The Half That You See by Rebecca Rowland (the two towers ebook .TXT) 📗

to peruse it. I thought, especially, that he’d be tickled to see one of the photographs we’d been shown, repeated in the text, this time definitely naming Lady Sofia Cranburgh as the sitter.

“According to this volume, Lady Sofia was an unparalleled paragon of taste, generosity and breeding,” Martin declared after tea one afternoon, when we were taking our post prandial walk about the property. I agreed, saying that I’d heard similar encomiums from virtually everyone in the village or surrounding area, including an otherwise surly auto garage fellow who had changed the tires on our rented car. “Then I’m afraid you have rather sizable shoes to fill,” Martin concluded. I told him I would do no such thing but rather rely on his own good works and would merely be a hanger-on. I knew his fiduciary business in London had gone exceedingly well, and we’d extended our lease on Cranburgh Grange for another annum.

The St Botolph’s Fair day was a gorgeous one, picture perfect, and both Martin and I were thrilled to see how wonderfully the front and larger south-side lawns looked as a fair ground. It was charming, naturally, with old fashioned booths of deal and other lightwood and so gaily done up—the cake stalls, the tombola, the jam racks, the duck race for the children, the curiosities booth (of questionable antiquities)—that I said to one villager, “If she were here, Lady Sofia would approve,” and she replied, “Oh, I do hope so. We do it all for her,” speaking of the long dead woman in the present tense which I thought quite odd.

The afternoon would have been perfect if Martin hadn’t gone off for a longish time with one of the plumbing engineers who was all but resident at the church grounds, just when he was needed to make a little speech. So, it was left to me to stumble through it. When he reappeared and I chided him, he merely said, “Well, they are professionals, aren’t they? I’m certain they’ll find the damned leak.”

I was surprised to hear that he was still bothered by the sound since I now slept in his previous bedroom and still had never heard it at all. I was about to discuss it when Elspeth Westin and her parents appeared and made us a gift of some lovely café curtains she’d embroidered especially for the Grange’s breakfast nook. That occasioned other craftspeople to come forward and simply inundate us with their works as signs of their appreciation. “No wonder Lady Sofia wanted the fair. We needn’t buy household goods for a year,” I said. However, Martin assured me, that these gifts signified that the givers wanted to be invited to tea or luncheon and so now I had that to look forward to.

Luckily Mrs. Grack was neither upset nor surprised and later remarked, “Tw’as a staple of the Lady Cee to hold little repasts for the village women. She was loved so….” She then aided me in putting together a menu for the first of these affairs which I admit would have baffled me to do on my own.

It was during the second such tea that the “professional” plumbers came by the house and went all about it with Martin looking for the leak. They found nothing but declared they would return some evening when everyone was out and it was quiet. That took place two days later and was productive of the following statement: “We tried out every inch of piping in the place, previously wrapping them all in linen for hidden leaks and, as a result, there is no leak to show. Not one leak at all,” adding, I thought, unnecessarily, “Unlike the damned parson’s edifices which haven’t a sound pipe among the lot.”

Martin’s response to this was silent at the time, but the following day I noted in his datebook an appointment in London with an otologist. Without saying a word to me, he was having his hearing checked out. It did apparently check out just fine and he returned without any tiny mechanism half hidden behind his lobes. But that only deepened the mystery. So he moved his bed chamber to the little parlor on the first floor. For a few weeks that appeared to be the solution.

But even before the irritating sounds returned for him, I noticed a distinct if not very large alteration in Martin’s behavior. He insisted on speaking of private matters between us outside of the house and usually on one of our walks, or long drives, which we begun to take whenever we faced inclement weather. One of these conversations began with Martin saying, “You don’t think me a failure in life, do you?”

I was never so astounded by a statement in my life and hastened to refute it. “Who has made you think anything that wrong?” I asked. “Tell me, Martin and I’ll…I’ll slap his face.”

“Too late for that,” he said, laughing at my surprising vehemence, “She was buried a decade ago, although she seemed to hang on far too long.” It was then that Martin told me of his father’s “second wife,” He never called her any kind of mother, and it became clear why. She’d scolded and chided and denigrated him behind his father’s back from the time they met until the day he joined the U.S. Navy, lying about his age to enter at age 17.  He’d never once spoken of her to me in our long marriage and I was both pleased for it now, and yet saddened by his awful parental experience—mine had been so normal by comparison—which seemed for some unknown reason to be returning to bother Martin’s consciousness so much later.

Not too long after this, we found ourselves entertaining another delegation from the village with a second request. It had been a dry and quite lovely autumn, and the month of December seemed unusually mild. Martin and I had discussed whether we ought to return to Longmeadow, Massachusetts for the holidays, but only the previous