Mare was hypnotized, bewitched by the shape and touch of Teddy Bridge's lips. No book could be held responsible for upholding such a sensation as this. Mare was at a loss so many years and words were wasted on love when there was kissing to be done.
"Mare," Teddy whispered against her lips. In the moments since that first brazen touch, they'd moved, somewhat mystically, to the conspiratorial embrace of the bur. Teddy's hands were upon Mare's hips, his breath in her mouth. She thought she could die happy.
"Don't," she said back simply, taking his collar in her fingers and pulling him closer. "Don't make it end, Teddy."
He bowed his chin, traced Mare's bottom lip with his thumb. "But I must, Ms. Atwood."
Mare balked, drawing back as if she'd been slapped. Teddy did not look at her. Ms. Atwood? He was distancing himself from her. He was running. Regretting. This...
"It means nothing," Mare whispered. She meant it to be a question, but the words emerged a declaration. A gutting truth.
"It means everything." Teddy's eyes lifted and bored into hers, torches once more. His hand returned to her hip, as though holding her there, blocking her escape. "You, Mare, mean..."
But he did not finish. Could not, perhaps. The notion in his mind was so unbelievable, so impossible, it had not the strength to uphold so simple a sentence. You mean everything.
Mare waited an interminable moment, but Teddy merely pressed his lips together. Mare remembered his father in the wood, saw the memory of the man in the bruise upon Teddy's clenched jaw.
There were a thousand things she might have said then. But all she could manage was, simply, brokenly: "You will marry her." She could not keep the tears from springing to her eyes.
Teddy merely furrowed his brow and lifted his chin. "And you will marry Camden."
Was he so foolish? Did he not see? "I do not love him."
"It can't matter."
"But it does! You have said so yourself, Teddy. We must..."
"What, Mare? What must we do?" Teddy pulled from her, turning his back and running his hands agitatedly through his wet curls. The rain had at last passed, leaving the glen drenched, eager to shine soon as the sun emerged. It did not. "My marriage has been set to Lilith since we went away to school. If I jilt her, I will..."
"What?" Mare crossed her arms. "Lose your inheritance? God forbid you live a life of simple happiness, of, of—"
"Suffering!" Teddy wheeled back, stricken, his eyes huge and shining. "A life of poverty. Of abandonment and alienation, the guest uninvited, the fool—"
"No, I am the fool. For believing you better. For—" Mare bit her tongue.
Teddy gazed at her, one brow furrowed, mouth twisted. "For what?"
Mare shook her head.
"For what, Mare?"
For falling in love with you.
"For believing you different." Mare knelt and pulled her boots from the mud, grabbing Teddy's ruined hat from its perch nearby. She passed him, pushing it against his chest and holding his eyes. "The truest masks are the ones we craft ourselves."
Teddy's nostrils flared. His eyes were bright with tears. "I am not alone in this."
"No. But mark my words. You will be alone in love."
She shoved his hat into his hands and stalked off down the twisting path. She lifted her face to the sky, but the sun remained stubbornly hidden, and as she waded out into the grasses beyond the wood, rain once more began to fall.
But when Mare looked back, she found Teddy had not followed.
This they would have in common, then.
Both would be alone.
***
Mare hated Teddy and Camden and Geoffrey. She hated her family. Her friends.
Most of all, she hated herself.
There was one place she was true and another was true to her. There was one place she was free. There was one thing that brought her joy through it all: every misstep, every heartbreak, every betrayal.
"Mare!"
Mare jolted, straightening. She was on her knees in the shed, working at the plank in the floor beneath which she stashed Camden's letters. It was stubbornly sealed shut, as though someone had hammered a nail back in or pasted the edges. Matilde raced across the yard, a parasol at her hip, clutched tight in one hand.
Mare stood, gathering her muddy skirts in her hands. "Matilde," she said, taking her sister in. "You look a fright. Your hair—"
Matilde's eyes were huge and full of tears. Mare was bewildered; she was almost certain she'd never seen her sister cry. "Good Lord," Mare said, going to Matilde and taking her by the arms. "Antony—is he all right? Is father—"
"No! They're fine, they're all fine. It's..." Matilde gripped Mare's filthy hand with her own sable-gloved one. "Mare. She found them. I'm so sorry. I tried to mislead her. I tried to—"
Mare's stomach plunged. She felt the blood drain from her face. Her hands on Matilde's tightened. "Where are they?"
Matilde's face crumpled.
"Where are they?" Mare's throat tightened. She felt tears again, rising fast and hot as she shoved past Matilde and sprinted headlong across the yard, banging through the front door, heedless of the mud she left in streaks across the floor, and Jenelle who she nearly bowled over in her hurry.
Mare stumbled to a stop in the parlor. Her mother sat by the fire, profile lit red. She gazed into the flames.
"I knew," she said after a long moment, her voice soft. "From the first, I knew."
Mare stared at her, panting, mind reeling. The box was nowhere to be seen. Her mother had no pages spread across her lap.
Mare's eyes went to the fire. No. She wouldn't.
Mare cast herself to the floor, clapping her hands to her mouth. She could see the corners of the box in the hearth, half-sunk in soot, the varnish running back in rivulets like hot wax. Within, the thick sheaf of papers burned steadily, half intact but for black blossoms of char, dotted with shining embers.
The word tore from her chest like a bullet. "No!"
Mare dove for the flames, but Matilde had appeared in a flurry of rain droplets and cool air, and pulled her back from the hearth.
Mare fought, wailing, but Matilde's grip was sure. Mare's sister pulled her close, and in her misery, Mare simply buckled into her and wept. Sobs wrenched through her, endless riptides, merciless.
"This was cruel, mother," snarled Matilde. "Even for you."
"This was a favor. Love is folly; fantasy is ruin." Mare heard her mother stand in a rustle of skirts and the protest of chair legs against hardwood. "Indulgence is the noose."
"Wretched woman," said Matilde coldly.
Mare did not lift her head, but buried her face in Matilde's skirts and cried. She heard her mother turn on her heel and see herself out, heels clicking all the way up the stairs.
"Mare," Matilde soothed, stroking her hair. "Oh, sweet Mare. The dreaming heart dares indeed."
"By existing," Mare sobbed, shoulders quaking. "My heart sins by existing."
"Daring is quite different than sinning, my dear. You'd do well to remember it."
***
Mare remained in bed through the next several days, arms wrapped around her knees, duvet over her shoulders. She refused to so much as part the drapes and when any but Matilde entered, Mare sent them away. This of course pertained only to servants, as her father was in Boston on business following Diana's Hunt, and Mare's mother dared not show her face here.
"You ought to go out and enjoy the sunshine, Mare," Matilde said from her perch across the room. She'd moved the chess table to Mare's room and played most hours of the day. She was the only one who fought Mare on the drapes, and so today the room was flush with light. "You know, you're only spiting yourself."
"Why are you here?" Mare sat dejectedly in bed, arms crossed. She refused to dress, and her meal and tea had grown cold on the night stand. At the sight of even a cold stale biscuit her stomach protested. Perhaps she was only spiting herself. "Does Antony not wish you back? You must be bored here in Star's Crossing after the bustle of Philadelphia."
Matilde chuckled, playing her fingers along the mane of a white knight. "Antony of course wishes me back. What would he do without his Cleopatra?"
Mare smiled. It was strange how the pressure of Matilde's company lifted when not used against her, but for. Mare's sister was a force to be reckoned with. It was something to be proud of.
"Unfortunately for my dear husband, he'll have to fend for himself a bit longer. I've unfinished business in this neck of the woods." Matilde considered her board with narrowed eyes, then swept a bishop from her opposition and placed her knight beside the queen. "And you know how I loathe unfinished business."
Mare hesitated. She'd been careful with her mind and tongue. Every thought of Teddy sent shivers down her spine, followed quickly by disappointment and fury. She couldn't think of facing Camden now her letters had all been burned. But curiosity, as it was wont to do, got the better of her.
"Does it pertain to the Bridges, Watts, and Doores? Your unfinished business?"
Matilde looked up, considering Mare across the room before dissembling and resetting her board. "It does."
Mare thought of that day in the Watt library, the vehemence with which grown men discussed Matilde. "You have a history with them."
"And inherited one, albeit. Antony's father was...cut out of an agreement with the Thatcher men. An agreement for which he paid all of their ways."
Mare raised her eyebrows. "An old grudge. Why do you take up its mantle?"
"When knights have no strength to lift blades, maidens must do so in their stead." Matilde smiled. She'd already begun shifting pieces across the board. "Funny, isn't it? We're only given a shot at something when men have failed. And soon as they're feeling less sorry, they'll take that shot right back."
"Has he? Taken your shot?"
Matilde sat back, her eyes moving toward the window. "No," she said. "He hasn't. And he won't. Women learn to hold onto power when they've got it. No use sulking when there's work to be done."
"Hm."
"You think you are a pitiable creature, Mare, but you're not." Matilde turned, one arm draped over the back of her chair, her bright eyes determined. "You're clever and bold. You're funny. You're romantic. You've a mind that is stubbornly yours and yours alone. How few women are free to say so?"
"Look what it's done for me," Mare said. But as she said it, she realized Matilde was right. The letters, the ball, the drama, the intrigue—none of it would have befallen another girl. Mare was more than the protagonist of her story; she was the writer.
"You're also dismally selfish," Matilde continued, turning back to her game. "Woefully melodramatic. And childish."
"I am a child."
"Indeed. But you cannot very well ask for the privilege of adulthood while crying over spilled milk, can you?"
Dismally selfish. Yes. This was true. Mare fell in love with Theodore Bridge though he all but belonged to a now-dear friend. She doubted Camden. She wrote off Geoffrey. She flirted with fate while her doting father's bank withered; she hated her mother for her callousness but praised her boldness in secret. She looked down upon her sisters for their cunningness simply because society said she should.
Yet in her heart, she could not help but admire them. Especially the one sitting across from her.
"I just want to sulk," Mare said at last, relieved that her voice was not pathetic, only tired.
Matilde laughed. "Sulk all you wish, Mare Atwood. I can't abide wasting time when there is work to be done."
Mare snorted. "And what is this?" She gestured to her sister's compulsive chess playing.
"This," said Matilde, checking her king, "is practice. Which is work. Which is success. Mare, you know so little of business."
Mare stared at Matilde thoughtfully. She realized she'd scarcely written a word since this whole business began. Before, she'd written more than a letter a week. She wrote Camden stories and songs, sonnets and epics and plays.
Mare hesitated. What if she couldn't do it anymore? What if her fingers were too weak? What if her mind was blank?
Woefully melodramatic.
Mare bent over the night table, pulling out a well, pen, and paper. Her mother had confiscated every book from her room, every scrap of paper and drop of ink. Matilde was quick to smuggle the contraband. Mare wondered if her sister did so to please Mare or spite their mother. Likely both.
Now Mare gazed at the blank page in her lap. She tried to remember the girl she was, penning that first letter. The girl she was that day in the rain in the woods. At the ball. Playing in the fields. Sipping whiskey in the parlor. Confiding in Meredith. Weeping in the Watt gardens with Lilith and Alison in her arms. Laughing with Camden. Speaking with Geoffrey.
Kissing Teddy.
Mare touched the pen to her lips, then the pen to paper.
Tomorrow, she wrote. Her heart beat a little faster. She took a deep breath. Steadied her fingers. And put pen to paper once more.
"Tomorrow." She spoke the word to taste it...