Page 17 of The Education of Ivy Leavold
Silas and I didn’t speak for a long moment, staying quiet in the breeze.
“He married his first wife in the York Minster,” Silas finally said, nodding his head toward the cathedral towers spiking up above the other buildings. “He loved Arabella, you know. People often think he didn’t, because it was arranged between their parents, but he did. He was wrecked after her death.” He sighed.
I thought of Arabella, of how Mrs. Harold had accused Mr. Markham of intentionally moving her to a climate that would force her death. I wanted to know more about her, about their marriage. “Did he know her before they married?”
Silas nodded. “Her family is well-known in the county—moneyed and connected—and she was the inevitable match for him from her birth. The right breeding and the right dowry. But they had a genuine connection too. They exchanged letters while he was at Oxford and even while he traveled…I think he found something refreshing in her. Something sweet. I would say it was her innocence, but I think it was something slightly different. Rather, I think he felt like she would accept his worldliness, his jadedness, knowingly, and still remain as she was. Much how he feels about you, I suspect.”
I glanced back into the dark room, where the long, languid form of Mr. Markham still stretched across the bed.
“But I’m hardly innocent,” I said, gesturing between me, Silas and the bed. “Certainly not in the unspoiled, untouched way that Arabella must have been.”
Silas shook his head. “That’s not what I mean. I mean that your sense of self—your ability to love and experience and live—it can persist, despite proximity to darker things. Women like Molly, they can get hard. Cynical. They stop trusting and eventually they stop opening their hearts. They calcify, slowly, into living stone. Your cousin was much the same,” Silas said, drawing my thoughts away from Molly. “She was also the opposite of Arabella. Passionate and strong, or so she seemed. And in you, I think Julian has finally found everything he was looking for, the synthesis of what he worshipped about Arabella and craved from Violet. The passion and also the ability to remain unsullied by the world.”
I should say thank you, I should feel flattered. My brain fumbled looking for the appropriate response, all as my heart sank under the weight of this expectation.
I could be Mr. Markham’s lover and I could be his wife…but could I be his moral anchor? Could I bear the weight of another’s heart and mind leaning on mine?
And what if I didn’t remain unsullied? What if I grew hard like Molly or Violet? Despite my determination to never see him with Brightmore, I had never deluded myself into thinking Mr. Markham would remain physically loyal to me for our entire marriage—everyone knew that husbands strayed, even those who were less sexually rapacious than my future spouse. But if he did, could I remain unhardened by that? Could I even remain with him? I wasn’t, after all, bred to endure quietly the way most women were. When things grew painful, my instinct was to flee.
And Silas had mentioned Violet, and that brought to the surface the most pain, the most powerful urges to flee.
“What’s wrong?” Silas asked. “You’ve gone pale. I can see it even in this light.”
I knew that this was one of those situations where I should demur, say something polite and reassuring, but there was no girlhood grooming to take over when my mind and tongue failed, and so the truth came out instead. “There are times when I doubt…when I doubt us. Our future. One moment, I think I can stay next to him forever, and the other moment I feel trapped by it. I feel terrified of him sometimes, that he’ll wound my heart or betray me or—”Or kill me.And grooming or no, I absolutely knew I shouldn’t voice that last out loud, not to his closest friend.
But I couldn’t not stay my tongue either—not completely. I had no one to talk to about this, no one to seek advice from. “The night he proposed,” I said, keeping my eyes on the shadowed bedroom, worried that Mr. Markham would overhear, “he made me promise never to ask about the night Violet died. Why would he do that, Silas, if there wasn’t something awful that he’d done? That he had to keep hidden from me?”
“Ivy,” he started, but I cut him off, pacing.
“I should have said no. I can’t agree to that; I can’t notknow. Because what if the rumors are true? What if he did kill her? And what if he kills me?”
Silas stared at me for a long moment, his face creased with deep unhappiness. His characteristic smile was absent when he asked, “Did I ever tell you I was at Markham Hall the night Violet died?”
It took a moment for his words to sink in. When they did, I turned and stared at him. “I didn’t know. Nobody ever mentioned…”
“There were a lot of well-known people there that night, but Julian and the local police very thoughtfully excluded our presence from public knowledge to spare our reputations.”
“I can’t believe Mrs. Harold didn’t tell the entire village,” I said, more to myself than to Silas, thinking of Mrs. Harold’s calculating gossip.
“Mrs. Harold?”
“The rector’s wife?” I prompted. “Young with blonde hair? Slender? Talks incessantly?”
His eyes widened with recollection and something else—something that flashed all too briefly in those blue depths and then vanished. “I remember now,” he said. “You know, she’s grown up in the county too. She always had a thing for Julian, even after he married. Even after she herself got married. She’s always finding excuses to hang around Markham Hall, I suppose hoping that Julian would finally notice her and give her all those things in bed that her feeble pastor cannot.”
“Anyway, what I wanted to tell you,” he said, steering the conversation back to his revelation, “was that night, I saw how deeply unhappy Violet and Julian made each other. He had almost completely reformed himself for her—celibate while he courted her those three months, swearing off any other women. But she didn’t care. She wanted only to be back in London again, to be the belle of the town again.”
“And she was pregnant,” I blurted. I hadn’t meant to tell him, hadn’t meant to bring it up at all, but it was such a shadow at the back of my mind, a shadow that changed everything.
Silas didn’t look surprised. “I know,” he said darkly. “I learned it that night.”
“You did?” I knew it couldn’t have been common knowledge, or Mrs. Harold would have told me all about it.
He nodded. “They fought at the dinner loudly, angrily. He wanted a divorce, she threatened to kill herself if he tried to sue for one. It was quite uncomfortable to listen to, so I suggested the other guests and I move into the parlor, farther away from them, and we all did, to give them more privacy. I was the last to leave the room, and so I believe I was the only one who heard her tell him.”
“About the baby.”
“Yes,” he said, looking troubled. “About the baby.”
