Valley of the Moon

“You’re lying. You’re not going to Spain.”

“Don’t be silly, of course I am.” She pushed me away. “And you’re far too old to be acting this way.”

“Mama,” I whimpered.

For a split second her expression softened and I saw my old mother gazing back at me with empathy and love. But a moment later the light drained out of her eyes.

“Take care of your sister,” she said.

“You must run away,” I cried, desperate. “Someplace he won’t be able to find you. Leave tonight.”

She pursed her lips. “And where would I go?”

“Anywhere.”

“There is nowhere else,” she said.

I wept silently.

A week later, the night before she was due to leave, her bags already packed, my mother lay down on her bed in a long dress like the Lady of Shalott, drank an entire bottle of nervine, and took her last breath. In an instant everything changed. Polly became Cook. Charlotte became Cook’s Girl. Madeline became Governess. I reverted back to Young Master; my sister, Little Miss. And my father packed me off to boarding school.

I would never see the greengage trees fruit again.

My toast had grown hard. The butter congealed. The consequences of time travel.

“A girl,” reported Martha, walking into the kitchen. “Ridiculously long lashes. Dark hair. Looks just like her mother.”

My American wife was an herbalist and midwife, as were her mother and grandmother before her. She carried soiled linens into the scullery.

“Are they still planning on leaving?”

“I assume so.”

“Did you ask them?”

“No, I didn’t ask them, Joseph. I was in the middle of delivering a baby. And it was a breech, at that.” She lowered the sheets carefully into the copper. “Thank you for filling it.”

Getting the water was my job. The scrubbing of the stains out of the linens was hers. I was progressive in all matters, including women’s suffrage, but I had my limits.

She stirred the sheets with a wooden spoon and sighed. “I’m sure they haven’t changed their minds.”

Greengage had lost more than a few families in the past year. I suspected it came down to the siren call of modernity. Electric lights. Steamships. The cinema. They were afraid of missing out.

When Kathleen O’Leary was a few months along, her husband, Paddy, had let me know they were moving back to Ireland.

“You understand,” he said to me in his thick brogue. “We’re not from here. We must stop our fooling around and go home. If we stay any longer, we’ll never leave.”

As if Greengage had been nothing but a holiday.

Martha was a tiny thing. When I was sitting, we were practically the same height. She put her cheek next to mine. She smelled of lavender soap. Soon she’d also smell of the chicken fat she used to moisturize her red, chapped hands.

“There isn’t anything you can do about it,” she said. “Greengage is your dream, Joseph. It’s not everybody’s dream. You have to remember that. Besides, maybe they’ll come back.”

“This optimism is quite out of character for you.”

“Yes,” she mused. “There’s something about a birth. One can’t help but be hopeful.”

After boarding school, I had attended Pembroke College at Cambridge, where I’d graduated with a dual degree in classics and economics. Then my father insisted I embark upon a Grand Tour. I thought it an antiquated rite of passage, but he thought it a necessary rounding out of my education. How he prized worldliness! He wouldn’t be able to pass as gentry, but damn it, his son would.

I traveled to France, Italy, and Germany. The Netherlands, Belgium, and Switzerland. I was supposed to go back to London then, to officially join Bell Textiles as my father’s second-in-command; instead I dropped down into Turkey and then made my way to Egypt. From there I went to the Far East, and after that, to Russia. I finished in Greece, spending a few weeks in Athens before finally returning to England.

I was gone for over a year. It took me that long to realize how depressed I was at the idea of my future—sitting in a glass room looking down at the unlucky souls on the factory floor. The women spinning and operating the looms. The men weaving and carding. The boys sweeping the floor, dust and lint choking the air. My father’s employees labored twelve hours a day, six days a week, amidst deafening noise for paltry wages. And why was I sitting in that glass room rather than on the floor? Not because of hard work, but because I’d been born into the right family.

This was not the life I wanted.

I couldn’t stop thinking of those shimmering days before my father sent my mother away. The world she created. Between the hours of eight and seven, the household hummed and buzzed joyfully. No job was valued more than another. There were no delineations between rich or poor. To be useful, to do good work with people that you respected, that’s what was important. But that world did not exist anymore.

I’d have to go out and create it.

It was in June of 1889 that I stepped off the train in Glen Ellen, California, steam curling around my ankles, the smell of fate in the air. I took a deep breath. A perfume of mountain laurel, ripening grapes, and chaparral danced on the breeze, deepened with a base note of sun-baked rocks and ferns.

My requirements for our new home? Close to a train—there were two train lines that ran through Glen Ellen. Near a large city—Santa Rosa and San Francisco were not more than a few hours away. Arable land—the hills were veined with springs.

I was enchanted as soon as I stepped off the train. As were the hundreds of others who got off the train with me who were now in the process of climbing into buggies and wagons, en route to the dozens of resorts, enclaves, and tent campgrounds in the area, where they would soak up the sun, get drunk on Cabernet, swim and picnic in the druidy redwood groves while reciting Shakespeare.

I climbed into a wagon and was driven off by a Mr. Lars Magnusson to view the old Olson farm. We traveled a mile or so into the hills, past oak glens, brooks, and pools of water, past manzanitas, madrones, and trees dripping with Spanish moss. Sonoma Mountain was to the west; its shadow cast everything in a soft purple light. When we finally reached the farm and I saw the luscious valley spread out in front of me, I knew this was it. Greengage. It would be a home for me and Martha at first, but I hoped it would soon be something more. A tribute to my mother and her ideals; a community in which she would have flourished, where she would have lived a good long life.

Greengage. The burbling creek that ran smack down the middle of the property. The prune, apple, and almond orchards: the fields of wheat, potatoes, and melons. The pastures for cows and sheep. The chicken house and pigsty. The gentle, sloping hills, mounds that looked like God’s knuckles, where I would one day plant a vineyard. I was done with fancy trappings, done with servants, with balls and hunts, with titles, with soot, with my Cambridge pals, the stench of the city streets, with war. I was about to cast off my old life like a tatty winter coat.

“Did you know the Olsons?” I asked Magnusson.

“We emigrated from Uppsala in Sweden together.”

“Why are they selling?”

“Dead.”

“Dead? Of what, may I ask?”

“Husband, diphtheria; wife, scarlet fever.”

“I’m very sorry to hear that.”

“One right after the other.”

“Really?” My mouth twitched in sympathy. “How difficult that must have been for you.”

Magnusson scowled. Compassion from a Brit was both an unexpected and unwelcome intrusion. “You plan to use this farm for a commune?”