Lady in Waiting: A Novel Read online

  BOOKS BY SUSAN MEISSNER

  White Picket Fences

  The Shape of Mercy

  Blue Heart Blessed

  A Seahorse in the Thames

  In All Deep Places

  The Remedy for Regret

  A Window to the World

  Why the Sky Is Blue

  Rachael Flynn Mysteries

  Widows and Orphans

  Sticks and Stones

  Days and Hours

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Part 1 - Jane: Upper West Side, Manhattan

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Part 2 - Lucy: Sudeley Castle, Gloucestershire, England, 1548

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Part 3 - Jane: Massapequa, Long Island

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Part 4 - Lucy: Bradgate Hall, Leicestershire, England, 1551

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Part 5 - Jane: Upper West Side, Manhattan

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Part 6 - Lucy: London, England, 1553

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Part 7 - Jane: Upper West Side, Manhattan

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Part 8 - Lucy: Bristol, Avon, 1592

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Author’s Note

  Readers Guide

  Acknowledgments

  More Books by this Author

  Copyright

  For Bob,

  the one my heart beats for.

  I saw the angel in the marble

  and carved until I set him free.

  —MICHELANGELO BUONARROTI

  One

  The mantel clock was exquisite, even though its hands rested in silence at twenty minutes past two. Carved—near as I could tell—from a single piece of mahogany, its glimmering patina looked warm to the touch. Rosebuds etched into the swirls of wood grain flanked the sides like two bronzed bridal bouquets. The clock’s top was rounded and smooth like the draped head of a Madonna. I ran my palm across the polished surface, and it was like touching warm water.

  Legend was this clock originally belonged to the young wife of a Southampton doctor and that it stopped keeping time in 1912, the very moment the Titanic sank and its owner became a widow. The grieving woman’s only consolation was the clock’s apparent prescience of her husband’s horrible fate and its kinship with the pain that left her inert in sorrow. She never remarried, and she never had the clock fixed.

  I bought it sight unseen for my great-aunt’s antique store, like so many of the items I’d found for the display cases. In the year and a half I’d been in charge of the inventory, the best pieces had come from the obscure estate sales that my British friend, Emma Downing, came upon while tooling around the southeast of England looking for oddities for her costume shop. She found the clock at an estate sale in Felixstowe, and the auctioneer, so she told me, had been unimpressed with the clock’s sad history. Emma said he’d read the accompanying note about the clock as if reading the rules for rugby.

  My mother watched now as I positioned the clock on the lacquered black mantel that rose above a marble fireplace. She held a lead crystal vase of silk daffodils in her hands.

  “It should be ticking.” She frowned. “People will wonder why it’s not ticking.” She set the vase down on the hearth and stepped back. Her heels made a clicking sound on the parquet floor beneath our feet. “You know, you probably would’ve sold it by now if it was working. Did Wilson even look at it? You told me he could fix anything.”

  I flicked a wisp of fuzz off the clock’s face. I hadn’t asked the shop’s resident-and-unofficial repairman to fix it. “It wouldn’t be the same clock if it was fixed.”

  “It would be a clock that did what it was supposed to do.” My mother leaned in and straightened one of the daffodil blooms.

  “This isn’t just any clock, Mom.” I took a step back too.

  My mother folded her arms across the front of her Ann Taylor suit. Pale blue, the color of baby blankets and robins’ eggs. Her signature color. “Look, I get all that about the Titanic and the young widow, but you can’t prove any of it, Jane,” she said. “You could never sell it on that story.”

  A flicker of sadness wobbled inside me at the thought of parting with the clock. This happens when you work in retail. Sometimes you have a hard time selling what you bought to sell.

  “I’m thinking maybe I’ll keep it.”

  “You don’t make a profit by hanging on to the inventory.” My mother whispered this, but I heard her. She intended for me to hear her. This was her way of saying what she wanted to about her aunt’s shop—which she’d inherit when Great-aunt Thea passed—without coming across as interfering.

  My mother thinks she tries very hard not to interfere. But it is one of her talents. Interfering, when she thinks she’s not. It drives my younger sister, Leslie, nuts.

  “Do you want me to take it back to the store?” I asked.

  “No! It’s perfect for this place. I just wish it were ticking.” She nearly pouted.

  I reached for the box at my feet that I brought the clock in along with a set of Shakespeare’s works, a pair of pewter candlesticks, and a Wedgwood vase. “You could always get a CD of sound effects and run a loop of a ticking clock,” I joked.

  She turned to me, childlike determination in her eyes. “I wonder how hard it would be to find a CD like that!”

  “I was kidding, Mom! Look what you have to work with.” I pointed to the simulated stereo system she’d placed into a polished entertainment center behind us. My mother never used real electronics in the houses she staged, although with the clientele she usually worked with—affluent real estate brokers and equally well-off buyers and sellers—she certainly could.

  “So I’ll bring in a portable player and hide it in the hearth pillows.” She shrugged and then turned to the adjoining dining room. A gleaming black dining table had been set with white bone china, pale yellow linen napkins, mounds of fake chicken salad, mauve rubber grapes, plastic croissants, and petits fours. An arrangement of pussy willows graced the center of the table. “Do you think the pussy willows are too rustic?” she asked.

  She wanted me to say yes, so I did.

  “I think so too,” she said. “I think we should swap these out for that vase of gerbera daisies you have on that escritoire in the shop’s front window. I don’t know what I was thinking when I brought these.” She reached for the unlucky pussy willows. “We can put these on the entry table with our business cards.”

  She turned to me. “You did bring yours this time, didn’t you? It’s silly for you to go to all this work and then not get any customers out of it.” My mother made her way to the entryway with the pussy willows in her hands and intention in her step. I fo
llowed her.

  This was only the second house I’d helped her stage, and I didn’t bring business cards the first time, because she hadn’t invited me to until we were about to leave. She’d promptly told me then to never go anywhere without business cards. Not even to the ladies’ room. She’d said it and then waited, like she expected me to take out my BlackBerry and make a note of it.

  “I have them right here.” I reached into the front pocket of my capris and pulled out a handful of glossy business cards emblazoned with Amsterdam Avenue Antiques and its logo—three A’s entwined like a Celtic eternity knot. I handed them to her, and she placed them in a silver dish next to her own. Sophia Keller Interior Design and Home Staging. The pussy willows actually looked wonderful against the tall, jute-colored wall.

  “There. That looks better!” she exclaimed, as if reading my thoughts. She turned to survey the main floor of the town house. The owners had relocated to the Hamptons and were selling off their Manhattan properties to fund a cushy retirement. Half the décor—the books, the vases, the prints—were on loan from Aunt Thea’s shop. My mother, who’d been staging real estate for two years, brought me in a few months earlier, after she discovered a stately home filled with charming and authentic antiques sold faster than the same home filled with reproductions.

  “You and Brad should get out of that teensy apartment on the West Side and buy this place. The owners are practically giving it away.”

  Her tone suggested she didn’t expect me to respond. I easily let the comment evaporate into the sunbeams caressing us. It was a comment for which I had no response.

  My mother’s gaze swept across the two large rooms she’d furnished, and she frowned when her eyes reached the mantel and the silent clock.

  “Well, I’ll just have to come back later today,” she spoke into the silence. “It’s being shown first thing in the morning.” She swung back around. “Come on. I’ll take you back.”

  We stepped out into the April sunshine and to her Lexus parked across the street along a line of town houses just like the one we’d left. As we began to drive away, the stillness in the car thickened, and I fished my cell phone out of my purse to see if I’d missed any calls while we were finishing the house. On the drive over, I had a purposeful conversation with Emma about a box of old books she found at a jumble sale in Cardiff. That lengthy conversation filled the entire commute from the store on the seven hundred block of Amsterdam to the town house on East Ninth, and I found myself wishing I could somehow repeat that providential circumstance. My mother would ask about Brad if the silence continued. There was no missed call, and I started to probe my brain for something to talk about. I suddenly remembered I hadn’t told my mother I’d found a new assistant. I opened my mouth to tell her about Stacy, but I was too late.

  “So what do you hear from Brad?” she asked cheerfully.

  “He’s doing fine.” The answer flew out of my mouth as if I’d rehearsed it. She looked away from the traffic ahead, blinked at me, and then turned her attention back to the road. A taxi pulled in front of her, and she laid on the horn, pronouncing a curse on all taxi drivers.

  “Idiot.” She turned to me. “How much longer do you think he will stay in New Hampshire?” Her brow was creased. “You aren’t going to try to keep two households going forever, are you?”

  I exhaled heavily. “It’s a really good job, Mom. And he likes the change of pace and the new responsibilities. It’s only been two months.”

  “Yes, but the inconvenience has to be wearing on you both. It must be quite a hassle maintaining two residences, not to mention the expense, and then all that time away from each other.” She paused, but only for a moment. “I just don’t see why he couldn’t have found something similar right here in New York. I mean, don’t all big hospitals have the same jobs in radiology? That’s what your father told me. And he should know.”

  “Just because there are similar jobs doesn’t mean there are similar vacancies, Mom.”

  She tapped the steering wheel. “Yes, but your father said—”

  “I know Dad thinks he might’ve been able to help Brad find something on Long Island, but Brad wanted this job. And no offense, Mom, but the head of environmental services doesn’t hire radiologists.”

  She bristled. I shouldn’t have said it. She would repeat that comment to my dad, not to hurt him but to vent her frustration at not having been able to convince me she was right and I was wrong. But it would hurt him anyway.

  “I’m sorry, Mom,” I added. “Don’t tell him I said that, okay? I just really don’t want to rehash this again.”

  But she wasn’t done. “Your father has been at that hospital for twenty-seven years. He knows a lot of people.” She emphasized the last four words with a pointed stare in my direction.

  “I know he does. That’s really not what I meant. It’s just Brad has always wanted this kind of job. He’s working with cancer patients. This really matters to him.”

  “But the job’s in New Hampshire!”

  “Well, Connor is in New Hampshire!” It sounded irrelevant, even to me, to mention the current location of our college-age son. Connor had nothing to do with any of this. And he was an hour away from where Brad was anyway.

  “And you are here,” my mother said evenly. “If Brad wanted out of the city, there are plenty of quieter hospitals right around here. And plenty of sick people for that matter.”

  There was an undercurrent in her tone, subtle and yet obvious, that assured me we really weren’t talking about sick people and hospitals and the miles between Manhattan and Manchester. It was as if she’d guessed what I’d tried to keep from my parents the last eight weeks.

  My husband didn’t want out of the city.

  He just wanted out.

  Two

  Sometimes, during those first few weeks after Brad moved out, I’d wake in the middle of the night and forget I was now alone in my bed. I’d instinctively move toward Brad’s side, and when I’d feel the emptiness there, a strange kind of vertigo would come over me, and I’d grab hold of the sheets to keep from falling.

  It happened every night the first week. I’d lie awake afterward until the alarm went off hours later, unable to stop contemplating why Brad wanted distance from me. And why it took me by such stinging surprise. By the third week, I wasn’t waking up in the middle of the night with vertigo anymore; I was just waking up. Sometimes at two in the morning. Sometimes at three. And I’d still be awake when dawn broke.

  I hadn’t known Brad was suffocating in our marriage. That’s the part that made me shudder as sleep skittered away from me night after night. Brad had felt like he was suffocating, and I hadn’t seen it. Sometimes doubt kept me awake. Sometimes grief. Sometimes anger. And sometimes a messy mix of all three.

  We were sitting at our kitchen table the morning Brad told me he was leaving. The Sunday paper was strewn among our coffee mugs, and the aroma of the western omelet I had made for us still lingered. Onions, peppers, and diced ham. It was mid-February, but the sun was bold that morning, and its flashy tendrils spilled across our shoulders from our balcony windows as if it wanted in. Brad said my name. I looked up, thinking he perhaps wanted me to pass the french press to freshen his cup.

  But he was looking off toward our front door, not at me.

  “There’s a position in radiology at a hospital in New Hampshire,” he said.

  Several seconds passed before I realized this was a circumstance that mattered to him. “New Hampshire?”

  He looked at his coffee cup and stroked the ear-shaped handle. “Manchester. It’s in diagnostics, working alongside oncologists. Part of the job involves research and clinical studies. I was asked to consider it.”

  He raised his head, and his eyes slowly met mine.

  “You were?” Scattered thoughts ran through my head. I hardly knew which question I really wanted to ask. Why are you telling me this? seemed like a good place to start, but he spoke before I could decide.

  “Ac
tually, I was specifically approached. They’ve read my articles in the Journal, and they want me to come on staff.”

  Perhaps I should’ve said something affirming, something that would let him know that I was proud he’d been handpicked for something, but all I could think was that Brad might actually take this job and we’d be leaving New York. Just like that. I was already wondering how I’d tell my mother and Aunt Thea I wouldn’t be able to manage the antique store anymore. Thea, tucked away in her assisted-living apartment in Jersey City, would probably insist my mother take over the store, since she wouldn’t trust it to anyone but family. My mother wouldn’t be happy about that. Antiques were not her thing. And the very idea of moving, of leaving everything that was familiar, was unsettling.

  “But it’s in New Hampshire,” I said.

  He resumed stroking the arc of the mug handle. “It’s a great career move.” His gaze was on his mug.

  My thoughts zoomed to my parents. They’d probably see this as a stellar promotion, even if it did mean leaving Manhattan. My dad would anyway. My parents adored Brad. They always had. Perhaps they wouldn’t flip if I told them we were moving. But my mother would definitely be annoyed about my leaving the store …

  “So, are you going to look into it?” I finally asked.

  My question was met with what seemed like a long stretch of silence. When Brad finally looked up at me, I knew.

  He’d already accepted the job.

  My elbow knocked my mug. A tiny wave of coffee winked out and dotted the sports section. “You already said yes? Without even checking it out?”