“I suppose it is,” I replied. “Though her husband still lives, so their passion, as bright as it burns, cannot be approved.”
“Passion is not enough for you?”
“Well, I can’t say that,” I said, barely believing we were discussing the matter. But we were talking about the opera’s story, of course, not our own. Or were we? “But society would require a greater proof to give its approval.”
He said, “Marriage.”
I couldn’t read his emotions, and I rushed to fill the silence, stammering, “Y-yes. Love stories should end that way. Although that’s not an end. That’s not what I mean. But you asked about the opera. And something like that ends. In real life—I mean, I imagine, and I’d hope—in real life, the marriage is neither the beginning nor the end of the love story. Just a part, a very important part.”
His hand reached out again to cover my hand, still bare, still warm. Whispering, he said, “Miss Charlotte, your thoughts intrigue me.”
I think he would have kissed me if the carriage hadn’t bumped to a stop.
We’d arrived at our destination. I could see the familiar gas lamps of Powell Street flickering in my window. Hastily, I began to withdraw my fingers, readying the shucked glove, but he didn’t relinquish my hand right away. Our faces were so close together. I still couldn’t read his expression, as hard as I tried. I had no experience with such things, and I could only guess at the emotions I saw flickering there. Was it affection? Lust? Hope? Confusion? All of them?
We heard a double rap on the carriage door; the driver had already hopped down from his seat and was about to swing the door open. Whatever Henry did or didn’t feel, he let my hand go. I stuffed it back into the glove, as much as I hated to do so. The door opened. The driver extended his hand to help me down, which I took. The stolen moment inside the carriage was different from what we would have to do, who we would have to be, outside it.
“Good night, Charlotte,” Henry said, and had I had any idea what waited for me inside the house, I would have rooted my feet to the spot until he kissed me. Or I would have kissed him myself, leaning across the gap and putting an end to both his wondering and mine. But I had no idea what lay in store, so I just smiled at him and thought, There is time.
Climbing the steps slowly, I turned my attention back toward the carriage and gave a last, gloved wave. I couldn’t see inside, though, and the driver was back up on his seat, reins in hand. The horse trotted off down the drive, toward his night’s rest, and I turned to go inside, the door swinging open under Matilda’s touch before I could put my fingers to the handle.
“Hello!” I said, startled.
“Evening, miss,” she replied with a quick curtsy. “You’re wanted in the parlor.”
“The parlor?” I said. “So late?” Perhaps Phoebe had waited up for me, hungry for news of Henry, though it was more usual for her to do so in my bedroom. I was eager to tell her what had transpired, to ask her what to do, to relive those exquisite moments by recounting them.
Matilda nodded silently, closing the door behind me, shutting the cool night air outside. I could have asked her what was going on, but in the time it would take to pose the question, I could walk to the parlor myself, so I bid her good night and did so. Perhaps my mother was waiting to scold me. If so, I was impatient to have it done and then head upstairs to chuckle and sigh with a more appreciative audience.
But in the parlor, I stopped short, my gloved hand pressed against the doorframe for balance. My mother was perched on her favorite settee, fully dressed for day, her body tense with expectation. The half-light of a lantern beside her mottled her face and figure in shadow.
When she saw me, she beamed with a broad, welcoming smile, which struck me as even more unusual than her garb given the lateness of the hour. But I barely had time to ponder it.
I had noticed an even stranger sight—my father in the farther chair, leaning forward with his elbows on his knees, the lamp next to him not lit. He stared down at his hands. I had never understood what someone meant by having cold water run through their veins. Now I did. A fearful shiver, icy and foreboding. He did not look up when I entered.
It was my mother who broke the silence, with no prelude. She said, “We had a visitor this evening.”
“Oh?”
“George Sidwell.”
I blinked at the name. It was familiar, of course, but I couldn’t understand why it merited this sudden, strange conversation. Nor could I account for the cheerful, almost giddy way in which my mother said it. “George?”
“Yes.”
My hand still on the doorframe, I said, “I hope he had a lovely visit. Might we discuss it tomorrow?”
“Sit down, please, Charlotte.”
I hovered for a moment, uneasy.
My father spoke, his eyes still on his clasped hands. “Sit.”
I lowered myself to the settee across from my mother’s, facing them both, spreading the generous satin folds of my skirt across the cushion. It could hardly matter how I sat at such a moment, but it was what I’d learned, and I could not shake the habit, even as my heartbeat sped up in confusion and fear.
My mother began, “I’d planted some seeds a while ago, and it seems, well, they’ve taken root.”
“Oh?”
“We talked a great deal about George’s prospects. He’s quite an accomplished young man. Doing very well managing affairs his father has entrusted to him, including the asylum, I’m given to understand. Certain to take a position in the state senate, for starters, and I wouldn’t be too surprised if our neighbor Stanford decides to back him for governor.”
My mother didn’t approve of too much reading, but I was familiar with the tales of Alice in Wonderland. I felt I was in Wonderland now, adrift in nonsense and struggling to make my way.
“Yes, he does seem to have a great future ahead of him.”
“It’s not only his future we discussed.”
I guessed at her intent, as best I could. “What? Does he want to marry Phoebe?”
“No, dear. He wants to marry you.”
I laughed aloud. I couldn’t help it. After the night I’d just had, alive with love for Henry, the idea that his brother might propose marriage to me—a brother who’d never said more than a sentence to me in our lives—was the most outrageous, foolish thing I could imagine. Not even that. It was beyond imagination.
I said, “He must know his brother is the one courting me. Is he confused?”
My parents exchanged glances, and my stomach began to sink. They were not laughing.
My father said, “You understand how important his family’s goodwill is to us.”
“Of course.”
Now my father’s words came faster and softer, his hands twisting together. “But there’s more you don’t know. We lost so much of the fleet off the Cape last year, and I needed funds to replace the ships, which Charles Sidwell granted me as a loan. That loan has come due. I cannot pay it. If our families are united in marriage, if you will be the wife George so ardently desires, Charles has offered me a business deal that will cement our future.”
“Of course,” I said. “I have no objections to a good business deal with the Sidwells. And I believe they have no objections to my marrying Henry.”
“Henry has not asked for your hand in marriage. George has.”
I gulped for air while I tried to think of something to say. My brain felt empty, hollow. I remembered the feeling of Henry’s hand in mine, of the unbearable closeness of the skin of his neck, of my longing for him and my feeling that I might at last be within reach of fulfilling it. That moment in the carriage, when I thought he’d ask at last, and the moment after, when I told myself the proposal was a certainty and only the timing was in question. George? What did George have to do with anything? I would have laughed again, but my mother’s initial cheer had subsided into something darker, less generous. I feared increasing her ire.
Instead, I said, struggling to keep my voice lev
el, “But that’s preposterous! George must know of his brother’s attachment.”
“Attachment?” my mother said, her voice sharp and cool.
“Interest.” I could not officially lay claim to any more than that, I realized. I couldn’t convey what I’d felt in the moments Henry and I had spent near each other, a current of energy surrounding us, the feeling that my blood and his sang at the same frequency. I had been so certain he felt the same way I did. But there was no evidence, no proof, nothing I could tell my mother as she stared me down in the half-dark parlor.
“Interest?” she repeated.
“In. . .spending time with me.”
“Many boys have spent time with many girls, and nothing has come of it. Nothing good, I should say.”
“But I’m sure!” I heard my voice getting too loud and struggled to contain it. “I’m sure George must know.”
My mother braced her hands on either side of her against the settee. “Whatever George may or may not know, Charlotte, I can only tell you what he said. He said he admires you, considers you the very ideal of womanhood. He said he wants you as his wife.”
“Talk to the Sidwells. They know. They know what he must intend,” I said. I was growing slightly hysterical. I remembered, with a sick feeling in my stomach, what Henry had told me about George when they were children: He would take things away from me just to watch me cry. It would take a dreadful man to steal his brother’s beloved for spite, but for all I knew, George Sidwell could be dreadful. I didn’t know him at all. And it didn’t seem to matter. My parents were too level, too unemotional. I could see the writing on the wall, and it terrified me.
“We did speak with them,” said my father, fingering a button on his shirt, looking down at his fingers instead of meeting my gaze. “After George proposed, they came to add their voices to his. They were terribly complimentary to you and went on about your beauty, your deportment, your elegance. What a good match it would be. For George’s career and for our fortunes. Charles will forgive the debt as a wedding present. We’re all in agreement.”
I didn’t ask what he meant. I wished he wouldn’t say it.
But he did. “You’ll marry George before the year is out.”
I had reached my limit. For once, the deportment the Sidwells had apparently found praiseworthy in me wavered. I tried to hold my tongue and failed. “Oh, will I?”
My parents looked at each other, her spine stiffening, his shoulders rounding. My father would not take my part against my mother, I saw in an instant. He was ashamed he’d put the business in jeopardy, ashamed his family should know his finances. He needed this deal, badly. He’d always expanded his business more by whim and luck than through patient, methodical investment, and this time, his luck had run out.
And I’d been put up against a rainy day, to be plucked from the shelf when all else failed. That was what all my education had been leading to. All the lessons and lectures. We were trained into ideal wives. Daughters were assets to be traded, like indigo, like hemp. And at last, Mother had her chance to rise. With Phoebe unmarriageable, I was her only way. This was the only way. Everyone would get what they wanted. A wife for George, status for Mother, money and absolution for my father. Everyone stood to benefit but me.
Her voice dripping with honey, Mother said, “It will be lovely. Perfect timing. No other major social events planned, so we’ll absolutely make the season. Charlotte, you’ll be such a beautiful bride.”
I said nothing.
I wanted to scream. I wanted to cry. I wanted to run out the door and into Henry’s arms and plead with him to take me away, anywhere at all in the world, even Patagonia, if it meant we could be together. I could fling myself upon him, tell him everything I’d been feeling, beg him to love me, marry me, save me.
I did none of these things. The decision had been made, and I could do nothing to change it. I had always been obedient. Every part of my body cried out against this, but I would obey. To save my father’s business, I would become the wife my parents needed me to be.
Gathering fistfuls of heavy dove-gray skirt in my hands, I rose from the settee, slipping one foot behind the other to drop into the curtsy the dancing master had taught me, my head down.
“Yes, sir. Yes, ma’am.”
I walked slowly up the stairs at first, but once I knew I was alone, my bottled emotions drove me forward. By the time I reached the hall, I was running. I banged open the door of Phoebe’s room and flung myself on her bed, waking her with a start, unapologetic.
“What? What’s happened?” she asked with sleepy eyes, taking me by the shoulders as I raved, my tears overflowing.
The story spilled out of me, and I watched my sister’s face grow horrified, then furious, then resolute. But I didn’t realize what I was doing. I only thought the pain might be less if I shared it, and that’s how I would bear doing this heartbreaking thing that duty compelled me to do.
I cried out every hope in my sister’s arms. Every moment that I’d held Henry’s hand, or imagined his beard tickling my cheeks, or let myself dream I might be Mrs. Henry Sidwell. Now, I never would. My parents had informed me I was to be Mrs. George Sidwell. In being close to the thing I wanted, it was a mockery how far it truly was from my desire.
She soothed me as I sobbed. Her hand delicately stroked my hair, making long steady progress from my crown to my shoulder, over and over again, a constant and beautiful thing. She said little, perhaps sensing that I needed no words. My throat burned. My eyes prickled. Deep in my chest, the ache grew until it swallowed me. I wore myself out, letting the emotion flow through me and out of me. After a time, the edges of everything blurred away, and I sensed her rising, and I was alone among the blankets.
I had drifted downward into the welcome oblivion of sleep when I heard the shouting. Three voices, in turn, none calm or level, each more animated than the next. As much as my exhaustion dragged me down, I couldn’t ignore them.
Eyes closed, I listened. Muffled and jumbled at first, the sounds became clearer. I wanted to remain ignorant but couldn’t. The door to the bedroom stood ajar, where Phoebe must have left it when she fled downstairs, and the sounds flowed toward me, over me.
I heard them shouting. Phoebe’s voice carried so well that hers were the only words I heard half the time. She was screaming no and death sentence and outrage. She was screaming no.
She might have been arguing with them about anything, I suppose, but she wasn’t. I knew she was talking about me. I had racked her with my grief, and she had immediately taken up my cause, pleading for me in a way I could not plead for myself, begging our parents to release me from the bargain they’d struck.
After she was sent to Goldengrove, I tried to convince myself there was some other interpretation. I hadn’t even heard them say my name, not once. But here, alone and defenseless, I had to admit it to myself at last. My sister had taken my side in outrage. She had defended me when I was too weak to defend myself. That was why they’d sent her away.
Deep in the isolation of Darkness, in the black empty cell, not knowing when or if I would ever see my sister again, I cried for her more than for myself. I had gotten myself into this situation only because she had sacrificed herself for me. She had always been the passionate one. She burned herself up in passion because she thought the match was wrong, and of course it was wrong, but I had knuckled under almost instantly. I loved her more than I ever had in that moment. I understood at last that she would always burn brighter than I, for better or worse.
And yet, I had already changed so much since the last time I’d seen her. I had taken a leap into disobedience, and now I understood there was no going back to the life of the ornamental doll I’d once been. I would emulate my sister in more than one way, for both our sakes. The only way forward for me was to burn.
Chapter Fifteen
Time passed in Darkness as a dizzying, awful river of empty hours. Anything I tried to measure slipped away. I tried pacing from one wall to another,
trying to take stock of the distance, but I always seemed to stumble just when I needed to stand still, and my mind skipped over numbers that lingered just out of my grasp. There was hunger and thirst, both multiplying, so intense, I worried I might die of one or the other.
But there was food sometimes, and drink sometimes. I tried to measure the intervals between, to find the boundary between day and night. There was none.
Hours and minutes bled into one another, and it seemed sometimes only minutes passed between two meals and sometimes days. But who knew what the truth was? Not that the food they brought was deserving of the name meal. Scraps, merely. Sometimes no more than a cutoff crust or heel of bread, sometimes a thin broth, sometimes half of a half-rotten fruit. Once, it was a heap of cucumber peels. Much of it was so wretched, I had to force it down, but I ate every bite, never knowing when something else might come along. There was nourishment in it, whatever it was, and if I held my nose, I could forget some part of it. There was power in forgetting.
And all my other powers were trickling away. After the reverie of the night of Phoebe’s last fit, I could manage no other reveries. I went about it just the same, but my efforts bore no fruit. Any loving memories I could summon up quickly twisted into nightmares. The soft fur of Henry’s beard, burned away like the far side of Celia’s face. Giggling on a picnic blanket with Phoebe, until the ground underneath her opened up and her side of the blanket plunged into it, black earth swallowing her whole. A carefree stroll through a garden of roses, suddenly interrupted by the rope gang from Euterpe Ward, trampling the flowers underfoot and cramming fistfuls of petals into their gaping mouths, heedless of the thorns.
It was better not to try to remember.
There was never more light or less, so I had no sense of days or nights, only minutes that clicked and chattered on and on, seemingly without end. Time and time and time.
I changed my approach. When I made the attempt to think, I summoned only modest joys. I reasoned with what little reason was left to me; if I did not try to remember anything too happy, my mind might not punish me with anything too sad. And I only let myself think of what had happened here in Goldengrove, nothing from my life before.
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