Chapter 1 #2
“The same.” Euphemia’s voice softened. “He is comfortable. He does not leave the house now, and I think he has stopped expecting to. Dr. Harwell comes on Tuesdays. We read together in the evenings when he is well enough.” She smiled...
a real one, small and unguarded in a way the others had not been.
“He pretends not to enjoy the novels. He has opinions about every character and voices them at considerable length.”
“He sounds exactly like you.”
“He is considerably more stubborn than I am,” Euphemia said. She straightened her spine, forcing the vulnerability back down. “I don’t know, Emily… I thought I could find something real here. But the only thing real about the ton is how quickly they turn on you when the money runs out.”
She swallowed hard and downed the content of her glass before looking back up again. “I do not think I am fine.”
“I know,” Emily whispered.
“I think… I’m scared,” Euphemia said and shook her head. “I… all of this… Lord Finch jilting me at the altar, and the rumors that I am a desperate huntress trying to trap a man to save us from ruin.. It is going to affect my sisters. They have done nothing wrong.”
Euphemia tried to take in a deep breath but found the air was too heavy.
“My sisters only came to London because I asked them to. Seraphina gave up her research, Leonora left behind a perfectly comfortable life in the country, and they did it because I wanted company and I was too selfish to come alone.” She stopped.
“Now everything that follows me follows them too. That is what I cannot forgive myself for.”
“Neither of them even wants a husband,” Euphemia continued, her voice dropping to a low, jagged whisper. “They have made that perfectly clear, but I foolishly thought I could change their minds about love.”
“You can!” Emily chimed in. “Euphemia, you are speaking as though you’re running out of time.”
“I am,” she said. “What if Lady Byron comes to London and sees all of this? Hears all the rumors? She will force us back to the country. I would have failed.” She turned her glass slowly in her hand.
“Just last week, Seraphina went to Lady Holt’s literary gathering and three women she had been close with suddenly found reasons to be elsewhere in the room.
Then Leonora, who could charm the very birds from the trees if she wanted to, confided in me that Mrs. Cavendish’s daughter has stopped calling altogether. ”
She paused. “Their lives are changing because of me, and the worst of it is that they will never say a word. They are too loyal and far too proud to admit they are being iced out, preferring to pretend nothing is wrong rather than let me see the damage I’ve caused.”
The music played on. Someone laughed too loudly near the fireplace and the sound landed wrong, too bright against what Euphemia had just said.
“The rumors are the cruelest part,” she said.
“That I was desperate. That I knew about my father’s debts and concealed them to trap a wealthy man, because what other explanation could there be for a woman of my circumstances pursuing a husband?
What happened to my father was awful, but I never lied to anyone.
I never deceived anyone. If anything I am the deceived.
Everything is all a lie. Lord Finch was a lie.
London is a lie. Love is a lie. Redemption is a lie. It’s all a lie. Everything!”
“Effie!” Emily’s voice was quiet but firm, cutting through the frantic spiral of Euphemia’s words. She reached out, grabbing Euphemia by the shoulders and giving her a firm, grounding squeeze. “Calm yourself. Breathe.”
Her touch broke through the hot, embarrassing momentum of what had just come out of Euphemia’s mouth in the middle of a ball, in a room full of people, where she had spent the entire evening performing composure.
Euphemia blinked, her chest heaving as she sucked in a lungful of the cool air. She hadn’t realized she was shaking. She hadn’t realized her voice had risen to a pitch that could easily carry through the room and straight into the ears of the very vultures she was trying to avoid.
“Forgive me,” she said, very quietly.
“There is nothing to forgive.” Emily shook her head. “You’re frustrated and you have every right to be.”
“I am fine,” she said, which was so obviously untrue that Emily did not even dignify it with a response.
She was not fine. She had not been fine for some time, and the effort of pretending otherwise had accumulated in ways she had not fully accounted for until this moment.
She thought about where she had come from.
Not London... not the borrowed rooms near her uncle’s house, but before all of that.
She thought back to the quiet, sun-drenched halls of their country estate where she had grown up under Lady Byron’s firm but fair hand.
It was the only house she had ever truly thought of as home, with its crooked garden gate, its library that smelled of old paper and its particular quality of quiet that London did not have and never would.
She thought about growing up there with Seraphina and Leonora.
They weren’t sisters by blood, but by a shared circumstance that had forged a bond stronger than any family tree.
They had been happy in their own little district, a trio of companions who needed nothing from the world but each other’s company and a good library.
Lady Byron had taken them in when they were children and given them a life that was small by London’s standards but complete by every other measure, and it had been enough.
It had been more than enough.
It had been Euphemia’s idea to leave it all behind.