Chapter Three #2
It was quiet at first, almost frightening in its audacity, and then increasingly clear.
I do not have to accept this.
***
By the end of the week, the machinery of the wedding had already begun to turn, indifferent to her feelings on the matter.
A dressmaker arrived before ten o'clock that morning, bearing bolts of silk and a great many pins, and spoke to Aunt Margaret about alterations as though Helena herself were merely a form to be measured rather than a woman with any say in what she might wear.
"You must try to accept it, Helena," her aunt said softly when the dressmaker retreated for a moment. "I know it is not the match you would have chosen. I know Crawford is…"
She hesitated, choosing her words with evident care.
"He is not a man I would have wished for you. But your father is not wrong that the alternative is far worse. A woman without a husband, without a reputation, has very little place in this world, Helena, and I would not see you cast out of it for want of accepting what cannot now be avoided."
"Perhaps," Helena said quietly, holding still beneath the dressmaker's pins, "there is a third path neither of you has considered."
Her aunt looked at her sharply, but Helena said nothing further, and the fitting continued as though she had not spoken at all.
It was later, wandering the lower corridors on some pretext of escaping the dressmaker's attentions, that she found herself near the servants' quarters.
It was a part of the house she rarely had cause to visit, and it was there, passing an open door, that she overheard two maids in conversation that stopped her where she stood.
"—left everything behind when she went, near enough. Old dresses, aprons, a cloak that's seen better days. Mrs Whitmore says we're to sort through it for the poor box, but no one's had the time with all this business about the wedding."
"Whose things were they again?"
"That housemaid who left last month. Went to marry a farmer up in Hertfordshire, if you'll believe it. Packed one bag and left the rest, said she'd no need of servants’ clothes where she was going."
Helena stood very still in the corridor beyond, some idea forming at the edges of her mind, too large and too frightening to look at directly.
Not yet.
But she noted which storage room the maids meant. She would return once the household had quieted for the evening.
***
Later, when everyone had retired for the night, Helena snuck out of her room and downstairs.
The chest was exactly where the maids had described it, tucked into an unused corner of the servants' quarters.
Helena knelt before it in the dim light of a single candle and lifted the lid with trembling hands.
Inside she found plain woollen dresses, worn but serviceable, several aprons, a heavy cloak gone soft with age, sturdy boots that looked near enough to her size, and a battered satchel that had clearly travelled a great many miles in its lifetime.
She sat back on her heels and stared at the contents for a long moment, her heart hammering with a fear that was tangled inextricably with something else, something that felt like hope.
She could not marry Crawford. She had known that with total certainty the moment her father spoke his name in the library, and nothing in the days since had shifted that certainty by so much as a hair.
But Helena had spent the whole of that library conversation and every hour since believing herself without alternatives, a woman with no path forward except the one being forced upon her.
She saw now that this was not quite true. There was another path. It required only that she become, for a time, someone else.
Helena gathered the clothing into her arms and carried it back to her rooms before the household could stir. In the privacy of her own chamber she locked the door, and, with a single candle burning low, she set about the work of disappearing.
Her hair was the first difficulty.
It was long and honey-blonde and dressed each morning by a maid who had tended it since Helena was a girl. But no serving girl of her station would have hair so carefully kept and no working woman could afford to.
Helena took a shaky breath before she crossed the room, fetching her sewing scissors from her workbox.
She moved towards the mirror, the blades cold in her hand, and before she allowed herself to think too carefully about what she was about to do, she began cutting.
It was not elegant work. The scissors were meant for thread, not hair, and the first cut felt like a small violence. She continued anyway, working by feel more than sight, until what remained fell only to her shoulders.
It was certainly uneven in places, but passably plain, the kind of hair a servant might wear beneath a cap without drawing a second glance.
She gathered the fallen locks with careful hands and wrapped them in a scrap of cloth.
She then fed them to the fire in her hearth, watching the flames consume them with a strange, hollow detachment.
The rest of the preparations proceeded with the same grim efficiency.
She removed every piece of jewellery she owned. Her mother's pearls, the small gold cross she had worn since her confirmation, and the ring her grandmother had left her.
Helena set them carefully in her jewellery case where they would be found. She could not bring herself to sell them and would not carry them into a life where their presence might mark her high-born.
She took only a modest sum from her personal allowance, folding it carefully into the inside pocket of the satchel. It would be enough to see her safely away from London and no more, because travelling with a fortune would draw exactly the wrong kind of attention.
She then dressed in the plainest of the gowns she had taken, the wool coarse and unfamiliar against skin accustomed to silk.
A short while later, she stood before her mirror in the grey light of dawn, studying a woman she barely recognised, hair cropped short and plain, gown rough and undecorated.
Every mark of Lady Helena Winford was stripped away, and only a stranger remained in the glass. She was someone ordinary enough to pass unremarked through the world she'd never once been permitted to enter.
Before she left, she sat at her writing desk and composed a letter to her aunt.
Dearest Aunt Margaret,
I cannot marry Lord Crawford. I know you understand why, even if you cannot say so where Papa might hear it.
I am sorry to cause you grief, and sorrier still to leave without properly bidding you farewell, but I could not risk being stopped, and I could not bear to disappear without some explanation, however small.
Please do not search for me. I promise I will write when I am able, and I promise I am not so foolish as to travel without care for my own safety.
I love you, and Clara, and even Papa, whatever he may believe of me now. I only ask that you let me go.
Your Helena
She folded it and left it on her pillow, where it would be found.
Then, before the fear that had been building steadily through the night could overtake her resolve, she took up the satchel and made her way down the servants' stairs, moving through a house she had known her whole life with the careful, silent steps of someone who no longer quite belonged in it.
Helena stepped out into the cold London air with her hood drawn low over her cropped hair and her heart beating so hard she thought surely it must be audible to anyone who passed.
But the street beyond Winford House stood empty and silent, lit only by the last guttering lamps and the faintest grey along the eastern rooftops.
She did not look back at the house. She could not have borne it if she had.
Instead, she walked through streets she had only ever seen from the safety of a closed carriage, past shuttered shops and silent churches, her boots, a size too large, stuffed with an extra pair of stockings to keep them from slipping, sounding strange and unfamiliar against the cobblestones.
She kept her hood low and her eyes down, as she imagined a servant woman abroad before dawn would do, and told herself, with each step further from Mayfair, that she was not running away so much as running toward something, though she could not yet have said what that something was, only that it could not possibly be worse than the fortnight that waited for her if she turned back now.
By the time she reached the coaching inns near the edge of the city, the sky had lightened to the pale grey of early morning. The yards were already stirring with the particular bustle of travellers, ostlers and the great creaking business of coaches preparing to depart.
Helena stood for a moment at the edge of it all, a plain woman in a worn cloak indistinguishable from a hundred others who might pass through such a yard on any given morning.
And in that moment, she felt something settle in her chest that was neither quite relief nor quite terror, but some new and unfamiliar thing composed of both.