottages by night, depositing children in them by dawn so the bailiffs could not remove the heather-thatched roofs above their heads. Then, the railway came to Linford, bringing rich city folk and consumptives from London. Yes, Cecily thought: Daddy.

Daddy—Cecil Chadwick—lay next to the ancient yew tree on the western side of the churchyard. Cecily had grown up knowing him only as a name chiseled on a tombstone. When she was young, she had been taken to his grave twice each week. Then it fell back to once a week, on Sunday afternoons. Now it was as and when—high days and holidays and special occasions, and Madeline alone each wedding anniversary. But sometimes Cecily took a walk through the churchyard on her own. She thought of the dead beneath her feet and pondered on all those long-unspoken, long-forgotten names: someone’s daughter, someone’s son, someone’s father: hers. In Loving Memory . . . Sacred to . . . Beloveds one and all.

In the churchyard, history—his story and her story—was condensed to names and dates. Nothing more. Lifetimes, no matter how extraordinary, had no narrative, no triumphs or defeats. There were no clues, no achievements listed. And yet there, just below Cecily’s feet, lay hundreds of untold stories, stories spanning centuries, bridging generations, linking then and now. Tales of derring-do and recklessness, wisdom and folly, passion and pride and honor, stories Cecily could only wonder at and imagine. The names themselves often conjured an image, the date adding context and detail. So much so that she could often see them, not as bones beneath the sandy earth but in the flesh, alive and animated once more.

Cecily’s allegiance with the dead had started at an early age, reinforced by all those visits to the cemetery and bound up in a fascination with Loss. And most particularly, Love and Loss.

Finally, and after some confusion about the point of his lengthy monologue (of which Cecily had heard not a word), the rector found his thread again. Yes, his wife was correct, Temple Hill, as far as he understood, had always belonged to the countess. The rector leaned toward Madeline. “But you must know,” he whispered loudly, “the land this very house sits upon was once part of the gardens of Temple Hill.”

Madeline shook her head and, glancing at Rosetta who stood by the sideboard, a dish in her hands, mouth open and cap askew, she said, “You can clear away now, thank you.” And the maid bustled out of the room.

Madeline then quietly explained to the rector that she had not been involved in her late husband’s business affairs. She had no recollection of him ever having mentioned from whom he had purchased their plot of land. But then, after some thought, she admitted she couldn’t be sure he had not; he had been ill, her attention focused entirely upon him, his comfort and well-being. And then, as though still taking in what the rector had told her, she said, “So, our house, the land this house is built upon, actually belonged to
her
, the countess?”

He nodded.

“Well I never,” she said.

Cecily listened as the rector explained that Temple Hill had originally had some one hundred acres of gardens and paddocks and woodland. But slowly, he said, over the past twenty years or so, parcels of land had been sold off for development, mainly on the other side of the hill. Now, he estimated the house would have only a fraction of those original acres; certainly less than ten, he thought.

The evening, Cecily realized, was producing answers to questions even she had not thought of. And as the conversation altered its course, touching briefly on the strikes and unrest spreading through the country, before turning to the recent and not so recent changes to the village, and Mr. Fox to his favorite subject—the loss of the old country ways—Cecily sat in quiet contemplation.

So, she was right, she thought, the countess was indeed the survivor of an epic adventure, one that had cost her dearly, robbing her of husbands, children and, it seemed, money. But how had it started? she wondered. She knew the end of the story—or almost, because the countess had arrived there, possibly penniless, and with no family to speak of apart from Jack—but where, exactly, had it begun? And why had she not returned to this country before? After all, she mused, having done the calculation earlier, she was a great age, and had had a house standing empty, waiting for her. If her only family had been in England, why had she chosen to stay overseas? It was incomprehensible. Something didn’t make sense. Was she so very selfish that she had allowed Jack’s poor widowed mother to sink further and further into her loneliness, her melancholia, while she continued her gallivanting across Europe? No, surely not. She had come here eventually, yes, but that, it seemed from what Cecily had heard, had been after Jack’s mother’s suicide. Then it dawned on her: the countess had had no plans to come back, ever.

Later, in the room Madeline Chadwick referred to as the parlor to her daughters and the drawing room to her guests, Cecily sat down next to the elderly rector. She wanted to ask him more about the countess. She had obviously led a fascinating life, she said, smiling brightly, eagerly, knowing he’d be flattered by her continued interest. “And what stories she must have . . .”