Roommates

by Valerie Reyes

  And so, I began to gingerly disconnect us. I didn’t think through what I was doing as I was doing it. I only tried to be as quiet, and as smooth and gentle as possible, so not to wake him. Then I looked around and tried to find some paper. There were his scraps of ideas and reminders, but I didn’t want to touch any of those.

  When I could find nothing more suitable, I took up a wine bottle, and found an old pen in his desk and some ink that had nearly dried out.

  There wasn’t enough ink, nor enough room on the label to say one quarter of what I wanted to say. I could try. I could say as much as I could fit on the label, or write until the ink was out.

  But the longer I stayed, the longer he would have to wake up, and the less likely it would be that I would be able to slink out of there without an argument.

  “I’m sorry,” I wrote. And then, far below, added. “I love you, and I will always remember you.”

  That would do what it needed to do. That would be enough.

  I laid it on the table and slid out the door.

  It had taken me some time to find the ink and paper and write the message, and the dawn was beginning to break. The path was lit in that soft dawn light that makes everything feel hopeful and private. But I felt watched, and judged, and not very hopeful at all.

  When I got home, it would be better, I was sure. I would lie in my bed for a bit. And then, perhaps, I would tell Lucy. Not everything. There were some things that Lucy couldn’t know for her own sake. But I could tell Lucy about Grandmother’s will, and about Henry. She ought to know, really. I could see now that she’d set up our meeting, at least in part, though heaven knew how she had discovered he existed at all.

  Money was no longer an issue. Now that I had returned home, I would not need to pay for lodging, and so I did not begrudge myself a cab all the way from Henry’s house to mine. The ride was long, but I needed the time. I wanted to have my head sorted out by the time I got home, if only so that I could make it to my room without arousing any suspicion of impropriety from the servants.

  But when I returned home, I realized this was impossible. Not the lack of arousing suspicion, but rather the idea that I should be able to go quietly to my room and find a way around to peace with my decision again.

  Three separate people came up to me and told me that my grandmother was awake, and lucid. Another told me that she knew I was in the house and was asking for me. I told them, as kindly as I could, that this was not an option. I explained that I had promised Mr. Burnham that I would not speak to her until he had had the chance to work out certain legal matters. And the servant masked his disappointment with me as only a servant is truly practiced at doing, and let me go to my room.

  There I only entertained for a moment the idea that I shouldn’t go see my grandmother. Yes, I had promised Mr. Burnham that I would not see her. But he had not accounted for a sudden bout of lucidity in the midst of her ailing, failing mind and body. And besides, there were things he did not know. And it was time he knew them.

  I called my maid to help me dress properly and tidy my appearance. I wanted a bath, to feel entirely clean, but this was the best I could do on short notice.

  Grandmother’s suite was much the same as it had ever been. It was opulent to the point of poor taste, or at least it had always seemed that way to me. But for women of her age and of her time, that was the style, I was aware. There were people in the anteroom, just waiting, it seemed. Servants who must have had duties that they were better off doing, but no one would yell at them today for attending their matron, even if they were only in the room outside.

  I strained my ears to hear. There was a conversation taking place inside. My grandmother was herself. I could hear it in her voice. There was not a trace of hesitation, or uncertainty. Her voice was measured and clear.

  But then … what was that? Who was she speaking to?

  It was Mr. Burnham, apparently come to speak with her in her moment of lucidity as well.

  I hesitated. He meant to get Grandmother’s will discredited if he could. He could be an ally. Perhaps I should leave him to talking to her. Maybe he would succeed, though I doubted it.

  My grandmother’s voice rose, to the point where I could hear her words clearly from the hall.

  “I won’t hear of it! I know what is best for my granddaughter and I will have a say in what she does!”

  The anger hit me like a stagecoach. I’d spent so many years trying to bury the anger I’d felt that night, the night before I’d acquiesced and made the agreement. I’d buried it deep – so deeply that I’d forgotten it was there. I had begun to think I had just made this decision for the benefit of both me and Henry, as an actor in a fixed universe, where my grandmother was a force not unlike God or Nature. She was immovable. She was constant. This was simply the way things were, and there was no use raging against it.

  But it wasn’t so! It wasn’t the case at all! My grandmother was just a woman, bitter and obstinate, but just a woman nonetheless. And then I had been a girl, and a girl silly in the light of love for all that. But now I was a woman, and she was an old woman, touched in the mind much of the time, and hardly unimpeachable. She would not be allowed to do this. She must not! She could not hold Henry’s fortune captive as a hostage against me … what there was left of it in any case.

  And after the anger came the joy. I would be with him! I would be with Henry. Whatever consequences there would be, there would be. It would be the work of tomorrow to unravel or defeat them. But today, I would return to Henry, and I would tell him what I had done and beg his forgiveness. I would beg him to hold me and keep me. And I would tell him everything, without holding back for the sake of a sense of fealty I felt to a woman who did not even respect me enough to think I could be trusted to make my own decisions.

  Full to the brim with this anger and mad joy, I burst into my grandmother’s room.

  “Emma!” she said, at the same time the Mr. Burnham exclaimed “Miss Cavendish!”

  Something was strange. Something was wrong. She was not angry, or condescending. She seemed instead delighted and surprised.

  “Here she is, Mr. Burnham,” she addressed the solicitor now, “and you will see, she is not in the slightest opposed to what I intend to put in my will.”

  I was again at a loss.

  “Grandmother…” I said, and then trailed off.

  “You’ve not read it?” she asked me, surprised, and then shot an accusing glance at Mr. Burnham.

  “Did I not instruct you, in the clearest of fashions, that you should make certain Emma reads the will? She must know what I want from her, before it’s too late for me to express it.”

  Perhaps I had been wrong. Perhaps all the servants had been mistaken, as well. This woman was not lucid. She did not know what she was saying.

  “Mr. Burnham has told me that you intend to make my inheritance contingent upon a romantic attachment, Grandmother. And you know as well as I do that I am well aware of what attachment you insist must not ever occur.”

  At this, it was Mr. Burnham’s turn to be surprised.

  “Miss Cavendish, what do you mean must not occur? Your grandmother’s will is very insistent that you must enter into at least a process of courtship with a certain Lord Henry Headwidge, if he is willing. Except that there has never been the hint of a relationship beyond passing familiarity between you, and he is a well-known rogue and scoundrel.”

  My anger didn’t leave, although it should have. And my joy was still too thin to be accepted and realized. I was uncertain, so uncertain. What did they mean by this? What was the meaning of the words coming out of Mr. Burnham’s mouth?

  I looked to my grandmother. She was contrite, and apologetic. She seemed deeply, deeply regretful.

  I stepped to the side of her bed and sank down onto it.

  “I have made mistakes in my life, child. I regret them. And none so much as the mistakes I have forced onto you.”

  I had believed my grandmother was a force that co
uld not be changed. And perhaps that was correct. No one could change my grandmother’s mind. But I had never stopped to consider that my grandmother might change her own.

  “Do you know what has become of him?” she asked me now, and I couldn’t help but laugh.

  “I have seen him,” I said, and my sly smile must have given away the whole of it, for my grandmother laughed.

  “Well, then,” she said, and left it at that. She held my hand.

  Whether or not I could abide the idea of forgiving my grandmother did not seem the right question to ask myself. It was such a long time ago. All that was left now was to accept with joy the gift that she had given me in changing her mind.

  “Oh!” she said, still holding my hand, but now addressing Mr. Burnham. “And have you any news on that other matter?”

  My heart began to beat faster. I had spent such time mourning the lack of my own happy ending, I had not even thought of anyone else’s.

  Mr. Burnham seemed off balance still. My understanding with Grandmother had convinced him, perhaps, that the woman was not so entirely touched as she seemed. But still he seemed hesitant to divulge the information in front of me.

  “Oh, it’s quite all right, Mr. Burnham,” she said, sensing his trepidation. “My granddaughter already knows. But so that you are quite at ease, I will tell her myself.”

  Then she turned to me, and said, with a comical ease, “My dear, many years before you were born, I found myself in a wild and unforgettable affair. The man in question, much to my misfortune, was a servant, and when I became pregnant there was no path to legitimacy for the child, nor for me should it become known what had occurred. Lucky, the man I loved was a servant to Lord Headwidge, grandfather of your Lord Headwidge, and in his service my lover had learned certain useful facts that, if they came to light, would ruin the Headwidge family. I used knowledge of these facts against Lord Headwidge to procure his assistance and discretion in concealing my condition and secreting away the child. And from that day forward we were held in a state of mutual distrust, with each having the keys to each other’s destruction.”

  This speech completed, she turned again to Mr. Burnham.

  “You see?” she said. “She is not the least bit shocked, nor is she traumatized. My granddaughter knows a great deal more, and can know a great deal more than I believe you give her due credit for. Now if you may permit me, I must insist you give me some account of your efforts. The time I have is uncertain.”

  Her manner was short and to the point, but this sort of shortness and impatience was stock and trade of Mr. Burnham’s world, so he paid it no mind.

  “Madam,” he said, “I am afraid I do not have good news to tell you. We were successful in finding your daughter. I … I have visted her grave myself. She lived, so far as can be determined by an onlooker, a pleasant life. She married and had a child. They were of middling means, but never poor.”

  “And the child?” my grandmother asked. Only those who knew her well, as I once had, could sense the disappointment in her voice after learning the fate of her child.

  “I’m afraid we are having no luck thus far in tracing her. She appears, some years back, to simply have vanished.”

  Mr. Burnham looked down at this. Grandmother did not conceal her disappointment with this matter, but I barely heard the tirade she unleashed upon him. My feet had started moving without me, before it had sunk in where they were going.

  I nearly tripped on the edge of the rug in the anteroom. I knew I held the full attention of those in waiting there, but I didn’t much care. Some calls of “Madam!” and, more accurately, “Miss!” followed me out into the hall but I didn’t heed them.

  I found Lucy in her room. She’d been put in a guest suite much better suited to a man with a deep and abiding love of hunting, and had taken the heads of the animals off the wall and stacked them all up in a corner.

  When I entered she was reading, but looked up at me as though she’d been caught at something when I came in the door.

  “Oh, you won’t tell anyone, will you? I couldn’t stand them looking at me anymore.” she said. There wasn’t any real desperation to her plea for concealment. It was just the sort of thing for Lucy to say offhand.

  “Come,” I said, and took her hand. I was out of breath from the walk here. One disadvantage of such a huge house was the shape one had to be in to get from one end to the other without losing one’s lungs entirely.

  She had questions, but I wasn’t sure how to answer them. I only kept pulling her along, telling her to wait and all her questions should be answered.

  She wasn’t pleased, and she complained loudly, even though she was in altogether better shape than I was, and couldn’t have been as tired.

  The servants said nothing as we passed them this time in the anteroom. They’d learned their lesson, I supposed, that it was futile. And Lucy and I burst, unimpeded, into Grandmother’s room.

  Grandmother and Mr. Burnham, it seemed, had been engaged in some matters of a technical or specific nature. They had papers out, and Grandmother had her spectacles on. She was peering over them now, at me, most alarmed by my being out of breath and a little disheveled.

  “Grandmother, Mr. Burnham,” I said, and then paused for dramatic effect, “I have found her!”

  I don’t know what I expected, but I was certainly disappointed with the blank stares I received.

  “I’m so sorry, my darling. You’ve found who, exactly?” Grandmother asked.

  “This is Lucile! This is Lucy.”

  Lucy took her hand back from me, but my mind only barely registered the movement.

  Only Mr. Burnham reacted to my clarification.

  “Lucile!” he said.

  “Yes,” I replied. “This is her.”

  Grandmother had begun to understand now what we must be meaning. She sat up straighter, and had begun putting the papers she was looking at aside, though the spectacles remained perched on her nose.

  “Emma,” came Lucy’s voice from beside me, “I think you had better tell me what is happening.”

  I turned to look at her. In my excitement, I had been too rushed to tell her what was going on. It was only now that I saw her face and the disturbed look on it that I began to realize how things must look from her angle.

  “Lucy, I have some confessions I must make to you,” I began, unsure how I should say what I needed to tell her. She just looked at me, expectantly.

  “I knew who you were before we met. I had tracked you down, you see, when I was leaving London. My grandmother had told me some things and, well, I wanted to be sure they were true. And I thought … Well, look here. I thought that your side of the family had been done rather badly by. And I was right, I dare say. And I thought I should, if I could, do something about it.”

  “Emma, you’re not making any sense.”

  Lucy said it calmly, but she was not at ease. I wasn’t sure how to continue with the confession. Lucy could unnerve me from time to time, when she was in this mood. So I turned my attention back to my grandmother, the only woman now smiling in the room.

  “Grandmother, Lucile is your other granddaughter. I found her for you, and I’ve looked after her, more or less, all these years on the allowance you gave me.”

  “Looked after me,” I heard Lucy grumble from beside me. But even now she was stepping forward as Grandmother was calling her. She shot me a glance that said we would talk about this later, but that was all.

  Suddenly it was as though I were invisible. I had no purpose anymore in the room. I’d brought my half-cousin to my grandmother. And that was all. They would have much to discuss, and I would only take up Grandmother’s little time.

  As I passed through the anteroom, I found that the servants had all moved to the doorway, listening as discreetly as possible. When I came out, they all averted their gazes, as thought that would somehow stop me from seeing them, or noticing what they had been doing.

  But I only grinned, walking past them. I had been s
o concerned with my grandmother and her wishes, and for Lucy’s future, there hadn’t been time for me to fully realize the more momentous portion of that audience.

  She approved! After all this time, she approved of Henry! She wanted, no, she insisted that we would be together.

  I could feel his hands on me. I could see his face, peaceful from this morning. He would be mine! Not only in my dreams, or in the thoughts that I allowed myself to sink into, like a warm bath, on a long voyage or train ride. But he would be mine in reality, and we could have a life together.

  It wasn’t until I reached the stairs to begin descending them, to go down to the front of the house and take the carriage straight back to his arms, that I remembered what I’d done.

  The message I’d left him hadn’t been vague. It was clear that I was leaving him. I had left him the first time, and then I had left him again. And then I had given him hope, and then I’d left him again. Doubt began to creep into my mind. What if he wouldn’t take me back? What if he didn’t want me? No, not that. I would never believe he wouldn’t want me. But what if he felt that, after the three times I had left him, I was not to be trusted with his heart?

  The thought of him refusing me now, after I had waited so many years yearning for this one thing, made me lose my step. I reached out for the balustrade, but my hand missed it. I was falling down, down the grand staircase, foot over head over hand. My arm hit the stairs with a heavy whack and I cried out. The pain in my arm was all-consuming, until I hit my head just as hard and the edges of my vision began to blur.

  And then, much more suddenly than my fall had begun, it was over. I was on the hard, cold marble of the entryway. Around me were crowds of servants. I saw the old butler. I could remember him now from when I was young. He always used to get that expression when I was doing something foolish and he was concerned for me but there was nothing he could do.