by Abigail Agar
Nathaniel trailed off as the violins in the orchestra swelled higher, faster. He swallowed, searching Everett’s eyes. He’d known Everett when he’d been a much younger, more optimistic man. When he’d spent long nights chatting with his father, and longer days still roaming the woods. He hadn’t craved the attention of Parliament, nor had he felt the pressing weight of time, creeping ever forward.
He hadn’t imagined that his father would ever be executed by highwaymen.
“All right. Let’s sneak off,” Everett said, his eyes alight. “I work with several of these blokes, as you well know, and I can’t imagine spending another moment with them, when I’m not paid for it. Food’s wretched, anyway.”
Everett spun on his heels and sneaked through the crowd, so snake-like and sneaky. He glanced back to ensure that Nathaniel followed. Nathaniel suddenly felt they were boys again, up to hi-jinks, playing pranks.
Seconds later, they passed within three feet of Lord Frederick, who opened his lips to blare out Nathaniel’s name. But in response, Nathaniel forced his smile from his face, turned his head to the side, pretended that he didn’t see the older man. He nodded to an invisible form, saying, “Wonderful to see you, sir,” before darting the rest of the way to the foyer.
Once outside, Everett sneaked along the edge of the foyer to a side exit, where he paused and waggled his eyebrows back at Nathaniel. Nathaniel sprung forward, feeling light and fresh. He’d met Everett when he’d been a teenager, a young and strapping and wild boy who hadn’t a single thought for growing old. Now, he felt a glimmer of that promise. That promise of forever youth.
Finally, Everett and Nathaniel found themselves outside, beneath the sparkling stars and in the chilly, yet oddly electric night air. Nathaniel flashed his eyes to the right, watching as Everett devolved into another set of chuckles.
“Why were you even there in the first place? Only for the face of it? Your colleagues?” Nathaniel asked, laughing, himself. “You seemed oddly willing to escape the minute I arrived.”
“Well, certainly, for the business side of things. But beyond that, my boy, it truly is a fine thing that I haven’t yet found a way to settle down. They can’t possibly understand it.”
He paused for a moment, gasping for air. “Besides, one can always convince one’s self of things unfortunately. I, for one, convinced myself that perhaps these balls weren’t so terribly horrific. And I found myself in a sad mental state, you see, and wanted to kick myself out of it. Shall we wander through the garden?”
Everett cut across the grass towards the walled garden, forcing Nathaniel to follow quickly behind him. Nathaniel wasn’t accustomed to having to “keep up” with anyone, in fact, and found himself soon out of breath, huffing beside the only-slightly shorter man.
“You’ve been around the world,” Lord Linfield said as they slid through the gates of the garden and wandered across the bricked walkway. On either side, dead rose vines tossed to and fro in the night-time wind. They looked like odd skeletons.
“Absolutely,” Everett said. He paused, dropping his hand across his chest.
“I suppose I haven’t seen you since, well …” Nathaniel paused, trying to trace it all back to before his father’s funeral. This drudged up countless memories, memories of his father’s dead body—so pale his face had been!—and his mother weeping across Nathaniel’s shoulder.
“I tried to contact you after it happened,” Everett said, his voice lowering. “I knew how much you loved your father. Looked up to him. Wanted to become him, as, it seems, you’re taking steps to do now.”
“I don’t remember hearing from you,” Nathaniel said.
“Well, Richard—I believe that was your father’s man at the time …”
“He works for me, now,” Nathaniel said, nodding.
“Well, Richard told me that you received my word, but that you weren’t bothering to leave your room much at the time—only for long jaunts through the woods. You should have seen the old boy at that time, that Richard. Absolutely stricken. Seems that he was meant to be in that carriage with your father but had had to attend to his own family. Something about his sister falling ill,” Everett said.
Lord Linfield paused, inching his feet across the bricks. Along the garden wall, rabbits hopped over the frigid grass, their eyes beady and strange in the night.
“His family? His sister?” Nathaniel murmured. He realised he’d given Richard very little time to speak of himself. How selfish had Nathaniel been over the years, swirling in his own pain about his father’s death?
“I believed the guilt would destroy him. But I’m grateful to hear that he’s taken up with you. Perhaps he feels he owes it to your father,” Everett said.
The men walked on, two dominant forces in the garden while the party whizzed along inside. Everett cleared his throat, perhaps sensing that Nathaniel had now grown lost in thought.
“I was in India for nearly a year, you know,” he began. “It took months to get there, months of arduous travel, and when I arrived, the sun was shining over Bombay, and I saw people, countless numbers of them, milling in and out of the rivers. You’ve never seen so many people in your life, Nathaniel. Not if you stretched the entirety of London out into a single line. Of course, while there, I wasn’t dressed like an English gentleman. Couldn’t very well wear my top hat or three-piece suit, you know, but they still sensed a difference in me. Children scampered up to me, grabbing my hands and staring at the colour of my skin. They tried to drag me towards the river, if you can believe it, but I hung back. Never been partial to water, you know.”
Nathaniel remembered something about Everett’s past. Something about Everett nearly dying as a child, nearly drowning at a nearby lake. Since then, Everett hadn’t so much as touched a body of water.
“And while there, I wrote,” Everett continued. “First one novel, then another. I found that when I was all the way across the world, I could see the perversities of England in a far fresher light.”
“Perversities?” Nathaniel asked, tilting his head. “I don’t suppose I know entirely what you mean.”
“Of course you do,” Everett said, halting at a fork in the garden path. One fork sneaked beneath a brick archway, which perhaps led to the exterior forest. The other fork snaked along the other dead plants, crunching away in the breeze. “I saw the look on your face in that ballroom. You feel the entrapping of British society. Understand that this world shoves us forward to realities that aren’t entirely our own. Wives, companionships, children: what’s it all for? It’s certainly not for the beauty of love.”
“You sound like a romantic,” Nathaniel said. Although, when he said this, he heard his mother saying it, instead. It certainly wasn’t from his own mind.
“Perhaps I am, Nathaniel,” Everett said. “But in fact, I’ve been in love with the same woman since I was a man of just twenty-two years old.”
Everett’s eyes shone with the moon. Nathaniel tried to make sense of this statement, tried to remember Everett with one woman or another during courting Season. But he drew only a blank.
“Who is she?” he asked.
“You probably wouldn’t know her.” Everett sighed. “I met her when I was travelling with my family to Brighton. She was working at the house of my father’s old friend, painting portraits of several of his daughters. She had an immaculate ability to capture whoever she was looking at in a way that froze time. I would watch her for hours, just behind her shoulders, noting the curvature of her neck as she tilted her head this way, that way. God, I could have watched her paint forever.”
Nathaniel sensed the heaviness of the story already. He took a step back, marvelling at the weight of everyone’s secrets.
“Did your father know you were watching her?” Nathaniel asked.
“Absolutely not, no,” Everett said. “I had to sneak off to watch. We both knew it was wrong. She’s several stations below me, comes from nothing. But one afternoon, when no one was in sight, I kissed her. Kissed her!
Completely tearing through every last rule of propriety. But at the time, at the age of 22, I hadn’t a care in the world. And she kissed me back, Nathaniel. She all but fell apart in my arms.”
Nathaniel felt a rush of emotion from a fountain he didn’t quite understand. “But you must have known, then, that class isn’t everything …”
Everett gave him a sneaky smile. “Why, Lord Linfield, I would have never thought someone of your status would say such a thing. Never in my wildest dreams.”
Nathaniel blinked, trying to rid the image of Lady Elizabeth, seemingly continually at the brink of his mind. “What happened next?” he said, trying to dart the conversation away from topics regarding him, or his emotions.
“It’s strange,” Everett said. “It’s strange how time passes, but your heart still clings to ideas and feelings and beautiful things. I left that house when I was 22 years old, knowing full-well that I could never be with Nelle. Never in my wildest dreams could she become my wife, no matter how much I wanted that sleeping form beside me every night of my life. But I took to my pen and paper after several sleepless nights and wrote her letter after letter, all of which she returned. In the letters, we talked about how we will surely find a way to be together one day. My status couldn’t be the single thing that kept us apart. And as the months went by, I forced myself to consider ways to impart the news of my love to my father and mother. I struggled with it. Practised to myself in my room.
“But that all changed when I received her next letter. You see, her older sister had been promised to a man of a higher status, a man in London, but her sister had been overtaken by an illness and had been crippled. For this reason, her father had offered her, my Nelle, to this Londoner. Immediately, I flew into a rage, demanding to know who this man was. This man who was going to take my Nelle. But she refused to tell me
“I knew that Nelle would be living out her life perhaps streets away from me, in London, and it absolutely petrified me. Throughout the next few years, I drove myself insane, thinking that nearly every woman I spotted on the street was her. I was stricken with grief, knowing she couldn’t respond to my messages. That she couldn’t be a part of my life. So, a few months after the tragedy befell your father, I ran off to India, then to China. I considered other ways of living. I wondered if I could ever take an Asian wife,” he said, almost incredulous at his own story. “But as the year went past, I knew I needed to return to England.”
“And what of Nelle?” Nathaniel asked, hunching his shoulders forward.
“When I arrived home, it took me perhaps two weeks to send out a man to discover her whereabouts,” Everett said, sounding world-weary. “And he discovered that her husband has since deceased, that he left her with a three-year-old child with golden curls, just like Nelle. The man told me they couldn’t be more alike in manner and in looks. It makes my heart break, knowing that Nelle is all alone in that big mansion, her daughter fatherless …”
“And your family certainly wouldn’t approve you marrying a widow,” Nathaniel murmured, feeling his stomach harden with sadness.
“You said it, old boy,” Everett said, his voice no longer jocular. “And so, I find myself here. At another godforsaken ball. Waiting, waiting. For what? For another Nelle to walk into my life? I don’t believe that will ever happen.”
Nathaniel felt the words flow out of him, then. “What you’re feeling about this girl is a decade old. It’s worth your time to uphold it. To go and find her. To tell her.”
Everett blinked at him, incredulous. Through the gaping pause between them, the air filled with the swell of string instruments from the big house. Everett’s smile was sneaky and wry, like a teenage boy’s.
“You old romantic, you,” he said, chuckling. “I never would have pegged you as such. Tell me. Who is she?”
Nathaniel shook his head, pretending not to fully understand the question. “She? No, goodness. There’s no one in my life, Everett. Nothing of the likes of dear Nelle.”
“Nathaniel, I’ve known you a long time. And to put it simply, you’ve always been a bit of a dunce in matters of the heart,” Everett said, arching his brow. “There’s something up with you. Something that perhaps you can’t put into words yet.”
Everett snapped his hand across Nathaniel’s shoulder, making Nathaniel’s firm frame shake a bit, back and forth.
“I owe you a similar bit of advice, then,” Everett said, his eyes glittering. “I owe you a feeling of resolution, which is what you’ve just given me. Whatever it is—whatever this feeling is, dear Nathaniel, follow it,” Everett said. “For I watched the plague take countless people across India. I watched Chinese people starve at the side of the road. I came home and saw that same look of fear and loneliness in my own people, the people of England. We’re all slowly dying, or else getting to it far too quickly. Explore this. Whatever it is.”
Nathaniel and Everett walked back to the party after that. Everett sneaked his way through the foyer, back towards the carriage, leaving Nathaniel with only another firm handshake and a wink. “I simply can’t stay a moment more. Not when she’s out there,” he told Nathaniel.
Nathaniel forced himself to remain. He forced himself through countless conversations with his father’s old friends, grinning and then frowning in a strange pattern to translate his worry and his interest. When he was introduced to their daughters, he bowed his head low and said he was grateful for the opportunity to meet them—and that certainly, yes, they should arrange a dinner together quite soon. But his words were hollow. And he couldn’t help comparing each and every debutante with Lady Elizabeth.
Could they possibly hold a conversation like Lady Elizabeth? Could they tease him, teach him, extend his mind in ways like Lady Elizabeth could? He felt frighteningly certain they couldn’t. They were young, bright-eyed, optimistic—perhaps the sorts of women Nathaniel might have appreciated when he was a much younger man.
Now, he wanted so much more.
Chapter 17
“Now, didn’t you hear it?” Bess said, her voice a kind of sing-song. “The way you fumbled over those last few words. Nobody in the audience would have any sense what you were saying, My Lord. You can’t possibly subsist on your good looks alone. The people want substance. And you must begin giving it to them.”
Lord Linfield gaped at her for a moment, seemingly ill-prepared to be spoken to in such a manner. But in response, Bess lifted her chin with defiance. “You hired me to help you, didn’t you?” she asked.
“Certainly. I didn’t hire you to belittle me,” Lord Linfield said.
But a spark behind his eyes hinted at his cleverness, at his teasing her directly back. Bess shifted, drawing her eyes to the horizon. They were walking through the grounds at Lord Linfield’s estate, with Richard and Lady Margaret, Bess’s friend from the shelter, marching along behind them. Bess had had to ask for Lady Margaret’s assistance, as Irene was bogged down at the newspaper and couldn’t accompany Bess to Lord Linfield’s estate. “Besides, it’s such a bore there,” Irene had sighed, her hair all frizzy and wild as she toiled over a stack of papers. “What a bore, isn’t it, that we must be constantly monitored? And you, at 28 years old! Practically a hag!”
But the rules of propriety had to be upheld. Besides, having Lady Margaret or Irene with her made Lady Elizabeth far more certain of herself. If she was alone with Lord Linfield, she felt apt to float away from her own thoughts, fearful and unsure what she might blare out. For it was absolutely true that she was frequently awash with feelings for him. Feelings she couldn’t completely monitor.
It was better to be his instructor. Better to uphold this level over him.
“Do it again,” she said, her nostrils flared.
Lord Linfield sighed heavily. He shot his hand into his pocket and drew out a slip of paper, the paper on which Bess had strummed up yet another speech. Bess knew he hadn’t bothered to memorise it completely, as she’d instructed, and this made her heart shimmer with a strange mix of anger and happ
iness. He needed her. God, he needed her more than he could possibly translate—not with money or words. At least, Bess liked to think so.