“Well?” I asked when her theatrical pause became unbearable.
“Can’t you guess?” Lydia said, performing to all of us. Clearly Bessy and Mary weren’t in on her secret either. “It is from Amelia. The Thompsons are to hold a dinner party at Kirby Hall, and we are all invited. Well, not you, Mary—you are too young and of no consequence. I do hope Papa doesn’t have us leave early as he did at the Christmas feast, when we missed the caroling. If he’d wanted to go to bed, he could have sent William Allison back with the carriage. What else is a coachman for? But then I’ve nothing to wear. Black doesn’t suit me, and this dress is an inch too short. And—”
“Lydia.” I spoke sternly enough that she fell silent. “Don’t be unkind to Mary. And give me that.”
Lydia looked at my outstretched hand. For a heartbeat, I wasn’t sure she’d obey, but at last she surrendered the letter. As I read, she skipped away to scrutinize her reflection in the mirror above the fireplace, pouting at her high black collar.
“Are we to go?” asked Bessy, jumping up from the window seat. Unlike Lydia, she hadn’t mastered the art of affected nonchalance.
Mary was staring at the discarded novel in her lap, feeling sorry for herself.
“No,” I said.
Mary’s chin jerked up. Her expression brightened.
“No?” repeated Lydia, spinning back to face me, all pretense of indifference forgotten.
“You may write to Miss Thompson thanking her, or rather her father, for the invitation. But we are in a period of mourning and won’t be making social calls.” I kept my voice level, trying to remember what I had been like at the age when selfishness was natural. My mother had merely been their grandmother. They’d hardly feel her loss the same.
“But—” Bessy started.
“I won’t have discussion or arguments.”
Lydia ignored me. “But, Mama!” she cried. “We haven’t seen any gentlemen for months, except the Milner brothers—”
“Will Milner don’t count!” said Bessy, rounding on her sister and turning even pinker than usual.
“Grammar, please.” I sighed. Why pay a governess at all when Bessy still spoke like a groom?
For some reason, she’d found Lydia’s comment objectionable and was listing everything that made the eldest Milner boy a poor gentleman and horseman—from his manners to his seat.
“And now we still shan’t see any gentlemen at all,” continued Lydia, shouting over her sister. “It isn’t fair.”
I folded the page smaller and smaller until I could no longer crease it down the middle, letting their voices wash over me.
“I suppose we’ll have to content ourselves with Mr. Brontë,” said Lydia, when Bessy paused for breath. “I’ll pay calls to the Monk’s House and have him read Byron to me.”
“You’ll do nothing of the sort,” I snapped, trying to create one more bend in the paper.
So Mr. Brontë liked poetry.
The fold wouldn’t stay. I flicked the page into the fire, where it flared for a second before crumbling.
“My letter!” cried Lydia, as if it had been precious. “How could you?”
“Oh, please!” I’d discarded it without thinking, but that hardly merited an apology. I couldn’t deal with any more of Lydia’s histrionics. “It’s time we were all abed.”
“Couldn’t you stay with us a little longer, Mama?” whispered Mary from the corner.
Her sisters glared at her.
“Not tonight,” I said. Yet I gestured for her to come to me.
She ran over and planted a fleeting, wet kiss on my cheek, as she had countless nights before.
Lydia and Bessy stood still, united in their act of small rebellion.
* * *
I UNDRESSED QUICKLY, WITHOUT Marshall’s help, and discarded my petticoats like a second skin on my dressing room floor.
There was a romance in walking the corridors barefoot and dressed only in my nightgown, even though this was my house and I could wander where I wished. I tiptoed down the landing, dancing to avoid the floorboards that creaked, my body lighter without the swathes of fabric that weighed me down in the day.
“Edmund?” I opened his bedroom door just wide enough to peer in and shielded the candle I was carrying in case he was already asleep.
“Lydia?” my husband called out, the confusion that comes with being pulled back from the precipice of slumber evident in the haste and volume of his reply.
In the days since I’d returned from Yoxall Lodge, our communications had only been of the most perfunctory kind. Each morning Edmund had asked me what was for dinner from behind the Times. And each night I had lain in my bed, flat on my back and hands rigid by my sides, waiting for his tread outside my door.
But tonight, prompted perhaps by the warm relief of Mary’s lips pressed against my face, I had softened and come to him.
“Is anything the matter?” he asked.
“The matter? No, not at all.” I hurried in, shutting the door behind me.
Edmund half closed his eyes, shrinking from the light, but then clambered onto his elbows and propped himself up against the bolster behind him.
I set the candle on the mahogany washstand and twitched the hangings of the four-poster bed over a few inches, protecting him from the glare.
“I am very tired, Lydia. It has been a taxing day,” Edmund said, stifling a yawn. But he moved over to accommodate me, lifting the sheets so I could slide under the heavy scarlet blankets, faded from years of use.
My legs were cold beneath my nightgown. He flinched when our limbs made contact, flinched and then tensed as I wrapped myself around him like a limpet and rested my head on his chest.
“You haven’t asked me about Staffordshire,” I said after a minute or two of enjoying the familiar waves of his breath, like an aged sailor who can now only find his legs at sea.
“What is there to ask?” he said. “It was difficult?”
I nodded as much as I could, held fast as I was against him. He didn’t want me to move. He wanted only to sleep, exhausted by a day of— what? Account books and reading the sporting pages? I wanted to run a mile, release the horses from the stables, and gallop beside them, crying, No more! No more needlework and smiling through stunted arpeggios for me.
“Your father must know it’s for the best,” he said. “She had suffered—”
“And what if it were your mother?” I bit my tongue too late, knowing how he hated being interrupted.
“Lydia,” Edmund warned. Eviction would follow if I continued in this strain.
Somehow it was even colder under the covers. The hairs along my legs stood up against the sheet.
“People rarely call me that now,” I said, snuggling close against his hard, ungiving chest. “It is like I lost my name to our daughter.”
Down here, I could pretend Edmund was the boy I had loved, a boy with chubby cheeks and a full head of hair, the boy I had won into wooing me, despite his shyness and that endearing stutter he’d had when conversing with the opposite sex.
How proudly I had sat, watching him give one of his first sermons, thinking, That is my husband, the father of my sons, whether the thought had crossed his mind yet or not. Less than three months later, he was mine.