The Wednesday Daughters

  The Wednesday Daughters is a work of fiction. All incidents and dialogue, and all characters with the exception of some well-known historical and public figures, are products of the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Where real-life historical or public figures appear, the situations, incidents, and dialogues concerning those persons are entirely fictional and are not intended to depict actual events or to change the entirely fictional nature of the work. In all other respects, any resemblance to persons living or dead is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2013 by Meg Waite Clayton

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Ballantine Books, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

  BALLANTINE and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Clayton, Meg Waite.

  The Wednesday daughters : a novel / Meg Waite Clayton.

  pages cm

  eISBN: 978-0-345-53884-0

  1. Family secrets—Fiction. 2. Female friendship—Fiction.

  3. Palo Alto (Calif.)—Fiction. 4. Domestic fiction. I. Title.

  PS3603.L45W423 2013

  813′.6—dc23 2013010322

  www.ballantinebooks.com

  Jacket design: Laura Klynstra

  Jacket photograph: © Narratives/Masterfile

  v3.1

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Epigraph

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Author’s Note

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Other Books by This Author

  About the Author

  Excerpt from The Wednesday Sisters

  I will share this room with you

  And you can have this heart to break.

  —Billy Joel, “And So It Goes”

  Autumn is far away the best time at the Lakes.

  —BEATRIX POTTER, IN A SEPTEMBER 1903 LETTER TO HER THEN PUBLISHER AND EVENTUAL FIANCÉ, NORMAN WARNE

  WE WEDNESDAY DAUGHTERS WEREN’T BORN ON WEDNESDAYS, AND we aren’t blood relations. We don’t gather to write at picnic tables like our mothers did. We’re just daughters of friends who’ve called themselves “Wednesday Sisters” since before I was born, daughters who became friends ourselves the way girls who grow up together sometimes do, whether they have much in common or not. Perhaps that is a lot to have in common, though: a shared childhood, friends who’ve known you since before you knew yourself.

  We’re all old enough now to understand what Aunt Kath forever tells us—that life and living aren’t the same—and our moms long ago moved on (more or less) from mothering us to other passions: Aunt Linda’s cancer-survivor runs, Mom’s infertility support group, the novels Frankie and Brett still write. But they’ve brought us together for holiday dinners and barbecues so often over the years that at some point we started gathering ourselves, our childhood bonds deepening despite, say, the dozen years that separate Anna Page and me. It’s that combination of our mothers’ friendships and our own that sent three of us together to the English Lakes—the fall of 2011, it was—and allowed us to share the comfort we found there in one exquisite wooden puzzle box. We are, in the Wednesday Circle, our mothers’ daughters: Kath’s Anna Page, Linda’s Julie, and me, Ally’s Hope. And this is our story, which is, I suppose, a love story. Or two. Or, actually, probably four.

  “You’ll want to be hearing the quiet of the evening coming up,” the boatman suggested as he led us to a rowboat rather than a motorized launch. “Your head’s a marly if you’ll have an engine spoilin’ this.” Such funny phrases, I thought as he loaded our suitcases and set off across Lake Windermere. Like so many of the expressions Mom brought home from her stays here: “queue” and “toff” and “fancy,” “single-track” instead of “one-lane” to describe the winding roads. But as the daylight softened from blue to salmon to steel with each hushed push of the wood oars, I could hear the quiet. Even with the squabble of geese down the shoreline, the occasional gunshot clap of a car passing over a trestle echoing off the hills, I could hear the quiet of our little boat slipping as surely forward as time itself.

  It was mid-October, the air fresh with the smell of lake water and field grass and forest, the promise of frost. On the hillside we’d left behind, the maze of stone walls dwindled. The black-faced sheep we’d seen out the train window faded to nothing as lights blinked on in the shops trailing down from the station to hug up together at Bowness, the boats in the harbor bare-masted as full sails were exchanged for fireside seats in restaurants and pubs and homes. Ahead, two white swans dug at the lake grasses. The thick woods on the shore beyond them took shape as individual trees. A stone chimney poked above the treetops upslope, collecting more stone around it: other chimneys, a square tower, various slants of roof that were all of a same.

  “That’s your mama’s little writing cottage, Hope?” Anna Page asked, fingering her hair, which was wavy-dark and wild in the still of the approaching evening.

  The boatman—Robbie, he’d said his name was—glanced over his shoulder, his hands on the rough oars not young, but steady and surprisingly well kempt. “That’s the one to gawk at, the big house,” he said, his voice Irish rather than English; perhaps that was the hint of not quite belonging I sensed in him. He raised the oars and pointed to the right of a lone wooden pier and a dilapidated boathouse. “There’s a cottage there through the scrub, see?”

  A glimpse of cornflower blue took shape through the tangle of branches—a door overhung with vines on a cottage I’d seen only in photographs: a simple rectangle of gray stone; low walls around a patio; a last straggle of geraniums in a window box. I trailed a hand over the boat’s edge, the echo wake of my fingers folding into that of the drifting boat as I imagined Mom writing at a wrought-iron table on the patio, her feet up on a second chair. When it was colder, she would have moved inside, written at a desk beside a wood fire, or at a table piled with books and papers, pens and paper clips and Post-it notes, empty teacups scattered as if to catch drops from a leaking ceiling in a life that held little rain—except maybe the disapproval of Ama, my dad’s mom, who spent a lifetime trying to make a proper Indian wife of her Caucasian daughter-in-law.

  “That’s the pier Mom uses, then, I guess,” I said. “She keeps a bicycle and a small boat here, so she doesn’t need a car.”

  Kept a bicycle. Didn’t need. Mom didn’t need anything in this
world anymore except for me to pack up what was left of her life in England, the way I’d not yet managed to pack up her pajamas and teapots and hairbrushes at home, her puzzle box collection, her manuscript drafts of the children’s books she’d spent her life writing but had never seen in print.

  “Aunt Ally said there’s a ghost who walks those hills?” Anna Page said to Robbie.

  Robbie answered softly, “ ‘That old Crier of Claife on Furness Fell, / as long as ivy evergreens shall twine, / May sally forth at will from his ravine, / And rouse the boatman with his human yell.’ ”

  Julie blinked back the same surprise I felt at the fact of this boatman spouting poetry—a poem he’d have memorized to amuse the folks he took on tours of the lake, but still. “A ghost,” she said, and I remembered Aunt Frankie joking about a ghost friend of Mom’s who played piano at an old mansion in the park at home. I imagined Mom insisting that the ghost of the grizzled old character who’d ferried her across this English lake could have been enlisted to take us.

  Anna Page leaned close to Robbie and whispered in his ear, the sprinkle of grays at her part line a bit tacky—although that was just me being tacky; Anna Page had no marriage to end first, and never had. She could have as many doors as she wanted. She could paint them any color she chose. Which she did; even at fifty-one, Anna Page took in men as often as I took in the Sunday paper, and took what she wanted from them, and set them out with the recycling bin, or that was the way it sometimes seemed. Julie could have as many doors or men or anything else as she wanted by then, too, with her divorce from Noah filed. I was the only one of us with a marriage left, or with what passed for one.

  “They say he killed someone,” Robbie said to Anna Page or to Julie, I wasn’t sure which, but it was Anna Page’s laughter that warmed the evening in response.

  “Lordy, did Ma pay him to say that?” she said to Julie and me. Then she delivered, in a near-perfect mimic of her mother’s Southern accent, the Gatsby line our moms all whipped out at the slightest provocation: “ ‘You look at him sometimes when he thinks nobody’s looking at him. I’ll bet he killed a man!’ ”

  I heard Mom’s voice wrapped around the words, Mom’s laughter.

  “Not a bloke but a lady,” Robbie insisted as he set his weight to the oars again. “His British wife.”

  “His British wife,” Anna Page repeated, charming him with the hint of tease that worked so well with men.

  “He had two, didn’e,” Robbie said. “One wife in India and a proper British wife as well.” He laughed uncomfortably, glancing my way as if his words might offend me when they wouldn’t offend Julie or Anna Page. He thought I was Indian. People who aren’t Indian always do.

  “Two wives,” he repeated more gently, staring shoreward with eyes as deep as the lake in a face that had seen as much weather, eyes that just might understand how two loves could be held in a single heart. “Or that’s the blather here,” he said.

  He dipped one oar and raised the other to ease us toward the pier, where he hopped out and secured the boat to a mossy post, the swan pair watching suspiciously from a jetty of flat rocks on the other side of the boathouse, where the original pier must have been. “They say old man Wyndham who killed his British wife is the Crier of Claife, the ghost who calls across to the ferrymen at Nab. The only one who ever went to him, though … that poor bloke wouldn’t speak of what he’d seen, and still he died the next day.”

  An awful animal sound broke the silence then: the bay of a wolf or a coyote, perhaps, deep and primitive. It had gotten dark so quickly.

  “ ’Course, another story has a monk taking a Bible across the lake on Christmas Day,” Robbie said, “plying the ghost ‘with candle, book, and bell’ and confining him to the quarry and woods ‘until men should walk dryshod across the lake.’ ”

  “Couldn’t just exorcise him altogether, I guess,” Anna Page said.

  Robbie met her amused gaze and held it. “Ah, but that’d spoil the gallery, wouldn’t it? How’s a body to boast he’s been trailed at dusk by a hooded figure in a wood that can claim no ghost?”

  The gentle lap of lake, the cheep-cheep and tit-tit-tit of evening birds, added to the quiet as I removed the iron key and pushed open Mom’s blue cottage door. Inside, it was chilly and dim, the air fusty with the odor of the books in the glass-fronted cabinet left too long unopened, their pages unturned. A deep claw-footed slipper tub sat not in the bathroom but on a rectangle of limestone set into the wide-plank floor between the fireplace and the end of a double bed. How often had I barged in on Mom’s bubble baths as a child, the smell of vanilla candles mixing with that of vanilla bubbles as she laid a wet washcloth over her breasts?

  Julie put an arm over my shoulders, and Anna Page draped one around my waist from the other side, sandwiching me in their warmth. “Damn, this makes Barton Cottage seem grand,” Julie said as they tilted their heads down toward mine: dark, dark, blond.

  “Duck, duck, goose,” they used to call out when we were younger, although they were too old for the game by the time they played it with me, and they always let me win.

  Anna Page supposed it wouldn’t take long to clean out the place, while Julie crossed the room and clicked the lamp switch beside the bed, to no effect.

  “ ‘It’s a sign,’ ” Anna Page said—one of my mother’s favorite expressions delivered in her best imitation of Mom’s shy wisp of a voice.

  “A sign we should have taken your mom up on that offer of a few nights at her swanky London flat, Ape, rather than having her join us here next week?” Julie said.

  “Lord, Ma thinks we’re still sixteen and can’t survive without a dang chaperone,” Anna Page replied, as if her mother were in England solely to vex her, rather than, say, to visit one of her authors who was a favorite for the Pulitzer Prize.

  Julie’s ring-laden fingers followed the cord to the plug, and a small click sounded as the light popped on, illuminating a pitched ceiling that gave the room the illusion of space. “How funny: there’s an on-off switch on the outlet,” she said. She squashed a spider with a swift pinch of finger and thumb before I could stop her, before I could begin to say the lines Mom used to quote from The Tale of Mrs. Tittlemouse as she corralled spiders and put them out: Go away, you bold bad spider! Leaving ends of cobwebs all over my nice clean house. Except she would misquote it, she would say “bad bold spider,” and even as a toddler, I would set her straight.

  A door in the far corner of the single room opened to a hand sink with no mirror in a bathroom so narrow you had to leave the door open to wash your hands. Another led down a stairway to a small kitchen in which we found Mom’s bicycle taking up most of the space. It all seemed so empty: the double bed, the tiny love seat, the slipper tub.

  As Anna Page spotted a radiator and went to turn it on, Julie said she imagined there would be small plates of crumbs resting on the pages of open books here, like in Mom’s dining room at home.

  “And manuscripts covered with red ink,” Anna Page said.

  “I imagined the tub would be in the bathroom,” I said.

  Anna Page didn’t think the radiator was working, so Julie went to have a look (as if there might be some other way to turn the single knob, and she’d do it better than Anna Page).

  Two quick raps on the door startled us, and a man burst in without waiting for an answer, all broad chest and broad jaw and thick silvering hair. He was older than we were but younger than our mothers, with a dark, solid face that might know every Lake District scandal in history but would take them to his grave.

  “Allison, you didn’t call!” he said. “You’ll freeze without—” His dark eyes registered a hint of ire behind silver wire-rims as he muttered something that might have been apology or cuss. He turned the hard black door handle and back-stepped over the threshold, nearly knocking his head against the low doorframe. Behind him, a huge dog—black and white, with a lion head and long hair—sat unmoving on the stone path. “I beg your pardon,” he said in that imperiou
s tone older men deliver so well, not begging anything, “but do you belong here?”

  Julie eyed the trace of mud his hiking boots left on my mother’s cottage floor as she might eye a library patron requesting “the Count of Monte Crisco” or “Tequila Mockingbird,” or wanting to do “an interplanetary loan.” “I beg your pardon,” she demanded, “but do you?”

  “The gate is marked ‘private,’ ” he said. “You’re quite off the public bridleway.”

  Anna Page, with a quick flip of her hair that as much as said he was her type—a bit arrogant and in need of being taken down a peg—said, “Your ma’s neighbors sure are friendly here, aren’t they, Hope?”

  He turned to study me, the imperiousness softening. “You’re Allison’s daughter? You’re Asha?” He stepped forward again, not quite convinced, as, behind him, the dog settled back. “And one of you is—No, neither of you is Santosh, are you? You’re Asha’s friends, then, here with her on holiday at her mum’s cottage?”

  On holiday. We didn’t deny it. It wasn’t entirely untrue. Tucked into Anna Page’s bag was a booklet for easy walks in Grasmere and Ambleside and, unbeknownst to Julie, two of Alfred Wainwright’s volumes of more ambitious hikes. Julie, who isn’t much for bugs or dirt, had brought a collection of Wordsworth poems for this land of Dove Cottage and “a host, of golden daffodils,” and she’d arranged “cookery lessons” at a place called Lucy’s that offered “Proper Puds and Sweet Solutions,” “Afternoon Tea and Temptations,” and “Cakes Fit for a Queen.”

  “I meant to see if your mum wouldn’t have a bit of help setting a fire in the grate, and perhaps a tipple after her journey,” he said with a quick flash of teeth not battered into picket-fence submission, an expression I supposed could pass for a smile. He glanced around the cottage, doing the arithmetic on bodies and beds. “But I don’t suppose she’ll be joining you, then, will she?”

  Anna Page slipped her clean, careful fingers—surgeon’s fingers—through mine. “Mrs. Tantry died a few weeks ago,” she said.

  He wrapped a hand around the edge of the still-open door as Anna Page’s fingers tightened on mine. Anna Page loved my mom as much as I did, and she loved her better.