by Baird Wells
A frown was Millicent’s first answer, and then she shook her head. “Gladstone. I thought I’d prevail upon him and his government yet again, for the introduction of some legislation.”
Hannah saw the fine line between futility and determination embodied in her friend’s sheet of paper. “Prime minister to a queen, a woman, how many times now? His influence could help us get the vote, with a woman on the throne. But first he’d have to ask for it, the obstinate old goat.”
Millicent shrugged. “I can agree with him sometimes; just not today.”
Worrying the embroidery on her glove, Hannah kept her gaze turned down. “I’m afraid you won’t agree with me either.”
“You’re not quitting the chapter…” Millicent’s words hung low with sadness.
“Not quitting, but perhaps leaving. You won’t tell a soul,” Hannah begged.
Relief and smugness mixed into a strange expression, mostly in Millicent’s eyes. “Finally taking my advice?”
“Not exactly. I’m thinking of leaving for good. America seems the right sort of climate, if you take my meaning. But I feel like a traitor, abandoning our cause.”
Millicent laughed and settled further in her chair, appraising Hannah with a long look. “Our cause is universal, and we have sisters on every shore, Hannah. You’d be welcomed there with open arms, and they will be fortunate to have you.”
“I don’t want to go.”
“My observation is that you do. You’ve held onto life here for so long, even when you shouldn’t,” Millicent offered. It was both wise and perceptive for someone who didn’t know the whole sordid history with Simon. “You’ve been stagnating. I think if you muster your courage and step away…” She nodded, serene. “You’ll find that you’re truly living.”
Hannah was too absorbed by her worry to believe it. “You mustn’t tell anyone. Not even Lydia or Ada; you have to be consistent in your ignorance.”
Millicent’s eyes danced, as though she relished being part of something clandestine for a change. “You are a very free-spirited sort within. Who knows what place or thing might catch your fancy? I could never guess.”
Tears, joyful and sad, stung Hannah’s eyes. “Thank you.”
“Thank you.”
“I will miss you, very much,” she whispered, taking a long look around the room.
“More than you will enjoy your freedom?”
“No,” Hannah admitted with relief, feeling alive inside just as Millicent had predicted. She wanted to explain James and what he had done for her, what she hoped waited for them out on the horizon. Unwilling to incriminate with details when she’d just made Millicent promise silence, she stayed quiet. “I’ve sacrificed freedom and happiness for so long. I’m ready to be selfish.”
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CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
Hannah asked Bethany to bring down her coat, her dark blue velvet with the belled sleeves and ostrich feather trim along the hem. It was a coat she had worn to the opera in the days when she’d been permitted to live in more than one or two shades. It had a high, silk-embroidered neck and lots of satin frogs down its front and a quilted silk lining. Those were the arguments that she made to the household in general for needing to wear a concealing garment; that it was winter and her black velvet coat for everyday would be inadequate when she went out the following afternoon. Margaret had shrugged and made an off-hand remark about Mister Hilton calling for her early tomorrow, and Hannah had carried the coat to her room in guilty ecstasy.
Hours groaned by between the necessary landmarks; a rattle of dishes in the kitchen sinks and a clink of teapots being put away in the still room, the thump and tin-shuffling of neatening the pantry, a repetitive hush of windowsills being dusted one last time, and a groan of the flue being closed in each room when the fire had been put out for the night.
Hannah lay in her bed to maintain her part of the illusion. Bethany came in and drifted from corner to corner like a specter, closed the curtains and raked the fire, laid out Hannah’s dressing gown, and drifted out again.
Painfully slowly, the servants flowed and then trickled up into the boughs of the house, further and further, until the last door thudded on the fourth floor and all was silent. By then, Hannah perched on a chair beside her vanity and waited. She watched through her panes, stared at the face of a brownstone across the lane until rectangles of light on its wall, from her house’s transoms and windows, winked out and became nighttime shadow. An ache built inside her breast, and her heartbeat rushed inside her ears as she strained to hear any sound from out in the hall.
She wasn’t afraid; she’d made up her mind and wouldn’t be scared off by the threat of tomorrow. Realizing that she could never be sure of having waited long enough, but feeling that she had, Hannah abandoned to the table top a book she had only stared at and got up.
First she dug to the back of her wardrobe, to a depth where garments went that were never worn anymore. She found the right garment after a lot of rustling and slipped it on over her chemise with a thrill. Then she got down a plain, black poplin walking dress from the front, the one with the high, frilled neck and the long, tight sleeves that dangled like snakes. She stuffed the walking dress into a scarlet and rose tapestry valise, ahead of her brush and comb, a seashell-shaped silver case that held her toiletries. Instruments for concealing her transgressions, she thought with a grin. Then she tossed in a full crowned hat of an older style and snapped the bag shut.
She took her blue coat from the bench where James had first begun to undress her, and sank into the garment’s plush embrace past all nine circles of the Inferno. Its lining slipped against parts of her skin that were never exposed, reminding her just what she was about, and she shivered.
Valise clutched to her chest, she crept through the front room. From there, she moved by held breaths. Turning the knob, scraping the door, and moving both feet out into the hall were all single and distinct acts. A dead mouse in her valise; that was her alibi if anyone questioned her. The dead creature had disgusted her too much to leave it be, and so she was just slipping out to the rubbish bin to dispose of it. Not even Margaret would insist on looking, under threat of being faced with miniature gruesomeness.
Hannah wondered that she didn’t hear the servants coming and going more in the course of a day. Their staircase was an aged turncoat, each step creaking and groaning out a warning of her flight. She tried reasoning with herself, that she was only self-conscious because she knew the truth of her purpose; people came and went throughout the night, servants using the water closet or tending to matters they had remembered in the groggy space between dreams. None of her arguments unknit the cords between her shoulders, wrapping her ribs. They were only massaged away by the night’s frosty caress when she slid out onto the step and closed the door, enjoying something like freedom.
She went west instead of east, to the fenced corner at Park Lane where there was a better chance of catching a passing hansom cab without being spied from her own house or a prying neighbor. She took her time along Upper Brook, not wanting to look any more out of place, and appreciated the street in a way she hadn’t for years. Gregory’s townhouse was on Upper Brook, of course. It had been a fashionable address in grandsire George Welling-Webster’s day, and unlike Avaline’s weathered street, Brook and Upper Brook had managed to keep the brickwork fresh enough and had hidden away the Greek and the Corinthian bits in favor of a Gothic frenzy, so that the street retained an element people called ‘charming’, when anywhere else they meant ‘passé’.
Hannah passed beneath the winking glass diamonds of the gas lamps, spilling their amber glow over mounds of snow that ridged the gutters, until she reached the wide corner at Park Lane. For the first time in memory, no carts or carriages rumbled over its cobblestone arms, and she clutched her valise and considered the wisdom of her scheme. Her heart jolted each time a figure separated from the shadowed alleyways, glowing like a warning under the lamps down the walkway, and disappearing again into th
e darkness.
She had never ventured further than The Strand on foot and never after dark. She traveled with an awareness of her surroundings amongst Whitechapel’s bedraggled crush of dead-eyed match girls and sooty children pressed up against the workhouse walls. Arch-backed, brazen Covent Garden ladies who waited for rushing, low-brimmed gentlemen in the obscure gloom behind the market were known to be as ruthless as their male counterparts when it came to demanding a purse. London on the East End, London anywhere after sunset, was a world she pitied and aided, but inherently feared. A cold and starving stranger wouldn’t know or care how many baskets she’d taken to families that month. Alone now at the street’s edge, in a coat so expensive that it invited violence from the hungry and the vicious, she recalled James's remark about madness and knew that he was right. Lunacy that made her fit for the asylum was the only basis for what she was doing now.
Then a cart lumbered past, its weathered side rails promoting the unsurpassed quality of Pederson’s shoe black, followed by two glossy landaus and a peeling hansom. A tinsel-caped matron and two dapper gentlemen strode past, raising their hats to her, and left her to wonder if the street had been empty at all, or her imagination full.
Another hansom clattered toward her, a swinging pair of lamps at the front revealing its high-hatted driver, just a torso and head seated behind atop his wired chair.
She raised her arm, he called to his horses, and she slumped in relief.
The cab drew up alongside, driver peering down at her from on high between the creases of his eyes, brush mustache twitching, sniffing curiously at her appearance. “Where to, so late?” he barked. He pried for details rather than asking her destination, but Hannah gripped the leather handles of her valise and held her voice even. “Twenty-Two Brook’s Mews. My aunt is ill.”
The driver chortled and clambered down from his high seat, cheeks ruddy. “I suppose I can grasp a lady having an aunt in any place,” he said, opening the narrow door for her, “but an aunt named Doctor Grimshaw?” His rough guffaw scraped a hot blush over her cheeks. “Well, that’s really something.”
Not to be outdone, Hannah raised her coat and ducked her head to climb inside. “Very well. I am ill, not that it’s your affair. But since you’ve made it so, five extra shillings might see that you keep it that way.”
A low, airy whistle at her back said that five shillings would do just so, and he shut her in while she wrestled into the seat of a cab she was practically wearing. She’d barely gotten situated and settled her bag when the hansom lurched to a stop again. It was a short trip to the Mews, but her driver’s haste hinted he was angling for more than five shillings, so she dropped three crowns into his thick palm and watched him dash off to his next fare, neither of them regretful over the price.
She stood on the walk before James's house, staring up at dim windows that revealed a few lamps still lit somewhere deeper inside, and wondered what she would say to the butler. Did he keep a butler? Butlers were always less apt to have curiosity over strange events, or less apt to show it and a little less eager to hand it off as gossip. Housekeepers and parlor maids had looks and attitudes, gatekeepers of their kingdom and intolerant of the odd or extraordinary event which might form a wedge in their domestic wheels. Squaring up her shoulders, Hannah resolved to do what she should have done with the hansom driver: to ask for Doctor Grimshaw and nothing more.
Mind settled, she marched up the steps, strangled her faithful valise in one hand and rapped with the other. She waited, blanketed by sounds from the outside but nothing inside, so that when she did finally catch the approach of footsteps, that was the thing that nearly stole her nerve and made her race back down to the street. But the lock snapped over faster than she’d expected and she stood her ground, armed with her excuse.
“Hannah!” James filled the doorway, newspaper fluttering in his hand. He was dressed in everything but an overcoat, and it was obvious he must have arrived home just ahead of her. Hannah gave thanks for her timing, still stunned by the imaginary, grim-faced housekeeper not having answered, while James stared wide-eyed, half-slouched, with his hand still on the knob.
“I’m here,” she managed, when he didn’t move and she couldn’t think of anything better.
“It’s Saturday.”
His observation clouded out into the night in a fog of breath that robbed her of some courage. “Should I…I know it isn’t Sunday. I can go.”
“No! What are you doing out here by yourself?” He grabbed her sleeve and hauled her in, and took her bag. “Don’t go. I just…I didn’t believe you were really here, for a moment. I had dinner with Tad and we went to Claridge’s, but I didn’t want to stay and play cards so I hurried home –”
She gripped his lapel and snapped off his words, passed him by and led him in a slow drag up the staircase until they reached the landing. She wasn’t sure he’d had time to close the front door. “Which one?” she demanded, examining the doors ahead.
“That –” James cleared his throat, glanced at her fingers still strangling his coat, and pointed past her, “that one.”
“Hm.” She went back to towing him, nerves frayed from hours of pacing and dodging, days of lingering over him.
James shut the door behind them and set her bag on a sturdy, slat-backed chair against the wall. His room was what she would have expected, though she had never given it serious thought. A sensible, blue, wing-backed chair posed beneath one of a pair of high arched windows flanking the fireplace, windows which would offer a fine view of Berkley Square Gardens on a sunny day. A writing desk waited patiently in one corner, looking little used, attended by a mate to the entry chair. Worrying a frog on the front of her coat, she crossed the threshold and made two short steps into the room. Two side tables, a wash stand beside the wardrobe, and a bureau capped by a small oval mirror; the room held very little, though it was all well-crafted. Everything was in a style the Americans called Federal, tapering legs and clean straight surfaces, unadorned but too proud to be called plain. His bed was the only odd guest, a sleigh sort without posts or a canopy, with a cherry wood head and footboard so cumbersome that it must have been left behind by the house’s previous occupant, probably on a relieved sigh. In retaliation, James had made it up with a blue and rust block quilt, plain ticked ruffle, and well-worn white flannel bedding that must have been a blessing on laundry day. Rich smells hung in the air, sweet hints of pipe smoke, musky citrus, and something soapy that she had caught on her pillow days before after he’d gone.
It was a room to be lived in, one built for comfort, not one to be opened and shown to guests for praise. Hannah felt a small pang of jealousy at his cozy arrangement.
“Would you like anything?” he offered, still hovering at the door. “Can I get you anything? Mrs. Fitzgerald has Saturdays off rather than Sundays…” He shook his head. “Something to do with her congregation, but I can fetch whatever you’d like.”
God bless Mrs. Fitzgerald and her unorthodox schedule. Hannah relaxed another rung at the knowledge they were alone. “Something to drink?” Her throat was parched with nerves and winter air.
His bow was low and regal enough to be absurd, and he backed out under her laughter.
When he’d gone, she undid her hat, spilling a braid she’d shoved beneath the crown with little effort and great haste, and unwound the ribbon that bound it. Her fingers trembled while she picked at it, and worse when she took the brush from her valise and made a few passes to tame her curls.
What she was doing now she had only read about in books and the sum of her practice at it was a product of her imagination. Her intentions towards James tonight were pure fantasy, constructed by wishes alone. There was no experience in her past, nothing with Gregory that had educated her for seduction. Instead, he had made her long for it, and Hannah mused that perhaps longing had made her a more thorough study.
“Here.” James reappeared, extended a small brandy glass halfway and then pausing when he saw her hair.
She caught his swallow, a rapid rise and fall of his chest as his gaze lingered on her fingers at the key. Brandy and eagerness gave her courage, and a searing memory of his unbuttoning and unlacing made her hungry. She turned her back to the door and faced him, biting her lip and breathing in courage. She committed her first sin and unfastened a frog on her coat. From there, her downfall was a sweet descent to her waist and just below her hips, where the closures ended and the coat parted in its own shameless abandon.
James followed the path of her fingers with a steady gray gaze, stone except for the deep pace of his chest, and Hannah knew what it meant to be beautiful. Not the beauty of rouge or crimping irons, she thought, shrugging from the burden of her coat until it slipped from her arms, but of a passion which bound a man and a woman in their bones. When her coat thumped onto the floorboards, Hannah knew that she had emerged from its folds an entirely new creature.
She felt his gaze through the white tissue voile of her peignoir, through eyelet and whorls of lace hardly conquered by her thin chemise, on the dusky tips of breasts and hips silhouetted by lamplight. His nod telegraphed in a few short jerks that she’d chosen well.
“You’re not wearing a dress,” he whispered, one corner of his mouth turning up.
“I’m not really wearing anything,” she offered needlessly, sure her abandonment of underpinnings and decorum was plain by now. “If I don’t have patience for your particular sort of attention, it’s your own fault. You shouldn’t have spoiled me and left me wanting.”
He grabbed at the buttons on his coat when she stepped away from the door, but she gripped his sleeve and snapped his arm down as she passed by. He had given her an education that afternoon in her room, taught her to enjoy these first, silver tendrils of lovemaking, a preamble she had suspected before him but couldn’t prove the existence of.
