Chapter Eliza Brandon
ELIZA brANDON
Eliza Brandon came from a long line of Elizas, an unbroken thread of life that spanned all the way to the beginning of time itself.
Of course, Eliza herself was unaware of such a thread or, in any case, was never allowed to consider it.
There had always been far too many things to do and books to read to get bogged down by her lineage, especially since she had no particular connection to it.
After all, her parents had died before she even learned to walk, before she could even remember their faces.
Back then she had been Eliza Fowler, daughter of George and Mary Fowler of Derbyshire.
Then, after, she was Eliza the orphan. Eliza the heiress.
But as far as Eliza had been concerned, she was still just Eliza.
Even now, years later, it seemed strange to think of her name.
It didn’t reflect any of those women who had come before, just a road map of the men hell-bent on their legacy.
Funny then, where hers had led. In a world where a woman’s appellation was really nothing more than something to be traded and changed, it had never occurred to her that the name she dreamed of someday having would end up being hers, but with cruel undertones.
A source of disappointment. Eliza Brandon.
Either a joke or a punishment from divine circles, she still wasn’t sure.
Goodness, how tragic. She almost wanted to laugh. There had been a time not too long ago when it would have all sounded so terribly romantic, like something from one of her favorite books. Strange how much can change in just a few years.
The sound of her daughter’s laughter pulled Eliza from her thoughts and back to the small room where she had been bedridden for the past few weeks, to the open window just a few feet away.
The smell of flowers and turned soil in the air wafted in as the little girl ran across the sunny garden, dark curls flying in every direction, just like Eliza’s had done years before when she would spend the day climbing trees and turning over rocks in the creek before returning to Delaford House with a skirt full of thistles and a smile on her face.
How odd. Eliza hadn’t thought about Delaford in ages.
She had hated it for even longer. Yet, in that moment, with her head swimming with fever and her small daughter’s laughter echoing in her ears, Eliza was struck with her early memories of that grand house and how she had loved it once.
A childhood spent roaming its labyrinthine grounds, hiding from her governess in the library with a pile of books, exploring the garden with its tall stone walls that she convinced herself were like a castle’s bailey protecting her from all manner of evils just beyond it.
She never thought to question why she didn’t leave the premises, or why she barely saw her guardian, an elderly man named Louis Brandon, who was a distant cousin of her mother’s.
It was a relation in marriage only; from the stories Eliza gathered from eavesdropping on the servants, his wife, who had been much younger and much richer, had died giving birth to their second son.
She left her fortune to her husband, and he promptly squandered it over the next five years.
Perhaps that was why he stepped in to take Eliza upon her parents’ death.
It was not out of altruism but a bid to control the immense fortune Eliza brought with her.
Of course, the details were never explained to her then.
What would have been the point? She didn’t have a choice in the matter.
She barely had any choice at all. Mr. Brandon was simply the master of the house, the one she needed to avoid, though that was rarely necessary since he was never really home.
Neither was his eldest son, William, which was a blessing.
Eliza’s few interactions with him seemed always to involve a cutting insult about her appearance or her orphanhood.
Fortunately, he wasn’t smart enough to devise anything particularly original, so when he was home from boarding school or the gambling dens in London, his taunts were predictable.
And, thankfully, rare. In fact, months could go by at a time without seeing Mr. Brandon or William.
But Eliza was never lonely. After all, her imagination kept her company, fantasies fueled by the books she found in the immense library, novels by Frances Burney and Henry Fielding, Charlotte Lennox and Daniel Defoe.
And, more importantly, she had the younger Christopher, the younger Brandon son.
Back then he hadn’t been Christopher, though.
He was Kit. Her Kit. Eliza couldn’t recall her first memory of him.
He had simply always been there, a permanent fixture in her life.
But surely there was a moment they met? She closed her eyes now, groping through her fevered mind to try to grasp hold of the moment.
Was it that morning he found her hidden in the branches of the apple tree?
It had been late August, cool enough that her small feet had crunched along the frost in the garden as she snuck out of the house at dawn.
She knew her governess would be looking for her, but she also knew the branches would do a good job of hiding her skirts.
By the time she reached the top limb and had filled her lap with a half dozen apples, she had convinced herself that she could happily live in that spot for the rest of her life, or at the very least until her ninth birthday.
That’s when she had heard his voice from below.
“What are you doing up there?”
Even then, his voice had been deep, vibrating at a timbre that should have been too low for a boy only two years older than her.
She looked down to the base of the tree and found him staring up at her.
He was already dressed in his breeches and a waistcoat, a miniature version of what Eliza had seen his father wear a handful of times, but his dark hair was always just a bit unkempt.
And his brown eyes always contained a small bit of mirth.
“Nothing,” she replied, then took another bite of her apple.
“So, not stealing one of my father’s apples, then,” he replied.
“It is impossible to steal an apple,” she replied around her mouthful. “God said so.”
“Did he?”
There was a hint of jest in his voice. It spurred her on as she raised her chin and recited the Bible verse she had heard at church the week before.
“ ‘The Lord is good to all: and his tender mercies are over all his works…. The eyes of all wait upon thee, and thou givest them their meat in due season. Thou openest thine hand, and satisfiest the desire of every living thing.’ ”
He didn’t look convinced.
She frowned. “What?”
“Nothing,” he replied, his head cocked ever so slightly to the side as he looked back up at her again. “It’s just a pity Eve didn’t have your working knowledge of Psalms.”
Eliza had been shocked, not only by his cheek, but to be considered a worthy recipient of it. So shocked, in fact, she couldn’t immediately think of a reply.
Then he had smiled. “Care for some company?”
From then on, he was her Kit, and she was his Eve. It was the name she would hear him call out across the garden, the one whispered when he found her in the library after she had fallen asleep with a pile of books.
“Hello, Eve.”
And with each utterance, she fell a little bit more in love with him.
Of course, as a child, she didn’t know it was love.
All she knew was the warmth that flooded her body when she saw him, the almost euphoric high when he returned home from a long spell at school.
She never knew when—the household staff barely looked at her for most of her life, let alone shared information about their employer’s family—but for a child who didn’t see the malice behind it, their silence only added to the almost unbearable anticipation of the moment when she would be caught by surprise in the library, in the middle of a book, or halfway up one of the trees in the walled garden, and she would hear Kit’s voice call out to her again.
And then she would be filled with such fierce affection that she didn’t think her pulse would rest until she was able to see him, take his arm, pull him along on another adventure.
Another moment came to her suddenly, so vividly that her breath caught.
She was sixteen, sitting along the banks of the small stream that ran along the far edge of Delaford’s walls.
The air was filled with the smell of the freshly turned dirt as the sun peaked through the branches of the towering oaks along the opposite bank.
But most of all, she remembered him, standing there on the banks, his shirt undone at his neck and his dark hair so long and messy it almost covered his eyes.
“ ‘O! how joyful it is to tell of happiness, such as that of Valancourt and Emily!’ ” Eliza quoted from her small leather-bound copy of The Mysteries of Udolpho, which sat in her lap as she extended an arm out toward the landscape beyond.
“ ‘To relate, that, after suffering under the oppression of the vicious and the disdain of the weak, they were, at length, restored to each other—to the beloved landscapes of their native country,—to the securest felicity of this life, that of aspiring to moral and labouring for intellectual improvement—to the pleasures of enlightened society, and to the exercise of the benevolence, which had always animated their hearts; while the bowers of La Vallée became, once more, the retreat of goodness, wisdom and domestic blessedness!’ ”
“Blessed indeed,” Kit had said flatly, throwing a stone and watching it skip over the water.
“You’re missing the point,” she said, ignoring the grating sound of the bird cawing from the other side of the stream. “It’s about the emotion. What is love if not a lens with which to view the world?”