Page 3 of Lady Like

Among the swollen hills of Sussex, in a village called Middleham, so small it is hardly ever marked on a map, Miss Emily Sergeant stands on a bostal path that cuts through her father’s land like a scar.

In each hand, she holds a fistful of mud, heavy from the morning’s rain and clotted with grass, leaves, and excrement—her father’s sheep are prodigious shitters.

She holds her arms out from her sides, careful not to stain her dress when she squeezes her fists, and the thick mud spurts between her fingers.

“Robert Tweed,” she shouts, her head thrown back so far that her straw hat tumbles off, “is a bastard!”

Beside her, her cousin Violet grabs her shoulders and shakes them encouragingly. “Yes! Yes, he is! What else?”

“He’s a crook and a cheat!”

“More specific,” Violet says. “Specificity is the soul of grievance—is that not a quotation of Plato?” She grabs Emily by the wrist and thrusts her muddy hand to the sky like a revolutionary, though the defiance of the gesture is undercut when they both have to quickly sidestep the stream of wet mud that rains down upon them.

A few drops soil Violet’s skirt, but she doesn’t wince the way Emily would had it been hers.

Violet doesn’t have a mother to answer to or a town constantly examining the state of her hemlines, along with every other minute detail of her dress and deportment.

Just a disinterested husband and a baby whose expectorations almost any stain can be blamed upon.

“What else? And really shout it this time.”

“What if someone hears me?”

“No one will hear you out here. You must let it out! Oh, but I do love a good scream. It’s so healing. Now, what else?”

Emily considers for a moment. Then, “He never—”

“Louder,” Violet says.

“NEVER!”—Emily’s throat constricts around the word, unaccustomed to being raised to such volumes—“cleans his teeth!”

“Never!” Violet repeats. “His breath would dissolve fish glue!”

“He does not like music or dancing!”

“What a cad!”

“And he shot George Robinson’s hound dog when it wandered onto his land!”

Violet gasps, audacious performance falling away in the face of true wickedness. “The sweet old one, who always let us pet her ears?” Emily nods. Violet steps back, giving Emily’s wrist one last squeeze. “Throw it.”

Emily pulls back her arm and launches the ball of mud toward the alder tree at the end of the path, onto which Violet has affixed a watercolor rendering of the villain Robert Tweed.

The sticky mud sails through the air but falls short, landing with a splat against the roots.

Only a few dark flecks splatter the painted scoundrel’s chin.

Violet scoops up her own handful of mud and steps up beside Emily, packing it like a snowball. “He grabbed my ass at the May Day dance two summers ago.”

“He spoke out against universal suffrage because he thinks the poor are too stupid to vote,” Emily adds.

“He told me it would be a shame when Martin and I had children because I would lose my figure!”

“He staffs his Brighton building sites with criminals, then does not pay them wages due to them!”

“He hired Thomas Kelly!” Violet turns suddenly to Emily, eyes wide. “Have I gone too far?”

“No,” Emily says, though the name sticks between her ribs like a splinter. “Throw it.”

Violet turns to their target, squares her shoulders, then launches her mud ball, though it mostly slips through her fingers and drops down the back of her skirt before she hurls it.

Emily squeezes her own mud ball, savoring the satisfaction of mess and dirt she never allows herself.

Clean hands, all the etiquette books say, are the true mark of gentility in ladies.

Any woman may don a dress and a fan, but you need only look to her hands to know the truth of her lot in life.

A lady’s hands are soft, the knuckles uncracked, the nails unchewed but cut short so they do not click when she is playing the pianoforte.

Emily takes great pains to keep her nails clean.

Emily takes great pains in all things, in hopes that when a suitor calls, he will find a lady so primped, polished, and well-mannered as to render her past irrelevant.

As if the Emily of now—nearly five and twenty, sweet and demure and deferential in all things—could blot out any trace of who she had once been, and what that girl had done.

“Robert Tweed,” she shouts— really shouts this time, so loudly a starling takes flight from the nearby alder—“has bullied farmers for years into selling him their land for his new road to Brighton. He took advantage of Mrs. Wild’s ailing health and tricked her into signing away all her holdings to him before she died. ”

“Yes!” Violet whispers at her side.

Emily looks out over her father’s own land, the view stretching all the way to the white ribbon of the Seven Sisters cliffs unspooled across the seaside.

How many times has Robert Tweed come to their house to collect Emily’s father so they might walk to his office or the pub to discuss business?

Her father would come home ranting of the gall of the man, the pitiful sum he had offered to buy the Sergeants’ ancestral lands, eager to pave over their only source of income to make it easier for him to get to the fashionable new seaside resorts in Brighton.

Her parents couldn’t live off the offer for a year, let alone the rest of their lives, particularly with their only child sinking into spinsterhood and showing no sign of swimming up.

“He’s eight and sixty,” Emily says.

Violet nods vigorously. “Not a crime, but far too old to be casting his eyes where he has.”

Violet scoops up a second handful of mud, takes aim, then seems to reconsider the distance in relation to the strength of her arm. She takes a few steps closer to the tree before releasing. This time, her projectile strikes the corner of the page, pinning it in place with a wet thwump.

How very childish it is, Emily thinks, for two women of their age to be standing in a field, throwing mud and screaming. How even more childish to think she is owed a fate more favorable than this, after what she has done.

But she has spent every ounce of energy since she was seventeen trying to make up for her mistake.

All her years of starving herself for a waist small enough to flatter a Grecian bodice and wearing cosmetics that make her skin itch, shoving her feet into uncomfortable slippers and burning her hands with Gowland’s Lotion, spreading burned cork on her eyebrows every morning—had it all been leading her to this inevitable end?

She learned to sew and play pianoforte and draw, swallowing every bitter medicine like it was treacle.

She goes to church and bites back her opinions and curls her hair and never speaks first and pretends she does not feel the critical eyes of the town always upon her, waiting for her to stumble or, when she doesn’t, sticking out their legs to trip her up themselves.

She has done everything right.

But, more important, she did one thing wrong, once. And now she has reached the final station of her cross.

Emily can hardly bear to stare at the painting, so she squeezes her eyes shut. “He beat his first wife,” she says.

“Scandalous gossip,” her mother had said when Emily had tried to raise the matter.

“She used to come to church with bruises on her neck,” Emily had said, and her mother had replied, “She had a large cat that liked to curl there very tightly.”

And Emily could only stare at her, wondering if this was how Galileo felt when declared a heretic for his assertion that Earth was not the center of the known universe.

“He beat his wife,” she repeats, louder this time, and rising as she presses on.

“And he kicks his dogs and his valets and speaks cruelly of others and has spent years trying to cheat my father out of his land and build a road to Brighton that would ruin our community. I have never met a man, woman, or child who had a single kind word for him, nor he for them.” Her throat is tight, eyes burning as her rage spills into frustrated tears.

“He is rude. He is hateful. He is cruel and cold. And I hate him. I hate him! I hate Robert Tweed!”

“Throw it!” Violet shouts, leaping with both arms thrust in the air.

Emily flings the ball of muck with such strength she almost tips forward. It sails through the air and strikes true, muck and shit smacking the center of Tweed’s nose with such force that the painting is ripped from its nail, but remains stuck to the tree.

Violet whoops, running a lap to the tree, where she mashes the mud into the painting with both hands.

Emily looks down at her own hands, coated in filth.

There is a metaphor in this, she thinks.

A woman in a white dress, fashionable and clean, with her hands stained black—surely the poets would swoon for that.

And all from soiling a man’s image. God, it’s positively dripping with symbolism.

But how tired she is of being a character in other people’s narratives.

She wishes she could fall to her knees and bury her hands in the soil, deep enough that the roots would pull her into the earth, slither under her nails and into her veins.

She imagines herself growing into wild vines and riotous blossoms, bursting forth from the forest floor every spring, left alone to flower in her own time.

In the distance, skylarks swoop low over the Downs.

The Ashdown Forest blots the horizon with its black branches.

Her initials are carved onto half the tree trunks there, alongside Thomas’s.

In the months after the Night That Ruined Everything, she had retreated into those woods, walking for hours and hours alone, feeling like Persephone each time she emerged, slinking back from Hades, her hair still stinking of the sulfurous underworld.

Emily sinks down onto a half-collapsed stile. Violet comes to sit beside her, handing her the crumpled remains of the watercolor. A single brown eye glares up from the page, and Emily crushes her fist around it.

“Did that help?” Violet asks, and though Emily is grateful for the pains Violet took in preparing this whole mad venture, it has left her hollowed out like a scooped melon.

“Do you feel better?” Violet prompts when Emily presses her forehead to her cousin’s shoulder. “Now that you’ve had the chance to berate Robert Tweed in private?”

“No,” Emily says. “For I still have to marry him.”