The rain was starting up again, but it was only spotting. It wasn’t hard enough to excuse us from the rest of our visits.
“My feet are wet,” said Mary. She stood on one leg to show me the hole in the toe of her left boot.
“Honestly, Mary, you are growing as big as your sister,” I said, gesturing at Bessy, who was stomping ahead of us through the puddles. “God knows what Miss Sewell is having Cook feed you.”
When I was Lydia’s age, they’d laced me so tight that my waist was eighteen inches. Mother had been proud of that, and so was I. I’d told Lydia once, and she hadn’t eaten for days just so she could say the same. She’d succeeded but given up an hour after Marshall had encaged her in one of my corsets. She’d been defeated, pale and short of breath, screaming at us to “get this cursed thing off her.”
But Bessy, for all her hair was dark like mine, might have been a different species from us. She was broader, taller, more athletic. It was hard to imagine the giant of a man who might consider her dainty.
“Whatever is the matter with Lydia today, Mary? Do you know?” I asked, transferring my basket to the other arm and lowering my voice so that her sister could not hear us.
Bessy and Lydia were so unlike each other. Yet what I said to one was always made known to the other, to the exclusion of Mary, who, at fourteen, they thought of as a baby.
“She is upset that no one has sent her a valentine,” said Mary without a second’s hesitation, looking up at me, unabashed, little traitor that she was.
A valentine? In the first years of our marriage, Edmund had left posies on my pillow, but today I hadn’t even noted the date. I nearly smiled at the girls’ naivety but then I remembered Mr. Brontë, the curve of his lip, the smile in his eyes and how he had called Lydia “charming.”
“From whom was she expecting a valentine, Mary?” I asked, walking a little faster now that Bessy had disappeared around a bend in the hedgerow-lined lane.
“No one in particular, Mama. Although if she had her pick, she says she’d take Harry Thompson,” said Mary, hopping along to keep her foot dry.
My shoulders relaxed. My pace slackened. The heir to Kirby Hall was double Lydia’s age, and it was doubtful he even knew her name. Besides, Edmund had told me a profitable marriage was brewing between Harry Thompson and the daughter of some merchant’s son turned baronet in Kent.
“She was upset, as Bessy was sent one by Will Milner,” Mary continued, her eyes widening. “It didn’t strike Lydia as fair, since she is the oldest and prettiest, but now, since Grandmama died and we all must avoid company, she sees no gentlemen at all, so when is she to have her chance? At church? Reverend Lascelles is so dull she says he’d kill any hope of romance. And she claims she’ll be old and haggard before we’re out of mourning, especially as our other grandmama will also die sometime, putting us back to the beginning. Oh, will I be pretty like Lydia, when I am seventeen? I know I shouldn’t care so much, but I do. It is wicked, and yet I cannot help it.” Childish confession tumbled out after childish confession. There was mud on Mary’s cheek and a look of terrible sincerity in her eyes.
“There is no harm in praying for beauty, Mary,” I said, reaching over to wipe away the dirt with my handkerchief, “although it should not be the first virtue you desire.”
Maybe there was no need to teach Bessy better manners or limit her dinner portions when young Will Milner was so devoted to her. It was a strange thing for a youthful attachment born out of a shared love of horses to have survived into the boy’s adulthood. It would have irked me too had I been Lydia. Her younger sister would have everything a girl could wish for—money, a husband only a few years older than her, and a property a short ride from ours. And Bessy hadn’t even done anything to earn it, while Lydia wasted her coquetry on her bedroom looking glass or, perhaps, on Mr. Brontë.
“Why, there are Mama and Mary now,” cried Bessy, as we rounded the corner. She was swinging on a wooden cow-gate beside the next house and conducting a shouted conversation with Eliza Walker.
Eliza was standing in the cottage doorframe, cowering from the thickening rain. She was daughter-in-law to George Walker, a rustic who’d been on his deathbed since I’d first come to Thorp Green Hall as mistress nearly twenty years earlier. The townspeople claimed he would soon be one hundred years old. Each day, Eliza made her thankless pilgrimage from Little Ouseburn, the smaller of the two villages, to tend to him since the obstinate old man refused to leave this rundown shack where he’d lived with his late wife for decades.
There was a flash of lightning, followed by a thunderclap in quick succession. The rain beat down so hard it rebounded from the ground. The three of us ran toward the house, seeking shelter before Eliza had worked up the courage to invite us in.
It took a few minutes to adjust to the dimness. The only room in the hovel was thick with peat smoke that clouded my eyes and coated the inside of my throat.
Mary, forgetting all her breeding, had dropped down to one knee to remove and examine her offending boot. Bessy stood at the door, watching the storm and delighting in the shocks of lightning and percussive thunder.
I didn’t have the energy to chide either of them. At least they’d come. And they hadn’t pointed out to me what a terrible failure this had been as Lydia would have, had she been of an age when I could have boxed her ears and dragged her along. What was I doing, traipsing round the countryside to impress a mere boy? Had I been so long alone that attention from any man could delight me?
Eliza untied my cloak and hung it over one of the two roughly hewn wooden chairs by the fire. In the other, her father-in-law slept, his breathing labored.
“We brought you…” I trailed off in embarrassment but passed her the soggy basket.
She curtsied in thanks and scurried off to unpack it.
I walked toward the fire to dry myself, but the heat was so fierce against my cheek that I had to hang back. It was a miracle that old George Walker hadn’t been mummified in the years he’d sat there, waiting for death.
There was a stool beside his chair I hadn’t made out before. I dragged it back from the fire and sat next to him. I gazed up at his face, took his ancient and withered hand in mine, and tried not to gag at the smell of feces and tooth decay. I should set an example to my daughters, although one of them was entranced by a worn shoe, another by the elements, my oldest would not come with me, and my youngest girl was dead.
“Mr. Walker,” I said, shouting toward his ear. “We have come to visit you.”
His hand stroked mine in response. I could have kissed him. There was someone in the world who thought me young and good, who took joy from my presence.
“You are in our prayers,” I said, my confidence growing. “You and your family.”
I could not make out her expression in the gloom, but Eliza was watching me.
George tried to speak but only a cough came out.
“Mary, fetch Mr. Walker some water,” I said, but she gestured toward her unshod foot and Eliza had passed me a mug before I could call to Bessy.
“Here.” I raised it to the old man’s lips with the reverence of a vicar doling out the Communion wine.
He gulped down what he could, although at least half the water ran down his bearded chin, the droplets hanging like dew from the scraggly gray hairs.