Peter stood up slowly. At the door he stopped, with his hand on the latch, looking out at the great dark shape of the gate in the fog, and the house beyond it that had been his whole life and his whole sentence.
"Thank you," he said, "for not being what I told the newspapers you were."
And he went up the drive through the fog, carrying the copy of his uncle's letter against his chest like something that might otherwise blow away.
Chapter 17: The Wedding Dress
Beatrice sent for her the next morning, which in the Whitmore house was an event; Beatrice did not send for people. She waited, in the manner of queens and headmistresses, for people to discover that they had been expected all along. But the message came down by Clara's hand, written on a card in a script so fine it seemed embroidered: Come up to me when you have had your breakfast. There is something in this house that belongs to your side of the story, and I am too old to carry it down the stairs.
She was waiting in her sitting room in a dress of dark blue wool, with her hair done and her rings on, as though for a portrait.
"Sit a moment," she said. "No. On second thought, do not sit. If I let you sit, I shall talk, and if I talk I shall be an hour arriving where a staircase will take us in four minutes. Give me your arm, Hannah. We are going up to the cedar attic, and I have not climbed to it in eleven years, and I intend to arrive looking as though it were nothing."
It was not nothing. The attic stairs were narrow and steep, and Beatrice climbed them one at a time with her hand hard on the rail and Hannah's arm under her elbow, refusing, with a small shake of the head, every offer to rest. At the top she stood breathing carefully among the rafters, looking about her with the air of a woman visiting a country she had once ruled.
The cedar attic ran the length of the house, low and fragrant, its floor a sea of trunks and hatboxes and the shrouded shapes of furniture that had outlived the rooms it was bought for. Rain ticked faintly on the slates. Light came through two dormer windows the colour of weak tea, and everything smelled of cedarwood and lavender and the particular sweetness of paper kept dry for decades.
"There," Beatrice said, and pointed with her chin. "The long box. Black, with the brass corners. It has been moved three times in fifty years and I supervised every move, and told three generations of maids it was my mother's christening gown. It is not my mother's christening gown."
Hannah lifted the lid.
Inside, under tissue that had yellowed like old snow, lay a wedding dress.
It was ivory β or it had been ivory in June of 1975, and time had deepened it to the colour of cream in tea. The bodice was worked with seed pearls in a pattern of small leaves. The skirt fell in soft, old-fashioned folds, and folded with it, as carefully as a flag, lay a veil of tulle with a band of the same pearls. It had never been worn. Somehow that was the first thing one knew about it, before any fact: it had the untouched, waiting quality of a room kept ready for a guest who is never coming. A card in a faded hand lay on the tissue. Beatrice did not pick it up.
"Mrs. Alcott of New Haven made it," she said. "Four fittings. I stood on a stool in her workroom in the spring of 1975 and she pinned and pinned, and my mother wept a little, in the way mothers were permitted to weep at fittings, and the dress was finished the last week of May and hung in this house, in my room, in a muslin bag, like a person holding her breath." She looked at it a long moment. "On the morning of the wedding I put on my underclothes and my stockings, and my mother came in with her face arranged, and said there had been an accident on the bridge road. By noon they were dragging the river. I took off my stockings and sat in that room until dark, and the dress hung there, and I could not make myself understand that it was only cloth. It seemed β it seemed to be the only one of us who had been told nothing. It was still expecting him."
"Beatrice," Hannah said softly.
"I had it put away that winter. I could not have it burned β brides burn dresses in novels; in life one is more cowardly, and more tender. When I married August, two years later, I wore grey, at the little church in the village, with twelve people and no music, and I was not unhappy, Hannah. Let that be in the record too. I have had a long marriage and it was not a counterfeit one. But this β " her hand hovered over the box, not touching β "this I kept. Every woman in this story kept something she should not have had to keep. Silas kept letters. I kept a dress and a letter, and did penance with both of them in the dark."
From a smaller trunk she directed Hannah to bring out a cedar box of its own, no bigger than a book, and opened it on her lap.
The christening cup was silver, gone the soft grey of silver never polished, and it was small enough to sit in Hannah's palm. Around its belly ran an engraved band of running hares, and beneath them, in the careful script of another century's silversmith: SAMUEL WHITMORE, and a date in the spring of 1951.
"His christening cup," Beatrice said. "August's is in the dining room cabinet, and has been used by three generations of godchildren, and has the dents to prove it. Samuel's came to me among his mother's things when she died β she sent it to me, I think, because I was the nearest thing to his widow this house ever had. I have kept it in the dark, like everything else." She took it from the box and held it a moment, and her hands, which were not steady anymore, were steady on it. "It was made to be held by his hands and drunk from by his children. Instead it waited fifty years in a trunk for his granddaughter to climb the stairs." She put it into Hannah's hands and closed the girl's fingers over it, gently, the way one closes a hand over a bird. "It is yours. It was always heading to you. Everything in this house that belonged to him has been heading to you at walking pace for half a century, and the house has felt it, and so have I."
Hannah stood with the cup in both hands and the tears standing in her eyes, and could not speak, and Beatrice, who had managed the whole climb and the whole confession without a tremor, nodded as though that were the correct reply.
"Now," she said, brisk again, because briskness was her form of tenderness, "the dress. I have thought about it all night, which at my age is a decision and not a symptom. It will not stay here. It will go to the county historical society, with a card β and I shall write the card myself, and it will tell the truth, the whole of it. Made by Mrs. Alcott of New Haven for the wedding of Beatrice Hale and Samuel Whitmore, June 1975. Not worn. The groom did not die, as this town was told. He walked out of the pedestrian gate of Whitmore House at midnight with one bag, and lived fifty years in Maine as Sam Hart, a fisherman, and was loved there, and this is his granddaughter who brings the dress out of the attic." Her eyes were bright and perfectly dry now, and very fierce. "Let the county keep it with the story told complete, at last. Let it be the first thing this family has ever put in a public place without anything left out. I am too old to be edited, Hannah. So is the dress."
They went down the stairs slowly, Hannah going first with the cedar box in her arms, turning at every landing to offer an arm that was taken with less refusal each time. In her sitting room Beatrice sat down in her chair all at once, like a marionette whose strings had been politely released, and looked at her hands.
"There," she said. "That is the last of my keeping. Whatever else this house is hiding, it is not mine, and it is not hidden by me. It is a very strange feeling, child. I had grown used to the weight. I feel as though I shall float up to the ceiling like a balloon at a fair."
"Then I'll bring the tea up here," Hannah said, "and sit on you."