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Chapter 16

Daydream Believer

“I have met your Miss Evans for tea,” Olive said on Sunday, sweeping into the drawing room Effie was sitting in pretending to read.

“She’s not my Miss Evans, and why did you not invite me?” Effie put down his prop book and smiled. He hadn’t been able to read because he couldn’t stop thinking about Julianna. He wanted to see her again, but if he couldn’t do that—he had yet to come up with another excuse to visit her office—a secondhand account of time spent with her would be a compensatory way to pass an afternoon.

“I wanted to get the measure of her,” Olive said.

“I’ve already told you the measure of her.” But he would gladly tell her again.

“I know, but you’ll forgive me for saying I wasn’t certain I could trust you to be objective.”

“How do you mean?”

“I say this with great affection, my dear friend, but you have been known to attach yourself to notions that are more fanciful than practical.” As he began to object, she glanced pointedly down at his shoes—he was wearing the red heels.

Effie could not help but smile. “And? Did you find Miss Evans up to snuff?”

Olive’s eyes danced. “I did indeed.”

He would have been relieved except he knew there could have been no other outcome. “Perhaps I am overly vulnerable to fanciful ideas, or fashions”—he kicked up one of the red heels—“but my taste in people is beyond reproach. Shall I call for tea?”

“Yes, please.”

Olive poured the tea when it came, and Effie sipped happily, once again relishing the prospect of talking about Julianna. He had spent ages not talking about her, years , and from this vantage point, he couldn’t think why. “Isn’t Miss Evans so intelligent?”

“She is, very.”

“What did you talk about?”

“Oh, all kinds of things. I couldn’t even begin to recount them. I think we have, in a short time, become genuine friends. Though I admit to being a trifle intimidated; she really is so very knowledgeable about so many things.”

“Yet her erudite nature coexists so delightfully, so apparently congruously, with a flash of a whimsical disposition.”

“I wonder if her whimsical disposition is reserved for you, for I did not witness it.”

“Oh, do you think so?”

Olive set down her teacup. “Effie, have you told Miss Evans that you’re in love with her?”

Effie set down his. “I have.”

Or at least his macaw had.

The message had been delivered, was the point.

Olive clearly had not expected that answer, for she opened and closed her mouth a few times without any words coming out. Her interlude of muteness was followed by a great peal of laughter.

Effie laughed. Her mirth was contagious, even if he had yet to discover the source of it.

“I thought I was coming here to read you a stern lecture on the topic,” she said when she’d recovered.

“Did you? Well, let’s have it. I wouldn’t want a stern lecture to go to waste.”

“Oh, I can’t deliver such a lecture now. We shall have to move on to plotting.”

“Plotting?”

“Yes, for your happiness and that of your future bride.”

“Clearly you and Miss Evans are not the bosom friends you believe yourselves to be if you haven’t been enlightened as to why that is an impossibility.”

“Your father can’t be made to come around?”

“No, but it’s got nothing to do with that.” He went on to explain that despite the ways in which Julianna and he were entirely unsuitable as a match—despite the strait between them—the fact remained that she wouldn’t have him. “She won’t marry me,” he finished. “She is vehemently, one might even say violently, opposed to the institution of marriage.”

“Hmm.” Olive twisted the string of her reticule as she stared into space. She did this sometimes, disappeared for a moment as she retreated into her scheming. “She won’t marry you.”

“Yes. That’s what I just said.”

You said it differently. “You said, ‘She won’t marry me,’” with each word given equal emphasis. I said, ‘She won’t marry you.’ ” She winked. “Do you catch my meaning?”

“I do catch your meaning, and I tried that already!”

“How so?”

“I proposed we continue to see each other. She has—” He’d been going to say ‘She has done it before,’ and though he was certain Olive would not be overly scandalized by that tidbit, it really wasn’t his tid to bit. “She was not open to the suggestion.” That still stung, that she had carried on with her prior lovers, for a time at least, but wouldn’t do the same with him. “I assure you, I would have taken whatever was on offer. I still would.”

Olive set down her cup, leaned forward across the table, and laid her arm on his sleeve. “Oh, Effie, I’m so very sorry.”

He shrugged. “At least we have regained our previous friendship.” They had, yes? “She was as warm as ever when we went to her to help with the coloring, was she not?” He suddenly required reassurance.

“She was very warm. I can’t speak to ‘as ever,’ as that was the first time I’d seen you interact, but I got the sense of the two of you as long-standing . . . friends.”

“And we are writing to each other more than ever. I daresay we are writing to each other furiously .” It was enough. It would have to be.

She came around and sat next to him on the settee and laid her head on his shoulder. He slung an arm around her.

“You know what I appreciate about you, Olive?”

“I assume there are so many answers to that question that we’d be here all day if you were to recite them all.”

“You understand heartbreak. You’re a schemer, and a bit of a romantic, I daresay, beneath your blithe exterior, but you know when to fold. You know when a cause is hopeless.”

She began to speak, but he cut her off. “It’s not all doom and gloom, for although I have indeed lost the love of my life, it turns out I have gained a brother.”

“I beg your pardon? Are you and the earls opening your brotherhood to another? That’s rather hard to fathom.”

“No. A long-lost brother.” He hadn’t been planning to tell anyone about Kenver yet, but he found himself moved to confide in Olive. “A literal one.”

“What?” she shrieked.

“Indeed. He’s been right under my nose for a while now, and it turns out he is rather wonderful.”

He told her everything, and his bearing grew lighter as he did so. He was walking around with a broken heart, but the key bit was that he was walking around. He had the boys—and a new brother. He had Olive. He had a sister he probably ought to pay more attention to, and he resolved to do so when she came home. He had already written to her with his report of the ball.

He had Julianna, too, didn’t he? His friend, Julianna. It would be enough. If he just kept walking around, perhaps his heart would mend, bit by bit.

“I feel that you are at a crossroads,” Olive said.

“What do you mean?”

“Something is about to change. Perhaps you aren’t going to get exactly what you want, but I have the oddest feeling that you are going to be all right. Better than all right.”

* * *

It started the same way it always did, with disbelief. Incredulity. Surely, they hadn’t locked him in the wardrobe and left? After an initial interlude of shouting and pounding on the inside of the door, Effie ceased his efforts. Father was trying to make a point. It would probably go better for him if he sat quietly for a while, ceased his struggling. Acted like a wayward boy who had learned his lesson.

It was a game. Effie was very good at games. He had in fact recently won a spillikins tournament at school, his patience and steady hand beating everyone, even that miserable toad Nigel Nettlefell. Even the graceful and dextrous Archie.

So he closed his eyes and counted as high as he could. He was somewhere in the hundred thousands when he opened them.

It was dark.

It had been dark before, of course, but it was dark now. The slice of light that had been visible around the edges of the door was no more, and he couldn’t see his hand in front of his face.

It was cold, too. Usually his mother’s room was toasty in the winter, its large fireplace kept perpetually stoked. Clearly, they’d let it go out.

Panic started to rise in his chest. It was the middle of the night. Where was Mother?

He still had the hat, though it had been destroyed in the tussle. He clutched its remains to his chest, trying to find the grosgrain ribbons he knew to be violet. He didn’t need light to see them, and he thought stroking them might be calming. He closed his eyes and tried to make his mind fill in the images that should accompany what his fingers were feeling.

It worked for a while. Until it didn’t, and the panic started creeping back.

He began knocking again on the inside of the door. Surely enough time had passed that someone would let him out.

Knocking became pounding, shouting became screaming, crying became hyperventilating.

He had to use the necessary. He was so hungry, so frightened, so cold.

Panic became terror as he began flailing about.

Flailing will not help.

He stopped moving. Looked around futilely. Where had that voice come from?

Get up.

He considered this voice. It was insistent but not unkind. He had never heard it before, yet it was familiar somehow.

Get up.

He got up.

Open the door.

He started to talk back. I can’t.

He had already tried every possible means of escape. He had rattled, pushed, pounded. He had attempted to break down the door with his shoulder but had managed only to injure himself.

Open the door.

He stood, the wardrobe being just tall enough for him to do so. He reached his hand toward the door, and suddenly, oddly, there was a bit of light. It should have been impossible. The door was still closed. It was surely the dead of night.

But somehow, some way, there was just enough light for him to see that there was a hook and eye lock on the inside of the wardrobe. That had not been there before.

Open the door.

The hook slid easily and silently from the eye, as if the mechanism had been freshly oiled.

He opened the door and surveyed the room. Mother’s room, but she wasn’t present, as he had surmised from the cold. She must be sleeping elsewhere.

He stepped down, and he was free.

It should have been impossible.

What now?

He could go back to his own room, he supposed, and slip under his covers. Ask for flannel-covered bricks to be sent up. Or he could go to the kitchen, for he hadn’t eaten since breakfast.

He wasn’t tired, though, and he wasn’t hungry, though he had been both mere moments ago.

What did he want to do?

The answer rose in him as if it had always been there, just below the surface. It felt logical, even though it was December.

He walked: out of Mother’s room, down the big mahogany stairwell, out the front door.

People saw him. Servants, initially, then Mother and Father andSarah. No one stopped him, though. No one even questioned him.

Outside, he wasn’t cold, though he wore no coat and no shoes.

The walk to the sea from the house generally took thirty minutes, yet he found himself approaching the water in thirty seconds. The moon lit his way, though earlier he’d had the sense of it being a moonless night.

There was something about the lack of shoes, here on the beach, that was familiar.

He stood, staring out at the dark water, at the pinned-up stars above it.

What do I do now? he asked the night.

The answer came not from the night but from inside him. You can do whatever you want.

He went for a swim. The water was warm.

After that extraordinary dream, Effie wrote to Kenver and asked him to pay a visit.

I have recently had occasion to reevaluate a few things about my life, and I should appreciate your counsel. Might I prevail upon you to come as soon as it is convenient?

A few days later, he was receiving the man.

“I’d like to speak some more about the succession,” Effie began.

Kenver made a shushing noise. “May we go somewhere more private?”

“More private than this?” They were alone in a drawing room. Effie glanced at the door through which Mrs. Moyer had retreated. It had been left slightly ajar, but he could close it.

“Yes,” Kenver said, still whispering but emphatic.

“My goodness,” Effie said, gesturing for Kenver to follow him, “one would almost think intrigue was afoot.”

“One can never be too careful.”

“Is everything all right, my lord?”

It was Mrs. Moyer, appearing out of nowhere as the gentlemen mounted the stairs, which Effie supposed was a case in point.

“Yes, indeed. I’m merely taking Mr. Nancarrow upstairs to . . . show him a painting.”

“There is actually a painting in here,” Kenver said, crossing Effie’s bedchamber to the picture of Julianna—placeholder Julianna, impressionistic Julianna—against the chartreuse sky. Effie had not been able to bring himself to take it down. Kenver spent a long moment examining it. “This is extraordinary.”

“Thank you.”

Kenver turned, inquisitive. “You painted it?”

“You needn’t act so surprised.”

“I’m not. Well . . . I am. But it’s because I am only just getting to know you. I didn’t realize you had artistic talent.”

“You should read my poetry.”

“May I?”

Effie was not accustomed to conversing with people who were so earnest.

He regrouped. There would be time for poetry later—he hoped. For now, he wanted to make his proposal. “Here’s the thing, Kenver. I don’t want to be the earl.”

“Well, you hardly have a choice in the matter, my lord.”

“Will you stop with the my-lording!”

“Well, you hardly have a choice in the matter, Effie ,” Kenver said, rolling his eyes ever so slightly in a way Effie found brotherly and therefore thrilling.

When Effie didn’t say anything, Kenver held up his hands. “What are you implying? I don’t want to be the earl, either.”

Effie threw up his own hands. Who was this purehearted? “Truly? You truly do not? Why not?”

“Why don’t you ? Once our father is gone, I mean.”

Effie had asked himself that question. Father would be gone soon, apparently. Effie couldn’t marry Julianna, apparently. So what was stopping him from being the poetry-writing, court-pump–wearing earl that Julianna had teased him about?

He even had a brother-steward who would help him, of that he had no doubt.

“Because I have other interests.” Of course, his chief interest was Julianna herself. Since that was not an interest that could go anywhere, he was determined to develop some others. Beyond writing poetry that he sent to Miss Julianna Evans for her consideration.

Perhaps he should not have been so hasty in instructing Archie to dispose of Hamlet. He had already prevailed upon Simon to write again to the Earl of Stanhope.

“I have other interests, too,” Kenver said.

“What are they?”

Kenver looked stricken and did not speak.

“See? You don’t have other interests; you’re just inordinately attached to some antiquated notion of propriety.”

“If I am inordinately attached to anything, it is the idea of not committing a criminal and moral offense.”

Effie smirked. Apparently some people were just that purehearted. “Well, my plan doesn’t require the commission of any offense, criminal, moral, or otherwise. It merely requires a bit of creativity. I propose we enact a ridiculous plan by which we . . . enact Father’s ridiculous plan.”

“Have you been listening to anything I’ve said?”

“We enact it in our own, perfectly legal way,” Effie amended. “I’ll be the earl in name; you’ll be the earl in practice. You agree to keep my sister and mother in the style to which they are accustomed, and you can do what you like with the rest of it. Well, you’ve got to look after the tenants, and the servants too, of course.”

Kenver blinked a few times. “What about you?”

“I am planning for a new sort of life.”

“Whatever can you mean?”

“I will tell you, I promise, but not quite yet.”

“Whatever kind of life you want, you can have it. We can all live more than comfortably from the estate’s income. You won’t have to wait much longer, and then you can do whatever you want.”

You can do whatever you want.

Effie smiled. The refrain was everywhere lately. As if it had been there all along, just below the surface.

What he wanted was to be his own man.

“I’m making it sound more dramatic than it is. I’ll come round and visit. Well, I’ll come round and visit you. I’m not sure Mother and Sarah will want any part of me.”

“What about Lords? You’ll have to vote.”

“Right.” Effie hadn’t thought about that. “Well, that’s fine. I can do that.” He would only ever have voted how Simon told him to anyway.

“And what happens when you die?” Kenver asked. “You will forgive my bluntness.”

“Cousin Herbert becomes the next earl. Or his son does, should I outlive Herbert.”

“What if you have a child?”

“Why would I do that?”

“Last time we met, you spent a considerable amount of time singing the praises of a certain lady.”

“Oh, yes, but she won’t have me.”

“You sound strangely cheery about that fact.”

“I’m not. I am in fact heartbroken about it, but one must move forward, mustn’t one?”

“All right. What if you have a child some other way? With some other woman.”

“I shan’t.”

“One cannot always plan these things.”

“Kenver.” Effie laid his hand on Kenver’s sleeve. “It isn’t going to happen.”

“So, you’re the earl in name; I’m the earl in work.”

“It sounds like a perfectly awful arrangement for you, but yes.”

“You forget that my other option is a scrabbling life of disre-spectability.”

“Yes, I do, don’t I?”

Kenver rolled his eyes in a way Effie dared think was affectionate. “If you are determined . . .”

“I am determined. Do we have a deal?”

“I still don’t understand why you must make such a decisive break from the title, but trusting that you will enlighten me in time, yes, we have a deal.”

* * *

Effie went to Julianna’s office the next morning without an excuse. He didn’t have Simon and his parapets in tow. He had no army of colorers.

He just wanted to see her, to tell her about the dream.

And, he reasoned, he didn’t need an excuse. She was his friend. People called upon their friends all the time. He was building a new life, and he wanted her friendship to be part of it.

Or at least that’s what he told himself as he climbed the stairs to the magazine’s office. They hadn’t talked about their relationship since she’d told him, in Brighton, that she didn’t want it to continue in person. So perhaps he wouldn’t be welcome without an excuse. Perhaps she would see the truth: he was attempting to worm his way back into her life.

“Effie!” She pushed back from where she’d been sitting at her desk. “What are you doing here?”

She was wearing the same green dress as last time he’d seen her, when they’d colored the December issue. It matched her eyes, and it was stunning.

“I thought to pay a visit to a friend,” he said, choosing his words carefully.

“Come in.” She smiled and beckoned him from where he was hovering in the doorway.

He breathed a sigh of relief as she gestured for him to follow her to the big worktable. “I’m finishing up January.”

“Are your alligators in?” he asked as he took the seat she offered him. “And were my letters fine?”

“Your letters were fine—they were exquisite as always. And my alligators remain at large!” She walked around the table and pointed to a blank page on which she’d written “Alligators.” “I am afraid I may have to wait for February for the alligators. I am already pushing it with the printing deadline for January.”

“I shall write the February Mrs. Landers letters over Christmas.” He had yet to finish—he had yet to start—his letters for February. He had been too busy overhauling his life. “I don’t get the impression that my parents are coming home for the holidays, so it shall be a quiet Christmas at home. Plenty of time for letter writing.” Plenty of time to draw up investment proposals, too, to enact new schemes.

“Oh, yes.” She waved a hand dismissively. “I have no concerns over your February letters.”

The conversation came to a halt there. Normally, he would have had no trouble coming up with something to say, but there was something about the way she was staring at him that had him at a loss for words. She pulled out a chair opposite him at the worktable and sat, regarding him the whole time. He began to wonder if he’d said something wrong. Done something wrong. When he could stand her scrutiny no longer, he said, “What?”

“Can we go to the sea?”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Southend-on-Sea. I have been looking into it. There aren’t frequent coaches as there are to Brighton, but it’s so close.”

What in heaven’s name was she on about?

He shelved that question in favor of a more mundane one, though he wasn’t sure why: “How would we get there?”

She sent him an appealing look.

“We would take one of my family’s conveyances,” he said, putting words to that look.

“Since your parents are away . . .”

“I could drive, I suppose.” That way they would only have to take the landau. They would not need servants to accompany them.

What was happening here? Transportation options were beside the point. He was still struggling to absorb the notion that she apparently wanted to go away with him, and to parse his own reaction to her proposal. A month ago, a week ago, that reaction would have been elation. Now it was . . . not elation.

It was the dream. The dream had impelled him to change everything.

“Do you drive?” she inquired.

“I can.” He preferred not to, historically. He was more comfortable as a passenger. As a passenger, one could daydream and such.

But suddenly the image of himself as a passenger, in, say, his father’s coach, seemed more akin to the image of a bird in its cage. He sat forward in his chair. “Do you remember Sally?”

Her brow knit. Fair: he had confused her with the abrupt change of subject. “Your parrot?”

“Yes, dear departed Sally.”

“I do. I never had the pleasure of meeting her as I did Leander, but you used to write about her rather a lot.”

“Do you think she was happy?”

“I don’t know anything about parrots, so I couldn’t possibly say.”

“I loved her. I believed that she was made happy by my loving her. I no longer know if that was true. Or if it was true, if it was enough.”

Her brow knit even more. He shook his head. He was getting off track, and he was confusing her. “Where would we lodge on his holiday you are proposing?”

She offered a tentative smile. “There is a pub right on the sea called the Castle where we might find a bed. And I understand that as of a few years ago, there are steamboat rides. Can you imagine ? I would adore an account for the magazine.”

Effie was stuck on a phrase she’d tossed off earlier. Where we might find a bed.

“How many beds might we find at the Castle?” he asked carefully.

His question was entirely in earnest, but she must have thought he was being flirtatious, for her smile contained a hint of wickedness as she said, “One, of course.”

Part of him wanted to agree. When may we leave and how long may we stay?

But then he thought of the fragile peace between them. The hard-won peace within his own heart. The peace that had inspired him to come here in friendship, to tell her about the changes he was planning to make in his own life. He had no doubt that if they went to Southend-on-Sea, that peace would be upended. They would have a wonderful time. She could wear her decoy wedding ring, and they could pretend to be husband and wife. He would, for a time, be allowed to love her.

But then what?

They would come back, and he would have to start anew the process of mending his broken heart. Archie and Simon told him that bones that have been broken knit back together stronger, but that must only be true the first time. It defied logic to think a person could keep breaking in the same place, in the same way, and not eventually stay permanently broken.

“And then perhaps in the summer, when the July and August issues are combined,” she went on, “we could make another trip. Somewhere further afield. Lyme Regis, perhaps.”

A trip where he would break again, and have to knit himself back together upon his return.

How curious it was to be offered exactly what one thought one wanted and to find it not enough.

He spoke carefully: “I thought you said you hadn’t time for an affair.”

Her lips quirked upward. “I find myself inspired to make time.”

Right.

“And honestly . . .” Her tone had dropped, grown more serious. “I missed you. I began to question why I had been so adamant, in Brighton, that there could be nothing further between us. Wasn’t being away from London—from life—so lovely? What if we could do that once or twice a year?”

Effie was suddenly so tired. So sad. Not sad in the way he had been in recent weeks, not gutted and desperate. More that he was resigned to being at the beginning of a long journey, a reinvention. He had thought he could share that journey with Julianna to some degree. As friends.

Her proposal had forced him to peer even deeper into his weather-beaten heart and to face the fact that she had been right, that last night in Brighton: this thing with them, whatever it was, had to end. It had to end entirely.

He thought about letting her down gently, about saying something vague. He didn’t have time to make a trip to the sea. He had to spend Christmas with family.

A lie would have been so easy.

“I won’t go to Southend-on-Sea with you,” he said, because some part of him knew that the truth, no matter how much it hurts, sets you free.