Chapter Eleven
Emily
Emily tried to read on the train, but the book might have been written in Noah’s questionably accurate Italian for all she could make of it, mind whirring as it was with the weekend’s happenings. While she’d planned a very basic visit—an interesting lecture, an afternoon at the coffee house, and a day with her brother, same as ever—instead, she’d gotten the news that her father’s career was coming to an end, an appointment with her first private patient, and a surprisingly pleasant chat with a most unexpected person in a place she’d hoped never to find herself.
While Emily still did not approve of David’s work, he was clearly talented at it. She was haunted by a sense that Miss Jo had seen their encounter as a romantic one, and it was troublingly difficult for Emily to avoid the association as well.
Obviously, though, the effect had been created with false lighting, cheap perfumes, and the sight—if not the taste—of chilled champagne lounging about on the table like a bubbly temptress. In fact, was there even such a thing as romance outside of those artificial trappings? Sure, she’d had her share of youthful infatuations at church and school, pointless and distracting though such feelings were. She’d even had what one might call a very close companion at the medical college. But unlike her brother’s uncommon attractions, which were associated with bohemian artistry, European exploration, and forbidden passion, there was nothing more ordinary and dull than a couple of overeducated women who couldn’t be bothered with the suffocating interest of men. Emily and her friend got their passions out of the way without any nonsense, same as they approached their work, their dress, their social considerations. They no more needed to cast red shawls over their lamps than they needed to don sparkling jewelry.
But Miss Jo didn’t seem to see it that way. Her surprising discomfort, as far as Emily could tell, had stemmed from an assumption that all those trappings could have been for them, if only they’d taken the bait. She’d dressed herself like the most wicked of lovers in those checked trousers and that glossy black braid; she’d taken them to a spot that was explicitly, unapologetically debauched. While she’d wound up in over her head, she’d still had the thought, which was more than Emily could say for herself.
Why was it that she’d never had the thought? After all, her father had been so blinded by love that he was still stumbling in the dark of its absence decades later. Noah and David risked their freedom and possibly their lives every day. And yet a little champagne was outside of Emily’s very imagination? A notion too impossible to even dream? How had that happened? It struck her suddenly as incredibly unjust.
It was a lot to think about, and the station wasn’t far enough along the Southampton line to give her sufficient time to process it. By the time she arrived, she’d gotten nowhere. She still had no idea what she was going to say to her father. Not the foggiest how she was going to keep her wits in the face of Miss Garcia’s pregnancy and upcoming confinement. And hardly a blasted paragraph read in the book that had sat on her lap all the way home, more like a kitten than a source of knowledge.
It was nippy out, but not dark quite yet. She had her valise sent on ahead of her so she could get her blood back to flowing, her clothing aired out, and a little more time to sort out her thoughts as she walked the half-hour home. Home. To her father. Her arthritic father. Her lying father. Her father, who was not nearly as pleasant a thing to think about as Miss Jo’s dark, smiling eyes.
She arrived to find her valise left on the porch by the delivery boy and her mind no closer to working out what to say to her father. She let herself into the house, where she heard his voice immediately, coming from the parlor.
Perhaps that was for the best. She’d face him now, and it would go however it was meant to go. She steeled herself and asked the Creator to fill her empty mind with the right words, before facing the doorway and drawing breath to say whatever she would—
But she stopped short, embarrassment creeping through her veins as she realized that it was not the housekeeper Papa was talking to, but someone else—Rochelle Baptiste, a Frenchwoman who’d found her way into their parish community some years ago and struck up a close friendship with the Clarkes. While it was not unusual to see her here, even to see the two of them alone in a situation that would be compromising for a woman of some other age, nationality, or political position, it was still shocking to stumble upon such a tender scene without warning. They were not indecent, but were not entirely decent, either, sitting together before the opened windows, their chairs pulled close as Rochelle dipped her fingers in a jar of ointment Emily herself had compounded, massaging it into one of Papa’s hands—his arthritic, failing hands—as they laughed at some joke one of them had made. It was sweet. It was quaint. It made the charming sound of Miss Jo quipping “princess” echo through her mind.
She shouldn’t wait, though. She should confront her father about his secret now. Her feelings about it aside, it was a practical task that had to be handled. She certainly would have, had she come straight from Noah’s without today’s decadent little detour. But she was apparently not as immune to all that nonsense as she had assumed. Why should she always be the one to ruin a lovely evening with practicalities and arguments? Didn’t she deserve a break, just once, from being the cold killjoy they’d turned her into? Ruining their evening would ruin her own just as surely. Since she wasn’t convinced she would ever feel quite this way again, she did not relish the idea of ending it so soon.
If it was Noah Papa wanted to talk to about the situation, let it be Noah who took up the duty of being the household scold for once. He knew what Papa had done, now. If he cared at all, he would confront Papa on the injustice of it. The men would right their wrongs without her having to interrupt her own good mood to harp, yet again, on why they ought to.
Instead, she went upstairs to her study, letting the uncanny dreaminess of her afternoon drift back into her limbs. It would be correct to change out of her travel clothes first, but if Jo could wear checked trousers, then Emily could bear a slightly sooty frock a few moments longer.
She grabbed up her whittling supplies, but it became clear that her distraction was not conducive to this hobby. If she went on like this, she’d spoil the piece—or her finger—in short order. She put the lot down. As she was going for her dustpan to clean up the mess she’d made, her eyes caught on an ink bottle, partly shadowed by the oversized queen that had been living on her desk since Noah put it there, during his and David’s last visit over the summer.
She hadn’t put it back because she liked its presence. There was something soothing about it, something comforting.
Something a little...devious.
I’ll call you anything. I’ll call you the queen, if you like.
Emily sat down at her desk. Though the chess figure had no eyes, no face at all, just a smooth expanse of cedar, it seemed she was looking at the ink bottle. Saying to Emily, there’s a whole life of drudgery ahead. Why bother with it now? You know what sounds nice now, don’t you?
Writing out that lemon water recipe.
Emily took out a sheet of clean, crisp paper, dipped her pen, and began to write. First the necessary pleasantries. Then the recipe, if one could call it that, done up with as many measurements and specifications as she could think of for something that was little more than a boil and a squeeze. But as she finished that up and was preparing to sign it, she realized there was no reason for Miss Jo to write her back. No dangling questions. Nothing.
She thought back on what awaited her in the future—the secrets, the uncertainty, the sense of unpleasantness closing in on all sides at last—and decided she wanted something to look forward to in her postbox. It wasn’t perfume or champagne. But it might at least be a bit...fun.
She hastily added:
Awkward though the circumstances were, I want to thank you again for letting me redeem myself in your eyes. In the interest of more neutral ground when I’m next in London, I wonder where you might have suggested if you weren’t actively trying (and failing) to horrify me...?
Emily typically tracked her time through the ebb and flow of her responsibilities. Her hours passed in chores and follow-up appointments, her weeks in hospital rotations and chapel meetings. Months were in trips to London and household management, and years stretched toward the vague notions of stable, secure, and good enough like plants toward the sun.
But in the weeks that followed, the keeping of time ceased to follow those rigid rhythms. Even the movements of sun and stars became little more than background lighting.
For the first time in her life, time became the servant of something unpredictable: Miss Jo’s letters.
They started simple enough.
Dear Emily,
Thanks for the recipe. It’s absolutely disgusting, which I assume means it’s very healthful. I’m pleased to report that a spoonful of sugar and a splash of whiskey does it wonders.
As for a meeting place, I’d probably pick my ladies’ club, rather than the gents’. I’m a member of Miss Withers’s Orchid and Pearl Society.Have you heard of it? If not, do you need me to explain the name to you, or have you got the gist well enough?
Miss Jo
Nearly as pleasing as the fact that Jo too had ended her note with a question that demanded a response was the change in tone that came along with it. No longer assuming that Emily knew nothing about anything, prodding at the fault lines of difference between the two of them, now her words came laced with an assumption of shared understanding.
“I’ve got the gist,” she scribbled out in response. She saved her reading and responding for late at night, so that candles rather than autumn sun lit her enterprise. All her carvings, her diary writing, her evening meditation were forgotten in favor of this far more engaging activity. In the quiet of a house where both family and staff had long-since taken to their beds, there was something furtive about it. A trembly thrill shot all along her arm as she continued, “I’m not familiar with The Orchid and Pearl in particular, but as a nonconformist and a bluestocking, I’m no stranger to such societies.” She paused her pen, then added the all-important concluding question,“Does that surprise you?—E. C.”
She nearly ripped the whole thing up and started over. Goodness, was there any way for someone to read that question without imagining Emily batting her rather unimpressive lashes while she asked it? Yet, Miss Jo had been the one to initiate that flirtatious dynamic, all but nudging with one of her patched-tweed elbows: Have you got the gist?
The letter was sent on as it was penned from the first.
Some sleeps, some shifts, some appointments. A complete and unsurprising silence from Noah and her father. A quagmire of duty and anxious waiting, until the response arrived and time chugged pleasantly forward like a train on its way somewhere exciting at last. The next letter was longer, pleasanter, more familiar still, and Emily responded eagerly and in kind.
The post between London and Surrey was very efficient these days, particularly in a town so close to a train stop, and so their correspondence became quite regular, responses coming only a few days apart.
On the evenings there were no letters, Emily took supper with her father, sometimes joined by his companion Mme. Baptiste, sometimes not. Each time, she watched his hands and considered bringing up what she knew. And each time she decided against it in favor of retreating to her study to reread Jo’s latest letter, work on her carvings, and fool herself into thinking Noah was sure to get around to the problem eventually. A smaller, more practical version of the curvy chess queen that might possibly fit into a whole set someday had become her obsession. Why argue over something she couldn’t control, when she could finally sand the piece properly during one of those long evenings, making her fit to sit on the desk, an exact but smaller replica of the giant prototype beside her, impatiently awaiting the rest of the pieces, who started coming along slowly but surely.
The queens were the only ones to witness the private moments Emily spent in the company of Jo’s letters, peering at Emily’s dreamy smiles and blushing gasps with their blank, rounded faces, presumably wondering why this kept cutting into their maker’s ability to stain them suitably and produce more subjects for them.
Emily did not mind such witnesses. A king might have been a little off-putting, but the queens, she figured, would understand.
The exchanges were such a refuge that it was easy to forget about the trouble with Papa entirely if she felt like it, because she and Miss Jo did not talk about any of that. They didn’t talk about their work, or their churches, or the men in their lives. And while Emily had also been sending a few messages with Miss Garcia, answering questions and arranging their next appointment, they didn’t talk about that, either. They talked of themselves, mostly, in banter and plans and the occasional innuendo:
“So how far down the path of nonconformity has Dr. Emily wandered?”
“All the way down to the women’s medical college. I cannot say the nonconformity was especially prolific, but it was, as you might imagine at an institution of learning, quite educational. And you?”
“Six months at the nunnery. Very prolific.”
It drove Emily mad. The personal details had her reeling with friendly sentiment, while the undercurrent of impropriety sometimes had her hitching her skirt up before she’d even left her study. There was nothing in the letters that most would find objectionable, and yet she kept them hidden like they were the stuff of the nearly-forgotten Mr. Smith’s press.
And on that count, how ridiculous it seemed, all of a sudden, to have even pretended to hold that against these people, when these days, the mere glimpse of Miss Jo’s thick scrawl was enough to light a fire between her legs?
Miss Jo’s next letter came a few days later than expected, and on a different paper. Emily herself might not have noticed the difference, but she’d learned by now that Jo—who’d worked as a printer and a bookseller—put a lot of stock in the material matters of correspondence. She wasted no time apologizing for what she considered a very cheap and unpleasant writing surface:
“I didn’t realize just how frequent our letters had become. I ran out of my usual supply, and this was all they had at the shop,” she said. “I might usually have waited until they had what I wanted—” Emily took a grateful moment to clutch the letter to her chest, relieved to have not had to wait even longer than she already had for time to progress “—but Miss Garcia mentioned that your next visit to London is growing closer. I didn’t want to delay telling you that I hope we can still meet. A waste of money, maybe, but the only other writing surface I had at my disposal was a stack of my old postcards. Not that you wouldn’t appreciate the view of me that the postcards offer (you would; it sounds like you learned to appreciate such anatomical models at the women’s medical college), but because the postman might have stolen it if the sunlight hit the envelope just right and revealed the contents within, causing the very delay I was hoping to avoid...”
View of me? Anatomical models? The postman? Emily was missing something, some joke she was too tired to catch. It had been a very long, trying day at the hospital. The sort of day where she could understand the impulse to swathe lifeless dummies in pretty fabrics rather than dressing wounds doomed to fester, witnessing final rattling breaths, and trying to figure out the mystery of why half her leeches had died overnight, all while handling the lion’s share of her patients’ nursing tasks.
She reread the perplexing comments about paper weight and postcards until it clicked. One of her old postcards. Postcards. An innocent enough term for Emily’s polite society, but Miss Jo was decidedly outside of all that. When she said postcards, Emily had a feeling it wasn’t Buckingham Palace on display.
For a moment, she just smiled at it like she did all of Jo’s scandalous humor. But slowly, she realized that there was a further scandal. View of me, she’d said. Not a view of some arbitrary beauty. A view of me.
Had Miss Jo had found herself in front of a camera? The rest of her was bad enough, but that...that was so blatantly wicked that Emily’s breath caught in her chest, her mind positively whirring...
And not, as it should have been, with disapproval.
Oh, goodness no. She turned the paper over and put it in her lap, frightened, all of a sudden, to even look at it. She’d let this flirtation go on, spurred and heated as it was by the odd setting of their last meeting. But this? This was too far.
Wasn’t it?
Hot curiosity made the letter’s position upon her skirts seem even more devilish than looking at it, like it was Jo’s own head rather than the contents of her mind nestled facedown where warmth was gathering rapidly. She couldn’t resist reading the letter again, and again, trying to ignore how thrilling her body found all this and find where she’d left all her sense. It was one thing to accept idiosyncrasies, or to reject the expectation of perfect chastity that caused more harm than good in the world. But it was quite another to approve of something so unnecessary, materialistic, and crass as dirty postcards.
She absolutely had to muster up something negative about this, even if it was only concern that Jo might have been taken advantage of. But try as she might, she couldn’t convince herself of that. Jo had never given the slightest whiff of being some tragically fallen woman, small and scared and needing the kindly hand of a reformer like Emily and her friends. Unlike Emily, Jo had built her destiny bit by bit. If she’d wound up on the business end of a camera, it was because she’d wanted to be there.
With even concern out of reach, all Emily could imagine was that Jo had indeed written her message on the back of some indecent photograph. If Emily was this flustered over the idea, what might the reality have done to her? Surely that would have been too far? Yet still, the only negativity she could gather up was disappointment that she hadn’t gotten to see it after all. And since she’d never been so crude as to behold such postcards herself, she wondered...
What did they look like?
“Emily?”
Nearly leaping out of her skin, she scrunched the scandal up and shoved it in her apron pocket, scrambling to her feet and calling, “Yes?” with high, false innocence that her father would see through instantly.
He tapped gently on the door before nudging it open. “Betsy called you for dinner. Is everything alright?”
No. Everything was not alright. Day after day passed without a word from him about his retirement. Noah had left her to deal with everything herself yet again. And somehow, brief and tiny as her protest against being the household nag had been, it had still left a crack in her constitution through which she could see a new perspective. She was not alright. All wrong, in fact, made more wrong still by how little it bothered her right now.
“I’m fine,” she insisted. “Just distracted. I apologize, and shall be down shortly. I have to finish a bit of correspondence.”
Papa gave her an odd look, as falsely casual as her own demeanor. “Your letters from London?”
Emily held her stomach in tight, calling on the professional skill of hiding emotion that was so vital to her continued presence in a field of men.
“Yes,” she said simply.
“Do you want to tell me anything about those letters?” Papa asked. “There have been quite of few of them these past few weeks. Is there something important about them?”
She had convinced herself he wouldn’t notice, but that was foolish. Jo’s latest letter seemed to burn and glow like she’d stuffed live embers in her pocket. All of them smoldered like that. Was it really any wonder her father had smelled the smoke?
She wanted to tell him. Shocking though this last one had been, Jo’s letters in general were exciting, new, something important indeed. They’d changed her. Impacted her. She was not used to keeping such things from her father, who would probably be pleased that she’d made a friend who expanded her consciousness and got her thinking from such new perspectives.
But that was back when she thought the exchange of personal joys and tragedies was reciprocal. If Papa still couldn’t bring himself to tell her what was vital, why should she give him the satisfaction of hearing her good news?
“Just my new patient,” she said calmly.
“Ah.” Papa relaxed as he believed the lie. “Is she well?”
According to Miss Garcia’s last letter, she was. But Emily wasn’t thinking about Miss Garcia’s letter. She was thinking about Jo’s. And because of that, she found herself shaking her head as the wickedness of it proved suddenly contagious.
“No,” she said. “Still quite ill. In fact, because of that, I was considering moving our next appointment up a bit, to see what I can do to improve her condition. I meant to ask if you could cover for me at the hospital this weekend, so I can get to London...with a little more time to spare.”
Dearest Jo,
I am still very interested in seeing you again when I return to London. So interested that I have arranged to come earlier than anticipated, to ensure I can dedicate a full evening to socializing. I look forward to seeing you along with whatever “views” you may allow me to appreciate...
Jo’s response came a few days later. It was very brief. On one side of it were the words Let’s meet at our own place this time, followed by the address of The Orchid and Pearl Society House.
On the other was quite a view indeed.
It was Miss Jo herself, at least ten years younger. Had Emily not known who it was already, she might have been impossible to recognize, covered in cosmetics and curls from the neck up, and covered in nothing but a black corset and knickers from the neck down. She was blowing a kiss and smirking at the camera, her eyes full of a devious light.
But that wasn’t where the delight and decadence ended.
Because the Miss Jo of today had made sure that she was represented in the artwork as well. She’d doodled a few details atop the original; a bowler hat, a mustache, a bowtie, and a cigar streaming inky curlicues toward the border had been added with care.
The feeling Emily got when she looked at it, joy and laughter and an instant flare of heat between her legs...it wasn’t like anything she’d encountered in a schoolgirl infatuation or practical arrangement at the college, that was certain. It was just as garish and unnecessary as she’d assumed. But rather than filling her with disgust, the combination of beauty and comedy ran her straight through with happiness she’d been sure was out of her reach until this one utterly irresponsible moment.
She ignored the nagging of her conscience, her morals, her intellect as she packed the more flattering of her simple skirts up for the weekend. So what if she’d stretched the truth of her trip to London a bit? What did it matter that she was still foolishly waiting on the respect from her father and brother that seemed unlikely to ever come? Who cared if she’d happily partaken of a vice that would appall nearly everyone she knew? Everything was changing anyway. In fact, if she could not figure out how to convince the hospital to keep giving her shifts once they no longer needed Papa’s services, or to get more than one desperate actress to actually pay her to practice medicine in any specialty, everything might very well be ruined.
If Miss Jo’s companionship was proving to ruin her a bit further, well...
Maybe she could explain, while she was at the task of ruination, exactly how one went about starting over from scratch to build up something just a touch more decadent.