The Wildest Rake

She looked up, smiling. Her face changed as she saw the expression on his face.

He held a letter in his hand. His eyes were shocked and anxious.

She knew suddenly, with a calm dull grief, what he had come to tell her.

Rendel stood over her without speaking, struggling visibly to find the right words.

‘Andrew is dead,’ she said flatly.

Rendel gave a deep sigh, as though relieved that he had no need to search for a way of telling her.

‘Yes.’

She held out her hand. It was quite steady, she noticed with surprise.

Rendel gave her the letter.

It was from one of his city friends. Andrew had used this man as a messenger before. Now, through the man’s careful sentences, she heard Andrew’s cool voice speaking to her.

He had not died of the plague, but of a slow disease of the lungs, she read. He had been aware of his sickness for a long time.

A small sheet of paper was wrapped inside the letter. She unfolded it and found it was a brief letter from Andrew to herself.

‘My dear,’ it began, ‘when you read this I shall be dead. Do not grieve for me. We shall meet again in the city of God. We are together now, not in the flesh, but in the spirit, as we have always been. Be happy in your life. My greetings to your husband.’

She looked up at Rendel when she had finished reading, and held out the paper to him. ‘You read this?’

He nodded, watching her. ‘He loved you,’ he said.

‘He loved the whole world,’ she answered on a sigh, tears in her eyes.

Rendel was oddly insistent. ‘But you above all,’ he pressed.

Cornelia smiled at him, tender as a mother for an anxious child, reading his hidden thought. ‘He was my brother,’ she said softly, thinking of the great man the world had lost in Andrew. ‘He would never have been more. He did not want it, and neither, in truth, did I. You may be easy, my love.’

They walked together through the garden, where the spider industriously spun her endless shining webs and the russet leaves blew rustily across the neat grass, and Cornelia leaned upon her husband’s arm looking back over the past year.

They had met on a windy, stormy autumn night a year ago. It seemed more like ten years now. These past twelve months had taken all her family and all the friends whom she had known since childhood. The city of London, once so crowded and busy, lay like an open sepulchre, its churchyards now as full as had been its narrow streets.

She had grown up in those close-set alleys, hearing the constant pealing of the city bells. The bells of the city rang now only for the dead who were carried to church.

Yet she had some gain to mark against the many losses. She had found Rendel, her love, her husband.

And she carried his child.

It was going to be hard for her to face a world in which she had no other friend but Rendel. One needed other people. The loss of Andrew, above all, would be a heavy burden to bear. Her calm acceptance of his death did not diminish the grief she felt. Andrew, if all the world had abandoned her, would, she knew, have been always there, and she loved him now, as she had always loved him, with an emotion very close to worship.

It did not affect her feelings towards Rendel though. Their relationship was the normal one between man and woman, compact of tenderness, desire and love. She could not have offered Andrew that, nor would he have wanted it, she knew.

Andrew had played the stoic to a world he feared. He had put up a defence of unshakeable courage against destruction. She would not fall below the standard he had set her now. She would face his death as he had done—calmly.

‘He will not deliver my baby,’ she said to Rendel quietly. ‘He will not be here now. But life must go on.’

Rendel looked at her in puzzled concern. Her reaction to Andrew’s death alarmed him, she could see that. She should not be so quiet, so calm, or so he felt.

She smiled at him in reassurance. ‘If I have a boy, my dear, may I name him Andrew?’

Rendel nodded and pressed her arm. ‘I should be glad,’ he said quickly.