Page 30 of Blueprints, Battlelines and Ballrooms (Tales from Honeysuckle Street #4)

Chapter Nineteen

Laudanum eased the pain. In payment, it stole time.

It dulled the edges of everything. Day and night became one and the same, light could have been candle or sun, and broth could have been breakfast or supper.

Grabbing hold of the world and shaking off the groggy haze had always been a challenge, because the temptation to ask for one more draught was as alluring as a lover and as dangerous as a siren.

No. No more laudanum. With the heels of her palms flat on the mattress, Florence wriggled herself into a seated position. A thin line of light ran over the bottom of her bed. That usually meant it was about ten o’clock. Morning. Now to discern what day it was.

‘Thank heavens. You’re awake.’

Florence blinked rapidly, and for a disoriented second, she was back in her marriage bed, waking to discover her mother wringing her hands in the doorway.

That morning was still etched in her mind—Mama bringing the news of her husband’s death as she emerged from a pained slumber.

George had been dead three days before she’d been lucid enough to be told.

One winter morning, he’d been walking too fast, slipped on a frosty plank, tumbled into a trench dug for footings, and hit his head.

He’d been coherent enough to wave everyone away for a few minutes.

Then he’d collapsed. Buried while she was sleeping. Her life altered mid-dream.

‘Mama? What has happened?’

‘It’s your father.’

No. No, no, no.

‘He’s fighting with the assistant. They’ve been grumbling at each other all morning, but now it’s a proper shouting match. What if they come to blows? If your father hits Johannes, it will only hurt his pride, but if it goes the other way…’

Florence hung her head as relief replaced terror. ‘Johannes won’t hit him. Of that I am certain. Will you help me dress?’

Muscles stretched and woke while joints moved with little cricks and clicks but eventually settled and became limber. Mama worried her bottom lip as she knotted bows and straightened cuffs.

‘Are they getting louder?’ Florence asked.

‘I think so.’

‘What in the heavens are they arguing about?’

Mama pulled the tie at her waist. ‘You.’

‘Me?’ Florence shuffled slowly towards the landing.

Mama followed, and at the top of the stairs, took a hold of her arm.

Her father’s frustrations boomed into the hallway, mingling with Johannes’s exclamations at intervals, the pair of them cutting each other off.

With one hand tight on the handrail and the other on Mama’s elbow, she descended, listening, trying to make out the shape of their argument.

‘It will risk everything!’ her father shouted.

Left right.

‘If people suspect or your man confesses, it will ruin my name. My career.’

Left right.

‘It happens all the time. I have no choice. You saw her, she needs to see the surgeon.’

‘She needs a house she can manage, not all these stairs.’

Florence released her mother so she could push ahead down the hallway.

Mama hovered behind her, humming off key with worry.

In the doorway to the office, Florence leant against the doorframe to steady herself.

Cool air swirled across the floor, unheated as the furnace sat cold.

Between the desks, her father and Johannes were squaring off against one another.

Johannes towered over the older man, but Father stood tall and determined, full of fire.

He raised his hand and shook it into the narrow space between them.

‘This competition is too important. One well-publicised victory can lead to a steady stream of private clients, steady work from other companies, and no more bowing to the system.’

‘We could work together. She learnt at your side, and she’s brilliant.’

‘Stop talking at me like I don’t know! But this city will not accept a woman, especially one who climbs stairs like a child and can’t pin her own hair.

You are living in a dream. They will lambast her, criticise her, scrutinise her every decision as proof that she can’t handle the work. She doesn’t deserve that.’

‘She needs—’

‘She will—’

‘Did either of you think to ask me what I want?’

Their shouts collapsed. They turned in unison like some lopsided mirror, their matching expressions of anger dissipating into shock.

Johannes pressed his palm to his chest, over his heart.

‘You’re awake.’ As he spoke, his face morphed into a smile so pure and lit with love she could scarce believe it was for her.

‘Why are you shout—’

‘I am trying to convince your father not to bribe our way to winning. I have a plan.’ Johannes reached her in two strides.

He gathered her hands into his own. ‘I’m going to take care of you.

I will build us a house on the vacant block on Honeysuckle Street.

It will all be on one level. No stairs. We’ll work together as Hempel Architects. ’

‘But we aren’t married…’

‘We will be.’ He raised her hands to his lips. ‘Pick a date. I’ll arrange everything.’

‘You have been in bed for three days.’ Her father cut across Johannes, his sternness as straight as a rail.

‘The system is corrupt. There is no way to fight it. You need to see the surgeon. And to pay his fee, we need the prize and the work that will follow. The doctor is adamant. This cannot wait.’

‘What if the surgery doesn’t work?’ Johannes snapped at her father. ‘What if she falls again?’

‘When we are successful, I will employ someone to watch her to make sure she doesn’t fall. Until then, she’ll stay upstairs unless her mother is with her to help.’

‘You can’t stop her from going outside—’

‘I’m not stopping her, I’m protecting her—’

‘ I will look after her now—’

‘Stop it!’ Shrill and cutting, Florence screamed into the small office.

‘Stop trying to fix me!’ She hurled the words at her father, who stepped back with a flinch.

Johannes opened his mouth with a smug tilt to his chin.

‘And you,’ she shot at him before he could cut her off again, ‘were you going to ask me about any of your plans? Or had both of you simply decided you knew what was best?’

‘I want to look after you,’ Johannes said. ‘And care for you, so that we can work together. Isn’t that what you want?’

The air hummed with the rise and fall of their breaths.

A lifetime of apologies and failures and not being enough.

For that was it: she was a failure. A failure to others and to herself.

Perhaps she could not be pieced back together, but that did not mean she had to be passed between them as a problem.

The parish bell chimed the hours. They watched her. Deathly silent.

‘Florence?’ Her father hesitated. ‘What do you want?’

What did she want? Because while she’d been abed, time had turned, and the world had forged ahead.

It was time to make her choice. Time to place her bet.

On the doctor and his scalpel? Or a husband with a new surname that would subsume her yet again?

Who would discover, with the cruel trick of time, just how broken she was?

That her body was a lie? Which horse to pick?

Which man to follow? Her father to the surgeon’s scalpel or Johannes to the vicar’s bible?

‘I want…’

She looked from one to the other, then back at her mother. But there were no answers, only expectant, waiting faces.

‘I want…’

A burst of fury and a dash of raw pride tied a knot in her chest.

No.

She would not back either of them.

She would back herself.

‘I do not know what I want! I have never been allowed to even think about it, I have always had to be what others wanted from me. I have always been Miss Holt, Mrs Murray, and now you’d like me to become Mrs Hempel?

I will not be only someone’s daughter or widow or wife.

I will not be defined by which man rules me.

I wish to be myself . My messy, broken self.

My name is Florence . All I do is live as a mistake.

The surgeon’s mistake, George’s mistake, your mistake!

’ She jabbed a finger at her father. ‘Every bloody man who fails, I live with their mistakes. Do what you like. Fight till you come to blows. But I will not have you take my blueprints and use them to make me bend. Maybe I will find myself in an invalid home one day, but it will be my own path that brought me there. Submit your plans. Leave me to make my own.’

‘But… I love you.’ Light fell around Johannes, casting creases over his frown and the hurt twist to his lips.

The ready response sat light on her tongue, but she bit it down and swallowed it whole.

She felt it. She wanted to say it. But those words were chains, and she’d forever be a slave to them.

Hemmed in, bristling, colouring plans, and discussing ideas…

Never master of her own mind and her own destiny.

‘I can’t. Love has not done me any favours.’ Florence turned her back on the office. Mama was waiting for her with a drawn smile. She offered her arm in assistance, and together, they inched their way up the stairs. Her hum continued like an anxious bee until she let her worry buzz into words.

‘You don’t want to see the surgeon. And you’ve given up your chance to marry. What will you do?’

‘I don’t know,’ Florence said. She forced her gaze ahead as Johannes edged into the periphery of her vision between the stair rails when he walked down the hall.

After a silence that was long enough for him to don his coat and hat, the door opened, then closed.

With its snip, a piece of her heart caught on an ache.

‘I don’t know,’ she whispered again, to herself, mulling over the phrase and letting the uncertainty grow.

Because from the ache came relief. Despite the vacuousness of those three small words, in them lay the seed of liberation.

She did not know what the future would hold.

How she would manage. But for the first time, it was her own future to be uncertain about. ‘But I am excited to figure it out.’