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She sat up straighter, and in so doing felt something inside her harden, as if her spine were being preserved in amber. Julianna wore invisible armor. She always had—an unmarried woman pursuing a career needed to protect herself from an unkind world.

Normally, she appreciated her armor. She needed it when she took meetings with Mr. Glanvil. When she was cast aside by her printer. When she listened in on Amy with her friends.

When she stopped working long enough to think about how alone she was in this world.

She had never— never —had to wear her armor when it came to Effie.

Again, the urge to cry rose. Again, she quashed it.

There was nothing for it but to don her placcate and her gauntlets and get on with it.

She physically turned away from Effie and ordered herself to attend the earls, who were still arguing about how many houses was too many.

Lord Harcourt surprised her by saying, apropos of nothing, “I have read and enjoyed your magazine, Miss Evans. You should be quite proud of yourself.”

How . . . unexpected.

“I concur, though I admit I have only read Effie’s poems,” Lord Marsden said. “But anyone who prints his work is all right in my estimation.”

Effie’s friends had read his poems? Did that mean the verses were in fact his?

The gentlemen asked a few questions, and she found herself telling them about the magazine’s history—her father’s founding of it, the fact that she’d grown up underfoot, trained in all aspects of producing it. “The only thing I absolutely cannot do myself is draw or engrave.”

“That plate in your September issue was really quite impressive,” Lord Harcourt said. “It has inspired me to see about getting tickets to the play it depicted.”

She resisted pointing out that for most of her readers, the plate would have to do.

“I am not much of a reader,” he went on, “but I find myself turning the pages almost compulsively.”

She smiled. “Thank you. I can think of no higher compliment.”

“Truly. One reads a short story, and one thinks one will put the magazine down after that, but then on the next page one finds a compulsively readable column on how to dress pheasants. It’s quite different from a newspaper.”

“It is. In fact, I must take care not to report too directly on the news if I want to avoid the stamp tax.” She paused, considering that she was in company with two members of the House of Lords. Ought she to press them for the tax’s repeal? She decided against it. “To my mind, a magazine such as Le Monde Joli is the perfect form. I strive always to balance art and practicality, and I make no apologies for doing so. If a lady is fond of poems, she may read some of today’s best in my pages. But if a lady wants to know what the latest fashions out of London or Paris are, she can learn that and skip the poetry. Or a gentleman, too, of course,” she rushed to add. She was tickled that a man such as Lord Harcourt had read her magazine, but she told herself not to be. Why shouldn’t he read it?

As much as the turn in the conversation had revived Julianna, she was aware that Effie had still not spoken. And that she was still wearing her armor.

Armor was so very uncomfortable.

“Perhaps we ought to be going,” Lord Harcourt said after their conversation about the magazine dwindled.

“Yes!” Julianna cried, regretting the vehemence with which her agreement had been tinged. But she did so desperately want to leave. A day ago she would have said she had no fonder wish than meeting Effie in the flesh. That wish had become the imperative that had propelled her to Brighton. Now she wanted nothing more than to get away from him.

As they were beginning to stir themselves, Effie—Lord Featherfinch, or whoever he was—suddenly grabbed her hands again. Peeled the glove off the left.

She gasped. That made twice in one afternoon. Julianna did not like to think of herself as a gasper, but she prized logic, and what did two gasps in one day make one if not a gasper?

Effie twisted the ring she wore on her fourth finger.

“You are married.”

“No!” she exclaimed, though again, she found herself regretting her pressed tone.

“No,” she said anew, and with more control. She was startled, possibly offended, that he could think she was married. Yet unaccountably glad that he had spoken. His voice had sounded . . . well, she couldn’t say it sounded usual because once again, she had no history of hearing his voice. Yet somehow it sounded like . . . Effie.

“You are not married,” he said, and she wasn’t sure if it was a question or a statement. Regardless, he sounded uncertain.

Was it possible that his silence all this time had been masking something else?

“You know that I will never marry. Besides, would I not have told you if I was married?” she asked, though she did not take her hand back. He kept twisting the ring, though the overwhelming sensation was not the tin moving against her skin, but the touch of his fingers. Gooseflesh rose all the way up her arm. She remembered that she prized logic and said, “If I were married, would I not have signed my early letters, before we moved to addressing each other by our Christian names, ‘ Mrs . Evans’?”

“Well, I did not tell you I was a man. I signed my letters with an entirely different name.”

“Point taken”—she smiled despite herself—“but I am unmarried, and I shall remain so. The ring is merely a decoy. A bit of armor.” Actual armor.

“How do you mean?” He was still holding the finger that wore the ring, and he was looking at her with that same intensity she’d observed in his countenance before, but now that he was speaking along with looking, his regard felt . . . different. It reminded her of the way his attention had felt via their letters. On paper, Effie always wanted to know what she thought about everything. It felt as if he were hanging on her replies, sometimes.

She considered his question. “Unmarried women on their own are disallowed from so many experiences. They must have a father or a brother, or at least a mother or a maid, if they want to do anything.”

Effie tilted his head. “Yes, why is that?”

“Everyone says it’s so the innocent young lady isn’t corrupted, but the degree of hysteria that accompanies the very idea of a woman alone in the world makes me wonder if perhaps it isn’t the reverse that’s true. Perhaps they are afraid of us . Perhaps it is we who have the power.”

“Hmm.” The head tilt deepened.

“Ahem.”

Effie let go of her finger.

Oh, dear. That was the second time that Lord Harcourt had cleared his throat to draw their attention to how improper they were being. Not just with the hand holding—finger holding—but Julianna’s speech just then. She’d meant it for Effie’s ears only. Never in a million years would she have said such a thing in front of two peers she’d only just met.

All the lowering things were coming in twos today: gasping, having to be reminded that she had an audience, the feeling that she might cry.

At least she had Effie back.

What a ridiculous thing to think. She didn’t “have him back.” She’d never had him to begin with. He was a treasured correspondent, yes, but he didn’t belong to her.

Julianna blinked as they stepped into the sunlit street. Tea had felt like an odd, not entirely pleasant interruption in the usual unfolding of time. Although nothing was usual about being here, she supposed.

What now?

“It was a pleasure to meet you, Miss Evans.” Lord Harcourt sketched a bow.

Lord Marsden did likewise. “May we escort you to the Old Ship?”

She looked to Effie, who was back to being a silent, looming presence. She waited a beat. When he did not speak, she said, “Thank you, no. I can make my own way. I want to stop in a shop I passed this morning.” That last bit was a lie. Julianna had neither the money nor the inclination for the shops, but she wanted to get away from the gentlemen as expeditiously as possible.

They said their goodbyes, and just like that, Julianna was walking—alone—back toward the hotel.

Until she wasn’t.

“Wait!”

Her heart leapt as she turned to see Effie loping toward her.

He was back. The silent looming presence from the tea shop was gone and he was just . . . Effie. The relief was profound. But it was shortly followed by something else. Not anger, exactly, because as she’d just thought, Effie was Effie. She truly didn’t give a fig that he was a man, an aristocrat. It was a kind of disappointment, a wariness conferred by the fact of his maleness, and his nobility, having been obscured.

He tripped over a cobblestone but righted himself, skidding to a stop in front of her. “Let’s go sea-bathing!”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Sea-bathing! You have always wanted to try it, have you not?”

“I . . . have.” Though she didn’t remember telling Effie that. It must have been early in their correspondence. Before she’d read and reread every letter. Before she started keeping them in a box under her bed.

“Let us sea-bathe, then!”

She waited for more. A crackpot plan. Or at least a time and direction. He only kept looking at her, grinning.

“ Now? ”

He couldn’t mean now, could he?

“Why not?”

She looked into his eyes, and they were alive. Dancing in blue and brown. Just the way she’d always thought Euphemia Turner’s eyes would be.

She wasn’t sure why she was surprised by his sea-bathing proposal. Effie was adventurous. Impulsive.

He started toward her as if he were going to take her arm but checked himself. Took a step back. She didn’t like that. It felt like the wrong direction. “Aww, Jules, I’m sorry I was so odd back there. I’m just . . . overcome.”

“By what?”

“What do you mean by what? By you , of course!”

Julianna was certain no one had ever been overcome by her before. She could feel her cheeks heating, though she wasn’t sure if it was pleasure or mortification stoking the fire.

She stared at him, hands on her hips, and she gave over caring if to do so appeared odd, or improper. When he began to squirm, she asked, “Did you write all the poems you sent me?”

It was his turn to gasp. “Of course I did. How could you think otherwise?”

She merely had to raise her eyebrows for him to bow his head before her.

All right. She had established that most important thing between them had not been a lie. That was enough for now. “Sea-bathing, you say?”

She looked around for his friends. Reading her mind, he said, “They’ve gone back to the Pavilion. Simon didn’t get enough of it, apparently.”

She could feel herself smiling. The Effie she knew was adventurous and impulsive, and while a week ago she would have said that although she admired those qualities, she did not share them. But was that true? She was here, wasn’t she, in Brighton? Perhaps Effie and his . . . Effieness was infectious.

Her smile deepened, as if mirroring some inner part of her, some primal core, that had already made her decision. “All right.”

“Hooray!” He performed a little leap that was both ridiculous and endearing.

On the walk to the sea, Effie made up for his earlier silence. “Why are you here, Jules? Why didn’t you tell me you were going to be here the same time I was? Though what if you had? Would I have responded by abandoning my plans?”

She waited for him to answer his own questions—that last one, anyway, but he did not. “I don’t know why I’m here,” she said, addressing his first. “And I didn’t tell you because I didn’t know I was coming until the morning I left—yesterday. It was a rather impulsive decision.”

“That seems unlike you.” He paused. The head tilt, which she was beginning to recognize as a signature mannerism of his—returned. “And yet in some ways, it is in character.”

“I suddenly found myself with a dismayingly empty schedule.” She told him about how printing problems had ensured she had nothing to do until next Thursday, and about the way she had found herself in an almost fugue state as she packed and bought her ticket for the coach. “I honestly don’t know what came over me. I wasn’t thinking at all!”

“Well, I’m glad you weren’t!” He flattened her with that smile of his, and she was glad, too. Glad to be flattened.

At the beach, he said, “We shall have to part ways here. Ladies are on one side and gentlemen on the other.”

Yes. She could see the nearby bathing machines marked with a sign that read “Ladies,” and as she peered up the beach, she could see another cluster of machines in the distance.

“Can a person just walk up? Does one need to . . . make an appointment?” And what about attire?

“I have no idea,” Effie said. “I’ve only ever swum by myself.”

“Well,” Julianna said, tilting her head to the sun and opening herself. Letting Effie’s spirit of adventure fill her up. “Let us try.”

“Excellent. Let us reconvene here in, say . . . I have no idea how long sea-bathing takes!”

“When you swim, how long does it take?”

“Oh, ages, but that’s just me. Once I’m in the water, if it’s calm enough, I can float on my back and gaze at the sky endlessly. But I suspect things are more circumscribed here.”

Something about the image of Effie floating in the sea was . . . stirring. What would he wear—or not wear—while doing that?

“Let us meet there when we’re done.” He pointed to a nearby bench. “I will endeavor to make my immersion brief so as not to keep you waiting. You, though—you take your time. I will wait for you.” He was staring at her again with that intense look. She didn’t dislike it anymore. “Look at the sky while you’re out there, Jules, and I shall, too.”

* * *

The bathing machines dotting the beach looked like covered carriages that had been parked at the edge of the water. Inside, after changing into the bathing costume provided, Julianna discovered that was exactly what they were. She entered through one door from the beach and was towed out a way. Once situated, she emerged into the sea from the opposite door. Julianna laughed to think that she had been concerned she might not be “allowed” to sea-bathe on her own. In fact, the whole operation was designed for maximum privacy. The bathing machine itself shielded her from the beach and it from her. She could almost believe she was alone but for the dipper, a sturdy, red-faced woman who seemed profoundly uninterested in her charge. She didn’t introduce herself, or even make a greeting. Julianna could have been anyone. She didn’t need a mother, or a maid, or even her ring. It was refreshing.

Another thing the dipper didn’t seem interested in was giving Julianna a chance to acclimate. She merely took Julianna’s arm and marched her down the few steps to the seafloor. It was sandy beneath her toes—how wonderful. Julianna had never been barefoot in the outdoors before, not on grass or dirt, much less on the seafloor. She wiggled her toes and laughed as the sand oozed over them.

“Come on, then, ma’am,” the dipper said brusquely, leading her farther out. Julianna wished her bathing costume wasn’t so voluminous. It weighed her down as it got wet.

“Are you in search of a cure?” the dipper asked.

“I beg your pardon?”

“Sea water is the cure for so many things—the gout, all manner of glandular issues.” She lowered her voice. “Some say it even helps the unfortunate lady who is unable to conceive.”

“I am not in search of a cure,” Julianna said. But . . . was that true? She could feel herself, lately, grasping toward something. Something more than control over her magazine. She sometimes felt as if something was missing from her life, but she couldn’t articulate what it was.

She shook her head. She wasn’t in search of a cure for anything that seawater could put to rights. “I am merely here for overall health and vigor.”

“Well, shall we get on with it?”

“I thought we were?”

“Come out a way farther and lie back.”

Julianna did as she was told. She closed her eyes as she allowed the dipper to lower her. The buoyancy conferred by the water was novel. Such a curious sensation. She wasn’t exactly floating, as her attendant’s arms stayed beneath her back, but she was nevertheless. . . light. She kept her eyes closed and concentrated on the way her body was moving. Gentle waves had her bobbing up and down. The effect was probably moderated by her minder, but it felt rather like being rocked.

A memory rose to the surface of her mind, suddenly, almost violently, like a whale clearing its blow hole. Her father, rocking her just like this. She’d been very young, and very sick. He had an issue of the magazine propped up on a stand, and he’d been reading it out loud. He had taught her that a final proofread was best done aloud. One could hear errors that one’s eyes slid over when reading silently. She still employed that technique.

As she floated, Julianna thought about senses. About hearing birds one could not see. About how she had seen Effie speak without hearing him yet had known what he was saying.

How he had appeared to hear thoughts she had not spoken aloud.

Look at the sky while you’re out there, Jules, and I shall, too.

She opened her eyes.