St Cuthbert’s Church, Levens Estate
The late Viscount Sandys lay in state in St Cuthbert’s church. The medieval walls, Tudor stained-glass windows, the Sandys banners to past lords and ladies marching along the pillars: all impressed on the younger son mourning his father that they were part of a tradition that would go on long after the son himself ceased to breathe. Was that a comfort or a burden?
The locals had been trickling in to pay their respects before the funeral on the morrow, but for that afternoon, Jacob had the chancel to himself. He suspected the vicar, a new man that Jacob did not know well but who had been appointed by his father a year ago, had put the word out that he was to be given privacy.
He’d been sitting here for an hour, trying to come to grips with his loss. His meditations had been disturbed by a butterfly that fluttered against a high window, searching in vain for a way out. The battering wings sounded loud in the quietness– such a tiny thing to make so much noise.
Jacob got up from the family pew and went to the bier to look one last time at his father’s face before the coffin was closed. He had a great depth of love for his sire, but now it seemed separate, frozen like a lake in winter. He couldn’t chip through to reach the love and maybe, if he did, he would fall into an overwhelming onrush of emotion. The ice might be an armour of protection to help him cope with his loss. He shouldn’t try to crack it until he was ready– until he was back with Dora.
Yes, that would be the right time.
He allowed himself to look at his father analytically, for that too was part of his character, an aspect his father had encouraged. A disciple of the Enlightenment, the viscount had liked men to be logical. It wasn’t true that those who passed away looked like they were sleeping, not to a doctor who had seen more than his share of death. They had no lift and fall of the ribcage to animate them, and their colour took on a greyish hue that was the opposite of lifelike. Jacob could give the medical explanation for these appearances, but the plain truth was the essence of his father had fled.
‘No motion has he now, no force; he neither hears nor sees, rolled round in earth’s diurnal course with rocks and stones and trees,’ he murmured, appropriating one of Wordsworth’s Lucy poems for his father. The man that lay there had given him and his siblings life, passing on the torch to the next generation, and it was the child’s duty, if life were kind, to see the parent on his way. ‘Thank you.’ He kissed his fingertips and pressed them to his father’s lips. ‘I’ll miss you.’
He heard a scuff on the stone floor behind him. Turning, he saw Evelina standing just within the entrance, a dark silhouette in her mourning clothes and poke bonnet. He beckoned her closer.
‘Come. You’re not disturbing me.’
She walked to him with her usual determined step, heels clicking. ‘You should’ve been there.’
‘I know. I explained?—’
She waved that away. ‘I’m not blaming you. Arthur is going to be unbearable as viscount, isn’t he? So obsessed with the family honour and propriety! I’m relieved I’m escaping to be Lady Driffield.’ She slipped her arm through his, her hand with its engagement ring starkly white on his black sleeve. ‘You always were his favourite.’
‘Father’s?’ Jacob couldn’t have been more surprised. Many of his interactions with his father had been about how Jacob had disappointed him, or how if only Jacob settled down in a decent profession with an heiress as a wife, he could salvage something from the wreckage of his bad choices. ‘I thought I brought him nothing but pain.’
She snorted. ‘Don’t think you were the only one Father made to feel a failure. He dismissed my composing; he told me to concentrate on the marriage mart. It took me four seasons to land Lord Driffield. Papa managed a faint “well done” in our last interview after Driffield asked him for my hand. I imagine poor Felicity feels somewhat similarly. Did you see how she glowed when Diana offered her a crumb of praise?’
Had their father starved them of his approbation to such a damaging extent?
‘That’s sad.’
‘Isn’t it? I’ve been thinking a lot about it since he died and decided it’s because he was raised by a harsh father.’
‘Grandfather was terrifying,’ agreed Jacob.
She cocked her head. ‘I don’t remember him.’
‘He wasn’t one to notice infants.’
‘Raised liked that, I believe Papa felt we were in danger of being immodest and prideful if he admitted what he liked about us. That didn’t stop him singing your praises in absentia.’ Her voice took on the gruff tone of their father. ‘Jacob makes his own way, don’t you know. Jacob is brave, facing the enemy in war, not hiding behind his privilege. Jacob is the most intelligent of my children, sharp as a scalpel.’
‘He never said anything like that to me!’
‘Of course not. I’m not surprised Arthur did what he did, not sending for you when he could’ve done so. He might not be conscious of his deeper motives, but I suspect he might be wielding some petty revenge against the golden boy.’
Jacob had been thinking his own bitter thoughts; it was helpful to hear someone else give voice to similar suspicions. He no longer felt so alone. ‘I thought I was the black sheep?’
Evelina shrugged. ‘Somehow in this family you can be both– a golden black sheep. Hurrah for the Sandys!’ She squeezed his arm. ‘But never forget that Papa did love us in his own way– and you especially. He wasn’t a bad father, just one who made a muddle when all he meant to do was keep us straight.’
Moved by her words, Jacob hugged her to his side. ‘When did you get to be so wise, little one?’
She chuckled. ‘As soon as you left home. Then I had less competition.’
* * *
Much to his sister’s amusement, Jacob insisted on climbing on a pew as Evelina kept watch in order that he could rescue the red admiral butterfly, and then they walked home together, arriving shortly before the dinner bell. With a kiss to his cheek, his sister dashed upstairs to dress, but Jacob followed more slowly, thinking about the odd configuration in his family that had stopped him knowing Evelina and Felicity so well as his brothers. There was a ten-year gap between the surviving boys and the girls. He hadn’t always been the youngest son. There had been little John who had died of scarlet fever at four, and a still-born daughter called Tabitha. Both were buried in the same church where their father would be put to rest. He wondered if his interest in medicine had begun then. He could remember with knife-sharp clarity his bewilderment that his playmate, John, had been there one day and in a crypt the next. He’d been puzzled by the difference between life and death and anxious to know if there had been anything he could have done to rescue his brother from that brink. As for the household, Evelina’s safe arrival had been a huge relief, a new start in the nursery, though Jacob was already at school when that happened.
