Chapter Twenty-One #3
Ismay drew a deep breath and clasped her hands.
‘It was all make-believe. We were appalled by the pact and the arranged marriage, so we tried to get you to unarrange it. At first we thought if we disliked one another enough you’d see the unsuitability, but as we never had any time together, there was no way to demonstrate it.
So we changed tactics and decided to like each other wildly, to be so compatible as to be dangerous to ourselves.
The gambling, the wagering, the risks, it was all designed to pressure you into calling off the engagement.
And it worked, but we discovered something else in the process.
We did like each other.’ More than liked.
In the process they’d discovered someone just like themselves—someone who was lost, who didn’t fit the moulds the world offered.
They were only whole when they were together.
She waited expectantly for her father’s reaction, for his absolution of Alistair.
Her father sighed and pushed a hand through thinning hair.
He looked tired. He shouldn’t be travelling so much.
‘You are saying all of this, confessing all of this, only now after meeting him in town, a meeting that you think is accidental. Oh my dear girl, don’t you see?
He has sent you to beg. You are his key to getting away with everything. ’
Ismay scoffed. ‘That makes no sense. If all he was after was the business, the house, the money, he’d never have agreed to the ruse. He wanted to be free as much as I did.’ They had been in this together from the start. ‘He told me he loved me at Eddington’s.’
‘So that you would stop the ruse, child, before it was too late. So that he could have it all while still looking like he’d been on your side all along. What better way to build empathy than to side with you?’
‘I don’t believe that,’ she countered. But hadn’t she accused Alistair of that very thing in the Eddingtons’ library? Right before he’d smashed her up against a wall and shown her how wrong she was?
‘Then, why didn’t you stop the ruse?’ Therein lay the rub.
‘Because I was afraid. Because I doubted myself, and I hurt him in my hesitation. No one has ever loved me the way he loves me. He champions me. He believes in me. He does not seek to change me. I don’t have to be a certain way for him.’ How had she not seen all of that soon enough?
‘But that was part of the ruse,’ her father argued.
‘How do you know that’s true when so much else was false?
Be careful you are not picking and choosing arguments in a vacuum, my dear girl, simply because your heart is broken.
Do not twist this into something it is not just because you fell for your own invention.
’ Her father turned back to sorting his papers.
She’d been unsuccessful and dismissed. The ruse had gone far deeper than she’d realised, persuaded more powerfully than she realised.
Once again, she’d not known when to stop.
‘I know because he left his winnings to me so that I could start a scientific journal for women,’ she blurted, desperate to make him listen, to make him understand.
‘He wouldn’t have done something like that if he didn’t truly believe in me.
That part was real.’ She squared her shoulders.
‘I will write to his father and explain it all so that there need not be a rift between you two, at least.’
Her father looked up again, patient and pitying. ‘Ismay, I am sorry for all of it, for the pact, for how things turned out. But your mother and I agree it’s for the best we all move on. Now, if you don’t mind, I have correspondence to see to.’
She did her own correspondence that evening in Alistair’s room, sneaking in after the house was quiet.
She told herself it was because his chamber had a better view of Vesuvius.
She left the balcony doors open as she wrote to his father, looking up every so often to watch the mountain.
It was in fine form tonight. The ash cloud that had formed in the daylight was now supplanted by a red glow.
She’d wager there were Strombolian explosions up there.
Ismay finished the letter and wandered out onto the balcony.
She glanced along the side of the house towards her room.
The trek across the balconies looked more treacherous and certainly higher up than she’d thought.
She winced thinking of Alistair making the journey, then winced again thinking of how she’d pushed him out on her balcony, requiring him to make the trip back.
He could have fallen, broken a leg or his neck.
Her stomach lurched, queasy at the grotesque thought of Alistair maimed or dead.
She leaned on the balustrade, waiting for her stomach to settle, and stared at the mountain.
She had to get up there. If Monticelli wouldn’t take her, she’d have to find another way.
There’d been a Norwegian artist, Johan Christian Dahl, who’d been at the last accademia meeting, a guest of the prince of Norway, Christian Frederick.
He’d come explicitly to paint Vesuvius and was planning to go up if and when there was an eruption to sketch it.
That was what she’d do: she’d offer her expertise in exchange for joining their party.
Ismay had just sat down to write to Dahl when her stomach heaved again, this time to such an effect she was scrambling for the empty chamber pot. The fish served at supper tonight must not have been as fresh as Cook claimed. She’d have to talk to the fishmonger next time she was in the market.