Free The Wild Dark Flowers by Elizabeth Cooke Page A

her maid, brought her his letters; she had instructions to intercept them before they were ever delivered to the breakfast room. Octavia did not want to offend William, and yet she had to have these letters for herself. It was all she had left of the wild, brief happiness of last year. The messages were like little patches of water in a desert; they were points of light in the grey dreariness of a dutiful life. She read John’s words over and over, and tried not to weep over them, for weeping was too absurdly adolescent. But they broke her heart nonetheless.
    His latest letter was even now concealed in her pocket; and, though she had tried—and still tried—to turn her face from him, his words always found a way through to her.
What are you doing there, this spring?
he had asked.
I hope you have rattled the bars of that pretty cage of yours.
He did not say that she should come to him, however. He did not need to; it was written between the lines. He told her about the house he was building on Cape Cod, but he did not call it
our house
. He only described it to her as if she would need to know in future.
    It’s pretty darn good, Octavia
, he wrote.
There’s a fine deck all around it looking toward the sea, real deep so that it could take a sofa and chairs. The eaves come low. I’ve ordered storm lanterns, a very nice kind, and plain. Can you imagine how beautiful they’ll be, all lit up at dusk? The grass has been bleached right down by the winter, though. Perhaps it was a mistake. Mother recommends sea grass so that the house would simply be part of the shore. I wonder what you would say I should plant to give color out here or if you would say that she’s right. . . .
    Octavia had never replied to him. Not once. She did not trust herself to put pen to paper. She was afraid it would be a letter of despair. But her silence had not dissuaded him; John Gould just kept on writing.
    She couldn’t blame William for their situation. She couldn’t bring herself to blame anyone. It was simply a dire dead end that they all found themselves in. She knew that William felt it, too. Last Christmas he had done his utmost to try to change things.
    He had made an enormous effort to make Rutherford charming. He had invited a large number of guests; he had, to her surprise, brought in actors and musicians to entertain them at New Year. He had told her—he had told everyone—that the home fires must literally be kept burning; that the season must be celebrated in the face of all the horrors across the Channel. It was an act of defiance, Octavia surmised; and, in the midst of their own long winter, their own long standoff, she rather admired him for it.
    As if to underline his determined optimism, he gave her presents that had made her gasp with their extravagance. A full-length sable coat had come from Debenham & Freebody in Wigmore Street, lavishly boxed, nestling in soft layers of tissue and silk. On Christmas Day, in her own bedroom, she had woken to find that he had himself made a little Christmas stocking and placed it on the foot of her bed. It had contained an exquisite leather-bound volume of Amy Lowell’s
A Dome of Many-Coloured Glass
. She was both perplexed and intrigued, for William did not like poetry, and the author was American. After Gould, he had good reason to despise the country. On the flyleaf, he had written,
To Octavia, Christmas 1914.
There had been no other words. Not
to my dearest wife
, or even
to my wife.
    He had come to her room before breakfast, while Amelie was styling Octavia’s hair, and looked at her in the dressing mirror like a blushing schoolboy. She had indicated the book. “This is very nice,” she said. She felt embarrassed; he was not a man for little trifles like this, or affectionate gestures. He had actually shuffled his feet while Amelie carried on curling and setting with a small smile on her face. “I hear she is quite the thing,” he told her. “I thought you might like