by Olivia Waite
Agatha’s temper roared up like a bonfire. “I am saying that she did you an immense kindness, and you ought to show that you are conscious of the debt!”
Ahead, Sydney and Eliza whirled round, blinking at the anger in Agatha’s voice.
She clamped her lips shut, ground her teeth together, and marched on silently, head down.
Mr. Flood turned and followed, keeping pace with her. His hands slid out of his pockets and clasped behind his back. His head tilted up, squinting at the sky, which promised more snow in the evening to come.
Agatha watched him warily, afraid she’d gone too far in her friend’s defense.
When Mr. Flood looked back at her, his eyes were clear, and frank, and shrewd as he said: “We always worry about the people we love.”
And then he walked on, whistling, as though he hadn’t just scoured every last bit of wax off Agatha’s soul to reveal the true picture graven on the metal beneath.
Of course what she felt for Penelope Flood was not precisely friendship. It was longing, and protectiveness, and pride, and joy, all tangled up together. A good bit of wholesome lust as well, Agatha knew—and she’d focused on that because it was the most visible, and the most inexcusable.
But that was only the shading, not the scene itself. She knew what name to put to the entirety of her feelings, when she looked at the whole and not just each individual part.
Love, in a word. She ought to have realized sooner.
She certainly ought to have realized it before Penelope’s husband did.
Merry Christmas, everyone, Agatha thought bitterly, and trudged unhappily toward the Hall.
Chapter Twenty
Once home from church the party ate, and drank, and exchanged gifts as though their lives depended on it.
Flood had embroidered two new seabags for her brother and husband: sturdy canvas things, dotted with small bright bees and green leaves and a painstakingly stitched miniature Fern Hall. “Which was so reassuringly square and regular,” she explained, “that even my haphazard embroidery skills could attempt it.”
Mr. Flood looked immensely gratified.
Captain Stanhope went into paroxysms of delighted laughter on account of one particularly poorly embroidered bee. “The eyes!” he choked, shoulders shaking. “Look at the eyes! I can’t stand it!”
Flood blazed red. “I can pick it out and try to fix—”
“Don’t you dare,” her brother protested, wrapping one arm around her and pulling her into an embrace. “I adore him. I’m calling him Clarence.”
“Most bees are female,” Flood reminded him, even as she blushed and ducked her head.
“I’m calling her Clarence, then.”
Agatha had given Flood a new volume of poetry—one of the sonnets was about queen bees—and had received in return a very small, very beautiful pot of green glass. When she raised the lid and sniffed experimentally, she inhaled the scent of lemons and honey and just a hint of warm bread. It was sharp and sweet and strong and Agatha had to fight the urge to scoop it into her mouth and devour it like a sweet-toothed child snatching frosting from an untended cake.
Flood was watching her, smiling shyly. “It’s one of Miss Coningsby’s balm recipes,” she said. “Do you like it?”
Agatha dabbed her fingers in and spread the balm onto the rough spots of her hand and the warm skin of her wrist; it sank in at once as that luscious scent swirled around her. “I love it,” she responded softly. Her own pulse beat rather unsteadily beneath her scent-drenched fingertips.
Penelope’s smile was so dazzling Agatha had to look away in self-defense—just in time to take note of Eliza and Sydney, gazing meaningfully at one another over a book of madrigals the girl had just unwrapped.
Sydney reached out and touched the back of her hand with just a fingertip; her lips curved teasingly . . . then Captain Stanhope’s belly laugh rang out again and the two young people pulled away from one another.
Agatha quashed a sigh. It had been months, now. More than time to have a proper motherly talk with her son about how his courtship was progressing. A flash of memory warmed her and had her smiling softly. She’d resented her own parents’ interference when she was his age; she had much more sympathy with them now, from the vantage of mature perspective.
Her mother would be laughing at her, Agatha knew.
Well, at least one Griffin could find happiness with the person they loved. Agatha was doomed to pine for the foreseeable forever, but there was no reason her son should do the same.
She managed to snag Sydney by the elbow as everyone else trooped to the dining room for dinner. “I have something for you,” she murmured.
Sydney stopped and tilted his head. “You already gave me a gift.”
“So I did, but indulge me.” Agatha reached into her pocket and pulled out her silver wedding band. It gleamed hopefully in her palm when she extended her hand to her son. “You might like to take this as well. To keep handy. If you can think of someone who might be inclined to accept it.” She smiled expectantly.
Sydney’s lips tilted up, just as she’d hoped, but his smile gleamed much more falsely than the silver. “I don’t believe I’ll be needing a ring, Mum,” he replied softly.
Her heart ached at his words. “You don’t think Eliza would have you?”
His face tightened even more. “We’ve decided . . .”
Agatha waited the space of five whole breaths before her impatience got control of her tongue. “You’ve decided what?”
“We’ve decided not to get married.” The words came out all in a rush, as if Sydney were trying to shove the incriminating sentence out the window before the constables came in and caught him with the evidence.
Agatha stood there, shocked.
Sydney tried to leave, but his mother’s hand shot out quick as a striking snake and latched onto his coat sleeve. The ring tumbled to the wooden floor and chimed a protest.
“What do you mean, not to get married?” Agatha hissed through a clenching jaw.
“Mrs. Griffin?” Eliza stepped cautiously toward them down the hall. “Is everything alright?” She spotted the bright ring on the floor and bent to pick it up.
Sydney froze. Eyes wide, mouth flat, poised on the edge of a precipice, with a long fall threatening.
Agatha bit back a thousand different harsh words.
Eliza turned the ring back and forth, then raised her eyes to the Griffins, twin statues on the parlor threshold. After a moment, she held the ring out to Agatha—slowly, as though confronting some kind of wild beast liable to turn feral at any moment. “This is yours, isn’t it, Mrs. Griffin?” Her smile was calm, poised, but the light in her eyes was just a shade too steely. She knew what she was doing, handing that bauble back.
Agatha closed her hand around the ring and felt the chill metal leach the heat from her palm. “It is mine, and was my mother’s before that.”
Eliza nodded. “You wouldn’t want to lose it, then.”
Sydney’s eyes darted back and forth from his mother to his . . . His what? Beloved, but not betrothed?
Agatha’s head spun, dizzy from the speed of revelations. “I had rather hoped to have a reason not to wear it much longer,” she said weakly, then pressed her lips together and tried to resurrect some maternal fury. “I’d hoped you might be the one to wear it instead.”
Eliza tilted her head. “But it would get tarnished, or dented, in the course of my work. I couldn’t risk it.” One quicksilver glance flashed to Sydney, and then her gaze was back to clash with Agatha’s. “Something so precious is worth being thoughtful about. Once damaged, it might be impossible to repair.”
Her eyes begged Agatha to understand what she was trying not to say.
Agatha could only shake her head. The conversation had gotten so beyond her she didn’t know how to grasp it. There was a time for delicacy—and there was a time to heave delicacy aside like so much rubble and get right to the heart of the matter. “Sydney tells me you two have d
ecided . . . not to get married.”
Eliza nodded quickly, visibly relieved. “That’s right, ma’am. We’ve been talking about it for a few months now.”
Agatha’s eyes narrowed. “Just talking?”
Eliza had the grace to blush.
Agatha’s teeth ground hard. Foolish girl. Foolish, stubborn, thoughtless . . . She rode this new wave of anger, grasping gratefully at the invaluable clarity of rage. “Do you love my son, Miss Brinkworth?”
Sydney started a defensive reply, but cut it off at a sharp glance from Eliza.
The apprentice squared her shoulders to face Agatha, tucking her hands behind her back like a disgraced soldier at a court-martial. “I love your son dearly, Mrs. Griffin. I expect to love him for the rest of my life.”
Agatha snorted. Such confidence meant nothing at seventeen. “Then why not marry him?”
Eliza’s reply was quiet, and sure, and utterly devastating: “Because if I made that choice, I would lose the right to make too many other choices in my life.”
Agatha’s heart all but stopped beating.
“Marriage is a legal prison, from a wife’s perspective,” Eliza went on. Softly. Inexorably. “You’ve said so yourself. And I’ve read Wollestonecraft and Godwin and Wooler, among others, and I find myself strongly persuaded against the whole institution. Your son loves me enough to trust my decision on this. I would like to continue loving him—but I can’t do that so earnestly if I marry him.”
She bestowed upon Sydney a smile of such pure and profound affection that Agatha half expected the boy to keel over on the rug from the force of it.
Eliza’s face when she turned back to Agatha was still composed, except for a slight tightness at the corners of her eyes. “I know this must be painful to hear, but I’m quite determined, and I hope that you can find it in your heart to understand in time.”
Agatha could find no reply to this. After a moment, Eliza turned away and walked down the hallway toward the dining room. Her spine was straight, her step unhurried. Everything calm and collected.
It was the calm born of unsurprise. She’d known the argument with Agatha was coming. She’d prepared for it, and now that it was here she’d weathered it, and not let it sway her from her chosen course.
Agatha would have admired that if she hadn’t wanted so badly to seize the girl by the shoulders and shake her until all her philosophical ideals fell to the floor like so many loosened hairpins.
She rounded upon her son, an equally appealing target. “What do you intend to do about this?” she demanded.
“Nothing,” Sydney replied shortly.
Agatha choked. “That is unacceptable!”
Her son’s frown deepened. “We talked about this, turned it over from every side. For months. She doesn’t want to marry me. It’s her choice to make. What kind of man would I be if I pressed my suit after she so firmly refused?” Sydney spread his hands, misery writ plainly on his face. “I love her. I’ll take anything she chooses to give me—but not a thing more than that.”
Agatha fumed at this, and fumed a little more when she realized he was using some of her own teachings against her. But there was one point yet to be made: “If you aren’t planning to wed,” she said, voice low and dark, “then the correct thing to do is to break off the affair entirely.”
Sydney’s long mouth twisted unhappily. “That’s not what either of us wants.”
“If your father were here—”
“He’d what?” Sydney cut her off. “Disinherit me? Throw Eliza out into the street?”
“We could find her another apprenticeship,” Agatha blurted out, desperate. It was a mistake, she knew it at once, and she kept going, anyway. “Plenty of printers in London could use someone as talented as she is—Novello, for instance . . .”
Sydney’s eyes blazed. “If you send her away, I’ll go with her.” His hands were fists at his sides. “I’ll go anywhere with her.”
“How about to her father?” Agatha shot back. “What will you do when he asks what your intentions are for his only daughter? What will you say when people start to whisper about you and Eliza—assuming they aren’t already—when no wedding happens—and if there is a child—”
“There won’t be,” Sydney replied staunchly.
“You can’t be certain—”
“If there is, we’ll revisit the question then.” One corner of his mouth turned up in grim amusement. “After all, we can always get married later on, can’t we?”
Agatha felt like screaming, but had to restrain it to a furious hiss. “Of all the irresponsible—”
“Enough, Mum!” Sydney cried.
Agatha’s mouth snapped shut.
Sydney huffed out a breath, fists balled at his sides. “I won’t force Eliza to place her whole life in my hands if I can’t do the same thing for her.” He skewered Agatha with a furious glare, which reminded his mother far too much of herself. “You and Father taught me that honesty was a virtue—well, I’m telling you honestly: I love Eliza, and I’m not going to marry her, and there’s nothing you can say to convince me what we’re doing is wrong.”
As Agatha gasped in outrage, he stomped down the hall and vanished into the dining room.
It was just past midnight, so farewell to Christmas Day. Penelope found herself fidgety—dinner had been a peculiar, tense affair, with half the guests at the table suddenly and inexplicably snappish and unsociable—and the first few hours of her sleep were punctuated by unsettling dreams. Running and running but going nowhere. Gravestones towering up as high as city buildings. Trying to write a letter, but watching the ink pour away from the paper as though it were blood being shed from a murdered body.
After this last, she decided a soothing drink was in order.
Apparently, she was not the only one in search of comfort. For when she stepped into the larder for milk, she found Agatha Griffin furiously slicing pieces of bread from a loaf. She wore a green robe and cream shawl, her salt-and-pepper hair hanging loose down her back and shaking with every movement. Penelope smiled at first—but her smile faltered, as she watched the abrupt, angry motions of Griffin’s hands, and saw the light of the single candle outline the tight lines at the corners of her mouth.
Penelope cleared her throat softly. “I’ve got something stronger than bread, if you want it.”
“Oh!” Griffin whirled around, knife raised—then fear and fury melted away when she saw it was only Penelope. “Yes, thank you—the stronger the better.”
Penelope strode to the shelves on the far wall. Mrs. Braintree usually kept a bottle near to hand—ah, yes, here it was. A short, slim bottle of deep amber. “I should give you fair warning,” she said, “this is quite possibly the most dangerous drink in all of Melliton.”
“What’s in it?”
“Honey. Well, mostly honey.” Penelope turned the bottle so its shoulders gleamed red in the candlelight.
A reluctant spark lit Griffin’s eyes. “Only you, Flood, would try to comfort someone by offering them something dangerous.”
“Is it working?”
“Give me a taste and we’ll find out.”
Penelope found two glasses, took a seat beside her friend at the long wooden table, and poured generous helpings for them both. Griffin sniffed at hers and reared back, blinking tears from her eyes.
Penelope grinned over the rim of her glass. “Warned you.”
Griffin shot her a defiant glare and swallowed half the drink in a single gulp.
“Steady!” Penelope said, alarm flaring up within her. “This stuff’s even stronger than that brandy you like.”
“Good,” Griffin wheezed around the alcohol fumes. She took one of the slices of bread and tore it apart with her hands, stuffing pieces into her mouth and chewing as if the bread had done her some grievous injury, and now she was finally taking vengeance.
Penelope sipped more cautiously at her mead, letting the fire of it roll over her tongue. She’d hoped it would sweeten her words, b
ring her something subtle and persuasive to say—but all she could find was a brief, blunt question: “What is it that’s troubling you?”
“Sydney and Eliza.” Griffin stared into her glass as if it could offer an oracle. “They’ve decided not to wed.”
“Oh dear,” Penelope murmured. “And they seemed to be getting on so well . . .”
“Oh,” Griffin responded dryly, “they are.”
Penelope frowned. “I don’t understand.”
“Sydney assures me that if they have children, they will reconsider the situation then.”
For a moment she was puzzled—then Penelope gaped in horror. “Oh no.”
Griffin toasted with the last of her mead. “Now you see where my head’s been at all evening.”
“That damn . . . nineteen-year-old!”
Griffin chortled bitterly. “Just so, Flood.”
Penelope gravely poured another measure of mead for them both, and raised her glass in a toast. “To the follies of youth,” she said. “Long may they last.”
Griffin spun her glass round on the table, her shoulders bunched up tight, the gray in her hair turned molten silver by candlelight. “I was so ready to wish them joy,” she said mournfully. “It seemed such a likely match. And Eliza is bright and kind and everything I could ask for in a daughter-in-law.”
“Did they say why they aren’t getting married?”
“I knew all that political talk would be trouble,” Griffin muttered. “I just didn’t foresee how.” She looked up, her mouth a flat line. “They’ve been reading.”
Penelope sputtered out a laugh. “Not that!”
Griffin remained unamused. “Eliza says marriage is a trap, and Sydney is unwilling to try to change her mind.”
Penelope’s laughter faded. “I sympathize, Griffin—really I do . . .”
