What can I do to drive away
Remembrance from mine eyes, for they have seen,
Ay, an hour ago, my brilliant Queen!
Touch has a memory. Oh say, love, say,
What can I do to kill it and be free
In my old liberty?
Lines to Fanny
~John Keats~
He was gone.
The girl closed her eyes, listening to his rapid, purposeful steps descending the stairs, and a moment later, the front door slamming with a violence that sent a palpable tremor through the house. Veiled in the opalescent light of the drawing room window, she stood with the perfect stillness of one in shock.
Slowly, Margaret began to breathe again.
Mr Thornton was gone, but something of his turbulent presence lingered still, like a particularly stubborn ghost that would not be exorcised. As she made her way, a little shakily, to clear the side table burdened by a pot of tea, still warm and untouched, she sensed him in the vital, trembling energy in the air, and his faint, familiar scent of freshly laundered clothes that survived somehow, the walk from New Street to Crampton. And though the uncomfortable guest had departed, the words he had left behind rang in her ears, echoing in her heart:
"I don't want to possess you. I wish to marry you because I love you!"
The memory of his audacity brought a renewed flush of anger to Margaret's cheeks, and with a brittle tinkle of china, she set down on the sideboard the delicate cup and saucer preserved, with so care through the long journey from Helstone. "How presumptuous he is! How I detest him! But what can one expect, from a mere tradesman?" she thought despairingly, "But surely, surely I could not have repulsed – no, rejected him in any other way?"
Distressed, she drifted back to the window and flung it open. At once, the outside air, cool and heavy with gravelly northern voices, coal-smoke, and the mixture of street-smells that mama always found so disagreeable came flooding in. Margaret drew a deep breath; willing, if nothing else, that the breeze would carry Mr Thornton away, whatever remained of him, far across the purple moors, so that the homely aroma of papa's books could settle back again where it belonged. On the cobbled road below, life went on, uninterrupted by the rupture between the man and woman upstairs, cataclysmic though it may have seemed to both; a carriage rumbled by, men and women, moving briskly about their business, a stray dog sniffing in the gutter.
She imagined him threading his own way through the crowd; he would be halfway to the mill by now, his long stride quickened by resentment and a desire to put as much distance as possible between himself and the scene of his mortification.
Her slender fingers tightened on the window-sill. It was not his resentment she had seen, but rather, an immensity of hurt, a strange vulnerability in his grey eyes before his honest temper flared to match her own; Mr Thornton did not have, as Henry did, the reserves of a shallower, sardonic character. In many ways, he was a living conundrum to her, as yet unsolved and as inscrutable as the Sphinx, but she understood instinctively that his integrity would permit no dissimulation.
"I have wounded him," she whispered, and to her horror, Margaret found herself suddenly on the brink of tears.
She turned her back to the street, but as she shifted, the pale light revealed what she, in her misery, had missed before. A pair of gloves on the side-board. They were of soft, black leather, and far more expensive than any her father had ever owned. Turning them over, Margaret saw that they were well worn, exquisitely made for a pair of slim, long-fingered hands.
And she remembered at once, with a hot colour creeping up her neck, those same hands on her waist only yesterday, and how she had clung to their owner, first in protectiveness, and then, in fear. She sank into a chair, confused and ashamed, yet determined to banish the unruly recollection to the back of her mind.
Then, Margaret knew what she must do. With new determination, she rose, sweeping out of the drawing room and into her own bedchamber, where she unlocked the small drawer in her bureau. There, Mr Thornton's gloves found their temporary resting place, beside a bundle of rose-scented letters from Edith and other small treasures from Helstone and Harley Street. One day, they would be reunited with the man to whom they belonged, but no one else must know of the manner in which they had been left in her possession. Not even papa, with his studious and benign curiosity, for surely, no friendship, however intimate, could endure such a revelation.
This would be forever her secret, and Mr Thornton's.
Author's note:
This is a piece of fan fiction inspired by the novel "North & South" and the BBC TV series of the same name. I don't own any of the characters, and this story is written purely for fun, and hopefully the enjoyment other fans of the book/series.
