That Summer: A Novel Read online

  “Dad?” Her father looked up from the paper. Julia levered herself away from the counter, the hems of her jeans, always too long, brushing against the tiled floor. “Why would this aunt … Regina leave the house to me?”

  She half-expected him to shrug, to punt the question. Instead, he folded the paper meticulously, setting it down on the side of the table, exactly aligned with the grain of the wood. “Your mother grew up in that house,” he said. He cleared his throat. “Your aunt always used to say it would be your mother’s someday.”

  His eyes met Julia’s. They were gray, like hers. They had the some coloring, or had once. Her father’s hair had long since gone gray, while hers was artificially enhanced with lighter highlights. Underneath, though, it was the same pedestrian mid-brown.

  Her mother’s hair had been black, her eyes a vivid blue. She was everything that was alive and lively. Until she wasn’t.

  When Julia tried to remember her mother, all she could scrounge up was an image from an old picture, the colors faded with time, her mother, in a garden, a kerchief tied over her black hair, laughing up at the camera. All around her, the trees were in bloom. There was a lake or a pond somewhere in the background, just the vaguest impression of a shimmer of water.

  The picture had stood on her father’s nightstand. It had gone into a drawer not long after their move to New York. Julia had never quite had the nerve to ask her father what he had done with it. Their mutual grief was a palpable silence between them.

  “And I was the next best thing?” Julia hadn’t meant it to come out sounding quite so sour.

  “Either that,” said her father drily, “or Regina was looking to put Caroline’s nose out of joint. There was no love lost there.”

  Julia tucked her hands into the pockets of her jeans, fighting against the urge to curl into a ball like a porcupine, all defensive prickles. She missed the familiar armor of her job, that relentless whirl of work that meant she never had to think about anything she didn’t care to, pushing it aside with the excuse of being too busy.

  But she wasn’t busy now, was she? And she needed the money. It had been nine months already since Sterling Bates had let her go, with crocodile tears and false condolences. They had fired her, as was their charming practice, the day before bonuses were announced, reducing her take for the year to a third of what it would otherwise have been. Her severance would run out soon, but the bills were still coming in: mortgage, health care, groceries. She had no idea what property sold for in Herne Hill, whether it had been hit anywhere as hard as the market in the United States, but either way one looked at it, it was an unexpected windfall. She’d be an idiot to turn her back on it, all because of something that had happened a quarter of a century ago.

  The past is a distant country, one of her art history professors in college had said. If Julia thought about it like that, maybe it wouldn’t be so bad. The England she and her father had left didn’t exist anymore. It was gone; the house was just a house, and there was no reason to let misplaced misgivings get in the way of a tidy profit.

  One month, maybe two. Surely it wouldn’t take longer than that? It would be irresponsible to sell the house without seeing it first. And it was really rather idiotic, all these years later, to still tiptoe around the topic of her mother. It had been a quarter of a century. People grieved, dealt with it, moved on.

  Julia had been in England since, to London, for work. Surely this wouldn’t be all that different. This would be work, too, not some sort of sentimental pilgrimage.

  “I’ll see what I can do,” she said. It was the closest she could come to a concession, to admitting that she had nothing better to do.

  Her father nodded, slowly. “Strange … After all this time…” His eyes looked past her, towards the half-open door of the den, where the shadows of Robbie’s electronic monsters could be seen playing out against the wall. “Your aunt always said your mother was the only true heir to the family legacy.”

  Julia cocked her head. “What does that mean?”

  Her father looked back at her, his lips twisting wryly. “I have no idea. No idea at all.”

  TWO

  Cornwall, 1839

  “Are you quite certain, my love?” Despite the mildness of the day, Imogen’s father had two blankets tucked around him, the edges overlapping, trailing onto the gravel and moist dirt below his bench. “I wouldn’t want you to feel rushed or constrained by—”

  “No,” said Imogen quickly, heading off her father’s words. She hated it when he spoke of death. Yes, he might be a little frail, the winter had been hard, but it was spring now, or almost spring, and he would get better, he would. “I don’t feel the least bit constrained.”

  On this first warm day of March, Imogen had brought her father out to his favorite spot in the garden, in the little wilderness next to the rectory. She had hoped it would make him feel more like himself again, put some color back in his cheeks.

  Not so very far away, she could hear the faint and omnipresent roar of the sea and smell the salt tang in the air. Penhallow was a small village. Officially, the inhabitants made their living by fishing, but if the sea sometimes swept up a bounty in the form of bottles and lengths of silk the local authorities turned a blind eye. Imogen and her father had lived in Penhallow for nearly as long as she could remember. This garden, with its paths lined by crushed shells, the well-worn arbor with the stone bench below, had been her haven since she was old enough to evade her nurse’s eye.

  Imogen knew this village in her blood, in her bones, even though she and her father were, in local parlance, foreigners still. She had had the run of the village from the time she was old enough to walk. She remembered nothing of the world they had left behind, the parish in Gloucestershire, the houses of her cousins. She knew, because she had been told, that her father’s older brother was a baronet, Sir William Hadley of Hadley Hall, and that her father had been meant to have the living on that estate. She knew also, from the curl of her father’s lip when he spoke of his brother, that he found the loss of his companionship no great burden.

  It was her mother’s health that had driven them from Gloucestershire to Cornwall. Sea air was meant to be good for frail constitutions, so, when Imogen was just old enough to toddle, her father had found this parish in Cornwall, a small parish, far from anything the world deemed fashionable. The sea air hadn’t had the promised effect on her mother’s health, but they had stayed in Cornwall all the same, in this pleasant, sleepy village with the smell of the sea in the air.

  It might, perhaps, have been a little bit lonely, but Imogen had never wanted for occupation. As soon as she was old enough to read, she had helped her father with his studies, marveling over the tiny figures painted into illuminated letters, careful not to rip manuscripts gone frail and brittle with age. By the time she was six, she could read the cramped Latin hands of late-medieval scribes as easily as she could the printed pages in her primers. There had been no question of her going to the village school—she was the daughter of the vicar, of a different order than the village children—so her father had taught her himself, making geography and history come alive with his tales of tormented kings and defiant queens, of knights and ladies and impossible quests.

  It wasn’t all knights and ladies and fantasy. All of the responsibilities of the lady of the parish had quickly devolved to her. The villagers came to her father for spiritual consolation, but it was Imogen who tended to their more practical needs, bringing soups and jellies to the poor, reading to the elderly, making sure they had enough wood for the winter.

  Through the shrubbery, just down the hill, lay the church where her father preached every Sunday, or had preached, before the cough had settled in his chest and his lungs. Hard by the little village church, in the shadow of the steeple, she could see the grim shapes of tombstones, one after the other.

  A touch of sun, Imogen told herself staunchly, that was all that was needed. Warm weather and good food and her father would be right as rai
n again.

  “Truly,” Imogen said, tucking in a corner of the blanket next to her father. “I want to marry Arthur—Mr. Grantham.”

  She stammered a bit over the name. It was so new still. She wanted to hug it to herself, to whisper his name in private, to marvel over it like a bit of sea glass found on the beach, something rich and strange and rare.

  Impossible to think that only three weeks ago she’d had no idea such a man existed and he no notion of her. There they had been at opposite ends of the world until fate had brought them together.

  Arthur, she repeated to herself. In public he could be Mr. Grantham, but she had the right to call him Arthur.

  It was her father’s illness, ironically, that had brought her and Arthur together. As the winter had grown colder and her father had grown sicker, he had begun to fret about money. There had never been terribly much. What little they had her father spent on books. That hadn’t mattered, so long as he had his parish, but with his death Imogen would lose her home and what little income there was. There was nothing saved away, nothing salable, except for her father’s beloved fifteenth-century Book of Hours.

  Against Imogen’s protests, he had put it about, through select channels, that his book, his precious book, might be available for sale.

  She had expected the purchaser to be someone of her father’s age, another elderly antiquarian, with a lined face and thin hands, someone as pale and fragile as the old parchment he coveted.

  Instead, it had been Arthur.

  He came riding in, like his namesake, like a knight of old, albeit in a sensible traveling chaise rather than on a charging destrier. Imogen didn’t hold that against him. It would be rather hard to ride a galloping steed all the way from London, particularly given the state of the roads in winter.

  He had appeared on a blustery February day, bringing with him the tang of the outside world, like the orange her father always gave her at Christmas, tart and sweet and strange. Arthur’s long ginger whiskers, the cut of his clothes, the shape of his hat, all spoke of a world well outside their cloistered village.

  He was not a man of fashion, Arthur had told her apologetically, just a widower, a scholar, a man of quiet tastes and quiet habits.

  He had found her in the garden that first day, on this very bench. Her father had fallen asleep over his papers, and Mr. Grantham didn’t like to wake him. Ought he to wait, or to return to the inn where he was putting up? He would, he said with a polite bow, enjoy more of her father’s conversation; it was a pity such a learned man was retired so far from his peers, from the men who might benefit from his knowledge. Arthur himself was engaged in attempting to create a comprehensive catalog of late-medieval devotional manuscript art.

  Was he limiting himself to any geographical area? Imogen wanted to know. Or was it a comparative project?

  He settled himself on the bench, his hat balanced on his knees, and began describing his work, the manuscripts he had seen, the ones he still hoped to find, his methods of classification and analysis, while Imogen asked questions and proposed refinements to the scheme.

  Had he considered a comparative study of Northern and Southern European manuscript art?

  The negotiations over the Book of Hours had stretched to two days, to a week. Imogen suspected both men were enjoying it. Every day, Mr. Grantham walked down the lane from the Cock and the Hen, the village inn. For an hour, he would sit with Imogen’s father in his study; through the window, Imogen could see them, heads bent over her father’s papers. Then, as her father dozed, Mr. Grantham would join her in the frost-crisp garden, on the bench, their cheeks red with cold, telling her tales of the places he had visited, the wonders he had seen. Venice, Florence, Bologna. Paris, Avignon, Tours. The very names sang.

  “And did you see…?” Imogen would ask, and he would steadily, patiently paint pictures in words for her, of this painting or that statue or the particular fall of light on an autumn day behind the ruined towers of a Cathar castle.

  Two weeks, then three. He had family waiting for him at home, he told her regretfully, family who would be expecting his return. A daughter, and his wife’s sister, who kept house for him. Since his wife’s death …

  His wife was dead?

  Yes, seven years ago, the same age as his little girl. Since his wife’s death, he had spent most of his time away from home, traveling the world, collecting treasures. But now that Evie was of an age to miss him, he owed it to her to return to his own hearth.

  “Although,” he added in a low voice, “had I known what wonders awaited me in Cornwall, I should have journeyed this way long since.”

  “You would have had little luck then persuading my father to relinquish his Book of Hours,” said Imogen practically. Her father’s real interest was in the secular literature of the High Middle Ages, the chansons de geste and courtly tales, but the Book of Hours had been a gift from her mother and was prized as such. “It is his greatest treasure.”

  “It was not of the book I was thinking,” said Mr. Grantham.

  It took Imogen a moment to catch his meaning. She looked at him in surprise, in confusion, doubting her own understanding. He was sitting where he always sat, beside her on the bench, but his eyes were steady on her face and there was a look she had never seen in them before.

  “You look like a Madonna,” he said. “Wrapped in serenity.”

  Imogen felt anything but serene. She could not think of anything to say, so she said foolishly, “I had thought the Madonna was meant to be blond.”

  “Only in the common way,” said Mr. Grantham, with a connoisseur’s scorn for the common. “Some men cannot see past the glint of gold.”

  Imogen touched a hand to her own dark hair. It was parted in the center, pulled smoothly back, not bunched and frizzed in the current fashion. There had never been any need to take pains with her dress; she was neat and tidy and that was all.

  Mr. Grantham leaned back, studying her with an intensity that made her drop her eyes to her folded hands. “You remind me of a Madonna I saw in a little church outside of Florence. The painter was a man of no name, but his work has survived him. The Madonna’s hair was pulled back just as yours is, her hair as dark, her skin as fair. There was a haunting loveliness about her. I would have bought it,” he said, with a deprecatory smile, “had it not been fixed to the wall.”

  “I can see,” said Imogen, speaking too high and too fast, “why they would not wish to part with their treasure. It should leave a rather large blank space on the wall.”

  When she looked up, Mr. Grantham was still looking at her, steadily. His eyes were a cloudy blue, like the sea on an overcast day. “I should like to take you there. To see it.”

  Her heart beating very fast, her fingers trembling in her lap, Imogen had said directly, honestly, “I should like to see it.”

  It was then that he had kissed her for the first time.

  He had been very apologetic afterwards, excoriating himself for abusing her father’s hospitality, for betraying her innocence, but Imogen had gone through the rest of the day in a cloud of wonder, touching a finger to her lips where his lips had touched. She had studied herself in the mirror trying to see what he had seen but saw only her own face, pale skin against dark hair, deep-set brown eyes, features too strong for fashion.

  But if Arthur saw loveliness there …

  “He is so much older,” murmured her father. “I should have liked someone younger for you, someone closer to your own age.”

  Imogen squeezed her father’s hand, trying to ignore how it quivered in her grasp, how frail and thin his fingers had become. “What are a few years? You’ve always said I was an old soul.” She made a face. “I’ve certainly more to say to Ar—to Mr. Grantham than to anyone my own age.”

  Not that she knew many people her own age. The boys in the village were shy in her presence; they pulled their caps and shuffled their feet. As for the Granvilles, who lived in the great house, they were seldom in Cornwall, spending most of their
time in London. Their boys were six and ten, still in the frogs and stones stage.

  “I have kept you too much secluded,” her father said, more to himself than her. “You ought to have had some exposure to society … to young people of your own kind.…”

  “I have never missed it,” Imogen said truly.

  “Your uncle…” her father said, half to himself. “He would take you in, at Hadley Hall. Even after— Your uncle wanted to marry your mother. Years and years ago, when we were all young. He was furious when she chose me, instead.”

  “Yes, yes,” said Imogen. She had heard the story before. Right now, she had no interest in old scandals; it was the present that concerned her. Arthur had tactfully returned to the inn, leaving her to wrangle her father’s blessing. “But, Papa—”

  Her father continued, “Even so, you are still a Hadley. And it has been so long.… I should have written to William months ago. I have been selfish, foolish.”

  Imogen bristled. There was nothing that appealed to her less than the idea of being a pensioner in her uncle’s home. The idea of going from mistress in her father’s household to an oddity in her uncle’s was distinctly unpleasant.

  “Uncle William wouldn’t know me from—from that rock in the garden. Why should I be bundled off to him like an unwanted parcel?” She added unhappily, “I thought you liked Arthur. I thought you would be happy for us.”

  Her father roused in his seat, the blankets rustling. “I do. But it’s a very different thing to like a man over a glass of port than to wish him married to one’s only daughter.” His thin lips pressed together, wobbling at the edges. “I wish I had more time. I wish your mother were here.”

  He had been speaking of Imogen’s mother more and more recently, speaking of her as though she were only a room away, near enough to call.