Coming Home to Greenleigh

Chapter 3

Elisabeth managed to walk with what she hoped looked like a steady, majestic gait as she moved down the hall and toward the side door of Lawson & Lawson. She did not dare turn around to see if Shawn was watching her leave. Head held high, she gave the receptionist a stiff nod as she passed by.

Once outside, she felt the resolve that had kept her back up and the tears down dissolve. Pressing her back flat against the sun-warmed brick of Lawson & Lawson, she gasped once, then shook her head briefly, winking the tears of strain back. I-will-not-cry, she recited to herself, coughing as the knot in her throat swelled painfully. Her feet took her in the general direction of home, but she realized that she couldn't bear the thought of seeing that rambling old house just now. Shawn knew that place so well. He had spent countless hours painting the carriage house with her one summer, she recalled, a small smile twisting her lips briefly. She blinked back the threatened tears. I am not crying, she thought sternly. She halted in front of the Congregational church down the street from home and turned into the gate.

There had been a church on this spot since the town was settled in the early 1700s, but the current building dated from some time in the middle 1800s when a few wealthy merchants had spearheaded a campaign to build a new church. The result was a graceful spired building of the sort that dots the New England countryside even today. Nearly every little town seems to have a little box-like structure with peaked roof and tall steeple, and this one was no different. It had a tiny cemetery and little bricked garden, and attendance nowadays was modest enough that the garden was usually empty and quiet when Elisabeth took her walks. She fled there today, not knowing where else to go in a town so small that she had practically walked the entire length of the downtown merely by walking from home to the offices of Lawson & Lawson.

She sat down on a bench in the shaded garden, the expanding branches of an ancient black walnut dwarfing the tiny courtyard. It was cold here despite the beautiful warm day, and the blue sky above seemed to be overlooking another planet entirely. The stone of the bench seemed to seep right through her thin dress and into her bones. Elizabeth hunched over a bit, briefcase clasped in front of her, and leaning forward, picked up a stray leaf from between her feet. Absently, she twirled it between her fingers. One big burden temporarily off her shoulders, but another one placed squarely on her again. Life seemed to work that way, she decided, but it sure wasn't a lot of fun.

She leaned back on her palms, ignoring the cold, smooth feel of the stone, choosing to look up at the wide blue sky and imagine some of the sun her way. He was still so handsome, a little voice said in her head. She sighed deeply, feeling a bit like she was one moment high in the sky in a Ferris wheel, plunging earthward the next, with her stomach turning somersaults all the way. No, indeed, she had never forgotten the intensity of those changing hazel eyes, one moment green, the next gray. Elisabeth caught her breath slightly, recollecting the many moods in which she had seen those eyes. She had never expected to see them staring at her again, and certainly not with the contempt and resentment she had seen in them today.

I deserved that, she admitted. I created that moment when I broke my promise to him all those years ago. If only I hadn't been there to beg for my livelihood. If only I hadn't been so very nervous, so upset about all this money business. Maybe I would have handled it better--been more pleasant, more polite. Maybe he wouldn't have been so mean. Or so angry.

Elisabeth got up, too cold to remain seated. She paced slowly back and forth, back and forth in front of the bench. She remembered very well how determined Shawn had been to take her with him to New York the summer after graduating from Harvard Law School. "We've got to get out of here," he'd said. "You and I, we can't let this place suck the life out of us." He had been so positive, so confident. He was so sure that the future held nothing but good and fine things for them both, if only they would escape this trap that Greenleigh set for them. He had painted a picture for her of the life they would lead, a life full of the arts, literature, each other. They would start a new legacy, without being hampered by the one left for them by generations of Greenleigh ancestors.