I regretfully woke a deep-slumbering Lucy just after dawn, and we gathered up the detritus of our night and emerged from the drawing room. Lucy took the back stairs up to her room, and I took the main stairs to my own room, nodding at the night guard sitting by the front door. I went straight to sleep the moment I crawled into my cold bed and woke up too late for both breakfast and the arrival of the locksmiths.
Having made myself presentable, I came downstairs to the sound of tools on metal and wood, the heavy clunk of hammers being set down on the floor, and the click of new keys being checked in locks. I peered into the rooms and felt an instant sense of relief when I noted the shining new brass of the locks that had already been changed. These particular locks, one of the workers explained to me once I had introduced myself, were almost impossible to pick.
But the noise of the locksmiths, the thud of work boots on wooden floors, and the continued clatter of tools was an unwelcome addition to my already whirling mind. I shut myself in my office and tried to do some work, but every clang and thump rang loudly in my ears and made me clutch at the edge of my desk.
I was thinking about that man in the hotel again. Thinking that I had felt more desire from Lucy’s hand on my waist, from her breath across my mouth, than I did having sex with him, more pleasure from resting my chin on her shoulder as we danced, from the soft touch of her finger rubbing against my lip.
My body heated as I remembered last night, and that afternoon last year when I had tried on dresses in her room, the feeling of her hands on my bare sides, moving me by my hips; the brush of her lips against my cheek when she greeted me out on the terrace at the ball.
I felt fevered. I could still smell her perfume from the bedding we had shared, and my hand kept lifting to my lips to touch the place where her hand had touched.
“This is madness,” I said under my breath. “Pull yourself together.”
That women could be with women was something I knew very vaguely, hypothetically—but surely in those cases one or both of the women were mannish, with queer habits and manners of dress, not ordinary like Lucy and me?
I picked up my to-do list, trying to clear my mind of impossible thoughts.
Even if—if—Lucy felt the same for me, she would surely never act on it, just as I should not either.
And yet last night, with her talk of kissing; and yet every time she had looked at me; and yet this strange tension that had bloomed between us.
What was I to do? My life had been barren of anything resembling love, or companionship, or desire returned. Could I be happy living thirty more years knowing that there was a chance I could find that—love—here and now; could I live with myself if I did not take the chance?
I spent the rest of the day cloistered in my office, barely giving a thought to the museum, doing mindless work, copying notes, and answering letters by rote. I vacillated from embarrassment; from the certainty that this was all in my head, that I had allowed strange fancies to sway my thoughts in an unnatural direction, to hope, to a surety that Lucy did feel the same, that she wanted me as I wanted her, that we would hurt no one but ourselves by not being true to these feelings, that it—that I—was not wrong; and back again. I thought I might die when I saw Lucy again, and that I might very well die if I never saw her again too—these were the crazed thoughts in my mind that afternoon.
It became clear to me that I could not wait until dinner, I could not sit there opposite her with this maelstrom of thoughts still whirling, I had to know, this had to reach some apex, some end, even if it was my utter embarrassment and shame. And so, once my working day was done, I headed straight for her room, and the higher I climbed in the house, the more desperate I felt, until I had to wait in the empty hallway outside to gather myself together as best I could.
I knocked on her door. “Lucy?” I called, my voice breaking with tension.
“Come in!” she called back. I could hear the smile in her voice and it fortified me.
“What’s wrong?” she asked as I entered. She was standing by her dressing table, putting on earrings—and even that little motion, the intimacy of watching her do her toilette, seemed to floor me.
I shut the door behind me but kept a hand on the doorknob, squeezing it painfully.
“There’s something between us, isn’t there?” I said to her, before my bravery could abandon me, every word shaking. “Or am I just a fool, embarrassing myself?”
She shook her head, and every inch of me hung on that very movement. “You’re not a fool, Hetty. Or if you are, then I am too,” she said, with a tremulous smile.
“I want—” I bit my lip and swallowed the words I could not say. “I want—” I said again, and she walked over to me, and my breath suddenly caught in my lungs. She was close now, a look of sympathy and hope on her face, close enough to fill my vision with only her. I glanced between her lips and her eyes as our faces inched toward each other, almost but not quite meeting, and then I kissed her, and her lips were soft and damp, and she twined a hand in my hair and kissed me back, the both of us gasping, making small animal noises into each other’s mouths.
It was as if I were kindling that had been lit by her touch and she had joined me in the flames, we could not slow down, we could not stop as I tugged off her blouse and she pulled off mine. My hands fumbled on the catch of her skirt as she kissed me and smeared her lips across to my neck, sucking at the skin as her own hands scrabbled at my trousers, and then we were falling down on the silk quilt of the bed, plucking off our stockings and socks, shifting camisoles and knickers out of place, kissing breathlessly, laughing into each other’s mouths as we wove our bodies together.
I touched her then as I had always wished to be touched, with lips and tongue and hands and fingers, and she touched me back. We whispered secrets to one another, we looked at each other in shared amazement, and then I tucked my face into the curve of her neck as we brought each other to climax, our bodies wedged together, wet and warm and shivering.
“Is it mad of me to say that I think I’ve loved you since the first time I saw you, standing in your traveling clothes in the middle of the drawing room?” she asked, several hours after we should have been at dinner. We were sharing some of the chocolate she had hidden away in her room, licking and nipping at each other’s fingers.
“I don’t think so. I remember the first time I saw you too, how beautiful I thought you were, how singular,” I replied, my head propped up on her stomach. I could not believe how natural this felt with her, lying naked with one another. Perhaps it was because we were both women, that her body was only a mirror to mine.
“You know,” she said, “no matter what the war brings, I am happy that it brought me you.”
I turned my head so that my ear was pressed against her skin and I could hear all the noises of her insides, the echo of her heart thrumming away. I wanted to believe in what she said, but I knew nothing of what war was really like, what horrors might ensue, and I did not trust this house to leave us unscathed. “We’ll be safe here at Lockwood, safe together,” I said, and tried not to notice that it sounded less like a promise and more like a plea.