Tell Me Not to Love You novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Front Door
Sol is told to carry a fiancee's glass to the kitchen at the engagement dinner, walks out the front door instead, and hears the young master ask her to tell him not to love her; at dawn an eviction notice is taped to the gatehouse door.
Rosalind Whitcombe tapped her fork against her glass, and the whole dining room went quiet.
I was sitting at the far end of the table, between a candlestick and Amos's good ear, in a borrowed green dress.
I had taken that chair every Sunday for ten years.
Amos had taught me chess at that table when I was thirteen and too shy to say my own name.
"I have news," Rosalind said, and she smiled down the length of the linen like a woman counting her silver.
"Garrick and Blythe have an understanding. We'll make it official at Christmas."
Blythe Harrington rose from the chair beside Garrick's, all cream silk and brunette waves.
She held up her bare left hand as if the ring were already on it.
Everyone clapped.
Amos leaned toward me and muttered, "I'd like it noted that nobody consulted me."
I looked down the table at Garrick.
He was looking at his plate.
He did not say no, and he did not say anything else.
I put my hands in my lap so no one would see what they were doing.
Blythe worked her way around the table, collecting kisses on both cheeks, until she reached my chair.
She set her empty champagne flute beside my plate.
"Be a love and take that to the kitchen," she said. "Your mother's slow tonight."
A few people laughed.
"Blythe, darling, that's Kersti's girl," Rosalind called. "She's Amos's guest. An old habit of his."
She tilted her head at me.
"Though the kitchen is short a pair of hands, Solveig, if you're feeling useful."
The swing door opened.
My mother came through it carrying the soup tureen, her silver bun perfectly neat, and she saw my face.
Her eyes said, please.
She had said that word to me with her eyes for eighteen years, in every room of that house.
I stood up.
"Thank you, Mrs. Whitcombe, but I'm not on the staff," I said. "I'm a guest at Amos's table."
I picked up the flute and put it back in Blythe's hand.
"Your arm works fine."
Nobody laughed that time.
My mother shut her eyes.
I folded my napkin and laid it on the plate.
The kitchen door was to my left.
It was the door I had used all my life, whenever I came up to the big house to find my mother.
I turned right instead.
I walked the whole length of that dining room with sixteen people watching, down the hall past the portraits, to the great oak front door.
I had never once opened it.
It was heavier than I expected.
The October air hit my bare arms as I stepped out onto the wide stone steps.
I pulled the door shut behind me, quietly, so no one could say I'd slammed it.
Behind the wood I heard Amos bark one laugh.
I walked down the drive to the gatehouse in my borrowed shoes.
I had barely got the porch light on when gravel crunched behind me.
Garrick came up out of the dark with his jacket open and his tie wound around his fist.
"You didn't say anything," I said.
"I know."
"You let her announce it."
"I let her, so she wouldn't say worse in front of Amos."
His breath came hard, as if he'd run the whole drive.
"I'm going to fix it."
"Don't tell me what you're fixing."
He stopped at the bottom of the porch steps, which put his eyes level with mine.
Two summers ago he had walked into the bakery at four in the morning and asked what was good.
I had told him nothing, and he had come back the next day.
Last March I had told him to go marry someone his mother picked.
He had never once argued with me.
"Tell me not to love you, Sol," he said.
My heart slammed against my ribs.
"Say it, and I'll go back up that drive and never ask again."
He held my eyes.
"I mean it. You've told me no before, and I'm still standing on your porch."
"Your mother can take this roof off my mother's head with one phone call," I said. "This whole town would say the housekeeper's girl climbed."
"That's why it's hard," he said. "It isn't telling me not to."
He came up one step.
I smelled cedar and cold air and the wine he hadn't drunk.
He lifted his hand and laid his thumb along my jaw, slowly, giving me every chance to turn my face away.
I did not turn it.
For three full breaths I stood there with his palm against my cheek and my mouth an inch from his thumb.
Then I put my hand flat on his chest and pushed.
"Don't love me, Garrick Whitcombe," I said.
My voice shook on the last word.
He took his hand away.
"I'll ask again when you can say it without the shake," he said, and he walked back up the drive.
At three-twenty the next morning I pulled on my coat for the bakery and opened the gatehouse door.
An envelope was taped to the frame.
It was cream paper, heavy, the Windward crest at the top.
NOTICE TO VACATE, it said. Kersti Ostlund and household. The gatehouse is to be cleared by Saturday, October 31.
Under the signature, in Rosalind's own pen, she had added one line.
Thank you for eighteen years.
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