Page 68 of The Phoenix Bride
“You can’t be certain of that,” Jan says.
“I don’t need to be certain. I have already lost so many things. I lost my husband, and I lost David before I ever had him, and I cannot risk that loss again. There is only so much grief I can bear.”
Jan frowns. “You sound like David when you speak like that.”
I snap, “Perhaps that is because David is right.”
Jan doesn’t respond. He just stares at me, still frowning, hands curled around his coffee dish.
I sigh. “Forgive me, I know I can be…harsh.”
“A little. I understand, though. I know it is difficult.”
I give him a strained smile, then drain my dish. Standing up, I say, “I am tired, and drunk. I ought to return home. Thank you for the coffee, Jan.”
He doesn’t look insulted by the abrupt exit, thankfully, only saddened. “Cecilia,” he says.
“Yes?”
“If you see David again,” he says. “Whenyou see David again. There is something you should bear in mind.”
“What is it?” I ask.
“He has lost people, too. He has loved and he has grieved.”Jan shrugs. “We all have empty rooms in our hearts. Better to fill them, surely, than to lock their doors and hope they are forgotten.”
Time passes, as it always has and always will. No amount of tragedy has ever changed that.
Sara comes while I am sitting shiva, with a basket of cherry tarts. She sits beside me on the floor and puts her arm around me as I press my face into her shoulder.
Others come, too—everyone from the community—and they take my hand in theirs and offer me the traditional condolence:May heaven comfort you. Sometimes I forget to reply, and they squeeze my palm, and say it again:May heaven comfort you.
Once my shiva is done, Jan comes to help Elizabeth Askwith and me remove the cloth from the mirrors and clear the food we have not eaten. He asks me when I will move, and I tell him I intend to stay. He stares at me blankly, as if I have spoken to him in another language.
“This house is too big for you alone, David,” he says.
He is correct; it was, in some ways, too big for me and my father, also. I ought to leave, find a smaller set of rooms with a smaller garden, let Elizabeth Askwith find work somewhere lessenamored with its own past. Gaspar Mendes is still here, in the carvings on the bench and the flowers that grow from soil he tended. His room is still as it was, and most of his things are inside there—in the wardrobe, or in chests that I pushed under the bed. The wooden figurines he carved are the only things I cannot bring myself to conceal, and so I take them out and put them in my cabinet alongside the porcelain painted with flowers.
I eat three meals a day because I should, I wash and sleep because I should, because if I don’t, then I have to admit that everything is different and that I am not the same. I double my appointments for the first week after my mourning is done, so I am away from the house from dawn until dusk. Despite the merciless heat of this year’s summer, during the earliest hours of the morning, the air by the river is still bracing. I never wear a jacket, and when the cold reaches its fingers beneath the sleeves of my shirt, it is a relief.
My friends maneuver around me as if the floor is made of glass. Sara does not push me for an answer to her proposal; Jan is gentle and patient; Elizabeth Askwith continues her work without any question as to why a single bachelor requires a maid at all. And between it all, I ache with missing my father, and I ache—shamefully—with missing Cecilia, whose absence now somehow seems all the more bracing. When people ask me,How are things,I know that Cecilia would not ask the same; she wouldn’t need to. She wouldn’t be patient with me, she wouldn’t send me sympathetic smiles and pat me on the arm. She wouldn’t afford me the indulgence of self-pity, because I rarely afforded her such things. It is strange how you can know a person so briefly, and yet learn them so well you can conduct conversations with them in their absence. I imagine telling her,It is difficult,and she replies,I know, David. I know.
—
In August, I am hired for a new job: another court family. Another Saint James’s townhouse, another suspiciously generous wage. I should know better than to accept, but the emptiness of my life in the past weeks has dulled the blade of my caution. What have I to lose?
Master Myddleton was afflicted last year with a fever of the glands, and as is the case with many such illnesses, it is taking him months to recover. He is beset by constant exhaustion. I suspect the issue is actually the quality of his sleep rather than some chronic condition. I see him on a Thursday, provide him with some medicines the next day, and consider the job done.
Then, the following Tuesday, I am awakened past midnight by a footman banging on my door, insistent I must come to the townhouse at once. I doze in the carriage on the way there.
Upon my arrival, I am informed by a distraught Mistress Myddleton that her husband fainted during a dinner party and is now unconscious in the parlor. On our way up the steps, I can hear the sounds of the party: Someone is playing the harpsichord quite exquisitely.
The décor of this townhouse is more modern than that of the Edens’, and the corridor leading to the parlor has been tiled in black and white like a checkerboard, marble statues standing between each window in languid poses. The parlor itself is a confection of honey-yellow and scarlet, and Master Myddleton lies snoring on the chaise longue. When I go to inspect him, the scent of brandy immediately hits me. I sigh: It is already clear what the issue is. Illnesses can make people far less tolerant of their drink. After ensuring the affliction isn’t anything more serious, I turn him so he is lying on his side, propping him up with pillows, and remove his wig so he doesn’t overheat. I leave one ofmy milk thistle decoctions on the table with a note—it will help with the hangover—and I depart.
At the base of the staircase, I pause to jot down a message for Mistress Myddleton explaining the situation. I could seek her out, but she is entertaining her guests, and I don’t imagine she’d want them to see me. As I write, I listen to the muffled cadence of the party, booming voices, clinking glasses. The distance makes their conversation a foreign language, perceptible but incomprehensible. A woman laughs brightly, and there is something about the sound that seems familiar—but the noise fades as quickly as it came, subsumed in the deluge of other speakers.
I hand the note to the footman, who places it delicately on a silver dish, then heads toward the dining room. I take my hat from the stand, shrug on my coat, stare at myself briefly in the mirror by the door—sighing at the frown lines marring my forehead—and then I realize I have forgotten my medicine case upstairs.
Back, then, to the checkerboard tiles and the marble statues and the grunting snores of Master Myddleton. I take my things, check his pulse once more—just in case—and then leave the room.
