Chapter 3 #2
"A terrible man you can argue with," Amelia said quietly.
"You can point to what he has done and say, there, that is wrong, that is cruel, that is not acceptable.
But he has not done anything wrong. He has been perfectly honest and perfectly fair and he looked at me as though I were a chair he was deciding whether to keep.
And there is nothing I can say about it because he has not been unkind. "
She looked at her hands. "He has simply made it very clear that I do not matter. Not as a person. Only as a function."
Bethany had no answer for that.
Because it was true. And because it was the kind of truth that was worse than cruelty.
In the end, the kind that left no mark, no evidence, nothing to point to. Just a woman sitting in a blue chair, understanding that the man who was going to be her husband had looked at her and seen only what she could do for him.
"He said he would be fair," Bethany offered, because she was trying.
"Yes," Amelia said. "He did."
Her sister was standing in the center of the room, her arms wrapped around herself, which was not something Amelia did.
Amelia stood straight. Amelia kept her hands folded, her chin level, and her expression arranged. She did not stand in the middle of rooms holding herself together with her own arms like something that might otherwise come apart.
Her breathing was wrong. Bethany noticed it now. Shallow and too quick, the kind that did not reach the bottom of the lungs, the kind that preceded something.
"Amelia."
"I am perfectly well." She said it immediately, which meant she was not.
"You are not perfectly well. Look at me."
Amelia looked at her. Her eyes were too bright, and her color was entirely gone, and her hands, where they gripped her own arms, had gone white at the knuckles.
"I need a moment," she said. "Just, a moment. I simply need …"
She stopped. Pressed her lips together. Breathed in through her nose very carefully, the way a person breathed when they were trying to keep something down.
Bethany crossed to her and put both hands on her shoulders. "Sit down."
"I do not want to sit down."
"Amelia. Sit down."
She sat.
Bethany crouched in front of her and watched her sister breathe. Watched her fight for it, watched her press one hand flat against her sternum as though she could slow her own heart by force, and did not say anything, because there was nothing useful to say and Amelia did not need words right now.
She needed air and stillness and someone who would not pretend this was not happening.
After a long moment, the breathing began to even out.
After another, Amelia lowered her hand from her chest.
"I cannot do it," she said.
"Amelia."
"I am not being dramatic, and I am not frightened. I cannot do this, and I need you to hear me say it without immediately reaching for a solution."
Her voice was quiet and completely steady.
"I have been agreeable my entire life. I have done everything Mama asked and everything the season required, and I kept telling myself the right situation would come, and I would learn to be content.
" She stopped. "And then you stood up in that church for me, again, and I thought, my younger sister fights my battles because I have never once fought my own. "
"You would do the same for me without a second thought."
"That is not the point." She said. "I am four-and-twenty years old and I have never in my life chosen a single thing for myself. Not where I live, not who I spend my time with, not who I am going to marry."
She continued. "I will not be handed to another stranger."
And for the first time all afternoon, she sounded uncertain rather than resolved, like someone standing at the edge of something and not yet sure how far down it went.
"I just need to not be in the room. I need," She stopped. Pressed her fingers briefly to her mouth. "I need five minutes where no one is looking at me and deciding whether I am adequate."
Her voice broke slightly on the last word. She did not try to recover it this time.
"I am not going to do anything foolish," she said. "I only need some air. I only need to think."
She believed it when she said it. Bethany could see that.
Whatever Amelia was about to do, she had not decided it yet. She was a woman walking toward a door without knowing what was on the other side, driven by nothing more and nothing less than the simple, desperate need to breathe.
That, somehow, made it worse.
"Please." One word, simply said, and beneath it that look, the same steady eyes that had always known exactly how to ask Bethany for something without demanding it. "Trust me to handle my own life. Just this once."
Bethany held her gaze for a long moment.
"If this goes wrong," she said, "I reserve the right to be entirely insufferable about it."
Amelia smiled properly this time.
"I know." She moved to the door, paused with one hand on the frame, and looked back. Her voice was soft but did not waver. "Thank you. For the church, and for everything before it. I love you very much."
Then she was through the door, and her footsteps were quick down the corridor, quicker than a woman who had simply stepped out for air. And then there was only the fire and the rain and that helpless feeling of watching someone do something you cannot stop and are not entirely sure you should.
Bethany stood in the middle of the sitting room and looked at the door, and told herself it was fine.
Amelia needed air. Amelia was sensible. Amelia had never in her life done anything impulsive or reckless or without first considering every consequence.
She would be back in ten minutes, with her color restored, her chin level, and her hands folded, and she would sit at that dinner table and get through it the way she always got through things.
Bethany looked at the chair where Amelia had been sitting.
Her reticule was still on it.
Her gloves were still on the side table.
Bethany picked up the gloves. Turned them over in her hands. Put them down again.
She went after her.
The entrance hall was empty. The front door stood open a full inch, and a thin dark line of wet ran across the flagstone beneath it where the rain had already begun to come in.
She has gone completely mad.
Bethany thought, pushing through into the storm.
My careful, sensible, patient sister has lost her mind entirely and walked out into a lightning storm without her gloves.
"Amelia," she called.
The word was gone before it had traveled three feet.
She moved down the drive, with the cold rain driving into her face and the fear growing under her ribs with every step.
Not the abstract fear of consequences and scandal and what their mother would say, but the real kind, the animal kind, the kind that lived in the chest and said something is wrong in a voice that did not use words.
Amelia had not taken her gloves.
Amelia had not taken her reticule.
Amelia had walked out of a warm room into a storm with nothing, which meant she had not been thinking about where she was going.
Which meant she had not been thinking at all. Which meant whatever had broken open in that blue sitting room was still breaking, still going, and Bethany had let her walk out alone into the dark to finish breaking by herself.
The storm had worsened considerably. Rain came sideways in thick sheets driven by a wind that had no manners whatsoever, and she was soaked to the skin.
She turned a full circle on the waterlogged gravel and saw nothing, only the bending oaks at the lawn's edge and the lantern above the gatehouse swinging uselessly at the far end of the drive.
"Amelia," she called.
She kept moving, gravel shifting and sliding underfoot, and squinted through the dark. The iron gate at the far end was just a shape. Nothing between it and her that moved like a person.
Where did she go?
She turned back toward the side garden, and the lightning came.
It struck the oak to her left without any warning, a crack of white light and sound so close together that she felt them as a single thing in her chest and behind her eyes.
The branch that came away was large, and the force of it reached her through the wet ground underfoot. She lurched sharply to the left, her foot turned hard on a loose stone, and she threw out her hand for something solid.
There was nothing there.
The ground did not come.
Two arms closed around her from behind, and she left the ground.
For one disorienting moment, there was nothing but rain and wind and the smell of wet wool and the solid fact of someone else's chest against her back.
Then her heart lurched back into motion, and she understood what had happened and immediately wished she had a free hand to do something useful with.
She did not. Both her arms were effectively pinned, and her feet were dangling approximately four inches above the gravel. The person responsible for this showed absolutely no sign of reconsidering.
She was warm, she realized.
For the first time since she had stepped outside, she was warm, and she resented this information considerably.
"Let go of me, you … you …"
The words froze when she saw who held her with such a firm grip.
"You won't escape me now, little mouse."