Chapter 2
Part 3
“Will you wait for me?” he asked.
“I will wait,” she said, “however long it takes.”
Before he left, he gave her a small gift. It was a thin silver ring, very plain, with a single tiny pearl set in the center. It had belonged to his mother.
“It’s not a betrothal ring,” he said with a crooked smile. “Not yet. Your father would have my head. It’s a promise. Wear it on a ribbon if you like, where no one can see. And when I come home, I’ll put it on your hand properly.”
She wore it on a blue ribbon around her neck under her dress against her heart. She wore it the morning he left, standing at the garden gate in the gray September dawn, waving until his carriage disappeared around the bend in the road. And then she waited for his letters.
The first one came in October from Portsmouth, where his regiment was preparing to sail. It was four pages long and full of small, funny observations about his fellow officers and the terrible food and the cold sea wind. At the end, he had written,
“I think of you every hour. I think of the apple tree and the rain. Wait for me, my dearest. Wait for me.”
She read it so many times that the creases wore through. The second letter came in December from somewhere at sea. It was shorter, and the handwriting was unsteady from the motion of the ship, but it said the same thing at the end.
“Wait for me.”
And then, in the bitter February of 1805, everything changed. The Reverend Whitmore caught a chill visiting a sick parishioner in a snowstorm. It went to his lungs. He lasted 11 days, and Eleanor nursed him through every one of them. On the last night, he opened his eyes and said, very clearly,
“You are the best thing I ever did, my girl. Don’t let anyone tell you that you are less than you are.”
And then, he closed his eyes and did not open them again.
He left her, she was told, almost nothing. The vicarage belonged to the parish. His books were sold to pay his debts. There was a small sum, barely £40 a year, and there was her mother’s sister.
Lady Harriet Crane had married well. Her husband, Mr. Bertram Crane, was a gentleman of comfortable fortune, with a fine house called Crane Park in the next county. When Lady Harriet wrote offering her orphaned niece a home and the protection of family, Eleanor wept with gratitude. She did not know then what that protection would cost.
She packed her few possessions into a single trunk, and she wrote to Alexander, care of his regiment, to tell him of her father’s death and her new address. She told him she was grieving, but safe. She told him she was still waiting. She never received an answer.
At first, she told herself it was the war. Letters were lost at sea all the time. She wrote again in April, and in June, and in August. She wrote every month for a year. She gave each letter to her aunt, who handled the post for the household, and who always took it with a sympathetic little smile and said,
“I’ll see it goes in the bag, my dear.”
No answer came, not one.
May you like
In the spring of 1806, Lady Harriet called her into the morning room and asked her to sit down.
“My dear,” she said gently, “I’m afraid Mr. Thorne has formed another attachment. A lady in Lisbon, a merchant’s daughter with a very great fortune. It is spoken of quite openly in town. A younger son must marry money, you see. It is the way of the world. You must not let it break your heart.”
