Helen Humphreys Three-Book Bundle by Helen Humphreys

she says.
    “Yes. A house large enough to be full of children.” Eldon looks over at her. There’s a steadiness to her gaze that soothes him. It is as though she has laid a cool hand on his burning skin. “It’s my wife’s house, you know. Her father was a Lord. He gave it to us when we married.”
    “It is a fine house.”
    “Yes, it is. A fine house.” Eldon thinks of his library, the cosiness of that room full of his books and maps. When it is cold outside and there is a roaring fire in the grate, he can think of no better place to be. “Isabelle,” he says again. “I gave her the camera. It was my idea. She has always been possessed of an artistic nature. She tried painting but the results did not satisfy her. I gave her the camera after the third.”
    “The third?”
    “The third baby.” Eldon spreads his fingers as though he is searching for a handhold in an outcrop of rock. “The third dead baby. Stillborn. All of them. Two boys and a girl. The first one, it was a girl. I never even held them.”
    Two boys, Annie thinks, Connor and Michael. The merciful Lord will take care of them, she wants to say, to him, to herself, but she remembers, just in time, that Mr. Dashell doesn’t see the world her way. No God. Foolishness, Cook had called it. Annie looks down at Eldon’s hands, fingers spread. They are smooth and white, gendeman’s hands. Annie looks at her own hands. They are thick and red and the skin is cracked and rough as tree bark. They are working hands, the hands of a maid. How can she possibly know anything of his loss? His children are not the same as her brothers. His world is not the same as hers at all.
    Annie and Tess he in their narrow beds at the top of the Dashell house. There is a wind tonight. A tree creaks outside their window, its thin upper branches brushing the glass, sounding like the scratch of a broom sweeping flagstones.
    Annie lies on her back, listening to the wind. So quickly, she thinks, she has become used to having a room in the treetops. She wriggles down further under the covers, feels something sharp against the back of her head. Her Bible. She traces the contours of it with her fingers, hoping the words will leak out, swim into her body. What would Mrs. Gilbey say about the state of her soul?
    Pray for your sinning ways, Mary.
The enormity of this imagined rebuke brings the first shaip stars of tears to her eyes.
    “Annie,” Tess calls out from the other side of the room. “Are you still awake?”
    “Yes.” Annie takes her hand out quickly, guiltily, from under her pillow. What has happened to her, she thinks, that she is now ashamed of the Lord?
    “What do you think,” says Tess, “of Robert and Betsy?”
    “Who?”
    “Lord Robert Montagu,” says Tess. “The one what married his housemaid, Betsy. Did you not hear of them?”
    “No. I led a quiet life in London.” Annie says this and, as she says it, thinks that it sounds as though she was convalescing from a serious illness. “I was not allowed out much,” she says, which sounds even worse.
    “You poor wretch,” says Tess, who cannot conceive of a life spent in forced solitude.
    Annie feels impatient with Tess’s pity. “What about Robert and Betsy?” she says.
    “Well…” Tess stretches her body out, liking the feel of it pulling tight. This is her favourite game now: supposing. It feels delicious to lie in the warm dark and send her questions out across the room, floating away from her like big, coloured balloons. “He saw her washing steps and was so taken with her looks that he had to have her. Betsy already had a sweetheart, but she married Lord Robert without a thought to that. Would you do that, Annie? Would you toss your sweetheart for Robert?”
    Annie knows how this game works. Tess is really asking the question of herself. Annie is only a way for Tess to think about the situation out loud. Still, there is pleasure in being included, and Annie, who has never really thought of such