Philippa Carr - The Drop of the Dice

I thought how wonderful it was to be young and in love and about to be married to the man of one’s choice. My thoughts went back to Dickon and once again I was wondering what my life would have been like if I had married him.

It was absurd to go on dreaming after thirty years.

The day before the wedding arrived, the house was full of the bustle of preparation; the smell of roasting meats and baking pies and all sorts of preparation filled the house. The guests began to arrive. Zipporah had wanted a traditional wedding with blue and green ribbons and sprigs of rosemary.

I was taken back all those years to the day I had married Lance. I remembered the haunting uncertainties which had beset me and how, when I had stood at the altar with Lance, it had seemed as though Dickon was at my side, watching reproachfully.

Soon Sabrina and I would be alone. It would be strangely quiet without Zipporah and Jean-Louis. I should miss my daughter’s bright presence greatly. But she would not be far away and I should see her often. And Sabrina and I would be together. I was always uneasy about Sabrina nowadays. I thought she should marry and have children. That would have been the life for her.

I wondered often whether she regretted not marrying. She took solitary rides. I wondered then did she brood on all that marriage might have offered; was she beginning to think her life was wasted? Now that Zipporah was getting married, did I detect a certain wistfulness in her eyes?

I was thinking about Sabrina when I heard her calling me.

I wondered why she did not come to my room so I went to the top of the staircase and there in the hall was Sabrina and beside her was a man.

I went down the stairs. There was something about him which seemed familiar.

I cried: ‘Can it be…?’

He turned to me and smiled. His eyes, I noticed, were of the same intense blue that I remembered.

‘Yes,’ he said, ‘it is. And you are Clarissa.’

‘Dickon!’ I whispered, unbelieving.

‘Returned to the home of his fathers,’ he said. Then he took my face in his hands and looked into my face.

I was immediately apprehensive. I had aged considerably and could not bear much resemblance to the girl he had known all those years ago. There were shadows under my eyes, and lines which had not been there when he had last seen me. I was long past my first youth.

And him? He had changed too. He was no longer the boy I had known. His lean, spare figure, his deeply bronzed face, the hair which was not so plentiful as it had been and had flecks of white in it. But the eyes were as brightly blue as ever and they burned with an intensity of feeling which I felt must match my own.

Sabrina was saying: ‘I found him looking at the house. He has come to see you. He went to Eversleigh and Carl told him where to come to find you. When he saw me, he thought I was you.’

‘Yes,’ he said, ‘I thought I recognized you.’

‘There must be a family resemblance. After all, we are cousins.’

‘I am so delighted to have found you.’

We were tongue-tied. I suppose after all the emotion we had shared and the passage of years that was inevitable.

‘You have come in time to dance at my daughter’s wedding,’ I said.

‘Yes, Sabrina told me.’

They smiled at each other; and I felt pleased because they liked each other. ‘This is wonderful,’ he said.

And so it was. Dickon was back.

I suppose what happened was inevitable. I should have seen it coming. When he had gone away I had been an innocent girl, very young. Sabrina had only just been born. When he came back he found an ageing woman, one whose own daughter was just married. He would have been thinking of that young girl all through the years. She would be ageless in his imagination. Surely he could not have expected me to have remained as I was before he went away? Perhaps he had forgotten the passing of time. He would have expected a certain maturity, of course. Perhaps he thought to find me looking like Sabrina.

Zipporah and Jean-Louis had left for the house on the estate. They were absorbed in each other. The guests departed. Dickon stayed with us. I had an idea that this would be a spring like no other.

I loved Dickon. I always had, and not even time and space could change my love for him. He had begun as an ideal and he continued so. As he talked to us, I caught glimpses of the old Dickon, the Dickon whom I had loved all those years ago and who had continued to haunt my life in the years between.

I knew that he had felt the same. I knew that he had come back for me.

We talked a great deal about his life in Virginia. He made us see the forests of arctic pine and balsam; he talked vividly of the plantations to which he had been assigned. He had found a certain consolation for exile in hard work.

‘I used to count the hours, the days, the weeks, the years,’ he told us. ‘Always there was the dream of coming home.’

He had worked with cotton and, finding it interesting, had worked hard; he was given promotion; his master appreciated him, and added to his responsibilities as the years passed. In time it was not like captivity at all.

‘If I had not wanted to come home so badly, I might have become reconciled,’ he said.

The climate was benign; he had been free to ride when he wished to. He loved to see the animals—the buffalo and elk, red and grey foxes, muskrats and weasels; he loved the opossums and often saw black bears in the Appalachians.

He used to fish in Chesapeake Bay for sturgeon and trout as well as cod and King mackerel. ‘We would catch the fish and cook and eat it right there in the bay,’ he told us.

In time he had been taken into his master’s house and treated as one of the family.

‘You never married,’ said Sabrina.

‘No… but there was the daughter of the house. She was a widow with a young son. She reminded me of you, Clarissa. When her father died I took over the management of the place. We might have married… but always I had this dream of coming home.’

Those were happy days. I felt uplifted. He had come home for me and all the years when I had thought of him, he had been thinking of me.

I looked at my face in the mirror and wondered how different I was from that young girl. I had aged considerably. But so had he. Who does not in thirty years? We were mellowed, mature now… but that should be no barrier to understanding.

I thought: He will ask me to marry him. It is the happy ending to our story. ‘And so they lived happily every after.’ How often had I read that line to the children. It always satisfied them. So it should. It was the only satisfying ending.

Those evenings in the twilight were the most precious moments of the day:

Sabrina was always with us. I insisted, although sometimes I think she avoided us. I wanted it to be known that Sabrina would always be with me. I knew Dickon would understand that. He always included her in the conversation and if we went riding, Sabrina would be there.

He told us how, when his term was over, he had felt impelled to stay until he had earned enough money to come back. He had felt an obligation to stay until the widow’s son was old enough to take over. Moreover, he did not know what had happened to his family’s estates, and he had wondered whether after the debacle of the rebellion in 1715 they had been confiscated. He had ascertained that they had not and that a distant relative had been looking after his interests while he was away, so he had a considerable estate in the North.

‘I am a free and independent man now,’ he assured us.

A week or more passed. Dickon had said nothing to me. Sometimes we went for long walks together and occasionally he would go alone. Once I saw him returning with Sabrina. When I asked if she had enjoyed the walk she told me she had and that she had met Dickon by chance.