22
That night, Eliza could not sleep. She had returned from her drive with Caroline, convinced that the whole business with Melville’s portrait was a hallucination, only to find, when she had gone upstairs to regard it once more, that her love was still there, quite as clear as day and just as damning as it had been an hour before. It was so very blatant, even indecent, and Eliza could not even think of it now without a rush of heat flying to her face.
Her body was tired—so tired—but her mind had never been livelier, bounding from Melville to Somerset and back again with such rapidity that Eliza almost felt nauseous. In the end, when counting sheep and reading by candlelight and sketching in her portfolio had none of them worked, she resorted to a piece of comfort she had not sought since she was a child. She got up in her nightgown, walked across the hallway to Margaret’s bedchamber, knocking softly upon the door, and peeked inside.
“Eliza?” Margaret’s sleepy voice whispered.
“I can’t sleep,” Eliza said.
Margaret grunted. Eliza took this as invitation and lifted the covers to climb in next to her cousin. The bed was big enough that they need not even touch, but Eliza reached out and twined her fingers through Margaret’s anyway, just as they had when they were children.
“If you snore, I shall make you leave,” Margaret threatened sleepily, though with a squeeze to Eliza’s hand. “I do not care how upset you are.”
Eliza gave a soft laugh. There was silence in the room, for a long while. For so long, in fact, that Eliza believed Margaret had fallen asleep, and when she spoke, it was almost more to ask her words of the night than it was to ask Margaret.
“Is it truly possible,” she whispered, “to love two persons equally, at the same time?”
There was a silence.
“I do not know,” Margaret said softly. “I have only ever loved one.”
It took a moment for Eliza to realize the full implications of such a statement.
“I thought . . .” she said slowly, “that you had never had a particular tendre for anyone.”
“I hadn’t,” Margaret said. “Before we came here.”
A horrible possibility dawned upon Eliza.
“Not Melville?” she said urgently.
“No, you goose,” Margaret said, not in her usual impatient way, but wobblier. Almost afraid. “Caroline.”
It took Eliza a little while to understand. For a moment she thought she might indeed have misheard.
“Caroline . . .” she repeated slowly.
Margaret nodded her head against the pillow. The hand within Eliza’s trembled slightly.
“Oh. Oh.”
Eliza’s mind began to connect a thousand pieces of information. A hundred different moments she had noticed but never divined their true meaning.
“And you . . . ? It is of a romantic nature, this love?” she checked.
“It is as you said, Eliza,” Margaret whispered. “When I see her, I feel as if I have been struck by lightning.”
“And does she feel for you, the same way?”
“I do not know,” Margaret said. “There are moments, so many moments, when I am so sure, so certain that she does, when I feel as if we understand one another perfectly, but . . .”
“But?”
“But she does not act,” Margaret said miserably.
“Perhaps she is waiting for you to act,” Eliza suggested.
Margaret gave a little snort of disbelief.
“When she is so much more worldly than I?” she said. “Why ought I risk myself first?”
“She is worldly, yes,” Eliza said slowly, “and used to far more independence than we have been, certainly, but she does traverse the world differently to us, Margaret. They both do.”
Eliza thought back to what Caroline had told her, so many weeks ago now, of the great variance of standards between her and Caroline Lamb—the same flagrant variance that existed between Melville and his closest contemporaries.
“Society judges them far more harshly,” Eliza said. “Perhaps the risk feels even greater to her.”
“I do not know,” Margaret whispered. “And I am too afraid to ask.”
Eliza could understand this. No one wanted to have to ask if their feelings were reciprocated—and under such circumstances as these, the risks stood far higher than mere embarrassment. But now that Eliza was considering each and every one of Margaret and Caroline’s interactions with new eyes, she could only wonder that she had not noticed their thrumming tension before.
“She flirts with you,” Eliza decided. “Most assuredly she does flirt. Perhaps there is a way we could find out—I could—”
But Margaret was shaking her head.
“Even if we could, for what purpose?” she whispered. “Oh Eliza, I have considered it. But we could never be together, not properly.”
“Could you not?” Eliza asked. “Consider the Ladies of Llangollen.”
“Believe me, I have considered the Ladies of Llangollen,” Margaret said.
“The gossip suggests,” Eliza persisted, “that their relationship is romantic in nature, but so long as they give society the excuse of friendship, meet proprieties on the surface, no one does a thing to stop it.”
“Except from gossip,” Margaret said. “And they stare and speculate and laugh—and the ladies may well be happy, but are they invited to dinner parties? Do their families still speak to them? Are they accepted by society?”
Eliza did not reply, for what reassurance could she give? There was a reason, she imagined, that the Ladies of Llangollen chose to live in such seclusion, and their romance was only rumored—and while the consequence of such a relationship being publicly confirmed was not fatal, as it was for men, social exile was still no trifling matter.
“Besides,” Margaret said, “I have no independent means, and in a few more weeks, I shall have no home other than my sister’s—and Caroline and I will not come across one another again.”
It was unlike Margaret to sound so defeated, and Eliza’s chest ached to hear it. Surely there was a solution, a way forward, something, that would give Margaret the future she deserved.
“I do not think you ought to give up entirely,” Eliza whispered. “If it were kept entirely, strictly secret, perhaps . . .”
“I am tired, Eliza,” Margaret said and Eliza did not think she meant just tonight.
Eliza subsided for a moment, closing her eyes, but Margaret’s revelation had made her only more awake.
“Was it her purple dress that made you fall in love with her?” Eliza whispered.
Margaret snorted.
“I am offended you think me so shallow.”
“I have nothing else to go on!” Eliza said. She turned quickly onto her side to try and see Margaret’s expression better. “Start from the beginning,” she instructed. “And do not leave anything out.”
That night, they stayed up into the early hours of the morning, spilling all their thoughts into the darkness between them, small and large and myriad—confidences so grand that not another soul could be trusted with them, trivialities so small that not another soul would be interested in them. And if no conclusions were reached, no solutions divined, then at least by the time they closed their eyes, unable to fight sleep any longer, it was safe in the knowledge that whatever tomorrow brought, they would face it together.
“You did say you would never again marry for duty,” Margaret said, her voice as thick as soup. “If that is what you are doing with Somerset . . .”
“I do love Somerset,” Eliza said. “Whatever I feel for Melville . . . it is nerves, no more. A passing fancy.”
“If you say so,” Margaret said, dubious.
“It is a passing fancy,” Eliza said around the shape of a yawn. “I promise.”