Page 94 of The Phoenix Bride
Instead, I go into the garden and crouch to check on my seeds. They remain untouched by birds—I’d hoped as much, andput up netting, but one can never be certain—and I smile. I plant a few more while I am there, some thyme and rosemary for the new season.
I imagine my father beside me, crouching to inspect the soil.Working on Shabbat, David?
I must,I picture myself replying.If I do not do this now, I never will.
The vision doesn’t reply. He just watches me, frowning.
You told me to leave London once,I say to him.Would you tell me that again?
He strokes his beard, but he makes no response. His eyes are dark and kind.
I ask,You were proud of me once. Are you still?
Still no reply. He offers me his hand. I lean forward to take it.
You wanted me to be happy, always,I say.Do I want that, also?
He cannot respond; he is my creation, my dream-golem, molded of my own insecurity. But I find my eyes are prickling with tears still as I let the imagined meeting fade, and I am left alone in the garden once more.
I go inside and take out my recipe book, wondering if there are any ingredients I am missing. I have decided to prepare a decoction. It is one I have not made since summer last, and it will have to wait now until my garden has grown. And as I open to the correct page, I find a little note scrawled in the margin—one of my father’s comments, in his sprawling, chaotic handwriting:plants for the easement of sorrow—a fool’s errand. But then, lower, in a smaller, hesitant addition:Well. I may be wrong. Eden was a garden, after all.
I smile. My father and his proverbs.
But now, to work. Daisy, dodder, fumitory—ingredients for my own medicine, one I will take once it is done. It is in someways a return to the townhouse, where Cecilia and I first met: a beginning and an end. A cure for melancholy, if such a thing exists.
—
Afterward, I go to my study, and I open the letter.
David,
At sunset on the twenty-seventh of May, I will be in Saint James’s Park.
Meet me there.
Yours, always,
Cecilia
When we left London eight months ago, we took a gilded carriage. Behind us, people dug through the ashes of a city razed. The houses were charred corpses, the streets filled with a slurry of abandoned things. I felt relief as we left, but regret, also: for the city, for David, for Margaret, for all I had abandoned and been abandoned by. I swallowed my tears and closed my eyes as the cobbles became dirt and the buildings became fields.
In the carriage, Sam spoke excitedly of the estate. He told me how much I would love it in the winter, once the snow fell and the lake froze over. How glad he would be to have company there, now that his parents had passed and his sisters were in France. When we stopped to rest that afternoon, I was referred to as Lady Grey by an innkeeper. For some reason, this made me laugh quite hysterically, and Sam had to apologize on my behalf and explain that I was exhausted by the journey.
We reached the estate by the evening. The Greys own acres upon acres of land, and their manor was built many hundreds ofyears before this one. It carries that age distinctly, in the narrowness of its windows and the darkness of its brick. Ivy crawls eagerly across the walls of its gardens. It is a haunting place, but a beautiful one. When we first saw it, Sam bounded out of the carriage and stretched his arms wide to greet it. Then he turned to me and said, “Home.”
I had sent a courier in my wake to deliver the news to Margaret. She was as furious as she was pleased; we were married, which was what she had wanted, but without her involvement, which decidedly was not. Sam assured me the court considered our wedding to be a romantic elopement, and even the king approved—so the mighty Edens could do nothing except smile and bite their tongues.
Over the winter, Margaret could only communicate with letters, which she sent in great piles. Each one demanded the same thing—that I apologize for my behavior, that I return and speak with her—but their tone swung wildly from demanding to pleading, cruelty to kindness. I never replied. Eventually, they became less frequent, and by spring they had stopped altogether.
Meanwhile, Sam did his best to make me comfortable. He bought a harpsichord and had a spare chamber made into a music room. I was comforted, but I still felt like such a burden to him. It had been so long since I had been given any measure of freedom. And I was surprised by my need to relearn very simple things; I don’t know how I had forgotten them, but I had. When I was at my sister’s townhouse, it had felt as if my very existence had been an insult, one I had to amend. I had to learn I was permitted simply to be, that I had not betrayed Will by my refusal to follow him. That I had not betrayed Margaret by leaving her. That David wasn’t there, and I was still Cecilia without him.
I wanted to remain hopeful and determined, imagining ourreunion, but I missed him. I missed him enough that I cried about it quite often, and I felt a fool each time I did so. Sam had a physician visit, and the man made me decoctions in an approximation of those that David had; I did my best to describe their contents and flavor, but they weren’t the same. The doctor had been quite confused by some of my requests. “I fear I will be unable to source epithymum,” he admitted to me, chagrined. “It is in short supply, and only the best of gardeners can grow it.”
For the first few weeks, I hid constantly in my room, as if to erase my presence from the house entirely. Sam had to coax me out with promises of music and tea and playing cards. It must have been exhausting for him, but he persisted. He had to remind me to bathe, which was the most dreadful thing of all—I remembered how to use water and soap, of course, but I had no instinct for it, no motivation.
“To learn something is commendable,” Sam said to me once. “Whether it is for the first time or the fiftieth!”
So I learned again. It took a long time. I was still grieving, as much as I wanted to claim otherwise. And there was no single moment where I was at peace. I often imagined that there would be—I imagined that I would find some sudden symbol of joy, see new meaning in life, and then be happy. But instead, one day in early March, I realized that I hadn’t felt despair for some time. Sadness, of course, and grief, and even melancholy—but not despair.
