SHE PRETENDED TO BE A “BOY” FOR 7 MONTHS TO AVOID AN ARRANGED MARRIAGE—UNTIL THE DUKE FOUND OUT…

Chapter 32

Many years later, when Josephine was old and Rose was grown and the third room had been repainted twice and the ewes in the orchard had long since been replaced by a small herd of sheep that belonged, officially, to nobody but which everyone considered to be Rose’s, there was a summer afternoon that Josephine would remember as the last good day.

It was June. The roses were out along the south wall. Rose had come down from the north with her own children — three of them, all under ten, all of them loud, all of them immediately absorbed into the orchard by Reuben’s grandson, who now ran the sheep.

Josephine sat on the stone bench in the garden and watched them.

Her hands were old and the knuckles hurt in the cold, but it was June and the sun was on the wall and the smell of the roses had not changed in forty years. Above her the window of the study was open, and she could hear Rose in there, going through the drawers, the way she did every visit — looking at leases and accounts and the old ledgers her mother had kept.

Then Rose came out into the garden with something in her hands.

“Mother.”

“What is it?”

“The ledger.” Rose sat down beside her on the bench and put it on her knees — the old one, the one tied with string, the account of a life that had been written down in July forty years before. “You wrote this for me.”

“I did.”

“There is something at the end I have never read.” She opened it. “The last page is dated after I was born. I have read up to the ledger entry and then — there is this.”

Josephine looked at the page. She knew what was on it. She had written it in October of the year Rose was born, sitting in the third room with the baby asleep in the cradle beside her, and she had never looked at it again.

“Read it aloud,” she said.

Rose read.

October 19th. My daughter has been alive for eight days. She has her father’s hair and her grandmother’s eyes and a temper that I am told comes from nobody in particular, which I do not believe.

When I was her age I lived in this house, and the roses were my mother’s, and I did not know a single thing about how the world would treat me. I know now. I have written all of it down on the pages before this one, the good and the ugly of it, and I have written it plainly, without turning anything into a story, because a house is not a story. A house is a set of decisions, and you can make bad ones or good ones, and no one can do it for you.

What I want her to know is this. Her grandmother planted the roses along the south wall and I thought for seven years that they were dead. They were not dead. They were cut back to nothing and they came back anyway, and they are still here, and they have covered the whole wall now.

That is the whole of my life, that wall. I was cut down to nothing in a house on the other side of the county, on a night in November, with a pair of kitchen scissors, and I came back, and I will be here for as long as the roses are.

I do not know what she will do with her life. I hope she does something enormous. But if she does not — if she has an ordinary life with an ordinary house and ordinary days — I want her to know that ordinary is what I fought for, and that I won it, and that it is more than enough.

— Josephine Foster Hawthorne

Rose lowered the ledger.

The children were shouting in the orchard. Somebody had found a lamb. The roses smelled the way roses smell in the last good week of June, and the wall was covered, from the lane gate to the corner by the study window, all the way up, exactly as far as it could go.

Josephine looked at her daughter, and her daughter looked back, and neither of them said anything at all.

Then Rose closed the ledger, and took her mother’s hand, and they sat together on the bench in the sun and let the afternoon go by.

The End