The Widow's Alpha

The eggs had gone cold an hour past, and Louisa ate them anyway, at the small table she’d had carried into the library, because cold eggs eaten where she pleased tasted better than hot ones served where she was expected.

Beorn had kept breakfast at eight. The dining room faced east, he’d said, and mornings were for correspondence, he’d said, and for eight years she had come down on the hour, sat at his right hand, and passed the marmalade before he thought to ask for it.

Beorn had been dead fourteen months. She had eaten breakfast in the library for eleven of them.

Mrs Armstrong came in with fresh tea and the expression of a woman who had given up a war but not the right to remark on it.

“You’ll take a chill, madam. The fire’s not laid in here of a morning.”

“Then have it laid of a morning. From today.”

“Very good, madam.” The teapot hovered. “Cook wishes to know about the dinner menus for the week.”

“Whatever Cook likes. She’s fed this house longer than I have.”

Mrs Armstrong poured, and did not leave. Louisa turned a page she was not reading and waited, because the housekeeper had a rhythm to her disapproval and it was nearly time for the second verse.

“Mrs Yoxall asked after you at church,” Mrs Armstrong said. “She observed that half-mourning is customary by now. Lavender, she said. Dove grey at the least.”

“Mrs Yoxall may wear lavender to her heart’s content.”

“She meant it kindly, madam.”

“She meant it loudly.” Louisa reached for the toast. “I look well in black.”

That was the whole of the argument, and the miracle was that it was allowed to be. Not that black flattered her, though it did, the crepe rich against her brown skin in a manner lavender could never manage. The miracle was that liking it was reason enough. Fourteen months ago, reason had lived elsewhere in this house, and it had worn Beorn’s face, and it had been kind about her preferences in the tone one used for a child’s drawings.

Mrs Armstrong went out. Louisa poured her second cup and looked down the length of the library, at the evidence.

The pianoforte stood under the south window now, where the light fell across the keys from ten until two. She had asked Beorn once, in their third year, whether it might be moved there. He’d considered it seriously, because he considered everything seriously, and told her the sun would fade the case, and that was that. It had taken two footmen twenty minutes. The case could fade to bone for all she cared. She played in the light.

In their fifth year she had wanted Bath for the winter. Her sister was there, and the concerts, and she had laid out her case at dinner over three courses, reasonable as a solicitor. Beorn heard her all the way through, which he always did, that was the trap of him, and then said the roads in January were a misery, and the Halewick air suited her better, and he had already written to decline the Royal Crescent lodgings her sister had held for them. Already written. The decision had been made, weighed, and buried before she’d known there was a decision, and he’d smiled at her fondly across the candles as though he’d done her a service. She had thanked him. That was the part her memory kept snagging on, fourteen months later. She had actually thanked him.

In January she had spent a week in Bath, on roads that were indeed a misery, and had enjoyed every jolt of them.

Her ring of keys sat by the teapot, every door in Halewick on it. The account ledgers lived in her writing desk with her own hand through fourteen months of columns, and if the sums ran slower than they had under Beorn, they ran, and they were hers. Last week she had declined an invitation to dine at the Yoxalls’ without inventing an illness. I do not care to come was not a sentence she had written, quite, but the refusal had gone out naked of excuses, and the sky had held.

He had not been cruel. She made herself remember that with the tea going bitter in her mouth, because it mattered, because the whole trouble lived inside it. A cruel husband would have left her with a clean wound and a clear conscience. Beorn had been affectionate on his good days and courteous on all the others. He had simply arranged her. Where they lived. When they travelled. Which invitations were accepted. She would begin a sentence at dinner and he would finish it, better, to general approval, and she would sit with her mouth still half-open around the rest of her own opinion.

I’ll handle it, he used to say, taking the letter out of her hands.

You needn’t trouble yourself, he used to say, and the accounts were locked in his study.

By their sixth year, when a guest asked her opinion of anything at all, she’d answer, “Whatever Beorn thinks,” and mean it, which was the worst part. She could not point to the day she’d surrendered. There had been no day. There had been eight years of small kindnesses that each cost her one small piece of jurisdiction, and she had handed every piece over politely, the same as passing the marmalade.

Then his heart had stopped between the stables and the house on an ordinary Tuesday, and God forgive her, somewhere beneath the true grief and the shock and the black-bordered letters, a window had opened.

She set down her cup. The vow did not need renewing, but she renewed it most mornings anyway, the same as winding the mantel clock.

No marriage. No bond. No alpha, ever again, deciding what she needn’t trouble herself about.

The mourning year had ended two months ago. The suppressant tonics had ended with it, as custom required, and society considered her officially available to be circled. Let them circle. A widow of independent means could refuse every man in England from now until the trumpet sounded, and there was not one thing anyone could do about it.

She opened her book properly this time, and the morning belonged to her.

♥︎♥︎♥︎

The letter came with the afternoon post, third in a stack of five, and she nearly didn’t open it before her walk.

Chilton presented the salver in the morning room, where she was writing to a seed merchant about roses, another small kingdom she was annexing one border at a time. Two invitations. A bill from the glazier. A letter from her sister in Bristol, fat with news, saved deliberately for after dinner like a sweet.

And one in a hand she did not know, franked from London, the paper heavy and the direction written in a clean, disciplined slant.

She broke the seal.

Mrs Eldred,

You will forgive, I hope, both this letter and its lateness. As co-executor of your late husband’s estate I have been detained abroad far longer than duty can excuse, and the remaining business of the will—chiefly the Ashcombe parcel and certain matters requiring both executors’ hands—can no longer be concluded by correspondence. I intend to wait upon you at Halewick on Thursday, if you will receive me. Should the day be unwelcome, a line to the Swan at Maldenbury will find me, and I will arrange myself entirely at your convenience.

I was sorry beyond the reach of this page to learn of Beorn’s death. He was the best man I ever knew.

Your obedient servant, Bradford Alston

Louisa sat very still.

Bradford Alston. She had to reach for the face, and then all at once she did not, because it arrived whole, the manner one remembers a room from childhood on stepping into it. Dark eyes. A beard, close-trimmed, when beards were half a scandal. Beorn’s best friend since school, best man at her wedding, standing at Beorn’s shoulder in the church with the ring, looking as grave as if the ceremony were a court-martial.

She had known him a little, before. He’d been at the assemblies the year she came out, one of the young men at the edge of the room who danced correctly and said nothing memorable, and then Beorn had begun calling, and Beorn filled rooms, and everyone at their edges had gone dim. At the wedding breakfast Bradford Alston had toasted them in two sentences, wished her every happiness in a voice she could no longer hear in memory, and left before the dancing. She remembered thinking him cold and then not thinking of him at all, which, married to Beorn, was the fate of most subjects that were not Beorn.

He had left for Lisbon in the second year of her marriage. Shipping interests, Beorn had said. Eight years, near enough, and in all that time he had not come back once, not for Christmases, not for Beorn’s fortieth, not for the funeral. A wreath had come from Portugal, six weeks late, with no letter.

She read the letter again. There it was, twice in five lines, and she checked it a third time to be certain she wasn’t inventing it: if you will receive me. At your convenience. An alpha, asking. Probably it was mere form. It was certainly mere form. Men wrote such things the same as they bowed, and meant them the same amount.

Estate business, then. Papers to sign, and a stranger with her husband’s ghost on him, sleeping seven miles off at a coaching inn, and within a fortnight it would be done and she could go back to her roses.

Still. An alpha was coming to Halewick with documents, and she knew from eight years’ education precisely how that visit was meant to go. He would explain her own affairs to her slowly. He would address the difficult points to the fire, or to Chilton, or to the memory of Beorn, and the simple ones to her. Somewhere before the second pot of tea he would produce the phrase no need to concern yourself with the detail, and the detail was exactly where her life would be decided.

Well. He would find the widow of Halewick did concern herself. She had fourteen months of ledgers in her own hand and every deed in the house read twice, and if Mr Bradford Alston imagined he was riding down from London to pat her on the head and administer her future, he could conduct that business with her steward, her solicitor, and the door.

She turned the letter over for the date, working out how much warning she had.

I intend to wait upon you at Halewick on Thursday.

Today was Thursday.

Louisa was still holding the page when she heard it through the open window, faint and unmistakable, coming up the long chestnut drive: the grind of carriage wheels on gravel.