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.
I tried not to think about how, in two hundred years, the Goodenoughs would have been able to make the entirely of the journey from the Goodenough's house in Bath to Godersham in a mere handful of hours on a straight off highway.
So, yeah, good that they were hunkered down somewhere that wasn't here.
Conversation then politely turned to me, as the stranger. But I didn't have much to contribute, beyond the same story of my family lost and observations, the journey here, and of the fashions of London. Nothing was said of my own preference for my jeans – starting to get worn in the knees from constant wear – my water-ruined Converses, my faded tee shirt. As improper as the bottom half of the outfit was, the top was at least more modest than what Elizabeth was wearing; I tried not to notice that Francis' eyes tumbled into her cleavage quite often.
So conversation moved on to things I need nothing about. The war, Napoleon, the Prince Regent's latest floozy, the song that was printed in the newspaper last week, lace and ribbons and the new printing machines that allowed whole bolts of fabric to be dyed in a linear, repeated pattern. I tried to pay attention. After all, this is where I was going to be living from now own. I should be up on all the latest news, at least. But they kept using terminology I didn't know, and idioms, and verbal shortcuts that left me frustrated and isolated and feeling so very alone in a roomful of people who clearly delighted in each other's company.
I bent my head to the soup, which was whitish gold, and tasted faintly of carrots and squash. It reminded me sharply of thanksgiving at my grandmothers, and I had a hard time swallowing around the burn of a small lump in my throat for a few minutes. Meanwhile, the men waited patiently for the conversation to come around to something that could hold their attention, and the mention of Turkey red cotton turned the topic towards an Arab skirmish that had been related in the post the week before.
That left us women with nothing to do but appreciate the roast mutton and veal that was next put down on the table, our empty soup bowls whisked away by efficient servants, and the boiled potatoes that came next. The mint jelly was actually quite delightful, and I managed not to be an utter boor and actually complimented my host's cook. This led to talk of who in the neighborhood had what kind of cook and from where, and when Mrs. Gale politely inquire as to whether my family had kept a cook, I could help but blink back against the lump as it got bigger traveled upwards and pressed hotly against the back of my eyes.
"No," I said, a sort of rusty choking sound. I cleared my throat. "No, we didn't."
"You cook then, Miss Franklin?" Francis asked, and he had no right to tilt his head like that at me, with those large brown eyes and the pursed lips and floppy brown hair right in the middle of his forehead. He was surprised. We were friends, now, but he didn't know everything about me, and I think that shocked him.
"I do," I said, and leaned back so a servant could replenish my water glass. "Small meals, mostly, one dish. Easy to throw together. Lots of usable left-overs." The company looked vaguely horrified. "We were busy," I said. "Very busy. Saw each other at meal times and that was about it."
"Your father was a very prominent member of the neighborhood, then, Miss Franklin?" Mr. Gale asked gently.
He used to run a video rental store, before those became obsolete. Now he's a school bus driver, I thought. And mom is the head of finances for the local school board. But you can't say that. You can't tell them that. Come on, lie more. What's a few more lies on top of literally everything else?
"I... yes," I said. "And my mother was so busy making the, you know... affairs go... sorry," I said, bringing my good hand up to cover my eyes, wiping at the bottom of my chin, where the tears had begun to pool with the glove of my right. That surprised me. I didn't expect to... to still feel so... so...
"I, I'll just..." I said, and swayed to my feet. I bumped my hip hard against the table, bruising force, and the china and crystal all rattled. "Sorry," I said again, and fled.
God.
What a pussy I was. My parents had been effectively dead (or rather I had died), for four months, and this is when my brain decided it was a good time to get a good cry out over it? Fuck.
I retreated back to the guest room that had been given to me, wrenching the sodden glove off my right hand and throwing it viciously onto the desk blotter. I flopped down onto the covers face first, burying my cheeks against the soft worn fabric and tried to take a deep breath. It started to hitch and I coughed once to even it out, but somehow the whole thing turned into one of those gut-twisting horrifying sobs, the kind that you can hardly believe comes from a human throat.
I pushed my face down harder, clamped my lips together to try to muffle it, to suffocate the air out of the crying, but all that did was press lines into my skin.
Mom. Dad – gone. My grandparents and my cousins, and my friends. My roommate, who would have to find a way to get rid of my shitty sofa and would probably keep the shittier TV. My best friend. I was never going to see them ever again. I couldn't even bare to think their names, let alone conjure their faces.
I could maybe leave them a letter, do some sort of safety deposit box thing, get it mailed to their house in a century and a half, tell them I'm okay (but no, maybe it would be better to let them have the closure that thinking I was dead and gone forever, taken by a plane crash, than that I survived but didn't care enough to come home?)
But I would never see them. They were gone and I had to keep on and it wasn't fair.
When it got too exhausting to continue crying, I flipped over on the bed. I flopped an elbow over my eyes and sucked in breath in big gasps, chest burning even as it bounced with an effort to suck enough oxygen out of the air.
There was a timid knock at the door.
I said nothing, and a second came, and then the door handle turned slowly and a white-rag cap poked into the room, followed by a worried looking face. I recognized the girl as the scullery maid who'd given me the wine in the kitchen the night before. She smiled and poked herself all the way into the room. She nodded once, and came and put a silver service tray down on the bedside table. On the tray was a small cut-glass bottle of what I recognized as sherry, and two small goblets, a delicately etched set. I frowned – two?
The maid toured the room, lighting and turning up the oil lamps. Then she went to the grate, rustled and huffed the fire back into roaring life, filling the dark cool room with heat and orange glow. I looked away when she bent over, firmly not checking out her bum, still miserably guilty about Miss Martin.
Elizabeth Gale came in with a small knuckle rap.
I hadn't had the chance to really get a good look at her downstairs. I hadn't wanted to get caught staring. Standing in the doorway, I realized she wasn't as slender as I thought all the girls in this era were - she had a pleasantly round face, and plump curves, and unaffected dark black ringlets the made her English Rose complexion all the more delicate looking. There were laugh lines around hazel eyes, dimples on both sides of her cheeks, and a sort of fluttering calmness to her, like a butterfly who could flit away at any moment but had chosen to rest nearby, opening and closing it's pretty wings slowly.
"Miss Franklin?"she said. She held a small basket between her hands. "I thought, perhaps, if you're feeling unwell, we could finish our evening here instead of in the parlor? I brought some embroidery." She proffered the basket. I sat up and wiped the last of the tears and snot away with my right hand.
She blanched, catching sight of it and understood at once what the curled fingers meant for my chance of joining her in the needlework, and then blushed.
"Oh, ah," she said, soft and delicate and mousy. So gentle that I wondered what Francis could possibly see in her that was interesting, but so compassionate that it was obvious. "Something else then. Do you play whisk, Miss Franklin? Betty, the playing cards, please?"
The maid bobbed, took away Elizabeth's basket, and bustled out the door. Elizabeth hesitated for only a second, then came in and picked up the small table by the fire – amateurishly but enthusiastically painted all over the surface with little vines and roses and a cheeky cherub – and placed it beside the rumpled bed. She pulled up the desk chair and then, with a defter hand than I had anticipated (her earlier movements were so hesitant, she was like a halting colt, except for when Francis was near) she poured out the sherry and placed a glass in front of each of us.
She deposited herself in the chair and I cast about looking for a handkerchief or something. Elizabeth anticipated my need and handed me hers from her sleeve, gently embroidered in one corner with a stylized EG. Betty was back with the cards and then gone again, and I watched as Elizabeth laid out them out and began to explain the game.
I sipped the sherry and let her talk to cover the silence, strangely grateful for her presence, the distraction it brought. She didn't push or press, just let me be.
Finally, when I was feeling warm and settled again, the painful ache in my throat lessened by alcohol and human companionship, I said, "Thank you."
Elizabeth looked up and smiled, and it was white and straight and pretty.
"I have something for you," I said. "Francis picked it out in London."
I went over to the bundle on the desk. My ID cards were on the top, still wrapped in the cloth, and I set them aside. I picked up the black dress, carefully laundered and repaired by Miss Martin, and shook it out.
"Black?" Elizabeth said, coming over and fingering the sleeve thoughtfully, running her palm across the smooth fabric, her nails along the seam work, as if testing it.
"For Lord Nelson's funeral," I said. "But I delayed our journey here, so now it... well, I don't know. Maybe you can bleach it?"
Elizabeth eyed it with suspicion, her eyes roving to take in the wrinkles my fisted grip caused in the black fabric, but the obvious fineness of the ribbon edging, then down to my own habitual attire.
"It belongs to you," I insisted, holding the dress out, but she didn't take it.
"I must admit that your reasoning eludes me," she said softly. "In what way can this dress belong to me? It is not my size, but yours, Miss Franklin."
"Your fiancé paid for it with the wages he should have saved for your wedding," I admitted. "So here, the least I could do is give you the dress he paid for."
I saw it there, in her eyes. Quick, and repressed easily; not jealousy, not really, but envy that I had spent all that time with Francis, at sea or in port on his arm. And she'd had to stay here. There was more to Miss Elizabeth Gale than at first sight. My first impression had pegged her as timid and sweet, but the more time I spent with her the more I was realizing that there was a steel core under all that whalebone, and probably a heart for adventure, too. Maybe she would be one of those shockingly modern wives who even joins her husband aboard ship.
"I'm no good at sewing," I said, offering her an out, "but I bet it can be pulled apart and remade..."
The vaguely hostile hurt in her eyes didn't fade, but the lines around them relaxed, her expression still carefully neutral. She took the peace offering and white-flag-waving for what it was.
"Of course," she said. "Thank you."
She reached out and took the dress from my white-knuckled grip. I released it only after a brief second, which I used to look up into her eyes and, in the most convincing way I hoped I could manage, said I'm sorry, and I didn't know and Men suck with my eyes.
Whether or not the message got through I don't know, but she took the dress, folded it into a neat square with a few practiced wrist flicks, bobbed her head and me and vanished out of the room. I waited at the door, shoulders up to my ears, posture tense; waiting for the sound of sobs or angry curing or breaking furniture to float back up, or at least a shouting match between the lovers to begin. All I heard was the soft click of a door closing and the shifting squeak of someone sitting down on a bed in the room beside mine.
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