Page 14 of The English Wife

January

“Mother?”

Servants could enter without knocking, but not Janie. She rapped again at the oak door, half hoping there would be no answer.

Another knock, more tentative now. Janie heard noises on the other side of the door, a sound like a dog panting, heavy, wet breathing. Like sobs. Janie paused, one hand pressed flat against the door, unsure whether to enter or leave. It seemed the sort of thing a daughter should do, comfort her mother in time of grief. But her mother wouldn’t thank her for being caught out in a weakness. If that was what it was, and not the sound of the wind howling in the chimney, or, as Janie’s mother would undoubtedly say, Janie’s own overactive imagination, turning silence into sobs and sorrow.

Janie was about to slip away when the summons came. Her mother’s voice was muffled by the wood, but no less autocratic for all that. “What are you waiting for? Come in.”

Janie cracked the door open. “Anne said you wanted me?”

Her mother’s eyes were suspiciously red, but if she had been crying, she gave no other sign. “Sit and read to me.”

No protestations of affection; no words of consolation. But for the black beads on Mother’s dress and the thin lines on either side of her mouth, it might have been any other night. Janie had always suspected that her mother’s demand that Janie read to her before supper was a form of penance for both of them: for Janie, for her failure to be married, and for her mother, for having a daughter so alien to her in taste and temperament.

“Well? Don’t just stand there.”

Murmuring an apology, Janie sat in her usual place, on a low stool on the far side of her mother’s dressing table. A book sat ready for her, a heavy volume in red morocco covers, with a leather bookmark inserted into it. Janie opened it and began reading at random, the words tripping off her lips without touching her mind.

A small enough rebellion, to let her mind wander while reading her mother’s chosen words, but it made her feel as though she were keeping some small part of herself, something that hadn’t been pounded into drabness.

Her father had been a collector of rare books. Not Americana, which might have been respectable in its familiarity, but French poetry and plays. He had been a quiet man in everyday life, his hair brown to his wife’s gold, a bit stooped in his stance, his Van Duyvil blue eyes blurred behind spectacles. And yet in the privacy of his own study, he became something else entirely: an actor, on his private stage. Janie’s earliest memories were of sitting beside her father in his study while the sonorous phrases rolled off his tongue.

Her father had died when she was eleven years old, his absence scarcely detectable in the house in which his wife ruled as queen—except to Janie. Her mother found her one night, curled in her nightdress in her father’s chair, reading to herself from the fairy tales of Madame le Prince de Beaumont. Within a month, his books had been boxed, the room in which her father had stored his treasures dismantled.

Janie had stolen what she could, squirreling a handful of precious books away in caches in the nursery.

Bay had known, but he hadn’t said anything. By some alchemy, he had persuaded Anne to hold her tongue as well. Anne had shrugged and said she didn’t see what the bother was about a bunch of old books. Janie might have told her if she could have found the words, but, as always with her brother and cousin, her tongue tied in knots, and all she could do was hug the book to her chest and duck her head.

When she thought of Bay, that was what she remembered, his hand silently replacing the book that had fallen from beneath her pillow. They might not have been close, but he had always been kind, not out of any desire for gratitude, or to extract favors in return, but because that was part of who he was. It came as naturally to him as breathing.

They had never confided in one another. But Bay had shielded her in a dozen ways: drawing their mother’s attention away from Janie at the breakfast table, giving her a respite from the endless admonitions to sit up straighter, chew more quietly; stepping in front of her in the water at Bailey’s Beach to shield her from curious eyes that day her bathing costume had torn.

The Bay she had known wasn’t capable of pushing his wife into a river or plunging a knife into his chest. What had happened in that house on the Hudson?

Janie let the book fall into her lap. “What happens next?”

It took her mother a moment to realize the reading had stopped. Mother’s head turned a fraction, the slight tightening of her brows the only sign of her displeasure.

“Nothing that need concern us.”

She hadn’t seen him, Janie reminded herself. Her mother hadn’t seen Bay, spangled with snowflakes like silver thread; hadn’t heard the horrible rattle and wheeze of his breath as he struggled to speak.

And even if she had, her mother came of an older, sterner school that prized self-control over sentiment. Janie had always thought her mother would have made a brilliant Roman matron, all strong profile and impeccably draped white robes, half-marble even in the flesh. No, that was unfair. It wasn’t that her mother was made of stone, devoid of feeling; it was more that the deeper the emotion, the more firmly her mother strove to contain it. And Bay’s loss must have cut very deep, indeed.

Bay had been her mother’s darling, the hoped-for heir to the Van Duyvil name.

Janie closed the book around her finger, feeling the weight of the pages digging into her flesh. “Will there … will there be an inquest?”

“One assumes.” It was the clipped voice her mother used to dampen the pretensions of the wives of railroad barons and copper kings. “You appear to lack attention tonight, Janie. Is the reading matter not to your taste?”

It was never to her taste, but that was beside the point. Janie edged forward on her stool. “Have you thought—have you considered—that we might perhaps hire someone to determine—that is, to discover…” The words tangled on her tongue, but she forced herself to keep going. “There are men who do such things. Pinkerton agents, I believe they call them?”

An awful silence filled the room. Janie pressed her lips together, wishing she hadn’t spoken.

“Surely, there must be some comfort in knowing the truth?”

It struck her, belatedly, that James Burke had said much the same thing. And she had looked at him much the way her mother was looking at her now, with a mixture of distaste and pure scorn.