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“No, I suppose not. But the blame wasn’t all mine! I was prepared to be a good wife. If your father had loved me more and despised me less, something might have come of it. But he too married to please others. There was another woman. I never knew who she was or what she was to him, but he would mutter her name sometimes, in his sleep. ‘Elena—’ he would say—‘Elena!’ And he called you Rowena Elaine. No, he never loved me! Is it any wonder that I sought love?”
For an instant I saw her as she must have looked twenty years ago, before she became overly plump and the fine lines etched themselves in her face. Poor Fanny. Product of her environment. But as selfish in her own way as she accused me of being. Whatever her reasons for her sudden outburst, we were past the point of understanding each other, or, for that matter, of any genuine communication.
So I looked back at her, saying nothing, and after a while, shrugging, she seemed to regain her composure.
“Ah, well. Perhaps it’s a good thing we need not indulge in the conventional strain of farewells. There were things that I felt had to be said, and they are behind us now.”
We did not kiss when the time for final parting came. A footman lifted my trunks from the carriage and set them down for the swarming porters to carry. Nor did I turn my head when the carriage drove off. Within a few hours I would be leaving the past behind me and embarking on a new life. I remembered my last journey, and could almost have smiled with pity for the miserable, frightened, and resentful creature I had been then. Could it have been only two years ago? This time, at least, I knew what I was going to.
I had reached the water’s edge, and as I lifted my head I felt the tangy, salty kiss of the wind on my face, felt it ruffle my skirts and tug at my bonnet.
“Journeys end in lover’s meetings.” Now, why had that ridiculous piece of nonsense suddenly sprung into my mind? I had no lover to meet me—indeed, I had already made up my mind that I would never have, if I could help it. I would never be controlled by anyone again. I would be my own mistress from now on.
Hadn’t I learned about love? A ridiculous, fumbling thing that made an animal of a man and required from a woman only a certain degree of compliance: At least animals didn’t try to rationalize their expressions of lust or attempt to prettify it by calling it love.
“We’ll be sailing with the tide,” I heard a sailor call to another, and the same wind that touched me made little dancing ripples in the water. A fine, sunny day. A good day to begin a journey.
Three
The vessel on which I sailed was an American one, and I was soon to get used to hearing the strange, nasal accents of my fellow passengers. These Americans were all more friendly and outgoing than the English, and although I kept to myself they persisted in being friendly and curious. Strangely enough, the fact that I was possessed of a title excited the most comment. For all that they prided themselves on their form of democracy, most of the friendly Americans I met could hardly hide the fact that they were impressed at meeting the daughter of an earl.
We stopped for over three days at Le Havre to pick up passengers from Paris, and I had the chance to visit Paris again myself, but under vastly different circumstances from all the other times I had been there. I saw none of Sir Edgar Cardon’s friends this time, but spent my time in shopping, completely on my own, which in itself gave me an exhilarated feeling.
Still, I was impatient for my journey to be over, and for the time when I would meet my father at last. My mother, who should have known, had said we were alike, Guy Dangerfield and I. I thought we would understand each other, for we were both travelers.
I had come halfway across the world and as I looked out for the first time at Boston harbor, I found myself wondering what my father’s impressions must have been when he first landed here. He must have been around the same age that I was now. Would he be here to meet me, or was he too ill to travel?
As I left the rail and made my way to my stateroom, the echo of my mother’s bitter voice suddenly came back to me.
“You are hard, Rowena… it is not strength, but hardness. I wonder if you are capable of any emotion…”
Well, at least I wasn’t weak. I remembered the diamonds that Edgar Cardon had presented me with—hard, scintillating stones, each one burning with its own tiny fires. How often he had compared me to a diamond. I had a cutting tongue, he had complained, and he had never been able to arouse in me the warmth and passion he had hoped to find. But I could not pity him. We had used each other—each for our own separate reasons—and now, at last I was free. I would never let myself be used again by anyone.
“Lady Rowena—” the steward’s voice broke into my thoughts, and I turned away from snapping the lock on my last trunk.
“Pardon me, Lady Rowena, but you have visitors. The other passengers have already begun to disembark, but your friends are on board to escort you personally to shore.”
“Thank you.”
I had not been sure whether there would be someone to meet me. We had been delayed by bad weather, and I had noticed that Boston, although basking in watery sunshine, had been thinly blanketed by an early snowfall. Still, I had been expected, and there were “friends” to meet me. Not my father, then. I wondered who his friends were.
When I went up on deck, they were standing there rather uncertainly, amid all the bustle of visitors and disembarking passengers. Mrs. Katherine Shannon was obviously a widow—a rather formidable-looking lady dressed in black. She was the sister-in-law of Mr. Todd Shannon, who was my father’s partner, and was accompanied by her niece and her husband, a pleasant young couple with friendly, if rather sober, manners.
I was soon to learn why they had taken the trouble to come on shipboard to meet me, and why Corinne Davidson, who was normally a vivacious, bubbling young woman, appeared so subdued on our first meeting. “The telegram arrived only a week ago,” Mrs. Shannon said in her quiet voice. “My dear, we are all so terribly sorry! It is not precisely the way your father would have wished you to be greeted upon your arrival in America. But you had to be told, of course.” She said again, “I’m so very sorry…” and I saw that Corinne Davidson’s eyes had filled with tears. My father was dead. I would never see him now. I could not cry. I suppose I felt numb, and I knew that my face had gone stiff, betraying no emotion.
It was a relief to be taken charge of for the moment, with Jack Davidson, a quietly competent young man, seeing to the disposition of my luggage.
They were tactful, understanding people, who seemed to take my silence for shock, and did not press me with any further displays of sympathy.
“Jack and I live in New York, but we’re visiting Aunt Katherine,” Corinne Davidson said softly. “Of course you will stay with her too. Isn’t that right, Aunt Katherine?”
Mrs. Shannon insisted that I must do so—a room had already been made ready for me, and I needed to rest, and to feel that I had arrived among friends.
“If you feel like talking later, I hope you will not feel reluctant to do so,” Mrs. Shannon said kindly, adding that my father had been a frequent visitor to her home in the past, before he had become so ill.
But in the end it was Corinne Davidson, with her natural, open manner, who broke through the shell of reserve I had learned to erect around myself, and became my first friend in America.
She came up to my room that first night, and her soft, hesitant tapping at the door turned me away from the window, where I had been standing looking out at the snow.
