Chapter 13

Thirteen

June. 1819.

O ne fine summer morning, Oliver took a jaunt. Every month or so, he would set out with his drawing tools, his viameter, and explore a new patch of land, taking notes and sketching in preparation for adding the area to his map.

To his great joy, Henrietta had come along several times, and now she asked if Nathaniel could come, as well.

"I'll keep Nathaniel diverted, so you can do your work," she assured him.

It wasn't work for Oliver, but he liked that she thought of his map making as a serious undertaking.

All three of them rode out in the brake with several large baskets packed into the back. Nathaniel sat between his father and Henrietta, occasionally bouncing with excitement.

Once at the chosen spot, Oliver walked and measured and sketched the view from the high meadow while Henrietta and Nathaniel played with the shuttlecock and battledores, even at times using one of the ancient dry stone walls as a separation between them to bat the shuttlecock back and forth.

After a while, Nathaniel asked Henrietta for the butterfly net she had fashioned for him. He leapt and ran and swooped the net with precision and caught butterfly after butterfly with astonishing ease. All of which he let go.

The day had started off cloudless, but suddenly the sun dimmed and a light rain began to fall. Henrietta laughed when a particularly large drop hit her nose with a splash, but Nathaniel scowled, saying he couldn't catch butterflies in the rain.

"Let's have our picnic under that tree, then," Henrietta said, picking up the baskets.

"I have a better idea," Oliver said.

The horse had been unharnessed from the brake and was tethered to the ground nearby, grazing, undisturbed by the rain. Oliver got on his hands and knees and went under the brake and spread the picnic blanket on the dry grass there.

"Come under here." He poked his head out and was rewarded by a giggle from his son who must have thought it funny to see his father under the wagon.

Nathaniel and Henrietta both crawled under the brake and after some arranging and Oliver making sure no limbs were in the way of a wheel in case the wedges failed to stop the brake from rolling, they were comfortable. Snug and dry.

Nathaniel and perhaps even Henrietta might have been able to sit upright under the brake, but since Oliver couldn't, they joined him in lying down for their picnic.

"Like the ancient Romans," Oliver said and then had to explain to Nathaniel how the Romans had eaten lying down.

After a bit, with the soothing patter of the rain, a stomach full of cheese sandwiches, and the exertion of the morning, Nathaniel fell asleep in the middle of the blanket.

Oliver was on his side, resting his head on his hand, and Henrietta had taken the same position. Their faces were only a few feet apart. It had not seemed dangerously intimate until Nathaniel had fallen asleep. But now it did.

Oliver touched the back of Nathaniel's dark head lightly. "You didn't have to tell the caterpillar story to get him to nod off."

"Running about was enough."

"My son, the lepidopterist."

"What is that?"

"A person who collects butterflies. Studies them."

"What is the word for a person who makes maps?"

"A mapmaker. But you're right. There should be a fancy word like lepidopterist. Chorographer. Chartographer. Cartographer."

She laughed. "That's you. You're a cartographer."

"No, not really. But I thought I might be." He rolled onto his back and looked at the underside of the brake rather than at Henrietta.

"Once upon a time," he started and then stopped.

"All the best stories begin that way," she said encouragingly.

"When I was young, I wanted to be an explorer, see new lands, discover things."

He cast a glance at her. He felt it was a laughable ambition now when his life was so confined, so timid. But she did not laugh. Her face was still. She was listening. He shifted his eyes back, away from her.

"So, after I left Eton, I did not go to university or go to work for my father's businesses. Instead, I joined an expedition to the East Indies."

He had quickly made a discovery on that voyage, but not of an uncharted island or a hidden reef. No, he had discovered Oliver Hartwell could not tolerate life on board a ship. Not one whit. And his wretched vomiting never subsided, even after weeks at sea. Fearing Oliver might die, the captain finally put him ashore at Cape Town, so Oliver might build up enough strength for the dreaded return trip to England by a different ship. He made it back to Portsmouth barely alive, according to the ship's doctor. He had been skeletal and wasted, skin collapsed, his mouth a desert of sores.

Oliver Hartwell was doomed never to leave the island of Britain again.

Henrietta's voice was full of enthusiasm and excitement. "You've been to the East Indies? That's marvelous! How could I not know that?"

"Because I haven't. I never went. Incurable seasickness. I had to quit the idea of a life of adventuring."

The sound of the rain hitting the topside of the brake filled the hush that followed.

"How terrible. How terrible that must have been for you."

No one had ever truly sympathized with him over the loss of his boyhood dreams. Even Crispin had never understood how deep the wound had gone. How, after that, it had taken all of Oliver's strength, physically and mentally, to go back out into the world and try to find something that interested him.

"Were you crushed, Oliver?"

He turned towards her, on his side again, and looked at her face. Those blue eyes were welling, her bottom lip was trembling. For him. For that long-ago Oliver Hartwell, the boy-man he had been at her age.

"I was. But I still liked maps. And that was when I chanced on your father again, having not seen him for six years."

"Papa always said you're the reason he got Mama to marry him," she said, brushing at her eyes. "You helped him woo her."

"He did all the wooing. I just showed him the back entrance to the British Museum Reading Room. But we became friends after that."

She smiled through her tears. "I'm glad you had a friend. I'm glad it was my father."

"He was the one who helped me decide what to do with my life. He asked me questions about what I liked. What I wanted."

What he had wanted, initially, had been what Crispin had found for himself. A wife. But Oliver was still too young, too unsure of himself, too untested. First, he must settle to a living. And Crispin helped him see how natural beauty and a life connected to the out-of-doors and the seasons would improve his health and lift his spirits.

After long hours mulling it over, Oliver decided if he must be consigned to a landlocked life in England, he should be in the prettiest part of it. He studied landscape paintings, pored over maps, and decided on the Lake District.

He sold half of his deceased father's business interests—the ones that could not be managed from afar—and bought Crossthwaite and became a yeoman farmer. He succeeded at his agricultural pursuits and bought more land and put sheep on the pasture, rented some to tenants. He had time to climb fells and swim in meres and read. But a wife still eluded him.

Finally, Crispin and Georgiana took him in hand, insisted he attend their dinner parties when he visited them in London. That was where Oliver had met Violet Winter.

But he could not speak of Violet. Especially not to Henrietta, even though he was sure she must already knew the sordid story from the villagers or the Crossthwaite servants or her own parents. He must move the conversation away from himself and his poisonous past.

He could feel the curl dangling, brushing his forehead, but he did not push it back.

"What do you like, Henrietta?" he asked her. "What do you want?"

"You know what I like, and you give me everything I want. Even before I ask for it, sometimes."

He meant large things. Intangible things. Hopes and dreams. Not silk threads or a packet of saffron.

But she must have known that. She called herself slow, but she wasn't. She understood what he had asked her.

Henrietta rolled onto her stomach and rested her cheek on her folded hands in front of her, her elbows akimbo, her face turned away from him, hidden.

Whatever his wife dreamed of, she could not bring herself to tell him.

The rain pitter-pattered on and off for another hour, and Oliver spent that time trying not to look at the curves of Henrietta's bottom, perfectly outlined by the clinging drapery of her summer dress.

She did not move until Nathaniel awoke and asked for another biscuit. Then she turned her head and blinked her eyes and smiled and seemed herself even when the rain stopped and they headed back to Crossthwaite.

Oliver Hartwell thought he knew his wife. But, maybe, he didn't, at all.