Page 51 of The English Wife

It was a pleasant prospect, or would be in spring, when the trees were in flower and the walks lined with creeping herbs. The breakfast room looked out over Annabelle’s knot garden, the herbs she had tended with her own hands, less formal than the terraces that led down to the river, with a view to a high hedge with a gate set in it. In summer, when the trees were in leaf, that was all one would see. But now Janie could see straight through the bare branches, to the outline of a peaked roof, set with humble dormer windows.

“There,” said Viola, pointing emphatically.

What a fool she was. Of course the new house felt empty. It was Bay’s love offering, built from the ground up as an exact—or near exact—replica of Annabelle’s home in Lincolnshire. The original plan, Janie recalled, had been to enlarge the old house, but a conversation with Ruth Mills’s architect, at Staatsburg, had convinced Bay of the folly of that idea. So they’d left the old house, left it and lived in it while the new house rose stone by stone.

Janie glanced down at her niece, feeling a surge of pity. How much worse to lose one’s parents and one’s home, living in hollow splendor when remembered comfort was only yards away, just beyond the hedge. “Why won’t they let you go back?”

Viola shrugged. “We don’t live there anymore.”

That, too, sounded like a direct quote.

“Well, I don’t see why not,” said Janie. “Do you have a coat?”

She didn’t know whether to feel pleased or guilty when Viola’s haunted eyes lit with delight.

TEN

Cold Spring, 1899

January

Slipping through the gate in the hedge felt like stepping back in time.

Viola skipped ahead of Janie, down the path, her red muffler lending color to her pale cheeks, her breath frosting in the air as she made determinedly for the white house that sat well back from the river, on the site Janie’s ancestors had chosen long, long ago, still homesick for their native Holland.

There were no gargoyles here, no mullioned windows or stone facing, just a white frame house, with a large central block and low wings protruding from either side. The original farmhouse had been burned down during the Revolutionary War, by either the rampaging British or familial carelessness, depending on which story one preferred to believe, but Janie’s ancestors had thriftily reused the old foundations in building the new. The green-painted shutters had been closed over the windows, giving the house the look of a comfortable matron who had nodded off over her knitting.

A flight of three stone steps led up to the front door, framed in a narrow arch, with a simple pediment above. Viola was already at the top, fizzing with impatience. Janie followed more slowly. In her imagination, she could smell apple fritters frying, spitting and hissing on the open range in the old kitchen. This had been her grandmother’s house when she was a child. Her mother and her grandmother had had little use for one another, but she and Bay had been sent for long weeks in the summer to stay with her grandmother, in the nursery up beneath the roof, where the sloping ceilings and dormer windows had made a cozy haven.

Janie could still remember the smell of those country mornings, the chill tang of the air, the chirpings of the birds in the trees, the bluebirds, robins, and sparrows as foreign and exotic to her city-bred ears as a flock of parrots.

“I used to visit here when I was your age,” she said, but Viola was deeply uninterested.

“We’re here, we’re here, we’re here,” she said, bouncing on the balls of her feet. “Can we go in? Please, Aunt Janie?”

It was only when she reached for the knob that it occurred to Janie that the house, disused, might be locked. But it wasn’t. The knob turned easily, and Janie felt her breath release. It would have been miserable to disappoint Viola, and she hadn’t looked forward to the prospect of demanding the key from Mrs. Gerritt.

The house had seemed large when she was little, a sprawling place built for a large family, but in contrast to the baronial splendor of Illyria, the square hall felt low-ceilinged and quaint. Through the doors to right and left, Janie could see shadowed rooms, chandeliers wrapped in sacking, Holland covers over the furniture. The fireplaces were cold and dark, the grates scrubbed clean.

“It does seem small after the new house, doesn’t it?”

A flounce of petticoat and a flash of dark eyes. Viola was already halfway up the stairs, moving with the determination of the very young. “My mother liked the old house better. She didn’t want to leave, either.”

“Didn’t she?” Janie followed her niece up the narrow stair with its solid oak banister. Viola must have misunderstood. Or reinvented her mother’s words for her own purpose. “It’s very beautiful. The new house, I mean.”

Viola paused on the landing, drawing herself up imperiously. “Nurse says it’s haunted and she wouldn’t stay there for a night if it weren’t for the poor wee mites.”

Janie bit back a laugh. She could just see Nurse, in her white cap, with her hint of an accent she tried to hide. “You’re a very good mimic.”

Viola looked at her blankly. “What’s a mimic?”

“It’s a—” How many words did one know simply because one knew them? “Like an actor. Someone who can pretend to be someone else.”

Viola had already lost interest. She tugged on Janie’s hand. “Come to my room.”

She didn’t take Janie up to the third floor, where the old nursery had been, but to the second, down two steps to one of the wings that overlooked the river. This had been an adult bedroom, Janie vaguely remembered, dark and formal, papered in green stripes with heavy drapes at the windows and a large bed hung with embroidered curtains. Now it was an open space, scattered with toys. Janie recognized some from her own youth: a battered wooden duck on a string, the yellow paint chipped and scraped; toy soldiers in various states of decrepitude; lopsided tops and leather balls missing their stuffing.

Viola pounced on the duck with cries of joy. She tugged on the string, sending the duck’s wheels clattering across the floorboards. “Polly! There’s Polly!”