Judith Ivory
Authors: Untie My Heart
Untie My Heart
This book is for my parents,
whom I would pick as dear friends
if nature hadn’t already done it for me.
I love you.
There is no excellent beauty that hath not some strangeness in the proportion.
—Francis Bacon
Essays,
“Of Beauty,” 1625
Stuart Aysgarth returned home from a month-long hunting trip in…
THE events that would drop Emma Hotchkiss—verily sink, she might…
IN the hands of an expert, separating a sheep from…
STUART waited at the front of the bank, inside his…
EMMA arrived on the first Monday in January in Hayward…
EMMA lay in the dark of her own skirts upside…
WHAT had happened here? Emma’s mind couldn’t absorb it. Had…
EMMA and Stuart waited less than a minute on the…
THE Stunnels were an older couple. Maud, John Tucker’s elder…
IT was dark by the time the carriage turned down…
STUART was already in the library when Emma found the…
EMMA lay tossing and turning that night in a huge,…
THERE was a small incident on the way to the…
LEONARD Aysgarth, Stuart’s father’s younger brother by fifteen months, could…
STUART circled the block in his carriage, thinking to be…
THE restaurant floor had a snug—a small secluded room for…
EMMA sent Leonard a note to join her for breakfast,…
SHE arrived home, her farm, in the afternoon, to find…
S
TUART
Aysgarth returned home from a month-long hunting trip in the Caucasus Mountains to find the following two letters awaiting his attention. They were postmarked three months previously, having traveled from London across the seas to his home in St. Petersburg, then over land to Tsarskoe—just missing him as he had been gathering up companions for his hunting trip—then forwarded south to his country home in Odessa. There, they had lain upon his library table for nearly the whole of his hunting-trip absence.
26 March 1892
London, England
To Stuart Winston Aysgarth, the sixth Viscount Mount Villiars:
I regret to inform you that your father Donovan Alister Francis Aysgarth, the fifth Viscount Mount Villiars, has at age fifty-seven passed on. Your being his only son, it is imperative that I locate you. Alas, all I have is this Russian address, found among your father’s papers. Indeed, no one in England is certain of your where
abouts, how to contact you, or if you live. Please contact me at your earliest convenience, then make arrangements, if you will, to come personally to London. You are the immediate heir to the former viscount’s entailment as well as a large and complicated estate—which, you must know, comprise not only a title but also a sizable fortune, future incomes, and many properties.
I condole in your hour of suffering.
Yours most humbly,
Daniel P. Babbage, Esquire
3 April 1892
London, England
Mount Villiars,
My last letter to you cannot possibly have found you yet, but I felt I must advise immediately that your uncle, Leonard Xavier Francis Aysgarth, has come forth as the heir to your father’s title and estates. He believes you dead. Moreover, he has convinced several others, men of importance, that such might be entirely the case. Indeed, it might. This letter may go unanswered. If you receive these words, however, please telegraph me immediately, so I might halt the process of your uncle’s assuming the title and assets of the viscountcy into his own use.
Yours most humbly,
Daniel P. Babbage, Esquire
That Monday at seven in the morning Stuart was at the telegraph office in Odessa, from where he sent a wire to Daniel P. Babbage. It read:
TELL LEO TO PUT A PUNTING POLE IN IT STOP I AM ON MY WAY STOP MUCH TO DO TO SETTLE MATTERS HERE BUT I AM ALIVE AND VERY VERY WELL STOP WELL ENOUGH TO MAKE LEO REGRET ANY IMPRUDENT DECISIONS STOP MOUNT VILLIARS
It took Stuart eight days to gather monies, put his estate in Odessa up for sale, and travel to Tsarskoe, where he made his formal good-bye to the tzar and court, put his new and elegant home there up for sale also, and gathered more money. When he finally arrived at his apartment in Petersburg, however, a further telegram was waiting for him.
MANY INTERDEPENDENT ON MOUNT VILLIARS MONIES STOP YOUR WIRE ARRIVED AFTER HOME SECRETARY MOVED QUICKLY STOP HAD COLLEGE OF ARMS CLOSE ALL ENTAILMENT’S ACCOUNTS STOP YOUR PRESENCE GREATLY NEEDED STOP CAN’T PREVENT UNCLE FINDING SECONDARY CREDITORS WHO BELIEVE YOU DEAD STOP MUCH CONFUSION MORE PROBLEMS BUT COMPLICATED STOP HURRY STOP BABBAGE
Highly alarmed, Stuart left three households of retainers in the hands of his butler, all to follow, then took off on his own with only his manservant. On his way to Paris he sent the following:
SEND SOMEONE TO GUARD CASTLE DUNORD STOP UNCLE MAY RANSACK LIKE AN ARMY OF HUNS STOP MOUNT VILLIARS
In Paris, the response read:
DUNORD LOOKS LIKE HUNS ATTACKED STOP UNCLE SAYS HE TOOK NOTHING STOP HAVE HIRED SMALL STAFF TO GUARD BELATEDLY STOP BABBAGE
From Cherbourg, Stuart wired:
UNCLE WOULD TAKE ANYTHING VALUABLE AND PORTABLE STOP WORRIED ESPECIALLY ABOUT A STATUE IN NICHE OF STAIRWELL STOP PRESS UNCLE FOR STATUE STOP ARRIVING TONIGHT STOP MOUNT VILLIARS
In Southampton, when Stuart stepped down onto English soil—for the first time in twelve years—he regretted his last two telegrams. A statue? One he hadn’t thought of in years? It must have been a belated reaction to the information that his father was dead, his own life once more changed dramatically by his detestable sire. Foolish. Stuart traveled to London by train, clattering along to the rhythm of self-reproach.
All could be put aright. Leonard was easily enough subdued. A small statue didn’t matter so much one way or the other.
There was nothing for it. And Leonard would get away with little of his attempt to usurp a peerage. For one thing, anyone only had to look at Stuart to know who was the heir to all connected to Donovan Aysgarth. He was the spitting image of his handsome father.
A fact that, at times, could tie Stuart’s stomach in knots.
No matter, though, he liked the idea of assuming one of England’s most powerful, wealthy titles. The statue, however, appeared lost for good. For Leonard simply denied and denied and denied that he had it. He argued that the castle in Yorkshire had lain dormant, uninhabited, for more than a decade. That things were missing didn’t immediately say that he had them. Anyone could have taken anything from the old place at any time by simply walking in and tucking it under his arm. Why was Stuart making such a row over something he’d left more than a decade ago and upon which he’d never looked back?
Why, indeed. Why did Stuart’s heart sink when he finally confronted the empty niche with his own eyes?
“Lost,” he muttered. Lost.
Yet he could envision it suddenly. Green, glittering, vaguely frightening, fascinating. An old, Byzantine animal creature, as he recalled. And in that moment the little lost statue felt, for the life of him, like the only thing he had had to come home to: something he remembered fondly from a time before memory was affixed—mapped and land-marked—with words.
The Lamb
Lamb Stuffed with Crottin, Spinach, Rosemary, and Toasted Walnuts
Bone a leg of spring lamb and put the removed bone into a hot oven to roast. Meanwhile, in a bowl, with knife and fork, cut and mash together two giant handfuls of fresh, washed spinach, the goat cheese, and the leaves from several sprigs of rosemary. Crack and clean a small apronful of walnuts; chop the nutmeats till crumbly. On a separate pan, toast the nutmeats briefly (about a minute) in the oven beside the roasting bone. Add half the toasted nutmeats to the stuffing mixture; reserve the rest. Fill the opening in the roast left by the bone with the stuffing, tie securely, then remove bone from the oven, reduce oven heat, and roast stuffed leg 30 minutes per kilo. While the lamb roasts, boil the roasted bone in four cups water with an onion, several carrots, salt, pepper, and the stalks from the rosemary. Reduce to a cup; strain and discard solids. (A feast for your favorite dog.) Remove cooked roast from oven and drain off the heaviest fat, being careful not to disturb the sticky bits on the bottom. Deglaze the pan with the reduced stock plus one cup brandy, letting the liquid boil till it is rich, brown, and slightly thickened. Pour reduction over roast and sprinkle with remaining walnuts. Accompany with potatoes roasted with carrots and fennel bulb.
—E
MMA
D
ARLINGTON
H
OTCHKISS
Yorkshire Ways and Recipes
Pease Press, London, 1896
Rams are the most difficult to shear. There is nothing like trying to move around three hundred pounds of indignation and hard-horned obstinance.
—Emma Darlington Hotchkiss
Yorkshire Ways and Recipes
T
HE
events that would drop Emma Hotchkiss—verily sink, she might have said—into a quagmire of sin and crime began on the first sunny day she’d seen in a week as she galumphed gracelessly across a green Yorkshire field in the vicar’s unbuckled muck boots. His boots, with her in them, clopped along, as big as buckets on her feet, making a nice rhythm: a hollow
plock
on the lumpy ground, then a
clap
as her foot knocked forward, her ankle catching at the gum rubber instep. She held her skirts high as she made good progress, collecting nary a mishap. That is to say, out of habit and despite the protective boots, she stayed clear of sheep droppings while making a fairly direct path for the far road, which she had to cross to get to her neighbors’, the Tuckers’, farm. She was headed there to collect their mending, which was how she brought in the extra shilling or two.
Emma was about fifty yards from the road, when she heard the unusual noise: a rising clatter that halted her, making her twist at the waist to look sideways down the road.
There, on the other side of the hedgerow, from around the far bend, a huge coach appeared, one of the largest she had ever seen. The driver atop it, hunched forward,
heeyahed
the horses as he energetically cast and recast his whip, calling to his team of eight. The whole thing, vehicle, team, and driver, shook and rolled hell for leather up the lane toward Emma, an unbelievable sight.
And not just because of the size and noise and lightning haste of the vehicle. The horse team comprised, shoulder to shoulder, eight of the shiniest black coaching stallions she’d ever laid eyes on—like black glass—with glimpses above the hedgerow of galloping white socks to their knees and hocks. Any more perfectly matched horses could not have existed, nor galloped better in time. Their braided manes jarred along in perfect synchronicity to a jangle of tack and the clatter of wheels, the brass fittings sparkling in glints from the sun. The coach itself shone: As it came closer, its black and green and gold filigree paint all but leaped into relief, bright, crisp, and clean in the way of new things.
It was a new brougham, in its seat a coachman in new livery, while, peering over the back, two footmen held on for all they were worth—each with one arm through a metal rail, the other gloved hand clamped to the crown of his top hat. Such rolling magnificence did not often frequent the country roads this far north of London. There was only one reason such an event should happen today, and, as the vehicle sped by, the family crest on the side of the carriage confirmed her suspicion: The new Viscount Mount Villiars was taking up residence. At jolly high speed.
Not that he would like what he saw when he got there. If he took the time to see it—the old place, Castle Dunord, had fallen into disrepair. Though what did it matter? He wouldn’t stay long. The Viscounts Mount Villiars never did.
She shook her head, thinking how dangerous it was for a carriage to race through narrow, crooked roads bordered by hedgerow and stone boundaries as old as the Roman inva
sion. The new viscount was going to kill himself (which was, come to think of it, what the last viscount did).
But, no, in the next moment, her silent rebuke heralded a different disaster, one more her own: For, up the road, from within a huge cloud of dust, the careening coach barely visible within it, came an exclamation, the coach driver yelling something. This quickly blurred into the scrape of carriage wheels, the creak of springs, a din of metal and stone. After which Emma distinctly heard a small thud and a tiny outcry.
Not human. Animal. Thank God, she thought at first, though her heart sank. For she knew the cry instantly—as it came again—to be the loud, plaintive bleat of a sheep.
The bleating pierced the air with distress, louder, clearer as the clatter of the carriage dimmed—the vehicle swerved in the lane, then trundled off again with nary more than a pause. While the bleating continued, high-pitched, desperate, hurt. No, not a sheep. A lamb. A baby. The sound was thin-voiced, forlorn: The wee animal bayed.
Emma was running. She wasn’t sure when she’d begun, only that she moved her legs as fast as they would go, her skirts hiked in her fists, her heart thudding loud in her chest. The air she breathed felt hot in her lungs as her feet beat against the ground up into her shins. Or clomp-hopped—somewhere, she’d lost a boot in the bargain, so her gallop had become lopsided. As she came up on the hedgerow, she saw the carriage disappear completely in a puff of dust at the next bend, its rumble fading to a distant drone. Gone. She clambered up and over the thick bushes, her clothes and hair tangling in them. The hedgerow held her for a minute, with Emma struggling, shoving at it, branches snapping, scratching. Then it released her, and she was out onto the road.
Silence, all but for the rasp of her own breathing and the
thump-thump
of her heart that echoed in her ears. On the road though, no sound. Quiet reigned as she spotted the lamb. It was only a few yards up, midway in the short straightaway. She hurried over, then squatted beside it, a pa
thetic thing at the edge of the roadbed. The animal lay on its side at an awkward angle, a tangle of thin black legs, the rear ones bright with blood. Its hips and abdomen oozed, the red spreading into the woolly white coat so quickly, it was as if the creature lay on some sort of gluey red fountain. It didn’t look real.
“Oh, poor dear,” she said as she stroked its woolly, oily white shoulder. Its dark eyes shone, focused on her. It bleated again, a puny sound, a lamb whimper. “It won’t hurt for long now,” she murmured. Oh, dear, oh, dear, what a mess that coach made of you.
Somewhere off, a sheep called. Emma could hear its
baa
growing closer. The lamb’s mother’s response to her offspring’s unique voice, to its call for her. Before the ewe could locate her lamb though, her son—the injured lamb was an uncastrated male—had stopped calling for help: beyond it. He moved his soft black mouth once, showing his pink tongue, then, openmouthed, grew perfectly still, his eyes staring straight.
“Oh!” Emma breathed out, covering her mouth with her palm. Oh. Her eyes welled for a second.
Stop, she told herself. It’s just a sheep. There were thousands in Yorkshire.
Precisely. And no one who lived here doubted the value of every single one of them. Especially the spring lambs. They were the future. A sheep farmer counted his or her rise and fall by the number of new lambs produced each year—and a male, uncastrated, by late August, was breeding stock. A fine herd of sheep meant milk, wool, food on the table, a sheep farmer’s livelihood. Emma wasn’t a sheep farmer herself. Her flock was too small to be said a living came from it. But one day—
That was when she saw the purple splotch of paint on the animal’s back—her mark. She looked at its dead face, took in its limbs, proportions, and
still
couldn’t believe it.
Her
lamb?
Worse:
her
male! She only had one. She looked at it again. Oh, bollocks it all! She wanted to weep, scream, bellow! What was he doing
here
?
Uselessly, she continued to stroke the lamb, a male who would have been old enough by winter to see it through its first raddling. What was it doing off the fell, where it was supposed to be grazing with its mother?
What was it doing here lying dead in the road?
Emma made herself straighten her legs, but could only get up as far as a stoop: bent over, her hands between her knees. She squeezed her eyes, fighting tears; she used her anger to do it.
Blast!
Here she stood alone over her hope of a future, a hope lying dead in the road, with her standing in one boot and a sock of a husband who was not a year gone himself.
Blast!
she thought again, then stood all the way up, and shouted.
“Blast it!” she said toward her ewe, waving her hands to shoo the animal back toward the meadow. “It was that west border again, wasn’t it?” she asked. Her west pasture was marked off by an old stone wall, built by the Romans, upright chiefly from its wide-base design and the glue of time. Periodically, a sheep jostled a stone loose, though usually nothing more came of it than Emma cemented the stone back. “Where? Where is the hole this time?” she yelled.
The ewe skittered away at a lope. Good riddance, Emma thought and wiped her hands on her apron—they were wet with a clamminess that had come over her. “Ah, life, drat you anyway,” she muttered as, with her forearm, she pushed her hair off her forehead.
Ah, life.
And blooming, bleeding death, curse it all.
And reckless viscounts, may the devil take them, who ran over helpless lambs in the road and kept on going.
The next morning, at the crack of dawn, Emma, in her best frock and bonnet, pulled herself up onto Hannah the mule—the community property of herself and several of her
neighbors—and made the eleven-mile trek uphill to Castle Dunord, the residence of the new viscount and seat of the viscountcy.
She would speak to her new neighbor, who had undoubtedly done her damage only by accident. He’d been inside the coach after all; he might not even realize it had struck a lamb. She would tell him. He was a gentleman, wasn’t he? He would act honorably and take responsibility.
Indeed, when she turned down the castle’s lane of trees, her heart lifted. A quick resolution seemed to lie upon the horizon, for the new viscount obviously had money enough to right a thousand dead lambs and hardly notice. Emma took in the sight of the old castle for the first time in years and was astonished. Its old stones, ghostly and dingy for decades, were clean, while the grounds were alive with activity: a regular beehive of journeymen, gardeners, and what-have-you in the way of servants and workmen. The regal old building was being refaced, its garden replanted, its roof mended.
She tied Hannah up in the midst of pots of new plants, some tall, some bushy, their foliage shushing in the breeze, then walked past where the old fountain had been, with two men staring down its plumbing, another hammering,
kong, kong, kong
, on new copper tubing.
Despite the noise—and there was more inside, of large things clapping, moving about—a neat butler in tails greeted Emma at the front door very formally.
No, the viscount wasn’t “receiving visitors.” When she explained it was more than a visit, that she had business with him, the butler a little irritably then told her, no, he wasn’t “doing business yet either, not without prior arrangement.”
“The viscount killed my lamb.”
The man in uniform blinked, then said, “The answer is still no.” The opening of the doorway narrowed. “I am not to allow anyone to disturb his lordship. He is busy. Good day.”
She leaned forward. “Then may I please make an appointment to see him, when he is free?”
“Do you have a calling card?”
A calling card. Now wouldn’t that be a la-di-da luxury. “I have a name: Emma Hotchkiss.”
The man raised a smug eyebrow. The door would have closed all the way, but a sound, someone’s voice, stopped the butler, making him twist at the torso and pause, rigid. As if something strange and remarkable, as alien as a dragon, had come up behind him.
A low voice addressed the man, a passing shadow. Whoever it was was tall. The butler, looking upward and behind, replied instantly with all but fearful deference, “A local woman, sir.”
In the servant’s distraction, Emma pushed the door open slightly and leaned closer, shifting an inch this way, then that, trying to see to whom the butler spoke. All she could be certain of was dark: dark coloring, dark clothes, long limbs. Or perhaps she was only looking at elongated shadows; hard to say. Though she heard distinctly the hushed reserve of a quiet, deep voice, a masculine register.
This voice rolled out another unintelligbly low tune of words—the speech having almost a musical rhythm, slow, measured, considered—then the tall shadow moved away, gone.
The butler turned back to Emma, more smug than ever. “His lordship has no time for local squabbling—”
Local squabbling? Emma risked her hand by putting her gloved palm flat on the door’s surface—did she dare push her way in? She wanted to. By jings, she wanted to latch hold of that shadow and give him a piece of her mind.
Local squabbling? That’s
what that low voice had been saying? For most assuredly the voice had belonged to the viscount himself. Within two feet of her, yet he would not deign to discuss her grievance. Gentleman, indeed.
In the garden behind her, construction, commotion grated.
Hammers clapped, rather like her heart, mirroring a rage that grew louder, banging in her ears. Such anger!
The butler eyed her hand on the outside of the carved wood door, as if he eyed the hand of a beggar, a strumpet’s—certainly a lady didn’t soil her white glove with such temerity. Then the doorway narrowed anyway, pushing at her arm as his face became a strip of whiteness in the dark, noisy interior.
Emma lifted her chin and spoke quickly, with the kind of youthful folly—the conviction that right would win—she could both berate herself for yet not stop herself from feeling. “What am I supposed to do,” she asked, “if his lordship won’t make good on this injury? I haven’t the money myself. So am I simply to be set back a year of breeding because the viscount likes to travel fast? He
must
see me. I am the widow of the former vicar of the parish, a woman of some respect in the village—”
“Indeed,” came a murmur over the last of her words. It was spoken almost with amusement: as the door quietly shut in her face.
Emma stood there stunned, then rode home fuming. She passed her own cottage and continued on to John Tucker’s, who, besides being her neighbor, was a local magistrate.
A lamb lost in the road could be worse, she decided: She could have not known the culprit. Too often, all a farmer had was an animal carcass, a casualty of fast conveyances on a winding country road. When the guilty party was known, however, Yorkshire courts were blissfully biased, nearly everyone being sheep owners themselves. Local laws did not tolerate running down one of the region’s chief resources. When a person was caught killing one, he paid dearly because hardly anyone was ever caught. A known offender, on the law books, paid for all the future sheep the dead lamb might have produced—a progenitor rule—though, in fact, he paid truly for all the sheep who had been killed with no culprit to hand. It was a jurisprudence of balance. And thank God for it.