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“Where have we heard that before?” Simon asked, raising his eyebrows at Archie, and Effie had to smile through his dismay. They had heard it on last year’s Earls Trip, from Archie’s now wife.

Archie grinned. “Yes, for what it’s worth, that particular impediment may not be as intractable as you believe.”

“Regardless, all these difficulties are not the point. They are indeed disqualifying, but there remains a larger reason I cannot be with Miss Evans. A more immediate and unscalable . . . obstacle.” Obstacle seemed an anemic word given the circumstances, entirely insufficient to describe the fortress his lies had built.

“And that is?” Archie asked.

“She thinks I’m a woman.”

Archie and Simon erupted, exclaiming and talking over each other. There. He had finally shocked them.

Archie got up and fetched a second bottle of wine from the sideboard. As he was opening it, Simon made a show of going for the third, which made them all laugh.

“You’d better start from the beginning,” Archie said when they were all refilled.

“What about dinner?” Effie said. “Aren’t you hungry?”

“You’re more important than dinner,” Simon said.

“Yes,” said Archie. “Tell us the story now, and we can consider it as we dine. Perhaps there will be some solution you have yet to think of.”

Effie’s throat tightened. His friends were the best of men. He couldn’t think why he had kept this from them for so long.

“When I submitted the poem she initially published,” he said, recapping what they already knew, “I did it under a pseudonym.”

“Yes,” Archie said.

Effie had known that publishing a poem under his own name would cause more trouble than it was worth in his family. And publishing a poem under his own name in a ladies’ magazine? All hell would have broken loose.

“I signed it E. Turner,” he said.

“Ah!” Simon exclaimed. “Your Miss Evans is corresponding with ‘Miss Turner.’”

“You will recall that Le Monde Joli published a handful of my poems over the next few years. Miss Evans and I corresponded about the poems, but gradually, our discourse became more personal.

“One day a letter arrived in which she signed only her Christian name: ‘Julianna.’ She said she hoped she wasn’t being too familiar but asked me what mine was.” He could still summon echoes of the thrill he’d experienced on reading that letter—the progression from “Miss Evans” to “Julianna” to “JE,” had truly transported him. “I regret this now, but I equivocated. I told her, ‘My friends call me Effie.’ She must have decided ‘Effie’ was a diminutive for ‘Euphemia,’ for she thinks that is my Christian name. To my discredit, I have never corrected her.”

“Why ever not?” Simon, always the sensible one, asked.

“I imagine,” Archie said, “that the longer it went on, the harder it seemed to disentangle yourself from the lies you’d spun, lies that initially seemed minor.”

“ Yes .”

Archie understood.

“Miss Austen was right,” Archie said. “Love does indeed make fools of us all.”

“You will perhaps recall how I’d sent that first poem around to a great many publications. I received rejections across the board from everyone except Miss Evans. She wrote me with her acceptance, and she had a few minor but exceedingly thoughtful suggestions that improved the work enormously. I was thrilled.”

“I remember,” Archie said, and Simon murmured his agreement.

“I didn’t realize until I saw the poem in print that Le Monde Joli was a ladies’ magazine.”

“With a name like that?” Simon exclaimed.

“What is wrong with the name?” Effie, a bit indignant, asked.

“Not a thing,” Archie said soothingly. “It’s merely that it sounds somewhat feminine.”

“An appreciation of beauty being an ability limited to the fairer sex?” Effie shot back, his affront growing. But he stood down. They meant no ill, and their way of thinking was commonplace, if baffling. “Regardless, yes, I did not know it was a women’s magazine until it was too late. I imagined that, like you, Miss Evans would assume her readership was exclusively female and therefore that I was, too. I should have corrected her when I sent in my second poem, but I was afraid she would reject it.” He heaved a sigh. “Eventually, I became less concerned about the poems and more afraid that she would reject me .”

“You talked at the end of our trip last year about needing to get back to Highworth because you were waiting for an important letter,” Simon said. “Was it from Miss Evans?”

“It was indeed. I was waiting on an editorial assessment of a poem she had agreed to print. She had written to accept it but said that she wanted to let it simmer and would write again in a week with her thoughts. That is a particular phrase of hers. ‘Let it simmer. ’ Isn’t it clever? Think how much better a soup tastes on the second day, having had longer to simmer.”

He caught an amused glance shared by the others. He wasn’t sure what was so diverting. “I was certain the letter had arrived in my absence, and I wanted terribly to read it, and also not make her wait too long for my reply.”

“Why hadn’t you simply told her to write to you at your London address?” Simon asked.

“I’d spent the summer at Highworth, and she had been writing me there. I did consider writing and telling her to reach me in London from that point onward, but I worried about the possibility for confusion. What if she didn’t get my new direction in time and she sent her thoughts on my poem to Highworth while I was in London?” He paused. “And honestly, I didn’t want to be in London at that point.”

“Why not?” Archie asked. “You used to be quite devoted to the entertainments of the city.”

“I didn’t want her to know who I was. Well, she knows who I am.”

She knew him in all the ways that mattered, as well as the boys did. Perhaps better. “But I didn’t want her to know I was noble-born. I had been representing myself as a country . . . person. To suddenly mention a second home in Town would have outed me as not a country . . . person.”

“But you’re in London almost exclusively now,” Simon said. “So you must have outed yourself as not a country person, if not as a man.”

“Yes.” He was confusing them. “In the last year, our correspondence has become much more voluminous. Whereas it generally took a letter a week or two to come or go from Highworth, in Town I can drop a letter at a receiving house in the morning knowing she will have it in a matter of hours. I also realized that while I hadn’t given any thought to the cost of all these letters, it was costing her twelve pence to send one to Highworth. In London, we can use the penny post and it’s only three pence.” For a single sheet, which was all she ever sent him. “And when I learned that she was saving for a printing press, I came to understand that writing to me was very dear for her. I could no longer justify time spent at Highworth.”

“But you aren’t tempted to see her?” Archie asked. “Now that you’re both in London?”

“Did you not hear what I said? She thinks I’m a woman!”

“Yes, but could you not see her from afar?” Simon queried.

“Skulk around as if I’m the main character of a novel of intrigue you mean?” Effie said tartly.

“You sounded rather keen on doing just that a while ago.”

“Yes, but that was merely as a holiday diversion. I do love dressing up. This is different.”

In truth, he had considered the idea and discarded it. So many things could go wrong. To begin with, he did not trust himself to see her from afar and not swoon in the street where he stood.

But more elementally, what would it get him? He knew her. He couldn’t have her, but he knew her. Seeing her would only make the yearning, the unrequited longing, worse.

Julianna had a few precepts she seemed to live by, or at least they functioned as aphorisms she frequently quoted. One of them was You can’t miss what you don’t let yourself want. He had tried, these recent months, to keep that one in mind.

“Why is it different?” Simon asked.

Effie didn’t know how to explain it to them without making himself pathetic—though he wasn’t sure why that mattered. He was pathetic. “It’s a bit like your not wanting to see the Pavilion just now, Simon. You didn’t want to see it casually, in passing. It wouldn’t be right. It wouldn’t be enough.”

“Ah. I understand.” Simon paused. “But the difference is, I will eventually see the Pavilion in all its glory. I will be satisfied.”

“Yes,” said Effie. “That is precisely the difference.”

* * *

After their evening meal, Effie took Leander upstairs to put him to bed. He stood in front of the cage and said, “I am in love with a woman named Julianna Evans.” He said it several times over, varying his tone. He wasn’t sure what his aim was in trying to get the bird to say it back. Was he merely trying to reinforce the creature’s expanded syntax, and if so, why now, on night one of an Earls Trip when his friends were waiting for him?

Did some perverse part of him want to hear out loud how hopeless his cause was?

He threw a sheet over the cage, and on his way back downstairs, he observed that, hopeless causes aside, he felt better than he had in days. Weeks. There was something about unburdening oneself to one’s friends that made one feel lighter.

Of course, six glasses of ratafia did tend to have that effect, too.

He rejoined the boys in the drawing room, where they sat by a roaring fire, chatting and smoking. They nodded at him and offered him a cigar, which he declined, and carried on talking about a horse Archie was thinking of buying.

Effie appreciated how the boys absorbed him into the room, into the discussion at hand. That they didn’t press him to discuss Julianna any further. He was glad he’d told them, but he needed a moment to adjust to having the knowledge out there, hovering in the world like a honeybee at a flower, rather than existing merely in his head.

When the talk of horseflesh dwindled, he asked, “If a ghost were to haunt a printing press, what sort of ghost do you think it would be?”

“The ghost of a printmaker, I should think,” Simon said.

“That’s a rather literal answer.” Though had he expected otherwise from Simon?

“The neglected wife of the printmaker who never gets to see him because he works such long hours?” Archie suggested.

“That’s more like it. But in that scenario, she would resent the press, would she not? It does not seem to follow that she would elect to haunt it for all eternity.”

“Do ghosts have a say over what or whom—or whether—they haunt?” Archie asked.

“I take the point,” Effie said. “Perhaps they don’t.”

“Why do you ask?” Simon said.

“Do either of you know the Earl of Stanhope?”

“Not particularly,” Archie said.

Simon shook his head. “Nor do I. Not well, anyway. Why?”

“He has invented a new type of printing press. I gather that a system of compound levers means it requires less strength to operate than a traditional press. I should very much like to get my hands on one.”

“So if, theoretically, a lady and her . . . friend had one of these presses,” Simon said, “they could operate it themselves.”

“Perhaps,” Effie said, suddenly feeling glum. He had been thinking along those lines, but there was no “friend” in his imaginings. He merely thought that if Julianna had a small, sturdy handpress, she might not need to employ a puller. But he really didn’t know. Because he didn’t know how much less “less strength” was, and he didn’t know anything about Julianna’s vigor or lack thereof. Was she slender and delicate? Or sturdy and hale?

He had to amend an earlier thought. He’d been thinking—and saying to the boys—that Julianna knew him. He’d meant that she knew him, and he knew her, elementally . Regardless of his deception, of the fact that she thought him a lady, their souls knew each other. And while that might be true, it was disconcerting to think he did not know enough about her physically to know if she could operate a hand press. He knew what she’d told him, that she was tall and had dark hair and green eyes, but those were but the most general of descriptors.

He ached to know her. The corporeal form of her.

Was this desire? If so, it was as exhausting as love.

“So you are trying to procure a press for your Miss Evans,” Archie said, drawing Effie’s attention back to the conversation at hand.

“Yes, but all I have been able to get is the piece of rubbish currently taking up space—a great deal of space—at your house. I can’t seem to get it to work, and not because I lack the strength. It’s broken—something is wrong with the screw mechanism as far as I can tell. That’s why I named it Hamlet. I’ve decided it is haunted.”

Simon said, “Perhaps you ought to name your press Dogberry, or Bottom, after one of Shakespeare’s more inept characters, rather than the one who was haunted and went on to destroy everyone he loved before dying tragically himself.”

“Hmm. I shall consider it.”

Eventually, Simon went to bed. He always retired early. Usually, Effie and Archie conversed into the evening, but Archie surprised him by asking, “Have you got any copies of Le Monde Joli with you here?”

“I do. I have the most recent issue.”

“May I read it? I’ve read your poems in the magazine, of course, but I’d like to give it a closer look.”

“Of course.” Effie was touched. Archie, by his own account, had trouble with reading. But part of the beauty of a magazine was that it presented information in different formats. September contained the latest installment in a serialized novel about a runaway heiress but also an engraving of a scene from Tom and Jerry, or Life in London , a wildly popular stage adaptation of the equally popular book, not to mention the medical advice column Julianna so hated, which this month contained a wretchedly compelling essay on the dangers of neglecting one’s teeth. Teeth, and the many things that could go wrong with them both medically and aesthetically, had proven, to Julianna’s mystified dismay, a perennially popular subject.

When Effie returned with the magazine, Archie went to sit with it in a wing chair near the fire. He looked up before diving in and said, “Simon won’t say it, but he is beside himself to see the Pavilion. Can we go tomorrow?”

“Yes, of course, and we shall go properly, in Simon’s way. Take it in all at once, or what have you. We shall look at it, and our hearts shall be shattered.”

His own drama aside, Effie understood the aim of this trip. They had come to Brighton so Simon could see the Pavilion. Simon never asked for anything for himself, so accustomed was he to being the seldom-seen, and, not to put too fine a point on it—but Effie was putting a fine point on it because he was affronted on Simon’s behalf—unloved third son of the late Earl of Marsden. Simon had never expected to inherit, but here they were.

This was Simon’s trip, was the point, and Effie had so far made it all about himself. He would correct course. Tomorrow, they would go to the Pavilion and be overcome by the mathematical beauty of it.

With Archie occupied, Effie took the opportunity to pull out his lap desk.

Dear Bound for Bedlam,

My advice for you is threefold, and I shall dispense it in descending order of urgency.

First, you must not have any more children. Six is quite enough. Take yourself to see a midwife and express to her your desire to prevent subsequent children. If you do not know how to find a midwife, ask a housemaid or a kitchen maid. I am assuming the wife of a barrister has one or the other, if not both. If I am mistaken, please write me back and I shall provide more specific instruction privately.

Effie did not know how he would discover the correct instruction to pass along, but he would find a way. Olive would know someone who could help. She had aided him in other situations in which his qualifications fell short of what was required to properly advise his correspondents.

Second, and this will require a bit of subterfuge, you must remove yourself from the situation temporarily. And by “situation,” I mean your family. All of them, with the possible exception of the youngest child if that child is reliant on you for nourishment. Your mother has taken dreadfully ill. Or your sister. Someone has taken dreadfully ill, is the point. You are needed at the bedside. You will not be gone long, but you must go.

And then, you simply leave. Perhaps, if this proves impossible to imagine saying to your particular husband in your particular situation, you leave a note. Either way, you leave. For a day, two if you can manage it. Your husband, your children: they will survive. The aim here is for your husband to understand, in a visceral way, the weight of the yoke you wear. This is not something you can tell him; you must show him.

Third, time is your friend, dear lady. When despair has you in its grasp, close your eyes and imagine yourself twenty years hence. Your children have left your home, which is quiet and peaceful. Except of course when they come to visit, some of them bringing their own children. (The cries of one’s grandchildren, I think you shall find, are significantly less vexing than the cries of one’s own children. And grandchildren have the benefit that after an interval of spoiling them, you can hand them back to their parents.) From the center of your present storm, picture this lovely future. Children home to visit, to dote upon their dear old mum. As for your husband, he is either retired, and reminding you what first drew you to him (unless what first drew you to him was his raven hair and slim build. I regret to inform you that both are lost forever) or he is . . . absent.

Could he say “dead” instead of “absent”? He would make a note in the margin and ask Julianna.

She would almost certainly say no, but she would be amused by the question. He often annotated his “Advice for Married Ladies” letters with asides meant for her.

Though in this case, he truly did mean “dead.”

The point, dear reader, is that time marches on, which is both a blessing and a curse. Your charge is to focus on the blessings associated with such. This, too, shall pass.

Yours, Mrs. Landers

When he was done, a kind of resigned calm settled over him. Archie was flipping the pages of Le Monde Joli , his forehead wrinkled in concentration. Simon was tucked into his bed, probably dreaming of Parliament.

This was where he belonged, with his letters and his friends.

For now, all was right with the world. Or at least as right as it could be.