Мэри Бэлоу: Someone to Romance

Lydia hired no one to replace her. The house was not so large that she could not keep it clean and tidy herself. She did not possess so strong a personal vanity that she could not groom herself to look decent in company. She did not have a stomach so large that she could not feed herself, though she had never in her life had to do so up until that point. She discovered that she actually enjoyed cooking and baking, once she had gathered some recipes from her neighbors and done some experimenting and made a few adjustments until she was able to produce edible and eventually even appetizing meals. Even dusting and polishing could be satisfying when she looked upon the results. For jobs like scything the grass and cleaning the outsides of the windows and running certain heavy errands, there was the blacksmith’s middle son, a lad who was happy enough to earn a little pocket money.

Lydia was living the life she had hardly dared to dream about before fifteen months ago. She had relatives and inlaws of whom she was dearly fond and with whom she corresponded regularly, but she was not answerable to any of them. She had neighbors who were amiable and fussed over her in quiet, sympathetic ways while she was still in mourning, forever bringing her flowers and baked goods and produce from their gardens. Mrs. Piper, Jeremy’s mother, was particularly attentive in these ways, almost to the point of being intrusive, since she always brought her offerings right inside the house without waiting to be invited and looked around with avid curiosity as she talked.

The neighbors now included Lydia in the social life of the community, both simple gatherings, such as this one tonight, and more elaborate events, like dinners at Sir Maynard Hill’s and the assemblies above the village inn, where there was music and dancing. But from her neighbors— most of them, anyway—as much as she valued their kindness, Lydia could withdraw to the privacy of her own home whenever she wished.

She had even acquired a few real friends over the last year or so, women such as Lady Hill and Hannah Corning and Denise Franks, with whom she could visit and sit and talk and laugh. Women she could welcome into her own cottage. She had never been able to enjoy that luxury at the vicarage, where people were invited only on formal church business, organized and conducted by Isaiah and catered to by Mrs. Elsinore. Lydia had never had women friends until recently, in fact. She liked it.

There was only one thing she needed now to make her life perfect. Oh, it was not a man. Well, not exactly, anyway. She had had a man. Indeed, she had had nothing but men all her life, it seemed, ever since she was eight, when her mother died a few weeks after giving birth to Anthony, the youngest of her three brothers. She had no sisters and no grandmothers. Her only aunt, her father’s sister, was estranged from him, since she had insisted upon marrying a man he had considered less than respectable. Then, at the age of twenty, Lydia had married Isaiah, who had one brother but no sisters and no living mother and not even a sister-in-law until three years ago, when Lydia was twenty-five. She had been married to Isaiah for a little over six years before his death.

There had been nothing but men in her life since she was eight— twenty years ago —until recently. She had decided during the past fifteen months that she had had enough of them, though none of them had ever been openly cruel to her. But there would be no more men—not, at least, men who would own her and have charge of her life and her very mind and person. Freedom was a wonderful thing, she had discovered. It was far too precious to give up. Ever.

Mrs. Bailey, the vicar’s wife, was arranging her considerable bulk on the pianoforte bench, having been invited to play by Tom Corning himself. She was by far the most accomplished pianist in the community. Unfortunately, the instrument was slightly out of tune, as it had been for as long as Lydia had been at Fairfield, and the key of high C stuck whenever it was depressed with any degree of pressure and had to be manually restored to its position before the music could continue. Everyone listened indulgently anyway, while Mrs. Bailey played and Major Westcott stood at her shoulder to turn the pages of the music and lend his assistance with the sticky key.

“Tom,” he called across the room when the first piece came to an end and the smattering of applause had died down. “If you do not hire someone within the next week to overhaul this instrument and repair that key, I swear I will undertake the task myself and you will be sorry.”

“He will probably saw off the key altogether, Tom, and leave a gaping hole in its place for Mrs. Bailey and others to break a finger through,” Dr. Powis warned. “I would not chance it if I were you, though the broken finger would be business for me. Get the dratted piano tuner here.”

“You have been threatening to have the thing tuned for at least the last four years, since I came home,” Major Westcott said. “Hannah must have the patience of Job to put up with it.”

“I am not such a saint, Harry,” Hannah said. “I have been threatening to tune Tom over it for at least that long.”

There was general laughter. Tom Corning and the major had apparently been close friends since childhood and were grinning at each other as they bickered.

Lydia laughed with everyone else.

No, it was not a man that was missing from her life.

It was a lover.

They were one and the same thing, of course, some might argue. But those people would be wrong. A man in her life, whether father, brother, brother-in-law, or husband, would want to own her—they would own her. They would also want to dominate her. She would not allow herself to be owned or dominated ever again. A lover, on the other hand, could be enjoyed and sent on his way when his presence became bothersome.

Mr. Carver, one of Major Westcott’s tenant farmers, who lived a mile or so beyond the village, had come to sit beside Lydia before the music began. As soon as Tom and Major Westcott had finished calling across the room to each other, he launched into an account of the sudden and mysterious lameness of one of his horses in the right foreleg, just when there was a great deal of farm work to be done. Lydia turned her attention to him, though at least part of her mind was imagining how very deeply shocked he and all her neighbors and friends would be if they were aware of her deepest musings.

A lover could be enjoyed and sent on his way . . .

She had been the Reverend Isaiah Tavernor’s wife and helpmeet . That was the word he had liked to use to describe her. It was as though she had had no identity of her own. She was only his helpmeet. For more than six years, first as a curate’s wife, then as a vicar’s, she had cultivated modesty and invisibility because it was what he had expected of her. Not literal invisibility, of course. Everyone had seen her, welcomed her, apparently liked and approved of her. She had forever been busy about parish business and the performance of good works, as befitted the wife of the vicar. But nobody, it seemed to Lydia, not even her closest acquaintances, had really known her. She had had no close friends while her husband lived. She had been too busy, all her time and attention devoted to furthering the work that was his passion. Sometimes she had had the rather dizzying suspicion that she did not know herself. Was there even a self to know? Someone quite separate and distinct from her energetic, zealous, charismatic husband?

Since Isaiah’s death, she had chosen to remain more or less invisible. It had been better thus while she was still in her blacks, and it was easier now so that she could guard her fragile, hard-won freedom. She was known, she supposed, as the amiable, placid, even bland Mrs. Tavernor, the brave, tragic widow and helpmeet of their much-revered deceased vicar. She did not mind. At least for the present, she did not.