Chapter 22

22

HENRY CAMBY WAS STANDING AT HIS BEDROOM WINDOW ON THE SECOND FLOOR OF the house, looking down over his estate, when he saw her walk up the lane. His heart nearly stopped, but he knew with certainty it was her. A year ago when someone resembling Lucille had shown up on his estate, standing in the daylight next to a mahogany tree, he had tremulously believed that it might be her ghost. He had asked his closest friend, who also happened to be his lawyer, to search the newspapers and the registers, and in the end J.R. had reported that Lucille Bunting was alive. That was a finding that had brought Henry immense relief. But it meant that there was only one other explanation then for who the girl on his property had been.

Now, it was the first Sunday in October. Holding his breath, Henry stood and watched. Lucille’s body was softer and rounder than it used to be, but he recognized the way that she moved, and she walked up the lane with just as much determination as she had walked down it sixteen years earlier. He had stood at this very same window then and watched her go. When she came near enough, he rose on his toes and turned his face down to catch every glimpse of her before she stepped up and under the roof of the veranda. The venetian blinds were raised, and he leaned his forehead against the glass, listening for her knock and wondering what he would do when it came.

***

GERTRUDE HAD JUST come in from the garden out back, where she had been sitting in the shade sipping a glass of lemonade. The lemonade had been sour since Henry had instructed Sarah the cook to use sugar sparingly if at all. Which was idiocy. What was the point of owning a sugar plantation if they could not have some of the sugar for themselves?

Gertrude had sat in the garden asking herself this and letting her frustrations well up. Upon finishing the lemonade, she had put the cool, wet glass against her cheek. The lilies were still in bloom, and they were supposed to be pretty, but their necks drooped dumbly toward the soil, and Gertrude had found herself frustrated with them, too. With the flowers, with the entire garden, with the lemonade, with her life. And why could a butterfly not simply fly in a straight line? When a small one flew by, she swatted at it with her foot and wished she had stomped it instead. Showoff. Flitting about. She had lowered the glass to her lap, curious how hard she would need to squeeze to make it shatter. Henry was in the bedroom doing Lord knows what. It was where he went on Sundays, his only day off, and though he claimed he needed time to recuperate from the week, she guessed it was merely that he wanted to be away from her. If the shattered glass drew blood, would it make him come down?

Gertrude had stayed in the garden, contemplating this, until sweat beaded along her hairline. Angrily, she wiped it off, but when it returned, she stood and went inside, wondering if she needed to bathe for a second time that day, which was an excess, yes, but was the only way she knew to effectively deal with the endless bother of sweat. She had just walked back into the house with the empty lemonade glass in her hand when she heard a knock at the door. Had she not been so full of her frustrations, she would have called one of the servants to come answer it, but as she was in no mood to talk to any of them, Gertrude answered it herself.

A Black woman was standing on the veranda, a Black woman who looked vaguely familiar. In the next second, Gertrude’s memory came into focus. She nearly fell over in shock when she realized who the woman was.

The woman appeared unnerved herself, and neither of them spoke for a moment until finally Gertrude, in a tone that revealed her distemper, said, “Why are you here?”

“Madam,” the woman said. She nodded slightly, but even through the nod, she looked Gertrude right in the eye.

Gertrude clenched her jaw, but she managed to say, “We have not seen you in quite some time.”

The woman nodded again.

Gertrude had not known the woman’s name while she was in their employ. It was possible she had heard it once or twice, but if so it was an arrow sailing across her attention, there one instant and gone the next. But after the woman had taken her house apart and left, a momentous event on the Camby estate, everyone whispering about it and standing around to watch, Gertrude—having gathered at last who her husband had been going to night after night—went to their lawyer, J. R. Robinson, and asked him the woman’s name. The fact that J.R. resisted telling her was additional confirmation. Gertrude had said to him, “I am but asking for her name, J.R.” J.R. had always been exceedingly loyal to Henry, which Gertrude appreciated, but at that moment his loyalty was getting in her way. J.R. stammered something incomprehensible. Calmly, Gertrude had said, “I will wring your thick neck if you do not tell me now.” Finally, J.R. had told her. “Lucille Bunting.” For many years Gertrude held on to that name.

This woman standing on the veranda now was doubtlessly her. She looked older, but she was still attractive, Gertrude saw, and suddenly all of her rumbling, petty frustrations turned into fury.

“Well, what is it?” Gertrude snapped.

“I am looking for Master Camby, ma’am.”

Gertrude snorted. “Yes, as I recall, you were always doing that.”

She wanted to shame her, but impressively the woman did not flinch.

“I need to speak with him, ma’am.”

“He is not here.”

“No?”

Unhurriedly, Gertrude worked her tongue side to side behind her clenched teeth. Then she spit in the woman’s face.

“Leave,” Gertrude hissed. “Leave, and don’t you ever come back.”

She watched the woman wipe her face, and she waited to see whether she would do or say anything else in return, but after a second, the woman simply turned around and walked down the front steps and started down the gravel lane. Before the woman was even out of her sight, Gertrude, hot with rage, flung the drinking glass she was still holding down on the floor and watched it burst into shards. Sarah the cook came running at the sound, but Henry did not.

***

HENRY STOOD PERFECTLY still in the bedroom, forehead against glass, but he did not hear her knock. He heard nothing at all, not even the tick of the clock on the bureau, which over the years had kept him awake many a night. The clock was an heirloom passed down along Gertrude’s side of the family, and she would not let it go. She wanted it right where it was—she claimed the ticking soothed her, although Henry suspected it was just that she knew it bothered him—and Henry had long ago given up the cause of moving it to a different room. He might have fought back—about the clock, about many things, really—but confrontation was not in his nature. That afternoon, with his heart pounding and the blood rushing up to his ears, he heard nothing for a long minute or more. Then, with his head on the glass, he saw Lucille walk away. Henry widened his eyes and, for the second time in his life, watched her go.

He remained at the window, wondering why she had come. Was it for him? After all these years? He had always dreamed she might return. In the beginning, every few weeks or so, Henry had a dream in which she was standing at the back door of the house, where she had been the day he first laid eyes upon her, dreams in which he was weightlessly happy, but as soon as he woke, he grew despondent again. It was a terrible fate to know that nothing in one’s actual life would equal the world of one’s dreams.

Henry sighed under the weight of what his life had become—all that he had and did not want, and all that he wanted but did not have. For it wasn’t only Lucille he had waited for. After deducing who the girl by the mahogany tree had been, a part of him always hoped that Millicent, too, would return.

Some mornings Henry woke, and there was a kind of charge in the air, and he thought, Today she will come. Today is the day I will see her again. And on those days, even if Henry had no business off the property, no reason to go into town, he would order his driver to hitch the carriage and take him down the long gravel lane where he had seen her that once. “Slow,” Henry instructed the driver, and the horses would trot as though they were out merely to enjoy the sun on their backs. From his seat, Henry would stare out the carriage for any sign of a girl. When they passed the same mahogany tree, he paid particular attention, but of course he knew she could be anywhere a second time. When his driver let slip that Gertrude had approached him, demanding to know the meaning of these strange carriage rides on the lane, Henry stopped making them. Now he only looked when he had legitimate business that took him out anyway. Or he looked from his window on Sundays like this.

Letting them go was one of the hardest things Henry had ever done. The right thing, though, Henry reminded himself again and again. Something in the air anyway was put to rest once they were gone. Gertrude, who had at that time been suffering from strange bouts of insomnia, tossing and turning almost every night, was suddenly still as a bone, sleeping straight through the night for the first time in months.

It had not been difficult to find out where they had settled, of course. J.R. was useful for such information. Nine months after they left, when the first of the girls’ birthdays rolled around, Henry slipped three gold crowns into a small silk pouch and arranged for a courier to deliver it to the house. He had thought that it was something he might do every year for each of their birthdays, but not long after he sent it, he received a letter in reply that said, Leave us be. That was all. He had turned the paper over, hoping for more, but he could find only that. It was another small break to his heart. He knew Lucille was the one who had written the words. Leave us be. And so Henry had obliged.

***

HENRY MOVED THROUGH the rest of the day agitated. He stayed in the bedroom until it seemed that the bedroom would suffocate him; then he went out in the sun and walked the grounds. A total of 256 steps. He counted them and came to where a new house had at some point been built. He sighed and turned and walked away.

It was hot as he wandered through the fields. The land was barren, stripped of cane stalks. In the distance the great stone windmill was still. He walked in circles, not knowing what to do with himself, and by dusk Henry had found his way out to the lane and felt that was the right place to be since it was where he had seen Millicent a year earlier and it was where he had seen Lucille that day. He paced up and down it until J.R. found him in the twilight and said, “Henry, stop.”

Henry, lost in thought, did not hear him at first.

“Henry!” J.R. called, louder. He had been riding his horse up to the estate when he came upon Henry walking in the humid, buggy air. He dismounted his mare and held her by the reins and called to his old friend again. “Henry!” They were far enough from the house that no one would hear them.

Finally Henry turned.

Leading his horse, J.R. walked closer. He had imagined this was the sort of conversation that would happen inside, in the study, over a glass of brandy or at least a cup of tea. But he supposed now was as good a time as any.

“I thought you might want to know...,” J.R. began. As he came closer, he saw how awful Henry looked, and he hesitated before continuing.

“What is it?” Henry asked.

“Are you okay?”

“Fine. Perfectly fine.”

J.R. nodded slowly.

Henry said, “What is it I should know?”

J.R. measured the moment. It was perhaps not the right time to say it, after all, but it was his duty, he always felt, to help Henry however he could—and in any case it needed to be said. “The girl is ill.”

“What girl?”

J.R. paused before saying, “Your girl, Henry.”

The light was dim, night settling in. J.R. saw Henry open his mouth and close it again. The horse made a noise, and J.R. reached up to stroke its flank.

Standing on the lane, Henry looked at his friend, his loyal friend who had kept Henry’s secret all of these years. A decade from then when Henry died at the age of fifty-five from influenza, J.R. would be rewarded for that loyalty. In his will Henry would leave certain assets and savings to Gertrude, but he would bequeath the whole of the estate to J.R., trusting that he would do with it what he felt was right.

“Is it serious?” Henry asked now.

“Yes.”

“Ill with what?”

“Pneumonia, it seems, that has not yet resolved.”

“For how long?”

“It has gone on for some time.”

“But you’re only telling me now?”

“I only learned it myself. The vestryman told me something about a surgery she requires. He thought you might want to know.”

“The vestryman?”

“I never breathed a word to him, Henry. He merely suspects.”

Henry nodded and looked off down the lane. Ill , he thought. So that’s why Lucille had come. It was not about him. He stood in the dusk, nursing his private pain.

“I thought you should know,” he heard J.R. say, “in case you felt moved to do something about it.”

“Felt moved” struck Henry as an interesting phrase, and if J.R. was not such a good friend, he might have taken offense. Of course he felt moved. But feeling moved and being able to move were two different things. What could he do? What was he honestly expected to do? He sighed. Lucille herself had told him once, in writing, to leave them alone. Although the fact that she had come now said something else. But even if he were to offer something—money, a room at the hospital—somehow Gertrude was bound to find out. Henry was certain of that. Gertrude had begun mistrusting him a long time ago, interrogating not only his driver but the house servants, too, about his comings and goings, inspecting the financial ledgers that Henry kept on the shelf, asking about him in town. Henry had learned to be careful. If she caught even a whiff of anything he might do in this case, she would hunt it down until she found where it led. And what then? Would she confront Lucille? Make both of their lives thereafter a living hell?

Henry sighed again. J.R. was waiting for him to respond, but it seemed to Henry that there was nothing to say. His hands were tied, and it was late, and all he wanted was to return to the house and rest.