The Heiress

by Molly Greeley

  And shiver every Feather with Desire.

  When she released me, Eliza stepped away, the back of her hand against her reddened lips. “I . . . did not mean to be quite so . . . forward,” she said. Her cheeks were flushed enough to disguise even her vivid freckles.

  I pushed myself away from the supporting door, and found to my faint surprise that I was quite able to stand on my own. “You did nothing,” I said, breathless with my own daring, “that I have not longed for you to do these past days.”

  “Interminable days,” she said, and reached for me once more.

  “Am I much disarranged?” she asked a little later.

  I looked up at her, woozy and disbelieving. “Beautifully,” I said. A few pins were loosened; anyone who saw her now would think she had been riding hard through the country, or napping with restless dreams. I was like a dreamer myself, caught in a world that did not seem entirely real.

  She laughed, touched her hair and her bodice, then pulled up her legs so they were tucked around her and smiled down at me with such affection that I could not endure it for long.

  “Mrs. Fitzwilliam once told me you are very accomplished,” I said, for want of anything better.

  Eliza collapsed onto her back and blew out a breath. “I suppose I am,” she said.

  “She said”—and now, to my bemusement, my voice teased—“that you were quite the most accomplished girl at school.” I rolled onto my side. Her proportions were as generous as her laughter and understanding. I reached out a hand, and though I was not quite audacious enough to touch her so intimately as I wished to, I took a coil of orange hair that had sprung loose from its pins and let it run through my fingers like strands of silk thread.

  Her eyes closed as, emboldened, I let my fingers drift to explore her apple cheeks and the short, hard bridge of her nose; the indentation between nose and upper lip, furred like lamb’s ear leaves; the lips themselves, wide and smooth; the small hard knob of chin, all but lost between the roundness of cheeks and the slope of her throat. “It came rather easily to me,” she said. “I should not say so, but almost everything we learned bored me.”

  “Not so surprising, I suppose, from a devotee of Mary Wollstonecraft.”

  Her lips turned up under my fingers, though her eyes remained closed, reddish lashes nearly invisible. I wanted to count the freckles on her face; I longed, with an explorer’s insatiable, questing desire, to know whether they existed elsewhere on her body.

  “I suppose,” I said, stroking the side of her throat—there were freckles here, but only a few—“that it is also unsurprising that you would choose to . . . spend time with . . . a woman who has no accomplishments at all.” Her pulse fluttered under my fingertips, as frantic as my own.

  It was the closest I could come to asking her why she seemed as drawn to me as I was to her.

  She pulled away, eyes opening. “That,” she said, “is a very roundabout way of speaking for someone so frank as you.”

  I bit the side of my lip; shook my head.

  “Oh, Frank,” she said, emphasizing the word so that it sounded more like a name. “I like you very well as you are.” She curled herself around me, wrapping me in her arms and legs, tucking her face into the nook between my shoulder and chin. “I’ve never quite . . . fit,” she said against my skin. “I can pretend quite well—sometimes I suppose I am not pretending at all. But school was nearly all pretense for me, years of it. I was merely lucky that it was easy to pretend, for I did not have to work very hard to learn the lessons they pressed upon me.” Her arms tightened around me, and she dropped a kiss on the tender spot just behind my jaw. “I fit here, though,” she murmured.

  I relaxed back against her. I never fit, either, of course; but I lived most of my life in such a strange state, and so secluded from the wider world, that I never quite understood what it was I was supposed to be fitting into.

  But still: “This is not . . . usual,” I said, though with a questioning rise at the end of the last word; for I truly was not certain. I should be certain; but there was so much of the world that I had not encountered, even then.

  Eliza sat up, and she looked as guarded as I felt whenever I remembered Miss Hall’s reaction to my absurd proposal. “No,” she said. “I suppose it is not . . . usual. If, that is, by usual you mean—what is generally accepted. But did we not—that is to say, unusual is so much more interesting, is it not?” She smiled, but it was false, possibly the first false expression I had seen her wear, and by it I understood that she was as terrified of frightening me away as I was of frightening her. I rubbed my lips together without meaning to; they felt larger than usual, swollen from being pressed to hers.

  “There are others,” she said, a touch too quickly. “Other women who—and men, too. And we ladies are the lucky ones, for we . . . for the consequences of being, ah, found out are not so grave for us as they are for gentlemen who prefer one another’s company.”

  I could not fathom what two men might do together. But everything, everything was so new; and if two men felt together even a small measure of what I was experiencing now, I could not wonder at their pursuing it. There was damp, again, between my legs, just as there had been on the night of Lady Clive’s ball, welling as mysteriously as dew on night-grass; a great, unsolved puzzle of my own body that I was determined to decipher.

  Eliza spoke to fill the silence, leaning earnestly forward.

  “There are ladies who live together as husband and wife,” she said, keeping her eyes on mine.

  “How do you know about such things?” They were hardly within the scope of gently bred ladies’ educations. I thought again of John and his club; how women could not walk down the street there, let alone enter the club itself. I only knew this because I asked, once; my cousin and Mr. Watters spent so much time there that I could not help but be curious about it. Mrs. Fitzwilliam looked aghast, and then laughed in an affected manner.

  “Those places are the purview of men, my dear,” she said, as if that were all the answer required. Which, I suppose, it was.

  “There was a story in the newspaper,” Eliza said. “It was one Papa would not read out to us, and so it interested me all the more. A pair of women—a wife and a husband-wife, who goes about in breeches and cravat and beaver hat. Can you imagine such a thing?”

  I could not imagine her in such garb, with her love of a well-fitted gown; and yet, even as I thought this, all at once I suddenly could. The breeches and stockings would show the shape of her calves, hidden now under her layers of gown and petticoat and shift. Her hips and bosom would offer a challenge for a fitted coat; but a proper seamstress could rise to it. She flushed as if she could hear my thoughts, and I covered my face until helpless laughter enveloped us both.

  I touched my own body in the darkness, and thought of Eliza, slipping a hand under the thin fabric of my chemise to explore the skin of my thighs and the rough hair between them. Tentatively, my fingers sought out the shuddering, shocking place I’d discovered when Eliza’s leg pressed it. I imagined that my hand was not my own; wondered what someone else would feel as she touched me. My belly was no longer a hollow to be filled; my hip bones were a little cushioned. I bled now with a regularity that was strange to me; there was a rhythm to my body that was absent when it was not properly nourished. But my breasts were still small, not quite filling my cupped palms.

  I’d seen the way men’s eyes dipped to a lady’s bosom and then back up, taking in the sight in genteel sips, the same way they would sip at a glass of good claret. I had done the same—indeed, at the ball, I found my eyes flitting from female form to female form, quite impervious to the charms of the men. But I thought that the impulse to drink in the particulars of other women’s bodies, my admiration for Mrs. Darcy’s vigor or Miss Hall’s long fingers, was simply another of my drops’ peculiar effects. But perhaps I was simply not made to admire male figures. And Miss Amherst—Eliza, Eliza!—had experienced the very same impulses.

  This was, I
thought, how husbands and wives must enjoy one another. A natural impulse—Nature’s great Command, as Mr. Thomson wrote. But never, ever had the sight of a man made me feel so questing an inclination.

  I cringed from the thought of Miss Hall’s stillness when she understood where my inclinations lay. Every muscle in my body turned stiff and miserable with the recollection. And then, like a tonic, I thought of Eliza—bright and quick, bold and yet as nervous as I, myself—and my limbs relaxed, my belly softened. The taste of her lips and teeth and tongue; the fear and desire writ clearly upon her face. Something pulled and pulled behind the bones of my pelvis, taking me back to Brighton, to the ineffable, surging waves of the sea; but these waves were not cold. They warmed me, thrummed over and through me until at last I let myself be carried along by them in a great rush.

  Surely, I thought after, slack and bewildered, turning my face into my pillow; surely there could be nothing so terrible in these feelings if someone like Eliza felt them, too.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  We could not, of course, see one another privately every day, but we could, and did, keep our servants busy running notes between John’s house and Cavendish Square. And between letters, we took moments together like thieves, wherever we could be alone even for an instant. Our chamber doors muted any sounds we made, and our palms did, too; we pressed them to our mouths—to each other’s mouths. We muffled laughter around our own fingers; we swallowed down one another’s moans.

  Even when we were in company with others, we were sometimes bold enough to steal touches. The curl of little fingers as we walked together in the park, hidden from view by the curtains of our skirts; the press of slippered feet under a table. Her arms solid around my ribs, lifting me so my toes came up off the floor—just the quickest snatch of warm touching cheeks and the tickle of her lips over the pulse at my throat before she set me down again and continued on her slow and decorous way down the corridor toward her music room, which had been our destination. Only the self-conscious roll of her hips and the smile she tossed back at me—quick as sunlight on water—betrayed that anything unusual had just occurred.

  Eliza had slim silver furrows running along the insides of her thighs; and the outer curves of her breasts; and her hips and belly, rounded as the sloping hills of Kent. Learning of their existence, I could not stop stroking them, fingers dragging lightly up and down and back again. “Like tree bark,” I murmured; and she batted my fingers away.

  “Tree bark! What—am I so rough?”

  I smiled at her. “Not rough,” I said. “But they make a pattern—see? Like the skin of oak trees.” I traced one furrow across her breast until it ran into another; and then I circled her areolae, which were darker than my own, and wider, the skin impossibly tender. Looking at them, I thought of flower petals; when I said so, she laughed.

  “Of course you would,” she said.

  Each of her breasts filled my hands, paler than the rest of her, the only part of her body, I had at last discovered, not peppered with freckles. Released from the confines of her stays, they gently dropped, their own weight pulling them down to hang against her ribs. My palms curved instinctively, forming cups to hold them; and the smoothness of her nipples went pebbled as a riverbed.

  “You truly are peculiar,” she said, catching my hands and holding them more firmly against her, so that her breasts swelled up over the top of my thumbs as if my hands were a corset. “I think you would make a perfect resident for a hermitage. I can see you now, clothed in a gown of moss, your hair snarled, odd lines of poetry falling from your lips like prayers.” She kissed the plane of my chest. “Do you truly see bark and petals when you look at me?” she whispered into my skin.

  I hummed a little. “Well. It isn’t all I see.”

  Another kiss. “It makes me feel . . .”

  My chest tightened. “Like flora?”

  “Mmm.” Her breath a vibration, loosening the muscle of my heart once more. “Lush.”

  In her letters, she copied out poems and asked what I thought of them; she mentioned articles in the newspaper, and requested my opinion, and I nearly laughed at the surprise on John’s face when I asked if he would keep the paper for me when he was through with it.

  I was reminded bittersweetly of my yearslong correspondence with Miss Hall; a similar eagerness filled me whenever John’s butler brought me a folded letter in Eliza’s neat hand. And yet, there the similarity ended, for unlike Miss Hall’s, Eliza’s letters spilled over with generous measures of herself. She was liberal with her thoughts, her feelings; and there was an urgency to her questions for me, as if she could not know me quickly enough.

  She told me that she detested Mr. King, Julia’s intended, for the dismissive way he spoke to her sister.

  The only benefit to woman’s constrained circumstances that I can see, she wrote once, is that men often look upon us as they do children, never guessing at the thoughts and passions that run through our minds and hearts. If I must marry—and I fear I must—I pray that my husband will be very stupid.

  If only I had been born a man! I think I’d have liked to go into business, like my father. Regardless of what society thinks of manufacturing as a means of earning an income—my father loved the challenge of it. I hated school so very much. Not the other pupils, for they were mostly lovely, but the course of study . . . ! If I have girl-children, I will have to find some unlikely, progressive school, of which my husband will no doubt disapprove; or else found one, myself. Let them learn to use their minds, as men are taught to do.

  Miss Hall never opened herself to me. For all the years we were together, as governess and pupil, and young lady and companion, even as the difference between our ages came to feel slimmer and slimmer and as her initial frustration with me began to fade, I had to work for every scrap of understanding I had of her. I wondered, now, whether she was always so reticent with everyone, or if she somehow sensed the attraction I felt, even if I did not fully understand it yet, myself.

  Eliza was entirely open. She spoke her thoughts, and wrote them, too, trusting me with her truths, however socially unsuitable. She laughed too loudly when mirth overtook her. She spread her thighs and let me right inside her very body, where it was warm and seeping wet as the ground after a rain. I smelled her there as I always wanted to smell the earth, close and intimate, my nose in the hair between her legs. It was darker than the hair on her head, and coarser than the hair on her legs and under her arms; though I loved to smell her there, too, where the faint traces of rosewater that clung to her wrists and throat were buried under the scent of Eliza herself.

  No matter how I turned the question over inside my head, I could not account for how easily I accepted the gift of her candor; nor how I allowed myself, from our earliest meeting, to be so forthcoming with my own thoughts and feelings. I felt easy with her from the first; it was the sort of easiness I had never experienced before. It took all my usual disquiet and smoothed it away like the tide over the sand. It made me willing to speak of things I’d never spoken of before—my nighttime visitors; the anger that rose in me with frightening strength when I thought about my mother.

  It made me willing to try things, even when I hadn’t the faintest idea what I was doing; even when my attentions tickled instead of pleased, leaving Eliza with her fist pressed to her mouth to stifle her laughter and fat, delighted tears spilling down her cheeks. Instead of turning thorn-prickly, I laughed as well; and when our laughter faded, tried again.

  Eliza’s watercolors were exquisite, delicate. Perfect renderings of what she saw. Landscapes; dogs; vases of pinks. I looked at them all, one after another, and then, half-teasing, said, “What else can you do?”

  She cast me an irritated look and then, half-defiantly, half-laughingly, she showed me the embroidered linens she had made for Julia’s wedding trousseau, the stitches so perfectly even that even Miss Hall would have been impressed, the design a complicated interweaving of thistles and flowing leaves.

  I
kissed her. “What else?”

  She murmured to me in French, sentences that would have made her schoolmistress blush. I was pleased that I could understand her, even if my own clumsy responses made her snort, more like a barnyard creature than an accomplished young lady. She played for me, three songs one after the other, and sang, too, her voice almost as resonant as the voice of the singer at a concert I attended with the Fitzwilliams and Mr. Watters. That lady’s voice had made me think impiously that if only she had sung weekly at our church in Hunsford, I might have grown up with a better understanding of the Divine than I gained from a thousand tepid sermons.

  But Eliza suddenly struck her palm against the pianoforte’s black-and-white keys, jarring discordant notes ringing out in the air.

  “None of it matters,” she said in a mutter.

  I approached her slowly. “What do you mean?”

  She stared down at her fingers, curled into fists. “I do not . . . love any of this. In fact, I rather hate it all. And it—it is the same as fashion, which I love despite wondering if I have been trained to care about it. I cannot decide whether my feelings are true—whether I truly dislike needlework and painting and—or if perhaps I would find joy in it had it not been forced upon me, and other endeavors discouraged.” She rolled her knuckles along the keys, a little looping melody.

  I touched the pianoforte’s shining wood top. My own feelings were knotted as the threads of my embroidery projects, all those years ago in the school room. “Is it pointless?” I said slowly. Eliza looked up at me, and I hastened to add, “That is—is art, of any kind, pointless?” My thoughts were on the voice of the concert singer; how it raised me up, higher and higher, until I was floating above the crowd in their spindly chairs. It was all the joyful freedom of my drops with none of the mindlessness. It was transcendence.