Chapter 14 — Eliza
Forget-Me-Not
ELIZA
I wake before the house does, in a bed that is not mine, in a room I have never once seen by daylight.
Beatrice sleeps the way she does everything else — without waste, without sprawl, one arm still loosely across me even in sleep, as though some part of her intends to notice immediately if I try to leave.
I lie very still for a long while, watching the gray light come up slowly behind the curtains, and I let myself do the thing I have been telling myself for weeks I am not yet permitted to do.
I let myself believe this might be real.
I am careful with the thought, the way I am careful with everything now — turning it over, checking it for the flaw I have learned to expect in anything that feels this good this early.
I have been careless with hope exactly once in my life and I spent seven years learning precisely what carelessness costs.
I am not going to spend this hope carelessly.
But I turn the thought over three times, four, and I cannot find the flaw in it, only the plain fact of Beatrice’s arm across me, and the plainer fact of what she told me last night, unprompted, unrepeatable, the kind of true thing a woman does not hand to someone she intends to let go of easily.
She told me something true. She moved first. Those are not nothing. I have spent my whole life being told what things meant by people who had already decided the answer before they spoke, and I find I trust my own reading of this particular evidence more than I have trusted anything in years.
I think, too, of what she told me last night in the dark, the plain unadorned fact of it — that she had never done this with a woman before me, that she knew women who had, that she was no stranger to the shape of it even if she was a stranger to the doing.
I did not ask her to say more, and she did not offer more, and I understood, even in the moment, that this was its own kind of gift: she had told me something that cost her something to say, and had trusted me not to require the rest of the accounting.
I find I am glad, this morning, that I did not press.
Some doors are meant to be left exactly as far open as a person chooses to leave them.
I slip out from under her arm as carefully as I can manage, though she stirs, murmurs something unintelligible, and settles again without waking.
I dress quickly in the cool of the room, my own clothes from the night before, and let myself out before the house begins to stir — not from shame, but from the plain practical understanding that a household’s good opinion is a fragile thing, and I am not yet ready to spend Beatrice’s on my behalf, not until we have decided together what we mean to do with it.
The blue room is cold and unfamiliar in a way it has not felt in weeks, and I stand in the doorway for a moment before I go in, feeling, absurdly, like a guest again.
I do not stay standing there long. I go to the illustration table instead, where the valerian is still pinned where I left it three days ago, finished now, and I take a fresh sheet and reach for my pencil, because I find I have too much feeling in me this morning to simply sit with it unoccupied.
I do not draw the valerian again. I draw the small blue flowers that grow along the greenhouse’s north path, the ones I asked Beatrice about weeks ago and she told me, without looking up from her work, forget-me-not — Myosotis, though she did not tell me then what it meant in the particular language the society speaks in tussie-mussies and pressed petals, and I did not think, at the time, to ask.
I do not need to ask now. I understand it well enough on my own.
I work until the household wakes around me, the particular ordinary sounds of Wyndermere coming to life — the housemaids on the stairs, a door somewhere below, Mrs. Prentice’s voice giving some early instruction to the kitchen.
I have learned this house’s morning the way I have learned everything else about it, thoroughly, without meaning to, and this morning it sounds exactly the same as every other morning, which strikes me as its own small miracle.
The world did not require any announcement of what changed in it last night.
It simply continued, ordinary and unhurried, as though it already knew.
I go down when I hear Beatrice’s step in the hall below — I know it now, the particular unhurried economy of it, the way I know a great many small things about this house I never troubled to learn about any other place I have lived.
She is in the breakfast room already, pouring tea, and for one unsteady moment neither of us says anything at all, and I do not know which of us is meant to speak first, or what either of us is meant to say, in daylight, with the household moving around us.
“You take it without sugar,” Beatrice says, which is not what either of us is actually discussing, and pours my tea exactly as I like it, which she has apparently known for weeks without my ever having told her so.
“Thank you,” I say, and sit, and something in my chest that has been tight since I woke loosens by some careful, incremental degree.
“Vivienne’s clerk in Maidstone should have the forged correspondence ready within the week,” she says, in precisely the voice she uses for household accounts, and I understand, gratefully, that she is offering me the ordinary — the letter, the plan, the shape of the morning as it would have been shaped yesterday — because the ordinary is a kind of gift this morning, a way of saying we are still exactly who we were, only more so without having to say it in words neither of us is quite ready for yet.
“Good,” I say, and we talk about Pemberton, and Fenwick, and the timeline of the thing that has occupied every corner of my attention since a trunk arrived at my old life’s door, and it is, in every particular, an ordinary morning at Wyndermere.
Mrs. Prentice comes and goes with the toast rack and does not so much as glance between us twice, which I take, at first, for simple discretion, until I catch the particular set of her mouth on her second pass through the room — not disapproval, nothing so unkind as disapproval, but the small satisfied look of a woman who has quietly known something for weeks and is pleased to see it finally confirmed.
I feel my face heat, and Beatrice, watching me feel it, does not look away, which I find I do not mind nearly as much as I might have expected to.
Except that the room is different. Except that I catch her watching me over the rim of her teacup in a way she does not trouble to disguise, and she catches me doing precisely the same, and neither of us looks away first, and both of us are smiling by the time Mrs. Prentice comes in with the post.
The threat has not vanished. I understand this clearly enough not to be careless about it — Pemberton is still out there, still assembling whatever case he means to make, and my own portion is still unsettled, my own future still, in the plainest sense, undecided.
But for the first time since I climbed into Vivienne’s borrowed carriage with a single trunk and no plan beyond survival, I find I am thinking less about what I am fleeing and more about what I am moving toward.
After breakfast, Beatrice goes back to the greenhouse, as she does every morning, and I stand at the kitchen window for a while and watch her go — the particular unhurried certainty of her walk across the garden, the way the household simply continues around her absence as though her presence in the greenhouse were as fixed a fact as the sun coming up.
I think about what it will be to have the widow’s portion secured.
I think about what it will be to have Pemberton’s threat resolved.
I think about what this house looks like on the other side of all of it, once the letter is answered and the danger has passed and there is nothing left standing between the life I am currently living and the life I might simply be permitted to keep.
I do not have an answer yet for what comes after. I only have the plain, undeniable shape of what I want, watching her cross the garden toward the glass house that has become, somehow, the center of everything I have.
I want to stay.
I want to stay here with Beatrice.