Chapter 46
Forty-Six
Aurora could barely see Alec riding away with Marjorie, her eyes were so entirely blinded by tears.
The strength of the sobbing, which took her by surprise, caused her to drop to her knees and bury her head in her arms. Any final doubts of how much she loved him dissolved.
No, not dissolved, shattered. Her heart felt as if she were being stabbed with the shards.
Still, he did not turn around. He did not come back.
She heard the sounds of hooves receding, the soft thunk of the clods of earth displaced by the horse’s travel diminishing as she knelt there.
She lost sense of time. Her mind felt as if it had fallen into a sea of gray, which smothered all thought.
Gradually, though, she became aware of the scent of the grass mere inches away from her face.
Her legs felt stiff, and one of her feet had gone to sleep.
A butterfly landed on top of her right arm, and she raised her hand to shoo it away.
Her cap had fallen off, and her hair, plaited and woven around her head, lay bare to the sun.
A few curls near her ears had become sodden with her weeping, and she brushed them away. She sat up straight and looked around.
Aurora was completely alone. She could hear the small stream a few feet away burbling without care through the trees; she could also hear the muffled sounds of the manufactory in the far distance.
The midday sun beat down on her, though a soft breeze came through intermittently, drying the salty tear tracks on her face.
The world around her was utterly normal, completely untouched by the emotional storm which had just swept through.
It made her feel as if she were returning from some far-distant world, its echoes receding out of her reach as she knelt there.
A part of her wanted to run after Alec, begging him not to leave, telling him she would agree to everything he wanted.
She would out-duchess any duchess; she would live to socialize and gossip; she would learn the arts of vapid conversation and forget about Homer and Keats and—and here she shuddered—Byron.
Definitely no more Byron. Finally, yes, she would renounce the manufactory, once and for all.
As quickly as the impulse arose, Aurora rejected it.
Not that, never that. Instead, she felt a sadder feeling take its place, fully aware for the first time of the emotional cost of going forward with what she wanted.
Is this the person I have become? She wondered.
Or the person I have always been, and now I finally know it?
Regardless, she knew who she was now and how she wanted to live her life, mores and strictures be damned.
Yet she had hoped; she had hoped so very much.
The storm of tears had cleared away any remaining fuzziness in Aurora’s mind.
There was a sudden and abrupt clarity, as if without noticing, she had climbed a high peak and the clouds were gone, revealing a landscape sharply etched before her, showing Aurora to herself.
That clarity carried its own pain, because she could not call herself a victim here.
Or at least, not wholly a victim in whatever this marriage “game” was.
Because she had muddled it all up with her impatience to introduce Marjorie to the place she had loved since she was very young.
It had begun so simply: Why not show Marjorie the manufactory?
And then, if she visited, it would be best to dress her in the way Aurora herself dressed on most of her visits, to keep both hair and skirts out of danger from being caught in the machinery.
As Aurora had told Alec! But after the fact.
She knew it was not the thing to do, that this was not regular behavior by women of the proper sort (how her mother had reminded her of this, over and over again).
In fact, she knew it was something she needed to explain to Alec.
But this opportunity, this moment had arisen, and so she had grabbed at it.
She could tell Alec later. He would understand after she explained.
She never imagined he would actually see them.
But then he turned up at the factory. The look on his face—and he had chased them!
He felt he had to chase them. Because she had run away.
She had panicked! As if she were in the wrong.
She was not in the wrong, she knew she was not. But she was, wasn’t she? She had behaved like a child, not thinking, just blithely doing. How stupid could she have been?
Once again, Aurora had tried to run before she had learned to walk.
She wanted to share this world, her world, with this little girl she had come to care deeply for.
But Alec was right. She was not Marjorie’s mother.
And he was her father. She could now see that her world, the world of Aurora Hardcastle, and his—they could not meet. There was no way they could meet.
She felt the tears start up again. What had she been thinking?
Her father had warned her. Perhaps if Alec had loved her?
Or was that question more romantic fairytales?
Nevertheless, it was clear he did not, yes?
She almost groaned in frustration. All her poetry and her reading of Homer was utterly useless at this moment.
Romantic, heroic absolutes did not work with the reality of life itself.
What a na?f she was. Missie had been correct in her disdain—she, Aurora, knew nothing.
Nothing. And the learning process was unbearably painful.
She pushed herself up to a standing position and lurchingly walked back into the trees, toward the stream.
Kneeling down at its edge, she splashed the cool water against her burning cheeks.
But even that did not provide her with enough of a respite.
Impulsively, she reverted to an old (and often scolded) habit: she laid herself, full-length, down on the ground, keeping a good grip on the edge of the bank, and plunged her whole face, including the top of her head, into the water.
She stayed submerged until her lungs began to burn, and then, gasping, she yanked her head out.
The bracing hit of the cold water brought with it additional clarity.
This countryside was her home and had a comforting familiarity to it.
But it was not the countryside which made its claim on her.
Rather, it was the people: her parents, the house’s staff, Calum, the workers at the manufactory.
They demanded something from her. If she had been a man, accepting this claim would have been taken as a given.
As a woman? She was meant to toss it away and abjectly submit to her role.
Well, she wouldn’t. She realized such an action would likely place her on the outside of respectable society, or, at least, of Society.
She felt a shiver of fear at that in the pit of her stomach, but she shook it off.
No time for that now. But she could not back away from what looked to be the loss of Alec.
This loss now showed her in no uncertain terms that it would hurt and hurt deeply.
And the loss of Marjorie. That, too, was a wrench.
Yet when push came to shove, the shove showed her clearly the road she had chosen and was determined to follow.
Aurora pulled herself back up into a sitting position on the stream’s bank, dashing away the rivulets of stream water running down her face from her hair.
If it was only stream water. She admitted she had begun crying again, though they were softer tears now.
She could hear bird calls amongst the trees, and the familiar sound soothed her.
Today is just today. A line from Homer came to mind, echoing what she was feeling:
“without was he,
Set sad ashore, where ’twas his use to view
Th’ unquiet sea, sigh’d, wept, and empty drew
His heart of comfort.”
She certainly felt empty. The very idea of bravery did not enter into the equation.
She would much rather climb the stairs to her room, crawl into her bed, and never come out again.
Oh, how tempting that was. But the moment of clarity brought with it a strong push to keep moving.
And keep moving forward. She had to find a way to keep moving forward.
This is who you are. This is where you are.
That was what the voice in her head told Aurora.
Because her father was dying, her mother was heartbroken, and she had to sort out all the details with her father to ensure his dreams and all he had worked for did not die with him.
She realized—again, the unexpected and even shocking clarity from that mountaintop in her mind—that her wealth would shield her somewhat from charges of eccentricity, but anything further?
That would have to wait for tomorrow. She had reached her limit.
Sufficient unto the day. Yes, sufficient unto the day.
I can do this—one step. Just one step.
Once more, Aurora got to her feet and pointed herself toward home.
She entered through an exterior cellar door at the back of the house and took a set of rear stairs to her room to avoid as many people as possible.
Safely back inside, she looked with longing at her bed but instead filled the basin with water and proceeded to splash her face again, removed her factory-visit clothes, and got herself ready for the new life she was about to build for herself. Starting now.
Just one step. I need to keep moving.