The Wildest Rake

‘Yes,’ Cornelia sighed. ‘He is very stubborn.’

They talked for a while, then Ellen picked up her basket from a chair and said that she had to take some food to one of Andrew’s patients in the tenements around the Walbrook.

‘So he has talked you into sick visiting, too?’ Cornelia asked with amusement.

‘He is a saint,’ Ellen laughed. ‘But it is a hard life trying to live up to his expectations. I daresay he will gallop me into my grave soon enough.’

Cornelia kissed her. ‘As you have taken to sick visiting, come and visit my mother one morning. She will be glad to see you.’

‘I should like to,’ Ellen said. ‘I would have come before, but I did not care to intrude.’

‘Foolish Ellen. Promise to come.’

Ellen promised, smiling, and next morning kept her promise. Mistress Brent was, as Cornelia had prophesied, glad to see her, and Cornelia left the two of them together for a comfortable gossip. Mistress Brent might claim to hate gossiping, but her daughter, indulgent but shrewd, knew that it was the breath of life to her, and knew too that Ellen, being so much in Andrew’s company, would hear far more of the choicest, latest, most fascinating gossip than any other woman in the neighbourhood.

When she came back she found them laughing over some incident, and was glad to find her mother looking slightly less grey about the mouth. The pain of the broken hip was acute, she knew, but Andrew had warned the family, that it was the mental effect that was most to be feared, for depression could so easily set in after a serious accident like this.

Andrew arrived just as Ellen was leaving, and looked at her with calm approval.

‘Ellen has been making my mother laugh,’ Cornelia told him with a return of her old playful intimacy.

Ellen looked from one to the other of them, and if her sharp eyes took in Andrew’s smiling indulgence as he replied, she gave no sign of it.

‘Wait for me, Ellen,’ he told her ‘I will not be long.’ But she said that she had to hurry back to cook her children their midday meal.

Andrew went up to Mistress Brent’s chamber alone. When he came down he looked cheerfully at Cornelia.

‘Yes, she looks much better. Is that to Ellen’s credit, or mine, I wonder? Does she take her physic?’

‘Reluctantly,’ Cornelia smiled. ‘The pain is bad at night.’

‘I can do little for the pain,’ he sighed. He looked at her searchingly. ‘And you, Cornelia? How are you? You look bonny enough today. I was anxious when I first saw you— you had a blue look about the mouth which did not please me. It is gone now.’

‘I feel very well,’ she smiled.

‘I am sorry about the child,’ he said brusquely. ‘I was very distressed.’

She nodded and turned away. ‘Such things happen to all women, I suppose. Since it happened I have been regaled with many sad tales of miscarriages and infant deaths.’

He looked white and swore beneath his breath. ‘Women are monsters. What horrors have they filled you with?’

She shrugged. ‘The truth, I fancy, Andrew. My own mother lost all her babies but me. I knew these things before. I had not known them as I know them now—with the resignation of acceptance. They were not to happen to me, you see. But it did happen. Now I am armed against fate.’

He looked at her with grim, angry blue eyes. ‘I would that you had never had to know, Cornelia. I did not want you to know such hard things.’

‘Hard truths,’ she said.

‘You are too delicate, too beautiful for such a world,’ he groaned. ‘Like my mother, you should have been better protected. It cannot be God’s will that such as you should be placed in such peril.’

She looked at him with a new comprehension. She saw, suddenly, that Andrew was tender and vulnerable inside the calm shell of his dignity, that he feared life, and had dedicated himself to making life less terrible for other human beings just because he could not bear what it did to them.

That was why he worked until he was grey with weariness, why he had repressed his love for her.

Andrew felt that he lived in a world too terrible to bear.

She was sorry for him in a new way. To love and be in terror for what one loved was a dreadful way to live.

It was not just his love for her that made Andrew so vulnerable. He loved the whole of humanity in that way. He saw the world from a strange angle, saw a wave of destruction poised above it, ready to strike, and ceaselessly built fragile walls of sand with which to dam up that destroying tide, but all in vain.