Page 29 of Lady Like
At Speakers’ Corner, Harry learns that after a lifetime spent on a Sussex farm, Emily has a great deal to say about the need to increase land rights to tenant farmers. Even more after she has been plied with rum punch, which she tells Harry four times with increasing volume she likes quite a lot.
The following day, in a coffeehouse they visit to locate a leaflet written by one of the orators, she learns Emily drinks her coffee black and hot, and without cream, and manages to charm the bacon-faced clerk into sending them a plate of scones without charge.
When they pay for the leaflet and the coffee, Harry learns that Emily has a tendency to round up any number to the closest multiple of ten rather than have to do arithmetic in her head.
At a talk on farmers’ rights the next week, Harry discovers Emily has a habit of fidgeting when she has something she’d like to say. She loses an earring midway through the talk and they spend almost half of an hour after everyone has gone looking for it under chairs.
Afterward, on their way to a bookshop the lecturer recommended, Harry learns Emily has no sense of direction.
She’s also stubborn, refusing to accept help, and they end up wandering increasingly unsavory streets for nearly two hours before finally finding themselves, in some improbable trick of London geography, outside Pearl’s tea shop, and it’s Emily who suggests they stop.
They drink small beers and eat peanuts and oysters until Harry realizes she is overdue at the theater and has to rush out.
It is Emily too who suggests they visit a casino where Alexander likes to play, and though he isn’t there, Harry leaves one of her cards with a note that she and her friend from the south—no names, must remain a bit mysterious, he’ll get the hint, she assures Emily—were sorry to have missed him and, by the way, won quite a bit on chance games, which they had.
Emily, it seems, is improbably good at hazard, a game that Harry had assumed it was not possible to be good at, as it is entirely chance based.
When Harry comments on how much she likes a figurine in one of the card rooms, Emily pockets it for her, not revealing her theft until they are halfway home.
Harry finds herself torn between delight and concern that they’ll be arrested.
Which might be a scandalous outing too far.
As spring tumbles forward, blossoms falling from the trees to make way for green leaves, Emily comes by the stables thrice to see Harry ride, though Alexander is never present, and none of the visits do anything to warm Emily to horses.
Harry makes a valiant effort, but Emily refuses to get in the saddle herself, insisting she would rather sit on the fence and watch Harry prepare Matthew for the steeplechase.
One morning she brings Harry’s favorite pastries, which Harry only remembers mentioning once in passing and yet Emily had remembered.
And though Matthew is saddled, the ride never happens, for their morning is taken up with sitting on the grass and eating them all, though Emily had brought enough for a family.
Harry knows herself well enough to admit she is developing quite an infatuation with Emily Sergeant.
But that’s fine. She has passively fancied a lot of beautiful women who once shouted at her.
There is no danger in the pleasant buzz of desire.
It’s the emotional equivalent of one glass of wine too many.
And Harry plans to enjoy the high, but drink no more.
It is a month to the day of their first attempt to visit Ranelagh Gardens when Harry finally makes the promised reservation, and though Emily has racked up more than enough adventures to impress the duke, they both continue to pretend the outing is essential.
The sun has hardly set, but Ranelagh Gardens is already lit brilliantly when Harry arrives with Collin, who had insisted on joining to witness this unlikely friendship firsthand.
They pay their shillings and cross the rotunda.
Two girls lurking about the entrance to the hall of statues wave to Harry and Collin, and Harry, recognizing them from Pearl’s, waves in return.
Collin looks the other direction. When a cry to watch your pockets goes up from somewhere in the crowd, Harry and Collin raise their hands, an old joke from youth signifying there’s nothing on them worth stealing.
Harry laughs, and Collin gives her a grudging smile.
Emily isn’t scheduled to arrive for another hour, so they find a box in the gallery and Harry orders wine for them both. When the bottle arrives, Collin nods at the label. “You remembered.”
“Of course,” Harry replies.
They have drunk most of the bottle when the organist in the next balcony clunks from an interminable ballad into the first notes of “There’s No One Can Love Like an Irishman.” Harry and Collin groan in unison.
“Do you remember—” Collin says at the same time Harry says, “That Irish beau of Mother’s—”
“He used to sing this to her before they—”
“—couldn’t carry a tune, he never hit a note—”
“—you’d think he’d get one right every once in a while, just by mistake—”
“—you could hear them through the whole house—”
“—he always left the window open, the whole street could probably hear—”
The organ reaches the last lines of the verse, and Harry, remembering suddenly the words of the cursed tune, sings, “ And I know she’ll say, from behind her fan. ”
Collin sits up, the words seeming to come to him as well, and he turns to Harry as they sing together, melody devolving into a chant, “ That there’s none can love like an Irishman, like an Irishman, like an Irishman! ”
Harry seizes Collin’s arm to keep herself from falling out of her chair with tipsy laughter. Collin snorts, tilting his glass back to drain the dregs. “God, he was a prick,” Collin says at the same time Harry says, “He was one of Mother’s better beaus.”
Collin swats at her. “In comparison only. Why are we laughing?”
Harry shrugs. “Easier that way, I suppose.”
Collin tips his glass back again, as though checking it really is empty. “She always liked you more than me.”
Harry scoffs. It was true their mother had paid her more attention than Collin, and attention and love are easy to misconstrue.
Collin had been better at keeping his head down and his mouth shut, two things Harry had never mastered despite how often her mother slapped her.
“I don’t think she liked either of us much. ”
“Certainly didn’t want us.”
“And neither did our father!” Harry raises the bottle. “Cheers to the unwanted royal bastards.”
Collin laughs, clinking his glass against it. “ Royal bastards. So strange.”
“How is your nonconditional inheritance shaping up?” Harry asks. “Have you picked out drapes for your house yet? Exorcised the ghosts?”
“Literal or metaphorical?”
“That house is most certainly haunted by something. Longley, I suspect, will always be home to the ghosts of everyone I might have shagged had I not been forced into a union against my will.”
Collin runs a finger over his bottom lip. Harry can still make out the faint scar that splits it, from when, as a child, he had tripped on the uneven stairs at Pearl’s and bitten through it. “Not that what I think matters,” he says, “to you or His Majesty. But I think it’s absurd.”
“What is?”
“His condition that you marry. He’ll be the bloody king! He could write a provision of inheritance for a single woman into the deed if he chose to. He can pretend it’s well intentioned and for your own good, but you’ve been taking care of yourself for years. You don’t need a husband.”
Harry is so surprised by this admission—and, strangely touched that he’s taken her side for perhaps the first time in their lives—that the only thing she can think to say is a foolishly simple “Thank you.”
Collin nods sharply, and Harry has a sense they’re both uncomfortable with this allegiance. Though perhaps that’s simply because it’s new. “When is Miss Sergeant meant to arrive?” Collin asks.
“Half ten. I should go find her, actually—and something more to drink.” Harry stands, pushing her chair back as she heads for the hall, but pauses on the threshold and turns back. “Collin?”
He drops his head over the back of his chair. “Hm?”
It’s been good to see him more, and she almost says so.
He leaves home early and returns late, always muttering something about his work, but their paths still cross in their shared lodging more than Harry thought she’d prefer.
But it’s been surprisingly nice to have her brother near.
He’s a bitter tea, but she’s drunk it since childhood, and sometimes still finds herself with a particular craving.
But Collin’s love has always felt conditional, same as their mother’s had been, though Harry knows he’d be loath to hear the comparison.
The fact that he had just acknowledged a disparity in their father’s treatment of them because of their sexes doesn’t make him a suddenly changed man.
So instead, she says, “Another bottle of the same?”
And he replies, “Please.”
Harry takes the short flight of stairs down to the bar two at a time, feeling buzzy with the wine and the atmosphere and the impending reunion with Emily.
She turns down a corridor behind the bar, passing a shadowed hallway leading to an empty card room marked no entry with a rope, when someone reaches from the darkness, grabs her by the arm, and yanks her to them.
Harry is torn between a well-timed scream and a well-placed knee driven into her assailant. Her first thought is that the Duke of Edgewood finally had the good sense to hire a true assassin rather than one who can’t be trusted with a weapon more dangerous than a pie.
But then her assailant fastens his mouth over hers and she catches a whiff of familiar cologne.
Harry pulls away, her back colliding with the wall. “Good God, Alex.”