Chapter Two #2
Eleanor had seen the portraits. She had heard the stories.
She knew that her mother had possessed the sort of beauty that silenced conversation, that drove poets to reach for inadequate metaphors, that compelled otherwise sensible men to behave with remarkable foolishness for the sake of a single smile.
And she knew what that beauty had earned her mother in the end: a husband who displayed her like a prized painting, praised her as one might praise a possession, and gradually—inevitably—lost interest once the novelty waned.
By the time Eleanor was old enough to form clear memories, her mother had already begun to recede—not physically, not yet, but in every way that truly mattered.
She spoke less. She smiled less. She spent long hours gazing from windows at a world she no longer seemed permitted to inhabit fully.
Beautiful, everyone said, even as she faded. Such a beautiful woman.
As though beauty were sufficient. As though beauty, in the end, were anything but a gilded cage that promised value and delivered confinement.
Eleanor possessed her mother’s face—the bones, as Aunt Georgiana had observed, if not quite the radiance.
But she had learnt, early and thoroughly, to regard that inheritance as a liability rather than a gift.
Beauty attracted attention. Attention bred expectation.
Expectation led to men such as Edmund Hale, who would smile at her translations and mean none of it.
Usefulness, Eleanor had decided, long before she possessed the language to express it. Usefulness was the only safe currency. It did not fade. It could not be taken. It could only be earned, again and again, through labour no one else cared to undertake.
It was not, perhaps, the most romantic philosophy. But Eleanor had ceased believing in romance on the same afternoon she had ceased believing in Edmund Hale’s smile.
She picked up her pen and returned to the Venetian glass merchant.
***
Dinner proved precisely as tedious as Eleanor had anticipated.
Sir Edward Holloway was a florid gentleman with strong opinions regarding hunting and weak ones regarding everything else.
His wife was pleasant but indistinct, the sort of woman who had mastered the art of nodding at appropriate intervals while contributing nothing of consequence.
Lady Tremaine’s nephew—the middling baronet—was handsome enough, Eleanor supposed, if one admired the sort of man who laughed too heartily at his own wit and allowed his gaze to linger upon Honoria’s bodice rather longer than propriety sanctioned.
Eleanor sat at the far end of the table, as custom dictated, and spoke only when addressed directly.
“I understand you possess a talent for languages, Miss Finch,” Lady Tremaine said midway through the fish course, in a tone suggesting that a talent for languages ranked somewhere alongside a talent for juggling—diverting, perhaps, but hardly consequential.
“I am tolerably proficient in French and Italian,” Eleanor replied. “And moderately capable in German.”
“How charming. Quite a drawing-room accomplishment.”
Eleanor smiled—the practised smile, which conceded nothing and revealed less.
“Do favour us with a demonstration,” the baronet said, leaning forward with the eager air of a man anticipating entertainment. “Say something in Italian. Something romantic.”
Something romantic. As though her languages were party diversions, meant to be dispensed at command for the amusement of gentlemen who would forget her name by morning.
“La pazienza è la virtù dei forti,” Eleanor said evenly. “E la vendetta si gusta meglio quando è fredda.”
“Capital! And what does it mean?”
“Patience is the virtue of the strong. And revenge is best savoured when it is cold.”
The baronet’s smile faltered, if only slightly. “That is… not precisely what I anticipated.”
“Italian can be unexpectedly expressive,” Eleanor said, and returned her attention to her fish.
Across the table, Honoria caught her eye and looked away with suspicious haste, her lips pressed together as though suppressing laughter. It was, Eleanor reflected, the nearest approximation of genuine connection she was likely to enjoy that evening.
She would accept it.
***
Later, alone in her small chamber at the rear of the house, Eleanor sat at her writing desk and stared into nothingness.
The evening had wearied her in ways that bore no relation to physical exertion.
It was the performance that exhausted her—the constant calculation of how much to speak, how warmly to smile, how much of herself to conceal.
The unceasing awareness that she was present only because her absence would have been ill-regarded, that her purpose was to occupy a chair rather than contribute to the conversation.
Useful, she thought. Invisible. Safe.
The words felt unusually heavy tonight. Heavier than they ought.
She thought of her mother, fading in a drawing room that had never truly been home.
She thought of Edmund Hale, smiling over her translations while quietly arranging his courtship of Lydia.
She thought of the baronet requesting something romantic as though her languages were tricks to be performed upon command.
She thought of Aunt Georgiana: Such a shame that accomplishments rarely help a woman in your position.
And for a single moment—treacherous and unguarded—she allowed herself to wonder what it might feel like to be seen. Not useful. Not invisible. Not the spinster cousin who translated correspondence and filled empty chairs at dinner parties.
Simply… seen.
The thought was dangerous, and she knew it. Hope was a luxury she had relinquished long ago, and to desire what could not be attained was to invite disappointment of the most ruinous sort.
Yet the wondering lingered, soft and sharp as a splinter beneath the skin.
What would it feel like, she wondered, to be chosen?
She did not have an answer. She was not certain she ever would.
Eleanor extinguished her candle and lay in the darkness, listening to the muted sounds of a house she would never quite belong to, and tried very diligently not to wish for anything at all.