Chapter IX
IX
She’s standing at her window when the letter comes.
It’s been raining for days, and the sudden break in the clouds, the arrival of late-afternoon sun, feels like a blessing.
She closes her eyes and lets it warm her, turn the inside of her lids rose gold, and for a moment, she is lying on the green at Clement Hall with a volume of Blake, or Keats.
Summer days were made for poetry. Daydreaming in verse.
“Charlotte.”
She blinks, and turns to find her aunt standing in the doorway.
“Come away from the window,” she tuts. “You hardly need the sun.”
At this hour, the light is barely strong enough to take the chill off the glass, but Charlotte bites her tongue and withdraws into the sitting room.
Her aunt studies her, taking in her hair, neatly bound, and her dress, a creamy satin, and, finding nothing else to chide, she gives a short, satisfied nod, and turns to go.
But halfway to the door, Aunt Amelia draws up short.
“Oh,” she says, producing a letter. “I almost forgot. This came for you.”
The wax on the seal is a rich, inky blue that Charlotte knows at once, since she is the one who gifted it to Jocelyn.
Her heart begins to race.
Jocelyn, who has not written since she first left Clement Hall.
It takes every ounce of Aunt Amelia’s teaching to keep from lunging for the paper, to stand and smile politely as it’s put into her hands, to wait until her aunt is gone to open it.
Charlotte doesn’t realize her hands are shaking until she tries to break the seal without damaging the wax, and fails. She doesn’t care. She sinks onto the stool, heart soaring at the sight of Jocelyn’s curving script.
Dearest Charlotte— that is how it starts, and just like that, she is back in her mother’s sun-drenched garden, laughter ringing with bare feet on the stones, Joss on one side of the trellis and Charlotte on the other. And they’re both smiling.
And Charlotte realizes how badly she has missed her.
Dearest Charlotte—
She reads on, hungry for more of Joss’s voice, her words.
I write to you with happy news.
Charlotte rushes on, but her eyes trip over the lines that follow.
Your brother James . . .
She stumbles.
I have said yes . . .
Pitches forward.
I hope you will be glad for us . . .
Falls.
How grand it is, when friends become family.
They are no longer at the trellis, no longer lying in the grass. Joss is on her feet, hands clasped and eyes cast down in shame.
Your future sister.
A tear hits the parchment, followed by a second, and a third, smudging the last three words.
Charlotte reads the letter a second time, and a third. Over and over, until the words sink in, coil through her, spread. Until the urge to scream gives way to something worse. Cold and hard and miserable.
She doesn’t know how long she sits there, staring at the paper. Only that when she finally looks up, the sun is gone, and her aunt is calling her downstairs.
Darkness has settled over the room, and yet, when she rises, it moves with her.
A loathsome fog that follows Charlotte out of the house, and into the waiting carriage, and through the first hour of the ball, stealing all the color and the sound.
It finally lifts a measure at the sight of Sabine moving toward her through the room, but even still she cannot shake it, and it must be a physical thing, because Sabine takes one look at her and says, “Come, this will not do.”
The next thing Charlotte knows, she is being ushered up the stairs.
“Where are we going?” she asks as Sabine draws her through the mazelike rooms, the sounds of the ball snuffed out by the intervening doors and walls, before they reach some far-flung corner of the house surely off-limits to the guests.
Sabine moves as if she knows the place, and when Charlotte says as much, she looks at her, bemused, and says, “I should hope so.” A hidden door gives way onto a private study. “After all, this is my house.”
The words are enough to dislodge Charlotte’s grief.
“ Your house?” she gasps, looking around.
Surely Aunt Amelia would have mentioned that night’s ball being hosted by her friend? Then again, perhaps she did. The carriage ride was brief, and her aunt kept up a steady stream of words. Charlotte simply wasn’t listening.
On the heels of understanding, horror. She wheels back toward the door.
“I cannot keep you from your own ball!”
Sabine brushes the words away. “Just like a ball, once it’s been set in motion, no one needs me there to keep it rolling. Besides,” she adds, going to a cabinet on the wall, “some nights aren’t made for dancing.”
She emerges with a pair of crystal cups and a bottle of sherry. She pours, filling each nearly to the brim.
“Now tell me,” she says, handing Charlotte one, “what has you in such a dour mood?”
Charlotte looks down at the ruby contents of her glass. She takes a sip, surprised by the sweetness, but as soon as she’s swallowed, her eyes begin to prick with tears.
Dearest Charlotte.
How grand it is.
“A friend of mine is to be married.” Her throat tightens around the words, and she feels like she might choke, so she downs the sherry, warmth rushing in its wake. “I am happy for her,” she makes herself say. The right words, but they ring hollow. “I should be happy for her.”
“But you are not.”
Something splinters inside Charlotte. She tries to draw breath, and feels like she might shatter. “I thought—that is, I hoped—”
But she cannot bring herself to say it, because she knows how foolish it will sound.
How silly she must look. A child, caught up in a child’s crush.
She should have known, the moment Joss pushed her away, the way her face went red with shame, the fact she never wrote.
But despite it all, some stubborn part of Charlotte was holding on to hope, shielding it like a candle in a breeze.
Now she shakes her head forcefully, as if to banish all of it.
“Oh”—dashing a stray tear from her cheek—“don’t let me bore you.”
“You have not bored me yet,” says Sabine, refilling her glass. “I doubt you ever will.”
The warmth turns to heat in Charlotte’s cheeks. The wretched fog begins to finally withdraw, retreat.
“Come,” says Sabine, leading her to the center of the study, where two low velvet chairs sit before an inlaid table.
Sabine lowers herself into one, and then, to Charlotte’s surprise, kicks off her shoes.
From a hidden drawer, she withdraws a pack of playing cards.
Charlotte cannot help but laugh a little as she sits.
“What would my aunt say,” she muses, “if she knew I was trading suitors and balls for sherry and cards?”
“The greatest gift,” declares Sabine, in almost perfect mimicry of stiff Amelia, “is a well-rounded education.” She gives the deck an expert shuffle. “Now,” she says in her own voice, “what shall we play? Cribbage, euchre, or whist?”
They decide on whist, and soon Charlotte has abandoned her own shoes, stockinged feet tucked up beneath her in the chair, the ball safely locked behind the intervening doors.
They pass the first hand in silence, but as Sabine deals the second, Charlotte can feel her thoughts begin to turn, the darkness rolling in.
Across the table, Sabine reclines, cradling her glass in one hand and her cards in the other. She looks perfectly at home. Which, of course, she is.
“I envy you.” The words slip out, and then Charlotte cannot stop them. “I know it came at such a cost, but still, I envy you. Your freedom. The way you get to live.”
Sabine glances up, over the tops of her cards. “What would you do with it, I wonder?” She sets her hand aside and leans forward in her chair. “Your life. If it were yours, to do with as you please?”
Charlotte’s gaze drops to her hand.
The room flickers, and for an instant she is back at Clement Hall.
She is crouching to plant a new rose in the garden, bare knees sinking into the soil.
She is at the breakfast table in the dining room, a book in one hand and a toast point in the other.
She is twirling barefoot across the parquet floor of the salon.
The scenes flash by, brief as cards being shuffled, but in them all, she’s not alone. A second figure flickers at the edges of her sight. It kneels beside her in the garden. It sits across the table. It spins her in its arms.
And then the scenes are gone, blacked out by her brother’s face, her journal in his hand.
Charlotte shakes her head. “But that’s just it,” she says, her vision blurring.
“My life is not my own. It never will be. I already know how it will go. In a matter of weeks, I will return home and watch my best friend wed my brother, and next year I will be forced back here, paraded about until some stranger deigns to claim me for a wife.” She knows she’s being maudlin, but she can’t help it.
Sabine takes up her hand again. “You don’t sound keen to make a match.”
“I don’t have a choice,” says Charlotte, frustration welling up. “So why pretend? The exercise has no point, except to hurt.”
Sabine shrugs and says, “Everyone has choices. They only have to make them.”
“You make it sound so simple.”
“Simple? No.” Sabine discards one card and draws another. “But you cannot have what you want until you know what you want. And once you do know,” she adds, “it’s only a matter of what you’re willing to do to get it.”
“Yes, well,” snaps Charlotte, “we are not all lucky enough to be widowed.” Her hand flies to her mouth. “I’m so sorry,” she says, wishing she could take it back. Fresh tears well behind her eyes, and she shakes her head, cheeks burning hot. “What a horrid thing to say.”
But Sabine doesn’t seem wounded. If anything, she looks amused.
“The night we met,” she says, resting the cards on top of her still-full glass of sherry, “do you know what drew me to you on the stairs? What has drawn me to you, every night thereafter?”
Charlotte shakes her head. In truth, she does not know. Has never known. “My quaint pastoral charm?” she quips, even as a tear escapes.
Sabine’s mouth twitches. “It’s the way you cannot hide your feelings. If they do not spill out of your mouth, they shimmer on your skin. They fill the air around you, so loud they almost shout.”
Charlotte colors. “I have always been this way.” She reaches up to wipe away the tear. “I cannot help it.”
“And you shouldn’t have to,” says Sabine, leans across to stop her hand so the tear continues down her cheek. “The world will try to make you small. It will tell you to be modest, and meek. But the world is wrong. You should get to feel and love and live as boldly as you want.”
Charlotte grits her teeth. “ Should is not can. And the world makes the rules, not me.”
“Does it?” Sabine’s hand drops back to her cards. “Oh look,” she says, laying them face up on the table, “it seems I’ve won again.”
Charlotte looks from her hand to Sabine’s. There are five aces between them. “How . . .”
“Isn’t it obvious?” says Sabine, leaning back in her chair. “I cheated.”
A twitch of her fingers, and another ace appears in her gloved hand. She flicks it onto the stack. “The wonderful thing about luck,” she says, “is you can make your own.” Her gaze drifts toward the study door. “Alas, it seems the ball is winding down.”
Charlotte startles. “Of course.” She rises to her feet, too fast, the sherry going to her head, forcing her to grip the chair for balance as she says, “I’ve kept you far too long.”
“Charlotte—”
She fumbles for her shoes, gets them on, and hurries toward the hidden door.
“Charlotte, wait.”
She never saw Sabine stand up, let alone cross the narrow room, but as Charlotte’s hand reaches the handle of the door, Sabine’s slides past her, comes to rest against the wood.
It is not the closest they have ever been—there were moments when Sabine was teaching her to dance, their bodies tangled briefly—but Charlotte startles at the nearness, the sliver of space between their bodies, Sabine’s like a shadow, close but not yet touching hers.
And perhaps it’s the sherry, or the talk of freedom, of chance, that is making her so hot, or perhaps it is knowing how easy it would be to close the narrow gap, as Charlotte had done in the garden, certain if she did, that Sabine would not pull back in shame.
And yet, she does not turn, is still facing the door when Sabine dips her head, lips brushing Charlotte’s ear. “Your dress,” she murmurs.
It is a finicky gown, with a dozen hook and eyes running in a column down the back, and the top one, it seems, has come undone.
And before Charlotte can reach to fix it, Sabine is drawing off her gloves.
“It’s a lie, you know, that you only get one story.
” Charlotte’s breath catches as Sabine’s fingers—cool and steady—graze the bare skin between her shoulders.
It takes only a moment to hook the clasp, but Sabine doesn’t pull away.
Her touch lingers, then begins to drift down the line of closures, cold fingers burning the satin in their wake. Charlotte bites her lip as Sabine’s hand slides around her waist, splays between her hips.
There is nothing chaste about that touch, their bodies flush against the wood. Charlotte tips her forehead against the door, breathes into the wood as Sabine’s hand ventures lower, her mouth coming to rest at Charlotte’s temple. She can feel the woman smiling against her skin.
Then, that voice, sliding like fingers through her hair.
“When you discover what you want, come tell me.”
And then her hand is gone, her weight is gone, Sabine is gone, slipping out past Charlotte, her dress vanishing through the door and down the stairs.