“We can go,” Louisa says. “We needn’t stay if you’re struggling.”
I resist the urge to pull my collar up over my face and retreat into my clothes like a miserable turtle. “Is it that obvious?”
She fans herself with her stack of leaflets, and the fine hairs that have come loose from her plait flutter against her forehead. “Well, you have yet to make eye contact with any passersby, and you’re making a face like someone’s pulling out your fingernails. So call it an educated guess.”
“Sorry.” I shake out my coat—borrowed from one of Edward’s clerks and too short in the cuffs by inches—and try to stand up straight. I can almost feel my father poking me in the back, hissing “Don’t slouch!” like he does at every society party, but I am so much taller than almost everyone I know, the urge to make myself as small as possible often overtakes me before I’ve realized it.
“I can do this,” I tell her.
“I know you can,” she says.
“I want to.”
“But you don’t have to. I know Edward and I like to shout from the turnpikes and throw rocks at Newgate, but you know I’ll still marry you whether or not you join in on those particular family outings.” She grins at me, though it fades when I don’t offer her one back. “It also doesn’t mean that you’re not helping the cause. For God’s sake, you wrote this.” She holds the pamphlet up, and I almost resist the urge to shush her, like my father might suddenly pop up from the bushes, hidden all this time in the guise of a judgmental gardener. “If you keep writing treatises like this, I’m happy to do the handing out in the park.”
And the copying out of my drafts because I’m terrified someone might recognize my handwriting, and the checking of my spelling, and the handling of the printers, and the distribution to salons and bookshops and at rallies across London, and how much longer before she grows weary of my inability to take ownership of my political beliefs?
What good is a desire to stand up for the poor if you never actually do the standing? Where will you hide once you take your seat in Parliament and have to start publicly voting on these subjects? What sort of coward hides behind a false name and a satirical style?
I squeeze my eyes shut for a moment, then say to Lou, “I should do more.”
She waves that away with a casual sincerity I covet like filigreed gold. “So you aren’t as shameless as I am and find it stressful to walk up to strangers and shove your politics down their throat? So what? There are other ways to advocate for reform.”
My posture starts to slope again. She likely didn’t mean it as a reminder of the fact that I had the chance to take up exactly that advocacy in Parliament—my father sought approval for a writ of acceleration, advancing me to the House of Lords before his seat officially passed to me on the back of his subsidiary title as Viscount of Disley. His hope was I’d add another critical vote against Edward Davies’s bill on workhouse reform that would soon be coming up from the Commons. Edward, in contrast, hoped I might be a vote in favor of it, my radical politics hidden from my father until after the ink of the king’s signature had already dried and my premature summons to the Lords was official.
Instead, I panicked and refused the acceleration entirely. My father had tried fruitlessly to bully me into changing my mind, though my mother’s death stopped him shouting at me about it daily. Or at least distracted him for a time—I suspect that, when he joins me in London at the end of the summer for the vote, grief will no longer be a sufficient excuse for the delay.
Lou stands on her tiptoes and presses her lips to mine, then smiles. It feels like the first bloom of spring opening in the middle of that gray walk. I want to be the sun it turns its face toward to drink in the light. I want to be everything someone as fierce and bright as Lou deserves in a partner and lover and friend and husband. My chest tightens.
“Let’s go home,” she urges, but I shake my head.
“I can do this. I want to do this,” I say, though the conviction behind the words is weak as milky tea.
“You can and you do!” Louisa repeats with sincere enthusiasm, then wiggles her hands in front of her in a little cheer.
“I can. Right.” I resist the urge to pull on the front of my shirt, afraid of the suctioning sound it may make because of all the sweat—maybe blood?—adhering it to my chest, and straighten. My hands are shaking, which somehow seems both an embarrassing overreaction and an insufficient expression of my fear.
There’s a man coming down the path toward us, dark skinned and tall, with an instrument case tucked under one arm. He looks kind. He’s probably kind. Most people are kind, aren’t they?
He’s going to laugh at me. So what if he does? He’s going to think I look strange or sound strange or that I am just plain strange. So what? He won’t say that to my face. But he’ll go home to his wife and tell her about this odd maypole of a man in a too-small coat who tried to give him a piece of poorly written propaganda on his way to the office, and they’ll have a good laugh at me.
So. What?
It doesn’t matter what this stranger thinks of me. It does. It doesn’t. I wish it didn’t. Why does it? It doesn’t. It shouldn’t. It does.
All you have to do, I tell myself, is walk up to that most likely kind gentleman and ask him if he wants a leaflet. You don’t have to look him in the eye or say anything more than that. He won’t know you wrote it. He won’t tell your father. Most likely he’ll simply say no and you’ll say all right, thank you, carry on, and you’ll both move on with your days.
He’s getting closer. Louisa gives me an encouraging thump on the shoulder.
He’s not going to laugh at you. He’s not going to think you’re strange-looking. He’s not going to demand to know the authorship of the pamphlet. He’s not going to tell you you’re too thin. He’s not going to think you so odd he’ll pull his hypothetical monetary support from the Whig party because of the oddness of its members. He’s not going to remember this interaction for more than five minutes, but you will be dissecting it for the rest of your goddamn life.
I have forgotten every word I know. I have lost any command of the English language I may have once possessed. I could not muster a three-word sentence were I standing on the gallows with a noose around my neck and asked to choose between a single utterance and death.
The man passes by us without glancing our way, and I don’t say a word.
Louisa looks from me to the man’s retreating back, and I can tell she is debating whether to run after him and offer what I failed to. “I’ll . . . ,” she starts, then holds up a finger to me. “I’ll be right back.” I watch her jog after the man until she’s near enough to touch his shoulder, watch him turn and take the offered pamphlet with a word of thanks, and oh my God it would have been so easy. What is the matter with me? I stare down at my hands, white-knuckled around my stack of pamphlets. My head is spinning and I’m breathing too fast.
Grow a goddamn backbone, Adrian. Jesus Christ, you’re pathetic.
When Louisa returns, she pries my fingers from around my pamphlets and adds mine to her own waning pile, then takes my hand. She rolls my wrists gently, and I try—I really try—to release the tension I’ve been bottling up in my joints, but God, my palms are so sweaty, that must be all she’s thinking of. And then wondering why she has agreed to marry such a sweaty lunatic.