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Chapter 12

Advice for the Heartsick

E ffie stayed up, keeping a vigil of sorts in the dark. At various points, he told himself to stand down. The problem was, he didn’t know how to. How could he possibly sleep in this last stretch of hours before she left? How could he do anything with her under the same roof, here but as good as gone? He was in limbo, in a terrible purgatory of his own making.

An idea took root. He pulled out the last letter he had yet to answer for December.

Dear Miss Heartsick,

I probably ought not to answer your letter, not because you are unmarried and appealing to the author of a column entitled “Advice for Married Ladies,” but because I am unqualified to do so. I do not know if it is possible to die of a broken heart. Plays, and poetry, tell us it is possible. Why, I wonder, did Shakespeare write tragic lovers whose fates ended in death and comedic lovers who were united in marriage by play’s end but nothing in between? Where is the story of the brokenhearted fool who picked himself up and kept going? The spurned lover who did not drown?

Perhaps you can write such a story for yourself. I hope so.

Yours, Edward Astley

He knew he could not sign the letter with any version of his real identity for publication, but for now, it felt good to affix his name to the sentiment.

Having been somewhat calmed by the act of writing a letter, Effie thought of his dear friend Olive Morgan, to whom he had not written as he’d intended. He had been too caught up in the events of the past week. Olive, no stranger to heartbreak, once told him that when she was in despair, she forced herself to act like a happy person. I put on a bonnet—the more outrageous the better—and take myself to the park and smile at people who smile at me. I’m not really smiling, mind you; I’m merely molding my lips into the shape of a smile, but no one knows the difference. Eventually, and for increasingly long stretches of time, I myself forget the artifice.

Comporting himself as a happy person was not within Effie’s reach. He wasn’t that good an actor. But he could act like a person who cared about himself. He thought about what Olive would do in this situation, or Archie and Simon. What Archie had done by sneaking into Effie’s room at night and sleeping next to him to ward off nightmares. He was lucky enough to have people in his life who cared about him. He needed to act that way toward himself.

That person, he decided, would change into a freshly laundered nightshirt. That person, understanding that sleep was restorative, that it, as Shakespeare said, “knits up the raveled sleave of care,” would fluff up his pillows and pull the covers up over his body.

That person would then lean over and blow out the candle on his night table and try to rest, even if dawn was just around the corner.

* * *

When the vigil was over and light began to slice in through a gap left in the curtains he hadn’t properly closed, Effie got up. Put one foot in front of the other and took himself to the breakfast room. He was the first one there, which was novel. He wondered if the boys or Julianna would turn up first. He wondered which option he preferred.

Everyone appeared at the same time, and there was a flurry of morning greetings in which he did not participate.

Neither did he make a plate for Julianna, as had become his habit. It wasn’t that he wanted to be hurtful, just that he was so hurt, so set back on his heels, he couldn’t bring himself to consider what she would like, to deliver her a plate of the choicest morsels, as if this were a morning like any other.

The conversation was somewhat stilted. Archie carried the brunt of it, asking Julianna technical questions about the printing and distribution of the magazine. Julianna kept looking at Effie as if she were waiting for him to chime in, and indeed, on other occasions, he would have been very happy to participate in a conversation about such matters—he had learned a great deal being in her orbit all these years—but this morning, he felt as if he were separated from the conversation by a pane of glass. A wavy pane that, in addition to muting sound, warped sight. He was outside looking in.

He checked his timepiece. “I suppose we ought to go if we’re to”—he glanced around, noting that there was a maid in the room clearing the remains of their breakfast—“meet Uncle and Aunt at the appointed time.” In truth, Julianna was planning to take the eleven o’clock Brighton-to-London coach, and he didn’t want her to miss it.

Well, he did want her to miss it. But he didn’t. He wanted her to want to miss it.

He was as befuddled as he’d been on the journey here.

The boys stood when Julianna did. Effie got to his feet as well. There was a brief moment of discomfiture while they all stood staring at each other around the table.

Archie broke the silence by turning to Effie and asking, “Shall we accompany you and Lady Sarah to meet your aunt and uncle?”

“Yes, thank you.” He could tell Julianna was surprised, but he wasn’t going to turn down the company of his friends on this painful errand.

“All right?” Archie whispered, after Julianna had gone to fetch her reticule. Archie, who was always insisting he wasn’t smart, had an uncommonly high degree of acumen when it came to sentiment and relationships.

“Not really,” Effie said. He would tell them the rest later. Or perhaps he wouldn’t. He still had that feeling of being isolated behind a pane of glass. He’d have thought that feeling would be limited to Julianna, but he felt it as regarding the boys, too.

They took Archie’s coach, and the silence that settled as they rumbled out of Hove was dismayingly awkward—or it would have been had Effie not still been tucked away behind his glass. The protective pane ratcheted the discomfort level down to mild.

“Miss Evans,” Simon said, “I’ve been thinking about my piece on the Pavilion, and I wonder if I might ask you a few questions, just to focus my mind before I begin it in earnest.”

“Of course.”

They talked, and while Simon was, ostensibly, speaking to Julianna, he kept eyeing Effie. Occasionally, he made brief eye contact with Archie.

When they alit, Julianna thanked them for allowing her to impose upon their holiday.

“I assure you, it was no imposition,” Simon said. “I ought to be thanking you for that tour you contrived.”

“Well,” she said, hitching her reticule into the crook of her elbow, “I’ve had the most wonderful time.” She was speaking to all of them but looking at Effie.

The boys echoed her sentiments and started to fall back. Simon succeeded, but Effie managed to grab Archie’s arm to keep him by his side. He probably looked like a right fool, but he didn’t care. He needed reinforcements.

“I have finished my Mrs. Landers letters for December.” He held them out, but Julianna merely looked at them as if he were holding a strange object she didn’t recognize. “You may as well take them now.”

“Thank you,” she said after shaking her head as if to rouse herself from a daydream. “I am sure I will return to the office to find a stack of new entreaties. I will send you the lot of them so you may begin thinking about January.” She paused. “A new year.”

“Yes,” he said, and he didn’t know which statement he was agreeing with—that he could start the January letters, or that January would be the start of a new year. He decided on the latter. “A new year.”

A new year in which everything would be the same as ever. He would still be behind his glass. In his cage.

Oh, such maudlin comparisons. He would have laughed at himself were he not so deep inside his own overwrought metaphors. At least he wouldn’t be meeting his watery end in a painful drowning.

“Goodbye, Miss Evans,” Effie said, suddenly needing this leave-taking to be over. Addressing her so formally hurt him, but sometimes a smaller hurt had to be tolerated in order to protect against a greater wound.

Well, he’d already sustained the greater wound. Perhaps the smaller hurt was a way of dressing the existing laceration, staunching the bleeding.

What he hadn’t banked on was that it would hurt her, too. Her eyes filmed with tears. She pulled herself together quickly, though: she straightened her spine, adjusted her posture, and said, “Goodbye, Lord Featherfinch.”

Yes. It was painful, wasn’t it? Julianna had referred to him as “Lord Featherfinch” a few times, but it had always been in company, when it would have been improper for her to have used anything but his title. In those instances, she’d been talking about him, to the boys. Lord Featherfinch told me you were staying at the home of one of your friends.

What do you make of Lord Featherfinch’s theory, my lord?

She had never addressed him directly by his title.

He couldn’t truly be upset, though, could he? He had started it.

After a long moment of silence, Archie stepped forward and helped Julianna into the coach—she was the last passenger to board, and everyone was waiting on her.

The coach rolled away, and that, apparently, was that.

“Do you want to talk about it?” Archie asked gently, as their own conveyance rumbled off.

“Do I want to talk about what?” Effie said—disingenuously, he knew.

Archie raised his eyebrows.

Effie sighed. “I’m not sure what there is to talk about. Everything has unfolded as expected.”

“What does that mean?”

“Julianna and I cannot be together, for all the reasons I enumerated when we first spoke on the matter.”

“And nothing about the past week changed any of those reasons?”

“She certainly seemed not to mind that you were a man,” Simon said with a smirk, “and if I recall correctly, you identified that as an ‘unscalable obstacle.’”

Effie moved his mouth into the shape of a smile, because that was what one did when one’s friend said something amusing—he was attempting to follow Olive’s advice about acting. “Indeed, but I am still me, and she is still her, and that is that.”

Effie had the novel experience of wishing the holiday would end. Usually, he dreaded returning home. Usually, being with Simon and Archie, wherever they were, felt more like home than Number Twenty Berkeley Square.

Now, though, with several days of holiday yet before him, he longed for the silent, sterile halls of the London house. For the sanctuary of his bedchamber within it. Would he take down thechartreuse-sky painting? He would have to. It would hurt too much to look at it.

Would he return to having the nightmares? They had been absent here, but was that because someone, be it Julianna or Archie, had always been sharing his bed? Or did he dare to hope they were permanently gone?

So many questions.

He pasted on another of Olive’s non-smiles. “Mrs. Mitchell tells me there is a Druidic stone of some note nearby. Shall we go see it?”

The boys both eyed him skeptically. They hadn’t excepted him to suggest a benign outing.

But what would a happy person do on holiday? A happy person would go see a stone in a field. What else? A happy person would catch up on his correspondence—his real correspondence, not his pseudonymous, advice-dispensing correspondence.

By which he meant he would write to Olive.

He probably ought to write to Julianna, too. He had said he would. He’d urged her to resume their correspondence, even offering to pay for it. He had, at the time, thought of writing to her as a lifeline. She didn’t want him as a lover anymore, but, he’d reasoned, they could still be friends. Correspondents.

He was no longer sure if that was true.

Still, he wasn’t the kind of person who made promises he didn’t keep. So he would write to her. Once, at least. It would probably take up a great deal of time. Striking the right tone would prove challenging.

And then perhaps he would take the boys sea-bathing.

Sea-bathing, letters, a great big stone: it was good to have a plan.

On their way to view the stone, Archie said, “You have been holding out on us.”

“I have not been,” Effie protested. Lord, he didn’t want to talk about this anymore. “We can’t marry. Well, I can; she won’t . She also doesn’t want to continue our liaison in any form whatsoever, so I’m not sure what more there is to say.”

“Not that, Mrs. Landers ,” Archie said. He turned to Simon. “It seems, that in addition to writing poetry for Miss Evans’s magazine, he’s also dispensing advice for married women under yet another pseudonym.”

Archie and Simon laughed heartily, and Effie said, “Yes, yes,” as he waved away their good-natured jeers.

It was good to know, though, that he still had his friends, that he still had their good-natured jeers.

They alit a while later in a farm field and contemplated a rather unimpressive rock.

“It’s a lump of sandstone,” Simon said.

“It’s no Stonehenge,” Archie agreed.

“The story,” Effie said, “has something to do with the devil being angered by everyone converting to Christianity in . . . the past at some point.” He hadn’t been listening that closely to Mrs. Mitchell, though normally this would have been exactly the kind of attraction he would have found fascinating. “He was digging a dike to drown all the ancient villages around here, and he stubbed his toe on this stone and abandoned his heinous plot.”

“All it took for the devil to give up his scheme was a stubbed toe?” Archie asked.

“This is the same devil who rained curses on Job?” Simon asked.

“And beheaded the faithful and what have you?” Archie said.

“Oh, and wasn’t there a terrible dragon with seven heads sweeping the stars from the sky?” Simon asked.

“Perhaps, and what about plunging people into a river of fire and boiling blood?”

“I believe that’s Dante, not the Bible.”

“Oh, my mistake.”

“Regardless, the point stands,” Simon said, turning to Effie. “A stubbed toe would not deter Lucifer.”

It was possible Effie’s smile at that point was a tiny bit genuine.

* * *

“Do you think I ought to let Leander go free?” Effie asked three nights later, when they were settled in with their post-dinner drinks. It was something he’d been thinking about the past few days.

“We are speaking of Leander the bird, not Leander the doomed mythological hero?” Archie asked.

“Yes.”

“Can a tropical bird such as Leander survive in England?”

“I don’t know.”

“I can’t think that he would live a long life in our climate.”

“Even so, perhaps he would rather be free.” Effie was in his cage, in his glass-encased prison, but did Leander need to be?

“I fear Leander may be too stupid to survive in the wild,” Simon said with a smirk.

“That may be true,” Effie said. “But even if the weather and/ or his own dullness of mind means it would only be a brief taste of liberation, perhaps he would still rather be free. Perhaps Sally would rather have been free.”

“What has brought on these thoughts?” Simon asked.

“Oh, I don’t know,” Effie said. “I am being maudlin, I suppose. I was lying awake last night contemplating going home and thinking about the fact that I am alone. And then I thought, Well, at least I have Leander. But then I thought, Am I using him as a sort of psychic crutch? Is it fair to keep him inside all the time and locked up nearly all the time? ”

“You are not alone,” Archie said. “You have us.”

“Yes.” Effie bowed his head. He did have the boys, and he hadn’t meant to minimize that. In fact, they’d been managing, these past few days, to cheer him somewhat, to start chiseling away at the glass separating them. “I am alone in my family, I meant.”

“As am I,” Simon said.

“Indeed,” Effie agreed. Simon’s elder twin brothers passed unexpectedly years ago, and his mother had yet to get over it, and by extension, her disappointment that Simon had inherited the title. As for Archie, his father passed years ago, and his mother descended further each day into the fancies of her own mind. It was daft to proclaim that he, Effie, was alone in his family when all his immediate relations were alive, whereas the boys had lost parents and siblings.

“I rather think my situation is different, though,” Simon said. “I am alone because my family is indifferent to me. You are alone because your family is cruel to you.”

“Only Father, to be fair.”

Simon shrugged as if he disagreed but wasn’t going to press the matter. Simon wasn’t entirely wrong. Effie had thought, these recent months, about how his mother had been conveniently absent during the worst of his father’s rages.

“Well,” Archie said, “to answer your original question, Leander seems perfectly content to me.”

Yes, Leander seemed perfectly content. Effie’s mouth was still in the shape of a smile. It was possible to seem perfectly content but not be content.