Chapter Twenty-Six
Gwen
“Good, you’re here,” Meredith says, pulling Gwen through the door before she even knocks.
“What’s going on?” Gwen asks, taking in her tight face and plain dress.
Meredith’s not outfitted for anything public facing, much less hosting a surprise early breakfast for mothers and daughters. She looks like she just woke up.
That knot of worry at the top of Gwen’s stomach twists even tighter. If Meredith isn’t actually hosting tea this morning, then Gwen’s not going to see Beth today. It’s been days since they’ve had a moment together, longer still since they’ve managed to have their parents at the same event. The wedding is almost here, and now she won’t even get to strategize with Beth. It’s time for a last-ditch, desperate effort. But she can’t plan that all by herself. They’re far beyond her slapdash plans now.
“Come on,” Meredith says, steering Gwen down the servant’s hallway and through the kitchen.
“Have you heard anything from Beth? Mrs. Stelm said she gave Miss Wilson my last letter, but Beth hasn’t replied yet,” Gwen says, trying to talk and simultaneously navigate her hoop through the narrow halls.
The servants pay them no mind as they pass, like Meredith must do this every day. But the silence is grating on Gwen. She’s anxious enough without Meredith making a mystery of things.
“Meredith, would you please just—”
“Here. You have twenty minutes,” Meredith says cryptically, yanking Gwen to a halt.
She opens a narrow door and shoves Gwen inside before she can so much as speak. Gwen turns, mouth open, but Meredith shuts the door on her. Gwen sighs and revolves, taking in the small single bedroom with one high window at street level. It’s dim, and cramped, and there in the middle stands Beth in her house frock, hair still braided from sleep.
Gwen’s chest clenches as Beth comes for her, shoving her skirt to the side so she can arch up and wrap her arms around Gwen. She presses into her, face tucked into her neck.
“I just wanted to see you one more time,” Beth whispers, pulling back only to rise into a kiss that makes Gwen stumble back into the door, hands gripping at Beth’s waist to steady them both.
“This was the only time I’m not scheduled to be at the Ashmonds’,” Beth says when they break apart minutes later, lips swollen, hair mussed, and cheeks pink. Her hands cradle Gwen’s jaw as they lean back against the door. “Mother’s still sleeping. She won’t talk to me anymore. I can’t convince her, I can’t make her understand, and I don’t think—” She pauses, surging forward into another kiss.
And Gwen lets her, sliding her hands back to splay over Beth’s narrow shoulders, clutching her close. This is it then. Lady Demeroven’s made her choice. The wedding is in three days. Their second attempt has failed, thwarted by politics and greed and fear. She has to surrender Beth to her unhappy marriage so she and her mother have somewhere to live, money to provide for them, security.
She loses herself in Beth’s kiss, clutching at her back. Gwen has a lifetime to grieve. But right now, they have only these twenty minutes in this little room. Their last twenty minutes. She won’t waste a moment of it.
“Here,” she whispers as Beth breaks away to press kisses down her neck. She gently steps forward, pushing Beth into the middle of the room until she can spin around. “Get me out of this thing.”
Beth hums and together they make the quickest work they can of pulling off her bodice and skirt, throwing off her petticoat and hoop. Then she can turn and tackle Beth onto the little bed. Then they can slide hands up underskirts and down corsets, unlacing until they’re a mess of half-worn clothes and skin and kisses, gasping against each other for what feels like a small eternity.
This is how she’ll remember Beth, bright cheeked and panting beneath her on a small, narrow bed—hair frayed, skirt about her waist, smiling as she comes down from her peak. She’ll secret this picture away into her mind. She’ll wait eagerly for the brief moments they can have going forward, stolen like this whenever they visit Meredith. Condemned to a quarter life of happiness, but they’ll wring every bit they can from it. They’ll savor every moment.
“I love you,” Beth whispers, stroking at her cheek. Gwen rests her forehead against Beth’s, heaving in air as she comes down.
“I love you too,” Gwen murmurs, angling her head to sip a kiss from her lips.
But as her sweat cools and her heartbeat calms, Gwen feels the moment breaking around them. The gravity of what’s to come presses down on her and she goes to pull back, to offer platitudes or excuses or—something—something to make it better.
Beth surges up, unwilling to separate, kissing her with a ferocity that steals Gwen’s breath away and pounds against her heart. Like if Beth tries hard enough, their kiss could forestall the future. As if it can keep them here, in this little secret, away from the world, and reality and—
There’s a sharp rap on the door.
“Beth, your carriage is here.”
Beth stills, held against her, eyes squeezed shut. She doesn’t move, holding to their love, and Gwen steels everything she has to pull away. To let Beth fall gently back on the pillows. To sit up and look down at her lover for as long as she dares.
Meredith knocks again and Beth shakes her head. Gwen stands and tugs on Beth’s hands. Beth hesitates and then her eyes pop open, hard and empty. She lets Gwen help her from the bed, watches as she straightens her bodice.
Gwen steps to the side, reaching out for Beth’s frazzled braid, and Beth seems to come back to life. She swipes at her hair until it’s captured in a messy knot high on her head.
It’s devastatingly beautiful. She is devastatingly beautiful.
They stare at each other, inches apart. It feels like the earth has tilted below them, everything wrong and off-angled.
“I’ll see you,” Beth starts, clenching her jaw as her eyes begin to shine.
Gwen nods, barely keeping her own tears at bay. “You will. We’ll write too,” she says, forcing lightness and promise into her words. They ring hollow around the little room.
Beth starts forward, but the door jerks open and they cleave away from each other. Gwen hurries back, out of sight of the hall, even though Meredith stands blocking any servant’s view.
“Come on,” she says, holding out a hand to Beth.
Beth glances at Gwen and their eyes hold for a moment, too much to be said, and never enough time.
And then she’s gone, and Meredith snaps the door shut, leaving Gwen leaning against the empty dresser in the dim sunlight from the street above, thoroughly ravished and utterly broken. They were supposed to have three more days.
When Meredith returns some ten minutes later, Gwen has managed through her sobs to step into her hoop and tie it with trembling fingers. Meredith just bends to pick up Gwen’s petticoat, helping her slide it over her ruined hair and fasten it over her hoop.
“We’ll make sure you see each other,” Meredith promises as they get her overskirt down on top of the petticoat.
“It isn’t—” Gwen starts, unsure how to explain how much that’s not enough. It will never be enough. She wasn’t ready to say goodbye. She thought they had three more days.
She thought she was coming here for tea.
“No, it’s not,” Meredith agrees, stepping around to her front to button the bodice Gwen threw on in a hurry before leaving her empty townhouse. “But it’s something.”
Gwen meets her understanding eyes. “Thank you.”
Meredith smiles sadly. “You would do the same for Albie, and I hope someday for me, if we needed you to.”
“I would,” Gwen says quickly, grabbing her hand. “If you ever need anything—”
“Be a good cousin to our children, a friend to me, to Albie, that’s all I ask,” Meredith says, her round face serene and earnest.
“I promise,” Gwen says swiftly.
“Good. Now, let’s go have scones, and then Albie will pick us up and we’ll promenade with my mother.”
Gwen deflates. “I don’t know that I—”
Meredith gives her a stern look. “You will not go home to grieve in an empty house. Beth has the luxury of being obnoxiously busy. We need to keep you at least half as occupied.”
And though it’s not enough, not by any stretch, the tea and scones do help. And listening to Meredith and Albie snicker about the ton keeps her breathing. And as the day wears on she finds that the world hasn’t ended. She still has her family, her friends. She’ll keep moving even though she’s been torn apart. It turns out you really can walk through life with an irreparably broken heart. Her father’s managed, after all.
That night, when she returns home, a little tipsy from the bottle of champagne Albie stashed in the carriage—of which Meredith’s mother happily partook while delivering Gwen home—she finds Father actually at their dinner table. He looks up, giving her an exhausted smile.
And for one moment, Gwen forgets her heartbreak and horror, and smiles back, settling at his side. Mrs. Gilpe brings their plates—a light summer salad with potato soup, easy and bright.
“You look well,” Father decides after they’ve eaten for a few minutes.
Meredith reapplied her makeup, and she supposes she does look sun brightened from the day. He hasn’t seen her frequently enough recently to really know better.
“You look exhausted,” she says, taking in the deep circles beneath his eyes, and the slight hollow to his cheeks. “Have you eaten at all in the last few days?”
“I—” Father begins, and then sighs, rubbing at the back of his neck. “I haven’t been home much, have I?”
Gwen shrugs and takes a sip of her soup, earnestly trying to hide just how much he hasn’t been home, and how much she’s missed him. It’s one thing to lose Beth—to feel like she’s losing him too . . .
“How are you, really?” Father asks.
Gwen blinks. “I’m fine.”
“I doubt that,” Father says softly.
Gwen sinks back against her chair, the ache of it charging back up her chest. “I had hoped—” She pauses. Had hoped what, exactly?
“You thought there was still a chance Beth might abandon her match, her security, her safety, and come live with you?” he asks gently.
Gwen looks over, surprised. “I—no, no, I . . . didn’t,” she argues, her voice brittle.
She knows that won’t happen. That it can’t. It’s why they schemed and tried and pushed. But Beth can’t just walk away from the life the Ashmonds can give her. Gwen knows that. She’s cried about it enough.
“I hoped so, when I was your age,” Father says, and Gwen meets his eyes, surprised. “Thought that at the eleventh hour Cordelia would give up her advantage and come back to me, marry me and live a small but happy life. I believed it might happen right up until the church bells rang. And it broke me.”
Gwen watches as he regards her, paternal and protective and experienced. “What did you do?” Gwen asks, feeling her heart breaking all over for him and herself.
“I drank, and I partied, and I got a good girl in trouble, and got you,” he says steadily.
Gwen swallows hard. She thought he didn’t know she had heard him and Mrs. Gilpe—hoped he’d thought that she’d just been sick. She hasn’t had the heart to mention it.
“And I would do it all over again to get you,” he says firmly, reaching out to take her hand. “But I can’t pretend it was easy or how I wanted to bring you into the world. And your mother, rest her soul—you can do better than me, Gwen. Find a good man, or hell, a good woman who can stay with you. We can go to Paris. I hear from friends it’s much more . . . open about these things right now.”
Gwen blinks. He—he would take her to Paris, to meet a nice woman—“But what about the title?”
“We can worry about that later,” Father says, shrugging like it’s no longer important. “If I can push this vote through, I don’t really give a damn what happens after.”
“And you wouldn’t . . . mind? If I never married?”
“I just want you to be happy,” he says simply.
Gwen sits for a moment, soaking that in. Words she’s wanted to hear for ages—she can stand down, she can let go of the season, she can simply be herself.
But what does it matter if it won’t be with Beth?
“What about you?” she asks, seeing one shimmering last chance.
“What about me?”
“If you don’t care, after this vote—if it doesn’t matter—why can’t you be happy too?”
Father snorts. “What do you mean, Gwennie?”
Gwen summons the last dregs of her courage. Beth gave it her all; Gwen has to at least try. “Ask Lady Demeroven for her hand. Take your own happiness. And who knows, you could get an heir—a planned one. And even if you don’t—”
“Gwen—”
“She’s miserable too. She hates the Ashmonds, and Beth says it’s like watching her submit to her father all over again. Can’t we—can’t you try, just once more? Ask again.”
The ease falls from his face, that guarded, aloof expression she so hates settling over him. It’s the look he wears at balls. The way he looks with women. Detached and poised and uncaring.
“You may be a glutton for punishment, but I am not,” he says stiffly.
“What?”
“The teas with Meredith? Do you think you’ve been subtle?”
Gwen leans back, surprised and defensive but with no way to argue it. “I—”
“How you and Beth deal with the pain is your business, but I did my time. I let that woman stomp all over my heart, twice. I won’t do it a third time.”
Gwen blinks and before she can formulate another argument, before she can say anything, he stands and tosses his napkin onto the table.
“You’re a good girl, Gwennie. I love you very much. But leave me out of this. I won’t have us utterly destroyed by the Demerovens again. We will move forward with our lives, and someday this will be just a painful memory, I promise you that.”
He turns and strides out of the room, leaving Gwen alone, for the second time today, heartbroken and winded.