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“But what about the fire? Is that how Mr. Barrett’s mother died?”
“It was a terrible thing,” she says with a look of genuine remorse. “Mrs. Barrett was such a queer sort of woman. Very kind as I said, and yet so cold. She was like a phantom almost with her pearly white skin and faraway blue eyes. You would be speaking to her and after a time realize that she wasn’t there.”
This is something I hardly think would be singular to Mrs. Barrett when listening to the long-winded Mrs. Tidewell, but I let her continue.
“The only time you felt she was really present was when she was with her little boy. Oh, how she doted on him! There was nothing too good for him, no suit of clothes too fine, no little pet too exotic. Apple of her eye, he was.”
I try to imagine Mr. Barrett growing up coddled, in suits of crushed blue velvet with a little squirrel on a chain. “He must have been heartbroken when she died.”
Mrs. Tidewell’s brow furrows quizzically. “I’m sure he would have been, only he died alongside of her.”
We’ve just about reached the benches when I stop suddenly. My stomach drops and cold spreads over me. “But John...you can’t mean...?”
“Oh!” She lets out her wet laugh again. “Oh dear, you didn’t think Mr. Barrett was a ghost all this time!”
Her face grows serious and I let out my breath not surewhatI had thought she was talking about. “No, it was his little brother, Moses, the poor mite. Moses was the favored son, and it was he who died alongside his poor mother in that fire.”
I lower myself slowly to the cold, slightly damp bench and Mrs. Tidewell settles beside me with a grunt and heavy rustle of silk.
Poor, poor John. What was it like to grow up in the shadow of his mother’s favorite, and then for them to both die? How heavy the guilt must weigh on him. Is that why he always has such a look of sadness about him? He may be a grown man now, but I wish I could sweep him up into my arms and hold him, stroking away the bad memories.
“For all her beauty, Theodosia Barrett was not a happy woman.” Mrs. Tidewell beckons me to move closer and looks around as if the grass itself is listening. I humor her and lean in, trying not to inhale her cloying perfume.
“I saw the marks on her myself. Such white skin as that and there’d be a terrible angry bruise at her wrist or near her neck. She tried to hide them, but not well enough, poor thing. Such a cruel man, was her husband.”
My mind races and breathless, I ask, “And what of the fire?”
“Well, there was—Why, is that Mrs. Wheeler?” Mrs. Tidewell half sits up from the bench, squinting across the green and then waving her handkerchief frantically at a pair of strolling women. “Oh, Mrs. Wheeler! Mrs. Hopkins!”
The women pause, and I can only imagine that there’s a tense dialogue taking place in hurried whispers debating whether or not they should acknowledge her.Please, please keep walking, I silently beg them.
But I’m to have no such luck, and I have to wait to hear more about the fire while the three women engage in a conversation devoid of anything of importance save pleasantries about the weather.
When they’ve exhausted all the different ways to comment on the recent rain, the women take their leave. With a bit of a tipsy smile still lingering on her lips, Mrs. Tidewell whispers to me, “You would never know it from looking at her now, but that Mrs. Hopkins once worked as a tavern girl in Manchester. Can you imagine? Ever since she married that lawyer she acts like she’s some sort of society woman through and through. Shameful, really.”
“Yes,” I hastily agree. “Very shameful. But you were saying something about a fire?”
“A fire? Oh, right. Mrs. Barrett had some great row with her husband. I never knew the particulars of it, but they were easy enough to guess. He tried to turn his hand to the boy—Moses, that is—and she barricaded herself with him in the house. Made Mr. Barrett mad with rage. Took a match and put the whole house aflame, her and the boy in it. I don’t think it was ever his intention to kill them, nor to make a ruin of his house. Just wanted to put a fright into her, get her to come out. But the fire took over faster than he thought, and there it is.”
I can hardly breathe. “And John?”
She looks surprised. “He was only a little thing at the time. He must have been off with his nurse somewhere.” She pauses, thinking. “I do remember him at the burial though, so solemn in his little mourning suit. Didn’t shed a tear the whole time, brave little fellow that he was.”
I can envision him perfectly, his jaw set, golden hair falling across his eyes as he watched his mother’s and brother’s coffins lowered into the ground. His father, an equally solemn man but with a vein of anger running through him as hot as lava, gripping his son’s shoulder. He would have leaned down and whispered in his son’s ear with breath full of brandy, “Now don’t you make a sound, boy, lest you want a taste of my belt on your back later.” And young Mr. Barrett would have been silent as the tomb.
“Oh, that burial.” She puts a hand to her heart in a gesture of being overcome, rolling her eyes up toward the heavens. “They never recovered Moses’s body, so they buried an empty coffin for him. Horrid, horrid business.”
“Horrid,” I echo back in a whisper. Willow Hall stands where the old house burned down, and they never found Moses’s body. My mouth turns to cotton as realization dawns. My God, his remains must still be under our house.
“The whole town turned against Mr. Barrett after that, wouldn’t do business with him. It took John Barrett years to pay off his father’s debts.”
I remember the dinner we had what now feels like years ago where I spoke out of turn, forcing Mr. Barrett to confess that his father died bankrupt. I feel even more terrible now that I know the story of what led to that bankruptcy.
“Miss Montrose?”
I start. “Yes?”
“I asked if you knew anything of an engagement between Mr. Barrett and a young lady of the town.”