20 Liney To Fall
Liney
To Fall
The days pass in a blur. I breakfast with Elle and Bridget and learn the skills to blend in with society.
Elle hems a pair of trousers and work shirt to fit my smaller frame and teaches me to walk in a masculine way. I don’t see much difference in it from her normal walk. The lines of gender are similar shades for my sister, while they feel at odds on me.
Bridget makes faces behind Elle’s back, daring me to laugh.
Elle teaches me how to avert a gaze without appearing suspicious, how to lower my voice, and which shopkeepers I should look for and avoid.
“A cap helps a great deal,” she explains one morning, adjusting it on my head. “Have you thought about your hair?”
I might have objected to the idea a few days ago. But a certain raven-haired girl, whose own short locks are quite fetching, has changed my mind.
“You’re lucky you’re blond,” Elle says as her scissors massacre my golden strands. “No one will think twice that you’ve got no beard, it’d be too pale to see.”
“Why have you never cut your hair?” Bridget asks.
Elle hasn’t explained our predicament like I think she should. In the few moments alone we’re afforded, mainly after Elle’s gone upstairs, I’ve explained bits and pieces. But it’s hard to let someone new, even as lovely as Bridget, into the darkness that required our escape.
Elle shrugs, but there’s a glimmer of embarrassment in her glance away from me.
“You’re too proud to do it!” I shout, turning in my chair to look at her properly.
“Any shorter and I’d look like a drowned rat,” she mutters. “Limp and stringy, not like yours. You’ve got as full and shiny a coat as a retriever.”
She’s never seen herself properly. “I like your hair.” While mine needs constant brushing and braiding, hers has a natural ease. It’s moonbeams surrounding her face. A champagne crown.
“She’s right,” Bridget adds to Elle. “You might be surprised how much volume a shorter style can give you. I was.”
Elle dismisses us and gets on with cutting.
Rain has melted the snow. It’s ceaseless, pounding at the windows and showing every new leak from the last storm. Every morning when Elle comes down from the lightroom, she scowls out at the weather.
“Did you see the bags under her eyes?” Bridget whispers one morning. She’s slathering jam on a slice of bread she baked the day before. “When does she sleep?”
It’s a good question. Every appearance of my sister adds something off to her tableau.
Her hair, while braided, doesn’t appear brushed or set.
Blue half-moons descend from her eyes. There’s a sluggishness to her movements that I’ve never seen before.
Yet every time she looks outside at the weather, she straightens and curses the clouds.
She doesn’t eat much at meals. Bridget and I have taken over the cooking. I don’t know what to say, though. Elle’s never had an issue with food. Is it stress? Or something worse?
On a thunderous afternoon, Bridget’s attempting to fix a hole in her traveling dress and cursing every time she sticks herself with the needle.
It makes me laugh so hard that Elle, who’s been stacking books on my head, pinches me as the books fall to the floor.
I spot Elle’s smile as she picks the books back up, though.
It improves posture and gait, something our parents forced her to do to combat a slump she developed young.
She promises it’s also effective to create a tall, confident man’s walk.
“We’re lucky Mr. Croxton hasn’t darkened our doorstep,” I say.
“Who?” Bridget asks, then rolls her head back from her perch on the bed with yet another poke to her thumb.
“From the harbor society,” I explain. “He came by looking for some information on the last keeper here. Did I not mention?”
“I’d wait for spring if I were him,” Elle says, hurried to move on without more questions.
She tips one of my arms to test my balance.
“The closer we get to true winter, the more treacherous a crossing becomes. Even the land portion of the journey can be blocked by snow or encrusted with ice. Our run must wait for a perfectly clear day.”
“Our?” I ask. Right. I’m to go with her.
Yet that would leave Bridget alone here. What I used to beg for from Elle, I now would only care for if another passenger were to join us.
Elle blinks at me, not masking her confusion.
“I know it’s later than you wanted, but I didn’t think you’d forget, little ghost. In fact, I thought Bridget could come along.
I wasn’t sure at first given it’ll be a tight fit in the boat with additional supplies, but it’s doable. Now—walk to the bed and back.”
Bridget brings out the life even in Elle. I thank her over and over, only stopping to concentrate on her lessons.
Minutes slip into hours with Bridget every time Elle ascends to the light.
We talk, we play checkers with a makeshift set made of burnt wood chips and chalk, and Bridget asks me to read her poetry from the small bookshelf.
I slouch, laugh open-mouthed, and one snowy night, I tell her what happened to me. At least the parts I know for sure.
She’s shocked by the actions of Mr. Seymour, but even more so of my parents. What lights my heart is how she asks, “How do you feel about it all?”
“Elle is the one who was most harmed,” I deflect out of habit. “I never knew she was being hurt throughout her engagement.”
“You were—what, fifteen when he proposed to her?” We sit on my bed, our foreheads touching as I confide. I’ve never wanted to close the distance between myself and a girl more than now, here, with her.
“Fourteen, I think. Close to my birthday, though.”
She holds my hands in hers. Her fingers lace warmly around mine. Exactly as any girl could with any other. “A fourteen-year-old isn’t to blame for the misfortune of adults. Especially adults who, it seems, hide it well. All you wanted was to please everyone around you.”
Bridget’s words crash into me until I’m caught in a riptide of understanding.
I was a child. I knew this, and yet I hold the guilt close to my chest all the same.
My parents trusted Thomas implicitly as a gentleman of good breeding.
As the wedding came closer, I kept winding up with him alone.
Both of us waited for Elle between appointments and bridal showers.
I thought it good—a chance to get to know my future brother-in-law.
I froze the night he betrayed her. We were under the eaves of the theater.
It was pouring rain. There wasn’t enough room in the first carriage.
Thomas had insisted Elle go ahead with our parents while we waited for the next.
She began to say something to me, alarm in her eyes as she was shuttled inside instead.
The carriage was barely out of sight when Thomas grabbed my arms and pushed me against the wall.
Freezing rain ran down the back of my dress.
I started to shiver, muscles locked in place.
His mouth was rough against mine, nothing like the gentle way I’d always seen him kiss the top of Elle’s head.
My mind lost its connection to my body. I’d never been taught to run or shout—nothing so vulgar.
I wish I’d bitten him. The decorum bred into me suppressed that violence, no matter the consequences it brought not to defend myself.
I lost control of my shaking jaw, soaked and shocked.
I hadn’t brought a proper coat. Only an umbrella, which Thomas had held for me, then discarded in his rush to grab me.
Thomas’s weight against me secured my stillness, my silence.
More a doll than a girl when he ripped my dress as though stealing a gift.
When he stopped, I thought he’d come to his senses.
Discarded a singular urge from which we could recover, even rewrite.
A secret left behind in the midnight rain.
But he only stopped when the next carriage arrived and the passengers got an eyeful of my compromised position.
Two older women from our congregation. I don’t remember what they said or how Thomas explained my state.
Perhaps he did not, merely let my swollen lips and dazed expression act as evidence.
The glint in those women’s eyes promised my parents would hear what they’d seen.
I was disgraced. Had he meant for us to be discovered?
My eyes sting, and bile rises at the memory. When his betrayal became my burden.
My parents changed their plans as easily as changing a dinner menu at his request. I became the bride in Elle’s stead. It was easier to believe that the kiss had been an error in judgment, the witnesses spurring him to act rightly.
Wedding a man made me want to claw out of my skin. Yet my mother was in my ear, reminding me of my duty. Didn’t I owe it to Elle for the humiliation I’d caused her?
Thomas showed no sign of regret. He plucked the last flowers of summer from our garden for me, just as I’d seen him do for her. Placed them in my hair. I still wore it down at home as I did as a child, a little wild and not set neatly like Elle’s.
My guilt turned to justification. Elle’s ambitions had never been to marry, only to appease our parents. I was saving her from a life in which she would’ve had to perform.
Preparations for the wedding took over my life. From early breakfasts with Thomas to late-night dress refittings under my mother’s eye. I was passed around like a plate of church sandwiches, never asked what I wanted.
Elle was absent from these activities. I’d only catch a glimpse of her stuck beside my father at the many social engagements I’d become the main event in.
No one mentioned her. It was cruel that she had to bear the shame of Thomas’s change of heart, not him.
She later told me that she’d tried to warn our parents.
She spoke with other women in the parish.
All it did was label her a jealous liar seeking attention now that her time had come and gone on the marriage market.
One night she rambled, drunk on vermouth, after I’d gone to bed.
She caused such a scene decrying Thomas as a monster that my mother locked her away in her bedroom until the wedding.
I needed her guidance as I had on matters much less consequential to both our futures.
Ask her true feelings about Thomas, which I’d always assumed were less than love but more than ambivalence.
The lengths to which everyone cut me off from her had me suspicious.
Was the prickling at my neck when he leaned his head down and breathed against my ear due to his being a man or something worse?
Could the growing hole in my stomach at the idea of sharing a bed with the man who’d preyed on me be a normal part of engagement, or was it a sign of darkness on my horizon?
She was the only one who knew the complete me.
Who’d listened as I swooned over ladies I’d never dance with and got tongue-tied when another girl touched my hand as we examined seaweed at the beach.
The only person who could understand how this marriage would be the end of the slim chance I had for real love.
Eventually I tried her bedroom. No answer to my soft knocks.
Someone was always too close to risk shouting.
When the lock wouldn’t budge, I slipped I’m sorry scrawled on the back of a wedding invitation under her door.
I was too cowardly to say more. What if she hated me?
Had my understanding of her lukewarm feelings been wrong?
Then why had I seen her flinch at his touch?
I took over an hour to pluck up enough courage to shove it under her door.
There was no response slipped under my door, or even outside of hers.
I woke before the sun to check, then once again was plunged into the endless details of plate settings and flower arrangements.
I couldn’t come up with the words I needed the next evening.
I sat on my bed, stared at an envelope and fountain pen, and waited for the inspiration to bridge the silence that neither of us ever agreed to. It never came.
My sister came for me before I could send her my next message on the eve of the wedding. It was I love you no matter what. It remained on my desk, a message that anyone we left behind could’ve interpreted as for them.
She’d crept into my room near midnight and whispered that we were escaping.
I’d spent hours deliberating on words on a page, yet with her I didn’t hesitate.
Neither of us should’ve been made to sacrifice ourselves to the altar, no matter how much we wanted to save the other.
She was a miracle, rushing around my room with two packed bags.
Her eyes were alight with fury and a plan. She saved me.