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“That’s kind of you, Julie, but you keep your money. You’ve earned it.” The sisters weren’t overly close, but to her credit, Amy never said anything condescending about Le Monde Joli or about Julianna’s work. Amy had grown up with the magazine, too. Not in the intimate way Julianna had, but she had been there. She still read it every month, often complimenting Julianna on some aspect or other of it.

While Julianna was, theoretically, happy to keep her money—she had impossible ambitions to save for, after all—she knew Amy could do with the extra income. It was the role Amy was playing that necessitated her refusal. Her sister was the sort of person who bent the world to her will. She thought things into being. It was admirable, in a way. Amy didn’t want to see herself as the kind of person who needed money from her sister, therefore she wasn’t the kind of person who needed money from her sister.

“Besides,” Amy said, “I’m taking the girls to the park this afternoon. You ought to take the opportunity to rest, Sister. You’ve been working such long hours of late, even for you. Perhaps your mishap with the printer is a blessing in disguise.”

Julianna could have hinted that she’d like to come along to the park. Amy would have responded by inviting her. Amy probably would have bought them all ices afterward, just to prove a point.

So Julianna would not invite herself along. She would stay home. For the next seven days. Eating her sister’s family’s food and reading their newspapers and creating work for their servants. Taking up their space.

Julianna divested herself of her gloves and began the trudge to the small parlor at the back of the drawing room that had once been Amy’s sewing room.

“Oh, Julie,” Amy called as Julianna was about to disappear into her cave. “A package came for you.” She nodded at the small table near the French doors that separated the drawing room from Julianna’s room.

“Thank you,” Julianna managed, though inside her chest a flock of birds had taken flight. There was only one person who would send her a package here at the house.

Clutching the package to her chest, she pulled the doors closed behind her and collapsed onto the bed that took up most of the floor space in the room. There was nowhere else to sit, but a mere chair would not have contained Julianna’s expansiveness anyway. Her anticipatory joy required room for her limbs to fan out. She felt like a cross between a starfish and a girl.

She smiled. That sounded like something Effie would say.

She sat up and used a letter opener on the packet, forcing herself to be careful and precise because she was a careful and precise person.

Inside, she found a folded . . . newspaper?

She turned it over and gasped.

No, it was a copy of Archer’s Lady’s Book .

Julianna had heard about the new American magazine, which was, as far as she knew, the first of its kind that country had produced, the Americans being rather behind in such matters.

But Americans were so bold. So enterprising. She could not wait to see what kind of ladies’ magazine an American would publish.

The cover featured a series of illustrations of ladies in various contexts—in gardens and drawing rooms and such. Under the title was a small circle that contained the words Edited by Mrs. Emmeline Archer . Envious and depreciative sentiments swirled together in Julianna’s mind. Imagine having one’s name printed on the cover of one’s magazine! Julianna’s name was inside hers, but underneath and in smaller type than that of Mr. Glanvil’s.

But, she considered, why have the editor’s name on the cover? What need did it serve? Did readers care that their magazine was edited by Mrs. Emmeline Archer? Perhaps they did, if Mrs. Emmeline Archer was a personage of some repute.

Before Julianna opened the magazine, she read the letter that had come with it. It was written in dark-green ink in Effie’s familiar, loopy, expansive hand. She smiled.

My dearest Jules,

A friend of a friend made a trip to America this past summer and I requested the enclosed, knowing you have been wanting to see an issue. It arrived yesterday, and though I’d said my previous letter would be my last until I returned from my holiday, I simply had to send you this before I left. I must admit, though, that I didn’t send it on yesterday because I spent the day reading every word inside it. I am all anticipation to learn what you think of it. I am certain your opinions will be more informed and refined than my own, but my initial impression is that it isn’t nearly as good as your magazine. I say that most earnestly. You have a way of coaxing out the best in your writers without inserting yourself overmuch in either the process or the prose, whereas look at Mrs. Archer with her name front and center! What purpose does that serve?

Julianna smiled. She and Effie were always so aligned in their thinking.

Though for all I know, she is well known among American ladies. Perhaps her name alone sells magazines. Perhaps it is akin to a magazine being edited by Mrs. Fitzwilliams.

Julianna’s smile deepened at the way Effie’s thought process was a mirror image of her own, but with a fanciful flourish at the end that was uniquely Effie.

Can you imagine a magazine edited by Mrs. Fitzwilliams? First, it should contain a menu for a dinner party featuring seventeen removes. Then, a column entitled “Counterintuitive Advice for Marital Harmony, or How to Make a Man Wild with Desire by Ignoring Him.”

Oh, and do you know, I have heard rumors of secret tunnels between the Royal Pavilion in Brighton and Mrs. Fitzwilliams’s residence! Apparently there were times the then regent was seen breakfasting with her on her balcony when the last anyone had seen of him was the previous night in his own palace. So perhaps Mrs. Fitz’s magazine can also contain some architectural drawings. What do you think? “Architectural Drawings to Aid in Clandestine Affairs”?

Julianna’s smile turned to outright laughter.

Speaking of Brighton, I am resolved to write a poem per day on my holiday. When I return, I shall mail you the whole stack.

I jest. I shall choose the best of the bunch and toil away at it endlessly over the next several months and talk about it so incessantly and oppressively that you lose patience and command me send it to you—which I shall then do, of course, as I always have and always will do whatever it is you command, my dear friend.

Farewell for a fortnight. Brighton will be less bright without your letters.

Yours, Effie

Julianna, letting the hand that had been holding the letter fall on the bed, resumed her starfishing. Oh, how she was going to miss Effie.

But she was being ridiculous. It was a fortnight! How many letters would they normally exchange in a fortnight?

She’d meant the question rhetorically, but she could check. She sat up and extracted from beneath the bed the box in which she kept Effie’s letters. She added this latest to the front—she filed her letters in reverse chronological order.

The answer, over the last fortnight, was four letters from Effie.

Their correspondence had not always been so frequent. She pulled the first letter, from the back of the box, dated five autumns ago. She hadn’t started keeping Effie’s letters until after they’d forged a friendship beyond their relationship as editor and writer. She remembered the day this particular letter arrived. She’d realized, with a shock as bracing as an unexpected clap of thunder, that Effie had, somehow, become her closest friend. And a woman keeps letters from her bosom friends in a way an editor doesn’t from her writers.

She returned the five-year-old letter to the box and pulled out the next one. It was dated three months later. She pulled out some more. The gaps between letters grew smaller as the months and years wore on. Presently, Effie was writing her twice a week. She was replying only half that frequently, but that was only because of the expense.

She put the box away. Julianna would miss Effie, but she could endure a letterless fortnight.

’Twas a pity much of that fortnight was going to contain very little work to do. Certainly, there were numerous small tasks she could complete, perpetually neglected matters she always shoved aside in favor of more urgent demands. She could tidy the office, for example. Start planning with Charles, one of her engravers, for the next few months’ worth of engravings.

She slumped back on the bed, less a gleeful starfish this time and more a mindless one. Starfishes, she imagined, were probably quite stupid.

But perhaps not so mindless, not so stupid, for an idea arrived. Arrived with such force she felt almost as if someone had slapped her.

It was a wild notion. Very unlike her. Impulsive and profligate and irresponsible.

She was back up in a flash, scrabbling under the bed, deeper this time, fanning her arms out until her hands made contact with worn leather.

She extracted the pouch and counted her money, the coins she typically pinched so tightly.

Did she dare?

Dear Amy,

I’ve decided to seize on my period of forced idleness and pay Mother a visit. I haven’t been to Reading since Easter, and even though it has been two years since the late Mr. Glanvil’s passing, Mother is still so melancholy, drifting around the halls of that drafty house with only the servants for company. She never could stand to be on her own.

I expect I’ll be back Wednesday of next week at the latest, though perhaps sooner—you know how Mother and I tend to rub along well enough for a few days but then find ourselves in a conversational morass that sometimes necessitates a premature departure in order to preserve the geniality of future relations.

My point is that I’ve gone to Reading, and I don’t know when I will be back, except to say that it shan’t be later than Wednesday next.

Your sister, Julianna

One of the benefits of being mindless, Julianna considered, as she hastily packed and hailed a hack, was that one needn’t stop to question one’s spontaneous choices, or to fret about having lied to one’s sister. One simply moved through space, more body than mind, a starfish drifting in the waves.

And when one arrived at the Blossoms Inn, one merely had tocount out one’s money for a return ticket on the London-Brighton coach and find a bench on which to wait for the departure of said coach.

It wasn’t until they were underway that Julianna’s logical mind reawakened. As it fired to life, the reality of her uncharacteristic decision began assailing her. Her breathing became shallow.

What had she done ?

The answer was that she had spent a quarter of her savings on a ticket to Brighton!

Julianna was saving to buy a printing press. Or, she corrected ruthlessly, she had been. Even without contributing to her sister’s household, Julianna’s salary was so low that it would take years for her to save enough. And who knew how much lodging in Brighton would cost?

If she’d wanted to be profligate, she could have spent a considerably smaller sum on postage. She could have written Effie as often as she wanted, letting her thoughts spill onto a second page without regard for the increased cost.

Well, it was too late now. She attempted to put her extravagance out of her mind and to resign herself to a seaside respite in Brighton.

How would she find Effie?

And assuming she did, then what? Was she going to be ill-mannered enough to gate-crash her friend’s holiday? Intrude upon her family? Or her circle of friends?

Julianna did not know with whom Effie was traveling. For as intimately as Julianna knew Effie, their friendship existed in a bubble. She knew the contents of Effie’s heart, but she did not know the contents of Effie’s day-to-day life. Effie talked about her sister, Sarah, but not a great deal, and she referenced her parents only in the vaguest terms. When Julianna probed, her inquiries went unanswered. Effie’s next letter would contain a poem, or a pressed leaf, or a vastly amusing anecdote, and the question would be forgotten by both of them.

Julianna had, uncharacteristically, not been so circumspect with the details of her family situation. She had confided in Effie about her frustrations with Mr. Glanvil—with both Misters Glanvil. Effie knew that Julianna felt like an interloper in her sister’s household. And when Effie had inquired about whether Julianna had ever considered marriage as a solution to that particular problem, Julianna had written a very long letter explaining why she hadn’t and wouldn’t.

In short, Julianna had sliced open her chest and allowed Effie to see her heart. To see the tender, beating core of her.

While Julianna couldn’t quite bring herself to regret how forthright she’d been—surprisingly, the slicing open of her chest had brought a kind of relief rather than the pain she might have expected to follow from such a surgery—she did sometimes wonder if the degree of her openness had had an inverse effect on the degree of Effie’s.

Euphemia Turner was hiding something, and Julianna was almost certain she knew what it was: her friend was of noble birth, and she didn’t want Julianna to be made unsettled by the knowledge of such. There was much evidence supporting this conclusion.

Effie’s vagueness with respect to her parents.

The fact that she sometimes wrote to Julianna from Cornwall and sometimes from London—and she never cross-wrote her letters, and they always came in envelopes that doubled the price of posting them.

How apparent it was that she’d had an excellent education. The daughters of working men did not, generally speaking, have Effie’s knowledge of and knack for poetry.

And, most damning of all, the bank reported that Effie had never cashed any of the drafts Julianna had sent her in payment for her work.

Julianna felt as if she and Effie were sister birds living in adjacent but separate cages. They knew each other’s song intimately, but there were bars between them.

Julianna wanted to know what her friend was hiding, because she wanted to know her friend, to know her with no veils or equivocations—or bars—between them, but she had, historically, feared that to inquire too directly, to allow her curiosities to shade into demands, would cost her the friendship. She had considered pressing the matter anyway, attaching a disclaimer: If you are the daughter of a peer, I shan’t be angry or alienated or envious. You’ll still be you, and I’ll still be me, and nothing will have to change.

Except she knew that wasn’t true. Effie surely did, too. Society wasn’t like that. Life wasn’t like that. Daughters of peers were not bosom friends with women like Julianna.

Which no doubt explained why neither of them had suggested they meet in person, even now that Effie had been resident in London for so long. Julianna had considered it, had even had quill poised over paper to propose exactly that, ready to risk her most important friendship.

Something always stopped her, though, something beyond the possibility of Effie’s not being entirely who she pretended to be. Julianna couldn’t quite put it into words, but it had something to do with a feeling of foreboding that overcame her when she thought of actually meeting her friend in the flesh. As if it might change everything.

She was being nonsensical. She shook her head. It was time to stop this madness and meet Effie. So, yes, Julianna was going to gate-crash her friend’s holiday. Not for long. She did not intend to be rude. Just long enough to open the doors to the adjacent cages and say hello properly. If there were consequences, she would bear them. She could no longer live in this limbo.

That settled, she began to consider what her strategy ought to be. Where would she look for Effie? And what about the more immediate problem that Julianna did not know what Effie looked like?

Well, she corrected herself, she knew what Effie looked like, to a point. She had described herself: long dark hair. Different color eyes—one blue and one brown, which would certainly aid in endeavors of identification should Julianna get close enough to her friend to look into her eyes. A tendency toward the fanciful when it came to her wardrobe. A fondness for old-fashioned court shoes. The latter was more evidence of Effie’s being highborn, for who but an aristocrat would wear such gaudy and impractical shoes if she had to actually do anything in them?

Sometimes Julianna asked herself how it was possible that her closest confidant, her dearest friend, was a person she had never met. But it didn’t feel that way.

To be fair, it wasn’t as if Effie had a great deal of competition. Julianna was, due to the nature of her employment, friendly with a great many people. She wrote scores of letters each month to assign stories and deliver editorial instructions. She was friendly with the banker who issued the drafts with which she paid her writers. She was friendly with the woman who worked at the receiving house where she posted her letters.

Friendly was not the same as friends .

Julianna did not have friends. Not the way Amy did. Amy took tea with her neighbors and visited the shops with Arthur’s brothers’ wives. More than once, Julianna, having heard peals of laughter from the drawing room, had entered it only to cause the roomful of ladies to go dead silent.

What if she couldn’t find Effie? What if she got so close but had to return home as far away from Effie as ever? What a waste of her money. Her time. Her sentiment.

By the time the coach stopped at the halfway point, Julianna had made herself quite melancholy.

They alit for a short respite, and she walked around the yard of the coaching inn and gave herself a stern talking-to. What was done was done. Her money could not be unspent. Time could not be unwound. Therefore, she must put her mind to having an enjoyable holiday, regardless of whether she managed to locate Effie.

Sea-bathing. She would concentrate on sea-bathing. She had been curious about it since she’d read about the practice gaining popularity in Brighton. It had been an idle sort of interest, though, because why allow oneself to want something one can’t have? That was another maxim Julianna lived by: You can’t miss what you don’t let yourself want.

Therefore, she hadn’t wanted to sea-bathe.

But now she could try it. And she would see the sea, too. Walk along it and stare at its vastness.

She dug in her reticule and produced the wedding band she often wore when she was out and about alone. Julianna would never be a wife, but being a “widow” afforded a lady a certain amount of freedom, and she had found that the existence of a dear departed husband, even a fictional one, often aided in her work. She suspected the same would prove true on holiday. For instance, a spinster, even a spinster of eight-and-thirty with a great deal of experience of the world, might not be allowed to sea-bathe without her mother, or a maid.

Back in the coach, she closed her eyes and attempted to visualize a flame. Julianna had read about the technique in a book written by a professor at East India College who’d been an acquaintance of Father. It was meant to be practiced every morning, and with time and diligence, reportedly led to “enlightenment.” Julianna had yet to achieve that exalted state, but the exercise reliably focused her mind when she was distracted.

Today, as per usual, enlightenment was not achieved, but alas, neither was focus. The attempt yielded only slumber. It wasn’t until the ostler shouted, “Brighton! End of the line!” that Julianna awakened. Well, if one could have neither enlightenment nor focus, a nap was a not-unwelcome substitute.

She smelled the sea the moment she alit. The air was heavy and tangy and salty and wonderful . The sun was shining, and the sky was a brilliant blue.

“Which way to the sea?” she asked a boy leading the horses off, and she went in the direction he pointed, reasoning that if she walked long enough, she would eventually reach it.

She took in fine town houses and green parks on the downward-sloping streets. When she finally glimpsed the sea peeking between buildings, she realized she’d been seeing it for some time. She thought she’d been looking at the sky.

She passed an inn called the Old Ship as she traversed the final stretch toward the water, making a note to return and inquire about a room. It looked like a fine hotel. Perhaps Effie and her traveling companions would be lodging there.

A few more steps, and she arrived at her destination at the end of the earth, buildings and other assorted man-made detritus behind her. She stepped onto a pebbled beach and marveled.

There were two shades of blue ahead, two wide stripes, one of sea and one of sky, meeting up in the middle in what looked like a poorly sewn seam between two patches on a quilt.

Even in London where she could hardly see it, Julianna understood that the sky was vast. She had not been prepared for the sea, too, to be so boundless. There was more water than she could fathom, steely and beautiful and blue. That water touched America and the Far East. It was home to shipwrecks and fanciful animals. It was the cure for any number of maladies if one believed Dr. Awsiter’s claims about the sea right here in Brighton. She had thought such claims a grift, but now she wondered. It seemed possible that this much water could do anything. Perhaps it could even remake a person.

There were people all about, strolling and talking and laughing, but she was alone in the ways that mattered. No one need witness her body being turned inside out, her ribs cracking and vulnerable in the salt breeze. She was a pillowslip being turned in on itself by a wash maid, beaten with a stick and hung to dry in the curative sun.

She was in a new world. She was new. She had not misspent her funds after all.