Page 57 of Lady Like

Emily sits on her bed, watching Robert Tweed secure the locks upon her windows. “Since we know your history,” he says, holding up the key and shaking it on its ring.

Their return to Sussex has been delayed another day, but only so her betrothed can kill her lover—it’s so comically Shakespearean.

Her bedroom door will be locked as well, with not even her cousin allowed inside, Tweed informs her, until he returns tomorrow from Epping Forest, upon which he will wash Harry’s blood from his shirt, finish directing the porters with their trunks, and then take them both back to Middleham and straight to the chapel.

Tweed is a known marksman in the Downs, and Harry had only won against Edgewood because they dueled with feather-light foils.

Though it’s promising that Tweed’s poor eyesight prevented him from identifying Harry as a woman from the opposite side of the kitchen.

Or perhaps he had only seen what he expected.

If Harry kills Tweed, she’ll be arrested, or have to flee the country. At the very least, her inheritance will surely be forfeit.

There is no way this ends but in tragedy. Shakespearean indeed.

When Tweed arrived, Emily confessed she had come to London looking for a different husband. He screamed at her and shook her by the shoulders before confining her to her room. He was convinced that she had taken a lover in the city. Harry’s arrival had only confirmed that.

Tweed assured her that if she did not marry him, he would ruin her life.

He would ruin her family’s lives. They had a contract for her marriage, and he would take the Sergeants to court to see it upheld.

He would not be jilted. He would not be a cuckold.

Her absence had already caused enough of a stir in town, and there was no world in which Tweed would return to Middleham without Emily in the carriage beside him.

“Pardon me.” Tweed and Emily both turn to find Violet standing in the doorway, her box of hairpins held against her stomach. “Emily,” she says. “I thought I might plait your hair for you before bed.”

“I do not want the two of you alone together,” Tweed snaps, “as you have already conspired against me.”

“You’re welcome to stay and observe,” Violet says sweetly. “But there’s nothing nefarious one can get up to while plaiting, I assure you.”

Tweed scowls. “Be quick about it.”

Violet kneels on the bed behind Emily, taking her time unfastening Emily’s hair from its coiffure before combing through it with her fingers.

Her cousin has never before fixed Emily’s hair before bed, and Emily waits for Violet to whisper some secret words in her ear, or provide some wisdom or advice or concealed weapon with which she can stab Tweed through the eye when he next leans in to kiss her.

Some explanation for this pretend ritual.

She’d take anything. Even a single word of love or encouragement, though she hardly feels she deserves it.

But Violet ties a ribbon at the end of her plait and tucks it over Emily’s shoulder in silence.

She squeezes Emily’s arms, and Emily turns to her mirror as Violet leaves the room.

In the reflection, she watches Tweed approach her, and her muscles stiffen.

She feels his hands upon her shoulders, resting lightly.

He doesn’t grip her, yet her skin feels suddenly thin as pastry.

“I believe,” Tweed says, “it is customary for you to wish me luck before my duel.”

“Good luck, sir,” Emily says simply, praying that will sate him, and he will leave her be.

But then he adds, “Perhaps you might give me a token to wear with me when I duel. Something your buck will recognize as yours and know I carry your heart with me.” He stalks over to her trunk, where her dresses are folded in preparation for travel.

He shakes out each and tosses them across the bed beside her, until he emerges with the dandelion yellow dress she had worn to the races, so riotous and bright and singular.

Tweed holds it out to her, draped between his arms in a way that makes Emily think of carrying a body. “Cut a strip of fabric from this for me, Miss Sergeant.”

Anger pricks Emily’s eyes. How infuriating that rage should manifest as tears.

When she doesn’t move, Tweed shakes the dress at her. “Quickly, please. Or I might think you are going against me.”

Emily takes the dress from Tweed and lays it across her dressing table, then retrieves her scissors from her sewing box. They’re so small, it will take ages to cut a panel large enough for Tweed to deem it adequate.

Emily makes the first snip, and thinks of Harry in the dress shop, unlacing her corset.

Harry’s hands on her waist. The way she could not stop herself from staring at the pale globes of Harry’s breasts pushing up from beneath the material cinched under her arms. That queer thrill of desire she had not allowed herself to feel, let alone name, in years.

Another snip, and she feels Tweed’s hand caress the back of her head.

A shudder goes through her, and it occurs to her how similar the physical reaction of love and fear are, for she had shuddered at Harry’s touch too, but for different reasons.

“When you wake, I will likely be gone,” he says, “to kill that villain with whom you have so unwisely taken up. Then you and I shall return to Middleham posthaste. And you will never again behave the way you have during your time in the city.”

Another snip. The yellow fabric frays at the edges.

“Is there anything you wish to say to me?” Tweed asks.

So many things, but she voices none. Where is the spine she thought she had grown?

Turned back to pudding. She hasn’t changed.

Nothing has changed. How foolish to think a few months and the transformative power of love or whatever poetical tripe could change her entirely.

She would always shrink under Tweed’s hand, and the weight of her own reputation.

“Harry will not answer your summons,” Emily says. “You need not go to the forest tomorrow.”

Tweed laughs. “How admirable that you still wish to save him. I shall go and see for myself, I think, whether he would rather be dead or a coward. That will suffice.” He snatches the dress from the table, material sliding through Emily’s hands like water, and tears parallel to the strip she has carefully cut.

He yanks the stripe of material free, then wraps it around his wrist. Emily balls her hands into fists.

“There.” Tweed holds his arm up to the lamplight in order to better admire the band. Emily wonders if he will wear it to sleep that night, wrapped around his hand and tucked under his cheek.

Oh that I were a glove.

“Be ready to depart when I return,” Tweed says as he turns for the door, but pauses on the threshold. “How I pity you,” he says, his eyes meeting hers in the mirror. “You really do pick the rankest of men.”

If this were a theatrical drama, Emily thinks as she hears the door close and then bolt behind him, this would be the moment she would leap to her feet, unfurl the rope of bedsheets she had woven in secret, pick the lock on the window, and shimmy down to freedom.

She would run to Harry and take her in her arms and kiss her deeply before running away to become exiles together.

Or she would break the window and slit her wrists on the shards, drink the poison, stick a dagger through her own heart rather than live without love.

She would let a snake coil itself around her neck and sink its fangs into the same spot Harry had last kissed her.

It would be a tragedy, yes, but a poetic one.

She drops her head onto her arms on the desk, feeling too empty even to cry.

And hears a small thunk.

She sits up. The ribbon has fallen from her plait and fluttered to the floor, but something heavy dropped with it. Aside from the sound as it landed, she felt the weight too. A pin? It sounded far too heavy.

Emily drops onto her hands and knees, groping beneath her dressing table until her fingers brush cold metal and she stands, victorious, holding a key up to the light.

Emily almost laughs out loud. Hadn’t Violet told Emily, months ago, that she’d made copies of every key in the house for her fear of locking the baby in by accident?

She has twice misplaced the key to the front door and had to use one of the spares hidden in the garden.

And now her clever cousin has gone and slid the spare key to her room into her hair.

Here is her escape, should she choose to take it. She can leave, now. She can go back to Harry.

But if she spurns Tweed, he will hunt her forever, the hound after a rabbit he had long ago vowed he would be.

She has seen his dogged pursuit of her father’s land and the great lengths he would go to for it.

There is no reason to believe he’d behave any differently in his pursuit of her.

Had he not made that clear when he had sat, dry eyed, at his wife’s funeral?

When he’d sat on Emily’s father’s couch and squeezed the blood from her hand? He’d be a murderer before a fool.

She could have left with Harry that morning when she had appeared like a ghost in the kitchen.

She could have left with Harry when they first fell into bed together.

She could have left the moment Tweed had come to call at her parents’ house, the moment Thomas had been pronounced dead at her bedside.

It would have been difficult, but she could have made her way as a woman in the world.

And over and over, she has made excuses.

She stayed because of the love she has for her parents, her desire for an ordinary life, to protect Harry’s future.

She had never run because it would ruin her reputation.

But there is no one as concerned about Emily’s reputation as Emily herself.

How many times must she be presented with a chance to save herself—whether that chance was a trip to London or a beautiful woman or a literal goddamn key to a locked door, a symbol so on point it makes her want to scream—before she realizes that the only thing standing in her way is herself and the fear burned into her flesh like a brand of what people would think of her?

How much longer will she continue to sacrifice herself on the altar of her own reputation?

In her younger years, before optimism had started to feel less like a necklace of precious jewels and more like a millstone roped around her neck, Emily had walked the Ashdown Forest that bordered her parents’ farmland and imagined herself Rapunzel.

A beautiful girl alone and waiting for destiny to carry her one true love through the forest to her.

Now, though, the childhood fantasy only strikes her as deeply ironic.

Rapunzel’s tower was a prison, not romantic solitude, and she can see now there is no folkloric spell keeping her confined.

She is her own captor. One can be both princess and witch, prisoner of a tower built with her own two hands.

She presses the key into her palm until it leaves an imprint upon her skin. Let anyone say what they want about her. Call her a murderer or a whore, unmarriable or unladylike or unworthy. She is through defining herself by the measurement others take of her.

Tonight, she is tearing down her tower.