Time & Tide - Original Wattpad Version

Chapter Seventeen: In Which Jessie Shares a Truth

I took breakfast in my room, and went back to sleep, which ate up most of the next day. Part of it was, yeah, I wasn't sure I was ready to face Francis and Elizabeth in love - I had to deal with this ridiculous surge of desire not for who they were, but what they meant to one another. Part of it was exhaustion from a broken night's sleep and the soreness that so much crappy travel had inflicted on me. And the last part of it was... well, I figured Francis and Elizabeth deserve the chance to reconnect without me getting in the way.

By the time evening rolled around, I was ready to be coerced into a quick sponge-down, and having my hair 'arranged', which made it sound just as artificial and constructed as it looked. At least the Gales weren't big, wealthy, grand folk. The dress they had offered, and I had ultimately declined to borrow, had a tiny tea stain on the lap, and the grommets were coming loose around the closures, and I could tell that these were people who weren't afraid to really live in their own home and clothes.

Dinner was served in the formal room. I found it sort of hilarious that it was improper for me to walk in all by myself; Mr. Gale held my arm and walked me to the seat opposite his wife. He took the head, and Elizabeth sat to my right, Francis opposite her. The rest of the table was taken up by two more daughters approaching adulthood, and a young boy who was just edging toward being a pimply, sullen teenager. He clearly would much rather have been upstairs with whatever the Regency equivalent of a video game was, but he sat dutifully beside his father and talked about horses, and his Latin studies, and riding lessons.

The rest of the Goodenough party – Mother, older sister Rose, and Margaret – were delayed by an unexpected snow storm that had closed off some of the less traveled roads while I had been napping. I was secretly relieved; my stomach was in knots enough over Elizabeth and Francis. To add to all that meeting firstly the people upon whom Francis had decided to foist me, and secondly somebody who is as well known as his sister Margaret...

I personally wasn't a massive Margaret Goodenough fan; I'd never read any of the books, except for The Welshman's Daughters, and only that in grade twelve lit. It took me a while to get into the book, I remember, and I can't recall if I actually liked it or not. I did enjoy the movies of course – tight corsets, heaving bosoms, pretty eyes flirting over fans, and lovely bums in even tighter pants. What wasn't to like?

And there was the cultural pervasive thing, too. I mean, the stuff was everywhere. It was impossible not to walk into a book store without seeing some mashup or revisionist version of the stories. Modern retellings and films were everywhere. You'd have to live pretty far under the rock to not know who the characters Jane and Mary were, especially in the queer community.

But I'd never met anyone famous before, and definitely not somebody famous and dead. So I was, understandably, sort of nervous. The weird part was that to everyone else around me, Margaret was just the little sister who wrote stuff. She wasn't one of the best selling and most dramatized authors of all time, she wasn't the woman who instigated a trend in more realism in romance books, she wasn't the woman who pioneered the Lesbian Subtext novel.

Here she was just Margaret. Silly little Margaret who wrote her silly little stories.

I was lucky that they had decided to take rooms at a roadside inn for the night, rather than try to push through to Godersham and arrive late. They were expected, Mrs. Gale explained, sometime before luncheon. That would give me a little bit of time to wrap my head around the idea that Francis really, truly could not be mine, that I would still be part of his circle, but somehow had to learn to treat his wife, when she became his wife, like a cherished sister.

And that I was being stupid-face jealous about a man that had died a century and a bit before I was even born. The thought of time travel and the disbelief and wonder that, once again, I was actually here, now, helped me through the course of tiny little quails whose heads had been reattached after cooking, little green banded throats decked with a garnish to hide the hideous slice.