The Enchanted April

Chapter 4

It had been agreed that Mrs. Arbuthnot and Mrs. Wilkins, traveling together, would reach the Italian villa of San Salvatore on the evening of March 31, while the unacquainted Lady Caroline and Mrs. Fisher would arrive the morning of April 2, leaving the first pair time to ready the house as if they were guests despite their equal share of the cost. The weeks leading up to the trip, however, were steeped in the quiet terror and moral conflict that came with stealing time away from their marriages. For gentle, conscientious Mrs. Arbuthnot, the entire month of March was a torment of guilt. Her sharpened conscience could not reconcile the selfish joy of a holiday with the suffering of the poor in her parish, battling a spate of bronchitis and fever brought on by the cold, wet spring. She avoided the vicar’s eye, dodged charity fundraiser speeches, and asked her distant husband Frederick for extra money to assuage her shame over spending her savings on the trip. He gave her a £100 cheque without question, a gesture that only deepened her guilt: she handed the entire sum to her parish aid work immediately, and spent the rest of the month plagued by doubts, her prayers interrupted by sharp questions of whether she was a hypocrite for seeking happiness while others suffered. Mrs. Wilkins had no such moral qualms. She was certain a holiday was a righteous use of her hard-saved pin money, and spent the month soothing Mrs. Arbuthnot’s fears, promising they would return kinder wives after their rest. Her own anxiety came entirely from her husband Mellersh, whom she cooked for with extra zeal all month, buying his favorite foods and perfecting every meal. The effort backfired on the third Sunday of March: after a lunch of perfect Yorkshire pudding and apricot tart, Mellersh announced he was planning to take her to Italy for Easter, assuming she would be overjoyed. She was too dumbfounded to speak, her planned announcement of her own invitation stuck in her throat. Mellersh, tired of the dismal English weather, cross-examined her sharply, refused to believe she had been invited at all, and refused to believe Mrs. Arbuthnot even existed until the gentle woman came to vouch for her. The lie by omission left Mrs. Arbuthnot’s conscience reeling: she knew she had given Mellersh an incomplete picture, not an outright lie, but could not shake the feeling that God saw no difference between the two. The rest of the month was a fog of guilt for both women, and when they boarded their train on March 30, there was no holiday excitement, only relief at escaping. Mrs. Wilkins complained bitterly on the Victoria platform that their months of being “too good” had stolen their joy, that they had been browbeaten into forgetting how to be real human beings who wanted small, selfish pleasures. Mrs. Arbuthnot did not correct her when she assumed Frederick was as angry as Mellersh; in truth, Frederick was away finishing a book, and she had only left him a vague note about taking a month’s rest, sure he would not care where she went. The crossing to Calais was rough, and both women were violently seasick, but the relief of stepping onto dry land, of eating sole for lunch in a French port where no one knew their obligations, began to thaw their dread. They rushed through rain-soaked Genoa and Nervi to catch their connecting train to Turin, and by the time they crossed into Italy the next afternoon, the weight of England—Mellersh’s irritation, Frederick’s indifference, the vicar’s judgment, the sick poor of Hampstead—had faded to the dimness of a bad dream. Their arrival was not the sunny welcome they had imagined. It was dark, pouring rain when their train pulled into Mezzago four hours late, and all regular fly drivers had gone home. Only Domenico, San Salvatore’s vigilant gardener, had foreseen the delay, and sent his aunt’s rickety fly, driven by his cousin Beppo, to wait for them. Beppo looked more like a kidnapper than a driver, his hat slouched over one eye, and when he grabbed their suitcases and chattered in rapid, uninterpretable Italian, they were half-convinced they were being led to their deaths. He assured them he was taking them to San Salvatore, then clambered onto his box and urged his horse—who he proudly declared was full of corn and blood, cared for like a son—into a wild gallop before he could even get in, the fly swaying so violently the women clung to their seats as dark rocks loomed out of the downpour. When the horse slowed at a rise in the road, they thought they were safe—until Beppo cracked his whip again, and the fly shot forward until it stopped abruptly in the village square. A group of men and boys jumped out to grab their suitcases, and the women’s hearts sank, until the men kept shouting “San Salvatore” and disappeared into the dark with their luggage. They had no choice but to follow the man with a lantern down steep stone steps, across a quay by the black sea, then up a winding, flower-scented path that climbed the hill to the castle. Half-convinced they were being led to a murder spot, they stumbled up the path, their skirts soaked, until they reached a heavy iron door that opened onto a flood of warm electric light. There, stacked inside the entryway, were all their suitcases, and Domenico greeted them with a warm, rapid welcome in Italian they could not understand. They stepped inside the medieval castle, arm in arm, white-faced and exhausted, and Mrs. Wilkins declared the first act in their new home would be a kiss. For the first time since they left England, they felt safe. The next morning, Mrs. Wilkins woke before dawn, too happy to move, lying in the small, bare bedroom with its iron beds and stone floor, savoring the privacy of being alone in a bed for the first time in five years. When she finally threw open the shutters, she gasped at the sight of sun pouring in over the calm sea, soft blue and violet mountains, a great dark cypress cutting through the landscape, the scent of flowers drifting up from the garden below. There was no guilt, no twinge of unease, only pure, uncomplicated joy, the weight of her old, self-sacrificing goodness left behind in Hampstead like a heap of rain-sodden clothes. She tried to picture Mellersh angry about her disappearance, but could not—he melted into the light and colour around her, and she said the General Thanksgiving out loud, grateful for this unearned beauty. She dressed in clean white clothes, unpacked her suitcases, and noticed her own hair for the first time in years, twisting it around her fingers and resolving to show it to Mellersh when she got home. When she went to find Mrs. Arbuthnot, they stood together in the spacious, flower-filled hall, staring at a Judas tree in full bloom, when they saw Lady Caroline sitting on the low garden wall, her feet dangling among lilies in the sun. They were shocked to realize how exquisitely pretty she was, far more than they had noticed at the London club, where she had seemed aloof. Lady Caroline looked up, smiled, and waved, and they learned she had arrived the day before, had already claimed the room with the best view, and had asked Domenico to fill the halls with flowers. Mrs. Arbuthnot praised her independence, but Mrs. Wilkins teased her gently for not letting them do small kindnesses for her. When Mrs. Wilkins bluntly told Lady Caroline she was lovely, the younger woman was startled, unused to such direct praise from another woman. Mrs. Arbuthnot joked that beauty would not last, and Lady Caroline suddenly realized the two women were far more spirited than she had assumed. She had come hoping for a quiet, solitary month to rest from the demands of her social life, and already worried these two would cling to her, ruining her peace. Before she could say more, she spotted Mrs. Fisher approaching, and her heart sank: the older woman, who she had tried to avoid traveling with, had arrived. They had ended up sharing the journey after all, taking separate flys from Mezzago only to be forced to merge at the castle steps. Lady Caroline had been forced to help Mrs. Fisher with everything, navigating the rough terrain for the older woman’s broken stick, listening as Mrs. Fisher rambled about walking a zigzag path with Alfred Tennyson decades prior. Her dream of a silent, solitary month was already crumbling, and she knew the quiet holiday she had envisioned was already over.