Page 3 of Much Ado About Margaret
He smelled incredible, musky somehow, but not unpleasant, like a powerful, wild animal mixed with the fresh blast of the outdoors after rain. It was enough to banish the reek of Mr. Gainswell’s unwashed stockings from her memory forever.
“Yes?” He cocked his head to the side. He was tall, well-built, with the strength of a person who rode and looked after their exercise. “Do we know each other?”
He sounded, well, annoyed, but he looked at her with enough inquisitiveness to light a flame of hope in her chest. Did he find her beautiful? Something in his gaze told her it might be so. His eyes were stormy blue, boundlessly dark to the point that they were nearly black. Even so, there was delight there or curiosity. The other hand, the one at his side, impatiently opened and closed around nothing. Whatever conversation she had interrupted, it didn’t seem to be a happy one.
“I’m afraid we haven’t been introduced,” said Maggie, dropping into a polite curtsy as she remembered her long-lost manners. “Miss Margaret Arden. We might be acquainted, sir, but it would only be through the post. Some months ago, I sent you my manuscript,The Killbride.” And here, she hastened totake the bundled pages out from under her arm and its protective shawl covering. She felt stupider by the second as she unwound the fabric, realizing that she must seem to him an absolute lunatic. “And because you never responded, I thought perhaps the pages were lost, or for some unfortunate reason you never received them.”
The shawl removed, Maggie held up the fat stack of paper between them.
It was her turn to feel like a lion in a cage as Mr. Darrow slid closer, staring down at the manuscript with one arched brow. “Your only conclusion was misadventure?”
Maggie nodded. “That was my opinion, yes.”
“This is rather unusual, Miss Arden, and unforgivably rude.”
Bad start.
“I know it’s unorthodox, and I do apologize for any offense given, sir, but this novel is not just a passion for me, it’s my life and I—”
Mr. Darrow plucked a few pages off the stack, perusing them. “Is that so? If it were as important as all that, then I would think you would take more care in how you present your life.”
Maggie’s mouth opened slightly, the air squeezing out of her.
It didn’t take him long to add, “I regret to inform you, Miss Arden, that I did receive your letter.”
“You…you did?” Her heart sank.
“Indeed, I did. These pages are familiar to me, yes, I begin to recall them despite my best efforts. I’m interested in publishing a novel of substance, you see, not an overwrought examination of whose misplaced giggle at the ball made Mamma beside herself or some similar nonsense.” His nose wrinkled as if the papers stank. They might, she thought, given where they had spent the last few hours.
Maggie refused to believe things were as he stated. “Oh,but…but that’s really just the beginning, and it’s completely intentional, for not long after, the heroine—”
“The heroine could sprout wings and fly to America, for all I care, and it would still not interest me,” he said with a sigh, dropping the pages back down to their mates. Maggie felt small and naïve, wishing she could shrink behind the ferns. “The most I can say for your work is that it demonstrates a confident control of language, and there’s clarity to the prose. I suppose your penmanship is to be commended also. Thank you, Miss Arden, for making an already unpleasant event that much more disagreeable. Good evening, and good luck with your”—he waved his hand dismissively—“with your life.”
Stunned, she watched him stalk away. Never had her opinion of someone changed so rapidly. A moment ago, she would have carved him onto her dance card permanently, now she hoped never to see him again. His enviably handsome face be damned, it was skinned over an empty soul. The coldness. The audacity.
Winny was rushing toward her down the corridor, face awash with concern. Violet was probably still pretending to be collapsed by the fireplace. Maggie turned, facing the ferns, hateful of the tears that gathered in her eyes and began to spill down her cheeks. This was her life, and whatever Mr. Darrow said about it, she knew it was worth pursuing. It was just one in a long line of unkind responses. Written responses from other publishers had remarked that a young lady ought to concern herself with more high-minded things.Additionally, we find it troubling that a person of your gentle sex should put their pen to describing scenes of violence, passion, and general indelicacy,wrote one mean little grump from the lofty heights of his Paternoster Row office.
Maggie wiped her face dry and pulled back her shoulders. “I suppose good evening to you, too, Mr. Darrow,” she murmured, covering the manuscript pages with the damp shawl. “I will tirelessly endeavor to prove you wrong.”
2
The instruments of darkness tell us truths.
Macbeth, Act 1, Scene 3
June
Bridger’s childhood home, Fletcher Estate, sat on a low hill overlooking the village of Tetherly, just west of Southam. The spring carpet of marsh marigold and mayflowers had given way to even brighter larkspur and early hydrangea. Fletcher Estate itself had always reminded Bridger of a Christmas pudding—brown, low, and bulging, with a single painted tower on top like a decorative sugared fruit. He wanted to love it, to feel the fondness everyone ought to feel for the rooms and halls of their youth, but the love never quite manifested.
And sitting then in his father’s ground-floor study, he felt not only loveless, but choked.
Bridger’s father sat hunched at his desk. He looked just like a feverish baby, his reddened face and bald head barely visible above a cocoon of blankets. Mr. Darrow was always cold now,summer or winter. His nurse was away in the village acquiring more tonics. Some of those empty bottles sat in a row in front of Mr. Darrow. The names on them were gibberish to Bridger, who was not often at Fletcher Estate and was ignorant of the ins and outs of his father’s decline.
No, this unfortunate position was meant to be Pimm’s.
“She shouldn’t bring all that lavender into the front hall,” barked Mr. Darrow. “It makes me sneeze. Damned fool woman.” He turned with some trouble in his chair and glowered at the closed door. “Mrs. Darrow! That’s enough of the lavender!”
Bridger stood, tugging the bottom of his waistcoat as he went to the window. His father was shouting at ghosts again. Mrs. Darrow, Bridger’s mother, had been gone for many years. He had never in his entire life heard his father refer to her as anything but Mrs. Darrow. A charitable reading was that the couple were not loving or close; a less charitable one was that Mr. Darrow had put his wife into an early grave, straining her gentle heart with criticism, contempt, and neglect. It was hard to tell when exactly his father had begun to decline, for he had always been a mean, reclusive person, but it had certainly accelerated over the last year. The physicians had called it a kind of mania brought on by advancing age.
