Time Squared, page 23
* * *
At the bombed-out townhouse, the countess held Eleanor back as her aunt went up the steps for a closer look.
“You won’t tell Clara about seeing Gordon Stickley at my show.”
She’d been so limpet-like because she’d thought Eleanor was planning to. “But surely she must know. I mean about . . .”
“She doesn’t want you to know. Her innocent flower.”
“My aunt gave her innocent flower a box of Durex.”
“If you expect people to be logical, my dear, your life will be one nasty surprise after another.”
“I like surprises,” Eleanor said. “Especially the most recent.”
She meant surviving the bomb, but the Durex was on the table, wasn’t it? The countess arched an eyebrow and Eleanor couldn’t help smiling, giggling despite her headache, making the countess titter until they met each other’s eye and broke into roars of laughter. The house gone, the ancestors gone, her art collection buried, her life barely saved, but sex, and well, glorious sex.
Aunt Clara called irritably, “Surely you can’t find this amusing.”
“Mustn’t succumb,” the countess called back. “As my old friend Mae West likes to say, usually before doing so.”
“You know Mae West?” Eleanor asked, feeling giddy from her headache. “As well as Beau Brummel?”
Even the old man on the steps was staring at her.
“Just a little joke,” she said weakly.
1951
Middleford, Connecticut
19
Eleanor’s headache was dreadful, worse than any she’d ever had. Her life was supposed to be moving forward like everyone else’s, but this recent cascade of migraines kept throwing her back into the past. Boadicea, the Blitz, the Sepoy Mutiny written up in the newspaper, today’s newspaper, poor Stansfield Mowbray driving a Rolls-Royce around the corner again and again and again.
Eleanor had always seen odd things. Yes, she had, even during the Regency. But lately so many images crowded in that she slept fitfully and spent her days dreading another attack. Doctors had become a threat, the world crazed with cracks she could fall into—places, time, other lives—as if something kept breaking the screen of her aunt’s television set and sucking her through it.
She turned it on. The CBS evening news, a report on the House Un-American Activities Committee. Murdo Crawley was there in the background, trying to reach the foreground. Congressman Murdo Crawley, who had positioned himself on the far right of the Republican Party. Her headache was so bad that Eleanor couldn’t remember how she’d met him, but the name was unforgettable and she knew he was married to Kate’s sister Alicia.
Who was Kate?
Eleanor turned off the television and paced the room. She had no idea who any of them were—Kate, Alicia—but told herself that her name was Eleanor Crosby. She’d done this lately during her headaches, holding onto herself by her fingernails. My name is Eleanor Crosby and I live at One Goodwood Road, Middleford, Connecticut, U.S.A.
The World, she’d written in school notebooks. The Solar System, the Galaxy, the Universe.
“Which universe?” said a voice in her head. She had to fight it off.
“Eleanor Crosby,” she repeated.
She lived with her Aunt Clara (Goodwood Road, Middleford) having been back home since finishing college two years ago. Aunt Clara Crosby, she insisted, who had moved here from England after the war, sailing over to claim this old clapboard house left to her by her second husband. It had once been his family home, then a private hospital, but the poor old girl had been abandoned for years, haunted, they said, by more than one ghost.
Some might claim the ghosts were the root of Eleanor’s problem, but she didn’t think so. She didn’t remember seeing one, although she clearly remembered her aunt setting up a dressmaking shop in the parlour and calling herself a couturier. Aunt Clara had taste and Eleanor did the books, and she told the voice, the ghosts—which weren’t there—that she would do them until Robin got back from Korea and they got married.
A sob at the thought of Robin, serving at the front. Captain Robert Denholm, U.S. Marine Corps. His brother, Teddy Denholm, was a pilot shot down not long after the start of the war (police action, according to the president). He was a prisoner of war, and Robin had to fight to get his brother back.
I am . . . she thought, and had trouble continuing. I am, I was, Eleanor, born in England, as was my aunt.
So was Kate. Where was Kate? Who was Kate?
Eleanor couldn’t go on. She was too dizzy, on the verge of another blackout. (They laced my stays too tight!) When she told the doctor what was happening, or part of it, he said she was suffering from stress, from nerves. He warned her to slow down, take care of herself, stop being so intense or . . . she stopped pacing to consider it. The implied threat of hospital. Of one of those hospitals, which her aunt couldn’t afford, not a good one. All of which Eleanor found unfair because whatever was wrong didn’t feel internal but imposed from outside.
Not ghosts, no connection to the television, and her aunt didn’t believe the theory Hetty sent from India that it was reincarnation gone wrong. Maybe it was a case of radiation from the nuclear tests disrupting her mental ganglia, if that’s what they were called. Eleanor had liked biology but had been distracted in class by sharing a lab bench with Margaret Darcy, whom she’d disliked; she couldn’t remember why.
“It comes from outside, not inside,” she’d told her aunt. Last night?
“You can’t say that to the doctors. They won’t like it.” Hand on her forehead, feeling for a temperature. “Promise me, Ellen. I’m trying to keep you at home.”
But now a fissure opened in the air and without moving, Eleanor was through it. She felt breathless this time, her eyes open on darkness, aware of standing in a London street before dawn. Her back was tight to a damp plaster wall as a creak-crack, creak-crick slowly heaved toward her. Creak, creak, crack. She didn’t want to hear it. Didn’t want to see it. Wanted it to pass by and knew that it wouldn’t, that it would stop at her house and take . . .
Father!
1665
London
20
Sickness was abroad, plague ransacking the city. They had stayed in London so her father could minister to his parishioners at a time when it was difficult for them to understand God’s purpose and they cursed Him in their grief and their pain. Eleanor could have left with her uncle and aunt, who had secured permission to take their household to her aunt’s estate in Kent. But her father had insisted on staying and Eleanor had stayed with him, having refused her aunt’s entreaties to come away.
“Now see here, Nell,” her father had said three weeks ago, as her aunt packed up noisily, shouting at the servants, shouting at her father to make the girl see sense. He had called Eleanor to his room, where she had turned briefly to look at his rich tapestry of Eve offering Adam an apple. Turning back, she found her father sitting at his table in front of the big diamond-paned window that overlooked the garden. It was a good place to read, the river at the garden’s end reflecting bright watery light onto the paper. Her father was a man of light, at least these past few years; a broad substantial figure in a parson’s coat and breeches who beamed goodwill like a big soft evening cloud with the sun just behind it. That glow about the edges. The warm grace. She had no intention of leaving him.
“See here,” her father repeated. “Your aunt wants you in Kent, and you’d better go.”
“I will if you come with us.”
“Nell, listen to me.” Her father paused a moment and surprised her with a change in his manner, leaning forward and clasping his hands on his table, his expression strangely rueful. “I can’t go.”
“You mean you won’t.”
He shook his head. Another pause, then he gave a small smile. “There comes a time in a man’s life, Nell, when he is called upon to serve his penance. Or do his duty. The two are often interchangeable. When, in essence, God wants him to do what he doesn’t particularly care to do. I have prayed on this.”
He didn’t seem to be speaking to her, then checked himself and met her eye.
“Many don’t do their duty. What do we think of them?”
“That they ought?”
“That they are human and fallible, and to be pitied. I don’t particularly like to be pitied, Nell.”
She didn’t understand him when he talked like this.
“Duty, penance, and pride are a powerful combination, and when one adds love of God, one’s course is clear.”
“And love of one’s fellow man,” she felt compelled to say, to show she understood this much, at least.
“I’ve been less good about that. Amusement I can manage, God help me.” He sat back in his chair and clasped his hands on his paunch, watching her closely. “I’m speaking of finding a purpose and embracing it. I must stay here, and I wish you to understand my reasons.”
Her father had never spoken so seriously to her. He was usually attentive and fond and satirical, as if he was forever in the middle of telling a joke. It came to Eleanor that he was speaking as if it were the last time they would see each other, and that this was the message he wanted to leave her with. It only made her feel more stubborn.
“You,” her father said, “have no penance to pay, having had little opportunity to sin. Only a few small occasions of disobedience, as I recall. You haven’t had time to do worse, have you? Your aunt has brought you up well, has she not?”
“I’m very grateful to my uncle and aunt.”
“Who wish you to accompany them to Kent. As things stand, one of your sons will be your uncle’s heir. Fifteen is young to marry, but circumstances oblige you to take a husband early. Your aunt has thoughts.”
Eleanor’s cheeks blazed. She wanted to marry a man like her father and hadn’t yet met one.
Maybe not exactly like her father. She knew in her heart he would be quieter. Taller. More reliable: a thought she pushed aside.
“Here is your purpose in God’s eye,” her father said. “You’ll spend your life as a wife and a mother. A helpmeet, as the daughters of Eve are asked to be. That is your duty, and it will be your pride. I hope it isn’t your penance, although I know your aunt will choose well.”
“But I’m not yet married, is it true, Father?”
“Eh, what?” he said, recognizing the start of one of their debates, amusement igniting his eyes. He had trained her in logic, in Latin and a little Greek, and had given her a glimpse of mathematics. He liked to spar with her, saying (as she had heard him say to her uncle) that it was like being attacked by a determined little sparrow.
“I’m not yet married. Is it true?”
“I humbly agree.”
“And therefore my duty is to my father. My purpose is to serve him. My pride is in making him comfortable so that he may serve God.”
Her father chuckled, but seemed moved. She went to him, winding an arm around his neck and kissing his cheek. “If God wants me, he can take me as easily in Kent as he can here.”
Her father had no answer to this. It was what people said when they chose to stay, or if they had no prospect of leaving, as was the case among the great body of the poor. Those who had started fleeing—the king and his court to Salisbury, the peers riding off to their estates, wealthy commoners like her uncle and aunt packing up for their houses in the country—preferred to say that God helped those who helped themselves. Resignation was suspiciously close to the religion of the Pope and antithetical to the muscularity of the Protestant faith.
Eleanor had overheard her father say precisely this to her uncle: God can take me here in London or in Kent or while I’m riding a unicorn across Hy-Brasil if he prefers. I’m more concerned with whether he will like what he sees when he does.
“My poor child,” he said, kissing her hair.
* * *
When her aunt learned that Eleanor was staying, she passed her in the hall with a fierce hiss and slammed into her father’s room. Eleanor followed on soft feet, intending to listen at the door. But her aunt’s French maid loomed over her when she got close, yanking her away by one arm. They began a silent tug-of-war, the maid under orders to keep her from eavesdropping, Eleanor trying to escape, until finally she managed to break free and slap the maid’s cheek.
Really, the Frenchwoman wanted to hear as badly as she did, and having obeyed her mistress as nearly as she could, she signalled truce so they could lean their ears against the door together. Inside was an argument about God’s will: whether he was testing them with the pestilence or whether the plague was the work of the devil. Her father and her aunt couldn’t agree, although Eleanor heard her aunt say very clearly, “Whether or not he’s testing us, William, I wonder whether in staying here, and keeping her here most pridefully, you mean to test God.”
* * *
The next morning, her aunt and uncle joined a flood of refugees jostling toward the city gates, swearing when they jammed at corners, cartwheels clattering together. The great bulk of gentle London had concluded on the same day that it was time to flee in a crowd Eleanor recognized without ever having seen it before.
Her uncle planned to cross the river at London Bridge so they could turn south, and Eleanor and her father walked beside their carriage toward the bridge, Eleanor holding tight to her father’s hand. She felt sorry for the poor whipped horses, the lost urchins, and discarded servants crying piteously to be taken. Her aunt was more benign than many, taking most of the household and leaving principally those who refused to go, Cook chief among them. Cook had survived the plague before and said she intended to do so again. Among the rest were guards charged with protecting her uncle’s property, uneasy men well armed.
Eleanor was afraid her aunt and uncle would try to snatch her at the bridge, but the way was so packed that her aunt had no hope of even opening the carriage door, and her uncle sat high on the box with his coachman. As the crowd pushed them back, her aunt could only turn her face from the window while her bullish uncle called down, “William,” as if saying her father’s name would pin him to the world.
Elbowing back through the crowd, they soon reached home, where her father shooed her inside before leaving to meet his sexton. After barring the doors, Eleanor faced the desolate hall and looked terror in the eye. Her heart beat like a rabbit’s and her breath panted in and out until her chest hurt. Propelled into a run, she clattered downstairs to the kitchen, where she found their squint-eyed cook sitting by the fire.
“So yuh didn’t scarper,” Cook said. “Stubborn, you are.”
A cat sat on Cook’s lap, one of her pride of watchful beasts. They were half the reason she wouldn’t leave, rumour having it that the Lord Mayor planned to kill the city’s cats and dogs to halt the spread of plague. “And mine a healthy breed,” she’d told Eleanor’s aunt, having improved the race like a pigeon fancier, drowning runts and mating the better mousers. Her cats were now smarter than dogs, she claimed, and famous for keeping her storerooms free of vermin.
“Hullo, Pisser.” Eleanor tried to hide her panic by patting a big tom. “Want your ears scratched, do you?”
“You’re not expecting to eat?” Cook asked.
“When my father gets home.”
“Not feeling sick, are ye?”
Shaking her head, she forced herself to sound casual. “I’m going to bring my book and sewing down here, so you’d better get used to it.”
“Put you to work peeling tatties.”
“No, you shall not.”
She loved their old cook and gave her a kiss before skittering upstairs for her things and running back down, scraping a bench toward the fire.
“You won’t go out,” her father had said at the door, and there wasn’t any chance of that. Nor did Eleanor have to, the gardens yielding well in the mockingly fine weather, the chickens laying and the piggery grunting with piglets just as the household diminished. It wasn’t only loyalty to her uncle or father that made her uncle’s men protect his walls, chasing out known shifters and priggers and former soldiers limping home from the Dutch war, which continued as heedlessly as the sun kept rising.
Eleanor tried to distract herself, sewing and reading to pass her days while her father was out. With neither maids nor friends in town, she was left with few companions. But her disposition was active, and before a week had passed, Eleanor found herself walking in circles around the empty house as if it were a cathedral and she was doing stations to plead for God’s mercy.
Then came a day, after rain, when Eleanor lingered at the door as her father girded himself to go out. (“The poor souls. It’s a miserable death.”) After closing and barring the door, she leaned against it, everything as usual except that her fear had invisibly dissipated and she realized she was bored. Grabbing her cloak, Eleanor put her head outside to make sure her father had turned the corner. Then she slipped out, her pattens pattering on the cobbles, wanting to learn what was going on.
The city was empty, the few passersby as silent as shadows, hoods drawn, hands up their sleeves, so any one of them might have been Death out walking. Few carts, no sedan chairs. Eleanor found the silence stony and uncaring, and more than once had to start away from vermin swaggering out in broad daylight. A pair of rats fought over slops in the middle of Threadneedle Street, shrieking like scraped metal.
Beyond them, she saw a cobbler they often used walking toward her. She was about to greet him when she saw the ravage of his face. She realized that his walk was a shamble and told herself, He’s walking to his grave. She pictured him lurching to the churchyard and unfastening the gate and finding a vacant hole to fall into.
