The Bluestockings: Chapter Eight
"Her body remembered. It recalled with startling clarity the icy bite of the surf as it washed over her...On December 23rd of each year, Ruby Hurst was very much the child she had once been."
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Catch Up On Previous Chapters: Prologue | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7
Ruby
By this time of year, most people were busy with Christmas preparations, eagerly checking off their to-do lists in advance of family parties and holiday dinners.
But not Ruby.
Ruby was growing more anxious by the day as the calendar tiptoed closer to the anniversary of her mother’s death, two days before Christmas. It mattered little how much time had passed since that day on the beach so many years ago. Her body remembered. It recalled with startling clarity the icy bite of the surf as it washed over her shoes and soaked into her stockings. The shiver that shook her from fingertips to toes. The fear of what had passed before her eyes. A body didn’t forget. On December 23rd of each year, Ruby Hurst was very much the child she once had been.
Her mother, Alice, remained a mystery to Ruby as much as she had been a mystery to the townsfolk of Hawthorn. Her arrival in town in the spring of 1944 caused quite a stir. She’d been a widow in her late thirties who was taken in by Ruby’s father, William. Her husband had died not long before she arrived, and she was a beautiful woman with wild and tangled copper curls that swept down her back like rays of sunlight. It was near the end of the Second World War, a time of great hardship and hope, and the people of Hawthorn loved William. And, so, they grew to love Alice, as well. By the time Ruby came along, William and Alice were engaged.
But the wedding never happened.
Ruby closed her eyes and pictured her mother’s tombstone, which she hadn’t laid eyes on in close to thirty years. She remembered the coolness of the marble against her palm, smooth and polished. William had chosen the epitaph for Alice, and Ruby—small and afraid, deep in the recesses of her grief, unable to make sense of a world without her mother—had committed the words to memory by tracing them over and over until the stone rubbed her fingertips raw.
I must go now,
but I am only in the next room,
waiting to meet you again.
Words failed to convey Ruby’s adolescent sorrow. Even an entire library of them couldn’t describe the emotional devolution that occurred within her battered soul. First, the unresolved grief had injured Ruby, leaving her unable to connect with people who loved her most. Then it had stolen her hope, eaten away at it bit by bit like the most luxurious silk turned to moth-eaten rags. Until she gave up on hope entirely and decided to make do with what she had left.
Pride. Stubbornness.
And a whole lot of money.
Ruby had refused to bemoan her fate in public. She was the product of her generation, after all. Besides, she’d had no real friends to confide in any way. No family who would have ever understood.
It had been bootstraps up for her entire life, and they were expensive bootstraps.
Wrapped in a heavy woolen blanket, Ruby stepped out onto the large, covered front porch and gingerly settled into a rocker. The weight of the scratchy blanket soothed the ache in her bones and warmed her papery skin against the cold breeze. With her head tilted back, Ruby watched the Spanish moss dance lazily back and forth on the branches of the live oaks, telling stories only they could under- stand.
What would the story of her life be when this was all over, Ruby wondered? The house would go to her next of kin, one of Edward’s children, who never bothered about this place and would sell it as sure as the nose on her face. A place was only as good as the people who inhabited it. And the wood beneath Ruby’s feet, the bones of the old home her ancestor had built on faith that it would become the heartbeat of a new town, were getting weary now. Just like Ruby. Would there be anyone who cared about this house—this land—the way she had once her time had passed?
Ruby closed her eyes as the image of a man, conjured by her wandering, melancholy thoughts, rose in her mind’s eye. He was not the sort of man one would have called handsome in the traditional sense. Indeed, no one ever had. He had been more Colonel Brandon than Mr. Darcy, overlooked and underrated. But Ruby had noticed him. She’d watched him pace the floors of the library from her seat in the parlor, where she could catch glimpses of his tender, serious face unnoticed. His name was Elliot, and he’d worked for her father. Once upon a time, he had sat with Ruby on this very porch, tears threatening to spill onto his ruddy cheeks, and Ruby could still hear the catch in his voice as he spoke. It was a sound that—like the scream that tore from her throat as she stood with the surf pounding her feet, terrified because she’d lost her mother—would never be forgotten. It was etched onto her brain deeper than the grooves on a vinyl record.
These were the worst moments, these late December days. Ruby had no recollection of ever truly enjoying the Christmas season. She’d wanted to love it. She could see why it was so wonderful, with all of its emphasis on light in the darkness, on gifts that redeemed the sorrow of broken things. As a child, Ruby would follow William around the house and help with the decorations, even when she was too small to do much in the way of actual assistance. She was his perpetual shadow. Her father’s tangible presence had grounded her every December when she felt at risk of floating away into oblivion.
Then, the year Ruby turned twenty-three, Elliot Russell had come along. Sweet, kind Elliot. A good man. A man who had disappointed Ruby with such intensity that she never spoke his name aloud again after that day on the porch. It had happened right here, where she sat in her rocker, though she was a mere whisper of the woman she’d been back then. Vivacious. Headstrong. Determined.
Crazy. Hysterical. Unwell.
The memory was still sour in her stomach.
Ruby rubbed her palms together beneath the blanket and sighed a long, uneven shudder that trembled its way through her shoulders. The breeze coming off the coast bit at her nose and ears, but Ruby hardly noticed. She hadn’t cried for a long, long time, but she wondered if it would help. She could feel the familiar tickle in her nose. Could she give in to it? Should she? She’d read an article in the newspaper once that touted the physiological benefits of crying, but maybe Ruby had read it wrong. Didn’t she need the reassuring touch of another person to soothe her cries? Because when—if—Ruby ever cried again, she couldn’t imagine it releasing much of anything within her except cortisol and ugly memories.
“Hey, it’s getting dark out here,” Marianne said, the front door propped open on her hip.
Ruby started. She hadn’t heard her come outside. “Want me to turn on the lights?”
Ruby pulled the blanket tighter around her torso. “Alright,” she said.
Marianne hesitated, her unspoken questions heavy in the air, but Ruby remained where she was, staring out at the trees. A few seconds later, the door snapped shut, and the Christmas lights blinked on. A quick flush of joy filled Ruby’s chest but disappeared as soon as it arrived. Deflated, she tried to chase her dreary thoughts away. She pictured Maggie at the dining table last night, she and Eleanor scarfing down slices of pizza and chattering away like two canaries. Ruby bit back a smile. Their uneasy truce over a shared love of books had been just the ticket to settle the score between aunt and niece. They were still mostly strangers, but Ruby found she was growing fond of the girl.
Eleanor Black seemed as trustworthy a friend as Ruby could hope for Maggie to bond with during her temporary stay. In eight decades of life, Ruby had never known a person to love books the way Eleanor did and not be a sensible, if not genuinely decent, human. It was not a barometer of truth likely to garner points for scientific accuracy, but it suited Ruby just fine.
In fact, Ruby was curious about Eleanor. In more ways than just their shared understanding of loss, Eleanor mirrored Ruby as a young woman. She was bright and bookish, devoted to her family business. Officially, Ruby had never worked for William’s publishing company, but she had championed it, pleased that her father had made a living as an honest, practical man intent on making books accessible to everyone.
A blush rose to Ruby’s cheeks as she considered it, but she wouldn’t mind a friend in someone like Eleanor. It was a silly thought; Ruby had nearly seventy years on the girl, a whole long life. But history was full of unlikely friendships, and it wasn’t as though the two of them had nothing in common. In the saddest way possible, they had everything in common. If anyone could understand the grief that lived tucked away in the recesses of her heart, if anyone could empathize with years of unanswered questions and fears, it would be young Eleanor Black.
Ruby chided herself for such thoughts, the thoughts of a long-forgotten version of herself.
But a quieter voice whispered of hope.
The porch lights blinked bright as dusk grew to dark, and quick brushes of sound filled the air. Some animals scurried home to their dens, their tasks completed, while others settled into the trees for a long night of work. Ruby contemplated their fates. Each was a story of sheer survival, of predator or prey, and as far as she knew, woodland creatures did not bemoan their lot in life. They simply got on with the business of living and hunting and eating and dying. No existential crisis there. Grief, sure. Perhaps joy. Animals were sentient beings, after all. But were they moral ones? Did they understand what it meant to consider another, better way?
Did Ruby?
