by Abigail Agar
****
“Lady Elizabeth.” She still remembered the way her father had said it, sounding so regal and proud. She’d been twirling in the centre of the foyer, her heart fluttering in her throat, while her father was on the landing on the second floor, near the staircase.
She’d paused mid-twirl, smiling up at him. He’d been a largely absent father, Thomas Byrd. But when he entered a room, Bess couldn’t help grinning madly. She’d loved him more than nearly anyone else on the planet. Loved him, perhaps all the more because he was so often gone. She’d stayed up nights as a girl, wondering what might keep him there with her. Wondering what might be enough for him if only he would stay.
“You’re really something to see. I’m sure old Conner Garvey will feel the same,” her father had said, sauntering down the steps. He’d paused, placed a kiss on her cheek.
This memory: this was the night she’d introduced them. The night Conner’s family had joined her and her father for dinner. Why hadn’t she noticed the twinkle in their eyes when they’d first begun a conversation? Why hadn’t she questioned her father, taking Conner off to his study for a private “chat”?
Because this was what was done. It was proper for a father to know his future son-in-law. In fact, at the time, it had filled Bess’s heart with wonder, marvelling at the fact that the man who’d picked her out of a line of so many, many debutantes, could possibly please her father, as well. The father she’d never been quite enough for.
****
“Have you made a decision?”
The voice rang out from the present. Lady Elizabeth stopped her twirling and gaped at the shoe seller in the corner, wondering where on earth her brain had been.
“I’m sorry?” she asked.
“Have you decided whether or not you’re going to purchase the shoes,” the man said. “For, it’s nearly time for me to latch my doors.” He pointed towards the window, noting the darkness of the sky.
Bess wondered how much time she’d lost. She wasn’t ordinarily so lost to the chaos of her own daydreams. She gaped at the seller for a long moment before reaching for her bag. “I’ll wear the shoes out, if you don’t mind,” she said. She flicked through her bills, drawing out the proper amount. “They fit perfectly. Like a dream.”
Bess walked slowly from the door of the shoe store, straining herself not to smile. Outside pedestrians swarmed wildly, and she scuttled on her new shoes towards the far end of the road. She felt her blood pumping wildly like she had a secret nobody else knew. Her shoes, her work for The Rising Sun, her work for Nathaniel. It all was hers and hers alone. And it had been years since she had something to secretly smile about.
Four women strutted towards her in the centre of the road, looking like a strange pack of animals. Their hats glowed beneath the lampposts; their dresses swirled out in drab colours, the colours of married women, of high-society women who’d long-ago latched onto a lord of their own.
The moment Lady Elizabeth looked up at them, her stomach dropped with fear. For, suddenly, she realised she knew them. They were all 28, 29 years old, just as she was, and had been debutantes at the same time. She remembered giggling with them, before balls—remembered catching their eyes as they’d twirled on the arm of one man or another. Even as they approached, she remembered their names: Charlotte, Anna, Olivia, and Ellen.
They recognised her, as well. Perhaps Bess would have continued on, tapping away in her little new shoes, if they hadn’t looked at her with more scorn than she knew how to handle. She pressed her lips together tightly, turned her eyes to the shops beside her, aching for anywhere else to look. But as the four women approached, they marched to a halt, drawing a line in front of her. Bess had nothing to do but to remain before them, at the mercy of whatever they would say.
“Well, would you look at that,” Olivia said, arching her very thin blonde brow. “Look at who thinks she can just waltz across London as if her very presence isn’t …”
“Olivia!” Ellen said, her voice like a chirp. “You can’t possibly think you can speak like this and still be deemed a lady.” Ellen sniffed, drawing her eyes up and down Bess’s form, seemingly analysing every single thing about her.
Bess had the strange instinct to stick out her shoe to show her brand new purchase. But she refrained, keeping her eyes towards the ground. These women; she’d attended their weddings. She’d been present for the baptism of not one, but two of Anna’s babies. But of course, due to their close proximity, their husbands had been very easy targets for Conner and her father.
How could Bess have known? She’d been in the sitting room with these very women, tittering about shoes and about hair and about fashion in ways that seemed entirely unlike her, now. But while they’d been occupied, Conner and her father had been presenting a business deal upstairs. They’d been convincing the husbands that this, this was the path to grander fortunes than their wildest dreams.
Of course, it had all been a lie.
Their money had been swindled, taken out from under them. Their husbands had been termed “idiots,” despite Conner’s conniving personality. All of Bess’s fortune had been gifted to these women, as well as the other families Conner had affected. She had been living in relative destitution until Irene had taken her in. She might have wound up on the street, without a friend.
Even though these women, they were meant to be her friend. They’d called themselves her very best friends, at one time. And now, many years after those fateful times, it felt rather shocking to see them in this manner. Their children were surely three or four years old; their bodies were a bit thicker, their faces a bit more scrunched and uppity.
Not a one of them were still girls.
Only Bess had been left out to dry.
“Aren’t you going to say something for yourself?” Anna said nonchalantly. “We haven’t seen you since, what, the trial?”
“No, the execution,” Olivia said, her voice scornful. “It must have been that. Don’t you remember? She cried out the minute it happened. Couldn’t keep her tears to herself.”
Bess veered to the right, trying to find a path alongside of them and out of the chaos, back to her home with Irene. Overhead, clouds filled the black sky, becoming like a thick blanket over their heads.
“Ladies,” Bess finally offered, swishing her fingers along her dress. “It really is remarkable to see you. You’re all looking quite well.”
Bess felt as though she was about to swallow her tongue. The women before her exchanged glances before falling forward in laughter. They were like a tribe of birds, so angry, so volatile—ready to attack with their beaks out.
“Listen to her. She’s clearly an imbecile.” Olivia sighed. “I always knew she was a bit thicker than most, but this is really ridiculous. What on earth are you doing these days, my sweet? I suppose you’ll never marry. I’m sure you’ve already lost that thought.”
“She has,” Anna said, stomping forward.
Bess remembered that Anna’s husband had been the one Conner and her father had wronged the most. They’d lost the majority of their fortune and had even had to move to a smaller estate—somewhere outside of London. This was news Bess had learned long after Conner’s burial.
Previously, Anna had been Bess’s best of friends, the girl who’d held her hand through her anxiety when she’d learned that Conner had asked her to dance. “You can do this,” she had murmured, her eyes alight. “This is why we’re here. We’re ladies. We’re debutantes. We’re future wives.”
All Bess wished was that she could translate this friendship to Conner in a better way. “You could have stolen from all of them, Conner. Any of them, but not her,” she’d thought many times. Just preserve this friendship with Anna. Allow it to breathe.
Of course, such was her luck that Conner would destroy the strongest emotional bond she had with any of these women. It was almost as if he’d done it on purpose.
And, since Bess had learned, more and more, that her true knowledge of Conner
was lacklustre, at best, she wasn’t entirely sure if he hadn’t.
“Anna,” Bess said. She forced herself to make heavy eye contact; forced herself to give Anna a sombre, heart-filled smile. “Listen, Anna. I never got a chance to say …”
“Don’t,” Anna said, almost spitting the word. “It’s ridiculous to offer any sort of apology, and you know that. Our lives have been affected by what you did. And we’ll never be the same.”
Bess baulked. She so wanted to implore to them for their understanding. To say that she’d never meant any of it, that she hadn’t put Conner in their midst to destroy them. In essence, she’d been destroyed far more than any other person involved.
“I lost everything,” she murmured. But she knew that the words were lost in the whooshing wind.
“Let’s go,” Olivia snapped, clearly unhearing. “I don’t have time for this.”
The girls—no, the women—marched past, tossing their faces away from Bess. Anna appeared last in line, making heavy eye contact with Bess. Bess wanted to reach out and grip her hand, to tell her what she’d been thinking since Conner’s death: that she would have given anything to never meet him in the first place. That she wished she could have met some other man, some man who would have been good to her. A man who’d wanted children, safety, love.
But she also wanted to explain that, beyond anything, she was the keeper of his memory. She’d loved him, and perhaps, in some respects, she still did. It was the nature of love. You couldn’t just force yourself from it. And you had to carry on the stories of whomever you loved.
Not that anyone was carrying on the stories of her, Bess knew.
Seconds later, Bess found her footing once more and walked the rest of the way home. Her new shoes dug into the backs of her ankles, producing dots of blood on her stockings. But she didn’t stall. When she reached the door of her and Irene’s home, she fell against it, creating a single, horrific sigh. But by the time she lodged the key into the door and flung herself through it, she had wiped the tears from her cheeks.
Irene was seated in the dark, at the kitchen table, with a single, flickering candle before her. The house swarmed with the smell of baked apple pie, of cinnamon. Bess hovered in the foyer of the teensy house, her eyes filling with the image.
This woman, Irene. This persnickety, brilliant, wild woman—who’d never married, perhaps only because nobody had ever suited her brain—was all hers. Her best friend. She didn’t need Anna. Didn’t need the imaginary men she’d never been allowed to meet, back when she’d been a debutante.
“How could I ever need anything else?” Bess asked, smashing her flat palm against her skirts.
Irene rolled her eyes. She tipped a fork into the platter of pie, sneaking a bit of it into her mouth. As she chewed, she chuckled. “Come on. Sit. It’s cold out there.”
Bess didn’t have to explain her feelings to Irene. Didn’t have to verbalise the event of meeting with the ex-debutantes, several of whom Irene had known, back in their Season. Rather, Bess could dismiss the memory, exchanging it for a forkful of apple pie, a bit of wine, a bit of laughter. In Irene’s eyes, she was nowhere near perfect. But she wasn’t the disgraced daughter of Thomas Byrd, nor was she the lost little debutante and ex-fiance of Conner Garvey. Rather, she was simply herself—Bess, better known as her pen name, L.B. And perhaps that was enough, for now.
Chapter 13
Lady Elizabeth and Irene reached the exterior grounds of Lord Linfield’s estate the following evening. Bess immediately fell silent as she looked up at the grand house, her breath catching. Irene was in the midst of complaining about yet another writer at The Rising Sun. “He simply doesn’t understand the English language. I mean, I don’t even know where my head was when I gave him the job …”
The carriage crackled along the cobblestones of the driveway. Lord Linfield’s grand house reminded Bess a great deal of her father’s before they’d lost it. It gleamed beneath the early moonlight. Willow trees swept around out front, casting their leaves to and fro like whips. For a moment, Bess was lost in memory of waiting in her father’s home, gazing out the window. Watching for Conner’s arrival.
To her surprise, Lord Linfield and Richard were awaiting the women near the front of the house. Bess’s heart fluttered when her eyes met with his. He reached forth, drawing the door of her carriage open and helping her to the ground below. His hand over hers was warm and powerful. She hadn’t been given such assistance, not since Conner. Not since her debutante days.
She’d just simply thought those days of being regarded as a beautiful, worthy woman were over.
And perhaps they were.
She watched as Lord Linfield performed a similar action with Irene, helping her to the cobblestones below. Irene grinned at him, flashing white teeth. “Wonderful manners, Lord Linfield,” she teased. “Who taught those to you?”
“Good evening, ladies,” Lord Linfield said. “You remember my dear friend, Richard,” he continued, reminding his existence to Irene.
Irene, Bess, and Richard all bowed their chins to their chests in greeting. They walked the little path to the front steps of the house before a maid in a little white hat opened the door for them. As Bess entered the foyer, she was conscious that this was becoming a kind of routine: coming to Lord Linfield’s home, for dinner and conversation.
She reminded herself that one day this sort of thing would end. That he would learn all he needed to for his presentations. That she would deliver his speeches by post, or through Richard, and he would deliver her cheques in the same way. They were little more than employer and employee.
She had to remember that.
“Shall we have a bit of an exercise before dinner?” Bess asked, twirling towards Lord Linfield, forcing her eyebrows high.
Lord Linfield sputtered slightly. “I suppose dinner isn’t for another 45 minutes to an hour …”
“Wonderful,” Bess said, snapping her palms together. “Where shall we rehearse?”
Lord Linfield led them towards a sitting room on the far side of the right wing of the house. The room was immaculate: blue and white wallpaper pressed against the wall, high-backed chairs on either side of the fireplace, a painting taller than Bess herself on the far wall.
Upon entering, Richard and Irene sat in the chairs near the fireplace. The fire already roared, and Irene sneaked her feet closer to it, giving Bess a mischievous smile. Richard’s eyes traced down Irene’s ankle. His face didn’t change, although Bess suspected he was shocked. Shocked at the white flesh, so revealing.
Bess wondered why Richard wasn’t married. Why he’d arrived at Lord Linfield’s home and remained there as a kind of right-hand man, somewhere between servant and friend. What had happened in his life?
Of course, she sensed Lord Linfield thought similar things about her.
“Shall we begin?” Bess asked, forcing a smile.
Lord Linfield pressed the door closed and turned to her, his eyebrows stitched together. “I can’t imagine for a moment what you’d like me to say, to begin,” he said.
Bess slotted her hand into a side pocket and drew out the new speech she’d written him. “I’ve created two copies,” she said, passing him one. “I want you to study the first paragraph and read it out to me. Do it the way you might address a full room of people. All your greatest friends, all your family members, all looking to you for the best story on Christmas Day.”
Nathaniel unfolded the pages of the new speech. Bess was surprised to note that his hands shook as he opened it. Was he really so anxious around only her, with Irene and Richard waiting in the wings?
“Good afternoon,” Nathaniel began, his eyes glossy.
“A bit brighter. Make sure you keep your chin up,” Bess said, crossing her arms over her chest.
Nathaniel did as he was told, asserting his voice a bit more. When he looked up, he caught Bess’s eye once more. She felt a shiver in her stomach, but she forced it away, pushing herself to pay attention to the way Nathan
iel articulated the speech.