“You miss your old life.” It was a given, but still she hurt to be reminded of it.
“Doesn’t everyone, from time to time?” He replaced the bell jar and turned toward her. “Ten years from now I’m going to miss my life as it is today, simply because I will never be twenty-seven again. There is always something worth remembering in every stage of the journey.”
“Even in the year you married?”
“Yes.” His expression was—surely she deluded herself—nostalgic. “Demolishing the north wing, for one—that opportunity will not come again. Mrs. Clements telling the colonel to shut up. Our conversation about the commodes with the queen’s portrait inside—still one of the funniest things I’ve ever heard.”
She didn’t know why it should be so, but her eyes tingled with tears. It had been a horrible year, but his words carried a great fondness—for this most arduous time of their life together. As if in looking back, the grief and the anguish had been sifted away, and only the gems remained—moments of camaraderie, memories that shone.
“Of course,” he said, smiling, “how can I forget, your panic over my determination to kill myself with a dummy rifle.”
Her voice caught. “You will never let me live that down, will you?”
“No. I can’t believe it: We never did give you any firearm lessons, did we?”
“There were always more pressing concerns.”
“We’ll do it this year—make you a crack shot in no time.”
“I’m sure the grouse will happily disagree as I miss every last one of them.”
“Grouse isn’t the only thing to shoot. The seasons for partridge and pheasant don’t end until first of February. And that’s plenty of t…”
His voice trailed off.
Understanding came all too swift to Millie, like a tropical sunset that abruptly turned day into night. There was no next year for them. Come January he would go to Mrs. Englewood.
“It’s all right,” she said gamely. “Not all of us are meant to be crack shots.”
He looked at her as if he hadn’t seen her in a very long time. Or perhaps, as if he might never see her again, and must memorize her features one by one.
When he finally spoke, he said, “They are still waiting for us for tea, you and me. Shall we go?”
CHAPTER 9
The Partnership
1889
Millie’s father died three weeks after Alice. But whereas Alice had given every indication that she was not long for this earth, Mr. Graves’s heart failed unexpectedly. He was forty-two.
Millie was stunned. Her mother was incoherent with shock. Thankfully, as he had done after Mr. Townsend’s passing, Lord Fitzhugh stepped in and took charge of the arrangements.
Mr. Graves’s will was simple enough. He settled a number of trusts on longtime retainers and employees, gave miscellaneous gifts to members of his extended family, provided generously for his widow, and left all of Cresswell & Graves Enterprises to Millie.
After the funeral, Mrs. Hanover, Millie’s aunt, suggested that Mrs. Graves, devastated by grief, would do well to spend some time in a bright and cheerful place. Millie and Mrs. Hanover together accompanied Mrs. Graves to Tuscany, to recuperate in a sun-drenched landscape of cypresses and vineyards.
They’d planned to stay for at least three months. But a month into their sojourn, a letter came for Millie from her husband. He dutifully wrote once a week—short missives that numbered not more than five sentences between greetings and salutations. But this letter was three pages, front and back.
He had performed an audit of the firm, from its accounts and records to its factories and other physical assets. He had also spoken with a number of retailers who sold Cresswell & Graves wares.
Mr. Graves, during his tenure, had been excessively cautious. The plum pudding and the mackerel had been the only new products added to the line during the past decade. His philosophy had been to produce few products and produce them well. With the ever expanding number of companies that daily introduced more varieties to the market, Cresswell & Graves still sold about the same number of products from year to year, but they were becoming a smaller and smaller percentage of the retailers’ stock.
Moreover, they could not even boast their wares as the best-made tinned goods anymore. Yes, their ingredients were still carefully sourced and thoroughly inspected, and the manufacturing process was clean and conscientious, but newer technologies and production methods had become available in the past ten years—means to make preserved foods taste fresher and last longer—and Cresswell & Graves had adopted none of them.
The company was stagnating. In Lord Fitzhugh’s opinion, they had not yet reached a point of crisis. But should things continue at the same sluggish pace, it might not be long before they were moribund.