Chapter Twenty-Two
Jo
And after all that, it was time for some biblical criticism with the Clarke family.
Emily said it would be alright if everyone started getting themselves together to leave the city sooner rather than later, but while some distance from the shop might save it in the end, such a talk was the very last place anyone with any sense would ever go looking for Mrs. Jo Smith anyway. There was hardly a more anonymous place for her in world.
“If you’ll take my irritating husband into your own damn home,” Jo reasoned, “then I’d be a right prick to refuse a few hours with your perfectly nice family, half of which happen to be my own friends already.”
“I haven’t heard yet whether David will be joining us—”
“Oh,” Jo said with certainty, thinking how pleased he’d be to know what exactly had come of the disastrous match he’d hoped to make of them. “Once you tell him I’m coming and why, he’ll be there.”
It wasn’t exactly a double shot of whiskey and a game of cards with her friends, but it wasn’t the worst way to unwind after such a bizarre morning. Jo sat on a hard bench in a simple meeting house that did not feel like a church to her at all. The few odd glances she got seemed more to do with her status as a stranger, rather than the strangeness of her attire. The service, if one wanted to call it that, was brief, pleasant, and didn’t involve communion or anything she needed to figure out how and whether to participate in.
The talk afterward about nativity criticisms or whatever it was was dull, frankly, but seated between Noah and Emily, she spent it getting last night’s club gossip on one side and further context about the lecture subject on the other. While that context was unnecessary—Jo wasn’t exactly set on taking this knowledge out with her and doing anything with it—Emily leaned in shiveringly close to whisper into Jo’s ear, and Jo was so charmed and pleased by it that she decided she’d happily come back to criticize the Pentecost too, if they could do it just like this.
She wasn’t quite as keen to go to the coffee house afterward, between the possibility of seeing the Bradigan family and intrusive questions from the obviously curious Dr. Phillip Clarke and Mme. Baptiste. But Jo’s attempts to excuse herself from the social meeting were disrupted by David, who did not voice his motivations for thwarting her escape, but he didn’t need to. Clearly, they lay somewhere between ifI have to go, you have to go and as your matchmaker, I cannot let you bungle things with this woman again. They were both reasonable enough arguments, even if he didn’t speak them directly, and so she tipped her hat over her face until she’d passed by the Bradigans and settled upstairs, preparing to tolerate the barrage of questions that inevitably came her way.
Notably, Emily did not tell her father about her invitation for Jo and the rest to take up shelter with them just yet. But it went well, otherwise.
By the time Jo and Emily returned to Miss Withers’s Orchid and Pearl Society House for the Sunday supper they’d irrevocably committed to, Jo was somehow both dead tired and wound so tight with both stress and affection that she worried she might never sleep again.
“Miss Withers,” she heard Emily say as she loaded plates for both of them from the excessive spread in the dining room. “Would it be too much trouble if we took this upstairs?”
“All comfort, dear,” Miss Withers said in her usual way. “Not rules.”
“Save for the one about committing to meals ahead of time.”
“Well, that’s not a rule. It’s simple manners.”
This time, Emily led the way, and Jo’s feet were happy to have someone else making the decisions for once. She clutched Gran’s book—which she’d carried along through the day’s events—under her arm and followed along.
God, Emily really should have run for the hills the second she saw Paul’s wrecked rooms. Jo’d had some questionable times with lovely women, but this one really took the cake. Yet Emily, who should have been even more disturbed than the average, had handled it like a dream. For a day that had begun with a police raid, it had been a surprisingly good one, all things considered.
They sat together in the parlor, just the two of them, eating their supper while Emily tried to encourage Jo to have opinions on the talk. When that didn’t get them further than teasing (which led, perhaps, to a bit of kissing here or there), they set their plates aside, curled up together on the small couch, and began to properly examine the damage to Gran’s book.
“This could be a lot worse,” Jo assured Emily as they flipped through, finding all the crimped pages, the muddy boot prints, the jagged rips through recipes handwritten in Gran’s heavy, left-slanting script. As they carefully turned pages, Jo was filled with a warmth that not even the damage could compete with.
“Oh, God this soup was always the best. I never did get it right myself, but if you could ever manage, you’d be in for a treat... This is the rouge I used to sell to the women in the parish, like I told you. Not that any of us were really supposed to be using it, but you could hardly tell that the pink was fake, so they paid well for the stuff... And fuck, this bugger. It’s a good medicine for a head cold, assuming the taste doesn’t kill you first...
“Nothing seems to be entirely illegible... Except... Oh, well fuck!”
Jo stared at the page she’d come to, smeared, with some of the page missing entirely. She laughed. Not happily, of course, but what else was there to do when she found that the only page not in salvageable order was the one titled Button Stitches.
“What was it?” Emily asked, running her hand over what was left of the page.
“It’s what I was looking for in the first place, of course.” Jo laughed again. If she didn’t, she knew she’d cry instead. She’d been a twat to misplace the book. To forget the stitch in the first place. She’d refused to look back one too many times, it seemed, and this was to be her punishment. Loose buttons for eternity. “My stupid waistcoat buttons keep coming loose.”
“I wonder why?” Emily mused, tracing the row of them down the center of Jo’s chest all the way to her stomach—a ticklish, pleasant action—and then across the page to what was left of the sketch Gran had done of her stitch. “What’s this then? Looks like a simple thread shank—”
“That’s what it’s called!” Jo exclaimed, pointing at what was left of the picture. “Is that something you’ve heard of, then?”
Emily cocked her head to the side like she thought Jo might be kidding. “It’s a fairly standard sort of thing. Don’t you already sew them on with a shank?”
“I don’t know,” Jo admitted, a little smirk ghosting over her face. “I sew them the way I sew them. Why don’t you take a look and see what I did?”
“I suppose I could try to diagnose the problem,” Emily said with a dramatic, world-weary sort of sigh as she settled herself on Jo’s lap, facing and straddling her.
“God, this rational dress is just relentlessly convenient,” Jo said, settling her hands on Emily’s hips, and tipping her head back to allow Emily to undo, caress, and very closely examine Jo’s most desperately strained buttons. “Between ease of removal and ease of movement, I can do without seeing the extra frills. You’re more than pretty enough without all that anyway.”
With a final nudge to the button with her nose, Emily raised her head. “You’re obviously not using a pin or a toothpick to hold your threads when you stitch the holes,” she said. “It’s not leaving enough of a shank, and it’s straining the threads until they snap. You could stand to wax the thread too, if you’re not already. I could do it for you, if there are some supplies.”
Jo couldn’t believe how it all came back to her as soon as Emily said it. All at once, she could remember her gran pulling a pin out of her own hair and using it to hold threads in place, to ensure the tension fell in the right spot in the end.
She squeezed Emily’s bottom in a show of thanks. “How did you know that? Noah?”
Emily scoffed so vehemently that Jo laughed. “I hardly need a Milan-trained tailor to get a button on properly. Did you never bother asking anyone for help?”
“Who would I have asked? Gran’s gone. My mum and aunts are—”
“Why didn’t you ask Miss Withers? Miss Merriweather? Even Noah—though he might have pretended it really was some tricky thing he learned from someone important instead of a rather basic life skill.”
Jo was bewildered by how silly the whole thing sounded now. “I remembered it being so complicated. Something I wouldn’t find anywhere else. Her own trick...”
“It goes that way sometimes, doesn’t it?” Emily sighed, pushing a bit of Jo’s hair behind her ear gently. “I find ghosts are very prone to complicating matters like that.”
“You believe in ghosts?” Jo snorted.
“Of course not—” Emily broke off, thinking about it for a moment. “Well. Actually. I suppose I must. It’s not rational, and I would very much prefer not to, but...one in particular has been complicating my life since the beginning. To deny her presence has only ever led to trouble.”
Something a bit chilling occurred to Jo, then. “Emily, are you sure you should invite Vanessa to have her baby at your house?” she asked, concerned that she’d accidentally pushed Emily into offering something that she really shouldn’t have. “It’s one thing to risk a pigeonholing, Em, but if it’s more than your mind can handle—”
Emily smiled. “Honestly, Jo, I think it will be the best thing either I or my father has done for our minds in ages. Our house has felt empty, tragic, frozen in time for as long as I can remember. I understand why Noah wanted to run from it.”
“I thought it was because he didn’t want to be a doctor.”
“Oh, he says that. Might even actually believe it, for all I know. I myself believed it was David’s influence that drew him away for an embarrassingly long time. But even now that all those rifts are healed? He’s still avoiding the house, leaving me alone to take care of a father who is going to need a lot more care much sooner than I anticipated. And it’s because the damned house still feels so... I truly don’t know what else to call it other than haunted.”
Jo nodded. “You think it might make Noah more willing to come help you? If you can chase that feeling out with a successful birth?”
“No,” Emily said immediately. “There’s no guarantee this will be successful, and I would never be so foolish as to bet on such a thing. But standing still and refusing to participate fully in our own lives, in our relationships to other people, is not keeping the past at bay. It’s giving it all the room in the world to thrive at our own expense. I want Vanessa to come stay with us just as much as I want you to come. As I want your very silly and surprisingly likable husband to come. I want everyone to come, because I cannot stand another year somewhere empty and frozen. There must be life in our house, Jo. Like there’s life in the place you sometimes share with Smithy. Or in your clubs. Or Miss Merriweather’s little flat above the shop. People making tea and pouring champagne for each other, playing chess, passing questionable novels around, giving each other flowers. Those things aren’t decadence. They’re life. And there’s a chance I’m bringing more death to our doorstep. I understand that. But that’s the risk you take, isn’t it?
“And maybe it won’t convince Noah to do right by me. Maybe it won’t wake my father out of his stupor. But I will enjoy every bloody minute of every bloody day. Because it is something in this world of nothing I’ve been moving through.” She paused at last, putting her small but strong hands on either side of Jo’s face. “And because you will be there. And being there is the most wonderful thing that anyone has ever done for me.”
“Just being there?” Jo repeated with a nervous chuckle at the notion. “Emily, darling, I hope to do that and a whole lot more for you in the future.”
Kisses were inevitable then, lovely ones. Soft with just a touch of heated hunger until Emily pulled back, breathing heavy but clearly determined to speak.
“Well, there’s one thing I’d like to do for you as well, before we go.”
“What’s that?” Jo asked. “I’d have thought hiding my husband’s stupid arse from the police would have been more than enough...”
“Where can I find some thread around here?” Emily spun her finger around the worst of Jo’s waistcoat buttons, then slipped her hands under the fabric like she might find sewing supplies conveniently hidden beneath the fall of Jo’s breasts. “That one’s a little loose already; I’ll show you how it’s done, and we can rewrite the page together, to replace the ruined one when you rebind the book.”
Jo arched her back into the touch, closing her eyes, grasping at Emily’s skirts, and letting the feeling of hands and then kisses carry her off a bit.
“But which of us should write it?” she mused, voice going rasped and floaty as Emily handled shirtwaist buttons just as dexterously as she had the outer ones. “Your script being so lusty and mine so cramped and closed off, it won’t look right.”
Emily’s next kiss was curved into a devious smile.
Jo pulled back, suspicious. “What?”
“There’s something I haven’t told you.”
“You? Keeping a mystery from me?”
She leaned in and whispered in Jo’s ear, “I know how to forge people’s handwriting.”
“What?”
“Well, you can’t blame me,” Emily huffed. “It’s society’s fault. If everyone took documentation and follow-up instructions as seriously from me as they do from my father, I wouldn’t have to. But I’ve been writing up notes to look like they came from him for years. Otherwise, the patients won’t listen, and that sort of closemindedness can be dangerous. Look, I’m not saying my skills will get past the sharp eye of an expert like yourself.” She tapped a single finger against Jo’s bottom lip. “But I can probably do well enough that your dear old grandmother won’t look like as decadent and lusty a writer as I am.”
As the joke landed, just as dryly delivered as all her best ones were, Jo was lit with a pure and uncomplicated happiness.
“I love the way you do that,” she said with a grin. “I love the way you are, Emily. I...”
Emily smiled back, blinking a few times in encouragement. “Yes?”
“I love you very much,” Jo said, a certain reverence in her voice that she herself hardly recognized. “I can’t believe I’m saying that to someone. Particularly someone who doesn’t drink whiskey.”
“Strange for me too,” said Emily. “To love someone enough that I’d go on kissing her even if she reeked of the stuff.”