The Pursuit of Pleasure (19 page)

Lizzie’s first thought when she awoke was that Mrs. Tupper, for all her starch, was as wily as Mama and must have put something in the tea. Her second thought was that in spite of the unpleasant dryness in her mouth, it had turned into a beautiful morning. She was in an attic bedroom, small and homey. Must be the Tuppers’ cottage.

And then it hit her, like a hammer between her eyes. The yawning emptiness. The sharp, aching pain.

That was when the shaking began again. It started with her hands as she pulled away the bedcovers and reached for her clothes, and it continued. She made a complete hash of her lacing but was so agitated she couldn’t pull her stays back off. She jerked the rest of her clothes on, with no care in their arrangement. It didn’t matter. It only mattered that she be up and moving, away from here before her legs gave out beneath her and she was reduced to a pitiful, spineless puddle of silent tears.

She went down the stairs with careful attention to the rail and went straight out the front door without answering Mrs. Tupper’s query. She just wanted to walk, to be outside and distracted the way she had been on her ride yesterday.

Was it only yesterday? It felt like forever. It felt as if the earth had changed. And it had.

How strange. Less than two weeks ago, Jameson Marlowe was the furthest thing from her mind. She had not seen him in ten years time. She had not exchanged so much as a word or a letter in all those years.

But now he was all she could think of. She had exactly four days of memories to fill all the emptiness that came before and all the emptiness that would come after. The emptiness that began the moment she had read the damned letter and would stretch endlessly through the rest of her days.

So she walked, pacing, back and forth along the cliff, down along the beach, around into the fields, over and over, trying to wear the pain out of her body. To exhaust the body enough so the mind would finally give up its tenacious hold on the painful truth.

“Ma’am.” She turned at the sound of the voice. Mr. Tupperstood quietly on the path, illuminated by a circle of lantern light. “Mrs. Marlowe, please, ma’am. It’s gone dark already. You’ve no shoes on. You ought to come in.”

She turned and looked down the coast to the west, where the last of the sun bled orange onto the horizon. The day had come to an end, and the endless night stretched out ahead of her like a prison sentence. She looked down at her feet. Tupper was right; she had no shoes. She had no right to the comfort of their beauty. Wearing them would have only ruined forever the solace she had once found in wearing them. But her feet were cold.

“Ma’am, you’ve been out all day, with nothing to eat. Come with us. Mrs. Tupper’s got a good dinner for you.”

“I … can’t.” She deserved to be cold. As cold as Jamie, sunk somewhere at the bottom of the sea, cold forever.

“Please, ma’am. For Mrs. Tupper. She’s that worried, she is.”

Lizzie looked at him. Lines of tension and worry creased his face. His accent was as rough as his face, but he held himself with dignity and assurance. He made a short nod, and knuckled his forehead.

Ah, that was a navy gesture.

“May I ask if you were in the navy, Mr. Tupper?”

“Aye, ma’am. Boatswain. ‘Bosun’ as we say.”

Just as she’d thought. Jamie
had
brought home one of the less fortunate of his men.

“How long were you aboard, in His Majesty’s service?”

“Near thirty year, ma’am. Until I lost my fin at Toulon.”

How like Jamie to have brought the couple here to Glass Cottage when Tupper was made redundant in the Navy. How thoughtful. And how ruinously sentimental, to let a one-armed former boatswain run an estate.

“And that’s where you met Captain Marlowe?”

“
Resolute
it was, ma’am, back in eighty-eight.”

It somehow gave her relief from her feelings to talk about Jamie to someone else who knew him and loved him. “He would have been eighteen. So young.”

“Aye. Just promoted he was, to Third Lieutenant under Captain Jackman.”

“And how long did you sail together?”

“Until Toulon, madame. Through the thick and the thin.”

Lizzie heard the feelings hidden behind the bluff words. Yes, she had lost Jamie, but so had Tupper, who had spent much more time with him in the recent past, who knew him as a man, had watched him grow to be that man.

“Yes, he was loyal that way, wasn’t he?” He had been loyal to her too, in his own fashion, coming back after all those years to marry her.

“He was, ma’am, and he wouldn’t want to see you out here like this. Please, ma’am.”

“Well, I daresay you’re well out of it, the Navy. It seems a particularly mortal career.”

“Yes, ma’am. Don’t fret about it anymore.” Mr. Tupper put a supporting hand to her elbow. “Let’s just get you up to the house to have your dinner.”

“Yes, all right.” It didn’t matter what she did, but she couldn’t have Mrs. Tupper fretting, nor Mr. Tupper out looking for her at all hours of the night.

If only the dull ache in her throat would subside, she might feel more inclined to eat. But all she could think and feel was the gaping hole of loss.

The next time, they found her at the overlook on the cliff path. She had been outside, walking, as was her want, since the first faint hint of dawn. The attic bedroom in the Tuppers’ cottage had proved to be only a temporary refuge. She hadn’t slept in days, it seemed. It had been too hard to sleep, especially at night, when all she could think of was Jamie and the stars above his bed.

“Ma’am?” It was the tall blond man, the man Jamie hadtalked to that first day. Why should he want her? She was too tired, too spent, to mind the cold itch of unease that wrapped around her neck at the sight of him standing less than four feet away. She hadn’t noticed him coming. But unease felt too much like misery for her to bother.

“What do you want?”

“Mr. Tupper’s been out looking for you. We both have. There’s someone come to see you at the big house. From the rectory in Dartmouth.”

Her father-in-law. She hadn’t been back inside the house yet, but she could hardly meet a visitor on the lawn. She trudged back along the cliffs to the house and went through the front door and across the foyer to find the unwanted visitor poking about the mantelpiece in the empty drawing room.

It was the Reverend Marlowe’s curate, Mr. Crombie, looking not a day under fifty, though she knew him to be nearer to thirty-five years of age: the very picture of the perpetual curate. He resembled nothing so much as a timid blackbird: all red, runny beak and beady eyes, always pecking tentatively at something. Lizzie wondered why it was her turn to be pecked at.

There were two new pieces of furniture in the drawing room, but as Mrs. Tupper had kept them under Holland covers, Lizzie stood just inside the doorway.

“Yes, Mr. Crombie, what might I do for you?”

Poor Crombie visibly recoiled at the sight of her. She turned and took a slow, detatched perusal of herself in the old looking glass hanging on the wall. She did look a fright. Hair unbound and tangled by the wind. Her cheeks reddened by the sun and salt air. Her dress a careless accumulation of random garments, instead of a tasteful ensemble.

And why not? She was bereaved. Why should she not look it?

“The Reverend Doctor Marlowe sent me with word for you, Mrs. Marlowe.”

“Yes?”

“They’ve sent the body down for burial. Arrived this morning. A lovely oak casket, too—” He stopped when Lizzie’s look near sliced his tongue off.

“Lovely?” She felt the first strange, familiar stirrings of rage. The sharp anger suited her. It was, at least, better than dull, omnipresent pain. “A… casket?” She forced the word out of her mouth. “Who sent it? He died at sea. The letter said so.”

“I’m sure I don’t know, ma’am.”

“Where did the casket come from?”

“From the Admiralty, ma’am, surely. The rector said he had not made any such arrangements, as it was not his place. Unless the late Captain Marlowe had friends in the Navy who might have seen to his remains as a token of their esteem and friendship, it must have been the Admiralty.”

Lizzie couldn’t think of who such unknown benefactors might be, but Jamie was the type of person who made friends readily. Surely his own generous nature had been known to his colleagues? It made sense there might have been people ready to make an act of charity for him at the last.

But now something would need to be done. “Did Reverend Marlowe make any arrangements or send any instructions?”

“Oh, yes.” The curate fished awkwardly in his pockets. “He gave me a letter for you.”

At least it was still sealed shut. She wouldn’t put it past old Crombie to take a peek at the missive, but she could only imagine he hadn’t because he was already appraised of the contents of the letter.

She broke the seal and forced the angled script into focus. Her father-in-law asked her preferences for funeral arrangements. Oh, Lord, a funeral. She’d never thought about an actual funeral, with a body and a coffin and horrible dirges and hymns. She had assumed he’d been buried at sea. For goodness sake, Jamie had been on his way to the Antipodes, not Plymouth. She’d never thought they’d box him up and ship him back, like a piece of lost baggage. It seemed so small.

And so final. So irrevocable.

“Thank you Mr. Crombie. You may tell the Reverend Doctor Marlowe I will call upon him tomorrow.” She might have sent a note telling him the same thing, and telling him to make whatever arrangements he felt were necessary, but it would give her something to do, someplace to go.

And she owed it to Jamie. She was his wife. She should arrange his funeral.

“We’ll have to get ready to go in to town,” she told Mrs. Tupper, who had hovered in the drawing room doorway like a chaperone. “I haven’t any black.”

Her last black gown had been for Great Aunt Elizabeth’s death nearly four years ago. It wasn’t even vaguely fashionable. She thought of Jamie and his fine blue coats. Blue to match his laughing gray eyes. He had looked so irresistible that first night at the assembly, so tall and handsome in his dark coat and buff breeches. So full of light and mirth. She should have had that portrait made after all.

Well, she’d have to mind her dress to do him proud. Lizzie took the curving staircase up and made her way slowly down the hallway to her room. His room. His beautiful domed ceiling, his wide bed.

But the room held no ghosts. It was spotlessly clean and full of morning sunlight streaming through the windows. Lizzie sat in a pool of light that fell across the bed warming the blue silk coverlet. They had been so happy here, in this room, buffered by its comforts from the harsh realities of the world for so very short a time.

She reached absently for the pillow, smoothing her hand across the soft linen. A faint trace of his scent, the spicy smell of bay rum, he had called it, rose up to tease her. Ah, there were ghosts after all. But still she raised the pillow to her face and breathed in deeply, surrounding herself with the last of his essence, before she curled down into it. The blue silk was warm in the patch of sunlight falling across the bed, the bed where she and Jamie had lain together.

She must have finally slept, for Mrs. Tupper woke her some time later, when the sun was much higher in the sky and the patch of sunlight had moved off the bed.

“Mr. Tupper’s ready to take you into town, ma’am.” The housekeeper had shaken out a carriage dress.

“But I had thought to ride. I don’t like a closed carriage.”

“We’ve only got the trap, but it’s comfortable enough and open. And if you’ll pardon me, ma’am, I don’t think you’re in any right state to ride all that way alone.”

“Oh, no. We’ll all go. I mean, I thought… I thought you would like to, seeing how long you both knew him, Captain Marlowe. That it would be fitting. There are plenty of rooms at Hightop. We could all be accommodated there.”

“Oh, I don’t know, ma’am. It’s very generous in you, I’m sure.”

“I thought… Well, I’d like it.” And Lizzie did something else she never would have done two weeks ago. She asked for help. “I’d like it very much if you would come with me. Please.”

And so the Tuppers did. They stood with her as she rang the bell at the rectory, sober and respectful in their black. It made her feel a little better to see other people’s grief. It was one thing to lose a husband of two weeks, and it was quite another thing to lose one’s child and only son. The grief etched in Mrs. Marlowe’s silent, lined face was unbearable, for Lizzie feared that it was mirrored in her own.

But the hardest thing was the coffin, placed out on trestles in the front room. God Bless Mr. and Mrs. Tupper. She could not have done it without them—her shaking legs might not have held her up. But she would manage. She would do her best to make Jamie proud. She ran her hands over the box, feeling the smooth certainty of the wood, wanting one lasttime to touch him and feel the liquid tension and heat in his body. Feel his mouth curve in a smile as it came down upon hers.

It was a physical ache, the missing of him. And she did not know how she was going to bear the pain.

He watched. He made himself, though it was painful to see his father’s tears as he read through the ceremony at the graveyard, and hear his mother’s restrained weeping as the horse-drawn bier made its way from the church across the burial ground.

He clamped his jaw tight as he watched the Admiralty’s instructions for a very public, highly visible funeral being followed to the letter.

Damn it to hell and back. It had seemed a necessary evil, originally suggested by himself and approved by Middleton, but he had never considered the cost. He had not considered anything beyond the benefit to their mission. But now he could see the price, the horrible cost to his family, was nearly too much. His parents, who had toasted his marriage with such joy only days ago, now looked unnaturally frail, aged by their grief.

Pray God they would one day understand and forgive him.

But it was Lizzie who concerned him most. He’d thought to find her handling it all with her usual self-possessed aplomb, observing the proceedings with her air of detached amusement.