Chapter 45
Etta didn’t sleep that night. She lay transfixed by the note Bessie had brought her in Clarissa’s fine, swirly handwriting:
Etta,
I will not apologise for what you saw last night. I must be married, and quickly, before my youth fades. The time we have spent together with Lord Stanhope and the courtesy he has shown to even one such as you tells me he will be a kind and decent husband.
I know you may find yourself unable to move past this, and that we can no longer be friends after my engagement to Lord Stanhope, but I hope you will one day find it in you to wish me happy.
Clarissa
So that was it, then. The only man who knew and could understand her full story was gone forever.
The man she loved. There was no doubting it now. Her whole heart and body screamed out for him.
But Max was as trapped as she was, if not more.
He had been caught with Clarissa and she’d had them drummed into her enough by now to know that Regency rules dictated he would have to marry her even though the double-crossing bitch had duped them both.
Lady Best would no doubt ensure everyone knew about the pathetic smooch in the hallway.
Etta rolled back over in bed and stared at the wall, crumpling Clarissa’s rage-inducing note in her hand.
She’d never really had a long-term relationship, but she’d had lots of short ones and had never had any problems ending them.
Breaking up with someone because they had been caught in a hallway kissing someone else and now must marry them wasn’t really a 2023 problem.
It had been a while since she’d even thought of 2023.
It was almost hard to believe she’d ever been a single woman, completely independent.
Hard to remember the wild period of travel she’d been on after Dad had died, when she’d skipped a month of lectures and just caught the first flight to Paris with a backpack and caught train after train around Europe, grieving not only the dad she’d had but the dad she’d wished she’d had. But her grief had followed her.
Etta sat up in bed, the solution obvious. She didn’t have to feel how she felt; she didn’t have to endure this. The solution was right in front of her: the bracelet. Just break the damn bracelet!
She scrambled over to her knicker drawer, but it was nowhere to be found. Ten minutes later she’d emptied out every trinket box and drawer in her room.
She was panicking, she knew. And the panic just swept over her again and again as she realised what a trap she’d been caught in all these months.
She might have been having fun at parties, wearing pretty dresses, playing the piano as much as she liked and sparring with Maria Marley, but if she thought about it, she didn’t actually have any autonomy in this age, did she?
She couldn’t marry the man she loved. She couldn’t vote, she couldn’t have a bank account, she couldn’t even go on a bloody walk without a chaperone! She was chattel.
But she was still Etta Moore underneath it all, wasn’t she?
She didn’t need to break some stupid bloody magical bracelet to escape.
She had feet and arms and a brain of her own.
And she could still speak French, right?
She surveyed her room. There were no bars on her four-poster bed.
No chains on her legs. What, precisely, was stopping her?
She had more to pack this time – her dress wouldn’t fit in a backpack, that was certain – but maybe this time her grief wouldn’t fit in her baggage. Maybe that, at least, she could leave behind.
As she sat in the crowded carriage later, stuffed between a sleeping elderly woman and a younger man awkwardly desperate not to touch her, Etta felt a large pang of guilt.
It was far, far worse than the time she’d stolen a Mars bar after school as a child.
Then, she’d felt so much guilt she couldn’t eat it and had buried it in a plant pot instead. Her dad had found it six months later.
This was definitely her darkest day. Etta had stolen from pretty much everyone.
She’d known she’d need money, but not how much – she so rarely spent any that she still wasn’t sure how it worked. So for that, she’d ransacked Charlie’s study and her mother’s dressing table.
She needed clothes – normal clothes, not the soft, thin clothes of the rich.
So, she took a trip to the laundry and pilfered some of the servants’ clothes.
Etta had felt like the worst kind of criminal as she crept around the house before dawn.
It was by far the most dreadful thing she had ever, ever done in her life.
She felt almost as detached from her actions as she had during her first few days in 1817, when she’d still thought she was living in a dream.
She cried over her letter to her mother, as the reality of what she was doing started to creep over her.
She listed the people she’d stolen from, the money she’d taken, so that nobody else would cop the blame.
Her tears had blotched the paper, making it hard for her pencil to write.
Etta wrote around the teardrops. She wasn’t from 1818, she reminded herself.
She was from 2023, and she had lived alone for years.
This was barely real. The lady she was writing to was not her mother; the rich man whose desk drawers she’d extracted a bundle of weird, large bank notes from was not her brother.
Max was not her fiancé. This whole world, her happy ending – it was all a fantasy. A dream that had gone bad. It was time to wake up. If she couldn’t return to 2023, then she could at least leave London – and she planned to do just that at first light.
Etta rubbed her eyes wearily, remembering the worst part, which had been writing to Max:
Lord Stanhope,
Let me be the first to congratulate you on your engagement.
Goodbye,
Etta
She hadn’t been able to help herself, but she knew her curt little note – written several times until she’d finally produced one without wet patches – would worry him. Well, good. Perhaps he shouldn’t go around letting dull-as-ditchwater, double-crossing bitches kiss him in corridors.
She had been travelling for most of the day; she hoped they would be at Dover soon. She wondered whether anyone would guess where she was going. Probably not, since Hetty couldn’t speak French. Etta, however, could. She was rusty, but she’d got an A at A-level. She’d be fine. Surely, she’d be fine.
Probably.