My mother. I thought about her constantly during the week after I arrived at Penderleath. For one thing, there wasn’t much else to do. Simon, shortly after rushing upstairs to assess his parents’ condition for himself, had driven me to this small, strange little cottage so I would be out of the way of germs, he said, and while the shelves contained books (old ones, bound in cloth) and a sort of village washerwoman brought me my meals, I found I couldn’t take much interest in either. My brain was too charged, my stomach too clenched. I would take down a book from the shelf and try to read, and find myself in the middle of a chapter without any idea who the characters were, or what had happened. I would be thinking instead about that last summer in the house in Connecticut, which was also by the sea: a friendlier sea, a wholesome, soft-lipped shore on Long Island Sound, where anybody ought to have been happy. But she wasn’t. That whole summer, I felt as if some thundercloud were driving in from the west, about to blacken the sky, to blacken the whole earth. And now that premonition had taken hold of me again. I could not get the image of thunderclouds out of my mind.
I took walks instead. The cottage snuggled next to the sea, in a crevice along a series of cliffs, not far from a path that I imagined might have been used by smugglers, some day long ago. Or perhaps it was still used by smugglers; who knew? This was Cornwall, after all: a strange, remote claw dragging into the confluence of three seas. The skies remained gray, the drizzle intermittent. The air softened by springtime but not yet warm. I liked to stand at the point where the cliffs made their highest ascent and stare west across the gray-green wash, brooding and tempestuous, where America eventually lay. If I looked northward, along the coast, I could just see the headland where the shore bent inward to Port Isaac.
But I didn’t venture into Port Isaac. Simon had warned me not to, in case there was more influenza. The disease was terrible; it was ravaging everybody, especially the young. So I remained isolated in the cottage, obedient to my husband’s orders, fed only by the washerwoman and the terse, anxious notes that arrived daily from Simon and my own imagination, until one afternoon when the rain dried out and the sun appeared, and Samuel Fitzwilliam walked up the pebbled path and found me sitting on a boulder.
For so large a man, he moved with utmost quiet, and I must have jumped a foot when he stopped behind me and said my name.
“What are you doing here?” I asked.
“Pack your things.”
“What? My God, has something happened?”
He was smoking a cigarette, nearly finished. He threw it down on the path and crushed the stub under the heel of his shoe. “You could say that, yes. Are you all right? You look pale.”
“Just tell me what’s happened! Is Simon sick?”
“No. No, Simon is not sick. Not with the damned Spanish flu, anyway.” He reached out to me with his large shovel hand and dragged me down the path. “Your husband is just fine, Mrs. Fitzwilliam, as he always is.”
“Then what are we doing? Your parents—?”
“My parents are dead, or will be shortly.”
“My God!”
“They’re dead, and you’ve got to leave, Mrs. Fitzwilliam, leave the lot of us here in Cornwall and go back to New York where you belong.”
I dug my heels into the path and skidded along until he stopped and turned to me. His face was thunderous and bewildered. “What are you doing?”
“What am I doing? What are you doing? What’s going on? Has Simon sent you?”
“No. Simon has not sent me, by God. I’ve sent myself. He’s ruined enough, hasn’t he? I’ll be damned if he ruins you, too.”
“He hasn’t ruined anything! He’s been risking his life, trying to save your parents, which is more than—”
“Save them? Save them?” Samuel’s cheeks were red. He dropped my hand abruptly, so that I nearly fell to the ground, and ran his hand through his dark hair. “No, Mrs. Fitzwilliam. You’ve got it all wrong. He wasn’t trying to save them. The opposite.”
I reached out for a nearby boulder and sat down. My ears felt as if something had started whirling inside them. “What are you saying? Simon’s not—what are you saying?”
“I’m saying he wanted to get rid of them. Get rid of them and claim his inheritance, before it’s gone entirely. He already has, almost. I was just in the village, and the word is they’re both unconscious, death expected any moment. Mind you, I don’t half blame him, but—”
“But that’s ridiculous.” I stood. My legs wobbled and held. “We arrived a week ago, and they were already sick.”
“Yes, of course they were. Because my brother came down here a few days before your wedding and made them sick. Poisoned them. The same way he did his father-in-law.”
“That’s the most preposterous thing I’ve ever heard! Poisoned his father-in-law?”
“Well, it wasn’t ’flu, was it? The magistrate himself told me that—in strict confidence, of course—straight from the coroner’s mouth. A magistrate and a coroner, mind you, who just happen to be on excellent terms with one Simon Fitzwilliam. They are all terribly snug with one another, the local gentry.”
“But Simon—it’s impossible. It had to be ’flu. What kind of poison could make you sick like that?”
“God knows. I suppose a chap like my brother might be up-to-date on all the most modern methods of poisoning.”
“Stop it! Stop saying such things! It’s ridiculous. Simon would never—you’ve got no proof—he would never—”
“You can believe what you like, of course. You’re in love with him.”
“And you’re the opposite. You despise him. You want to think the worst of him, whatever the evidence.”
Samuel shrugged. “I know what I know.”
“Besides, Simon didn’t go to Cornwall last week. He couldn’t have. He was busy making arrangements for the wedding.”
“Is that what he said? Well, I daresay it wasn’t an absolute lie. He drove down here to ask them to go to the wedding after all, to give the whole affair the appearance of their approval. Naturally they refused. Told him exactly what they thought. A frightful old row, or so I’ve heard. Not having darkened the old doorstep myself, in recent years.”
I opened my mouth to say that this was a lie, too, but the truth was, I hadn’t actually seen Simon in the days before the wedding. For a week or so before, he had been away—running errands, as he told me—interviewing with some hospital about a position, squaring away the license and that sort of thing. I hadn’t asked him to account for himself, and he hadn’t given me any details. But I remembered, now that I thought about it, how haggard he looked when he visited me in my private room at the hospital in Hampstead, upon his return. It was the night before the wedding, and I had just finished packing my trunk, which he loaded onto the back of the Wolseley. I told him he looked tired, and he said he’d done an awful lot of driving, and I kissed him and said he should go to bed early and rest. Because tomorrow was a big day.
Yes, he had said, kissing me back. Tomorrow is a very big day, indeed.
I said, Aren’t you happy? You don’t look happy.
He had pushed back my hair from my forehead and told me he was the happiest and luckiest man in England at that moment.
But I thought, at the time, he was putting up a bit of a front. That the strain of everything had taken too much hold, and maybe it was the divorce. Divorce was always a tremendous strain, I’d been told, even if both parties approached the dissolution amicably, and he’d always been reluctant to share his troubles with me. He had always wanted to protect me from upset.
And I thought, as I searched his face that evening, how this had to stop. How I would do everything in my power to make it up to him. I would do everything I could to be a good wife, a wife who brought joy and comfort to her husband.