To Love and to Cherish Read Online Free PDF Page A

river, which is called the Wyck and flows right through the village alongside the main street, spanned at intervals by old Roman stone bridges—lovely arches; I’d love to paint them. The house has a courtyard that’s gone to seed, a dozen outbuildings in bad repair. The terraced gardens were beautiful once, it’s easy to see, dropping down steeply behind the house and meeting open parkland; but now they’re a wilderness of vines and tangles, and they make me feel tired just to look at them, outside my sitting room window.
    I call it my sitting room. It’s not; my proper sitting room is downstairs, a staid affair with flocked wallpaper and too much furniture. But this is my refuge and my sanctuary, the sort of room I longed for in Battersea Road, because there wasn’t even any turning-around room in that dreadful flat. Lynton Great Hall has thirty-nine rooms, more or less. My sitting room is a half-garret on the third floor, miles from the servants’ bedrooms, accessible only from a set of narrow, dangerous steps leading up from the never-used gallery. There’s a fireplace, thank God, but I would hide myself away up here without it, summer or winter, because I’m safe here. (I feel safe, I should say—I shall see how safe I am.) I sit in my soft leather chair with my writing desk in my lap, scribbling or reading, sketching sometimes. The world is literally at my feet, for the windows—two of them, south– and west-facing—start nearly at the floor. If not for the trees, I wonder if I could see the south Devon coast on clear days. I’ve brought all my books up and set them on the mantelshelf. (The viscount’s library was a great disappointment; apparently he stopped reading anything new around 1825.) I can’t bring myself to ring for the girl if I want tea, or the post, or a clean handkerchief; six flights of steps to and from the basement kitchen are too much even for a viscountess to ask. This is a drawback, but I put up with it willingly in exchange for my safe solitude.
    But sometimes my solitude . . . no, I won’t write that.
    The lawyer came yesterday. Hedley is his name, a dry old stick of a man very much out of Dickens’s
Bleak House
. His news was mixed. There’s money in the estate, perhaps quite a lot, but old D’Aubrey put it in so many different trusts and accounts that it’s going to take some time before Geoffrey can get his hands on it. Hence, much ranting and storming about last night. I think of the time, not so long ago, when Geoffrey’s rages terrified me. But terror numbs eventually. Now I listen and watch as if from behind a thick stone battlement, uncaring, although not always unscathed.
    So, I suppose we are rich. It’s what he’s always wanted. Too late to make him happy, though, I think. What will it make me? Not happy. I cannot see a picture of myself here in this place in six months’ time, or a year from now. Cannot imagine it.
    Geoffrey will go off to fight in the war in the Crimea now that he’s got the price of admission, or soon will have. But I wonder if they will let him fight this time. He’s much stronger, but he still looks bad. Why does he crave it, the fighting and the killing? It’s something I have never understood. But perhaps I make it more complicated than it really is.
    9 April
    Geoffrey took Christy Morrell to his first brothel. It was thirteen years ago, in Devonport, and the girl’s name was Crystal. Or so she said. Geoffrey delighted in telling me this, I can’t think why.
    Exhausted today. Mrs. Fruit is worse than no housekeeper at all, a hundred times worse. Geoffrey says to let her go, but I can’t. Won’t. She’s outlived all her people—there is no place for her to go except the charity home. My throat hurts from shouting at her, which I can hardly bear to do anyway; regardless of the circumstances, one ought not to shout at feeble old ladies. Even when she hears me, she has a truly remarkable way of botching the instruction. I asked