To Die but Once (Maisie Dobbs #14)(42)
“Tante Maisie. You know you said I was too young to learn how terrible war is? Well, I’m sixteen—how old were you, when you went to France?”
Maisie sighed. “I was seventeen, Tim. Your mother was a bit older than me, but no more prepared for what we encountered.”
The boy nodded, though Maisie thought she saw his eyes redden, and he looked down, as if to avoid her gaze. “Tom will probably telephone tomorrow. Friday is usually his day, and he missed it.” He turned, picked up his kit bag from the kitchen floor where he had dropped it as they’d entered, and made his way toward the conservatory. He did not look back, but called over his shoulder, “Good night, Tante Maisie.”
“Good night, Tim.”
Maisie stood for a moment, and then went to the library. She still thought of it as “Maurice’s library” even now she was at peace with the legacy she had inherited upon the death of her beloved mentor. It was to this room she would come when the ache of loss was most keen, and she yearned for the comfort of his wisdom. Now, with the house full, it was her makeshift bedroom. She poured herself a glass of sherry, and as she was about to take a seat alongside the fireplace—cold, and covered with a needlepoint screen for the summer—she stopped, and returned to the trolley that held the same two decanters as it had in Maurice’s day. She poured a measure of aged single-malt whiskey into a glass and set it on a small table alongside his leather wing chair. She clinked her glass against the glass she’d left for a man now passed, and seated herself on the chair opposite. She took a sip of the sherry and leaned back.
“Oh, how I miss you at times, Maurice. How I miss you.”
And she waited for the counsel she would not hear, but would feel in her heart.
Chapter 9
Maisie and Lady Rowan left Chelstone Manor early for the drive to London. As Lady Rowan would doubtless have been more comfortable had her chauffeur taken her to Westminster Abbey, Maisie concluded that, in accepting her offer, her mother-in-law probably wanted to discuss something, without interruption and away from her home.
“Now we’re under way, I think I can relax,” said Lady Rowan. “And I must say, I do like your new motor car.”
“Thank you very much,” said Maisie. “It’s bigger than the MG, so easier to take the family out for the day, though of course when I bought it I hadn’t considered the fact that we would be dealing with petrol coupons. I have to be very careful because I have an assignment that’s taking me down to Hampshire now—it’s a bit of a journey, and I cannot depend upon buses and trains when I get there.”
“And it’s not as if you can put your toe down and push this motor car a bit is it? I suppose it uses more petrol if you get too enthusiastic.”
Maisie looked across at Lady Rowan for a second, then brought her attention back to the road. “I know you, Rowan—you would be tearing around the countryside if you had this motor.”
Rowan laughed. “I always liked a little speed, you know—the wind in my hair and the feeling that I could just drive off in search of something thrilling, if only for a short time. The hip put paid to that though—the wonderful hazards of riding horses diminished the years of excitement behind the wheel. And as you know, my son inherited the devil-may-care aspect of my character—which I . . .” She faltered. “It’s something I very much regret. I wish he had been more like his father; more measured, more a thinking man than a doing man.”
Maisie continued to look ahead but chose her words carefully for she understood her mother-in-law was, perhaps, making a confession of sorts.
“The James I knew—and loved deeply—had within him the best of both you and Lord Julian. He was also his own man, and he followed his heart.”
“He followed it too high that day, didn’t he, Maisie?”
“Time has passed, Rowan—time has passed for us all. It’s taken me a good long while to reach this point, but I don’t think it serves any of us to look back. Tormenting ourselves with ‘What if?’ and trying to change past events—if only in the imagination—can drive a person mad.”
Lady Rowan looked out of the window. “I love the way the mist comes off the fields in the morning, just as the day is warming up. It makes me feel as if the next twenty-four hours could hold the promise of something extraordinary. Something new.”
Maisie nodded, aware that the older woman had turned toward her and was now watching her as she drove on toward River Hill.
“It was the me in him that caused him to make that bad decision, Maisie. It was the me in him that caused you to lose your child.”
Maisie looked in her rearview mirror to check the road behind, slipped down the gears, braked and pulled over into a lay-by. She switched off the engine, turned to her mother-in-law and reached for her hand.
“What do you want to say, Rowan? We’ve never really made the time to talk, just the two of us, and we’ve always skirted around what happened in Canada, touching upon it here and there before escaping to our respective corners. We’ve let fear of what might be said prevent us from saying what has to be said, so we can be at peace, both of us. And I know only too well how time can cast a sort of skin over an event—a membrane that gets thicker until a point where broaching the subject is all but impossible, even when you think you can face the grief and terror once more. I did the same thing—years ago, with Simon. Remember?” Maisie looked down at Lady Rowan’s hand, clasped in her own—at the deep brown liver spots, and the arthritic thumb and forefinger. It was a hand that revealed a life lived to the full. “I loved James for who he was, and he loved me for who I was. His death caused me to lose myself for a while—for years, really—you know that. But I am back. I am whole. And you do not need to make your confession to me, but I will hear it all the same. Your son loved his life, Rowan. He loved the man he became, and the man he was on the day he died.”