The Mother: A Novel (The Good Lands) Read online

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Otherwise, any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  Text copyright © 2023 by Brooke Blanchard Tabshouri

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  Published by 47North, Seattle

  www.apub.com

  Amazon, the Amazon logo, and 47North are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.

  ISBN-13: 9781542036535 (paperback)

  ISBN-13: 9781542036528 (digital)

  Cover design by Faceout Studio, Molly von Borstel

  Cover image: © Shelley Richmond / ArcAngel; © Ildiko Neer / ArcAngel; © Rolf Richardson / Alamy Stock Photo; © Social Media Hub / Shutterstock; © Abstractor / Shutterstock; © LeksusTuss / Shutterstock; © Chaikom / Shutterstock; © getgg / Shutterstock

  For my mom, Shelly; and my sister, Abbey.

  If we tried this, we’d be caught in five minutes, but we’d laugh the entire time.

  CONTENTS

  Map

  That’s my last . . .

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Chapter Forty

  Chapter Forty-One

  Chapter Forty-Two

  Chapter Forty-Three

  Chapter Forty-Four

  Chapter Forty-Five

  Chapter Forty-Six

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  That’s my last Duchess painted on the wall,

  Looking as if she were alive. I call

  That piece a wonder, now . . . She had

  A heart—how shall I say?—too soon made glad,

  Too easily impressed; she liked whate’er

  She looked on, and her looks went everywhere.

  Sir, ’t was all one! My favour at her breast,

  The dropping of the daylight in the West,

  The bough of cherries some officious fool

  Broke in the orchard for her, the white mule

  She rode with round the terrace—all and each

  Would draw from her alike the approving speech,

  Or blush, at least. She thanked men,—good! but thanked

  Somehow—I know not how—as if she ranked

  My gift of a nine-hundred-years-old name

  With anybody’s gift. Who’d stoop to blame

  This sort of trifling? Even had you skill

  In speech—(which I have not)—to make your will

  Quite clear to such an one, and say, ‘Just this

  Or that in you disgusts me; here you miss,

  Or there exceed the mark’—and if she let

  Herself be lessoned so, nor plainly set

  Her wits to yours, forsooth, and made excuse,

  —E’en then would be some stooping; and I choose

  Never to stoop. Oh, sir, she smiled, no doubt,

  Whene’er I passed her; but who passed without

  Much the same smile? This grew; I gave commands;

  Then all smiles stopped together . . .

  —Robert Browning, My Last Duchess

  Chapter One

  Gregorian Calendar: Monday, 3 August 2020 (Feast Day of Saint Faustus)

  Anishinaabe Moon: Manoomin Giizis (Ricing Moon)

  Islamic Calendar: 13 Dhu al-Hijjah 1441

  Chinese Calendar: Cycle 78, year 37, month 6, day 14 (Year of the Rat)

  Hebrew Calendar: 13 Av 5780

  Mayan Calendar: 13.0.7.13.2

  Ethiopian Calendar: 27 Hamle 2012

  Marie, Duchess of Suffolk, left Grayside in the middle of a clear and moonless night, having stolen the most valuable thing that her husband’s family owned. As she did it, she thought of her mother and smiled.

  If she was lucky, James would never know what she had taken. She did not chance looking back as she walked away. She knew that if she did, she would never have the courage to keep walking. And she had no choice but to keep walking.

  It would hopefully be days before James even noticed she was missing. She and her husband did not normally share a bed—at least, not unless he was there to try to have sex with her. Otherwise, she was left unbothered, in a plush and comfortable room done up exactly as she liked it, in the opposite wing of Grayside—the name apparently chosen by one of James’s forebears because of the mist that swallowed up the manor house and blocked the view of the sea. The name was apt in every way. Marie’s life was bleak and gray; always had been. She wasn’t the only one who held that opinion: before she’d married James, she’d heard others refer to the house as “Graveside.” Marie had learned never to do so after she’d chanced saying it once in the presence of her mother-in-law, the Dowager Duchess of Suffolk, who still ruled the house and everyone in it.

  She hadn’t had long to make her plan to escape, but she’d used the short period of time well. Marie had tested how easy it would be to get out of the house without any of the twenty-six live-in servants noticing, which was roughly half the number actually needed to run a house the size of Grayside. The house was old, the money running low, and so there was no modern alarm system as would be common in comparable homes. It was cheaper to employ people from the village—ideally, those who had fallen behind on their rents and could serve as nighttime security in the Duke’s home as payment. They were untrained, often drunk and then asleep. Perfect.

  Paid servants were another story. They often had to support not only their own immediate families but also members of their extended families on their meager salaries. Any slipup in their performance would result in an unceremonious dismissal without pay. They had every incentive to ensure that Marie, like everything else James owned, was not misplaced. Marie felt bad that what she was doing was likely to cost many of them their jobs—probably all the maids who attended her. But not badly enough to stop. It was them or her, and she’d chosen herself.

  After two successful sojourns from the house in the dead of night, with no one mentioning or noticing it, she had laid her plan. She’d acted withdrawn during the day, being less than pleasant to her husband and his mother, and made sure that the servants saw her looking unwell. If she were unwell, James wouldn’t want to see her. It would also provide cover for what was to happen later, if she were to seem faint and confused. She was a woman; they expected it of her anyway. She’d wandered in unpredictable directions on both nights so that her maids could say later that she had seemed unstable but would not be so concerned that one of them would be placed in her bedroom with her overnight. That had happened in the past, and she didn’t wish to be punished like that again.

  And tonight, once Marie had made it out of the window on the ground floor that was easily unlocked and not patrolled by anyone, she scurried over to the edge of the sharp cliffs that led down to the sea. Waves thundered hundreds of feet below her. England had many beautiful seasides, and none of them were in Suffolk. The rocks here were jagged, the cliffs were high, the waves were unforgiving. Each year, the sea reclaimed more and more of the shoreline. The nearby town of Dunwich, once one of the largest towns in England, had nearly disappeared after centuries of erosion. The cemetery was the most recent victim, and it was not uncommon to see bones jutting out of the cliffside. And as the cliffs crumbled into the sea year after year, so too did the size of Grayside’s estate diminish. It was almost poetic, and had Marie read that as a metaphor in a book, she would have found it too on the nose.

  Marie took the bundle of sleep clothes from under her coat—the ones that her maid had dressed her in earlier that evening. She removed the slippers from her feet, left one on the ground, then tossed the other over the edge. She lifted the robe high into the air and let it go—it billowed out like a white flag of surrender, and she let the wind carry it where it might. She took the nightgown and let it flutter down to the sea below. She turned before she could see it hit the bottom and, stepping gingerly on stones to avoid leaving footprints, walked barefoot as fast as she dared toward the road that led to the nearest village, Covehithe. From
there, she could catch the train to London, where she might pass safely and anonymously until she could get across the channel. She looked up, longing to see some stars, but they were hidden by the mist.

  As far as faked deaths went, this was probably not the most convincing. But it was in everyone’s interest for her to be dead, so she trusted they wouldn’t look for her too hard.

  Once she was over the rise of the hill that hid Grayside from the village, she allowed herself a shaky breath of relief and put on a pair of old shoes she’d found in a toolshed. She hadn’t been seen or caught. Marie wrapped the coat around herself more tightly, pulled a scarf from an inside pocket, tied it over her hair, and marched into the wispy embrace of the fog. She checked the watch on her wrist—four hours until the first train of the day, which would leave before sunrise.

  Marie felt inside the pockets of the coat: the little money and jewelry she’d been able to steal; the paper that she’d folded and refolded so many times in recent days that it was now as soft as flannel; a small book from the library; and the most valuable object in the whole estate. She’d never wanted for a single possession in her life, and now she was down to just the essentials, ones without which she could not survive.

  Marie shivered; she was used to being cold at Grayside, but this was new. But she embraced the discomfort, the damp, the fear in walking along an unlit road at night without directions. She’d left her phone back in her room—not that she’d ever been allowed to use it without supervision. In London, maybe she could buy a new one—one that would actually provide the freedom the politicians and priests all said was too dangerous for women to wield.

  When she saw the first smokestack rising from the village, she felt hope for the first time in her life. Maybe, just maybe, she could do this.

  Chapter Two

  Like all good broodmares, Marie Kenfield had been raised to attract the most optimal male and bear his children. She was the third of three daughters of Thomas Kenfield, the Eighth Earl Kenfield—making Marie her father’s greatest disappointment. When she was born, he was so apoplectic with rage that he beat her mother, Charlotte, as she lay in bed recovering from Marie’s birth. He banished Charlotte from the bedroom while he very publicly carried on with other women—tenants, servants, daughters of friends—who bore him three illegitimate sons, just to prove over and over to his wife that it was her fault that she had not produced an heir to the Earldom, not his. He was Earl Kenfield, and she was just his useless wife. After years of such humiliation, when Marie was only seven years old, her mother had walked off the cliffs. Her body had been found by the children’s nanny, Jane. Earl Kenfield had refused a funeral or burial on the Ellthrop grounds. Instead, he’d quickly replaced his first wife with Louise Goodman, daughter of his shooting friend Lord Goodman, Baronet. After a quick wedding in the chapel and a few more nights in the bed, Louise had given him what he’d always wanted, what the estate had always needed—a son, Marie’s little brother, Arthur.

  Until Arthur was born, there had been a very real concern that her father’s line would end with him and that the Earldom would be inherited by his horrible younger brother, Edmund. Edmund was unsuitable for the Earldom in every way, being a “confirmed bachelor,” as they called it in polite circles, and Earl Kenfield was not going to let a man like that inherit his title. Arthur had been raised as the favorite, with his sisters, Alice, Emma, and Marie, distantly behind him.

  Despite being only an Earl, Marie’s father was a close member of the King and Queen’s inner circle, frequently socializing with them on holidays. To attract a husband, the girls had to remain untouched and unblemished English roses. And they’d grown up in the regimented and stratified society of the English nobility, one of the few left on earth that classified and ranked its members according to class.

  Their mother, Charlotte, had been the most beautiful and desired woman in all of England. She’d chosen Thomas Kenfield, who, despite being an Earl and not a higher-ranked Duke, had the more ancient family name, the older title, and the longer history with the Royal Family. His family home, Ellthrop Hall, was one of the oldest, largest, and grandest, with a portrait gallery rivaling that of the Royal Family itself and fifteen thousand acres of farmable land in Northamptonshire generating income for the Earl and his family. His daughters had wanted for nothing material. All they’d had to do was spend the useless years between their births and when they came of age doing three things: staying beautiful, learning a suitable hobby, and remaining virgins.

  Alice, the eldest, had done two of the three. Tall and large-boned with a complexion that could turn flushed at any time and for any reason, she had been determined by her father not beautiful enough to attract an heir to a Dukedom, or even an Earldom, and he had signed her away to a low-ranking baronet as soon as she’d come of age. She’d born three sons in her young marriage, each one a plea for her father’s affection and acceptance. He’d doted on his grandsons and continued to ignore their mother.

  His second daughter, Emma, had approached Earl Kenfield one evening when she was sixteen and informed him that she was pregnant with a stable boy’s child. She’d been thrown out of Ellthrop within the hour, with no money, and her sisters had been forbidden to try to contact her. The stable boy had also never been seen again. Marie, only twelve at the time, would forever remember the sound of her sister’s footsteps on the gravel of the long drive. With Emma banished from the family, Alice married and in her own home, and their mother long in the grave, Marie had known deep in her immortal soul that she was going to be alone for the rest of her earthly life. And though it was a sin to do so, she’d prayed for a swift death.

  But the Lord God did not hear her prayer, as usual. As soon as she turned eighteen, her father took her, his least-loved daughter, blushing and blonde and pale as a white rose petal, to London to be presented to Her Majesty Queen Federica, wife of His Majesty King Edward X, God Save the King. Queen Federica showed her favor to Marie, who was all done up in white with feathers and pearls in her hair. By the end of the week, Marie had attracted the attention of the most eligible man in England: James, Earl of Lincoln and only son of the Duke of Suffolk. They’d been married before Christmas, with Marie hiding under her veil as her father handed her over to her husband, whom she’d met only twelve times before that day. Her stepmother, Louise, had hissed at her to do her duty, and Alice had hardly met her eye from her seat in the eighth pew back from the altar.

  Marie had brought to the marriage not only the prospect of an heir but also much-needed income for her new husband’s ancestral home, Grayside, which was growing as decrepit as the old Duke himself. Within the year, the old Duke was dead, and James had inherited the Dukedom. Within three years, Marie had still not produced an heir. Her father stopped speaking to her altogether, and her husband did not speak to her any more than was strictly necessary.

  For what was there to say to a third daughter of a mother who’d failed in her basic duty to her own husband? How long would it be before Marie’s husband turned his eye to another woman? Marie spoke to the priest. She spoke to the doctor. She even spoke to the woman in the village who everyone called a witch. They gave her prayers, herbs, medicines, injections, bloodwork, new positions to try when her husband visited her bed. Nothing worked. Before long, Marie found telltale signs that her husband’s eye was beginning to wander. A servant with a rumpled apron here, a tenant woman walking to the gatehouse there. At the shooting party, the wife of James’s friend would disappear for a short period, then return, hair mussed and appetite ravenous, with her swollen lips and sharp teeth smiling at Marie as she devoured a tart.

  Marie spent her days in the library, slowly and methodically making her way through the dusty old tomes that had been bought more as decoration than a thirst for knowledge. No one else read them; no one noticed that she took them. There was mobile phone reception at Grayside, but it was poor, and besides, the internet was not something ladies used. Her access was limited anyway by WifeLock, which prevented married women from doing or accessing anything on a phone that could betray their husbands in thought or deed. It was one of the many restrictions swiftly placed on phones once they had become available in England. Like everywhere else, they had represented a sharp break from the past and opened up a new avenue of clandestine conversation and research. This had led to women asking questions and learning about other parts of the world, two things that could never be permitted in England. So if Marie ever needed to use her phone, her husband or another approved man in the household used it for her. WifeLock kept her from using the more subversive parts of the phone, such as the internet or calling numbers that were not on a preapproved list.