We paused long enough for a quick lunch, which I had been remiss in helping Miss Brown prepare. She gave me a bit of a scathing look but accepted my apology when I told her I'd been helping Miss Margaret with her writing. Even though it was supposed to be strange that a woman threw herself so single-mindedly into writerly pursuits - or at least, that's what English Lit. and History classes told me - apparently everyone in Margaret's life was all for her doing it. Though, according to some cross-talk I heard between Miss Brown and Mr. Edwards, they only thought Margaret was doing it to fill time until she got sensibly married.
Ha. Joke's on them.
As Miss Rose was again out making the obligatory visits to friends and drumming up some more pupils to tutor – and I was warned that it would be our turn to host tomorrow – and Mrs. Goodenough had chosen to take her luncheon at the Pump Room, Margaret and I ate yesterday's leftovers in the kitchen and chatted with Miss Brown. I hadn't thought that in Margaret's social situation sitting around eating leftovers with the servants was a done thing, but it seemed that the done thing for Margaret was anything that Margaret wanted to do.
Her concentration thoroughly broken, Margaret suggested a walk down along her favorite gravel path. My legs protested but I decided that it might be good for the sore muscles to get a bit of a mild workout. Having nothing better to do than to be at Margaret's complete leisure, I agreed to go along. I changed into the warmer calico blue dress, now trimmed with the same coarse brown of my jacket, with no bonnet. Beside Margaret in her white dress and dark plum coat and matching hat, we made an interesting picture, I was sure. Margaret was twenty-four, I had learned during my time with the Gales; two years younger than Francis, five years younger than Rose, and one year my senior. But out under the clear April sky, cheeks red with nip of the wind and her careless attempt at securing her hair up causing mischievous little tendrils to wriggle out of the back of her bonnet to dance in the wind, she looked ageless; lovely.
I reached out and looped my hand through her elbow as we passed the milliner's I had been eyeing up yesterday. Margaret paused when she noticed my interested and looked at our hands while I peered through the glass at the hats I hadn't had time yesterday to fully inspect.
"What is this, Miss Franklin?" she asked, shaking our joined arms slightly. I noticed that out in public, it was back to formality.
"It's us, touching more," I said, "Miss Goodenough. Just like you and your sister."
She let out a little surprised puff of laughter and we continued on our way. Apparently the road to Margaret's particular favorite walk was to take us directly through the market, so I made a point of twiddling my fingers at Mr. Cooper as we passed his shop. He was behind the counter with an older man who couldn't be anyone else but his father, counting out a handful of change for a serving girl. He caught my wave, grinned fit to break his face in half, and tried to return it, forgetting of course that he had a hand full of coins. They went flying like a shower of sequins and I laughed, covering my face with my hand and wondering if this was the sort of instance where one needed a fan.
"Who is that?" Margaret asked as she tried to hide her own smile.
"That is Mr. Cooper," I said. "Or, I guess it's Young Master Cooper, if that's his Dad, there. I bought flour from him yesterday. My very first errand."
"You seem pleased with yourself," she said as we walked out of sight of the shop.
"Oh, I am," I said. "Do you know how long I've been cooped up while people did things to me? For me? I actually miss going grocery shopping, if you can believe it."
"You were very independent then?"
"I lived alone, yeah. No servants. Just me."
"That must have been..." Margaret sighed and squeezed my arm.
"What? Expensive? Nerve wracking? Busy? Hard?"
"Freeing."
I laughed. "Yeah, Margaret, it kinda was," I said. "I could leave my dishes in the sink if I wanted to, or walk around naked after a bath. I knew that there would be no new mess when I walked into the apartment, just the one I had left behind."
We stopped at the top of a street, one of the many hilly protrusions that dotted Bath, and I gestured down to the river below us, the rows and rows of yellow sandstone houses, the hills that were positively verdant beyond. "But this? This is great. We don't have anything like this."
"No trees?" Margaret teased.
"Not a lot," I said. Her mirth vanished.
"What, none?"
"The human animal is inclined to reproduce and sprawl." I shrugged. "People don't start building up until they crash against their neighbors and have to. A little garden like yours is worth a pretty penny now-a-days." I frowned. "Then-a-days."
Margaret frowned too. "I do not think I would like to visit your time, Miss Franklin," she said. "I like open skies and leafy laneways far too much."
I grinned. "Oh, there's still some green left," I said. "Just not in the cities. Not unless there's a park carved out of the concrete. And even then that's planned. It's not just... actually and honestly untouched, like this." I waved at the forest that was encroaching on the meadows that ringed the edge of town we could see.
We found our way to the gravel path, and I instantly understood why it was Margaret's favorite. It was engineered, like the parks back home I'd been referring to, but it was still pretty. The walkway itself was covered over with the arching branches of sturdy young trees, giving the long walkway the feel of a green-stained-glass covered arcade. The sun shone through gaps in the wide leaves like arrow shafts, and aside from the faint tweet of some sweet little bird or other, all the sounds of the world vanished as we entered, muted by the foliage.
I assumed this was originally intended to be somebody's shortcut, but it was so private and so quiet that it made for the perfect little getaway. Halfway through I pulled Margaret to the side and, spreading out the tails of my jacket carefully, found us both a place to sit on the little grass embankment without staining the bum-area of our dresses.
I instantly thought about Green Gowns and then tried very hard not to. It was warm enough for a little sit, but far too public for anything more than that. More's the pity.
"This is really nice," I said, and bumped my arm against Margaret's. "Thanks for bringing me."
"I come here to think," Margaret said, and bumped back. She leaned backward and spread her hands behind her and I had to shift to keep my balance and us both on the tails of my coat. My shoulder ended up right against her armpit, but she didn't seem to mind. I swallowed once and did not shift so that my bicep could brush her boob. I did not.
I shut up and swallowed again and stared up at our emerald ceiling and let her think. I let my mind wander too, onto thoughts of rambling English gardens and wild bushes of roses, of toadstools and fairy rings, or pixies and fair folk, and the probabilities of magic. This laneway felt magic. Private enough, perhaps?.
The air was still and warm inside the arcade, and when I nosed at Margaret's cheek, she turned obligingly to let me at her mouth. That sweet bud, indeed.
* * *
After we returned from the leafy arcade - our lips and cheeks pinker, and our hair rather more askew than a simple walk should have produced - Miss Brown had another purse and a list of shopping for me, and the names of the places I could get the items. This time I got a wicker basket with a handle large enough for me to loop over my arm to carry everything in, and an apologetic look from Miss Brown that she'd forgotten it yesterday, though no pity for needing it.
Good.
My feet were getting sore from all of today's walking, but still I lingered at the errands, remembering the phantom brush of Margaret against my arm, the taste of her mouth and the humidity of her breath on me cheek, the way the hems of our skirts had flirted with one another as we walked, pressed together, appearing to gossip like school girls but really keeping our voices down only so nobody heard us talking about two hundred years from now. First I stopped outside of the milliners, to smile at the hats I could never have, feeling sort of like a kid staring in at the kittens in the pet shop window that Mom has already said 'no' to a hundred times. Then I moved on to a stand filled with vegetables in season and shriveled little fruits out of it, a butchers, the dairy again, and lastly Mr. Cooper's baking shop.
"Miss Franklin!" he said as I entered. The shop was once again empty, and he looked like he was tidying up for the day. "I saw you with your pretty friend today." The grin was mega-watt again and I wondered if ever turned down the voltage, or only used it on his female customers to charm them into buying more than what they came for.
"That was Miss Goodenough," I said. "She's my... companion. Or, rather, I'm hers, I suppose."
"You are staying with the Goodenoughs while in Bath?" he asked. It didn't sound like he particularly knew them, just their name. From what I understood, they hadn't been living in this neighborhood long.
"Yes. I need, um... this?" I read the list of ingredients off of the paper, and he moved around the store like a choreographed dancer to fill my order, stretching up to reach the tops of shelves, crouching low. I let my interest wander to a collection of bottles by the window, each of them labelled and proclaiming themselves to be "Essence of" some herb or flower or other. I couldn't quite imagine putting rose or lavender flavoring into a cake, but as I was learning every day in the kitchen with Miss Brown, what I consider cuisine or delicious, the people here might not. And vice versa.
Eventually Mr. Cooper moved to the counter with my assembled bags, I paid, and he began to close up. I loaded up the basket, careful to shift around the eggs and vegetables I already had in there so the heavy flours and powders would not bruise them; it cut into my elbow, but it was still manageable.
"Have a good evening," I said to Mr. Cooper and walked out the door. He caught up to me a few shops later, panting and red cheeked and grinning foolishly, in such a rush that he hadn't even changed his coat.
"Come now," he said, "please let me escort you home again. Your basket looks heavy."
"I'm fine," I said. I was. I didn't need his help and worst, I didn't want it if he was only doing it out of some misplaced sense of pity.
"Miss Franklin-" he began and I cut him off.
"Mr. Cooper, I have an immobile hand, not a case of the stupids. I am perfectly capable of carrying a basket two city blocks."
He frowned and went a little white. "I did not mean... I mean, I apologize, Miss Franklin, if you thought that I... ah... I just want to walk you home. If I may."
I stopped and looked up into his face. It was wide and soft everywhere Francis and Margaret's were sharp and pouting. He wasn't immediately attractive, but not unattractive either. He wasn't spotty or gross, just very, very plain looking. Ordinary. I blushed to think that I had once thought Margaret plain looking, too. She wasn't classically beautiful, but I had learned to appreciate the purse of her lips, the glitter in her laughing eyes, the quick way her slim eyebrows bounced. She had this habit of sucking her lower lip in and tapping her teeth and nibbling when she was writing and it was so distracting in all the wrong ways.
"Why?" I asked, and looked away to hide the red on my cheeks that thinking so intimately of Margaret's face had put there.
"Why what, Miss Franklin?" he asked.
"Why do you want to walk me home?"
"It is..." he floundered, confused by the fact that I thought it necessity to ask the question. "It is merely polite. When one's acquaintances are far away, it always benefits to make new friends. And new friends walk each other home."
I pondered for a minute, then sighed and held out the basket. It was getting heavy anyway. He smiled, took it, and offered his arm again. I took it, used my left hand to lift my skirt a little to make the walk easier, and asked, "So when is it my turn to walk you home?"
The impertinence of the question startled a laugh out of him. "But that would defeat the purpose, Miss Franklin, as I would have to promptly turn around to walk you again home afterwards."
"What, a lady can't walk home in the dark alone?"
"No, Miss Franklin. It is not wise, not even in Bath."
I sighed. "The more things change," I murmured.
We made our goodbyes at the garden gate, and Mr. Cooper turned and walked into the growing dark alone, his white baker's coat practically phosphorescent against the twilight.
* * *
The rest of April passed in a similar manner. Rose returned to tutoring shouty little boys in the back salon most days, and Margaret and I huddled in the front parlor with her book revisions. I shuttled between both rooms with the tea cart and refreshments, or fetched paper, pencils, ink, balls, books, this, that and every other thing in the house. I didn't have as much time to simply sit and be with Margaret as being a paid companion sounded like it should have had, but I was fine with it.
Rarely, the Goodenoughs entertained guests in the parlor after breakfast, or Rose and Mrs. Goodenough went to visit other people in theirs. Even more rare was the time when they managed to wrangle Margaret, and therefore me, out to visit with them. Margaret would have preferred to stay in and work on her books or play the piano -or kiss and cuddle by the fire, if we knew we had the . I would have preferred to stay behind and not be forced to pretend to care about a new variety of tea or the latest gossip and scandals, and pretend not to notice every single person pretending that they weren't staring at my hand.
Mrs. Goodenough still insisted that we use my full name in public. I know that I was named for my grandmother and all, but the name was just so old, so dowdy sounding. I had always gone by Jessie, but Mrs. Goodenough was introducing me all over Bath as Jessica Franklin, and Rose had continued calling me that as well despite my invitation otherwise. Margaret was forced into the use of the name in front of her family, and 'Jessie' sort of became ours. The way Margaret began to say it, with that pretty little twinkle curling around the side of her mouth, made it seem like it was a nickname, like it was a secret just for us. I tried calling her Megs, or Mags, or even Peggy, but none stuck. Margaret, clever, stubborn Margaret would not be diminished.
This new version of my name also helped separate Jessie the Mermaid and the girl in London who embarrassed Francis Goodenough at Lord Nelson's funeral from the Jessica of the Goodenough household. Jessica Franklin was written of in Margaret's letters to her sister, and went round for tea in the different households of Bath. Jessie Franklin stayed behind and made dinner, and I thought it was all marvelous fun to have two identities.
In the afternoons, if Margaret was blocked or there were social obligations to uphold, we would walk to the leafy green avenue or down to the Pump Room or up to the Assembly halls. No balls were held in April, for which I was eternally grateful. I wasn't sure which would be a worse feeling – being taken and being absolutely social embarrassing to my hosts, or being left behind like the common servant I sort of was, knowing that there were people out there circling Margaret and I couldn't get between them, keep her for myself.
Before supper every day I was sent on errands, buying the last of the meal's required ingredients or the items that would be needed for the next day's breakfasts and lunches. More often than not I visited the Cooper's shop last and let him walk me home. Mr. Cooper had plans to move to London and open a bakery. He talked endlessly of bread and Sally Lunn's Buns (something that I found shocking for the era until I realized he was talking about a sweet roll that a shop in Bath was famous for making, and not a girl's ass cheeks). He laughed at my ever more ridiculous stories about being a pirate, and never pressed to know what had, exactly, happened to my hand or where I was really from. It was nice having someone to just... be friendly with. To be social with, without all of the multiple layers of society and place and employment that filled every interaction in the Goodenough house.
On Sundays I went to church and tried not to fall asleep in the pew, because it made Margaret happy to go, and I liked seeing Margaret happy. In the afternoons I baked a pie for tea time. I watched Margaret carefully lick pastry crumbs off the fork tines and tried not to be a total pervert.
And most nights after dinner we four sat together in the parlor and Margaret read out passages of her novel, or Rose played the piano, or Mrs. Goodenough read from a book. We gossiped, played whisk, and the three of us younger ladies suffered Mrs. Goodenough's jovial attempt to play matchmaker at every turn with shy smiles and self-depreciating eyebrow lifts. I began a needlepoint that had to be constantly picked apart and repaired by Rose.
Afterwards, we all went to bed and started all over again.
And then, in mid-May, Margaret finished her book.
Margaret and I had the windows open in the parlor, letting the breeze in to ruffle our hair and the corners of pages, secure in their red folder. The air felt good on the naked skin of my neck; I finally had long enough hair to pile it up in pins and curls like the other women around me. Margaret's own neck and her little fly curls had become somewhat of a preoccupation for me, and I sometimes found myself sitting on the sofa, the edits forgotten on my lap, staring at the back of her head, thinking of all the little kisses we'd traded in the leafy avenue, or on that sofa.
We hadn't gone further - firstly, because there wasn't enough privacy or space to do so, but also because Margaret was still new to this whole PDA thing and honestly, I was in no rush. We had literally all the rest of our lives together, if I really was the lover from history, the woman who retires to that little cottage alone with Margaret after her third book does well enough to afford it. When did it matter, then, when we got around to sex?
Not that I didn't want it - god, did I ever want it! But I was content to let Margaret dictate our pace, to tell me she was ready for the next step if and when she was, and not before. (Though, man, engineer excuses for time enough alone with a shared bedroom to indulge in a little bit of fantasizing and self-relief was getting to be a pain.)
But right now, I was on the sofa and she was in the chair beside me, the manuscript on the tea cart between us with a bottle of sherry.
"Congratulations," I said, and lifted the cut crystal glass that she had poured for us.
We tapped glasses and drank the small swallow of alcohol.
"So what now?" I asked. "Do a fair copy and send it to publishers?"
Margaret made a face. "Yes. But I fear that it will not be considered. I am no Ann Radcliffe, with her Monks and Udolphos. My story is so small, Jessie. I may have actually to pay the publisher to print the books."
Ah. And the Goodenoughs couldn't afford that - especially knowing what I did about the book not selling well in the first run, which would probably make it hard to even earn that investment back. I suddenly wished I still had something of value to hock. My cell phone and watch had both gone to Francis to pay my debts and buy him his bride. I had nothing left to give Margaret, except ... well, except my assurances.
"Trust me," I said. "Someone will buy this book. I know it for a fact."
She laughed, and it was a such an ugly little self-deprecating sound that I was actually startled. "Nobody will wish to read the romantic nonsense of a woman."
I sat forward on the sofa, leaned over the arm, and took her hands in mine. And decided, fuck it. Tell her your last secret. "Margaret. They will. I know this."
She sat back and her eyes went wide. "You... you know it?" she repeated, that clever brain of hers putting all the pieces together like lighting. "My god. Your reaction to the kiss. That was not horror, that was recognition. You... You have read it before."
"A long time ago," I admitted, leaning close, intimate, whispering this final truth into the warm flower-perfumed afternoon. "Long enough that reading it again just now was like reading it for the first time."
Margaret set down her sherry glass and seized my hands. "Does it match what you remember?"
"I don't remember it at all," I said, trying to stay calm. "Maybe? I always confused the plots of your books, anyway." I shook my head, smiled wryly, shrugged with one shoulder. "English wasn't my best subject, I'll admit."
"Books," she repeated. "Plural?"
"Oh god," I said, and pulled away and covered my face with my hands. "I'm rewriting history."
"I had more ideas," Margaret enthused, and she was up out of her chair, pacing, manic with glee. "But I have not done more than jot down notes... and I want to change some things in Letters Across The Seas, but I ... now I'm uncertain." She stopped and turned to me, lip between her teeth, shy and uncertain.
"Do it," I said, looking up. "Do whatever you feel is what you want to do. Don't let me influence you or dictate. Write the other books. Change this one however you need to in order to make it the best version of it, the version you love best."
"Which...?" Margaret began, then stopped. She licked her lips, making them wet and pink, and I forced my eyes down to my hands so I could concentrate on her words instead. "Which book is your... is your favorite?"
Of all the questions Margaret could ask about the future, about how well known she is, about any awards she'd earned or how many novels she'd published, this wasn't one I was expecting. Still, I could answer that one without hesitation.
"The Welshman's Daughters," I said. "Of course, I think that's everyone's Favorited."
"The Welshman's Daughters," Margaret murmured, one fingernail tip slipping into her mouth to be nibbled nervously between her teeth. It was a disgusting habit and I found even it adorable. Jesus, I had it bad. "Which one is that?"
I grinned and tapped the sheaf of manuscript papers sitting in the leather folder.
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