The Wife in the Attic by Rose Lerner

Author:Rose Lerner
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Rose Lerner
Published: 2021-06-19T00:00:00+00:00

22

Heat bloomed in my cheeks and beneath my breastbone. I could think of nothing to say.

“If you mean, because he was married,” I stammered at last, “then could he be constant? One hopes...for a lasting attachment.”

His jaw spasmed. He nudged the inkwell onto a clear patch of desk, like a chess piece. I remembered my first day in this office, my wifely impulse to keep it from tumbling off the edge. “A fair question. But sometimes...” I had to strain to hear him, so low did he speak. “Sometimes people change so much after marriage, that I cannot believe it inconstancy to have loved who they were, yet not to love who they are.”

The tumult in my breast matched the emotion on his face. Was he in earnest? Was I? Or were we both playacting, weeping for Hecuba like Hamlet’s player?

“Your wife is a clever woman, is she not? Those books you gave her—she took an interest in the natural sciences?”

His face was suffused with emotion. “‘O, what a noble mind is here o’erthrown,’” he whispered, and I started, that we should both be thinking of Hamlet. “‘Like sweet bells jangled, out of tune and harsh.’” He scrubbed at his eyes. “Tabby has inherited her intelligence, and will inherit her money. I pray to God she inherits nothing else.”

My own heart echoed his grief. I saw Lady Palethorp baring her breast in a rage—weeping like a child—brandishing her candle at me. Like sweet bells jangled...

I meant to be a good mother. I meant for my little girl to be happy.

I heard her musical voice, reading to me in the dark until it gave out.

My own voice scraped in my throat as I asked, “Does she enjoy books, still?”

He blinked. “I don’t—I don’t know. Her nurse might fetch her anything she liked from the library, if she wished it.”

I took a deep breath. My sight cleared, as though I had stepped from a hazy room into fresh air. I recalled the pitiful stack of dull books, the dry ewer, the rank, dirty room, the opium-eating nurse.

Even if he spoke the truth—even if he had loved her, and she had gone mad—even if, in her madness, she had hurt him—he might have been kind. If it pained him too deeply to see to her comfort himself, he might have paid someone to do it. He might have asked—Does she want books?

I had felt crawling revulsion at my grandmother’s drunken weeping. I had seen my family sicken and die, each in turn. I understood the impulse to turn one’s face away from a loved one’s pain and weakness. I could pity, even, such terrible human frailty.

But the vows Sir Kit had sworn were for sickness as well as health, and he had broken them.

I relaxed my sweaty grip on his note for Peter, slipping it beneath my kerchief. “You spoke of Tabby’s portion,” I said slowly. “Is it large enough she truly need not marry? Can Goldengrove pass to her?”

He laughed mirthlessly. “Oh no, Goldengrove will go to the next baronet, and I wish him joy of it.

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