Vivian stood at the window, sipping her tea.
The panes had fogged over. On the streets, horses passing by nickered. Vivian hoped for sunshine warm enough to stroll about with a parasol.
Perhaps in Rome. She imagined herself as a creature of the world. Perhaps she would wear trousers and learn to duel.
She’d once read of a female, in some high court, who got into duels because she could best the men—until the King forbade anyone to fight with her because she was bloodthirsty and killing his friends.
‘Have you ever been to France?’ she asked.
‘Once.’
Everleigh stood at her shoulder, staring outside with her.
They’d not talked of marriage, or of food, or even of the weather, or of anything else.
‘I should have stayed in today.’ Vivian took another sip of the liquid.
‘You really didn’t like the kisses?’ Everleigh asked.
She bit the inside of her lip, considering her answer. ‘I liked them.’
‘It’s hard to believe that man you were considering marriage to didn’t kiss you.’ He touched a lock of hair that had fallen from her bun.
‘Mavis was always scowling at him. He was scared of her. She once made a grabbing motion with her hand, clenched her fist as if she was grasping something, then twisted and gnashed her teeth together. Scared me, too.’
‘I must thank her, then.’
The wind shuddered the window pane. The temperature must be changing. A few drops of rain splattered.
‘Do you ever think of it? The kiss?’ she asked. Her cup rattled in the saucer.
‘Of course.’
The warmth in his voice convinced her he’d not just said it to please her.
She took another sip. ‘It’s odd, but I feel, if I were to marry you, my life would end as I know it. I want to dance. To travel. Just to live, basically, and live to the fullest.’
‘We’re not to discuss marriage.’ He twisted the lock of her hair, fluttered it across her cheeks and tucked it closer to the bun.
She moved just a bit, so that she could feel the barest bit of him at her shoulder. ‘What do you usually do on Sunday?’ she asked.
He shook his head. ‘Ledgers. Check my man-of-affairs’s progress from the previous week. I must keep caught up so I can have time to attend the events I need to appear at. People are important to progress. I have to keep among them. No progress is ever made alone. You have to work with others.’
‘Your wife would be expected to attend a lot of soirées and spend a lot of time with the architects’ wives, her back straight and accepting many invitations.’
He shrugged. ‘I’ve never given it any thought.’
‘I did. When I was getting better. What it would be like to be married. To you. I’d promised it. There was little else to do but think about it as I waited to see if I would live.’
Mavis had been married once and her husband had squandered the household money on new plans to make them rich, or make them appear to be rich. Creditors had knocked. A mistress or two. Her companion said she had considered the best night of her marriage to be the night she’d sat with his casket. She often reminisced fondly about that night—the un-wedding night, she called it.
Vivian looked to her left, only seeing the side of Everleigh’s shoulder.
Everleigh was a fancy, caused by the first kiss and circumstances. He was a tower of masculinity and stood firm, much like one of the battering rams people had once used to push in the doors of castles.
Everleigh touched the window pane, standing so close she could feel the heat of his body through her clothing.
His fingertip sketched against the moisture on the glass.
It almost squeaked when he wrote the words Marry me?
This was not her dream of love. His proposal hadn’t been spoken again, or penned on to a note that she could hold close for ever. It could easily be wiped away, or would fade on its own.
It was rather like her father had suggested. She was of suitable lineage and so was he, and they would produce children of suitable lineage, and those children would marry other children of suitable lineage. The country would be happy. The ton would be happy. The households would be just as they had been for centuries before.
‘Do you usually drink spirits, on those Sundays when you are doing the ledgers?’ she asked.
He waited a heartbeat before answering. ‘Yes. Usually. I like the routine of my Sundays. I put away the ledgers when I’m brought a glass of brandy late in the afternoon. I make my notes for the next week. The events I wish to attend and the people I need to meet with. Sometimes I have a second glass, while I strategise my week. At night, if I cannot work out how to solve a problem, I get a cheroot and step out under the stars to think about what needs to be done.’
Her father had once had two glasses as well when he drank, except sometimes he didn’t notice when the second glass had been replaced with a third or fourth. He would mix his words and think it grand. The more he drank, the more he laughed, until he became angry and shut himself in his room to drink more.
‘I want to dance,’ she said. ‘Just go to dances. I know I should have loftier ambitions, but I want to swirl around the floor as if everything is light-hearted and all that matters is the laughter, and the music, and the dance. I thought I’d never be able to do such a thing and I want to.’
She swept her hand over the words on the window pane, erasing them. ‘That sounds so frivolous, but I know I wasn’t meant to march in wars or pursue ambitions of such things. I’m satisfied with that. I know I was meant to marry and I’m not satisfied with that.’
‘A ruined lady does not garner many invitations.’
‘I’ll get Father to hire musicians. I’ll get a dancing teacher. Because I am going to dance. I am going to have music. Laughter will be around me. It may only be mine, but I will have laughter. I’ll dance in Bath and perhaps in Scotland. I’ll dance in the places I’ve dreamed of.’
She let out a long breath. ‘I thought I was to be forced to marry. Marriage does not seem so important to me when I compare it to being alive.’
She twisted around to speak directly to him. ‘Alexandria is not such an innocent and that has not kept her from dancing. She wanted me to be ruined and you to be forced into marriage. I will not have it.’
She had thought she had no choice but marriage before. Now she had an option.
She thought of the darkness of Rothwilde’s estate. The coldness of Everleigh’s father. The Book of Martyrs and the other books in the library, each one almost seeming alone in the space.
Everleigh’s town house had rooms just as sombre.
To have a kiss was one thing, but she had been living in the shadows long enough. She didn’t want to remain in them.
‘I have a choice: to be forced into spinsterhood, or to be forced into marriage. I plan to smile, to live and to embrace life...not a husband.’
She would dance and put the last years behind her, and enjoy quadrilles and reels and life.
She would never let her heart and her spirit wither away again and she would seek out others who needed laughter. She would make certain that if someone were too frail, they would be able to count on her for a moment of joy. A respite from their pains and something other than four walls and sadness.
Her mother and Mavis, and even the maids, had provided lightness when Vivian was ill. They’d given her respite over and over again.
She would do that for others. She would find joy in life and pull people around her into the merriment.
If there was to be a time for everything under the sun, then there would be a time for everything under the stars. Laughter soothed pain better than poultices and she would distribute happiness. Only the people receiving would never know what had happened.
‘I will let your parents know.’ He left the room. The door remained open behind him.
Her father’s oath shattered the air.
Then everything was silent as her mother murmured placating words. Her father grumbled.
The voices moved away and a door was shut. Her future was being discussed.
Everleigh’s kisses—those she would miss. But a kiss was so fleeting. It made her feel alive, but didn’t keep her alive.
Soft footsteps sounded behind her. Her mother came into view.
She’d not realised how close she and her mother were in size. Nor had she realised how pale her mother was. Her mother seemed different. Puffy. Wan. Momentarily Vivian was distracted. ‘Are you ill?’
Her mother laughed. ‘No. Not at all. I will stand with you on whatever you decide. Right now, it will only make your father feel I am goading him if I say so and I am so trying to keep all the best parts of our marriage. But you need to know, Vivian, that I don’t care whether you marry or not.’ She dusted her hands together. ‘I’ve heard tales of Everleigh’s maternal grandfather. The man happily married his daughter off to get that title in the family. No one should be bartered so.’
Her mother walked out of the room. ‘Unless, of course,’ she mumbled, ‘Everleigh might take your father in addition to you. Right now, that could cause me to change my mind.’
Vivian waited, listening for Everleigh to leave, wondering if he might come into the room to bid her goodbye.
* * *
She didn’t know if it was a quarter or half an hour later when she heard footfalls on the stairs. She couldn’t see him from the window as he departed. All she could see were the grey colours tinting everything beyond the window pane.
She imagined the cold hues surrounding her and being locked inside them for ever. She imagined Everleigh, never loving, but holding her heart captive.
Sitting at the table, she put her elbow on the wood, and rested her forehead in her palm. Something inside her felt lost, abandoned, and more alone than she’d ever been—yet she could change nothing of her decision not to marry him.
The seasons would change. Over and over. Spring would arrive again and it would be followed by summer, and autumn, and then winter—perhaps a winter colder than she’d ever seen before.
But never colder than the depths she’d felt inside Everleigh.
* * *
Everleigh gave his hat and gloves to the butler. Then he moved up the stairs, stopping midway.
Vivian’s father wanted Everleigh as a son-in-law. They had discussed that after Everleigh had written the words of proposal on the window pane and then left Vivian alone in the room.
Darius had been angry to have his daughter ruined. Only one thing would solve that...a marriage. To Everleigh. He’d insisted that Vivian would have no choice, eventually, but to wed.
After all, Darius would not fund foolish ventures where Vivian might travel, and fall into trouble, or into the waters of Bath. He would see that she married Everleigh. The chance to marry an earl’s heir did not happen every day.
Everleigh had listened and it had been rather like a negotiation, he supposed, of centuries before when one ruler wanted to make an alliance with another country. A discussion of the benefits of alliance. The heritage of the Baron aligned with the heritage Everleigh carried.
Negotiations had begun, with Vivian at the centre. He wondered if his father and grandfather had had the same conversation.
It had seemed odd having the discussion without Vivian in the room, and pointless. Talking with her father had made the idea of marriage less appealing.
Then her father had grumbled that he’d not even known Everleigh was in Vivian’s mind until the soirée when she’d invited the architects. He’d been so surprised because she’d never once mentioned Everleigh to him.
Her father had told Everleigh that Vivian had never stopped speaking of the fortune hunter who had once courted her, until she found out the settlement the man had been promised for every month she lived past the wedding.
Then she refused to consider anyone.
Everleigh went to his room, shrugged off the coat, and threw it over the back of a chair.
He could not blame Vivian.
Not at all. He didn’t want to marry.
Neither did Vivian.
She wanted to dance and he understood her wanting such a thing. He’d never wanted to dance. Life was too short for such nonsense. There was so much work to be done.
Everleigh had insisted the negotiations stop.
He didn’t encourage projects that wasted time.
* * *
Later that night, he heard the clump of footsteps on the stairs and the tapping noise of his father’s cane.
He raised his face in time to see his father step into the room, chortling. ‘What is this I hear about two women fighting over you in the streets?’
Everleigh stared around the room. The stories had already started. Vivian was at the centre of them.
‘A mishap. With idle chatter taking it out of proportion.’
‘It’s said shots were fired.’
Everleigh put his elbows on the desk and rested his face in his hands. ‘Alexandria did not take well to my rejection.’
‘Are you going to marry the other one?’
‘We have no plans to wed.’
His father’s cane crashed into the floor. ‘You did not propose? The men at the club told me it is Baron Darius’s daughter. She would make a fine wife for you.’ The tip of the cane kept rattling against the floor.
‘You also told me Alexandria would make a fine wife for me.’
‘Well, she was breathing, and would have passable offspring.’ Another slap of the cane on the floor.
Silence.
‘I cannot fathom how I raised you. You know your duty. How long do marriage vows take? Less than an hour. A matter of hours beforehand to get the special licence. A few hours,’ he sputtered. ‘A few hours of your life and you cannot spare them.’
More silence.
‘I cannot believe that.’ He rushed down the stairs as fast as he could, shouting to a servant, ‘Tell them not to unhitch the carriage.’
Everleigh raised his head and walked to the window, watching a servant run for the carriage. Thankfully, his father would go back to the estate. At least the house would be peaceful.
His father walked to the street and stood, tapping the cane.
When the carriage pulled up, the driver stepped down to help him in. His father gesticulated wildly with the cane. Realisation flashed in Everleigh’s mind. His father wasn’t telling the driver to return to Wildewood. He was pointing in another direction.