There were seven envelopes of different colors and sizes; some had been mailed and others had only Iris’s name across the front in Rose Jarrett’s now familiar handwriting. The one on top was addressed to Rose in New York City, the postmark too blurry to read. The letter itself was written on thick white paper, one side faintly shiny, the other porous, so that the ink spread out, blurring some of the letters, which had been written in a heavy, rather awkward hand. When I unfolded the single page, a lock of pale brown hair, tied with a piece of string, fell into my lap.
17 October 1914
Dear Rose,
I was on the farm all week. When I came into town your letter was in the silver tray. No one spoke of you, your name is never mentioned. I am happy to know you are safe.
You will be happy to know that Iris is fine. This is a piece of her hair I cut for you. She was playing on the porch, lining up pebbles from the lake from small to large. There were letters made from pebbles, also: R, I, S. I think Cora has been teaching her to spell, she is smart. I hope smart gets her further in life than it has gotten you, that’s all.
I am glad you found the money. I will send more if I can. Please send news. Mrs. Elliot goes on here as if nothing ever happened. I do not think she is your friend.
Fondly from your brother, Joseph.
I let the letter fall into my lap and stared out at the lake—smooth this early evening, and deep blue. This brief missive written by my great-grandfather was almost more astonishing to me than Rose’s longer letters had been. He had lived here, had worked on the cupola of this house, perhaps pausing to wipe sweat from his face and gaze out at the ever-changing lake, as I was doing now. His portrait hung over Arthur’s desk at Dream Master, and though Joseph Arthur Jarrett had died long before I was born, I’d grown up with that image of him as a middle-aged man, successful and certain, the master of all he surveyed, and I’d filled in the rest through imagination and story. The voice in this letter was as different from my image of the man as Rose’s story was from the family legends we’d grown up hearing. Kind, he seemed—there was the lock of hair—but also, by turns, terse and judgmental.
I folded the page back up and slipped it into the envelope with the lock of hair, remembering Rose’s first letter, where she’d talked about her daughter’s dandelion hair. The next letter was to Iris again, and I opened it to find several sheets of plain paper, tissue-thin, the ink once black but now fading to brown, the handwriting slanted, strong, and sure. It had no date, and on the later pages the color of the ink changed and grew lighter, then darkened again, as if the letter had been written over many days.
Dearest Iris,
I am at the station. People come and go. They did not meet me. I waited on the platform, but no one came. After a long time I found a bench and sat. The lobby is vast and grand and there is a clock in the center. I have an address but they are supposed to meet me and I do not know what to do. I must not weep. I must look calm no matter how I feel. So—I will write.
It is late. The station is cold and I keep my coat on.
I think of you warm and safe beneath the blanket. I hope Mrs. Elliot has given it to Cora and that you sleep beneath it, warm and comforted. I wove it all last winter, in the cold attic at night. Across the street, Mrs. Elliot’s lights were often on late. They gave me company. Mrs. Elliot is a suffragette and not afraid to say anything. While she is in the room the other ladies are always quiet, but when she is not some of them whisper that she is too extreme. Cora threw away the pamphlets Mrs. Elliot left, but I took them from the trash. I took them up to our room and read them. They made me feel on fire with ideas. After that I tried to stay in the room when Mrs. Elliot was talking, keeping my expression calm even though I wanted to jump up and agree. I think the ladies who came to tea are safe, so they did not understand. They are safe so the world seems safe to them. But to me the world is different and her words were like lamps.
An hour has passed. I am tired, but I must keep writing, that is one way to be safe. When I put my pen down earlier, a man sat beside me and invited me with a wink to share his bed. He shrugged at my outrage.
I am not so desperate.
Not yet, at least.
Oh, I did not set out to be a scandal. To be so alone in a place I do not know.
It is near midnight. I hold myself still. I dozed a little and dreamed of your father disappearing into the bell tower, gone, a silver ghost, and me climbing up and up forever.
He kissed me in the ruins and that moment became like a dream woven into my other dreams, things I yearned for but could never have. I was haunted by his laughter, too. For what he said was true: I could wash and mend the altar cloths or make dinners for the rector or the bishop, but no matter how much I loved the church or God I could not carry the communion wine or bless it or serve it to the people. No woman could. Not even Mrs. Wyndham in her silks. The more I thought about this, the angrier I got. Anger ate a great space in my heart. If the rules of the church made me less—less human—then maybe the rules did not apply to me. I was foolish, I know that now. The rules always belong to those who make them. I was foolish, and so young. I worked, scrubbing or mending, my skin growing brown in the fields. I worked, and in my anger I remembered that kiss. It was like flowers opening and it made me confused. Sometimes I shaded my eyes to watch his automobile flashing through the trees.
On the night of the comet I was fifteen. Our windows were sealed and we were frightened and the air was very still. Everyone was sleeping, but I could not. A sliver of light came in beneath the wool, where I’d left it loose. After a long time I got out of bed and I felt my way in the darkness to the window. When I opened it clean air rushed in, full of the scents of water and the earth.
I crawled out onto the roof to see the comet, soaring like a jewel against the sky, trailing light. Voices rose up and I knew them: Joseph, and another. I hesitated. My hair was loose. I was wearing an old dress I had pulled on, and no shoes. And then I jumped. When he saw me in the garden Joseph’s voice turned low with anger.
“You can’t come, Rose. Go back to bed”.
“I want to see the comet”.
“You weren’t asked”.
“Never mind”, Geoffrey said. He was by the hedgerow. I’d heard his voice, but I didn’t see him until he spoke. He was carrying a brass telescope. “Let her come, if she wants. At least there will be three in this village who haven’t succumbed to mass hysteria”.
Succumbed. I remembered the word. All these years. I looked it up in Mrs. Elliot’s dictionary. To bring down. To bring low.
Joseph didn’t answer. He could not, since Geoffrey was a Wyndham. But he walked ahead of me, by Geoffrey’s side. He pretended I wasn’t even there.
I think all my life I will remember that night, and the light. It was a new moon, so the sky should have been dark. Instead, the dirt road, the roofs, the trees, all glimmered faintly, as if frosted. From the roof of the church tower we found the comet, its head like the tip of a pencil and pure white, like an eraser in the darkness. The tail spreading out like tresses of hair.
Geoffrey opened his telescope. We took turns looking. The village slept below. An excitement ran through me.
The same sky, I thought when it was my turn and I found the comet in the glass. Here or India or America, it didn’t matter. The same moon and the same stars, and on this night the same wild light on everything. I felt as if the world were turning and must change. No more sewing, no plucking warm eggs from beneath the chickens, no walls built up against my deepest yearnings. I could study and travel and have adventures and be a priest or anything I wanted, I could give voice to the truest aspects of my nature.
I do not know how long we stood under the spell of the strange light, watching the comet, before birds began to sing in the still-dark trees.
Geoffrey folded up the telescope and looked at Joseph. “You go on”, he said. “You go on, Joey. I’ll see her home”.
“I’ll wait”, Joseph said.
“No need”, Geoffrey replied, his voice reserved, dismissive.
The Wyndhams owned the land. They owned our cottage. Joseph stood for a long moment, his eyes as dark as the sky, before he punched the wall and started down the stairs.
I could not speak. I was as powerless as Joseph. Also, I was full of anger and desire. I was like the bird that senses a cat amid the leaves but can’t resist the brightness of the flowers. We started down the stairs, around and then around again, and at first I thought it would be all right, that we would reach the bottom and he’d see me home beneath this comet sky, as he had promised.
But at the landing he caught my arm and pulled me into the bell room with its long windows.
That first time he never touched me, only asked me to stand in that faint light, so he could look at me, he said. Step out of that old dress, he said, I only want to look, and after a long time of hesitating, tears in my eyes, I did. That time he kept his promise, walking around me and whispering oh, my beauty, and he never touched me. My fingers were shaking when I dressed.
When I stepped out of the tower, the shapes of things were starting to come out from the darkness. Joseph was waiting. We never spoke, walking home.
I did not seek him out, but he found me that whole summer long. In a clearing, by a stream, in the dusty barn at the end of the lane. Oh, my beauty, I’ll marry you one day. He said this each time. I believed him. I understood nothing, I see that now. I told myself I was the princess in a fairy tale, helped from a silver carriage, unfastening my hair in the tower, even though it hurt my heart to do it. Later, when Mrs. Elliot talked about the rights of women, my face would burn at how little I had cared for myself and what might happen to my one and only life. But I was very young, and I had no power, and I believed this was a fate I could not question.
My phone rang, startling me so much that the papers slipped from my fingers to the floor. I had to dig through my bag for it, and by the time I found it the ringing had stopped. Yoshi—it was Monday morning there, early, so he must have arrived, it must be before his first day of meetings. I pulled up the number and pressed REDIAL, standing up to stretch and pace in the little room. The lake was as smooth as glass, a silver gray.
“Hey,” I said when Yoshi picked up on the second ring. “Where are you?”
“On my hotel balcony. Overlooking a river of traffic. Where are you?”
“In the cupola at the top of the house, watching boats on the lake. I found her letters, Yoshi. Rose’s letters. I’m in the middle of reading them now.”
“Are they good?”
“They’re amazing. Very moving. I don’t know the whole story yet. I wish you were here,” I added, though in fact I was riveted by the letters and had hardly been thinking of him at all.
“Why can’t I just be there?” he agreed. “Why can’t I be there and not here, watching the boats and floating on the water with you?”
“It’s just a few more days. How’s everything?”
“Not looking forward to the meetings. Otherwise, okay. Look, I have to go, but I’ve got a break in three hours. Can you give me a call? We can Skype, and I’ll fill you in on what’s happening.”
“Good,” I said, “that sounds great. About noon your time, I’ll call.”
“Are you okay?” he asked. “You sound a little off.”
“Just distracted,” I said. “It’s the letters. That’s all.”
When I hung up I saw that Zoe had left me three messages, but I was so eager to get back to the letters that I tossed the phone into my bag without calling her and picked up the fallen pages from the dusty floor. I scanned the last paragraphs I’d already read—the comet night, when the whole world changed, the way he’d pursued her all summer long, the way she’d blamed herself although she’d had no real choice—and came to the place where I’d stopped.
It ended when he went on holiday. I stood in the fields as the Silver Ghost passed by. My friends, weeding, said I was pale. They made me sit down to rest, they brought me clusters of red grapes. So sweet, they stained my fingers. The blood of grapes, I kept thinking, those verses from Isaiah, that cry against injustice. The blood of grapes.
It was Joseph I finally told. The Wyndhams had returned by then. Grim, he went up to the manor house.
I waited outside. I waited for Geoffrey. I’d been inside the manor house just once, the ceilings so tall and the furniture all beautiful, and the servants scrubbing floors or making food and serving it on silver trays. Soon I would know how it was to live there, to drink lemonade or chocolate all day long.
I was so young. I see that now. Yet he had promised to marry me. I felt so sure that I could hardly understand what Joseph was saying when he came out alone, an envelope in his hand, talking about the new life we would have, both of us. How we could travel to America and start again. How no one would ever have to know. We would help each other—a whole new life.
He had piles of money. Passage to America. I touched it, then pulled away.
“But he said he’d marry me”.
“Don’t be daft. Be glad he gave this money to start your life again”.
“Start my life again?”
“A new beginning, yes”.
I remembered the silver auto flashing in the trees, and the scattered stones of the ruins, and the comet.