Page 55 of Lady Like
Emily and Violet walk the western trails of Hyde Park, lapping the perimeter of the green three times while Violet listens patiently to Emily’s story, unedited, beginning to end.
She had kept to herself for the first few days following parting ways with Harry, shut away in her bedroom in hopes that she might find her answer in quiet contemplation, but after four days, she is as muddled as before.
When she finally emerged from her room, Violet was already waiting with their parasols.
“I told her I’ll have my decision to her by the week’s end,” Emily finishes.
“So, tomorrow?” Violet asks.
Emily nods. “But I still have no notion what that decision will be.”
“First,” Violet says, “I must ask you something important.” Violet leans in and asks, her mouth against Emily’s ear, “Were there dildos, or was it mostly tongue?”
“Violet!” Emily slaps her cousin’s arm. “Vulgar!”
“What?” Violet bites the finger of her glove. “I’ve always wondered!”
“How did you know it was even possible?” Emily asks. Then, much quieter, “And how do you know what a dildo is?”
“Because I haven’t lived my whole life in a tiny Sussex village where the same aunties who rocked me in childhood now spread vicious rumors about my suitability as a bride!
” A pause, then Violet adds, “Also, I bought a book in preparation for my wedding night and it was much more extensive than I expected.”
Emily rolls her eyes. “Someone should have told me. I’ve only just learned the word Sapphist, and it would seem I am one.”
Violet loops her arm through Emily’s. “Do you love her?”
“I do,” Emily says sadly. “I can’t remember ever being this happy before.”
“That’s the somberest declaration of happiness I’ve ever heard.”
“Because there is no future for us.”
Violet squeezes her arm. “Marrying Mr. Lockhart could allow you to remain in her life.”
“I do not want to be forced to marry anyone, even a good man like Collin Lockhart. I want to choose for myself.”
“But that choice is legally unavailable.”
“I know.” A gust of wind strikes them, and Emily and Violet both clap their hands to their bonnets, holding them in place. “I wish I could go backward in time and do everything differently.”
“Such as what?”
She tries to trace her time in London backward, pin down the moment that falling in love with Harry had become inescapable, but nothing seems far enough. “Never meet Thomas?” Emily offers at last. “Never go to that village fair? Never let him bed me?”
“Thomas?” Violet’s brow puckers. “What has Tom Kelly got to do with any of this?”
“When given agency in my own life, I always choose unsuitable people,” Emily says. “He was just the first. I have proved again and again that I cannot be trusted. Which is perhaps why I should let this all go.”
“Unsuitability is as much a part of love as mutual respect and trust. It’s the fabric of the thing. No one ever falls for someone suitable.” Violet encourages a duck off the path in front of them with her foot. “If there was no inheritance to consider, would you stay with Harry?”
“It’s not that simple.”
“Why not? You love each other. You make each other happy.”
“Because Harry needs money from the prince to see her brother freed from the Marshalsea. And because I am promised to Tweed! And what about my parents? I have already put them through so much shame; can you imagine what would happen to them if I ran away with a woman? They’d bear as much shame as before. ”
Violet stops walking and Emily turns back, unsure what has stopped her. “Emily.” Violet folds her parasol and clamps it under one arm so that she is free to take both Emily’s hands in her own. “What happened with Thomas was not your fault.”
Emily laughs without meaning to, a harsh cackle that takes her by surprise, but she hadn’t expected such an outlandish statement from her sensible cousin. “I killed him,” she says, though she feels silly for explaining it.
“It was an accident,” Violet says. “You defended yourself against his advances. You may have been the cause, but that does not mean you were at fault. I’m sorry if I never said that to you.” Violet squeezes her hands. “I should have.”
“But I let him court me,” Emily says, for if Violet thinks her blameless, she surely doesn’t understand. “I let him come to me. I invited him into my bed, I was going to marry him.”
“None of that means you are to blame,” Violet says.
“You had the right to tell him no. Having bedded him before does not mean he is entitled to you in perpetuity. You said no. He ignored you. You acted in your own defense.” Another breeze tears a strand of Violet’s hair free from her bonnet and whips it in front of her face, but she makes no move to push it away.
Her eyes are fixed intensely on Emily. “People act as though shame is a disease. They’re terrified of catching it.
Not everyone in town blames you—most people never did.
It’s just a few meddling biddies making a show, and everyone else being too afraid to stand against them. ”
“It is not so easy,” Emily says, her voice thick. She cannot believe any of this. She doesn’t dare. If she does, her entire past will shatter and reform. Will she even know herself without Thomas Kelly’s shadow hanging over her? “You cannot simply offer me atonement.”
“Then you must find a way to give it to yourself,” Violet says.
“You have spent years walking around with this shackled to you. Even here, you cannot let yourself be free of it. You can be sad for it, you can be sorry, you can regret it, but you cannot let it define you. Nor can you let what others say bear so much weight.” She puts a hand to Emily’s cheek.
“You fought back. That is proof of your strength. Of knowing your own worth.”
A door opens inside Emily’s heart, just a crack. A sliver of light shines into a long-shadowed corner.
“I wish it had ended differently,” she says.
“Of course,” Violet replies. “But that does not mean you have to carry it forever.”
Emily presses a hand to her eyes, like she is shielding them from the sun, when really she is trying to push tears back.
For so long, she has scratched repeatedly at the Terrible Thing she had done and wondered why the wound wouldn’t heal.
Her past had been a bodily sensation. She had felt it every day on her skin, under her nails, in the lines of her palms.
But Harry had held her and kissed her and taken those palms in hers. She had seen Emily in darkness and told her how lovely she looked in black.
She feels restless. She wants to run, like she once had through the trails of the Ashdown Forest, her hands trailing along the branches and searching their shadows for Thomas Kelly. Instead she starts to walk, strides as long and quick as her tight skirt will allow.
“What do I do?” she asks, voice hoarse, as Violet catches up to her and loops a hand through Emily’s arm once more.
“I don’t want to marry Tweed, and I don’t want to marry Collin.
I cannot marry Harry but neither can I ask Harry to give up her inheritance or her brother’s freedom. I cannot ask her to choose.”
“Why not?”
“Because I’m afraid she’d pick me,” Emily says. “And regret it.”
“That would be her choice,” Violet says.
“You are not coercing her by asking, Emily, you must ask people for what you want. You must tell them what you need and let them give it to you and trust they do not mean you harm. In a perfect world, with no questions of money or sex or inheritances, what would you want?”
“I would want to be with Harry.”
“So does it matter if it isn’t marriage?”
“Of course it matters!” Emily says. “Marriage is everything. The whole world is centered around who you marry and marrying well and marrying for happiness and position and security and protection and life. It’s the only thing that gives a woman any existence.”
“Life is only centered around marriage in our very small and particular corner of the world,” Violet says.
“You think you are the first person in history who has had to bend the boundaries to make a space for themselves? I know your whole world—your whole life, particularly since Thomas—has been centered around marriage, but it doesn’t have to be.
You can change that. You can make a choice for everything to be different. What’s stopping you?”
“The world—” Emily says, but Violet interrupts with a wave of her hand like she’s clearing away a cloud of pipe smoke.
“—is made up of a bunch of rules that change all the time! Men wore dresses in the Bible and sold their daughters into slavery. Sod convention! Your life need not make sense to anyone but you, so long as you are happy.”
They have reached the edges of the park, falling into silence as they turn onto their street. When they reach home, Emily stops them on the doorstep and kisses her cousin upon the cheek. “I do love you,” she says.
Violet smiles. “And I you.”
“Tell me everything will turn out all right.”
“It might not,” Violet says. “The world will not remake itself for you, but neither should you remake yourself for the world.”
Emily presses her forehead to Violet’s shoulder. “Then what am I to do?”
“Make your own world,” Violet says, and touches Emily under the chin. “The two of you.”
Violet pushes open her front door and Emily follows her inside, her head spinning. It takes her a moment to notice the ornate walking stick leaning beside the door, though Violet is already frowning at it.
“Were you expecting company?” Emily asks as she hands Violet her parasol and bonnet.
“Not that I know of. Martin?” she calls.
“In the parlor!” her husband’s voice replies. “Is Miss Sergeant with you?”
Which is when Emily notices the silver top of the cane. A rabbit head, ears tucked back and eyes glazed.
Rabbits always scream when cornered.
“Yes, where is Miss Sergeant?” comes a second voice from the parlor. “I’ve come all this way to see her.”
Emily feels the ground tip beneath her. She had once thought herself Persephone, but never has she felt it so acutely as now. Six months of spring, and now here is the lord of the underworld to drag her back into his dark domain. Her time is up and the flowers will never bloom again.
Robert Tweed has come for her.