Chapter 6
It was the sixth day of Sidney’s absence. Four days overdue. The snow had begun to fall within hours of his departure, and it continued, whiting out the sky, until even the trees at the edge of the woods disappeared behind a white veil.
Ophelia stood at the window, watching. Waiting. Where was he? Had he reached shelter before the storm began? Would he return home in time for them to celebrate the holiday together?
The worry wore at her peace, settling like a dull ache in the pit of her belly, until she couldn’t keep at bay the worst questions. Was he dead or alive? Would she be like the sad-faced Mistress Thorpe, waiting for her newlywed love to return and waiting in vain? If he were dead, what was she? Who would she be without him?
She’d push the questions away. But over and over again they overcame her defenses, just as the snow snuck into every crevice, between each branch, filling each line carved on the statuary in the barren garden.
She’d waited a long time to marry Sidney, long after all the other girls who debuted with her were married and had children. She’d refused his offer time and again, believing foolishly that he wanted her for all the wrong reasons. But she had been wrong. She had wasted those years she could have spent with his laughter. Normally she saw those years as allowing her to learn her own mind and allowing her never to question her decision. In those years she had come to see the admirable depths of her husband’s character and appreciate all that marriage to Sidney would allow her to become. But if he were dead, she would hate all the days of his presence that she had denied herself.
Ophelia, without thinking, set her hand on her now-constant companion, Mistress Thorpe’s book. She’d translated most of Thorpe’s pages, particularly the poetry by her husband. He’d sent poetry to her in letters from their courtship until only weeks before his execution. Alongside one on their separation, she’d kept a tally of days apart in dots down the side of the page.
Mistress Thorpe’s fragments spoke to Ophelia: she was another woman left alone, waiting. Sadly, for all her reading, Ophelia never found out her name, only her husband’s term for her: Annwylyd, dearest, darling, beloved.
The room was chill, the draft from the rotten windowsills making her breath visible. Ophelia drew six dots in the frost on the window. Six days.
* * * *
It was Twelfth Night, the night before the feast of Epiphany. Ophelia’s tally of days since Sidney had left now had four more dots. Ten days. Her heart threatened to break every time she thought of him. She understood why Alderson refused to speak and why he threw himself into physical labor. It was a way to keep the grief at bay, at least for a little while. Each day, Alderson shoveled the snow from the parterre, clearing from one end to the other, then he would begin again, until Judith called him in for dinner.
Alderson had the snow. Ophelia had Mistress Thorpe’s book and, in it a portrait, in fragments, of the life of a woman long dead. Ophelia had decided she wouldn’t give Alderson her translations. She wouldn’t reveal that Annwylyd, as she now thought of her, had collected witch’s spells in her recipe book. Practicing magic during the Commonwealth, even if it were nothing more than knowing the right herbs to treat a sickness, was a crime greater than regicide. No wonder she hid her book, then disappeared into the mists of Monmouthshire never to be heard from again. But Ophelia couldn’t begrudge Annwylyd wanting to bring her true love home. How could she? If she weren’t a woman of science, she might have tried one of the spells herself.
In the week since Sidney left her, she had focused on her translations. That act had kept at bay the worst of her fears, leaving them to torment her in nightmares of Sidney lost in the snow. But, watching the minutes tick on the standing clock at the end of the room, she knew that if Sidney didn’t return before midnight, she would dissolve into a puddle of despair and sorrow. But he would return: he’d promised. And she clung to that hope.
* * * *
“We haven’t found the treasure yet.” The twins fidgeted.
“We found a recipe book,” Ophelia felt obligated to point out.
The boys collectively rolled their eyes.
“What sort of treasure is that?” Aidan countered. “If you have a cook, who needs to know how to roast a duck or how to fillet a fish?”
“Have you read it thoroughly?” Tom asked. “Are you certain it contains no clues?”
Ophelia hesitated, not knowing how to explain why the book enchanted her.
At that moment, the double doors at the end of the hall burst open, and Ophelia’s heart leapt up in hope.
Sidney walked through. Her Sidney. Safe. Home. Hers. Her heart melted, and she put her hand on the table to keep her balance.
Sidney caught her gaze. Though he spoke first to Judith, he kept his eyes on Ophelia. He raised a single finger. “One moment,” he mouthed to her, and she thought one moment would be an eternity too long.
Judith crossed to Alderson, sitting before the fire, his head cradled in his hands. She touched his arm, directing his attention to the entrance.
Sidney pulled the double doors wide open, pushing them back against the wall. Then he disappeared back into the hall, beyond sight. Ophelia felt her heart pull after him with longing.
A moment later, Benjamin and Sidney appeared on either side of a young man in rural dress, supporting him as he limped forward slowly. His head was wrapped in bandages, and his arm was immobilized in a sling. His face was bruised and cut, with one eye swollen almost shut.
The room fell silent, and the company stared for a moment. Then Alderson gasped. He cried out, “My son!” and ran forward, followed closely by Nigel, whose face beamed at the sight of his brother.
“Father!” the young man tried to step forward but almost fell.
Sidney and Benjamin caught him. Then his father and his brother were at his side, taking Benjamin’s and Sidney’s places. Judith worked in the background, sending Aidan and Tom to bring the chaise longue from the front drawing room and place it before the fire in the hall. The room was rearranged in minutes, and the battered youth was settled before the fire. His father tucked a blanket around his son’s legs and brushed the hair from his face.
At the door stood the woman who had tried to deliver the letter, looking wary. Benjamin pulled her forward. “This is Maribel Owens, your son’s savior. Her father keeps the lighthouse near where his vessel wrecked. She saw the disaster and rowed out to save as many as she could. She saved ten men that night. Your son was the last, almost drowned when she found him far from the others, clinging to a reef. The tide had turned, making it impossible for her to reach the shore until the next night, but by then, your son was too feverish to travel farther, so she cared for him in a cave above the line of the water.”
Alderson embraced the girl, then Sidney, then Benjamin. She understood Alderson’s relief profoundly, for Sidney had returned to her as well.
* * * *
Sidney picked her up and swung her around. “I told you I would return before this evening was over.”
She clung to him as if he had been gone a year instead of only ten days. “How did you find him?”
“We traced Maribel back to a tavern outside the village, then to an inn about a half a day’s travel from here. After that, we lost her for a day or more because we traveled all the way to Liverpool, expecting to find her on the roads. By that point, we were too far away to come back empty-handed. True to her heritage, she had borrowed a boat. She brought him almost the entire way by canal and waterway!”
“My clever Sidney!”
“I must share the credit. Your cousin is quite good at this. He asks a question in just the right way to get a useful answer, and he seemed to know when people weren’t giving us all the information they knew or when they didn’t know what was important to tell us.”
“My generous Sidney! Always giving credit to someone other than yourself.” She buried her face in his chest. “I was afraid, so afraid, that you wouldn’t return to me.”
“I will always come back to you, Ophelia. I’m like a bad penny in that. Now that you have me in your pocket, you’ll find that I never leave your hand. But tell me, darling, how you entertained yourself in my absence.”
“You mean other than standing by the window waiting for you to come back to me.” She curled her hand into his.
“Yes, other than that.” Sidney wrapped his arm around her shoulder.
“I read Mistress Thorpe’s book. I’m fascinated by her disappearance. It seems so unlikely: a wealthy woman, lady of the manor, simply disappears, never to be heard from again. Someone had to know where she went, and someone had to help her go.”
“Have you considered, darling, that she didn’t just disappear.” Sidney turned her toward him until they were facing.
“What do you mean?”
“Think of it this way: his family never heard from her again, but that doesn’t mean she died. These were Catholic lands. The Welsh knew the land, where to hide, how to disappear, how to resist. What if her neighbors knew where she was but didn’t tell? We see that sort of thing in Ireland when Jonathan Swift was printing works critical of the king. His enterprise required a printing press, type, paper, ink, and all the associated tools—all in all, several thousand pounds of equipment. Everyone had to know. All it would have taken to send Swift to jail was one person speaking up. But no one ever did. Perhaps the same thing happened with our Catholic lady. Perhaps we are looking for her in the wrong place.”
“What would be the right place?” She searched his face for more information.
“Your brother said it days ago.” He grinned. “We should look in the chapel and in the churchyard.”
* * * *
The next morning was the feast of Epiphany, and the family gathered to celebrate. Alderson made an impassioned speech about how he had been like Job, but his son had been returned to him, like Lazarus from the dead. He thanked Benjamin and Sidney for their efforts in bringing his son home safe. The lighthouse keeper’s daughter was well compensated for her troubles, and Percy seemed genuinely distressed when his nurse attempted to return home. She agreed to stay until he was more fully healed. Alderson declared that when she returned to her family, she would have the finest rowboat she could ever hope to own.
When Ophelia and Sidney proposed they search the chapel before they abandoned the hunt, Alderson—who would have granted Sidney any boon—handed them the key.
The chapel Thorpe built for his wife had been almost a ruin when Alderson bought Coldmarsh House. Alderson had installed a new roof to stop the decay, but he had done nothing else, and services had not been held in the chapel for years.
Ophelia and Sidney walked the aisles, hand in hand, while the young people searched, their excited voices resounded off the hard walls and floor. They were running their hands across the larger monuments, feeling for irregularities that might signal a hiding place.
“Alderson says that after Thorpe’s execution, family members had buried his body in a crypt in London.” Ophelia ignored the larger monuments. “After the restoration, they arranged to have him interred here.”
“You seem to know what you are looking for,” Sidney observed.
“A woman who spent her life in hiding would want a quiet burial near the husband she lost too soon. If she managed to escape, she wouldn’t want a gravestone that called attention to the fact that her neighbors had hidden her.”
“Let’s look there.” Sidney pointed to the back of the nave where the most modest memorials were set into the wall.
Ophelia took only moments to find the one she was looking for. “Here.”
Near the corner, low on the wall, was a memorial carved so faintly that one would need a rubbing to read it clearly. But Ophelia could make out the name.
Annwylyd
She pressed her fingers to the cold marble. “You have been here all this time.”
Sidney wrapped his arms around her, looking over her shoulder. “Annwylyd?”
“It means beloved or dearest. I think the recipe book was left in the wall to lead us here, to her tomb. But I can’t prove it.”
“Sometimes, darling, the things we know are true can’t be proven, just as I know that I love you with all my heart.”
“And I, you, darling.” She turned to trace the features of his face. “And I you.”
THE END