Lost Among the Living(57)
I am alone, I thought.
The wind stung my eyes, but the tears on my cheeks were not from the cold. Here, in this remote place where no one could see me, I did not wipe them away, but let them dry, salty, on my skin.
Keep it together, Jo.
I pulled the letter I’d received this morning from my pocket, unfolded it, and looked at it for the hundredth time. The wind flapped the page sharply, but I held on, watching the words blur.
We are very sorry to inform you that Mrs. Christopher passed away last night in her sleep. There was no warning, and she spent yesterday as usual, so the doctors have declared that her heart stopped as she was sleeping. Though this news must grieve you, please accept our assurances that Mrs. Christopher went to her Maker peacefully, without struggle or pain, and that she rests now in the arms of Heaven as innocent as a child, as all of our patients do.
There are certain arrangements to be made . . .
I lifted the letter higher, watched it flap in the wind. I thought of my mother, her beautiful hair, her porcelain skin, the fine bones of her wrists, the dark half circles under her eyes like bruises. All of those years with the refrain in the back of my mind—Where is Mother? What is she doing? Is she all right?—were over. She had been a mystery, a labyrinth of rooms I could not know, and now she was gone, unknowable forever, and I had no one left to worry about. Had she remembered me, even as she died? Had there been any memory of me at all?
I doubted it. Mother and I were strangers; last night I had been in my bedroom at Wych Elm House, reading a book by lamplight, as she had been dying. But without Alex she was all I had, the only thing mooring me to the earth. With Mother gone, I suddenly felt as insubstantial as the leaves in Wych Elm House, as transient as Frances Forsyth’s face printed in nitrate on a piece of paper. Someday I would vanish, and no one would ever know I’d been.
Where is your Mother?
The wind tried to snatch the letter from my hand, but I would not let it go. Eventually I folded it again and put it back in my pocket. Then I wiped my eyes.
I turned my steps away and walked back toward the path, to meet Martin and Cora as they came my way.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
It was a surprise to no one that Cora and Martin emerged from their walk in the woods engaged. In the jubilation that followed among both sets of parents, I kept the news of Mother’s death quiet, privately asking Dottie for time off to travel to Hertford for her funeral and to sign the papers from the hospital.
Dottie had been distracted as I spoke, but when I came to my reason for the time, she turned her gimlet eyes on me with perfect focus. “That is a shame, Manders,” she said. “You may have the day. Take the motorcar and driver.”
“I will, thank you.”
“Are there any financial concerns?”
It took me a moment to realize she was asking if I was capable of paying for Mother’s funeral. “The hospital is burying her in their chapel yard,” I said. “It’s where many of their patients go. The expense is modest.”
“They’ll bury her properly, then,” Dottie said. “Make sure they do. If any of the arrangements are unsatisfactory, have them telephone me.”
She was awful—she had granted me only a single day off, and in a moment she would forget about me altogether as she planned Martin and Cora’s engagement party—but my eyes stung with embarrassing tears. She had buried Frances properly and had likely had to fight to do it. She was willing to fight the same fight on my behalf for Mother. Why Dottie made it so hard to befriend her, I would never know.
“Thank you,” I managed.
“Eight o’clock Thursday morning, Manders,” she said in reply. “Look sharp, as we’ll be busy. I detest maudlin emotions.”
“Yes, Dottie.”
As it happened, the hospital did bury Mother properly. Their chapel yard was calm and green, well tended, with a view over the rolling hills. They gave her a small stone, with her name and dates, and the simple word BELOVED. Aside from the hospital’s chaplain and one nurse on behalf of the staff, I was the only one in attendance.
It was on the ride back in the motorcar, as I half dozed beneath a headache of grief, that I suddenly realized I would no longer be paying Mother’s hospital bills. The expense that had burdened me for so many years—that had driven me to work for Casparov, and therefore meet Alex and change my life; that had driven me to work for Dottie, and to change my life again—was gone. I would still have to support myself, but I now earned enough to put a few pounds into savings. The relief was so hideous that I wept in horror at myself, with no witness but the silent driver. By the time we arrived back at Wych Elm House, I was myself again.
? ? ?
The engagement party was to be grand, the first social affair Wych Elm House had seen since Dottie’s father had bought it for her. The bride’s parents had offered to host it, as was custom, but Dottie had insisted; she used the excuse that Martin’s health prevented him from traveling, which was accurate, but the truth was she wanted badly to show off.
The arrangements were many: flowers, china, additional servants, champagne, music, food. Dottie and I were kept busy morning and night, and though it was dull work, it was a blessing, because there was no room to think of anything else.
Though Martin and Cora were the feted couple, they had nothing to do with the arrangements. I rarely saw them. Martin had taken a turn for the worse again, as if the effort of courtship and proposing had taxed him, and Cora took to reading to him in the back study as he lay on the sofa with a blanket over him. Her voice was grating, her pronunciation terrible, and her reading hardly expert, but still he lay there hour after hour, his eyes closed, as she read on.