After dinner that night, where I was seated almost as far away from Francis as the table allowed, the menfolk peeled off to their brandy and cigars and billiards, and whatever else they did in a cramped, over-crowded country house like this. Right, okay, so I knew things were over with Francis but, jeeze, I thought the guy would want to at least remain friendly, or something. Whatever, gender separation was weird. As the good ole boys left to go be good ole boys, us women retreated back to the parlor, with sherry and cards, books and embroidery hoops, and in Margaret's case, her writing desk. It had been set up on the little table in the back corner where she'd been hiding most of the day, and I wondered how she planned to get any work done with everyone else chattering. One of the Gale girls whisked the cover off the skinniest piano I'd ever seen - I hadn't even known it was there - and began practicing a truly agonizing lullaby.
My hand luckily precluded me from being pulled into any activity that required deft fingers, and I found myself sitting at another tiny table with the eldest sister of the lot, Rose Goodenough, who was laying out a game of solitaire. We spoke sporadically, and only when Rose asked a question. Otherwise, she concentrated on her cards and I... okay, I was staring at Margaret.
"My sister's preoccupation with the written word may seem odd to you," Rose ventured at length, and I caught myself blushing without realizing it. "But she has great aspirations, and though I'm her sister and inclined to tease, no small amount of talent." She leveled a hard look at me from doe eyes that matched her brothers' that dared me to call her little sister a weirdo.
"I have great respect for any artist working hard at their craft," I said, because first, it was true, and second, if I was going to be employed by these folks in the near future, I wasn't dumb enough to piss off my boss. And it was clear from the way Mrs. Goodenough left all practical planning to her eldest daughter, the way Francis deferred to her opinion in every discussion I'd seen them have, and the way Margaret spent most of her time in pensive observation of the people around her or tied to her pen, Rose was indeed the boss.
Rose blinked at me, clearly not expecting that answer. "Yes, well, good," she said, and dealt out another round of cards for herself. She didn't ask if I wanted to play anything, for which I was glad. I didn't want to have to concentrate on the rules when I'd rather be... god, what are you doing? Stop it, I scolded myself. Stop staring. Stop mooning. Stoppit stoppit stoppit.
I forced my attention back to the cards, and Rose, and our spare conversation. When Rose's sherry glass was empty, I made a point of fetching the decanter and walking around the room, refilling everyone's glass, Margret's last.
"You would make an abysmal spy, Miss Franklin," Margaret murmured as I paused beside her.
"Huh?"
"One is not meant to look directly at the object one is attempting to study surreptitiously. It's rather against the point of being surreptitious."
"Ha ha," I said, deadpan. "So funny. Hilarious. I'm gonna bust a gut."
Margaret squinted up at me. "Curious idiom," she said, that little smirk curling back into the corner of her mouth. "But I take your meaning."
"Right. Yeah, I'm just gonna..." I said and like the stupid bumbling disaster I suddenly always was around her, and hustled back to return the decanter to the credenza.
"Sit with me, Miss Franklin," Margaret said as I was crossing back to resume sitting with Rose. The elder Miss Goodenough waved me off when I checked in with her, so I sat. "Do you have a great curiosity for writing?"
"Not particularly," I said. "I like reading a lot, but, uh, you know, haven't had much time for fiction lately."
"Oh?" Margaret asked, setting aside her pencil and fixing me with her moonstone eyes. "And why is that?"
Oh shit, I thought. Busted. What are you gonna say? Because I was studying for exams for a degree at a university that doesn't exist yet for a subject that is still in its infancy? Even though I'm a woman? Yeah, no.
Instead I made a vague noise and an even vauger gesture with my ruined hand. Margaret frowned and reached out, grasping my wrist gently. "May I?" she asked, already plucking at the buttons on my glove.
I thought about saying no, but the truth of it was she was going to have to see it sometime, if I was going to be living with the Goodenough ladies. Why not rip the band-aid off? All the same, I scooted my chair over so our bodies blocked the view of everyone else in the room. What I wasn't prepared for was to become a sideshow attraction.
It have been a long few weeks since I'd really looked at my right hand.
The entry and exit points of the wound had closed over, both in a lumpy knot of angry scar tissue that was slowly hardening, getting shiner and whiter by the day. The two fingers that I had broken grabbing onto the life jacket had never had the chance to heal straight, curling inward toward the palm. There was motion in them, but very little. My middle finger was, for lack of a better way to describe it, dead. The tendon had been severed and bones in the centre of my palm shattered, the nerves still not healed. While there was blood flow to the muscle and skin, so my finger didn't, you know, rot and drop off, I couldn't move it or feel it. It was curved inward, slightly, but useless. My index finger had fared better. I could curl and straighten it, but it took a lot of effort and felt like pushing through sand. My thumb, luckily, was spared, which meant I was still able to pick things up or pinch things if I worked at it. Buttons were a fury, laces were easier, and I hadn't managed to hold on to a pen at all.
Margaret's nose wrinkled as she studied my hand, but it was in concentration, not revulsion. She traced each finger gently with the tip of her own graphite-smudged finger, gentle and thoughtful.
"It's a bit gross, I know," I whispered, so the rest of the room couldn't hear. Let them think what they wanted about our heads tucked close together, bent over the table. Let them think I was reading her work, or we were swapping secrets. I didn't care, so long as they didn't come over and try to look.
"Not 'gross', Miss Franklin," Margaret said softly. "Regrettable, but not disgusting."
"That's kind of you," I said, slipping my hand out of hers, a surge of shame and grief and anger at my own self-pity welling hard against the back of the throat. "But I know what it looks like. By most people's standards, I'm damaged goods now."
"By whose?" Margaret asked, eyes snapping up. "My brother? Or that revolting Mr. Lewis?"
I goggled at her. "Francis told you?"
"Miss Franklin, I am a writer of fantastical romances and even I would be loathe to include something so ridiculous as 'wandering outside while in the throes of a brain fever' in my tales." Her expression was hard and if this were the twenty-first century, I would have said she was giving me bitch, please face.
I wriggled the glove on, and instead of pitying me, or making a comment, or pointedly looking away while I struggled, she simply reached out and helped me get it properly buttoned up again.
"Thanks," I said, swallowing hard around the lump of shame.
"Miss Franklin," Margaret said, straightening up. "If you are to join our household, if you are to be our companion and, I do hope, friend, then trust that you never feel that you need to hide, or feel shame for who you are." She tapped the side of my ruined hand gently, but she was looking at me so steadily that...
No.
No fucking way.
There was absolutely no way that Margaret Goodenough was telling me I could be out. She didn't mean that. She couldn't know. My BiFi was okay in a century where I knew how to read all the signals, there was no way I could be throwing off enough bandwith for her to be picking it up. Could I be?
She meant my hand. She only meant my hand.
That was it.
Christ. I really needed to stop reading into things so deeply.
* * *
The wedding date was set for July; lots of time to get a morning glory, then. The Goodenough ladies meant to stay in Godersham for another few weeks before striking for home in the ancient city of Bath. The days, therefore, were spent in a flurry of cutting, pinning, and tedious hours sitting in the parlor carefully stitching the panels of fabric together by hand. Slowly the wedding dress began to take shape. I didn't envy Elizabeth, or blame her for putting everyone to work while she could. She'd be losing her sewing task force in a few weeks, left to make her own married-woman's-wardrobe alone when the material arrived from London.
My upcoming professional duties in the Goodenough household conflicted with my status as guest of Francis in the Gale one, and I was relegated to some sort of odd combination of companion-slash-tea-fetcher. I didn't mind one bit, because it meant that I was never expected to sit with the ladies and take part in embroidering buttons, or any of the ridiculously minute things that they did with their needles. Even if my hand could have facilitated it, I don't think I would have been any good at it. Instead, I made sure everyone's cups were full, their materials were close at hand, that cucumber sandwiches and bowls of fruits and little custards arrived like clockwork at eleven o'clock, noon, and two, and that the conversation never lagged. It was actually far more soothing than I thought it would be.
It was nice to have a job again, to have a purpose and a schedule and meaning.
And it was so radically different than the previous high-stress, must-get-commission work I had hawking cell phones at a mall stand in the middle of a busy metropolis, Far from the pressure of marking and good turn-arounds and forcing students to read books they didn't care for when I was a TA, of the competitive and cranky world of academic studies, that it barely felt like work at all. I spent the time after breakfast helping the serving staff prepare meals, and remembered that once upon a time, I had actually liked cooking. Before the compact schedule my last year ran on robbed me of time to do anything more than scarf a pot of Kraft Dinner or swing out to the pizza place across the street.
I was never actually paid a wage, and I frankly didn't expect it.
The indomitable Betty gave me a spare apron, however, and Elizabeth, now that she was getting married, offered me two of the dresses that she would be leaving behind, which her younger sisters weren't tall enough yet to inherit. One was a simple morning dress, white and plain, already stripped of all the useful trim and elaborate lacing. That she would put onto her new dresses. Lace was expensive. The second was a light blue calico day dress, a remnant from her youth when her own color preferences had overridden her sense at what made her attractive; the blue would have washed her out, but it made my eyes sparkle.
This dress, too, was plain and stripped of all useful trim, but I didn't mind. Lace always made me itchy, anyway, and made me feel like a fru-fru two year old being dressed up by her mother for church. I was given a spare bit of muslin for a fichu – one of those neck scarf things that was superficially supposed to make the deliberate plunge of the Regency neckline more modest – and so finally had the beginnings of a proper wardrobe of my own.
My tee-shirt was relegated to sleep wear, with the jeans destined to be forever hidden in the back of a drawer. Though my Converses remained my footwear of choice, the black canvas and signature white rubber toe peeking out from under my hems when we went outdoors.
In the evenings I became a guest again, dining with both families and joining in conversations more and more, now that I had determined how much I could tell about my previous life. And now that I'd begun reading the morning paper, so I had some idea of what was actually happening in the world around us.
Francis and I spent absolutely zero time together alone, and that seemed fine for both parties. He had nothing left to tell me privately, and I had nothing left to tell him. Not in a bad way, just... well, just that our lives had orbited back away from one another again. We were back to being acquaintances who had taken it in turns to pull each other out of bad situations; grateful, fond, and platonic. We never had enough time together for it to be too awkward. Stiff, maybe. But not filled with hanging regret.
After all of our social obligations were fulfilled in games of whisk and reading aloud from books every evening, Margaret and I retreated to my bedroom to converse.
As we spoke, Margaret showed me how to pick apart the seams of the Mr. Fletcher's brown jacket, and over the course of several nights we remade it into something more suitable for a lady, skimming more tightly across my chest and down my hips, flaring over my bottom in a neat sort of faux bustle supported by all the extra volume of fabric. The sleeves were made narrower, the large cuffs removed and put into storage with my jeans for later use as a trim for the calico blue dress, uniting the two pieces into a full outfit. Nothing was wasted here, I noticed. No one could afford to throw away perfectly good fabric.
Margaret had to do all of the needle work, of course, my complete unfamiliarity with needlework and my right hand both preventing me from doing much more than hold the coat down as I took apart the seams with the small pick, or cut slowly and awkwardly with my left hand along the chalk likes that Margaret drew onto the coat.
And as we slowly performed the nineteenth century version of a makeover, Margaret told me about her family, her best friend in Rose, about the loss of her father last year and their domino-like move from their father's house in the most prominent part of Bath to less elegant accommodations, then to downright cheap ones, and how it had affected Francis' marriage prospects.
In return, I continued to tell Margaret about my trip into her life. She was particularly interested in the people I'd met, their general characters and little verbal twitches. Their own particular person-ness.
The one thing I did not speak about, the one thing I refused to ask about, were her books. I had no idea how far along in her career she was. Had she published anything yet? Did she have contracts? Was she already beginning the unknown climb to fame? I didn't dare ask, in case I let something slip that either made her suspicious that I wasn't who I said I was, that I was a liar, or something that changed the choices she made with her books.
I'd watched enough science fiction TV to know that you're not supposed to change history if you can help it. It never ends well. And I didn't want Margaret to distrust me because... well, she was a good person. She was a nice person. She was calm, and confident, and clever, and I liked being her friend. I was determined not to do anything to screw that up, including reading too much into what Margaret called our "little intimacies."
We were each other's confidants, filling the air between us with the secrets, the confessions, the truths that we could never tell anyone else. I accepted Margaret for who she was - and did not condemn her for it, did not urge her instead to get married and stop being a burden on her mother's purse like Mr. Gale did nearly nightly - and Margaret returned the favor, by never calling me crazy, never disbelieving my fantastical stories, letting me just be me.
But breakfast... I was never an early riser, but breakfast fast became my favorite part of the day. Breakfast was when everyone else was too hungover to be up early. Breakfast was when Margaret sat at the end of the table furthest from the door with her writing table, disheveled and cranky, and loath to be disturbed. By any except me, so long as I kept her teacup full, and my mouth closed.
This was the real Margaret - hunched over her paper, nose smudged with pencil marks, muttering and scribbling, totally devoid of social performance. Human, and startling real. Working on her great craft, like a genuine person, instead of staring out of an oil painting portrait, the classic writer whose worlds had sparked an empire of LGBTQA+ romance adaptations and novels and merchandise, benevolent patron goddess whose genius sprang fully formed into being from her be-curled head.
This Margaret Goodenough scrunched up paper, talked to herself, paced the room acting out scenes, cribbed dialogue from actual conversations, and wrote, and wrote, and wrote. She worked for her genius. She suffered. She cared.
And this Margaret Goodenough, at least for now, was mine alone to watch, and witness, and care for. While I know she had a lover later, that I wouldn't be able to keep her, the privilege of being here, watching her become more than just a woman with a story to tell, every day, was enough. Being allowed to be her friend, and confident, and the one person who was able to make her tea just the way she liked it, was enough.
It had to be.
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