Risky Rules of a Passionate Governess

by Henrietta Harding

  “Cecil? Cecil, darling?” she murmured, drawing a towel across the side of his head. The motion was tender, the one only a lover could muster. “Cecil, do you hear me? Make a noise, if you can.”

  Cecil’s eyelashes fluttered. The doctor coughed, saying, “You’re wasting your time, My Lady.” Still, his words hadn’t the same edge as earlier. It was clear to them all that this was a losing battle. Perhaps Cecil had known this, had requested that he return to his estate – to the place in which he’d been born – to die. Wasn’t that the sort of thing animals did all the time?

  The other men clunked out onto the landing, marching down to the tearoom below. Alice remained perched at the side of her marriage bed, clinging to Cecil’s hand. He drew slow, shallow breaths, while she dotted at his face and chest with a cloth, trying to take the blood away.

  Alice used words she remembered her mother using when she was a sick child, words like, “You’re going to be all right. Keep going. Remember that tomorrow will be a brighter day.” But the words felt hollow, useless. The doctor no longer had to remind her how wretched her presence was in the bedroom. She knew it, fully. Knew that whatever she did in these moments, it wouldn’t secure Cecil’s place on earth.

  When the doctor, John and Nigel had fully abandoned her, Alice rose from the bed and ripped the curtains to the side of the window. Outside, a gruesome blue sky arched over them. Alice marvelled at the number of times Cecil had gazed out at such a sky, surely filled with excitement and thrill about his days ahead. All the plans he had for himself – for their family – she felt them dying along with him.

  “Look, Cecil,” Alice whispered, splaying her fingers across the glass. “You have to stay awake. We could have a picnic in the garden, like you always did as a child. I know you always say it’s not pleasant, doing it before the flowers bloom. But darling, there’s such hope and promise in seeing the garden in the weeks just before the green takes.”

  Cecil’s eyes closed. He no longer hunted the room, looking for impossible ghosts. Alice felt she could see his soul seeping out of him, perhaps sweeping out from his lips or through his wounds. She’d never given much thought for the ways in which souls made their way from a body. Now she felt the poetic nature of it, wondering if the soul slipped away little by little, or if it came away all at once. Perhaps now, the pieces of what had escaped lurked over the top of him, waiting for the rest to catch up. They would journey to heaven together, forming a full Cecil in the clouds above.

  “You’ll watch over me. Won’t you, Cecil?” Alice whispered. She leant towards a spot of clean skin on his forehead, a spot the highwaymen had missed, in the midst of their raucous beating. “I married you for love, Cecil. I married you for the future we could have had together. And I’ll always remember that future. Until my dying day, I will.”

  Each staggering breath seemed to be his last. Alice felt herself counting them, wondering how many she would watch. She prayed for another, and then another. Downstairs, it seemed that more people had gathered. Gossip spread quickly throughout London, like a poison or plague. Up in the bedroom, where she watched her husband slowly teeter into death, she felt hollow, weak, unwilling to interact with another soul.

  At some point, Alice lost consciousness herself. She was told later that Evelyn found her, cupping several pillows with her little frame, still gripping Cecil’s hand. “She was muttering to herself,” Evelyn told another maid, who informed Alice much later. “She was saying that she would give him children, if only he’d stay with her. As though she hadn’t seen the injuries. As though she didn’t comprehend the horror they’d shown him. My poor, darling Cecil. My beautiful boy. Gone. Gone from us. How will we go on?”

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