Astray: Stories Read online

  Caroline always asks about his work, though there’s not much to say about the drawings on which he’s engaged; mostly he passes on gossip about the architects. In return Fred inquires about her reading; he’s created a sort of fiction that his sister’s day is divided between the care of her child and intellectual advancement. (Caroline sometimes leaves a book on her desk for a few days, then returns it to the library unread. It is not that the visitors take up so much of her day, but until they are dealt with and banished to the other side of the front door again, she can’t settle to anything else.)

  She tries not to recall the moment four years ago when she told Fred his articles would have to be canceled; his face like a starched sheet. There’s no one in particular to blame, which makes it worse. Not the man she lived with for nine years, seeing to his accounts as well as every other wifely duty; he would have gone on supporting her and her brother for the rest of his life, she’s sure, had his business not failed. He’d have married her, in fact, if he hadn’t had the bad luck to be married already. Caroline can’t blame herself, either. When she was nineteen she gambled all she had, but hardly recklessly; for nine years it seemed a decent bargain. What did abstractions like honor matter compared with realities: white bread in a child’s wet mouth?

  “Tired, sis?”

  “Not really,” she says, rousing herself to smile. Fred still looks like a boy, especially when he puts on that avuncular face.

  “Shall we have a game of cards?”

  “Oh, yes,” she says, mustering a tone of delight. Ersatz, every word, and yet all meant in good earnest.

  “This is very snug,” says Fred, poking the fire. “Nothing so jolly as an autumn evening in the bosom of the family.”

  She wishes he wouldn’t overdo it. Every evening is just like this, unless there’s some drama such as Pet coming down with mumps or a bird banging about in the chimney. They can’t afford any amusements, and they have no friends. Fred claims to get on well enough with the other draftsmen, but he’s never going to risk inviting one home to meet his “widowed” sister. As for Caroline, no woman of her own sort would know her, and she doesn’t want to know the other sort. She lives in the crack between two worlds.

  This cozy-nest stuff is not exactly a lie, though. More like a show: a play to entertain Pet. She’s the one who knows least, and so matters most. Again, Caroline feels that queer impulse to shut those bright eyes with her hand, cover those shell-pink ears, close that curious mouth. To beckon her daughter back inside her. To squeeze her like a pearl locked up in its oyster. To—

  No, not that. Caroline can never wish Pet unbegun. That’s the paradox that tires her brain, strains her heart: the best thing in her life has sprung from the worst. So though Caroline can’t bear her life, she wouldn’t swap it for any other.

  A heavy sweetness; she turns her head sharply.

  “Piddy flower,” Pet is saying, as she lays the bruised lilies across Fred’s knee.

  “Wherever did you get those pretty flowers?” marvels Fred.

  “Mamma visitor,” says Pet confidingly.

  Caroline snatches the bouquet. Halfway down the stairs, she hears the house ring with Pet’s shrieks. In the kitchen, the reek of the scrap bucket makes her retch, but it’s better than the lilies. She pushes them down deep under the gristle and turnip peel, and scrubs her hands on the cloth.

  “Sis—” Fred is holding Pet with her face pressed against his shirtfront; she’s still gulping.

  “Mamma’s sorry,” she tells Pet hoarsely, “but the flowers were dirty. They had to go in the bucket.”

  She tries to take the child, but Pet clings to her uncle with a fresh burst of wailing.

  “I’ll bring you some more tomorrow,” Fred promises the child. “What about roses? Roses are ever so pretty.”

  “And ever so expensive,” says Caroline under her breath, examining her nails.

  “It’s my money.”

  They stare at each other in the dim kitchen. After a second she reaches for Pet—unresisting now—and carries her upstairs.

  Caroline takes longer than usual to go through the routine; she sings Pet half a dozen nursery rhymes and stays for a while after the lamp is turned down. They say it spoils a child to let them have a light at night, but Caroline doesn’t care. If you break the cardinal rule when you’re still a girl, what does it matter if you break a few more? When the bough breaks, the cradle will fall, she sings under her breath. Down will come baby, cradle and all.

  Bone-weary: she’s tempted to go to bed. But she can’t leave Fred alone downstairs. Entering the parlor, she sits straight down and picks up her hand of cards.

  Her brother’s hand closes over hers. “Caro.”

  The old name saps her, melts her.

  “What I said—”

  “Of course your wages are your own,” she tells him.

  “Of course they’re not. All for one, and all that. Besides, you earn twice what I do.”

  The word hits her hard. They’ve always spoken as if the figures Caroline adds to the household budget every week come from dividends, or a legacy. Earn: as if it were a job like any other. She feels mortification, and a strange sort of relief.

  “Last week I applied for the position of ticket-collector at the Olympic,” he goes on.

  “Fred, you can’t work in the evenings, too!”

  He shrugs like a small boy. “Today I heard the position has been filled; there were more than thirty applicants.”

  She doesn’t know what to say: what a shame, or just as well.

  “We can’t go on like this,” he says, pursing his lips.

  She stares at him.

  “A new beginning, that’s what we need, where nobody knows us. New surnames, even.”

  Caroline’s eyes hurt as they rest on her brother. So young still, so wonderfully stupid. Not that her borrowed surname means anything to her; she’d change it in the morning if it would do any good. “Fred,” she says softly, “that wouldn’t work for long. In another part of London, or another town, even, the neighbors—they’d start to notice as soon as there were—” Her throat locks on the word visitors. “People coming and going,” she finishes weakly.

  Fred’s jaw is set. “If I could get a better position, you could drop all that.”

  All that: only now, in the tightness of his words, can she hear how much he hates the men who have been swanning into his house since he was a child. She bites her lip. But what better position? Thirty men ahead of him for a job collecting theater tickets!

  “I wouldn’t mind getting into some other line altogether,” he mentions. “Some business you could help me with, even; you’ve got a great head for figures.”

  She breathes out her exasperation before she speaks. “In such times as these, Fred—”

  “I don’t mean in England,” he says, very low.

  “Not in England?” She repeats it without understanding.

  And then, unexpectedly, he grins. “If we made up our minds to a really fresh start … well, it could be anywhere. The Cape. Australia. Canada.”

  Caroline blinks. “You’re proposing that—”

  “Don’t ask me for any details yet,” he says, “but there are opportunities. Everyone says so. More space,” he adds urgently, “and fewer people. Less fuss about one’s origins, too.”

  She nods at that.

  “Things are just getting started in those sorts of places,” says Fred with a kind of wonder, “whereas here …”

  “Things have been going on as they are for such a long time.”

  “Yes.” He grips his sister’s fingers hard enough to hurt. “Where should we go?”

  “I—” She stops herself before she can say she doesn’t care, or that it makes no difference, because it’s not going to happen; it’s a child’s fantasy. “You choose.”

  “Could you bear it, really, Caro? Leaving England behind?”

  What’s the harm in humoring him?

  “I expect I would hate it at
first,” she says quietly.

  Fred’s face falls.

  “But I could get used to it, I believe. We all could, especially Pet.” Her throat locks on the syllable. To really live. Not walled up.

  “Oh, sis. Afresh start!”

  “People do it every day,” she says, a little giddy. Is she deluding herself that she could be anything but what she is? When you change countries, perhaps your old self stays fixed to your back, like a turtle’s shell.

  Fred is standing by the little writing desk. He lets out his breath in a half whistle and sits down on the beveled edge.

  You’ll break it, she wants to say, but she stops herself. Instead she says what just a moment ago she wasn’t going to. “But it can’t be done, Fred, not really.”

  His jaw juts, exactly like his niece’s. “Why can’t it?”

  “Come, now. However would we raise the cost of our passage?”

  “Ah, I have one or two ideas about that,” he announces.

  Caroline’s eyes narrow. “Nothing reckless, Fred?”

  “No, no. There’s someone to whom I mean to write, to ask—”

  “For charity?” she interrupts shrilly.

  Her brother’s fiddling with the pen she uses to keep the household books, rubbing dried ink off the nib. “This person’s a very distinguished gentleman—I won’t name him, in case nothing comes of it, but I know he takes an interest in such cases.”

  Such cases. That means her. A long pause, and Caroline considers the curiously lingering nature of pride. “You wouldn’t tell this person? Tell him my story?” she forces herself to add.

  “Ours. Our story. I would be obliged to tell it,” he says, almost stern, coming over to the sofa and letting himself down beside her.

  She squeezes her eyes shut.

  “You have nothing to be ashamed of,” Fred says.

  Hot water spills down her face. What does he know?

  “I’d put it all down on paper just once. To be done with it. Say I may?”

  Sell her story, instead of her body? “No.” Caroline’s pulse is in her ears, as fast as the wheels of a train, as loud as a ship’s engine. Not on and on, but out and away. To let out the truth, and then sink it under the waves. What will she tell Pet, years later? Nothing, nothing at all. Or a beautiful lie: We lost your papa back in England. “No,” she says, “I’ll do it,” opening her eyes blindly and taking the pen from his hand.

  Onward

  Caroline Thompson’s existence is recorded only in the letters of Charles Dickens. The young draftsman Frederick Maynard first wrote to the novelist about his older sister on October 10, 1854, and Dickens got to know both siblings before persuading his fellow philanthropist Angela Burdett-Coutts to set Caroline up with a lodging house. When that failed to make Caroline a living, he and Burdett-Coutts let her sell the furniture (for something more than a hundred pounds) to pay her and her child’s way to Canada. Since on May 14, 1856, Dickens referred to “an endeavor I am making to do something to help a sister and brother to go out to Canada with some sort of light upon their way,” it looks as if Fred went with his sister and niece. On September 26, 1857, Dickens recorded, “I saw Mrs. Thompson before she went, and told her that I trusted her with great confidence.”

  Fred’s song is Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s “The Village Blacksmith” (1842).

  NEW YORK CITY

  1735

  THE WIDOW’S CRUSE

  It was peculiarly warm for an April morning. Huddlestone left his apartment and crossed Dock Street to the best coffeehouse in town. The young attorney nodded to a couple of wholesalers, but he took his coffee alone by the window, with the New York Weekly Journal.

  There was a paragraph about some females down in Chester County who’d formed a sort of secret court to arraign a man who’d battered his wife over some trifle. They’d sentenced the fellow to be ducked three times in a pond, and shaved off half his hair and half his beard to make a laughingstock of him. Huddlestone grinned over this story but was not convinced; newsmen today would invent any nonsense to fill an inch of paper.

  Two ships from Curaçao had just docked on the East River, he read. Missionary work among the Mohawk might prove a waste of Christian energies. One Scriblerus Despondus wrote to complain that no play had been mounted in two years, the whole thoughts of the boorish freemen of New York being turned upon price and profit. Huddlestone couldn’t see that this constituted a problem. God knew, he hadn’t followed his father into the law for love of Justice. He was an eager servant of Mammon, even if he hadn’t yet been rewarded for it, since business was so damnably tight.

  Huddlestone stared out the grimy window at the human traffic, spotting Highlander blow-ins and stern old Dutch, penniless Palatines and English infantrymen. Just about every second face was black. Huddlestone kept only a couple of indentured Irish himself, and he’d lost one of those in the smallpox epidemic. According to the Weekly Journal, the dreaded scarlatina was currently cutting a swath through the colonies of New England. Any reader who found red, itching pustules on his neck, face, or tongue was urged to be patriotic enough to board up self and family at once.

  Having some bills to send out, the attorney drained his coffee to the grit, then crossed the road to his cramped office, yawning.

  An hour later came an unexpected knock. Huddlestone jumped up and clapped his wig back on.

  The sight of the widow’s weeds made him deepen his bow. Her hoops were so wide that she had to execute a sideways maneuver to get through the door; the skirt was excellent black satin, pulled up through pocket-slits to keep it out of the mud. Linen mittens hid her hands, except for the narrow fingertips. Under the hood of her cape, the widow’s face was sharply boned; not an Englishwoman, and no more than twenty-five, Huddlestone reckoned. At the edge of her crisp white cap, the darkness of her hair showed through the blue-gray flour.

  She began to apologize for imposing on a perfect stranger.

  “No imposition, madam, I assure you. A certain clique of men keep such a grip on legal business in this city, the rest of us are always eager for new clients,” he admitted disarmingly. “If it’s as a client that you’ve come?”

  She turned sharply toward the wall, as if to examine his diploma from Yale College.

  Damn it, had Huddlestone somehow offended his visitor already? He pressed her to a glass of Madeira, but she shook her head, her face still averted. “Then, if I may ask, how may I be of assistance?”

  When she turned back to him her powdered face was striped with tears.

  “Madam—”

  “My name is Mrs. Gomez,” she said. “My husband was a merchant.” Her throat moved as if she’d swallowed a stone.

  Huddlestone should have guessed it, there was a certain tint under her pallor. Of course he’d heard of the Gomez clan: Sephardics from the West Indies, and among the more substantial fortunes in the little Mill Street congregation who’d recently erected the first purpose-built synagogue in the New World.

  She spoke with difficulty. “He set off to Boston some weeks ago, to meet his trading partners.”

  “By sea?”

  “By land.”

  Huddlestone winced. Country roads—if you could call them that—were only a foot or two wide, and bedeviled with Indians.

  “A martyr to seasickness,” she whispered.

  “Ah.”

  “He—word reached me this week, that he got no farther than Connecticut,” she gasped. After a moment, she brought out the words. “The scarlatina.”

  A nasty death. Huddlestone deepened his voice. “May I offer my deepest sympathies?”

  Mrs. Gomez pressed her lace apron to her face for a moment. “I happened upon your sign,” she said, her eyes lifting to his. “I was walking along. You must understand, I am quite friendless.”

  “Your kinsmen, surely …”

  “They reside in Jamaica.”

  And her husband’s, what of the Gomez family? But of course Huddlestone corrected himself, matters of inh
eritance were always delicate. “May I ask, have you children?”

  She squeezed her eyes shut. “We were not so blessed.”

  Sharpening his quill, Huddlestone began to take notes, keeping his gaze on the page to give the widow a chance to calm herself. There was no body, that was the first problem. According to the peddler who’d brought the news, the Connecticut village had been so laid waste by the epidemic that all the dead had been thrown into one great pit. Nor were any proper records available, since the official responsible had been one of the first to die. “Inconvenient,” Huddlestone murmured, “but the Court should take the circumstances into consideration.”

  “Court?” the widow repeated in fright.

  “Mr. Gomez’s will must be probated in the Prerogative Court, if the estate amounts to more than fifty pounds,” he explained. “Unless he died intestate?”

  She blinked again.

  “Is there a will?” he spelled out gently.

  “I suppose … there must be.”

  Huddlestone suppressed a sigh. Not that he liked the domineering sort of female—like that Dutch matron his father used to talk about, who’d called him in to draft a will for herself—but some of the ladylike ornaments of the present generation were as innocent as butterflies.

  “I don’t know what to do, sir,” Mrs. Gomez said hoarsely, her milky fingernails half covering her mouth. “One hears such stories—widows mired in financial complications—jailed for debt, even!”

  “Ah, but so great a merchant as your husband won’t have left you exposed to danger.”

  She shuddered. “Without him—I feel entirely unprotected.”

  “Not entirely, I hope,” said Huddlestone, allowing himself to touch his hand to his brocade waistcoat, in the general vicinity of his heart. Then he turned businesslike again. “Let me set your mind at rest, Mrs. Gomez; the laws of His Majesty’s colony aren’t as ungallant as you fear. Even without a will, you’ll be entitled to a life interest in a third of the estate.”