Chapter 22 #2
William hummed at that. “It does not feel like a talent. You would not say the sun has a talent for shining, or the moon a knack for changing shape. They simply are as they are made.”
Verbena eyed his strange—and strangely beautiful—mixed clothing. “Forgive my ignorance, dear William. Will you sit?” She gestured to the vanity bench across from her.
William gazed at her with that pained expression he wore when running across a mixed-up metaphor in prose, then very slowly lowered himself to perch on the bench.
He gave the assorted balms and ointments on the vanity table an interested glance, the long, white line of his neck baring itself to Verbena’s gaze as he looked over his shoulder.
The candlelight played along the birdlike wing of his collarbone, exposed as it was in the thin chemisette.
Verbena was possessed by the lecherous urge to bite it.
With great restraint, she cleared her throat. “Would you like to avail yourself?” She nodded at the vanity. “Or I suppose I should say, does Flora? If, indeed, the two of you do not always share the same desires.”
A delicate thing, discussing desires, yet Verbena could not avoid it, not when William was here with her. In her room. Alone, together, the night before she was to be married.
“That is one of the things I needed to speak to you about tonight. You are, above all others, the one I would trust with this.” He turned back to her and flushed a warm pink. “I confess I have lately considered calling myself a third name.”
“Really?” Verbena tried to rein in her surprise.
“It was a long carriage ride from London.”
“What is it?” Verbena asked. “The third name, I mean.”
A moment’s pause, but only a moment. Considering the weight of the thing, it was a miracle. “Willa,” he said.
“Oh, as in…?”
He shrugged ruefully. “In this, I am not very creative. But it fits, does it not? At least”—another shy smile—“I think so.”
“And is Willa— That is, are you,” Verbena ventured, “man or woman?”
“Both, perhaps. Neither. Or rather—” He sighed and looked up toward the cobwebbed ceiling. “I do not think my state a godlike one, but the nearest I can explain is existing as the trinity does, each part comprising the whole.”
“But how shall I regard you?” Verbena asked.
“However you wish, I suppose. There is no error you can make, so long as you do not think me solely one thing or another.” He touched her hand, fingertips trailing along her skin.
Verbena smiled encouragingly. Tears pricked at her eyes, the overwhelming emotion of seeing her beloved like this moving her like nothing else ever had. “Then I am extremely gratified,” she said, “to make your acquaintance, my dear Willa.”
Tension flooded out of the newly christened Willa, his shoulders dropping from where they had been cinched up to his red ears.
A sigh of pure relief flowed from his lips, his eyes closing briefly.
“I thought you would be,” he murmured. “I thought, I hoped, yet I did not know.” His eyes opened, warm and searching on Verbena’s face. “How wonderful it is, knowing.”
Verbena dabbed subtly at her eyes with the cuff of her dressing gown. “What else?” she said.
“Hm?” Willa asked.
“You said that was one of the things you needed to tell me tonight.” Verbena clasped her hands about her knees.
She could barely stand her mounting excitement, though it was tinged with dread.
Surely Willa had not appeared at Eden Abbey intending to share this part of himself, then say farewell forever?
Surely there was hope. “Why are you here, sweet Willa?”
Willa licked his lips before forming the words. “I came because you asked me to.”
Verbena waited, but there was nothing else. She cocked her head like a curious spaniel. “Simple as that?” she asked. “No other reason?”
“Reason and sense leave me where you are involved,” Willa said. He rose from the vanity seat and paced the room, his naked feet tracing a path from the bedside to the window, then back again. “I am powerless in this regard. Perhaps I shall always be powerless when it comes to you.”
“Now, really!” Verbena had heard a lot of declarations in her time, but this was too much.
“No, no, it’s quite true,” Willa said. “I tried to stay away, to ignore my heartbreak, and yet here I stand. I think I shall always come when you call. I came to you tonight—and I will come again, once you are married, if you so desire it.” He stopped pacing, his hands clasped behind his back, the dark window behind him showing the long stretch of night.
“I would sunder myself for your sake. I would be solely Flora, should you deign to be seen with me in public. Bosom friends might promenade arm in respectable arm.” He swallowed.
“Or you might prefer William take the role of your lover. If we are ever discovered, it would be better to be accused of the usual sort of affair instead of an unnatural one. Then again—”
“Wait.” Verbena held up a hand, pleased it did not tremble visibly. “You have reconsidered my proposal? You…have not come to ask me to forsake étienne?”
Willa looked at her, bereft. “I would not ask you to treat a friend so cruelly. His life is at stake.”
“But before, you said—though I did not know your reasons, which are now readily apparent—” She motioned at Willa’s trousers, his shawl. “You told me you could not bear to live a half life with me. Yet now you say you will?”
“I will do whatever you require of me,” Willa said softly. “I am, despite my best efforts, utterly devoted to you. And I do not foresee that ever changing.”
“But it will,” Verbena blurted out. “It would have to. If you did as I asked, if you cut yourself in two when you have only recently understood the unity that exists in your dual nature—”
“I could be myself when we are alone,” Willa argued. “That, at least, will be a great comfort to me.”
“I do not want you to be with me despite the misery it will cause you. I do not wish misery upon you at all!” The tears, which had threatened throughout the evening, now swelled over the riverbanks of Verbena’s eyes.
She dashed them away with the sleeve of her dressing gown.
“I could not bear it if the strain of a clandestine affair caused you to regard me with bitterness. Oh, why would you introduce me to your third, beautiful name only to tell me you would destroy it? I do not want it done, not ever! I—I want you whole.” She covered her face with her hands and began to weep.
It was a strange sensation; tears normally only came to Verbena when she required them. To be sobbing without her own say-so was an awful thing.
“My darling girl.” Soft, swift footfalls crossed the room.
Verbena felt the air shift as Willa knelt at her feet, clutching at the fabric of the dressing gown that covered her thighs.
“Please don’t cry. You must understand that, even without an arrangement between us, I would still be required to hide this version of myself from the public eye.
I cannot be destroyed by that, only forced to choose which persona would have the pleasure of your company in polite society. ”
Verbena lifted her wet face and pinned Willa with a look. “Yet doing this for my sake would bring you pain. Do you deny that?”
Willa’s face pinched. He was no liar. “I do not,” he said at last.
“Then I cannot allow it.” Verbena could hardly believe the words pouring out from her.
Here was the one she loved, offering himself up exactly as she had wanted, and she was refusing him?
Where was the Machiavellian girl who devised ploys that could shape the royal court?
Dead, perhaps, murdered by love. “Think practically,” she said, sniffing hard.
“You cannot tell even the simplest lie to save your own skin. How can you be expected to conduct an affair with me—as man or woman—without exposing yourself eventually? Not to mention your misery would likely cause you to make missteps that a more contented soul would not. You could be ruined.”
“I do not care for my reputation,” said Willa.
“I care for it,” Verbena countered. She envisioned, terrifyingly, William being discovered and losing what little support his family gave him.
Worse—Flora being exposed as William’s alter ego and losing all patronage.
It was too terrible to contemplate the possible ramifications if either came under such scrutiny that their nature was discovered.
“I care for your reputation; I care for your good health; I care for your safety and freedom; I care for you.” She gave up all pretense.
“I love you, dear Willa. I love you too much to keep you for myself.”
Willa stared up at Verbena, his fingers twisting in the silk of her dressing gown.
“All right,” he said, though his voice was choked with tears.
“Yes. All right. As you say. Pah!” He rose to his feet, giving Verbena his back.
It shook under her gaze, a fine tremor in Willa’s shoulders, making the embroidered flowers bob in some imaginary breeze.
“Stars above. Even being rebuffed by you is sweet, if it means hearing you say those words.”
Verbena stood without hesitation and placed her hand on Willa’s quaking shoulder.
That did not seem enough to hold her love in one piece, so she claimed his narrow waist with a cinch of her free arm.
Her hot cheek pressed against the plane of his back, rising and falling with Willa’s breath.
“I am sorry,” she said. “I would tell you every day, if I could.”
“In a little cottage with a thatched roof,” Willa said between sobs. “With a tabby cat on the window ledge.”
Verbena pressed her forehead to the blade of Willa’s shoulder. She could see the cat’s fat tail swinging, a beam of sunlight slicing through the curtains. “But it’s not to be.”