Chapter Twenty Five #3
“Quite stupid,” Kate admitted, sinking deeper in the bath.
Another drink of wine, and she held out one hand before her.
Too often just lately her fingers had been stained with graphite.
Too often they had cramped from all the writing she had been doing within the notebook Elliot had given her. And for what? Nothing!
Rebecca offered, “I don’t think you to be stupid at all.”
Another drink, and another. Kate hunched her shoulders, bowing her head over her glass.
“All this time, I had no idea. And he—he had me interviewing ladies as prospective brides,” she said.
“He gave me a damned notebook to put them in to determine which he ought to marry, and it made me so—so—” A vicious little sound wrenched itself from her lungs. “I don’t know,” she concluded weakly.
“Don’t you?” Rebecca ventured softly. “Don’t you know?”
Jealous. Yes, all right, she had been jealous. Eaten up with it, though it had taken her some good time to recognize it for what it had been. To recognize what it had meant. To realize that the cherished friendship that she had always held so close to her heart had taken on romantic tones.
Her glass was nearly empty, now. Kate finished it off, set it aside, and reached for a pitcher of clean water to rinse the soap from her hair.
And she said, quietly, “I haven’t let myself think of things like love, like marriage, since before my father died.
There was always something left to do, some bill in want of paying—the butcher, or the miller.
There was always bread in want of baking, yarn in want of spinning, herbs in want of drying.
Before I knew it, I had watched all my friends in the village marry and have families of their own.
Before I knew it, I was an old maid already. ”
“An old maid!” Rebecca choked on an incredulous laugh. “Kate. You’re seven and twenty. I swear to you, you have got plenty of good years left.”
But she hadn’t felt like it. She’d lived out those dreams she’d surrendered in the romantic novels she’d borrowed from Longthorpe Manor’s library and convinced herself that she had needed nothing else.
She had always known that Elliot would go on to marry a lady of his status, someone who was more than the daughter of a country vicar.
She’d always known that Elliot—who had always been just hers—would find some other woman to belong to.
She just hadn’t realized how painful she would find it.
How much of her heart had belonged to him long before she had even known it.
How wretched it would feel to give him into the keeping of another, how much worse to select the woman who would become his wife for him.
How far into the depths of despair she would sink, knowing she had learned it all too late.
That somehow she would have to dredge up a smile for him on his wedding day, because still she wanted his happiness above all else.
Plenty of good years left. But how many had she wasted already? How many had Elliot wasted upon her, wasted his love upon a woman who had been oblivious to it? Had it hurt him, her ignorance of his feelings?
Her heart ached for him—and burned, at the same time, for his manipulation of her. His deception. She hadn’t ever played with his feelings with intention, but it certainly felt as though he’d played with hers.
But this was Elliot, she thought, as she dragged herself out of the tub and dried herself off with a towel. Her dearest friend in all the world. He would never have hurt her by design. He had never been cruel, or mean-spirited, or in the least unkind.
Rebecca brandished a brush as Kate, clothed once more in her dressing gown, rounded the screen. “Sit,” she instructed. “We have got to do something about your tangles.” And then, as Kate sat upon the edge of the bed, she added, “But don’t you feel at least a little better?”
She did. Cleaner, certainly. A little more put together.
A little more capable of sorting herself out once again.
Like that chaos which had seethed within her head had become almost…
manageable. Kate let her hands fall into her lap, and her bare toes curled into the carpet beneath her feet.
“Could you please fetch me my notebook? It’s in my reticule, just there. ”
“Certainly,” Rebecca said, and she popped up to cross the room and grab the little bag that Kate had left lying upon the top of the dresser. She pulled the notebook out and tossed it into Kate’s lap. “What did you want it for?”
“Just to see something.” A sneaking suspicion that had come upon her only now, only in retrospect. All of the remembered frustrations of his wife-hunt, all of his patently ridiculous specifications, which he had continued refining over the weeks they’d been in London to her increasing chagrin.
Now, with fresh eyes upon those first pages, she could see it at last. This list of all the qualities he wanted in a wife, and which she had dutifully inscribed here—they all described her. Every last one of them.
Amelia Applegate wasn’t Elliot’s ideal wife. She was. She always had been. The truth of it had always been there—just as Elliot had been—waiting silently, unobtrusively, for her to finally notice.