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Chapter 8

More Subterfuge

“G ood morning.” Effie led Julianna into the breakfast room where his friends were seated at a round table and a maid was fussing with a chafing dish on a side table. “You gentlemen will remember my sister?”

The Earl of Marsden dropped his newspaper, and for a moment Julianna thought he might fall off his chair.

The Earl of Harcourt recovered more quickly as amusement replaced startlement on his face. “Yes, of course. Lady Sarah , how nice to see you.” He shot a look at Lord Marsden that seemed to contain an instruction of some sort.

“We were so happy to hear you would be joining us,” Lord Marsden said smoothly, apparently having received the silent directive.

“Father regrets that he could not stay,” Effie said mildly, strolling over to help himself to some food, “but he asked me to convey his greetings to both of you.” He glanced over his shoulder at Lord Marsden. “In truth, he is avoiding you, Marsden, because he doesn’t want to talk to you about your gaols act anymore.”

“Edward!” Julianna exclaimed, feigning disapproval.

“’Tis the truth, and we are among friends.” Effie shot her a wink.

Julianna turned to the lords, continuing to play her part. “You will forgive my brother. Or perhaps it is my father who requires your absolution. One of the horses threw a shoe, which is why we arrived so late, and he was determined, despite the hour, to make the trip to Dover to catch his boat, which is set to depart this afternoon. Edward probably told you our father is sailing for the Continent to rejoin our mother in Italy.” She lowered her voice. “He is mad for her, even after all these years, and will happily abandon his children in favor of his wife.”

Effie snorted. They hadn’t discussed that last little embellishment. Effie’s playful demeanor had inspired Julianna to extemporize.

“I beg your pardon, Edward!” she said, affecting sisterly annoyance. “There is no call for such scorn. In truth, it is all rather romantic.” She performed a mock swoon. “Except for the part where I’ve been dumped on you, brother mine.”

The maid had gone and fetched the housekeeper, who’d heard the last bit of their exchange, and she began exclaiming over why no one had awakened her when Lady Sarah arrived. “I would have made up a room for you, my lady.”

“Oh, it was very nearly dawn by the time I arrived. I couldn’t possibly have slept. Edward walked me down to the sea, as my legs were in terrible need of stretching after the journey from Town.”

“Well, I shall see to your accommodations immediately. How long will you be with us?”

Oh, dear. When Julianna awakened this morning in Effie’s bed, she had been vulnerable—she had shed her armor with Effie as easily as she had shed her dress and stockings on the beach—so she had allowed his mischievousness, his spirit of adventure, to infect her. And she had so enjoyed spending time with his friends yesterday, so when he had beseeched her to spend the day with them, she had easily relented.

But she had been thinking only about today. About staying for breakfast, about spending a little more time with the gentlemen before she went back to her real life.

“Not long,” she said, vaguely, because she had to say something. “A night.” She would invent an excuse to leave before night fell. Perhaps her “father” had missed his ship after all and would come back to collect her. Or perhaps she had an uncle and aunt who were to be fetching her to return to London. She would think of something. But not without consulting Effie. She had gone a little rogue just then, with her ode to their fictional parents’ love, but it wasn’t wise to be getting too off-script. Effie actually had a sister named Sarah. She had no idea what kind of aunts-and-uncles inventory he had.

“You’re the one who made Father drive you here because you were bored in Town,” Effie said tartly. “And now you’re only staying one night?”

She shrugged with what she hoped was insouciance—Julianna had never been insouciant a day in her life. “’Tis a lady’s prerogative to change her mind.”

She breathed a sigh of relief when the housekeeper left, promising a room would be ready post haste.

Effie tiptoed to the door, shut it, and turned to the rest of them, grinning. Lord Harcourt made a show of applauding as if he were at the theatre, and Effie took an elaborate bow as if he were, too.

“Everyone did such a fine job,” he said when he righted himself. “Even you, Simon. We ought to form a theatrical troupe.”

Lord Marsden merely regarded Effie with his eyebrows raised.

“Oh, calm yourself,” Effie said. “We went swimming very early this morning and entered the house through my bedchamber window. He turned and inclined his head in Lord Harcourt’s direction. “Thanks for that, by the by.”

Julianna had no idea what “that” was.

“We merely meant to dry off, but we fell asleep, and rather than having Miss Evans sneak back out the window—”

“Window sneaking being properly a one-way activity,” Lord Marsden interrupted.

“Oh, he sneaked out this morning,” Lord Harcourt said.

“How do you know that?” Lord Marsden asked.

“ Regardless ,” Effie said, talking over them and turning to Julianna, “now that you are my sister, you may stay. The problem is we neglected to think through what ‘staying’ meant.” He grinned. “I suppose you shall have to stay indefinitely. For the duration of your trip, I mean.”

“No!” she protested.

“Miss Evans,” Lord Harcourt said, “do not fret. We shan’t keep you here against your will.”

It wasn’t that so much as she refused to be a permanent interloper, to intrude on the gentlemen’s holiday beyond more than a short visit. “I have to be back in London by Wednesday at the latest.” That was three days hence—three nights hence. She couldn’t spend them all here.

Could she?

“You are welcome to stay as long as you please, but we can come up with a scheme to get you out of here whenever you like,” Lord Harcourt said, and Lord Marsden murmured his agreement.

For his part, Effie made a vague noise of resigned acceptance. But, recovering quickly, he clapped his hands together. “What shall we do today?”

* * *

They spent the day gamboling. The cook packed them a picnic, and they rambled: through the village, along some roads that stretched out beside fields of barley and oats, and eventually back to the beach, where they set up their lunch.

“Oh, look, Effie, strawberries,” Lord Marsden said. “Have you told Miss Evans your theory of strawberries and salt?”

Julianna was gratified that Effie’s friends did indeed call him “Effie.”

Effie shot Lord Marsden a quelling look.

“You haven’t told her?” Lord Marsden, apparently immune to quelling looks, said. “Not even about the legs of lamb and pots of cream?”

“Oh, for heaven’s sake,” Effie said. “She isn’t interested in that nonsense.”

“Yes, she is,” Julianna said.

When Effie didn’t say anything, Lord Marsden turned to her and said, “We’re all food. People are food.”

“People are food?” she echoed, bewildered.

“ Simon ,” Effie said, his tone laced with affront. “You’re going to tell it all wrong.”

Lord Marsden made a gesture to indicate he was yielding the floor to Effie, who heaved a put-upon sigh.

“It is a metaphor,” he explained, “about how people sometimes find themselves born into the wrong families, and about how they might endeavor to find the people with whom they truly belong.”

“Please do go on.” She was terribly anxious to hear this theory. She hadn’t known how to react to Effie’s stories of his father’s cruelties. Her instinct had been to provide a solution, a means of escape, though she understood and respected his assertion that he was trapped by the title he stood to inherit. But perhaps she needn’t have fretted. Perhaps he had made his own way out of the mire with this theory of his—and these friends of his.

“Some people are strawberries, say,” Effie said, “and some people are salt. If you’re a strawberry born into a family of salt, you’re out of luck. Or, I should say, you have your work cut out for you. For you must go out into the world and find people who are pots of cream.”

Julianna was struck with the urge to laugh. She suppressed it. “I see.”

“And what do the salt people do?” Lord Marsden prompted.

“They’re off to find legs of lamb, which are improved by salting.”

Julianna did laugh then. She hoped it hadn’t come out as mocking. “How delightful and absurd.”

“Absurd?” Effie echoed, and she was almost certain his affront was put on. “It is perfectly logical. Simon—Lord Marsden—calls it ‘found family.’”

“Isn’t that lovely?” she exclaimed, understating the matter entirely, for the phrase had lanced her chest.

“That’s exactly what I said when he came up with it,” Effie said. If only it were so easy. If only one could “find” a family as easily as buying a newspaper. Julianna loved Amy and her nieces and nephew—she loved Mother, too, even if it was a more abstract sort of love—but she sometimes felt as if she didn’t quite belong with them. She was lonely in a full house. And, of course, there was the hole in her life where Father had been.

But now was not the time for rumination, or grief. She turned to Lord Harcourt, who’d been watching the exchange with a kind of silent fondness. “What do you make of Lord Featherfinch’s theory, my lord?”

“I think it brilliant, like he is.”

What a fine answer. What good men. Though they needled one another, they also respected and esteemed one another.

After lunch, Lords Marsden and Harcourt proposed an outing to Brighton. “If I’m truly to be writing for your magazine, Miss Evans, I want to have another look at the Pavilion—the exterior, I mean,” Lord Marsden said.

Effie begged off, so Julianna did, too, and soon she found herself alone with Effie at the sea. It was beginning to feel usual to find herself alone with Effie at the sea.

Until Effie took off his boots and proclaimed that he was going to wade in the water.

Julianna nearly swooned when she saw Effie’s bare feet. She’d had the same reaction this morning on the beach, when he’d strolled up shoeless. She comforted herself, though, that this swoon was a trifle less . . . emphatic than the first had been.

Of course, all Julianna’s swoons were interior. She was fairly confident that in general, she betrayed nothing of her true feelings. It was one of her particular talents.

There was something almost painfully intimate about seeing Effie’s bare feet. On paper, it made no sense. She’d seen much more of him yesterday. He’d been bare-chested during their swim, and though she hadn’t seen his manhood, she’d felt it when they embraced.

And she had been intimate with others. She had, to use a phrase she abhorred, given away her maidenhood—as if it were a flower that could be given only once before it wilted. She’d done it happily, knowing it was not a currency she needed, given that she had no plans to marry.

She was not a sheltered schoolgirl, was the point.

So what was it about a pair of feet—as nicely shaped as they were, they were just feet—that was making her wish she were the sort of woman who carried smelling salts?

She considered the concept of intimacy.

She had been intimate with others before, in the traditional carnal sense, but she had never, before Effie, been barefoot outside. She had never stepped into the sea, much less lain back in it and talked about liberation and the color of the sky.

And Effie was so attached to his fashionable footwear. For that reason, there was something about seeing him sans shoes that felt almost transgressive.

She smiled to herself, satisfied over having puzzled through the mystery of the bare feet. But then she sighed. Like a lovestruck young miss. How lowering. Effie was just so . . . everything. All the things she had said before: kind and intelligent and thoughtful. But also dashing and brave and capable of observing the world and reporting back on it in verse with a savage truthfulness that took her breath away.

They had embraced this morning, and kissed yesterday. They had slept in each other’s arms. And not once had he dropped to one knee to exhort her to marry him. They’d merely kissed, or embraced, when they felt moved to, as if these things were part of life, part of their relationship, but not something to fixate on.

Effie was utterly unlike most men of her acquaintance.

Julianna had had two affairs in her life, the more recent one with Charles, one of the engravers she used with some regularity. Charles had, after their initial, spontaneous encounter, proposed.

“You don’t want to marry me, and I don’t want to marry you,” she’d said—he had been a widower with no interest in a second wife.

When he’d apologized profusely and assured her that nothing untoward would ever happen between them again, she’d taken a leap and said, “I shan’t be marrying, ever. But need it follow that I shall never know the joys of the marital bed?”

“I don’t think they call it a marital bed for nothing,” he’d replied, his quick wit reminding her why she liked him so much. She’d had to spend a great deal of time convincing him that she was in earnest. Once she succeeded, they’d gone on to enjoy themselves for a few months. Their affair had run its course, and Charles continued to provide excellent engravings for the magazine. She remained fond of him, and she suspected he felt the same about her.

And then there had been Edith. Her one true lady friend.

Her onetime love.

She had been a sister of one of Amy’s friends, visiting for the summer. They’d talked endlessly about books, Edith eventually confessing to harboring secret aspirations of writing a novel. From there they’d progressed to reading aloud their favorite literary passages to each other. From there, they’d . . . progressed.

It had been wonderful, for a while, until the topic of marriage had come up.

“This doesn’t count,” Edith had said.

“What do you mean?” Julianna had braced herself, ready for the dagger.

She hadn’t thought to put her armor on—she’d been young enough then that armor hadn’t yet been her default wardrobe—so when Edith said, “This isn’t the same as lying with a man; I can still say I’m coming to my future husband with my maidenhood intact,” the dagger slid in, silent and lethal. Lady Macbeth herself could have been no more effective.

Julianna still had trouble understanding why she had been so hurt. It wasn’t as if Edith could marry her . Still, some foolish inner part had wondered—hoped—that Edith’s devotion to Julianna might have kept her from the marriage mart generally. Edith came from money; she didn’t need to marry. Perhaps girlish Julianna had thought the two of them could be spinsters together.

She had been out of her mind.

After some time passed, Julianna’s hurt had crystallized into something harder, darker. Anger, mostly, initially at Edith, but then at . . . everyone. Society. The rules they all labored under, which sometimes felt so arbitrary. So cruel.

Which she realized was absolutely ridiculous.

But she didn’t regret any of it, not the anger, not the underlying hurt from which that anger had alchemized. For it had reminded her what was important— the magazine above all . The heartbreak wrought by Edith had made Julianna into the businesswoman she was. The woman who had been in earnest when she’d told Charles she didn’t want to marry him.

So she was a wee bit worried about the way, when she was with Effie, she sometimes experienced that same out-of-her-mind sensation. Not that she was pining girlishly over him. It was a more literal sensation. Sometimes, Julianna’s mind simply . . . emptied out when Effie was near. She was back to being that mindless starfish she’d been that morning she impulsively left Amy’s house. With no thoughts left in the brainless void, all that was left was longing. Longing that felt disconcertingly familiar.

Effie loped back to the carpet she was sitting on and lay back, his hands clasped behind his head. “Do you think it a good thing or a bad thing that I’m suddenly remembering unpleasant childhood memories?”

Julianna had to take a moment to absorb the question, to wrench herself from memories of lovers past. “When did these memories start?”

“About a year ago.”

“Was there any precipitating event?”

“Not that I can think of.”

“Well, what was happening a year ago?”

“I suppose I was on an Earls Trip. We were in Cumbria. We were joined—’tis a very long story—by Archie’s now wife, Clementine, and her sister, Olive.”

“Did you emerge from that trip with any revelations? Was anything different about your life after versus before?”

“Olive and I became bosom friends. Correspondents.”

Julianna felt a twinge in her chest. Was she . . . jealous? No. Jealousy was for married couples, for people who had elected to tie themselves together permanently. As she had just been thinking, that wasn’t what was happening here.

“Don’t worry, Jules,” Effie said. “It’s not like you and me.”

“I’m sure I don’t know what you mean,” she said, mortified she was so transparent to him.

“Olive and I are only friends.”

“ We are only friends.”

He rolled onto his side, propped his head on one hand, and regarded her with an expression she could not parse. “Is that true?”

She didn’t know how to answer. All her introspection just now hadn’t really answered that question.

“Well,” he said, after a few beats of silence, “if you and I are only friends, we are very different sorts of friends from Olive and I. You and I—” He sat up suddenly.

“What is it?”

“Olive and I became friends rather quickly. The setting made for an accelerated path to familiarity. I cannot say more without betraying a confidence. But I did tell her about many aspects of my life. I unburdened myself in a way I hadn’t for some time.” He glanced over his shoulder at her. “I told her about you.”

“You needed to unburden yourself regarding me?” She wasn’t sure if she should be miffed or flattered.

“‘Unburden’ is perhaps not the correct word. It is . . .” He shook his head. “I also told her about my father. That is the relevant point. She was the first person I told about how much of a disappointment I am to my father. Well, the boys always knew that Father and I didn’t see eye to eye, but I’d never told anyone the extent of it. They thought I didn’t mind being a disappointment.”

“But you do mind,” Julianna said, as gently as she could.

“I try not to mind,” Effie said quietly.

I try not to mind. Oh, her heart ached for him.

“On that trip last year, I told Olive the true contents of my jumbled heart. And now that you mention a timeline, I think the nightmares—the nightmare memories—started after that. In retrospect, it was as if I’d opened a dam. Do you think that’s possible?”

“I do indeed. I don’t have anyone like that in my life, but I have often heard my sister say she feels better after having tea with a bosom friend who lives nearby.”

“But I don’t feel better. I can’t sleep!”

“Is it possible you will feel better? Perhaps the dreams are coming now that the dam is open, but the water supply is limited? Perhaps it’s spring and the water is high, but by summer the riverbed will be dry. Perhaps you merely need to survive the current flood.” She shrugged. “I am no expert. As I said, I have never had a bosom friend like that.”

Except you. She wanted to say it aloud but held back for reasons she couldn’t articulate.

The thought wasn’t quite correct, anyway. Effie was a bosom friend, but he was also something else, wasn’t he, if she was being honest with herself? One didn’t kiss one’s bosom friends the way she and Effie had kissed.

One didn’t turn into a mindless starfish around one’s bosom friends.

Effie had been correct when he said that they were “different sorts of friends.”

“I should like you to meet Olive,” Effie said, drawing Julianna from her ruminations.

Julianna wanted to ask Effie about what was going to happen when they were back in London. She would meet Olive, and then what? They could hardly carry on the way they had been here, lazing about and bearing their souls, interspersed with the occasional kiss or ardent embrace.

Could they?

She and Charles had, for quite some time.

But no. Effie was the heir to an earl. One didn’t carry on with the heir to an earl. The heir to an earl needed a wife .

And . . . there it was. Julianna couldn’t get a breath in. The truth had pushed all the air out of her body. Earlier, she had observed that she couldn’t understand why she had been so hurt by Edith, why her departure after that lovely summer had inflicted a wound that felt so much graver than garden-variety heartbreak. It had to do with marriage. Julianna had spent so much time thinking about marriage, even if only to resist it. She didn’t want to marry. And even if she’d changed her mind on that front, she couldn’t have married Edith.

So to have Edith flit off and marry her gentleman correspondent, to so easily assume the mantle of a conventional life, her “transgressions” with Julianna erased by her easy embrace of matrimony. . . well, yes, that explained a great deal to Julianna about her own mind. All that anger, at both Edith and at society.

And it explained what was going on here. Like Edith, Effie would eventually leave Julianna behind. Perhaps he wouldn’t do it as blithely as Edith had, but he would have to.

Julianna blew out a breath, a bit overcome by having hit on a truth she hadn’t realized was buried inside her.

But she could not betray this truth. None of this was Effie’s fault, not even the fact that if they were to embark on a long-term liaison, he would one day leave her to marry another. He was as constrained by societal mores as she was. Perhaps more. At least she had her magazine.

The magazine above all. It had never felt truer, or more important.

“Olive would be exactly the sort of reader to appreciate your travel accounts,” Effie said, apparently oblivious to Julianna’s swirling thoughts. “She has a passion for traveling, a passion that has mostly gone unindulged. She did recently accompany her sister and Archie on their honeymoon to Italy, though.”

Julianna told herself to set aside her revelation, at least for now. It wasn’t going to do any good to dwell on it at the moment. Besides, her inner editor had perked up. “What part of Italy did Miss Morgan visit?”

“The north. Lombardi and Piedmont.”

“Did she see the Shroud of Turin? If so, would she be willing to write an account of it?” Julianna had been thinking that one way to satisfy Mr. Glanvil’s increasing interest in “moral” content—by which he meant biblical content—might be to disguise it as travel reporting.

“She did, and I believe she would be delighted to do so. However, I must warn you that she maintains some rather unconventional opinions as to the origins of the shroud. Some—not I, mind you—might even call them blasphemous opinions.”

“All the better!” Julianna refrained from applauding but only just. “I shall write out a brief and have you pass it on to her, and if she is agreeable, she can send me her reflections directly. I will of course outline the terms. I don’t pay first-time writers very much, but if she will accept . . .” Baroness Cartworth’s report on the Lake District aside, Julianna was not accustomed to having members of the aristocracy write for her. “She probably doesn’t mind how much I pay.” Julianna could pay Miss Morgan half the magazine’s monthly budget and it would be a crumb to her.

“Oh, no, I think she will mind exceedingly. She is . . . Well, it’s not my place to say, but I don’t think she would object to my telling you that she is saving up for something.” He paused. “Not unlike you.”’

“You are referring to my fantasy of purchasing a press.”

“I am indeed, but I wouldn’t consider it a fantasy.”

“It was always thus, but it became even more so when I took leave of my senses and came here.”

“We need to move you out of the hotel!” Effie exclaimed. “How foolish of me not to think of it earlier. You can’t be paying for it when you’re staying with us.”

“I can’t stay with you!”

“Why not? You are my sister, and everything is very proper.”

“I know, but—”

“I am happy to have you.”

“But are the others? I gather that this trip has been a long-standing masculine tradition.”

“If Clementine and Olive Morgan could gate-crash—that’s your terminology, not mine—last year’s Earls Trip, you may do the same this year.” He smirked. “Perhaps next year will be Simon’s turn.” The smirk turned into a genuine guffaw.

“What is so amusing?”

“The idea of Simon doing anything so disrespectable.” He shook his head. “No, next year’s Earls Trip will be a return to form, just the three of us gents. I would bet my title on it.”

Julianna refrained from pointing out that by his own admission, Effie didn’t value his title very highly so perhaps he ought to find something else with which to wager in favor of saying, “What is disrespectable about my staying with you? You just got done explaining that I’m your ‘sister’ and that everything is in fact very proper.”

“Everything is very proper as far as the household staff is concerned.”

“But not as far as we’re concerned?”

“Oh, pish, we don’t care about propriety.”

“We don’t?”

“Are you not the one who made a speech on this very topic not two days ago?” He made a silly face as he raised his voice and mimicked her. “‘I am not a refined lady whose reputation is a fragile glass bauble in need of protecting.’”

She rolled her eyes—fondly. She wished she had a pillow to throw at him.

He grew serious. “Of course you must not stay if you truly do not want to. And of course I care about propriety insofar as it is important to you.” He paused before revisiting a previous question. “And we are friends. It’s only that sometimes it feels as if you are a friend I can never be without. I am terribly afraid that when this trip is over, you will insist that we go back to the way we were before. That I’m to climb back into my cage and communicate with you only through letters.”

She thought it was curious he’d used the image of climbing back into a cage. She herself had been thinking of them as birds in adjoining but separate cages. She had used the words freedom and liberation when they’d been swimming together. If she felt liberated when she was with Effie, did if follow that she was going to feel imprisoned when they parted ways? Which they were going to have to do, of course. Being left heartbroken was one thing. Being left heartbroken because your beloved had plans to marry someone else was quite another. Now that she understood that, she merely needed to integrate this truth into her conduct. Into her plans.

“Don’t confirm my fear. Or deny it.” His tone was growing increasingly urgent, and he took her hands in his. “Don’t say anything. Just let me be with you, whether that’s only for the rest of the afternoon, or until you have to go back to London.

“And if you are truly harboring fears that the others wouldn’t welcome you, please set those aside. They themselves said only a few hours ago that they would be happy to have you, and they don’t lie.”

Julianna could feel herself softening. No, she was already soft. Effie made her soft and had been doing so for quite some time. What was happening now was a process by which she let him see that she was soft. Not knowing how to put any of this into words, she tried a small smile.

He heard what she wasn’t saying and smiled back. “It’s only three more nights, yes? You said you had to be back in London on Wednesday, in order to be at the printers for Thursday morning.”

“Yes.”

“So it’s settled. Stay.”

“All right.”

How easy it had been to agree, to simply acquiesce. She ought to take that as a warning. She could stay for the rest of her holiday, but then she was going home—alone.

He rolled over onto his back and stared at the sky. “Now tell me about November. Or December.”

He didn’t have to ask her twice to get her to talk about the magazine, especially after her episode of inner turmoil and startling self-discovery. “I have the most wonderful fashion catalog planned for December. There is one dress in particular that is most extraordinary, or must be in person.” Effie closed his eyes as if to better picture the dress she was about to describe. “The accompanying text explains that the overskirt is lemon yellow and the underskirt burnt orange. Can you imagine? The wearer would look like a sunrise.”

“Like this morning’s sky.”

“Like this morning’s sky,” she echoed.

He grinned and opened his eyes. “I do so love your year-end fashion spreads.”

“I do, too.”

He rolled over, propped his head up on one hand, and regarded her with a quizzical expression.

“What is the matter?” she asked.

“Nothing at all! Just that even now, even after all our letters, after years of friendship, I occasionally encounter an aspect of you that remains mysterious. For example, I never thought you’d be the type to grow exercised over lemon-yellow silk. I’d have thought that was more my department.”

“I wouldn’t personally, but I am the type to grow exercised over the notion of pleasing my readers. And of selling magazines. But I do appreciate your point. You are noting the chasm between my apparent enthusiasm for fashion and the dull dresses I wear.” At least she was wearing the blue-gray today rather than the merely gray.

“I wouldn’t call them dull!” Effie protested.

“I would, and you should.” Julianna didn’t care for deluding herself. “I do like fashion, but I prefer to save my money for larger pursuits.” Why was she so defensive? Effie knew about the printing press. And she wasn’t ashamed of her paltry wardrobe. Her dresses were always clean and tidy, and she had a new one made every year or two, when one needed to be retired. But since she only had the two, she couldn’t justify one of them being one of the outrageous confections she printed in her pages. Her wardrobe was another example of one of her adages in action: You can’t miss what you don’t let yourself want.

It occurred to her that she’d had the identical thought about sea-bathing. She hadn’t let herself want to sea-bathe. Then she’d gone sea-bathing, and it had been a revelation.

She didn’t quite know how she was going to go back to a life without it.

* * *

Back at the house, Julianna was shown to a graciously appointed bedchamber done in shades of cream and pink. It was rather like being inside a cross between a French pastry and a fluffy pillow, but she didn’t hate it. French pastries were delicious, and fluffy pillows were cozy.

After Mrs. Mitchell left, Julianna lay back on the bed and considered her next move.

She thought about how relieved she’d been when Effie hadn’t proposed after they kissed that first time, back at the Old Ship. How he hadn’t seemed pressed to analyze their situation. He had said, Just let me be with you, whether that’s only for the rest of the afternoon, or until you have to go back to London.

Until she had to go back to London. Yes. That was what she wanted.

She wanted him so very, very much. She pined for him, and she didn’t think she’d ever pined for anyone or anything in her life. Except perhaps a printing press.

She just needed to keep whatever happened between them contained. She needed Effie to be more Charles than Edith. Like Charles, except more time—and place—limited. They had three days left, after all, and she rather suspected the pining was mutual.

Could they do that? Could she do that?

Yes. She was no longer the naive girl she had been the summer of Edith.

Effie stuck his head in, almost as if she had summoned him. Perhaps she had. “Everything up to snuff?”

She sat up. It was now or never. “Yes, thank you. Everything is lovely.”

“We dine at seven. Shall I ride to the Old Ship and collect your things? There doesn’t seem any point in maintaining your room there.”

“No. Well, yes, I would appreciate that. But would you come in first, please?”

He did as she asked, and when she added, “And shut the door behind you,” his eyes twinkled mischievously.

She patted the bed next to her, and as he sat, he said, “Why do I get the feeling you are about to suggest a most amusing diversion?”

She smiled. “Because I am.”

He performed the single clap she had come to understand was an expression of excitement.

She didn’t see any reason to dissemble. “Would you come to me after dinner?”

“Of course. I—Oh.” His eyes widened. “ Oh .”

“If you like,” she added, breaking with his gaze due to an unexpected surge of bashfulness. Followed by an expected surge of annoyance because Julianna did not do bashful .

By the time she got herself in order, Effie’s eyes had gone from wide to knowing. Practically smouldering.

“Yes,” he said. “I would like that very much.”