by Baird Wells
Lord Charlton barked out a hmph, and Lady Harriette’s thin limbs crumpled like a marionette’s when she clutched his hand. “Thank you, doctor. A thousand thanks.”
If James didn’t know better, he’d take their relief as an insult. “Don’t thank me just yet,” he muttered, stalking past them and taking the staircase with the same enthusiasm as a man approaching the gallows.
His trepidation was not diminished on opening the drawing room door. Emily paced by, arms crossed, and glared and shook her head but did not stop pacing. To the window, where she ground on her heel, then swished back by in an outraged whisper of baby blue silk, train dragging along behind like a hog-tied hostage.
“Emily,” he drawled, and skirted the room in half-steps until he was at a safe distance and could occupy a russet leather armchair near the fireplace. Occupy, but not sit, because he didn’t dare more than hang at its edge, just in case.
“Did they bring you here?” she demanded, huffing and striding past with enough force to jostle her halo of sable curls.
“They did, but,” he threw up a hand and cut off her retort, “I came to speak with you. Your parents have told me nothing; I’ve not been prejudiced against anything you have to say.”
“Ha! The first thing I have to say,” she declared, stopping in front of him and raising a finger, bosom heaving, “is that I am eighteen now. Eighteen!”
“So you are.” He agreed without agreeing to any specific fact, perceiving danger in picking a side and hoping to stay neutral a moment longer. How had Emily, of all people, cornered him so? Where was the pouty-mouthed, unruly, sixteen-year-old tomboy he’d carted home in a rain storm?
“Eighteen,” she asserted. “And so I should know something of my own mind.”
Now they were at an impasse. He didn’t want to alienate Emily’s parents, but it was bound to happen if he acknowledged that Lord and Lady Lennox believed that they knew Emily’s mind better. Her thoughts and desires, the whole of her future, were designs of which they were the architects. Emily was simply the structure which was acted upon, beautified and improved to their taste. He wondered now at Emily’s older sister, who was never seen and hardly spoken of, and at the misfortune of two such eager masters being given two entirely headstrong pupils.
Instead, he chose a safer path, and asked, “And what decision has that brought you to?”
She crossed her arms tight over her chest, and raised her chin at the jaunty angle which always cocked her head a bit to the right. “I want us to be married.”
He looked at her, into her eyes, sinking by moments. She stared back. A clock ticked with the slow grating cadence that timepieces seemed to have when one person needed a moment and another person demanded an answer. James swallowed and folded his hands in his lap, staring down at them and wondering how long he’d had a deep scratch over his knuckle. For a moment, his heart beat so hard that he couldn’t feel it beating at all, could just feel a weight where it belonged. It took effort to catch a breath, so much that he held it through most of the second-hand’s journey around the face.
“James?”
He met her wide brown eyes again and exhaled.
“Well? Did you hear me?”
Her parents were right to be concerned, but wrong to have brought him to intercede. He was too much terrified hare and too little cunning fox just now to reason with Emily.
“I heard you.” He heard her, and he saw her, and shifted in his seat with a hard swallow. She wasn’t sixteen, all straight lines and calico jumpers hiding bruised knees, anymore. Every part of her that was intended to torment a man had come to prominence: cheeks, lips, bosom, and tawny eyes filled with perilous curiosity. She had stopped hissing in low tones about gossipy Catherine Milton’s pug nose or what Louise Granville had worn to the spring ball. After dinner, she didn’t slouch on the sofa, but sat ramrod straight and told him in a measured voice about her itinerary for Rome if she were ever allowed to go, and how too much jewelry was déclassé and not how a woman ought to distinguish herself. And, in a hunted moment, James realized she had seen him too, had been watching and settling her mind. But she was eighteen, only eighteen.
He gulped, straining an arid throat. “I won’t say you don’t know your mind, because I know better. You’re the most decided person I think I’ve ever met.” He sighed and rubbed damp palms down the fronts of his trousers. “You know your mind, but I don’t think you know what you’re saying.”
“Just like my father,” she accused, and turned away, stamping to the window.
“Because you are naive?” he demanded. James shot to his feet and his poor chair rocked precariously before catching itself. “I’ve a decade head start on you in these matters, and I can promise that, at eighteen, you might know your own mind, but you don’t know everything.” He raked fingers through his hair and stared at her back. “I’m a friend to you, Emily, to your family. You’re young, and that friendship has yet to be compared to something more. You’ll change your mind soon enough. You’ll see.” He understood her parents’ pleas on his arrival and was forced to agree: Emily, in all her May-day loveliness, shouldn’t be wasted on him, no matter his longing.
Appreciating too late that with Emily, a feather was often more successful than a hammer, he followed her to the window. He stopped behind her and tugged at her ear, meeting her eyes in the reflection. “Help me understand. Explain to me your decision.” If he listened, even feigned listening, she might be more negotiable.
She unlaced her arms and deflated. “I love you,” she whispered in a gentle fog against the glass. “That’s my explanation.”
He gasped and coughed, lungs spasming while the rest of him paralyzed, even his mind for a moment. “What you feel is not –”
“I love how no one is ever a burden to you!” she cut in, already a step ahead of his protest. “You treat an ingrown toenail with the same compassion as a broken arm or a fever. And I know that some days you must be exhausted and wish that people and their problems would just go away, but you never show it, not to your patients. I love how you don’t allow anyone to push you down. When someone comes to dinner all puffed up and questions you, or is coarse with you, you show real spine!” He saw her smile in the window pane and heard rough tears in her words. “You tolerated my temper, my moods, when I was young, but you never made me feel childish. You always treated me like the lady you expected me to be. And you never once told me that something was too grownup or too smart for me because I’m a woman.”
He stared through the glass now, out into a black night that revealed nothing. Emily was whip-smart, but he had expected simpler arguments, ones more easily reasoned with.
“I love you,” she whispered again. “And I think you love me. You just haven’t realized it yet.”
He hadn’t. She was perpetually a sixteen-year-old hellion, and while the years had passed for Emily in a tumult of adolescence, he had drifted along, sure of his footing. So sure, that he hadn’t looked to see his impending trip over the cliff. The tip of her wit had been sharpened to a fine point, her brilliance polished to a shine, while her beauty had blossomed a petal at a time into new womanhood. All three had been slow but steady in coming, deceiving him.
Emily turned to face him, the move eating up most of the space between them, and she slipped a slender hand around his. “I know I’m just a child to you, but Mama and Papa are wrong; this isn’t a new scheme. I’ve been thinking about it for so long.” She gripped his hand. “I’ve had dances with gentlemen, and they’ve started to pay lots of calls, and I always compare them to you. I could never feel the same way about one of them.” She took his other hand and stared up at him, lip caught between her teeth in a gesture that spelled his downfall. “I think you could, James; love me. Don’t you?”
“I could,” he admitted hoarsely. He already did. But he thought of Charlton and Harriette’s desperate faces and of what Emily deserved from life. He considered what he could offer and shook his head. “I cannot afford the s
ort of wife you’ve been raised to be,” he tried in a final effort.
She let him go, rushed the room’s length to table near the fireplace, and tugged something from its drawer, which she held up proudly the whole way back. “Look! A cookbook,” she beamed. “And I’ve been practicing my sewing every day. I sneak down to the kitchens and I’ve asked Mrs. Iverson so many questions about how to manage sending out the laundry.” She hugged the white canvas cookbook to her chest and smiled up at him. “I’m trying.”
He groaned in surrender and swallowed back a sting of tears. “I will be an enemy to your parents, Emily,” he pleaded. “They will never forgive me. Think where that will put you.”
“With you,” she breathed, and took his hand again but with a slow friction. “Which is more than enough.”
She raised her other arm and pressed trembling fingers at the back of his neck, and lifted on tiptoes to put them cheek to cheek.
He cradled her face and tipped it up, found her lips, and was lost.
* * *
No, James decided as the memory faded, leaving him cold with more than the church yard’s winter air. If he had known then that putting Emily from him and leaving her house would have saved them both, he still couldn’t have gone. And he was glad he hadn’t known, had never known to agonize over their future, which was all the past now.
“We were happy,” he asserted. “Right up until our last night. I forget that sometimes. Even when we ate bread and butter with the windows open to let out the smell of burned roast. Even when I had to keep my waistcoat buttoned to hide the iron marks on my shirt. And I think you were happy too, even when I came home tired and cross and left you flowers on the parlor table to make it up.” His throat ached, and then his eyes. “I love you.”
“I love Hannah, too,” he confessed into the space between where he sat and Emily’s headstone, not surprised when it dawned on him. “And I hope you won’t be cross about that either. It isn’t the same.” He rubbed his hands together, fingers stiff. “I’m miserable, Emily, and I don’t want to be. I can’t fill the hole you’ve left inside; our baby has left; I wouldn’t even try. But Hannah makes another part of me feel alive again, and I –” His throat clenched and words failed for a long moment. “I need that.” He stood, and brushed off his pants. “I love you. I wish you could show me that you understand. I hope that you do.”
A wind rushed through the trees and rattled dry branches, and swirled up glittering mare’s tails of snow into the air. It kissed his cheeks and ruffled his hair, and as suddenly as it had come on, the world was still again. It was just a breeze, nothing more than nature, but as he replaced his hat and strode back between the graves, he stepped more lightly.
.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Avaline Guildford’s neighborhood had been fashionable once, in the woman’s childhood. Her father’s person and her mother’s nerves had survived Napoleon’s last onslaught, and when both had sufficiently recovered after a few years, they celebrated personal and national victory by spending like kings and taking up residence in a lavish Georgian townhouse.
Avaline, being of a practical mindset, had seen no reason for moving elsewhere and had never brought anything new into the house, not even a husband. Her guardian, a soldier of fortune whom her widowed mother had been very ill advised to place in charge of her, had made an aggressive bid to take her virginity, and when that had failed, had taken her fortune instead. But hailing from a stock as rich as Lord Guildford’s, who had refused to die even when shot and after having two fingers sawed off by avaricious Belgian women on the battlefield, Avaline would not be sunk. She had believed in the railroad when so many voices shouted that a mule and cart had sufficed for centuries. Those voices had sounded a great deal like laughter when she had scraped her meager savings into the endeavor, and a great deal like silence when her returns had come in.
Lady Avaline was one of the few women that Hannah’s mother Harriette dared not cross, fearful of a name as bold in print, as illustrious and occasionally notorious as their own Lennox. But Avaline’s once-grand square had enjoyed its heyday and now gazed upon greatness from a distance, its former glory settled further west in the city. Her antique townhouse was the jewel in the dilapidated crown. It held at the foot of her street, clean and straight and newly re-plastered, while on either side of the overgrown lane peeling facades had been made over in blue or peachy pinks, with tumbled gardens that were labeled as ‘English’ to conceal the inhabitants’ laziness.
The old families had moved away along with the street’s prime, in favor of Piccadilly and Portland Place, leaving a vacuum which was filled by the worst sort of person in Harriette Lennox’s opinion: Bohemians. Men who wrote literature, and worse, women who did likewise. Painters and free thinkers who never concerned themselves with what society they kept, or pedigrees, or – shudder to think – money. Like hobgoblins in a children’s story, one had got inside and unlocked the door for others to follow, and now poor Lady Avaline was trapped at the end of her tatty street.
The worst of it, Harriette had declared, was that Lady Avaline didn’t know that she was trapped, and all her acquaintances were forced to do the worrying about it for her. She even let the interlopers into her sanctuary on occasion, and though no silver or jewelry had been taken yet, it was agreed upon as being only a matter of time. The poor old lunatic thought she enjoyed all the new people come to her beloved neighborhood, thought they added undesirable qualities such as ‘color’ and ‘excitement’, which only the senile could imagine to be of benefit to any place.
Avaline had repeated this diagnosis to Hannah more than once in a deep and serious tone, with a wink and a stout finger resting beside her nose. “I might be senile,” she had whispered between her wide, twitching lips, “but my grandsires lived well on to eighty-five, and so my madness must be endured for another twenty years at least!” Then she had cackled and fallen back in her chair, and convinced everyone in the room, save Hannah, of the truth of their sad prediction.
It was for this reason that Avaline rarely kept company. She liked hardly anybody, and the people she did like were apt to be labeled if they spent too much time together, and since she was pleased as punch at being alone in her beloved house, that was how she passed much of her time. On occasion, she sent for people who could not stand her, in order to remind them that the feeling was mutual. It was from Avaline that Hannah had learned to make a nuisance of herself for its own sake. Since she had a slim amount of reputation with which to concern herself, Hannah was invited more often than other people, but not as often as she would have liked, because Lady Avaline thought Margaret haughty and unforgivably Irish-looking, and, like today, Hannah was usually obliged to bring Margaret along.
Ordinarily Margaret’s company cast a dark cloud over such outings, but not today. Hannah hardly spared Miss Maddox a thought, staring out the carriage window and fidgeting against the squabs. Her heart thrummed and her hands shook with the same delicious nerves as a young deb on the eve of her first ball. Would he be there when they arrived or would she be forced to wait in agitation?
She was about to have her answer. The carriage bounced and drew to a halt before Lady Avaline’s, and she descended ahead of Margaret, who cast slit-eyed glances down the street, apparently in fear of the bohemians lying in wait.
Everything from that point was a series of measured inconveniences. They went in, relinquished outer garments, and were taken up and shown in. Lady Avaline’s house, and most especially her drawing rooms, were a museum. Madame Tussaud could prop up a waxwork of Lord Byron and a Duke of Wellington and convince any visitor of having gone back in time. Her rooms were unchanged by time, but whatever whispered criticism that might generate, they were clean. Not a speck of dust or a threadbare cushion was to be found. Avaline spent as much as any other fashionable lady on decorating, just not re-decorating. Her fabrics and furnishings would be replaced like-for-like so long as she drew a breath.
Avaline was
already holding court when they entered, and handsome Mister Hilton and the rumpled Duc de Beringar were regaling their hostess with a shocking quantity of gesticulations. That came to an abrupt halt when Mister Hilton caught sight of Margaret who, for reasons Hannah could never fathom, had caught his eye but had yet to claw it out.
“Lady Hannah!” Avaline raised a black, silk-sheathed arm and jangled her wealth of jet bracelets. “Miss Maddox.” Margaret’s name escaped her lips like the breath of Jack Frost.
“Lady Avaline.” Hannah curtsied and turned for a small Grecian sofa, cushioned in primrose silk and framed by straight lines of mahogany carved with a meander whose square links were so necessary to identifying an article as authentically Greek. She turned and skidded to a halt on the well-worn Aubusson carpet.
He stood before a pot-bellied curio cabinet between two of the drawing room’s high windows and pretended to examine its contents. She knew he pretended by the stillness to his silhouette and a pointed lack of curiosity at the new arrivals. He knew she was there, and he was making her wait. She drew a long breath to banish a smile. She could play his game. Hannah put her back to James and settled on the sofa and didn’t turn back, not even when Avaline announced ‘Doctor Grimshaw, Whom She Likely Already Knew’.
Hannah murmured that she did know him and enjoyed a rough clearing of his throat which demanded that she look. She ground teeth into her cheek, lips twitching. He could come ‘round and sit, or stand back there and be damned.
To punish him, she turned her attention to Beringar, abandoned by Mister Hilton who flapped against Margaret’s impenetrable cage, and questioned the duc about what he had seen and done since their dinner together. That query discovered for her James's boundaries; he appeared along her periphery and took up a seat across from her, beside Lady Avaline.