Chapter 22 — Eliza
Heartsease (Reprise)
ELIZA
I tell myself, lying on top of the counterpane with my trunk half-packed at the foot of the bed, that I am simply resting my eyes until the house wakes properly and Mrs. Prentice can be asked about the carriage, but the truth is plainer and less comfortable than that.
I am watching the greenhouse light through the gap in the curtain, and I cannot make myself stop, and some part of me that I have not yet forgiven for its own foolishness is waiting to see when it finally goes out.
It is still burning when the gray comes up properly over the garden, and I am still watching it, and I am considering, for the first time since the confrontation, that perhaps composure has its limits after all, when I hear footsteps on the stairs — familiar ones, that I would know in a house full of strangers — and then a knock at my door.
I do not answer right away. I have had, over the past several hours, a great deal of practice deciding how much of myself a given moment is going to cost, and I want, before I open my mouth, to know the answer for this one.
“Come in,” I say, finally, because I find I want to see her more than I want to protect myself from the wanting.
Beatrice opens the door and does not come further than the threshold.
She is still dressed in what she was wearing last night — she has not slept either, I understand, looking at her, the particular exhaustion around her eyes unmistakable even in the low morning light — and she stands there for a long moment without speaking, and I understand, watching her, that whatever she has come to say, she has not rehearsed it.
Her face is doing nothing to manage what is in it.
I have never once seen her arrive anywhere unmanaged, and the sight of it now, unguarded and plainly frightened, does something to the careful wall I built for myself sometime around three in the morning.
“What I said was not about you,” she says.
No greeting. No careful opening line. Just those words, plain and simple, and clearly unrehearsed.
“I have spent all night trying to find a gentler way to tell you that, and I have decided gentleness is not what either of us needs from me this morning, so I am going to say it plainly instead. It was never about you. It was about me, and about ten years of believing that if I controlled everything within my reach, nothing could ever again be taken from me the way things were taken from me before. Last night something arrived that I could not control, and I did what frightened people do — I aimed it at the nearest person, because striking at you cost me less than admitting what actually frightened me. Portia’s warning was not the cause of what I said.
It was only the excuse I reached for, because it was easier to hide behind her judgment than to name my own fear honestly. ”
I do not say anything. I am not certain in this moment that I trust my own voice to do what I want it to.
“I am not asking you to stay,” Beatrice says, and something in her own voice catches, briefly, before she steadies it.
“I have no right to ask you that, not after last night, and I am not going to spend whatever courage brought me up these stairs on a request I have not earned. I am asking only that you know, before you decide anything, that I see you. That you are not careless — you are the most precise observer I have ever watched work, and I have spent ten years around people who thought precision was a thing to be suspicious of in a woman, and I let that suspicion speak for me last night instead of the truth, which is that your attention is the finest instrument in this house, finer than my own, and I have been treating it as a danger instead of what it actually is.” She glances, briefly, toward the window, toward the greenhouse below it.
“The illustration on my potting table is not good because you are talented, though you are. It is good because you looked at that flower until you understood it completely, the same way you looked at me, from the very first week, until you understood things about myself I had not yet said aloud. I do not know when I decided that was a problem to be managed rather than the rarest thing I have ever been given. But I decided it, and I am sorry, and I do not expect my apology to undo anything.”
I feel something in my chest come loose, slowly, the way ice comes loose from a roof in the first real thaw — not all at once, but in a long low groan that makes clear the whole structure has already given way even before the first piece falls.
“There is one more thing,” Beatrice says, and her voice steadies further, moving into something more familiar — the particular careful precision I have come to know as the sound of her actually solving a problem rather than performing the solving of one.
She tells me, then, plainly and without asking anything of me yet, what she pieced together in the greenhouse before dawn: Pemberton’s weekly meetings with his clerk at the coaching inn, his private condition and his inferior apothecary, the particular shape of leverage that requires nothing more than a respected woman’s ordinary kindness and one carefully chosen piece of information about the terms of his retainer with my husband’s estate — information that exists nowhere but in what I carried out of that townhouse in my own reticule, three months and a lifetime ago.
“The terms,” she says. “Read them again with the account books beside you. Your husband did not retain Pemberton to look into the society. He retained him to make certain the society never looked into what had already been done with your portion — and he was not the only one of them who did it. Three of the families paying for that petition have their own names in your husband’s ledgers, on both sides of precisely the transactions Pemberton claims to be investigating.
He has been hired by the men he would have to accuse. ”
It takes me a moment. “He cannot know that.”
“He may not. Men of his sort are paid rather well not to look too closely at who is paying them.” She does not smile. “But he will know it the instant you set it in front of him. And he cannot lay a petition before three magistrates without one of them eventually reading the same page you did.”
“You do not have to be part of this,” she says, before I can speak.
“I want to be entirely clear about that, because I have spent last night discovering exactly how much damage I do when I forget that your choices are yours to make and not mine to arrange around my own convenience. You could leave for London this morning, as you said you would, and I would use whatever else can be found, and you would owe this house nothing further. The choice belongs to you. All of it does.”
I am quiet for a long moment, not because I do not know my own answer, but because I want to give what I have to say the weight it deserves rather than offer it too quickly and have it mistaken for reflex.
“What would I need to do?” I say.
Something moves across Beatrice’s face that I have never seen there before — not relief, exactly, though relief is somewhere in it, but something closer to the particular unguarded look a person gives you when they understand, all at once, that they have been given something they did not think they still deserved to ask for.
She crosses the room. She does not ask permission this time.
“Eliza,” she says, my name alone, and I understand it as the whole of what she means to say — not a beginning, not a question, simply my name, offered the way a person offers the one thing they have left that is entirely their own.
“I am still angry with you,” I say, and it is true, and I say it with my hand already rising to the collar of her shirt.
“I know.” She does not step back. “You are permitted to be both at once. I intend to spend considerably more than one morning proving I understand the difference.”
I pull her down and crash my lips to hers before she finishes the sentence.
It is not gentle, not at first — three months of carefully guarded want and one entire night of thinking I had lost the right to it collapse into something with more urgency than either of us has previously allowed ourselves, her mouth hard against mine and my hands already working the buttons of her shirt with a haste that costs two of them their thread.
She makes a sound against my mouth that I have never heard her make before, low and involuntary, and I find I want to hear it again, want to hear every sound she has spent ten years learning to keep silent, my lips at her jaw, her throat, the particular place below her ear that makes her hand fist in the sheet beside my head.
“I want to hear you. All of you.”
“Tell me what you want,” she says, her voice rough in a way I have never heard it, and I understand she means it as an offering rather than a question — that after last night, she needs to hear me say it as much as I need to say it.
“I want you to stop being careful with me,” I tell her. “Just for this morning. I have had a great many people be careful with me. I want you to want this the way you actually want it.”
Something in her breaks open at that — I feel it more than see it, the particular give of her whole body against mine — and what follows is nothing like the careful, quiet reverence of that first night in her bedroom, all those weeks ago, both of us still learning the shape of what we were permitted to want.
It is loud. It is unhurried in the way that only comes from two people who have finally stopped rationing themselves.