2
The following afternoon found Eliza standing upon Harefield’s front steps, ready to bid her guests farewell. Only Margaret, who had acted as Eliza’s companion since the earl’s death and would continue to do so for a fortnight longer, was to stay, and Eliza could hardly wait for Harefield to be their own again. Eliza heard her parents before she saw them, Mr. Balfour barking commands to the footmen, Mrs. Balfour reprimanding the maids, and as they appeared through the oak front doors, she took in a fortifying breath.
“You can do it,” Margaret whispered in her ear. It had been plain, in the hours since the will reading, that Mr. Balfour fully expected to hold the purse strings of Eliza’s new fortune. This would be Eliza’s final chance to disabuse her parents of this notion.
“We shall see you in a few weeks, of course,” Mrs. Balfour said.
“You mustn’t tarry, the roads will only worsen,” Mr. Balfour instructed.
“I wondered if—” Eliza began tentatively.
“By then, all your most pressing financial business will be managed,” Mrs. Balfour said. “Won’t they, husband?”
“Yes, I have already spoken to Mr. Walcot.”
This being the most heartfelt farewell Mr. Balfour could muster, he gave Eliza a sharp nod and disappeared down the steps, leaving Eliza with her mother—the more forbidding opponent.
“I thought perhaps . . .” Eliza said.
“We think it best if you make Hector’s boy your heir,” Mrs. Balfour said briskly.
Hector was Eliza’s youngest brother.
“I don’t know that—”
“Rupert, I think, would benefit most,” Mrs. Balfour’s voice overrode Eliza’s.
Of all her brother’s entitled weasels, Rupert was the worst.
“I think I would prefer—”
“Mr. Balfour can organize the papers as soon as you return home.” Mrs. Balfour patted Eliza’s cheek in a concluding sort of way.
It is not yours, Eliza might say to her mother, if she were braver. It is not your fortune to spend, or to assign or to organize out of my reach.
“Yes, Mama,” Eliza sighed, defeated.
“It is decided. Goodbye, then—we shall see you anon. And recollect that you are still the countess, darling: you oughtn’t to allow those Selwyns to run roughshod over you.”
The irony of Mrs. Balfour issuing such advice was not lost upon Eliza—nor Margaret, who only barely suppressed a choke of laughter—and with this final instruction delivered, Mrs. Balfour left.
“I know she is your mother and my aunt,” Margaret said, as they watched Mrs. Balfour climb into the carriage. “But if I saw her balanced precariously upon the edge of a cliff—perhaps about to fall into the ocean—I would hesitate to act. I wouldn’t push her, but I would most definitely hesitate.”
Unlike Eliza, Margaret’s general manner of conversation was to say exactly what she thought, at exactly the moment she thought it, a trait their family deemed as the reason she had never married. Eliza was just sparing a moment of thanks that Mrs. Balfour was at least no longer in earshot, when a quiet cough had them both turning. Somerset had appeared in the doorway and, by the humorous cast of his expression, had overheard Margaret’s less than respectful remark. Eliza flushed pink on Margaret’s behalf.
“Ah,” Margaret said, not sounding particularly worried.
“I shall pretend I did not hear that,” Somerset responded, amused. In their youth, he had stood upon friendly terms with Margaret and it appeared his indulgence of her incivilities remained.
“If you could,” Margaret said.
Somerset grinned, his smile breaking through his reserve just as the sun shone through clouds, and Eliza’s breath caught—but then he turned toward her, and the warmth vanished as swiftly as it had appeared.
“Your father has informed me that you intend to return to Balfour, my lady,” he said, and though he was making direct eye contact, Eliza felt as if he were gazing straight through her.
Look at me! Eliza wanted to shout at him. I am here, look at me!
“Yes,” she said instead, voice as quiet as a mouse. “I do.”
Ladies did not shout, no matter the provocation.
Somerset nodded, his expression giving away nothing. Was he relieved? He must be.
“If that is what you wish,” he said.
It was not. It was not what she wished at all. But what other choice was there?
“You may of course have any of the carriages for the journey,” he went on. “And if you wish to take any of the household servants . . .”
“That is kind,” Eliza said.
“It is nothing,” he said, and he sounded as though he meant it. Could there be anything more excruciating than this apathy?
“Nevertheless, you have my thanks,” Eliza pressed.
There was a pause.
“You need not thank me,” Somerset said quietly. “It is no more than my duty, as head of the family.”
A remark which was, in fact, more excruciating than his apathy. Duty. Family. The words burned.
“Farewell, my dear Lady Somerset!” Lady Selwyn sang with affected sweetness, as she swept through the doorway. “We cannot thank you enough for your hospitality.”
“Farewell, my lady.” Mrs. Courtenay, not so skilled an actress as her daughter, did not smile.
“You behave yourself, now!” Selwyn said, wagging a finger in Eliza’s face. “We wouldn’t want to take that fortune away from you, would we?”
“Selwyn!” Somerset said, in sharp remonstration.
“Lady Somerset knows I am only funning!”
“Of course she does,” Lady Selwyn agreed. She looked from Somerset to Eliza, and her expression tightened. “Somerset—may I borrow your arm to climb into the carriage?”
“Will your husband’s arm not serve, Augusta?” Somerset suggested mildly. “I have a few matters to discuss with Lady Somerset.”
Lady Selwyn shot Eliza a stinging glance, as if this were her fault, but reluctantly retreated with her husband and mother.
“I will be in town for the next fortnight,” Somerset said to Eliza. “If there is anything at all you need assistance with, please do not hesitate to write.”
Eliza nodded.
“Good day, Lady Somerset,” he said, bowing his head over her hand.
“Lord Somerset,” she said in return. There was something dreadfully ironic about their sharing the same name, now. Fate’s cruel jibe at what they might once have shared, had Eliza’s mother not been so eager to secure a title for her daughter—and had Eliza’s will not been so very easy to bend.
As Somerset raised his head from her hand, their gazes met. And whether Somerset had lowered his guard, now that he was about to leave, or whether he was simply surprised by the sudden proximity of her face to his, as their eyes met, his neutral mask slipped. His polite expression turned abruptly arrested, even stricken, and his gloved hand tightened convulsively upon hers. And Eliza felt, at last, truly seen.
Not just looked through, as if she were some peripheral stranger, or looked upon, as if she were a mildly inconvenient duty, to be resolved, but seen: she as Eliza and he as Oliver, two people who had once known each other as deeply as it was possible to know someone. And though the moment could not have lasted for more than two seconds—the length of three quickened heartbeats—it was as if someone had thrust a hand directly into Eliza’s chest and squeezed.
“Somerset! Do hurry up, old thing!”
And then it broke. Somerset dropped her hand as if it had burned him.
“Farewell, Miss Balfour,” he said hurriedly. “Though I would wish it to be under happier circumstances, it was good to see you both.”
He ran quickly down the steps and into the carriage.
“And I you,” Eliza whispered to the empty space he had left behind—as ever, a little too late.
“Shall we go inside?” Margaret said quietly, her eyes watchful on Eliza’s face. Eliza nodded.
They retreated to the first-floor parlor. It was the least grand of all the rooms, its drapes moth-eaten and brocaded carpets faded, but Eliza’s favorite, for upon the wall hung a seascape that had been painted by her grandfather. An artist of superior talent and some renown, the painting—of a tiny boat sailing through cold, unfathomable ocean—had been brought to Harefield by the previous countess and it was a daily comfort to Eliza. An enduring reminder of the golden afternoons she had spent with her grandfather, learning to paint, in the simpler days of girlhood, before her skirts had been let down and her hair put up, when Eliza had naively believed she might follow in his artistic footsteps.
“Would you care for a pot of tea, my lady?” Perkins asked quietly.
“Oh, I think we need something considerably stronger than tea,” Margaret declared, as she wrenched the lace cap from her red hair and the satin slippers from her feet. “A drop of brandy, if you will!”
Not by a flicker of an eyebrow did Perkins betray any surprise at such an unladylike request, and he returned promptly with a tray bearing the late earl’s finest cognac.
“Thank you,” Eliza said, as he poured them each a ladylike tipple. She would miss Perkins, when she left for Balfour.
“Famous!” Margaret agreed, though as soon as Perkins departed the room, she was reaching for the crystal decanter and liberally topping up both glasses.
Eliza would miss Margaret most of all. The last nine months, trapped within Harefield’s walls for the strictest period of her mourning, might have been interminable, had not Margaret been sent to accompany her. Having her cousin—her dearest friend—at such close proximity after so many years apart, had been an unexpected joy, but now . . .
“Are we to toast our imminent return to the loving bosoms of our families?” Eliza asked, accepting a glass.
“Certainly not,” Margaret said. “I think it a terrible idea.”
“I know,” Eliza said, for Margaret had made this opinion quite plain. “But I cannot remain here, Margaret. He was perfectly civil—but I think I might have preferred hostility to such nothingness.”
Eliza did not have to clarify who “he” was.
“It has been ten years,” Margaret said. “Surely you cannot still . . .”
Eliza sipped at her glass. The brandy burned her throat on the way down.
“I know it is foolish,” Eliza said. “But when I saw him again . . .”
She remembered the jolt that had run through her, body and soul, as soon as he had stepped into the room.
“I might have been struck by lightning,” she said, flushing to hear herself speak such a high-flown sentiment aloud.
“How uncomfortable,” Margaret observed. “It makes me rather glad I have never been in love. Did he look the same as you remembered?”
“Better,” Eliza said morosely. “Unnecessarily handsome, in fact. Could he not have returned just a little ugly?”
“Are you sure he is handsome and not simply very tall?” Margaret asked. “I have often noticed the two are confused.”
“I am sure,” Eliza said, taking another draught of the brandy.
“The Dower House is a little way from Harefield,” Margaret said. “You might easily avoid him from there. Could you truly not abide that?”
Eliza shook her head.
“To linger on the outskirts of his life,” she said. “Always wishing I were sharing it with him, while he thrives and marries and has children with someone else? No, I cannot.”
Yet once more, as she considered the alternative—Balfour with her mother—she shuddered.
“But to return to being badgered and bullied by my parents,” she said. “I—I think I will simply disappear. There is not enough of me left to endure it.”
“Have you truly been so miserable, these past years?” Margaret said quietly.
Eliza did not answer. She had avoided telling Margaret, in their weekly letters and infrequent visits, details of her marriage, not wanting to be thought dramatic or spoiled. And, truthfully, while the late earl had not been the husband she would have chosen, nor life as Countess of Somerset one she enjoyed, the years had not been without their pleasures or joys. It was just that, in a life spent trying to please a man whose natural inclination was to disapprove, Eliza had had to find small pleasures, quiet joys. Until she had begun to worry that she herself had become so small and quiet that she might easily be tidied away into a cupboard with the crockery—and left there until she was required to adorn the table once more.
“There is no point worrying over it,” Eliza said, after a pause. “I shall return to Balfour. I have no other choice.”
She felt a pathetic, forlorn figure and hoped Margaret might say something appropriately soothing, perhaps while stroking her hair.
“I must say, I think you are making a great cake of yourself,” Margaret said acidly.
This was not at all what Eliza had in mind.
“Excuse me?”
“Have you forgotten that you are now one of the richest women in England?” Margaret sat up and flapped an accusing hand at Eliza, who watched its progress with some alarm—it was straying dangerously close to a very expensive Ming vase.
“I have not forgotten,” Eliza said, “but I am not sure it makes a difference, Margaret. I am just as trapped as I was before.”
“Then the fortune is wasted on you, if you are going to act so damnably defeatist,” Margaret said, shaking her head.
“Where else would you have me go?” Eliza demanded. She had thought Margaret understood.
“Anywhere!” Margaret snapped back. “You can most certainly afford to set up your own establishment, now. Have you never considered it?”
In truth, Eliza had not. Mrs. Balfour had always said the only unmarried women who set up their own establishments were either very eccentric, very elderly or both. Eliza was neither.
“Margaret, be serious.”
“I am perfectly serious,” Margaret said.
“What would I even do?” Eliza asked.
“Oh, only anything you want, Eliza!” Margaret said. “Have you really become so downtrodden that you do not want anything anymore?”
Eliza stared at Margaret, shocked at the venom in her voice.
“Not want anything?” she repeated. “Not want anything? Margaret, I want . . . endlessly.”
“Is that so?” Margaret asked, sounding so dubious that Eliza began to lose her temper.
“It is so,” she insisted. “I want to wear gowns of my own choosing—I am sick of being such a dowd—and I want to paint all day if I so choose. And I want to spend money as frivolously as I like!”
Eliza could not seem to stop, the words spilling out of her.
“I want to light fires in the daytime and to go where I please, and most of all—most of all, Margaret—I want to have married the man I loved, not the one duty required. But I did not. And nothing can change that, so you’ll forgive me if, after a lifetime of being denied every single one of my desires, I seem defeatist now.”
Eliza gave an angry swipe at her eyes. Mrs. Balfour had her wish for tears at last, but it was far too late for them to be of any use.
“Well,” Margaret said, after a short silence, “you may not be able to achieve all of that, but in your own establishment, you could certainly try—”
“They would never let me,” Eliza interrupted. “I am a widow in my first year of mourning. The rules . . .”
“E-li-za,” Margaret said, drawing out each syllable in remonstration. “You are not mousy little Miss Balfour, anymore. You are a countess. You own ten thousand acres of land. You are richer than our whole family put together. Isn’t now the time to break the rules?”
Again, Eliza found herself staring at Margaret. Nothing she said was wrong, exactly, but the way she had arranged the facts, to make it seem as if Eliza now held some power . . . It did not feel true.
“This is your chance to finally have a life of your own,” Margaret said. “I cannot bear you to waste it—oh, what I would do for such an opportunity!”
Margaret was leaning forward now, her hands clasped tightly before her, and Eliza wished, suddenly, that the fortune could have been gifted to Margaret, not her. For Margaret, braver, cleverer—and certainly more outspoken than Eliza—would surely make the most of such a chance. She deserved it, too. Deserved more from life than being shipped around the family to look after their various children, overlooked and unimportant—trapped, indeed—as the last unmarried sister. It might not be said aloud, but Eliza knew their family considered Margaret irredeemable, on the shelf: a spinster. It was not fair.
The injustice of it all began to burn in Eliza’s chest, hotter than the brandy. “Obedient and dutiful,” her husband had called her in his will. “Incapable of causing a raised eyebrow,” Somerset had announced to the whole room. And that is how everyone had always seen her. It was the chief reason the late earl had wanted to marry her in the first place, perceiving Eliza’s timidity to be proof of her malleability—and in all the years of their marriage, Eliza had never once given him reason to disbelieve this. But perhaps Margaret was right. Perhaps now was her chance. Perhaps now was their chance.
“I could not do so alone,” Eliza said slowly. “To live alone would be most improper.”
“Oh, society is positively riddled with spinsters and widows that you might invite to act as your companion,” Margaret said, dismissing this at once. “Any respectable female would add to your consequence—I would come, but Lavinia is with child again.”
“Lavinia is a shrew,” Eliza pointed out.
“But a very fertile shrew,” Margaret said. “As soon as the child is born, she will require me, and my mother will insist I go and—and that will be the end of that. You will have to do this without me.”
Without Margaret, Eliza’s resolve would crumble within a week.
“When is the child expected?” Eliza asked.
“Mid-April, all being well,” Margaret said. She looked at Eliza contemplatively. “Though . . . Lavinia will not need me until then.”
“If I wrote to your mother,” Eliza said, “begged your company for three more months . . . ?”
“Just until the baby comes,” Margaret said, a smile beginning to form around her lips. “Three more months is not so great a request.”
A silence lay between them for a moment.
“We would have to be very, very careful,” Eliza said.
A veritable grin now spread across Margaret’s face.
“I am serious, Margaret,” Eliza said. “If the Selwyns catch a whiff of impropriety, they will start caterwauling about the morality clause. We need to think of a reason we are not going to Balfour—one everyone will accept.”
“Where shall we go?” Margaret asked. “London?”
“London . . .” Eliza said wistfully. Eliza had barely visited the metropolis since her own first (and last) Season. She imagined herself and Margaret living there, free and independent to take in as much art and as many museums as they liked. In May, it would be the opening of the Royal Academy’s Summer Exhibition, a sight Eliza had not seen since she was seventeen . . . But no.
“It cannot be London while I am in full mourning,” Eliza said. “We would be in immediate disgrace.”
“Another town, then,” Margaret suggested. “A town, with enough entertainment to occupy us, even if you cannot attend any public occasions. What about Bath?”
Bath. Eliza considered it.
“Yes,” she said at last. “For I believe there is entertainment to be had there of a quiet nature and I could say I had been prescribed a course of the waters by the doctor. No one would know it was a lie.”
“I will visit the libraries, and attend concerts, and meet interesting new persons,” Margaret said, voice dreamy.
“Yes, indeed,” Eliza said. “And I will . . . I will . . .”
Eliza’s voice faltered, doubt crept in. In her mind’s eye, all at once appeared Mrs. Balfour’s disapproving expression, and Eliza wilted under the imagined glare. She would be so disappointed. Her father, too. Eliza bit her lip and looked up to her grandfather’s painting, hanging upon the wall—that tiny, brave boat that remained afloat only by overwhelming effort. Margaret made a gentle encouraging noise, as one might soothe a spooked horse, and Eliza took a deep, deep breath.
“While I will become . . . a lady of fashion?” Eliza suggested.
“Yes,” Margaret said at once.
“And I will paint,” Eliza went on, firmer now.
“All day if you should choose it.”
“And—and I will never again marry for duty!” Eliza said, throat very dry all of a sudden. “That—that is behind me, now.”
Across from her, Margaret swept her glass up into the air.
“Now that is a toast I like,” she said. “To Bath!”