The Legacy

Lasting

1904-1905

The stationmaster at Dodge City was most sympathetic. He listened patiently to Caroline’s tale of her lost ticket and allowed her to pay there and then for her whole journey, from Woodward to New York. She spent the long days of the train ride watching out of the window, at gray storm skies and blistering white skies and china-blue skies so pretty they hurt her head. She thought of nothing, but tested the kernel of grief inside herself from time to time, to see if it would diminish with distance when it hadn’t with time. William, still recovering from his fever, slept a great deal, whimpering fretfully when he awoke. But he knew Caroline and allowed her to soothe him. She sacrificed lunch at the Harvey Hotel in Kansas City to shop instead for clean napkins, blankets and a bottle for the baby, hurrying back to the train with her heart fluttering anxiously, in case it left without her. The train was the only home she had at that moment. It was her only plan, the only thing she knew.

“Oh, he is just beautiful! What’s his name?” a woman exclaimed one evening, pausing on her way through the carriage to bend over the carrycot and clasp her hands together over her heart.

“William,” Caroline told her, swallowing; her throat suddenly, painfully, dry.

“That’s a handsome name, too. Such dark hair!”

“Oh, yes, he takes after his father in that respect,” Caroline smiled. She could not keep the sorrow from her voice as she spoke, though, and the woman glanced at her quickly, saw her red-rimmed eyes and the paleness of her face.

“Just you and William now, is it?” the woman asked kindly. Caroline nodded, amazed by how easily the lie came to her.

“I’m taking him to live with my family,” she said, smiling a wan smile. The woman nodded in sympathy.

“My name’s Mary Russell. I’m sitting in the third car and if you need anything-even if it’s just company-you come and find my husband Leslie and me. Agreed?”

“Agreed. Thank you.” Caroline smiled again as Mary moved away, wishing that she could accept the offer, wishing that she could seek out some company. But that could only be in another world, where Corin was not dead and they were just visiting his family in New York, perhaps, and with a baby that Caroline had carried in her womb, not just in her arms. She returned to her quiet study of the landscape, and William returned to sleep.

New York was impossibly loud and huge. The buildings seemed to lean over from their vast heights, casting deep, murky shadows, and the noise was like a tidal wave, crashing and foaming into every corner of every street. Heavy with fatigue, and with her mind wound tight with nerves, Caroline hailed a hansom cab and climbed aboard. Her clothes were travel-stained and smelt stale.

“Where to, madam?” the driver asked. Caroline blinked, and her face grew hot. She had no idea where to go. There were girls whose addresses she knew, whom she would once have called her friends, but she could not think of calling on them after more than two years without a word, with a black-eyed baby and her face dirty with smuts from the train. She thought briefly of Corin’s family, but William squirmed in her arms and she blinked back tears. There was no way she could have carried and borne them a grandson without Corin having written to them about it. And she did not want to be anywhere she might be found. This knowledge came like a sluice of cold water. She could not go anywhere somebody might look to find her.

“A… um, a hotel. The Westchester, thank you,” she answered at length, naming a place where she had once had lunch with Bathilda. The driver flicked the reins and the horse started forward, narrowly missing a motorcar that drew to a halt to let them go ahead, tooting its horn impatiently.

Bathilda. Caroline had not thought of her, had deliberately not thought of her in months and months. She knew what her aunt would have made of her fears, and of the wreck that life had become out in Woodward County. Now Caroline shut her eyes and at once she could see Bathilda’s knowing look, her scathing expression. She could imagine Bathilda hearing of Caroline’s plight and responding with a weighty, sanctimonious Well… She would not have gone to her, even if the woman had remained in New York, Caroline told herself defiantly. She would not have gone to Bathilda even now, now that she knew nobody and had no idea where to go, or what to do. She suppressed the treacherous longing she felt just to see a familiar face, even if it was not a friendly one. For whose faces would remain friendly to her now? She thought of Magpie, waiting in the dugout-but only for a second. The thought was too terrible. She thought of Hutch, of what emotions his face would register when he rode back in from the ranges, found White Cloud dead, maybe others too, and she and William gone without a word. Her insides seemed to burn her, seemed to writhe around themselves, and pain snapped behind her eyes. With a small cry she buried her face in her hands and concentrated hard on staying upright on the cab’s padded bench.

At the Westchester she paid for a respectable room, and enquired after a nursemaid for William, explaining that her own maid had been taken seriously ill and been forced to return to her family’s care. One was found without delay, a pug-faced girl with bright ginger hair, called Luella, who looked nothing but terrified when Caroline handed William to her. William took one look at the strange girl’s frightened eyes and garish hair and began to wail. Holding the child awkwardly, Luella backed out of the room. Caroline went into the bathroom and, realizing in a way she never had before just how miraculous indoor plumbing was, she ran herself a hot bath, sank into it and tried to quiet her mind, which rang with unanswered questions and thoughts and fears, and threatened at any moment to tip her into panic.

In the end she did not stay more than a week in the city where she had been born and raised. It no longer felt any more like home than the ranch house, or Woodward, or the railway car that had brought her back. The oily fumes of the motorcars that had proliferated in her absence stuck in the back of her throat, and the throng of people made her feel every bit as invisible as she had felt out on the prairie. The buildings were too close, too solid, like the cliff walls of some labyrinth from which escape was impossible. There’s nowhere I belong, Caroline thought, as she walked William in his new perambulator down streets she had never seen before, had never heard of before, hoping in this way to reduce the risk of anybody recognizing her. She paused on a corner and looked up, high above, to where a crane was swinging a steel girder that looked like a toothpick into the waiting arms of a gang of workmen. The men stood at the edge of this unfinished tower with nothing to keep them but their balance. Caroline felt a sympathetic clench in her stomach for the danger they were in, for the nearness of the fall. But she soon walked on again, recognizing the feeling as one she had herself, one she’d had for a long time. The creeping knowledge of life’s precariousness, of the transience of it.

Passing a photographic studio, with a handsome gilt sign that read Gilbert Beaufort & Son, Caroline paused. Inside the cluttered, stuffy shop she recoiled from the vinegar stench of the developing chemicals. Not quite finding a smile for the camera, she commissioned several portraits of herself and William, arranging to have them delivered to the Westchester when they were ready.

Her fingers shook as she opened the package. She had hoped to create something permanent, to prove to herself, in some way, that she existed; and that even though she was widowed, she had Corin’s child, the child that was rightly hers, to show for her marriage. She was part of a family. She would have some record of herself and of her life, which she was so unsure of that she sometimes wondered if she might still be lying out on the prairie somewhere, dreaming everything that had happened since. But in nearly every picture William had moved, blurring the image of himself so that his face was tantalizingly obscured; and in nearly every picture Caroline, to her own eyes, stared out from the paper every bit as ghostly and insubstantial looking as she felt. One photo alone had captured an intangible trace of what she’d hoped to see-in one shot she looked like a mother, proud and calm and possessive. She slid this picture into her case and threw the rest into the grate.

On the fourth day she saw Joe. She was walking with William in search of a park or a garden, a green space of some kind to feel a breeze and, she hoped, to calm the child. Fully recovered from his illness and returned to his strength, William was loud and unsettled. He cried in the night and snatched his arms away when Caroline tried to comfort him, squirming in her embrace as she rocked him and tried to sing to him as Magpie had done. But she could no more capture the Ponca girl’s odd melodies than she could howl like a coyote, and her efforts were drowned out by William’s shouts. Thinking it was the open prairie he missed, Caroline walked him most of the day, growing increasingly aware of how different the noises and smells and sights must be for the child, and how heavy the unclean air must feel in his tiny lungs. This was not his home, any more than it was hers, she realized; but unlike herself, William did have a home. She should take him back. The thought stung her like a slap to the face. Even if he was Corin’s, even if he should have been hers, he belonged in Woodward County. She stood rooted to the spot, knocked senseless by this realization, while pedestrians flowed around her like a river. But how could she? How could she explain-how could she be forgiven? She could see the pain, the accusation in Hutch’s eyes, the anger and fear in Magpie’s. All the times they had helped her, all the times they had encouraged her. And this was how she had repaid their belief in her-she was an outrage, a despicable failure. It was not possible. She could not face them. There was no going back.

And then she saw Joe, coming around the corner toward her, his face set into a grimace of hard fury, his black hair flying behind him as he strode toward her, knife ready in his hand to kill her. Caroline went cold from her head to her toes and stood petrified as the man walked past her, the black hair in fact a scarf, the knife a piece of rolled up paper, the face not Joe’s at all but belonging to a swarthy, Mexican-looking man who was late for something and hurrying. Shaking uncontrollably, Caroline sank onto a nearby bench, the din of the city receding as a strange, muffled thumping invaded her head. Black speckles swirled like flies at the edges of her vision, and when she shut her eyes to be rid of them they turned brilliant white and danced on undeterred. In the distance, a passenger liner sounded its whistle as it slid gracefully into the docks. The deep blast echoed all around and brought Caroline back to herself, and to William’s cries. Swallowing, she stroked his cheek, made some broken, soothing sounds, and then she stood up, turning to cast her eyes southward toward the docks, the ship, and the sea. Five hours later she was aboard a steamer, bound for Southampton.

Joe was indeed in New York, but not on that very day. He and Hutch arrived two days after Caroline’s ship had departed, where they made their way directly to the home of Mrs. Massey, Corin’s twice-bereaved mother, ignoring the stares that their country clothes and Joe’s Indian blood elicited. No trace of Caroline or William had been found since she had been seen taking breakfast at the hotel, the morning after she’d left Woodward. The manager of Gerlach’s Bank confirmed that there had been no transactions on the Massey account since the recent wages withdrawal. Word was sent out with every passing traveller, and to every outlying rancher, to report any sighting or signs of her; and although the ticket office clerk at the station swore that no fair-haired women carrying babies had bought a ticket for any train from him that day, or indeed that week, Hutch followed a hunch of his and took Joe and himself to New York, making fruitless enquiries at each station after a Mrs. Massey.

Mrs. Massey Senior had not, of course, seen or heard anything of her daughter-in-law, and was most distressed to hear that she and a young child had vanished. She was able to supply the men with Caroline’s maiden name and former address, but their enquiries in the city after Miss Fitzpatrick were every bit as fruitless. They retraced their steps, trying the name Fitzpatrick instead of Massey, and then had little choice but to return to the ranch, to where Magpie had fallen into a trance, at times tearing at her hair and making long cuts down her arms with a blade that sent rivulets of bright blood to drip from her fingertips. Joe let his wife mourn in this way; he was impassive, the rage had burned from him, and his own heart was empty without his son. Between them, the men raised the money to pay a Pinkerton man for one month, but this was just enough time for the detective to follow the same path that Joe and Hutch had, and he finished the term unable even to say whether Caroline and William had been abducted or had run away. Hutch lay awake night after night, mystified and suspicious at once; scared for Caroline and for the ranch, which, having no owner, no longer had a future either.

Dreading her arrival more with each mile that passed, Caroline took the train from Southampton to London, and upon arriving found a hotel she could afford once the shrinking packet of dollars from Gerlach’s Bank had been converted into pounds sterling. William was heavy in her arms and his cries made her ears wince, as if withdrawing inside her skull to protect themselves. During the long days of the sea crossing she had felt sick, distracted by a pounding at her temples that made it hard to think. William had cried for hours at a time, seemingly without pause, and although Caroline told herself that he must be feeling the same sickness as she, the same pain in his head, she could not shake the belief that he somehow knew he was being carried further and further from home, and that his cries were of rage at her for doing it. She saw an accusation in his face each time she looked at him. She stopped trying to quiet him, to sing to him or to hold him, leaving him instead to cry in the carrycot that he was rapidly outgrowing, so that she herself could remain in bed, curled against the cabin wall in misery.

Now, in an unfamiliar city, so tired she could barely think and with the ground still rolling beneath her feet, Caroline hefted the child higher in her arms and propped him against the smooth marble counter in the hotel lobby.

“I need a nursemaid,” she announced, with a note of panic in her voice. “My own has been laid low with some fever.” The man behind the counter, tall and thin with immaculate hair and clothing, inclined his head condescendingly at her, twitching one eyebrow at her accent. She knew she was creased and careworn, and that William smelt bad, but these facts only served to make her crosser with the hotelier.

“Very well, madam. I shall make inquiries,” he told her smoothly. Caroline nodded, and toiled up the stairs to her room. She bathed William in the porcelain bowl of the washstand, trying not to ruin the towels with the filth smearing his bottom and legs. He stopped crying as she washed him, and made small, happy noises, slapping his feet in the water. Clearing her raw throat, Caroline hummed a lullaby until he began to drowse. Her ears rang with the quiet left by his absent cries, and she held him tightly to her, still humming, forgetting everything else but the warmth of him, the trusting weight of him, as he slept. There was no more water to wash herself with, and she put William to sleep on the bed as she fruitlessly paced the corridors of the hotel in search of a maid to remove the foul water, and to ask about the possibility of a hot bath.

Later a woman came to the room, announcing herself with a quiet knock. She was plump and florid with pale, frizzy hair and grimy smears on her dress, but her eyes spoke of warmth and intelligence as she introduced herself as Mrs. Cox, and they lit up when they fell upon William.

“Is this the little chap in need of a nursemaid?” she asked. Caroline nodded and waved her forward to gather him up from the bed.

“Whereabouts in the hotel do you stay? In case I have need of you or the child?” Caroline asked.

“Oh, I’m not attached to the hotel, ma’am, although I have often been called upon to look after the young children of guests when they find themselves in unusual situations, like you, ma’am… I live with my own children and my husband not far from here in Roe Street. Mr. Strachen downstairs will always know where to find me, if you need him to. How long will you be needing me to watch him, ma’am?”

“I… I don’t know. I’m not sure yet. A couple of days, perhaps? A little longer… I’m not sure.” Caroline hesitated. Mrs. Cox’s face fell, but when Caroline paid in advance she smiled again, and was jouncing a startled-looking William merrily on her hip when she left with him not long afterwards. Caroline’s heart gave a sickening little lurch as William disappeared from view, but then a vast and numbing weariness pulled at her. She lay down on the bed in her dirty clothes and, with her stomach rumbling, fell instantly asleep.

The next day, wearing the cleanest, least creased clothes she could find in her bag, Caroline gave the slip of paper upon which Bathilda had written a Knightsbridge address to a cab driver and let him transport her there with all the quiet resolution of a person going with dignity to the scaffold. The house she arrived at was four storeys high and built of pale, gray stone clamped into a strict row of identical such houses with handsome, red front doors. Caroline reached for the doorbell. Her arm felt as heavy and stiff as the iron railings, and by the time her finger was near to its target it was trembling with the effort. But she rang it, and gave her name to the elderly housekeeper, who admitted her to a gloomy entrance hall.

“Please, wait here,” the housekeeper intoned, and moved away along the corridor at no great speed. Caroline stood as still as stone. She looked inside her head and found no thoughts at all. Nothing but an echoing space, hollowed out like a cracked and discarded nutshell. Oh, Corin! His name rushed into that space like a thunderclap. Reeling slightly, Caroline shook her head, and the emptiness returned.

Bathilda was fatter, and the hair at her temples was a brighter white, but other than that the two years since they had last met had wrought few changes upon her. She was occupying a brocaded couch with a cup of tea in her hand, and she stared at her niece in astonishment for several seconds.

“Good gracious, Caroline! I should never have known you if you weren’t announced!” she exclaimed at last, raising her eyebrows and adopting her old familiar froideur.

“Aunt Bathilda,” Caroline said in a quiet voice, quite tonelessly.

“Your hair is quite wild. And you’re so tanned! It’s disastrous. It does not suit you at all.”

Caroline accepted this criticism without blinking, saying nothing while Bathilda sipped her tea. She was aware of her heart beating, hard and slow, just like when they had brought Corin home from the coyote hunt. This was another kind of death, but a death all the same.

“Well, to what do I owe this honor? Where is that cow-herding husband of yours? Has he not joined you on this foreign expedition?”

“Corin is dead.” It was the first time she had said the words. The first time she had had to. Tears scalded her eyes. Bathilda absorbed this news for a moment and then she relented.

“Come and sit down, child. I’ll send for some more tea,” she commanded, in a softer tone of voice.

Bathilda soon took control of Caroline and seemed happy enough to do so now that the younger woman was meek and broken, and no longer defiant. Caroline went back to the hotel to collect her things that afternoon, and moved into a spare bedroom at the pale gray town house with the smart red door. She was introduced to the owner of the house, Bathilda’s cousin by marriage, Mrs. Dalgleish, who was thin and dry and wore a censorious look above a lipless mouth.

“Where is Sara?” Caroline asked hopefully.

Bathilda merely grunted. “The foolish girl has wed herself to a grocer. She left last year,” she said.

Caroline’s heart sank a little more. “Did she love him?” she asked wistfully. “Was she happy?”

“I really don’t know. Now, to the matter in hand,” her aunt swept on.

Bathilda took Caroline to the bank and arranged for her money to be transferred from her parents’ New York bank into an English account. She took Caroline shopping, accepting the story that all of her old clothes had been ruined on the ranch. They visited a hairdressing salon, where the rough ends and stray wisps of Caroline’s hair were trimmed and tamed and curled neatly against her head. She applied to a chemist for Sulpholine Lotion, which was wiped, stinging, over Caroline’s face and hands to bleach the tan from her skin. Fingernails were shaped and buffed, calluses worked from the skin with pumice stone. And, for the first time in over a year, Caroline’s tiny form was tied tightly into corsets once again.

“You are too thin,” Bathilda said, scrutinizing the end product of this beautification. “Was there no food, out in the wilderness?” Caroline was considering the answer to this when Bathilda continued. “Well, you are almost fit for society. You will have to remarry, of course. Two widows in this household are more than enough already. I know of just the gentleman, and he is in town now, to see the newest girls. A Baron, if you please-land-rich but cash-poor, and in need of an heir. He would make you a lady… from farmer’s wife to nobility in the space of a couple of months! What a resolution that would be!” Bathilda exclaimed, reaching out for Caroline’s shoulders and pulling them back a little straighter. “But, although he is not as young as once he was, he’s known to prefer fresh young things… not the world-weary widows of backwater cattlemen. It will be best if we do not mention to anyone your unfortunate first marriage. Can you do that? There’s no evidence to the contrary? Nothing you haven’t told me?” she asked, fixing Caroline with stern blue eyes.

Caroline took a deep breath. Words clamored to be spoken, and her pulse raced. But she knew that if she confessed to having brought a child with her, this new life Bathilda was building for her would fly apart like a mirage and she would instead have to remain in this agonizing present, with no chance of a more bearable future. She would have to remain with Bathilda, or alone, for ever. Neither could she stand. Caroline knew the answer she was expected to give, and she gave it. Biting down on her tongue to silence it, she shook her head. But when she raised her left hand and worked the wedding ring free, it left a perfect white band on her skin. She kept the ring in a closed fist and later slipped it into the satin lining of her vanity case, next to the photograph of herself and William.

The white band soon faded, kept hidden under satin and kid gloves until it was wholly invisible. Caroline met Lord Calcott at a reception that Bathilda took her to the following week, and she remained obedient and demure and nearly silent as he spoke and they danced and he looked at her with a heat in his eyes that left her cold inside. He was lightly built, not tall, perhaps forty-five years old, and he walked with a slight limp. His hair and moustache were speckled with gray amidst the dark, and his fingernails were neatly manicured. His hands left damp patches on her silk gowns when he held her waist to waltz. They met twice more, at a ball and a dinner party, in rooms stuffily heated against the late autumn chill. As they danced he asked her about her family, and her favorite pastimes, and how she liked London, and the English cuisine. Later he spoke to Bathilda and enquired after Caroline’s temperament, her lack of conversation, and her income. After one such evening she accepted his proposal of marriage with a nod of her head and a smile as fleeting as winter sun. He drove her back to Knightsbridge in a smart black carriage pulled by a team of four, and his goodnight kiss roamed from her cheek to her mouth, his hands shaking with rising lust.

“Darling girl,” he whispered hoarsely, pushing up her skirts and kneeling between her legs to shove his way inside her, so abruptly that she gasped in shock. Do you see? She hurled the anguished thought out, silently, to wherever Corin had gone: Do you see what has happened because you left me?

Caroline spent Christmas of 1904 with Bathilda and Mrs. Dalgleish, and she arranged to marry Henry Calcott late in February the following year. This time her engagement was properly announced, and a picture of the happy couple, taken at a celebratory ball, was published in The Tatler. As the wedding approached Caroline began to suffer from a consuming lassitude, the taste of copper in her throat, and a sickness in the mornings that made her long for the strong, cowboy coffee that Bathilda and her cousin considered too vulgar to keep in the house. Bathilda kept a stern eye on these developments.

“It seems the wedding won’t come a day too soon,” she commented one morning, as Caroline lay in bed, too dizzy and weak to rise. When the nature of her condition dawned upon her, Caroline was stunned.

“But… but I…” was all she managed to reply to her aunt, who raised an eyebrow and ordered beef tea for her, which she could not look at without gagging. Caroline remained still for several hours, and thought and thought, and tried not to see the clear implications of her pregnancy. For she was every bit as thin as she had been in Oklahoma Territory, if not thinner; and every bit as unhappy, indeed if not more so. The only thing that had changed was the man with which she lay.

Storton Manor seemed unlovely to Caroline. It was grand, but graceless; the windows too stern to be beautiful, the stone too gray to be welcoming. The driveway had been colonized by leggy dandelions and couch grass, the paint was peeling from the front door and the chimney stack was missing several pots. Her money was much needed, Caroline realized. The staff lined up crisply to meet her, as if determined to outshine the shabbiness of the house. Housekeeper, butler, cook, parlor maid, chambermaid, scullery maid, groom. Caroline descended the carriage steps and swallowed back a threatened storm of weeping as she pictured the scruffy ranch hands who had lined up for her presentation to her first marital home. And you left them, she accused herself. You just left them all without a word. She smiled and nodded for each as Henry introduced them, and they in turn bobbed a curtsy to her, or made a short bow, muttering Lady Calcott in lowered voices. She took hold of her real name, Caroline Massey, and squeezed it tightly in her heart.

Later, walking around the broad sweep of the grounds, Caroline began to feel a little better; the snowstorm pieces of herself began to settle, just softly, into a kind of order. The air of the English countryside had a sweetness, a kind of soft greenness to it, even at the far end of winter. No clamor of city streets, horses, carts, or people; no empty prairie wind, or coyotes crying, or mile after unbroken mile of horizon. She was neither too hot, nor too cold. She could see the rooftops and smoke plumes of the village through the naked trees around the house, and it soothed her to know that within a moment’s walk there were lives, being lived. A swathe of bright daffodils lit up the far end of the lawn, and Caroline walked slowly through them, her hem brushing them flat and then springing them free again. She meditated on the emptiness of her mind, on the hollow feeling she couldn’t shake, but she allowed herself to think, just for a moment, that she was safe and could bear it all.

Henry Calcott was a lusty man, so Caroline suffered his conjugal attentions every night in the first few weeks of their wedded life. She was passive and turned her face away from him, amazed at how different lovemaking felt when undertaken with a person for whom she felt nothing. Her mind and senses completely free of passion, Caroline noticed the wet sounds enjoined by the meeting of their bodies; the fleshy, slightly fetid smell; the way her husband fought for breath, and the way his eyes crossed as he neared his climax. She tried to keep her face neutral and not let her distaste show.

Workmen appeared at Storton Manor and began to tidy the grounds and make repairs to the house, both inside and out.

“Will you be all right, if I go up to town? The men shan’t bother you?” Henry asked Caroline at breakfast, three weeks after her arrival at the manor.

“Of course they won’t bother me,” she replied calmly.

“You are more than welcome to come to town with me…”

“No, no, you go. I prefer to remain here and get better acquainted with… with the house, and…”

“Very well, very well. I’ll only be a week, I should think. Just a few matters of business to attend to,” Henry smiled, returning to the morning’s papers. Caroline turned to look out of the window at the overcast day. Matters of business, she repeated to herself. At one London ball, a thin-faced girl with platinum hair had whispered to her that Henry Calcott loved a game of poker, even though he almost always lost. Caroline did not mind as long as his habit took him to London every few weeks, and left her well alone.

The second day after his departure was a day of steady rain that hung a wet curtain around the house. The view from the window was of grays and browns and muted greens, a sludgy smear of countryside blurring through the glass. Caroline sat close to the fire in the drawing room, reading an overblown romance by a woman called Elinor Glyn. Her eyes skimmed the text and her thoughts were on the child inside her: why she could not tell how she felt about it; when she should tell Henry; and why she had not done so already. This last answer at least she knew-because it was unbearably bitter, to have to give Henry Calcott the news she had yearned, fruitlessly, to give Corin. The parlormaid, a timid girl called Estelle, interrupted her reverie with a quiet knock.

“Begging your pardon, my lady, but there’s a woman here to see you,” Estelle announced in her wispy voice.

“A woman? What woman?”

“She wouldn’t state her business, my lady, but she gave her name as Mrs. Cox. Should I show her in?”

Caroline sat mesmerized with shock. There was a long pause, in which the sound of approaching feet could be heard.

“No!” Caroline managed at last, standing up abruptly but too late, as Mrs. Cox pushed past Estelle and stood before Caroline with rainwater dripping from her hem onto the Persian rug. She fixed Caroline with a fiery eye and a determined set to her jaw. “That will be all, thank you, Estelle,” Caroline whispered.

Mrs. Cox looked immense but as she unbuttoned her raincoat the reason for this became clear. William was asleep, safely warm and dry beneath the coat, in a sling the woman had fashioned from a length of cotton canvas.

“I don’t know what you mean by it!” Mrs. Cox exclaimed at last, when it became clear that Caroline was lost for words. “Leaving the child with me all these many weeks… I don’t know what you can mean by it!”

“I…” But Caroline had no answer to give. Her careful neutrality, her passive acceptance of her fate, had written William out of the script. She had distanced herself from all thoughts of him, all responsibility. Seeing him again, waking up now as light and fresh air reached him, gave her a feeling like a blow to the stomach, a hard spike of love that was riddled with guilt and fear. “How did you find me?” was all she could think to ask.

“It wasn’t that hard, not with news of your wedding published in all the papers. I waited a bit longer, thinking you’d wanted the child kept safe and quiet while you got wed, but then I saw you weren’t going to come for him at all! You weren’t, were you? And him such a good, healthy boy… I don’t know what you mean by it!” Mrs. Cox repeated, her voice growing thick. She took a handkerchief from her pocket and dabbed at her eyes. “And now I’ve had the expense of bringing him here on the train, and the trouble of walking him here through all this rain without him catching his death…”

“I can pay you. For the train, and… for the time you’ve had him. I can pay you more than that, even-here!” Caroline rushed to the dresser, withdrawing a purse of coins and holding it out to the woman. “Will you keep him?” she asked suddenly, fear making her voice shake. Mrs. Cox stared at her.

“Keep him? What can you mean? I’m not running a baby farm, I’ll have you know! You’re his mother-a child belongs with its mother. And look at the life he’ll have here!” She gestured at the grand surroundings. “I’ve enough mouths to feed and enough bodies to find beds for without taking on another one!” The woman seemed distraught. Caroline could only stand and stare in desperation as Mrs. Cox began to work at the knot holding the sling around her shoulders. “Here. I’ve brought him back to you now. Fit and well. All his things are in this bag-all but the carrier, for which he has grown too big, and I could not carry it as well as him to come down here. I… I hope you’ll love him, ma’am. He’s a good boy and he deserves to have a mother’s love…” She seated William on the red silk cushion of a winged armchair. He held his arms up to her and smiled. “No, lovey, you’re staying with your real mam now,” she told him, her eyes again filling with tears. Now that it came to leaving him, Mrs. Cox hesitated. She looked from William to Caroline and back again, and then her face creased in anguish and she knotted her hands in the folds of her skirts. “Take good care of your boy, Lady Calcott,” she said, and hurried away. William sat quietly for a minute, his eyes darting around the room from one unfamiliar object to another. Then he began to cry.

Frantic to hide him, Caroline scooped William up and went quickly via the back stairs to her bedroom. She put him down on the bed and stepped back, clasping her hands to the sides of her head, trying to still her thoughts, and her heart, which was clattering far too fast in her chest. Her breathing came in short, panicked snatches. Quickly, she found a pacifier in William’s bag of things and gave it to him to distract him. He stopped crying and grasped at the familiar, tinkling object, making small conversational noises to himself. Gradually, Caroline calmed down. He had grown so much! But then, he was a year and a half old now. His skin was darker and his hair was thicker. His face was beginning to show the high, slanting cheeks and straight brows of the Ponca. How could she ever have thought he was Corin’s child? William was Indian, through and through; it would have been obvious even if she had not come to realize that her failure to give Corin a child had more to do with Corin than with herself. Which meant that she had stolen Joe and Magpie’s baby. The enormity of this heinous crime hit Caroline like a poleaxe, and she sank to the floor, cramming a fist into her mouth to stifle uncontrollable sobs that surged up from her stomach and near strangled her. And she could not undo this terrible thing. There was no redress she could offer to Magpie-kind, gentle Magpie, who had been nothing but loyal and friendly, who was missing her child thousands of miles from where he now lay. Thousands of miles that neither she nor William would ever traverse again. It was another world, another lifetime. In bringing him here she had crossed a one-way boundary. In that moment, Caroline did not know how she was going to live with what she had done. She sat slumped on the carpet, and she wished to die.

Half an hour later, the maids and the housekeeper, Mrs. Priddy, saw Lady Calcott struggling across the waterlogged lawn, carrying something heavy in what looked like a cloth bag. They called after her, and wondered whether to accompany her and make sure she was well, but if Lady Calcott heard them she showed no signs of pausing. She vanished with her burden into the trees at the furthest edge of the gardens, and when she appeared again, pale and shivering, at the mudroom door, she was without it.

“What a day for a walk, my lady!” Mrs. Priddy exclaimed, as they found clean towels for her and unlaced her muddy boots. In truth it was a mild day, beneath those soggy English clouds, and certainly not cold enough to have brought on the storms of shuddering that wracked their new mistress’s frail body. “Let’s get you up to your room. Cass will bring you some hot tea, won’t you, Cass?” Mrs. Priddy addressed the chambermaid, a girl of fifteen who goggled at Caroline with round, green eyes. If any of the staff thought anything more of Mrs. Cox’s short visit, Caroline’s walk in the rain or the pillowcase missing from the bed, they knew better than to say anything about it. All except Cass Evans, that was, who whispered things late at night to Estelle, up in the small room on the top floor that they shared.

Caroline kept to her bed for several days. She lay in a state of dread and sorrow, which deepened when she slid her hand beneath her pillow and found William’s pacifier there. The one she had given him, to quieten him as he lay on the bed; the one she and Corin had presented to him as a welcoming gift. She ran her fingers around the silken ivory, cradled the silver bell gently in her hand. She ought to get rid of it, she knew. She ought not to have anything in her possession that could link her to the child, to any child. But she could not. As if some essence of William, of Magpie, of life and love, remained caught up in that one precious talisman, she clasped it tightly in her fists and held it close to her heart. And when Lord Calcott returned from London with an empty wallet, she finally delivered the news of her delicate condition with an expressionless face and a calm demeanor.

The tinker family did not move on, as Caroline had assumed they would; as she had prayed they would. Instead, a few days later, they brought William to the door, to ask politely if anybody in the household had any idea to whom the child belonged, since their inquiries in the village had proved fruitless. Caroline saw them coming along the driveway from her position at the drawing room window. Her heart squeezed fearfully in her chest-just as it had when Corin had first told her she had Indian neighbors-and she jumped up to flee before realizing that there was nowhere to go. She waited as the butler opened the front door, heard muffled words spoken, then the approach of footsteps and a subtle knock.

“Yes?” she called, her voice wavering.

“I’m sorry to disturb you, my lady, but Mr. Dinsdale and his wife say they have found a child in the woods and they wonder if we have any idea to whom it might belong or what they ought to do with it?” The butler, Mr. March, sounded puzzled, as if the etiquette surrounding lost babies was new to him. Feeling like she was going to be sick, Caroline turned on the man.

“What can that possibly have to do with me?” she demanded coldly.

“Yes, my lady,” Mr. March intoned, every bit as coldly, making the slightest of bows as he withdrew. So the Dinsdales went away again, still carrying William and casting looks back at the house over their shoulders, as if bewildered by their dismissal. Caroline watched them go with increasing unease and a rush of blood to her head that dizzied her, and she traced this feeling to the way Mr. March had referred to them-Mr. Dinsdale and his wife. As if he knew them.

“Dinsdale? Ah, you’ve met our young campers, have you?” Henry exclaimed when Caroline asked him about the tinkers. She put down her knife and fork, her throat too tight to swallow. “Harmless folk. Now, I know it may seem a little out of the ordinary, but I’ve given them permission to stay on that stretch of land-”

“What? Why would you do that?” Caroline gasped.

“Robbie Dinsdale saved my life in Africa, my dear-at Spion Kop, some years ago. Were it not for him, I would not be here today!” Henry announced dramatically, putting a huge forkful of potatoes dauphinoise into his mouth. A drop of hot cream ran down his chin, and Caroline looked away.

“But… they are gypsies. Thieves and… and probably worse! We cannot have them as our neighbors!”

“Now, my dear, I will not have that, I’m afraid. Private Dinsdale stayed with me in our pitiful trench when I was shot, and defended my prone body against a dozen Boer snipers until the Twin Peaks were taken and the buggers pulled back!” Henry waved his knife emphatically. “He was wounded himself, and half dead with thirst, but by my side he stayed, when he could have run. All that was left of the rest of my men was a bloody mess like a scene from hell. The war changed him, though… He was eventually discharged on medical grounds, although they never did settle on what was wrong with the chap. Lost a few of his marbles out there, I would say. One day he just stopped talking, stopped eating, and wouldn’t get up from his bunk no matter who ordered him to. I had to step in with a good word for the fellow. He’s much improved now, but he was never quite able to fit back in to his civilian life. He was apprentice farrier in the village here, but that soon finished. He couldn’t pay the rent and was thrown out of his cottage, so he took to the road. I told him he could stay here as long as he made no trouble, and he never has done. So here they stay.” Henry wiped potato from his moustache with a crisp, white napkin. Caroline studied her plate, fidgeting nervously.

“He took to the road, you say? So they move around the country, they’re not often here?” Her voice was little more than a whisper.

“They’re here a lot of the time. It’s close to both their families, and Dinsdale can get work here and there where his name’s known; mending metalwork and the like. So I fear you will have to get used to them, my dear. They need not trouble you-indeed, if you avoid that area of the grounds, you need not encounter them at all,” Henry concluded, and Caroline knew that the matter was closed. She shut her eyes, but she could feel them. She could sense that they were there-or rather that William was there, not two hundred yards from where she now sat at dinner. If he remained always there to remind her, she knew it would prey upon her, and slowly devour her. She prayed that they would give the child up, or move on, taking the object of her guilt and anguish with them.

When her baby was born, Caroline wept. A little girl, so tiny and perfect that she did not seem real, but wrought of magic instead. The soaring, consuming love that Caroline felt for her daughter only served to show her just how great the ill which she had done to Magpie truly was. The mere thought of being separated from this child of hers was painful enough. So Caroline wept, with love and with self-loathing, and nothing that was said could console her. Henry patted her head, at a loss, and did a poor job of hiding his disappointment that he had a daughter, not a son. Estelle and Mrs. Priddy told Caroline, over and over, what a beauty the girl was, and how very well she had done, which brought fresh tears that they ascribed to exhaustion. At night she was beset by dreams of Magpie, her heart in flames, eyes fever-bright, failing, fading, dying of grief; and when she awoke the taint of her crime made her head throb as though it would burst. The baby was dressed in white lace gowns and named Evangeline. For four months Caroline loved her to distraction, and then the tiny girl died, one night in her crib, for no reason that any one of three doctors could ascertain. She flickered out of existence like a snuffed candle, and Caroline was shattered. What little will to go on she had kept since losing Corin now ran out of her like blood from a wound, and there was nothing left that could staunch it.

On a Tuesday, months later, Caroline went down to the kitchen and found Mrs. Priddy and Cass Evans preparing a basket of vegetables from the garden with which to pay Robbie Dinsdale. He was out of sight in the scullery, sharpening the kitchen knives with a stone treadle wheel, sending sparks flying and filling the air with the piercing whine of stressed metal. Caroline would not have sought out the source of the racket if she hadn’t seen guilt in Mrs. Priddy’s eyes; if the woman hadn’t stopped what she was doing so suddenly, with such a start, when her mistress appeared in the room. Cass pressed anxious fingers to her mouth. They all knew how Lady Calcott felt about the Dinsdales, although they did not know why. Caroline strode through to the scullery and interrupted Dinsdale, who looked up at her with soft, amber eyes. Slowly, the wheel ground to a halt. Dinsdale was wearing rough clothing, and his hair was long and greasy, tied at the back of his head with string. His face was quite lovely, as fresh and innocent as a boy’s, but somehow this only made it worse. Caroline’s grief had turned her heart to stone. She knew herself to be punished, forced by fate to suffer the same anguish that she had inflicted upon Magpie, but so great was her pain that she did not accept it-she could not. She fought it, and bright anger coursed through her veins.

“Get out!” she shouted, her voice vibrant with rage. “Get out of this house!” Dinsdale started up from his stool like a jack-in-the-box and fled. Caroline turned on the housekeeper and the chamber maid. “What is the meaning of this? I thought I had made my feelings about that man perfectly clear!”

“Mr. Dinsdale has always done the knives for us, my lady… I didn’t think any harm could come-” Mrs. Priddy tried to explain.

“I don’t care about that! I don’t want him in the house-or anywhere near it! And what’s this?” she demanded, gesturing to the basket of vegetables. “Are you stealing from the gardens as well?”

At this Mrs. Priddy swelled, and she pinched her brows together. “I’ve worked here for more than thirty years, my lady, and never once been accused of any such thing! The excess from the kitchen garden has long been used to pay local men for their labor-”

“Well, not any more! Not that man, anyway. Do I make myself clear?” Caroline snapped. She fought to contain her voice. It was wavering, reeling; it threatened to rise to a shriek.

“They ’as extra mouths to feed!” Cass Evans piped up.

“Hush, child!” Mrs. Priddy hissed.

“What?” Caroline said. She stared at the green-eyed girl in incredulous fear. “What?” she repeated, but Cass shook her head minutely and did not speak again.

Only Lord Calcott’s intervention kept Mrs. Priddy in her job in the wake of this misdemeanor. He did not understand his wife’s objection to Dinsdale, and he did not try to. He merely silenced her and then took himself to London to avoid her vitriolic mood. The staff began to give Caroline a wide berth, fearing her unpredictable rages, her spells of sudden weeping. Late one night, after retiring, Caroline rose and went down to the kitchens in search of liver salts to calm her stomach. She went on soft feet, her slippers making almost no sound, and paused outside the scullery, hearing the girls still clearing up the dinner plates, and chatting to the stable boy, Davey Hook.

“Well, why else do you think she’s took against them so fierce?” Cass’s village accent was instantly recognizable.

“ ’Cause she’s a nob-they’re all like that! Noses up in the air,” Davey said.

“I think she’s half lost her reason since little Evangeline died, poor mite,” Estelle spoke up.

“I’m telling you, I heard it. There weren’t no mistaking it-I heard it. That woman who came in from the station had something hidden under her coat, and then I heard a baby crying up in the mistress’s chamber-I did! And then all of a sudden Robbie Dinsdale finds a lad out in the woods-and we saw her go over there, carrying something with her. We saw her.”

“But you never saw what it was she carried, did you?”

“But what else could it have been?”

“Why, anything at all, Cass Evans!” Estelle exclaimed. “Why ever would the mistress take a child out and leave it in the woods?”

“You said yourself she’s lost her reason!” Cass retorted.

“Only since she lost the little ’un, I said.”

“Maybe it’s hers. Maybe that’s her baby-another man’s baby! And she had to keep it hid from the master-how about that, then?” Cass challenged them.

“It’s you ’as gone soft in the head, Cass Evans, not her upstairs! Toffs don’t go about dropping babies like farmers’ daughters!” Davey laughed. “Besides, you’ve seen that bairn the Dinsdales have got-swarthy as a blackamoor, he is! He’s not her boy, he couldn’t be. Not with her so pale. That there’s a gypsy child, through and through. Some other lot probably cast it off, too many mouths to feed, and that’s the beginning and end of it,” the boy said.

“You mustn’t say such things about her ladyship, Cass,” Estelle warned her, softly. “It’ll fetch you nothing but trouble.”

“But I know what I heard. And I know what I saw, and it ain’t right!” Cass stamped her foot. Outside the room, Caroline’s chest was burning. A pent-up breath escaped her in a rush, not quiet enough, and the conversation within halted abruptly.

“Shhh!” Estelle hissed. Footsteps approached the door. Caroline turned on her toes and fled back to the stairs as silently as she could.

Henry Calcott was not at home when Cass Evans was dismissed. Caroline dealt with Mrs. Priddy, Cass having been sent to her room to pack her meagre possessions.

“The girl’s family is well known to me, my lady. I am certain she is not the thieving kind.” The housekeeper’s face was clouded with concern.

“Nevertheless, I came in to find her rifling through my jewelry box. And now a silver pin is missing,” Caroline replied, marvelling at the dispassion in her voice when inside she was wrought with panic.

“What kind of pin, my lady? Perhaps it has been mislaid and is around the house somewhere?”

“No, it has not been mislaid. I want the girl removed from the house, Mrs. Priddy; and that is all I have to say on the matter,” Caroline snapped. Mrs. Priddy watched her, helplessly, with eyes so sharp that Caroline could not hold her gaze for long. She turned back to the mirror above the mantelpiece and saw no trace of fear, or guilt, or nerves in her own face. Her features were pale, immobile. Like stone.

“May I give her a good reference, at least, my lady? To give her a start elsewhere? She’s a good girl, she works hard-”

“She steals, Mrs. Priddy. If you write a reference, you must include that information within it,” Caroline said quietly. Behind her, she saw Mrs. Priddy’s expression change to incredulity. “That will be all, Mrs. Priddy.”

“Very well, my lady.” The older woman spoke coldly, and walked stiffly away. When the door closed behind her, Caroline sagged, holding the mantel for support. Her stomach churned, and she tasted bile. But she swallowed it down and steadied herself. Cass left via the kitchen door, with tears and highly vocal outrage, an hour or so later. Caroline watched from the upstairs hall window, and when Cass turned to look back at her former home she met Caroline’s guarded gaze with a glare of such fury that it would have scorched a more feeling person.

Lord Calcott merely grunted when the new girl, who was fat and plain, opened the bedroom curtains one morning.

“What happened to that other lass? The brown-haired one?” he asked, idly.

“I had to let her go,” Caroline replied flatly. He said no more on the topic, since it was hardly an inconvenience to himself. Indeed, he was in residence less and less, and spent scant enough time with his wife for a second child to be conceived-the pregnancy was a long time coming. Caroline feared that nothing would ever again feel as wonderful as holding Evangeline for the first time, but the changing of her body brought with it an anticipation of love that was irresistible, and she succumbed to it, turning in on herself, humming softly to the unborn baby, feeling it wedged tightly beneath her ribs, a kernel of warmth and life in the dead husk of her being. But the boy, for boy it was, was born months too soon and had no chance of life. The doctor was all for taking it away with the bloodied sheets, but Caroline demanded to see her child. She studied the tiny, unformed face in wonderment-that she could still feel loss, that her eyes had tears left to shed. But it was the last of the love she possessed poured into that one gaze, that one long look she took at the dead baby’s face. The very last touch of warmth inside her, she passed to him; and then the doctor did indeed take him out with the bloody sheets and all was lost.

Caroline’s recovery was slow, and never complete. By the time she was well enough to receive visits from friends, and Bathilda, they found her slow and dull, her conversation near nonexistent, her movements sluggish and her beauty much diminished. There were hollows at her eyes and cheeks, her hands were as bony as bird claws and there were touches of gray at her temples even though she was not yet near thirty. She seemed ghostly, as if part of her had left for another plane. People shook their heads sadly and thought twice before adding the Calcotts to any invitation list. Left alone, Caroline walked a great deal. Around and around the gardens, as if looking for something. One day she went through the woods, to the clearing where the Dinsdales still camped. They had learnt to give the house a wide berth, and never came again to swap labor for food. Caroline, therefore, had no excuse to argue for their removal, and to be thwarted this way made her ever more bitter toward them.

She waited in the trees, staring at their brightly painted wagon and the patchwork pony tethered nearby. Their home looked so jaunty, pitched there on the green summer grass; so practical, so wholesome. Caroline was reminded of White Cloud’s teepee, and this, like any thought of the ranch, made her vision swim and her mind close up in misery. Just then the Dinsdales returned from the village. Mrs. Dinsdale, whose blonde hair hung in angelic ringlets, had a babe in arms, and holding onto Mr. Dinsdale’s hand was a sturdy boy of about three years, dark colored and round. His steps were sure but they made slow progress, pausing every few steps for the boy to crouch down and examine something on the ground with an endless curiosity. Caroline’s breath caught in her throat. William so resembled Magpie that it was near unbearable to look at him.

She watched them for some time. Mrs. Dinsdale put her baby down to sleep inside the wagon, then sat on the steps and called to William, who came running to her with his arms aloft to be carried. She did not call him William, of course. It was some other name that she used, that Caroline could not entirely hear, but that sounded like Flag. Watching them, Caroline was so torn apart with sorrow and envy that she did not know how to contain it. But she was so angry too, that this family of drifters should flourish when her own had been snatched from her, twofold. She stared at William and she hated him. She hated them all. No more, she thought, I can take no more. The price she had been made to pay was far too high, and though some part of her thought that this injustice must, somehow, be redressed, she knew that it could not be. She sat down in the shadows and cried quietly for Corin, who could not help her.