The Window Dresser and Other Stories

By Meredith Allard

A window dresser who sees the world as a creative playground. A Jewish grandmother's try as Chaucer's Wife of Bath. A look at the perils of online dating. A struggling artist examining her life. Bestselling author Meredith Allard (The Loving Husband Series, When It Rained at Hembry Castle) presents her first short story collection.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Copperfield Press
• Release date: Nov 13, 2020
• ISBN: 0578806525

Meredith Allard

Meredith Allard is the author of the novels The Loving Husband Trilogy, That You Are Here, Victory Garden, Woman of Stones, and My Brother's Battle (Copperfield Press). Her latest release is the historical novel When It Rained at Hembry Castle, a great read for fans of Downton Abbey. She lives in Las Vegas, NV.

Book preview

1

Keats’ House

The house in Hampstead Heath did not strike Anne as anything so worthy of veneration. Formerly known as Wentworth Place, the white two-story home had not belonged to the poet Keats; he had lived there for two years as the guest of his wealthy friend. As Anne studied the damask settees and the oriental rugs she felt a tap on her shoulder.

Are you Miss Manning? the woman asked. Anne looked at the woman’s gray bun-pulled hair, her upright stature, the single strand of pearls beneath her tweed jacket.

I am Mrs. Stewart.  Follow me.

Anne felt the heaviness of being scrutinized by someone whose back was to her. Mrs. Stewart paused in Keats’ bedroom.  I always begin my tours here, Mrs. Stewart said, because here is where much of the poetry began.  Not necessarily written in this room, of course, but this was where he slept and dreamed, and poetry begins in our dreams, does it not?  

There was a small print of Shakespeare and a portrait of Keats’ sister on the wall facing the door. A portrait of the young poet himself was slanted over the fireplace, and Anne stepped closer to inspect the seeking eyes, the melancholy face, the wisps of gold-brown hair. When she turned from the portrait she saw Mrs. Stewart looking at her.

Where is your notebook? Mrs. Stewart asked.

I have a good memory, Anne said.

Yes, said Mrs. Stewart, I believe you do.

Outside the leaves dangling from their spindly branches still whispered rhymes in the breeze. Mrs. Stewart gestured towards an ordinary plum tree in the tulip-filled garden. 

Miss Manning, Mrs. Stewart said, you cannot come to Keats Grove without seeing this tree. It was planted to commemorate the tree where the nightingales nested, inspiring Keats to write his poem. Are you familiar with it?

I read Keats in college. I loved poetry then.

Life is difficult without poetry.

Life is more difficult with it.

The docent disappeared into the house and returned with a leather-bound book. The name on the spine was Keats.

Take this with you, Mrs. Stewart said.  Anne nodded, said thank you, and took the book with no intention of reading it.    

Anne couldn’t sleep that night. Raindrops like steel-covered pellets pummeled the windows while she stared at the dark, her tendons quivering with the thunder. She thought of Keats and her sadness deepened. Keats had died too young, too talented, too unfinished in the work he had been inspired to do.  No one with such a beauty-seeking soul could be suited for the job of a surgeon, doctors who learn the anatomy of corpses until they forget that living people feel pain and fear. Keats, whose sensitivity would not allow him to treat patients like experiments, had to be a poet. She turned on the light beside her bed, pulled the thin book from her bag and flipped past words with meanings she had lost. 

On one of the pages Anne saw a portrait of a modern-looking woman with intelligence and straight-looking eyes. Her deep brown hair was parted down the middle and curled under, and she wore a low-shouldered dress like they wore then. Anne liked the face of the young woman, seeing something familiar across the generations. Suddenly, she understood what she saw—a young woman in love.

The straight-looking woman was Fanny Brawne, and the man she loved was John Keats. They were lucky, Anne thought, they had found each other. And then it was over. It was cold that winter of 1820, and he, being a poet, needed to save his money so he rode outside the coach bringing him home to Hampstead Heath. When he took to his bed he coughed up blood, arterial blood he knew, and he knew from his medical schooling that he had contracted the consumption, the same disease that killed his mother and his brother when he had nursed them until their deaths.    

His doctor told him to winter in Italy. Fanny Brawne packed his clothes and lined his traveling cap with silk. His friend Joseph Severin went with him. Keats wrote Bright Star, his last sonnet, on the boat to Naples. A few months later he died in Severin’s arms. In his last letter to Fanny he wrote, I can scarcely bid you good-bye even in a letter. I always made an awkward bow. He was 25 years old.

Look at where poetry brought you, Anne said aloud.

But she couldn’t put the book down. She turned on all the lights and sat beneath the window and read La Belle Dame Sans Merci about the power of love, the fair maiden who distracts the knight from his mission. She read "The Eye of St.