Elanora slept with the little black box under her pillow that night, but it did nothing to ward off the crushing headache that throbbed at her temples when she woke in the early hours of the morning and lay staring into the dark dawn. Well, she’d learned one thing. An engagement ring in the little black box didn’t have magic powers to make everything alright again.
So just how did she pick herself up and go on from here? She had been imagining herself sharing her life with Eustace since she was sixteen. She’d had only eyes for him since she’d had a nanny in the nursery. And she’d avoided seeing the thing that now stuck out more clearly than any other.
Eustace would never stand up to his father and be his own man. His comfortable life as merchant-man-about-town depended on him obeying his father’s every wish. This week it was the demand that he goes to the Indies. This time next year it would be something else.
She rested her hand on her stomach and recalled their love making. All done on impulse, but on the assumption they were soon to be man and wife. She rolled over in bed, suddenly feeling hot and sweaty even though the snow still lay several feet deep on the ground outside. She drew her knees up to her chest and keened silently, rocking from side to side, a sharp stabbing pain in her chest.
She put her hands to her eyes and pressed them down so hard she saw little shards of light behind her fingers. How could she have been so naive? Didn’t they say “Like father, like son?” She really should have known better, and nothing would ever be the same again.
Even with Aunt Coco. She pictured Coco’s kind, careworn face, one she now knew better even than her own mother’s. Things wouldn’t be the same there either. Firstly, she knew William’s awful secret.
How could she look Coco in the eye and not have something of what she knew leak out of her? And secondly, Coco’s first loyalty would always have to be to her son. She, Elanora, was no longer in the first circle of family. She’d just been banished.
What to do? Who to talk to? She couldn’t imagine that her life would not be scarred forever by what had unfolded last night.
Unbelievably, she dropped off into the welcome oblivion of an exhausted sleep, and the light had fully broken when she was woken hours later by an urgent rapping on her bedroom door. She struggled up from the pillow and the hammering in her head resumed the second she opened her eyes. A bitterness burned in her mouth.
She recognized the Irish brogue of their housekeeper, Dana O’Loughlin; a doughty woman Aunt Coco had rescued from a Five Points tenement house and helped set back on her feet.
“Miss Elanora …” There was the faintest hint of a rolled “r” in the loving caress of her name. A long pause. “Miss Elanora, please … You have a visitor.”
Her heart leapt. Eustace. It was Eustace coming to tell her he was choosing her over his father. That he was going to start work as … She flopped back onto the pillow. It was not going to be Eustace.
“Who is it, Dana?”
“Miss Amelia is here to see you. She says you were taken unwell last night, and she’s concerned.”
“That I was, Dana. That I was. But I’m better this morning. It was just a headache, nothing serious.”
She drew her legs to the edge of the bed and placed them down on the rug that overlay the cold wooden floor. “Give me just a few minutes to clean up and I’ll be down. Set her in the parlor and make some coffee, would you be so kind, Mrs O’Loughlin. I’ll be down, right smart.”
“Certainly miss. Straight away. Miss Amelia will be ever so relieved.”
So Amelia’s parents had reported last night’s humiliation. The chill of the ice-cold water from the bedside ewer was just what she needed. She dipped and rung out the muslin face cloth and applied it to her eyelids, the back of her neck, her arm pits.
Then she doused herself in lavender water in the places where she’d had the ice-cold cloth. Within minutes she was pleasantly revived. She wasn’t going to give anyone the satisfaction of talking about her behind her back. And today, what was it, a week before Christmas. She was going to set about making a new start.