twelve

When watching one’s tongue in a relationship, there’s a difference, I think, between using kind words and safe ones. The first seeks to protect their love’s heart, the other only their own.

~A scientist’s observations on love

After many long moments, Golda Gresham came back into the world with a delicate shudder and blinked up at me. Gabe rushed in, his body tense.

“She’s fainted,” I said.

“I can see that.” His voice had a hard edge.

I set aside the smelling salts and closed my bag. “I mean to say that she’ll be all right. Other than a slight concussion from the fall, she seems unharmed.”

Gabe’s stare held the weight of a brewing storm that communicated everything—she’d been fine before I’d opened up the door to the truth. I was, after all, supposed to be on his side. He scooped the ghostly pale woman up in his arms and settled her on the red damask settee as she clung to him. “You’re all right, Mother?”

“I’m coming ’round. Go on, now.” She lifted a spindly white hand and placed it on his cheek. “Dear boy.” How weak she looked.

He studied her a moment longer, then gave a nod and rose. “You have the maid find me if you need me for anything. Anything at all.”

I followed him to the doorway, my heart thumping against my ribs. “I never intended to stir things up that way, you must believe me. I was merely speaking the truth because no one else would. She may have many talents, but she is not a singer.”

“It’s not about her being bad or good at it, Willa. It’s never been about that.”

“False encouragement isn’t love. It’s wrong to pretend you enjoy her singing when you don’t.”

“I do enjoy it.” His face was dark and passionate. “I enjoy every moment of watching her light up, hearing her voice rather than her silence, being in the presence of such passion when I’ve seen her deflated. There’s far more to what a person does than whether or not it impresses other people.”

“But her friends . . . they’ll all laugh.”

“Not the right ones.”

I breathed out, my mind spent and my heart depleted. Somehow if this man did not think much of me, I could do naught but share his opinion.

“Singing fills her heart. A filled heart keeps beating, longer than it’s supposed to, and that makes it all valuable to me.”

Her . . . heart. Her heart. Jagged pain tore through my chest. Awareness thrummed. I spun, looking with fresh eyes at the woman wilted onto her fainting couch, seeing the pallid skin, the weak rise and fall of her chest, the swollen feet she’d kept hidden beneath her hem until now.

“You of all people, Willa, should realize how fragile and precious life is. Every life. It’s worth preserving, however we can.”

I couldn’t speak. When Gabe slipped out, I untangled my stethoscope from my bag and settled the diaphragm gently on Golda’s rising and falling chest, moving aside the ivory cameo necklace and listening to the erratic heartbeat buried beneath finery. Hard as ice she was, yet just as easily shattered it would seem.

I sat back on my heels with a sigh, and a sick rolling in my belly. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

She lifted those ever-elegant blue eyes to me, shifting the cameo back into place. “Why ever would I? No one can fix it.”

“I could have helped you differently, worked on other things instead of giving you those . . . those silly singing lessons.”

Her gaze met mine, steady and meaningful. “Nothing is truly silly.” It was a moment of rare openness, a glimpse into how she grappled with her approaching death, yet it made me feel like the vulnerable one.

I swallowed as my heart rose into my throat. “Why do they let you go on this way when they know—”

“They don’t know. Only Gabe.”

Because he noticed. He listened. Words may be powerful, as I’d tried to convince him, but sometimes an absence of them was even more so. “I suppose he assumed I already knew.” As my heart began a painful realignment regarding this woman, it melted into compassion. Curiosity. “Why singing, Mrs. Gresham?”

“You mean, why sing when I possess no talent for it?”

“Well, I mean . . . that is—”

“Come now, let’s speak plainly with one another. I’m ill, not deaf.”

I traced the edges of my stethoscope. “All right then, why?”

She turned to stare at the empty fireplace, the silence stretching long enough to make me wonder if she was going to answer. “Because I am not ready to cease existing.” She remained poised, candle glow smoothing the lines of her face into a nearly youthful expression. “When you first learn your end is coming, it becomes obvious just how much of this life does not matter. Why decorate for Christmas? I may not live until then. Why learn something new? I shan’t be here to use it.” She inhaled, then let out a long sigh. “But then you realize there are things that matter, more than you ever thought, because they will last longer than one’s body.”

I’d seen this before—the desperate scramble to put into place a few things that will mark a person’s existence, something besides a stone and a name in the family Bible to show who you were.

“I’ve learned so much in life, felt so deeply, but it’ll all be lost. Everything I know and think and care about will fade away like me . . . unless I leave something behind.” She ran one finger along the spine of her red book. “I used to sing like a bird, many years ago.” Another caress of the spine, then she tossed the book into the cold hearth. “I suppose I ought to give up that notion.”

“We must tell your family of your condition. Perhaps your children would all join together and . . .” My voice faded miserably as I remembered what she’d heard below.

Her sad smile extended past me into the emptiness of the room. “As we both heard tonight, I have surprisingly little influence here.”

“You have more than you’d think. Everything you say—”

“Has made them hate me, turned them all into ruined towers of bitterness like me.”

“And it can build those same ruins right back up. Make that your legacy.”

She shot me a look, her gaze taking me in, assessing my meaning.

“There’s always hope to repair what’s broken. Every breath in your body means there’s still a chance.”

She frowned and turned away.

“Mrs. Gresham, I need to see exactly how advanced your condition is.” When she gave a reluctant nod, I performed a more thorough examination, looking beyond the throat and voice to the deeper issues. The stethoscope told me everything I’d feared, and I wrote it down slowly in my notebook:

Diastolic murmur, frequent irregularity likely in the aortic chamber, possible regurgitation in the valve.

I looked her over, taking note of the symptoms she’d hidden so masterfully.

Shortness of breath, especially when taxed, fainting spells, swollen feet and ankles.

I lowered my notebook to my lap and exhaled the weight of my failure. I’d lost sight of the patient in treating symptoms. That’s what overworked hospital doctors did, and what I vowed I’d never do. No, I’d be different, I always thought. I’d combine the intellect of men like my father with the compassionate, perceptive eye of a woman, yet I’d failed already. When had I ever neglected to dig for the cause of illness?

When I began treatment with passing judgment.

I looked up at the woman whose severe, hostile face suddenly morphed from bitter to hurting—from controlling to one desperately clinging to life.

“I hope you are not set on saving me. Even the daughter of the great Phineas Duvall cannot work miracles.”

“I just want to understand. As your nurse, I must be allowed to care for you however I can. To start, I’ll need to draw blood so I can learn more.”

She gave a regal nod, and I began, removing syringes and test tubes from my bag.

I looked up at her when the needle was established. “How long has it been this way? Your heart, I mean.”

“I had rheumatic fever as a girl.”

“None of this was in your patient file.”

“Because I’m not truly anyone’s patient. Your father was my husband’s physician, and by default our family’s doctor, but not mine. He never examined me, never treated anything. Then came Dr. Tillman, taking over for your father, but I found him distasteful. Burke sent him ’round to talk sense into me a few times, but I never gave him leave to examine me.”

“So who . . . ?”

She took a deep breath. “A traveling doctor. Years ago, in my youth. He told me the fever had likely settled into my heart when he heard an abnormal rhythm after a relapse. I grew better and worse throughout the years, but that was the beginning of my end. I didn’t care to know the details then, and pretended when I felt well, I’d stay that way, but now it will not be escaped. Nor can it be cured.”

“Then all this time, you’ve merely been preparing to—” I clamped my mouth shut. My foot had fit into it enough times for one day.

She lifted a hard, practiced smile. “Aren’t we all?”

I watched the little tube fill with blood, scrambling for something concrete, something factual to say. I tripped over deep, maudlin thoughts. “Inflammation is probably what you were noticing. It might come and go for years, but the problem is actually the scar tissue from the fever that has built up in one of the heart valves. It slows down blood flow and makes you weak, especially in times of distress. Which is what happened tonight, and it will only worsen as this progresses.”

“Eventually it’ll be blocked completely, I suppose.”

Her question hovered in the quiet room as I withdrew the needle and focused on applying pressure to the spot. The ever-present aroma of chamomile and rose water stung my nose with each quick breath.

“Come now, Miss Duvall, this is the time for that truth you claim to peddle, since you’ve come this far.”

I took a long breath and looked at her. It was easier now to see her as Gabe did. She was both stronger and more delicate than I’d ever imagined. “Yes, that is the eventual outcome. But it needn’t happen anytime soon. I will do all I can to—”

She laid a clammy hand on mine, lips firm. “Don’t bother trying to wrestle my life away from the Almighty if he wants it. There are precious few here who do.”

I put my tools away, cleaning and packaging the syringes with my usual precision. What a relief routines could be, procedures one could simply follow without involving the brain. I breathed in and released it as I looked at the cold hearth with the discarded red book. I glanced again at my patient, so lovely and intimidating, who had chased away everyone except the one paid to be here, and I finally understood. I grasped why I was here.

Being alone is a wretched way to live, but an unbearable way to die.

My neck ached hours later as I curled over my microscope, studying the blood samples. My patient slept across the room. I glanced up at the woman’s rising and falling chest, willing it to continue.

So much for being a healer.

I jerked up at a noise. Someone stepped in and I blinked, adjusting my eyes.

“How is she?” Aunt Maisie approached with a whisper of taffeta and set her candlestick on the night table.

I rose and moved to the little chair beside my patient’s bed. “Recovering. Sleeping, just now.”

“And you?”

Better than I deserved to be. “I’m well.”

“You look terrible.” The statement was warm with compassion. The old woman moved a chair up to the bedside next to mine. “You needn’t feel it’s your fault. If that’s what is flying through that oversized heart of yours, simply tell it to stop. The Almighty’s hand is much, much stronger than your nursing hands, and Golda Gresham is cradled in the palm of his sovereignty.”

I swallowed my arguments. I could handle all manner of criticism as a female doctor, ridicule for being a spinster, even scorn from rejected suitors. Yet watching a patient suffer, especially if I had a hand in it . . . nothing did my heart in more thoroughly than that.

The old woman perched on the chair and pulled out a tangle of string, expertly arranging her fingers in the mess, and beginning to work. “No one should be alone at such a tumultuous time. I’ll stay for company.”

“She won’t be alone, I can promise you that. I plan to remain through the night.”

“Not for her—she wouldn’t know if the entire circus visited her room, tired as she is. For you. I will not let you spend the entire night slandering yourself in your own mind.” She settled in and smiled as her fingers moved nimbly in and around the threads, tatting with surprising ease. “I expect we can find something to talk about for a few hours.”

I looked up at this blessed little package of energy and couldn’t help but feel utter gratitude for her. “Why don’t you talk, Aunt Maisie? I believe I’ve said far too much already.”

She rocked back and forth, her body melting into the wooden spindles behind her as she watched me. “You needn’t be afraid of your words, Miss Duvall. Only careful. They’re as easy to gather as rocks, and just as easy to throw about, but don’t underestimate them. I’ve never happened upon a neutral word.” Her rocker creaked against the floor as she rested, eyes closed and head back, and knotted by feel. “What do you think of charlatan? I’ve just discovered it. Isn’t it simply ripe with danger?”

“If you aimed it at someone, I suppose.”

“One day I’d like to. Charlatan. What a lark.” A chain of perfectly formed little circles and knots appeared from the tips of her nimble fingers, even as her mind lost itself in a forest of inconsequential thoughts. “Now then, what shall we talk about to keep ourselves awake?”

“I want the rest of the Aberdeen story.” I breathed out this answer without hesitation, and felt it again—that gentle undercurrent of love about the house, like wind through silvery little wind chimes. With all the damage I’d caused in this house, I felt the need to restore something, to offer at least one person a happy ending.

She watched me for several silent moments, as if assessing my worthiness to be admitted deeper into the story. “Very well, then. Not the whole thing, mind you. Now where did we end?”

“He’d caught her picking flowers that were not his and she taught him to paint.”

“Ah yes, the flowers. As it turns out, they were his mother’s prize flowers. She was the lady of the estate, the wife of the squire. Which made him—”

“The heir. Grayson Aberdeen was the heir.”

“That he was. And his little Rose was not exactly who his flower-growing mother had in mind for her firstborn to marry.”

“I assume Rose was poor.” My mind grasped all the clues as they came, trying to make sense of them. Why did the letter make it sound as though he was the one undeserving of her, though? Had he committed some horrible deed?

“Her father was a butcher. They had sufficient income, but she was from a small hamlet near here and certainly not of the right pedigree to marry a gentleman.”

“I thought they met in the country, not at the coast.”

Her pointed look of annoyance silenced me. “Does a body never set foot outside her home? Of course they met in the country. She summered with a relation near Hassocks every year. Stiff old lady, she was, and in need of a bright and sunny companion. She found that in little Rose.”

“I could imagine you being such a girl.” I threw the bait out and watched her reaction.

The shock was evident, but she recovered quickly and cleared her throat. “Now, then.” As if she hadn’t heard. “The story. Our hero asked for Rose’s hand no less than three times before he was accepted. He hadn’t a token to give her, but he brought her as many of his mother’s flowers as he could carry each time he proposed.”

“Cad.”

She blinked.

“He should bring something that’s his, rather than flowers belonging to his mother.”

“He was the heir. That means he was about to have many things, but as of yet he had nothing of his own.”

“Is he not capable of making her something? Perhaps a painting.”

Her mouth twitched up into a smile. “Perhaps it wouldn’t have taken three tries if he’d had a mind like yours. He did, however, make one of those little flowers into a ring for her. Just a little purple weed, twisted into a circle, but she said yes.”

I sighed a fluttering, breathy little sound. I couldn’t help it.

This earned me a stern look of disapproval. “I told you, the story isn’t over. Don’t be all twitter-brained over them yet.”

“So they married. How did they manage to convince his family?”

The clouds descended over her expression. “They didn’t. Therein lies the problem. He knew they’d never agree to the match, so it had to be done in secret. They ran to Gretna Green during a terrible thunderstorm that boded rain but did not come to fruition, and their wedding in a little shop overlooking the River Esk went much the same way. They planned a honeymoon along the Rhine, with stops in Paris and Portugal, but none of it came to pass.”

“They disinherited him. Rose and Grayson were destitute after the wedding, weren’t they?”

“No, they did not disinherit him. He had been groomed to be the heir, mind you, so they took him back. Only . . . without her.”

I gasped. “They couldn’t.” I ached inside as I tried to fit together how the letter figured in. Oh, how big and terrible and captivating was the story behind that note. I was beginning to understand why he believed himself unworthy of her.

“Unfortunately, they could. Very convincing, his parents, and they were accustomed to having their way. Especially that mother of his. They pounced on them as they emerged from saying vows and forced them to annul it, then sent the girl on her way.”

“How terrible. What wretched people.”

She sighed and shook her head, gaze staring into nothingness as her fingers resumed their mad dance of strings. “Such things happen every day, I’m afraid.”

The story turned my insides, leaving them hollow and aching. “It cannot end that way. Surely there’s more to the tale.”

“Oh yes, but later. It’ll have to wait for another night.” She lowered her voice. “It seems we’re disturbing someone.”

Footsteps padded down the hall. I nodded, swallowing my disappointment. “Later,” she had said, and I clung to that like the last rose of summer. Later meant more was coming. The story was not yet over.

I pondered everything until even Aunt Maisie slept, eyelids fluttering. How helpless it seemed, this love story I’d determined to piece back together. Yet I had another purpose here. I hugged my knees to my chest and looked at my sleeping patient, the delicate woman whom I had hurt with my foolish tongue. After all the trouble I’d caused this night, it was time I did something good with my words.

Moving to a little desk, I burned through one quarter of a candle and several pages of perfectly good paper composing a letter. The idea had been blossoming for hours, culminating when Golda had tossed her red book into the hearth—and I’d felt compelled to retrieve it. Longfellow, is it, Mrs. Gresham? Now I scribbled like mad, praying that with a few well-placed words the sold-out event was not so terribly sold-out.

Yet the lines all sounded hollow. Weak. I laid my forehead on a blank page, took a breath, and humbled myself before the only one who could help, the one who had harnessed words to create the entire earth. What would you have me write, Lord? Do what you will with this letter, with this position at Crestwicke. With her life and mine.

A surge of strength and compassion cooled my skin, urging me on. Rising and dipping the pen, I took a breath and started in, the tip scratching against thick paper.

I’d like to write to you concerning your poetry night to be held on September the 29th. I know the event is now closed, but I also know that the purpose of your work is to inspire life in people’s hearts. Now I beg of you to do that for a woman named Golda Gresham. I am her nurse, treating her dire heart condition, yet I’m afraid her problem extends beyond the power of medicine . . .

After a page and a half of writing that bled directly from my overfull heart, I folded it into an envelope and dripped red wax on its flap. Please, please. Send a reply.

For a moment I sat back and stared at it, imagining Grayson penning his love letter by candlelight. Had he written it after the annulment—and lost the courage to send it?

When I’d laid my missive on the side table in the foyer for the post, another whish of footfall against tile made me jump, as if the ghost of Grayson Aberdeen walked about every time we dug up a little more of his story. A childish thought, of course, but many times at night those sorts of notions crowded out reason. Chiding my foolishness, I crossed the hall and edged toward the shadows, but the footfall—a man’s—came again. “Hello, is someone there?” A few steps forward. A gulp, then a bold attempt. “Mr. Aberdeen? Grayson Aberdeen?”

A deep, growling voice rolled over my senses, and I spun to face it in the dark. “What are you doing here? Who are you?” A grim, fully suited man with silver-streaked hair stepped into my candle glow, scowling like a bear who had been poked. Tall and gaunt, he wore his white skin on hollowed-out cheeks as if it were one size too small. I couldn’t determine his age—life had used him hard.

“If you please, sir, I have something that belongs to you. A letter.”

Thick eyebrows descended further. “What sort of letter?”

“Well—that is, you are Mr. Aberdeen, are you not? You must be, for you’re the only person in this house I’ve never met and—”

“Why not give me the letter, then?” He held out one long hand and the light sparkled against his cufflinks. Did ghosts wear cufflinks?

“I would, sir, but I don’t have it with me this moment, you see. In fact, it seems to be misplaced. It was a silly thing, really—”

He released a long, windy sigh that left his shoulders stooped. “It’s just as well, since my name is Gresham.”

I blinked. “Oh, Mr. Gresham. Of course. You are Mr. Gresham.”

“And who might you be?”

I stuck out my hand, eager for something to do, no matter how improper. “Willa Duvall, sir. Daughter of Phineas Duvall. Nurse to your wife.”

A grimace contorted his sallow face. “What connection have you to the Aberdeens?”

“None at all. I’ve come across a letter he wrote, but no one will tell me where he is so I can return it. He’s like a ghost in this house, who no one sees but everyone fears.”

“Ghost, indeed. He haunts the very walls of this house, yet I doubt he’s even dead yet, the scoundrel.” He licked his lips, a flash of stubble showing across his jaw. “What sort of letter?”

“A love letter. But I’ve no idea who it was intended for.”

He shoved his hands deep into his pockets, driving back his jacket. Silence followed with his slow breaths marking the seconds that passed. “If you happen upon it again, burn the thing.”

I stared at the candle flame, feeling terribly intrusive even in my silence, as if I’d tread deeply into a family story in which I had no business. Cobwebs was exactly how it felt—thick and repulsive, the type you walk into unawares, praying there was not a spider at home.

“Would you like me to inform your family that you’re here?”

“No.” The return was swift and final. “I’ll be gone by first light, so I’ve no wish to disturb anyone.”

He spun and so did my thoughts. I was beset with the idea that I must tell him of his wife’s condition. It was imperative that he understand. I’d be breaking my promise of privacy, but a husband should know when his wife was lingering near the exit of this earth. “Sir, there’s something you need to hear. It’s about your wife.”

But he didn’t stop. I closed my eyes and pushed out a breath.

When he disappeared without turning back, I hurried to the sitting room and brandished a paper and pen, pouring out more words in another pointed letter. The man was needed at home, and he should know it. Details would only be given in person. I carried it about with me the next morning, but he’d already left. I asked Parker to post it to Mr. Gresham’s London address, praying I hadn’t done the wrong thing.