The Governess of White Stag Hall

Parting

(image by Sonja Langford on Unsplash)

The last thing Edith wanted to do was confront Rhys. She wouldn't even know where to begin. So it was fortunate that the man seemed to be avoiding her as much as she was trying to avoid him. He immediately stopped joining her and Meg on their walks and when they bumped into each other in the halls or on the stairwell, he would not look at her or speak. When their eyes did happen to meet, there was always something like shame and regret in his expression.

Had he seen her in the garden? Or was this just how he ended things when he lost interest? Like a child putting a toy away for the last time and never playing with it again.

The rest of October passed quietly. Come mid-November the Pierces and their visitors began their preparations for the Season in earnest and one day Pierce pulled Edith aside to inform her that she and Meg would be joining them. Edith knew that the weather would be just a dreary whether they were in the middle of the Northumberland heath or London, but the prospect of getting away from White Stag came as a relief.

Still, it would feel very strange to return to London. While she had only been at White Stag since the early summer, it felt like a lifetime had passed, and the prospect of going home was a bittersweet one. Especially because there was no "home" left to go to.

Hugh wrote Edith only once to assure her that they'd made it safely to Scotland and not again since, which she had made a tentative peace with. There was no amount of hand-wringing that would make her brother a better man or that would make Liza open her eyes, so she took comfort in Nicholas' reassurances that she had acted with the girl's best interests in mind and that in such a situation there was no ideal solution. Still, it bothered her when she found herself thinking about the whole affair again. Had she really been thinking of Liza? Or was that an excuse to justify the outcome that most benefited her own brother? And what about any of it made her different from her aunts?

As November went on as the leaves slowly lost their color and the air lost its warmth, a new kind of hurt began to eat away at Edith. There was an aching, gnawing sense of not just loneliness but loss that she felt in the very core of her being and no matter how she tried, It was impossible to just ignore.

Meg, who had always had an almost preternaturally keen sense of people, seemed to know that something was wrong, even if the finer details of why escaped her. Yet she mercifully did not push for answers. Instead, Edith would occasionally catch her eye and the girl would look at her with a piercing, sympathetic sadness in her eyes.

November faded slowly into December. The days grew short and the air was sharp and chilled. As her bedroom was too small for a fireplace of its own, Edith woke most mornings shivering despite the additional blanket Blake had given her and she had taken to wearing her heaviest stockings and dressing gown to bed.

Still, Edith did not complain. She felt empty, as if something had reached inside of her and left her hollow, and the cold was the furthest thing from her mind. Instead, the days passed one into the other as a colorless blur devoid of life. She felt like a distant observer, looking down upon the goings-on and nothings of a familiar stranger.

It was a troublesome thing–all of these feelings. Every day she was nagged by the persistent sense of having lost or forgotten something. She dreamed of nothing, but woke up haunted by a feeling of wrongness. She wanted to be done with the matter and purge the man from her mind, but it seemed that he had spread like a weed through her very conscience.

"Ah, there you are, Miss Belle!"

Edith looked up at Pierce as he was approaching her from the other end of the hall as she was leaving the schoolroom. "May I help you, Mr. Pierce?"