Page 33 of Lady Like

Emily dreams of Sappho.

Or, not Sappho, but a woman her mind tells her is Sappho, cobbled together from component pieces of the day and Emily’s own imaginings, shades of Eve and Rapunzel and Persephone, with the world blossoming at her touch.

She’s an actress, a woman with many faces, strutting the stage in a Shakespearean doublet.

She’s the painted women calling to her from the balconies of Ranelagh Garden, the older cousin of a neighbor who had spent a summer in Sussex and fascinated Emily with her coarse, curly hair and freckled arms. She is Harry.

She is Emily. She is a rabbit, cornered and shrieking as Tweed stands over her, rifle to her breast.

Emily sits up. The wan light of morning cascades through the rippled glass windows.

She had fallen asleep while Harry was still undressing, and assumed Harry would crawl into bed beside her, so she’s surprised to instead find Harry squashed into the armchair beside the hearth, her legs drawn up to her chest, like a present wrapped in a too-small box.

Emily is struck by the sight of Harry so unrefined, with her feet bare and her white calves peeking out from the blanket in which she is wrapped.

Emily puts a hand on the covers beside her, not sure what her disappointment can be mapped to.

It flows inside her, a river without a source.

The last time she had slept with someone beside her, it had been Thomas.

She had woken beside him in the new daylight, expecting to feel changed and instead feeling hollowed out and alone.

She has never told anyone what happened with Thomas.

She had never thought of it as anything but a secret to guard.

Middleham would think what they wanted no matter what she said.

Every person she has met in London only knows the genteel version of herself she has put forward—and she’s hoped that’s all they will ever know, the duke especially.

If all goes according to her plan, no one will ever know everything about her.

Before she left home, the thought would have been a relief.

Now, it makes her feel as though she is standing by herself in a crowded room.

She has a choice, she realizes. A choice to tell someone the truth. To tell someone the worst thing she’s ever done, and know that they know it.

Emily scoots to the edge of the mattress, quilt wrapped around her shoulders, and says quietly, “Harry.”

Harry jolts awake, wiping her mouth. Her hair sticks straight up on one side. “Good morning.”

“Are you awake?”

“I can be.” Harry stretches with her hands linked above her head and smiles at Emily, though when Emily fails to return it, she sobers. “What’s the matter?”

“I have to tell you something.”

“Go on.”

“I’m afraid.”

“Of what?”

“To tell you. That you’ll think of me differently.”

Harry sits up, leaning forward to Emily. “You can tell me anything.”

Emily licks her lips. Perhaps she is delirious with exhaustion. With memories of Thomas. With Sappho still dancing through her mind, unbridled and wild. And she knows suddenly, with absolute clarity, that she wants Harry to know. She wants Harry to know all of her.

“When I was eighteen,” Emily says, “I killed a man.”

“You…” Harry blinks hard, then shakes her head, as though to make certain she really is awake and has not dreamed this startling sentence. She scoots forward to the edge of her chair until her knees nearly touch the footboard of the bed. “You…what?”

“His name was Thomas. I met him at a village fair when I was seventeen. He was working as a builder in Brighton, and he was like no one I’d ever met before.

He bought me dirty books and dosed me with whiskey and taught me things about science that God doesn’t want us to know.

He was charming and witty and I thought he was kind. ”

Harry doesn’t say anything. Emily takes a breath.

Perhaps this was a mistake, but she cannot stop now.

She began with the ending for exactly that reason.

“He wasn’t kind to his dogs, though. Or servants.

Or most women. Or me, really. I know that now.

But he paid me attention, and I mistook that for love.

And when he asked me to marry him, I said… ”

Emily stops. Her chest is trembling, like her bones are pressing in on her lungs to stop her breath and keep her silent. She cannot tell if the nausea crawling up her throat is a sign to keep it to herself, or the feeling of a poison finally leaving her.

Harry reaches out suddenly and puts her hand atop Emily’s, where it rests on the bed. Emily lets out a sound like a sob, though her eyes are dry. Harry presses her hand around Emily’s, thumb against the center of her palm. She waits. Emily takes a breath.

“I said yes,” Emily says. “My parents wouldn’t stand for me having anything to do with him, which only made me want him more.

So we decided to elope. We arranged a night he’d come and fetch me, and we would abscond to Scotland together.

On the appointed night, he climbed up through my window, but he was…

different. Coarse and gruff and so rough with me.

Or I suppose he was always that way, but I hadn’t noticed before.

Or it hadn’t mattered. Or I thought he’d never turn his hand on me. I don’t know.”

“You don’t have to explain,” Harry says. “I understand.”

Emily almost sobs in relief. She wants to fall forward with her face in Harry’s shoulder. “In that moment, I finally saw him for who he really was. So I told him I had changed my mind and didn’t want to marry him.”

Emily takes another breath, expecting it will tremble the way the previous ones had. But her chest feels suddenly looser. Her lungs have unclenched and she takes her first deep breath that morning—perhaps her first deep breath since Thomas crawled through her window.

“He called me a whore,” Emily says. “And a tease and said I had already shown him the best china, so to speak, so what did he even need to marry me for? He pushed me down on the bed, and I knew he meant to hurt me.”

Emily puts a hand to her face. Harry still cradles the other, her skin soft and warm against Emily’s palm. “I kicked him,” Emily says. “Or struck him, somehow, and he fell and he hit his head on the bedpost and…he stopped moving.”

She closes her eyes and presses her face to her knees.

After a moment, she feels Harry’s hand on the nape of her neck, the touch so gentle and tender Emily feels undeserving.

She wants to shout at Harry, Did you not listen to everything I said?

You should not want to touch me with such tenderness!

As if in defiance of the thought, Harry reaches out and takes Emily’s face in her hands.

“You defended yourself. You protected yourself. There is no shame in that.”

Emily lets out a wet laugh. “You needn’t spare my feelings.”

“I’m not—Emily, he was trying to coerce and attack you. Even if he was not, you should have been able to refuse him without consequence.”

“He was there because I asked him.” She sits up, rubbing a hand over her eyes. “I invited him in. You can’t make a deal with the devil if you don’t open the door to him.”

“Who told you that?” Harry asks.

“Everyone,” Emily says.

“Was there an investigation?”

Emily nods. “I told the magistrate he had come to take me away, then fell and struck his head, and it was ruled an accident.”

“Did you tell them he tried to take advantage of you?”

“Well, he didn’t. I had already given myself freely.”

“That isn’t—”

She cannot bear to argue this point, and when she holds up her hands, Harry goes silent at once.

“It wouldn’t have mattered. Thomas was suddenly a good man with a family and bright future that I’d stamped out.

No one would speak to me or associate with me after that, let alone marry me.

No one but Robert Tweed, because he wants my father’s land for his road.

I’ll be as beaten down at his hand as I would have been at Thomas’s.

I escaped a bad marriage only for it to send me into another one.

” She holds up her hand. “ Out damned spot. Isn’t that how the line goes? ”

“Emily,” Harry says. “I’m so sorry.”

“What for?”

“I’m sorry anyone made you think you were any less for the way a man treated you.”

Emily meets Harry’s eyes. Though she cannot yet make herself believe those words, something about the sincerity in Harry’s voice makes her feel, for the first time, that someday she might. “You can go back to sleep now. I shouldn’t have woken you.”

“I’m glad you did.”

“But now you’ll…” Emily pauses. Now someone knows all of her, and even though there’s relief in that, she also wants to know how she may have changed Harry’s opinion of her.

She’s spoken the truth, and she wants it in return.

She clears her throat. “Now, will you think of me forever as the woman who killed her intended?”

“Hardly. I’ll think of you as the woman who licks your cake plate.” Emily laughs, but Harry isn’t finished. “Who shouts at that boy who threw a pie at me. I’ll think of you as the woman stuck in the mud with one shoe. I’ll think of you as you are. As I know you to be.”

Emily presses her palms to her cheeks to stop herself shaking her head.

It’s too much—for Harry to know it at all, but even more so for Harry to respond in fierce defense of Emily, as though what she had done was righteous.

The idea of having to reconfigure herself around that idea is too overwhelming, and too dangerous.

She cannot let this kindness warp her self-image into something false.

She cannot let herself off so easily. “Every single thing I’ve ever done is because I was the woman who killed Thomas Kelly.

I’ll never know who I might have been otherwise, and if I’m not that, I don’t know who I am. ”

“You can be whoever you want. You’re hardly the first woman to run away to London to escape a past she’s been unfairly saddled with.

Nor the first to remake herself in defiance of others’ expectations.

” Harry runs a hand over her face, then says, “Why don’t you try it on for one night?

Try being exactly who you want to be with no hesitation? ”

“What opportunity would I have for that?”

“ Macbeth ends next week. There’s always a company party after a show closes. Why don’t you come as my guest? You can see the show and then come drink too much with people who don’t know you and you can present to them whatever version of yourself you want. You can be anyone, real or pretend.”

“Are you inviting me to meet the Sapphists?” Emily asks, and she manages to muster a smile.

Harry smiles in return. “I’ll make sure they go easy on you. I’ll be there, looking out for you. But let me give you this: one night of doing whatever your heart tells you.”

Emily considers this. The idea thrills her.

She could be anyone. She could say yes to anything.

Eat what she likes. Drink whatever she wants and in any volume.

Wear a ridiculous dress or sing while standing on a bar top or dance with a stranger.

All the things she had once thought she might like, but after Thomas, could never imagine doing for fear of rumors collecting on her like burrs. “I’d like that,” she says.

“But I swear to God, Miss Sergeant, if this was all a pretense to see me humiliate myself as Macbeth—”

Emily laughs. She feels suddenly exhausted, as though she hasn’t slept at all. “Come here,” she says, scooting backward and patting the mattress beside her. “We can both get a few more hours of sleep.”

Harry smiles. “I’m all right here.”

“You could have gotten in bed last night,” Emily says quietly. “Even though I was already asleep—you wouldn’t have woken me.”

And Harry, silhouetted against the white pane of sky, turns her head away, so Emily sees only her strong profile, backlit by the morning light.

The sunlight is luminescent on her round cheeks, turning her skin the liquid gold of honey just lifted from the hive.

“With the greatest of respect, Miss Sergeant,” Harry says, “I could not.”