Chapter 5

Friday, the morning after the Emmys, Jenny woke up feeling awful. Her mouth was dusty, and something thick and heavy was pushing against her eyes. She sat on the edge of the bed. Why didn't they have these ceremonies on Saturday night so people didn't have to go to work the next morning? Because the prime-time viewing audience was bigger during the week. She knew that.

She went down to the kitchen. Brian was sitting at the long pine table, his script open. He was working on his lines. His black hair was still damp from the shower. His shirt had fresh creases in the sleeves. He was ready for work.

She wasn't. She dropped into a chair. "Are any of the workmen coming today?" This kitchen remodeling was taking forever.

"No," Brian answered. "The backsplash tile isn't in yet."

Why did they need to tile the backsplash? What was wrong with plain old wall? Tile was easier to clean, but she never cooked and Brian never spilled.

"Then I think I'll work at home today," she said. "I'm not going into the studio. I'm beat."

"Don't you want to celebrate with everyone?"

"We celebrated last night. That's my problem." A person who went from one month to the next without touching a drop of alcohol shouldn't have champagne before dinner, wine with dinner, and then more champagne afterward. Brian hadn't had a thing to drink, and he was doing fine, creases in his shirt sleeves and everything.

Of course, he hadn't had a miscarriage three days ago.

She glared at him resentfully.

He got up to make her a cup of coffee.

"But no one from the cast was there last night." He had to speak up over the whir of the electric coffee grinder. "They'll be so happy for you. The answering machine was full of messages this morning. I'm sure someone will be planning some kind of party."

Brian made wonderful coffee, strong, fresh, and fragrant. He always emptied out the kettle and started with clean, cold water. He used an European-style coffee maker, a glass beaker with a stainless steel plunger. It wasn't a speedy operation.

Jenny put her head down on the table. So she owed it to everyone else to go in today, did she? She was getting tired of this business of always being the cheerful one, good old perky-and-bouncy Jenny. Why was that her job? She and George, the show's executive producer, would have awful stomach-churning meetings with the network. Everyone who knew about the meetings would be scared and depressed, and they all always expected Jenny to cheer them up. Why couldn't she be the one who got cheered up?

Last night she had been the one who had been nominated. She should have been the one running to the bathroom to throw up. But throughout dinner George had been nervous, Brian had been nervous, the whole table had been nervous. So she'd felt like she had to calm everyone down. It was as if the seats at the table had place cards. This chair has the right to be anxious. This chair has the right to be hysterical. By the time Jenny had sat down, all the good ones had been taken, and she was left with Calm and sane.

Why did she have to get stuck with that chair? Why did she have to be a good sport all the time? No one expected Chloe Spencer to be a good sport.

Brian had finished the coffee. Jenny took a sip and set her cup down with a sharp click. Coffee sloshed over onto the pine. He wasn't going to like that. The table was new. No, it wasn't. That was the problem. It was almost a hundred-and-fifty-years old, having started life in a Swedish homestead. They had paid the earth for it, and Brian kept talking about how soft pine was, how careful they needed to be. But Jenny had to believe that those good Swedish farmers stumbling around on dark mornings occasionally had spilled their coffee on the table.

She moved her cup around, making little rings in the spilled coffee. It was very satisfying. "I got out of the hospital two days ago. I won an Emmy. I think I'm entitled to do whatever I want."

Brian was crossing the kitchen with a wet rag. No, no, it wouldn't be a wet rag. People in Oklahoma used wet rags. No doubt farmers in Sweden used wet rags. Brian would be using a cloth, lightly moistened.

What a bitch she was being. This wasn't like her. She didn't want to feel this way about him. He was her partner, her friend. It must be the miscarriage.

You've read all about miscarriages, there's grief afterward, grief and pain. Why did you think that wouldn't apply to you?

Because it was girl stuff.

She stayed home and spent the day thinking about Lydgate. Her instinct told her that there was a story in his sex life. She had had such a strong response to Alec last night. His body, his presence, his movements, his touch—she had been aware of everything about him. Surely that was telling her something about the character he played.

But what? She stared at the blank computer screen for twenty minutes.

He had put his hands on her arms last night. His hands had been browner than her arms. He was coppery tan, she was almond.

Brian's skin tones were fairer than her own. How was a person supposed to play the magnolia-skinned belle when your coloring was more salt-of-the-earth than your boyfriend's?

Now why was she thinking about that? She was supposed to be working on Lydgate. Alec protecting her from the crowd—what did that say about Lydgate? Nothing. If he had noticed Amelia being jostled—and that was a big if—he would have signaled for a footman.

She wasn't making any progress. Lydgate and Amelia in bed. There had to be something to this. She turned from the computer and picked up a pad and pencil. It didn't help. She wasn't coming up with anything. Lydgate and Amelia. Alec and Karen. She kept seeing Alec and Chloe.

Alec's first daytime job had been as a construction worker. It was one of those young beefcake parts—the writers put a character in a blue-collar job so he never has to wear a shirt. Bare skin and muscles was often all there was to such parts, but Alec had given his character an alert animal quality. The man was always touching something, the back of a chair, a piece of lumber. He was very rooted to the physical world. It made sense that he would be half-clad so often. The man lived through his body. Sensuality wasn't something that was turned on for the love scenes. It was how he lived. Scenes that weren't supposed to be about sex, Alec had made to be about sex. And that had only been his first job. During the Derek-and-Ginger story, he had managed to make even fatigue sexually interesting.

This was embarrassing. Here Jenny—now Emmy-winning Jenny—had an actor who was great at subtle sexual tension, and she could not think of anything to do with his character.

She worried about it all weekend, and on Sunday night she finally gave up. She wrote a couple of scenes and threw them into an episode. Let Alec and Karen see what they could do.

On Monday she worked at home again—that was her day to concentrate on the long-term story outline, and she couldn't risk any of her notes being seen by anyone. Even the actors weren't supposed to know what lay in store for the characters. So she wasn't back in the studio until Tuesday. Because of the days she had missed after the miscarriage, she had been away for nearly a week. It seemed like an age.

She arrived later than usual. It was seven o'clock and the day had started. One of the girls from wardrobe was wheeling a big rack of costumes down the first-floor hall. Every so often she peered around the clothes to be sure the path ahead was clear. The minute she saw Jenny, she abandoned her rack.

"Now I want you to take note of this," she announced to Jenny. She was clearly proud of something. "We're clearing out some space. We figure Lydgate will be getting a bunch of new costumes. Makeup claims they know everything first, but we're miles ahead of them on this one."

On what one? Jenny watched as the girl retrieved her cart and maneuvered it onto the elevator, presumably to take it down to the basement storage area. What had that been about? Why would Alec be getting new costumes? Jenny had spent the weekend trying to get him out of his costume. Shaking her head, she headed down the hall. She pulled open the door to the stairwell.

Frank, who played Jaspar, and Jill, a production assistant, were on the landing. At the sound of the opening door, Frank turned. He saw Jenny and instantly dropped to his knees.

"I offer my apologies." He clasped his hands in melodramatic pleading. "You have my deepest apologies, my maximum apologies, my maximum deepest apologies."

Jenny stared at him. "What are you talking about?"

He got up, brushing the dust off his knees. "Alec. You might not have known, but when I started here, I was a total snob about soap veterans."

"Were you really? I don't believe it."

She was being ironic. Frank had trained at Yale, and he did not let anyone forget that.

"It's the truth," he said, proud to be so humble. "But Alec has made me change my tune. The last couple of days he's been unbelievable, hasn't he?"

"What's he done?"

Frank drew back, puzzled. "Surely Brian told you. Lydgate's all anyone is talking about."

Brian hadn't said anything about Alec or Lydgate.

Frank went on. "His performance has been eye-opening, revelatory. I can't believe how good he is."

Eye-opening? Revelatory? What was going on? She had been watching the show at home, but an episode was taped a week before it aired. Any changes Alec had made in his performance last week she wouldn't have seen yet.

She went up to the director's office. Terence was directing today's episode. He was gathering up his script and notes, getting ready to go into the rehearsal hall. He stopped and waved Jenny into a chair. "So have you heard about our amazing duke?"

Amazing? Terence was not one to exaggerate—or even necessarily notice—what an actor was doing. "I keep getting bits of the story. You tell me."

"He found his character. Totally, out of the blue, wham-o, one day there the guy was. Gil says it started last Thursday." Thursday had been the Emmy ceremony; Wednesday Alec had come to see her in the hospital. "Then I saw it Friday, and Gil said yesterday was even better. We can hardly keep the camera off him."

Terence and Gil occasionally felt that way about a prop—that they couldn't keep the camera off it. There had been a teacup last summer that Gil had been fascinated with and finally Francine Kenny, the actress who played Lady Varley, had dropped it. She said it was an accident, but everyone knew that she was tired of the china getting more close-ups than she was. And no one blamed her. So for the two directors to be stirred by an actor... something must be happening indeed.

"I'm not taking any credit for it," Terence continued, "and neither is Gil. We knew when you hired him that he was good, but I didn't know how good."

"What's he doing?"

"I don't want to intellectualize it. You come see for yourself."

Jenny would have liked to follow Terence into the rehearsal hall, but it was only fair to wait until at least dress. And after a week away, she had plenty to do. She looked at some audition tapes, returned about forty million phone calls, and edited some scripts. At one-thirty she went down to the floor.

The studio floor was a large vaulting space with room for eight sets. The show had more than fifty. One way a writer could save money was by managing the story so that sets were used for several days in a row. To have union labor breaking down a set on Monday afternoon and then putting it up again on Wednesday was expensive. Money was so tight on My Lady's Chamber that Jenny did a lot of strange things to the story in order to keep the sets as "stand ups."

Everyone was clustered around the large Almack's Assembly Room set. Makeup, wardrobe, and prop people were all there, waiting in case they were needed. Jenny didn't join the crowd. As interesting as it was to watch a scene as if it were a staged play, what mattered was how it came across on video. She went into the glass-walled control room, a spaceship-like booth off in the corner. From here the director called the shots, the sound engineer monitored the sound levels, and so forth.

Jenny watched on the monitors as Colley Lightfield, the extravagantly foppish, effeminate baron, had a scene with his mother, Lady Lightfield. She was whispering furiously to him about his need to marry for money. In a moment, Jenny remembered from the script, Lydgate would enter, and Lady Lightfield would—for about the seventieth time—talk about her six unmarried daughters.

It was not the sort of scene you rushed out and submitted to the Emmys. Quite contrary. You passed it along to the actors with rolled eyes and apologies. Why Lady Lightfield would ever, in the middle of Almack's, explain primogeniture and entailment to a duke who had to have understood this since the cradle made no sense even to Jenny, and she had been the one who had written it. But scenes like this were necessary. All soaps had to recap their own stories, but My Lady's Chamber had to give history lessons as well. Viewer mail made that clear. So Jenny put them wherever she could. Lady Lightfield was the one to give the lesson because she had other scenes in today's show. It was happening at Almack's because the set was up, and Lydgate had to listen to it because Alec's contract guaranteed him three appearances a week.

The Almack's set was near the control booth. Jenny could look up through the glass and see Alec waiting for his entrance. He was in Lydgate's most formal garb: black velvet knee breeches and a black coat, with diamonds on his fingers and in his neckcloth. He was in character. His shoulders were stiffer, the line of his mouth narrower. His own careless masculine charm had become the duke's austere handsomeness. His easy confident sexuality had become magisterial and cold. He stepped forward to make his entrance. Jenny turned back to the monitors to watch the scene.

Colley twitched his lace at his strong-minded mother and flounced off, almost charging into Lydgate. Jenny could hear Terence calling for camera three.

Lydgate was irritated and impatient with the near collision. The camera remained on him during much of Lady Lightfield's explanations.

The previous actor had always played these scenes as if Lydgate was stupid, as if he really did need to have this stuff explained to him again and again. But Alec's duke wasn't stupid. He was bored and distracted. He didn't want to be bothered with this. It was tedious. It was about other people. Why should he care?

So that was it. Jenny suddenly saw a different dimension in the character she had created. The man didn't like things that were complex—not because he was stupid, but because he was too self-centered, too caught up with his own interests, to want to hear from the outside world.

His replies were crisp, curt enough to make Lady Lightfield uneasy; she started rushing her lines. Jenny noticed a production assistant showing the stopwatch to Terence. The scene was running short. Terence murmured a word into his headset. And through the glass of the control room, Jenny saw a stage manager signaling to the actors to stretch, pulling his hands apart as if pulling taffy. Alec responded by having Lydgate stop listening. So after each of Lady Lightfield's speeches, there was a pause while he recollected himself and deigned to reply.

It was chilling, this complete disinterest in other people. I'm all that matters.

This was interesting, very interesting. An accident of birth had made this man a duke. He controlled a vast estate. The lives of hundreds of tenants depended on him. He had a voice in the House of Lords, he controlled several seats in the House of Commons, and church positions were within his patronage. And he didn't care about anyone. Everyone else bored him.

"And... we're clear." The stage manager waved his script, and the actors relaxed.

"Nice work, people," Terence spoke through the intercom and then leaned back in his secretarial chair and spoke to Jenny. "So?"

"He understands the character better than I do."

"Do you remember the stuff you had in the bible about him being a collector?"

"Yes." When she was first thinking about the show, Jenny had imagined the duke as a art collector, interested in paintings, porcelain, and old manuscripts. But the character had always seemed too cold and stupid for even that kind of a passion, and she had let it drop. It was just as well. Terence and Gil's cameras would have fallen in love with the objects in the collections, and all the actors would have quit.

"Did you tell Alec about that?" Terence asked.

"No. There wouldn't have been any reason to. I gave up on it."

"Well, you might want to rethink that," he suggested. "Because Alec got there on his own. Last Friday he had this amazing scene—actually I'm surprised Brian didn't tell you about it—it was with Amelia, and he did not look at her once, spent the whole time with the things in the room, touching them, ignoring her. Wait till you see it. He has the best-shaped hands in the cast."

Alec would probably never see his face on camera again. "What did Karen say?" When an actor changed what he was doing, sometimes it was the other actors who had the best sense of whether the change would work in the long run.

"She hated it. But that was Amelia talking, not her."

"Amelia's supposed to hate him," Jenny answered.

But the minute she said it, she realized that that was not true. Amelia hated much about her life, but she hadn't really hated Lydgate. He was inconvenient, tedious, a rock in the road that she had to plan around, but there hadn't been enough there for her to hate. She hadn't been afraid of him. He hadn't been dangerous.

He was now.

The assistant director was on the intercom, calling for people to take their places for Prologue C. Jenny looked over Terence's shoulder at the script. Prologue C, the last little snippet before the opening credits, showed the duke and duchess entering Almack's.

Nothing was happening in the scene. Its sole purpose was to show off Amelia's gown. This was another thing that viewer mail made clear—people wanted to get a good look at the clothes. The actors didn't like it, but it was fine with everyone else, even Jenny. So blinking much money was spent on these stupid costumes that they might as well get their own screen time.

Jenny had seen a sketch of the dress, but this was her first view of the actual thing. Shimmering lilac silk fell in slim, fluid folds from a high waist. A deep pleated frill stiffened with silver embroidery was gathered into a flounce at the hem of the skirt, and twists of amethyst ribbons adorned the sleeves and the bodice.

The camera was going to be on the dress, and Jenny was interested in Lydgate. She left the control room and went out onto the floor, crossing through the tangle of cables. She nodded to Trina who was perched on a packing crate, running lines with Pam Register. Pam played Amelia's impoverished cousin Susan. Jenny joined the group around the Almack's set.

The stage manager called for quiet, and Lydgate and Amelia made their entrance, pausing at what appeared to be the top of the stairs, waiting a moment before entering the Assembly Rooms. Amelia was lovely and resigned. Lydgate was upright and distant, barely aware of her.

Karen turned to ad-lib a silent word to Alec, her movement stirring the silken folds of the dress. Alec mouthed a response and even though the camera was not on him, he took the smallest step backward.

It was a good touch, that withdrawing. It was the sort of thing some men did, the desire to distance themselves welling up even when they were unaware of it. Jenny hated it when Brian—

When Brian did it. That was Brian's gesture. Brian took that little step backward all the time.

She had hardly completed that thought when the stage manager called that they were clear. Prologue scenes were always short. Alec moved off the set, and a girl from wardrobe hovered around Karen, wanting to protect the dress. Then a voice came over the intercom. Something had gone wrong with a light. They needed another take. Alec and Karen moved back to their places. They repeated the scene note for note, beat for beat, Karen appearing resigned, Alec distant. She turned to ad-lib. He took that small step back. And suddenly everything about Lydgate seemed like Brian.

What a stupid thought. Why should Lydgate remind her of Brian?

But suddenly the set blurred. She had to grip the back of a chair. Everyone was clustering around her—"Are you okay... She's faint... Maybe her meridians are out of line... it's her planets..."

She brushed everyone off. "I'm fine. I'm okay, really. I just didn't have a chance to eat lunch, that's all."

A tunafish sandwich was thrust in her hand, and people were urging her to eat it. The tuna had a strong fishy odor; she could smell the sharpness of the pickle, the yeastiness of the bread. A sick uneasiness churned through her. The Almack's set went dark. The grips were wheeling the cameras away.

She was overreacting. Alec had picked up on one mannerism. It wasn't an unusual gesture. It didn't have anything to do with Brian. It was nothing.

So why was her heart pounding? Why did she feel faint?

She thought about Lydgate's first scene of the day. What did Brian do when people bored him? He didn't interrupt, he didn't walk away—children of alcoholics avoid confrontation—he instead went glassy, just as Lydgate had. Lydgate had been looking at Lady Lightfield with the same expression Brian often wore.

Her eyes searched the studio floor. She needed to find Brian. She needed to see his familiar face, needed to see him looking like himself, not like Lydgate. Then she remembered. Brian wasn't in today. He was at the house, supervising the tile contractor's last work on the kitchen.

The kitchen. The antique farm table. The endless pursuit of the perfect tile, the exact finial. A collector. Lydgate was a collector. He cared more about objects than people.

Did Brian?

Jenny was up in her office. She hardly remembered how she had gotten there. She sat at her desk. She knew she would get nothing more done today.

It was crazy to be this upset. So what if she had used a thing or two from Brian's personality to develop one of her characters? That's what writers do. It was no big deal. The first time you felt guilty, you felt like you were betraying your friends, violating their privacy, but then you got used to it.

This was more than that. Something within her was shrieking. This wasn't a minor offense, an everyday transgression of privacy. She felt feverish, her arms ached. Her body, her instincts, were pounding a drum, sending her a message.

But she already had used Brian on the show. Knowingly and deliberately she had paid tribute to their relationship. Lord Courtland and Lady Varley had grown up together and had loved each other since they had been children. Their parents had arranged marriages for them to other people, and they had both been loyal and faithful spouses to those people, but even after all these years they still loved each other... because they had grown up together.

That was how she had used Brian. That was all.

She switched on the video monitor and the intercom and sat with her elbows on her desk, her hands pressed to her eyes, listening as scenes were called over the intercom. Occasionally she would look up and watch on the monitor. Her recall of this script was suddenly complete—she knew precisely which scenes the duke was in, and when they were finished, she waited ten minutes and then went down to the second floor, pass the guard's desk and the mail cubbies, past the closed door of Brian's empty dressing room. She knocked on Alec's door.

"Come in, come in." It was Ray Bianchetti's voice, deep and friendly.

She had forgotten that Ray would be there.

She opened the door. The two men were standing in front of the counter, removing their makeup. Ray was bare-chested, a pair of sweat pants riding low on his lean hips. Alec was in jeans, and his shirt was unbuttoned, the tails hanging loose. Their coloring was different, but they had the same broad-shouldered build, and they were both leaning toward the mirror with the same easy masculine grace. They did seem like a pair of brothers.

They straightened when they saw her. Ray wiped his face with a towel. "I suppose you've come to praise our young friend because he's finally figured out how to do his job."

"Yes, as a matter of fact, I have."

Alec turned toward her, buttoning up his shirt. "It took me a while," he said, as if he were apologizing for not having achieved this instantly. "But I think I've got the guy more or less pegged."

He gestured for her to sit down. The dressing room was long and narrow. The cinderblock walls were painted ivory. It was crowded. Ray's former roommate had left behind a suite of cheap living room furniture, a wood-armed sofa in a nubby fabric with a pair of matching chairs. She took one of the chairs. The furniture was crammed so close together that to reach the sofa, Alec had to step over the coffee table.

On the left thigh of his jeans there was a lighter patch, the denim almost frayed. He must have been wearing a tool belt at some point.

He sat back on the sofa, one foot propped up on the coffee table. Lydgate would never sit like that.

What exactly had she come here to say? Please tell me that this isn't happening. Please tell me that I didn't base this character on Brian.

She took a breath and looked straight at Alec. "You are doing a fabulous job." That was very hard to say. The last thing she felt like was praising him for the quality of his work. "What can you tell me about the character?" She was speaking too formally, but she couldn't help herself. "You know I have trouble writing for him. I'd appreciate your insights."

Alec didn't say anything for a moment. And a sharp pain shot along the undersides of Jenny's arms. It was as if he understood everything. But he couldn't. That wasn't possible.

"I don't know how well I can articulate this," he said at last, "but I see him as a man who was raised by women—"

Yes, Brian had been raised almost entirely by his mother.

"—and by women who did not particularly like men."

Oh, yes, that too.

"On one hand," Alec continued, "that made him feel like the center of the universe, but he also knew that it wasn't supposed to be this way. That there was supposed to be someone else in the center—his father. I guess he would have been a duke too."

"The old duke," Jenny murmured. "That's what we call him." Was this at the center of Brian's soul, the absence of a father?

Tucked into the chrome frame that held the mirror to the wall were more than a dozen snapshots. They ran all the way up one side of the mirror and partway across the top. They were pictures of a baby, a black-haired little fellow in a blue blanket. He was Tony Bianchetti, Ray's son. As young as he was, Ray was the only person in the cast with a conventional life—a wife, a house, a child. He was a father.

Alec was still speaking. "My brothers and I always spent a lot of time with our dad. You do on a farm. You'd see him kicking and cussing a big piece of machinery and then settling down to fix it. You look at him, and you know what you're going to be like. And in my case, that always felt okay."

"That's how it was for me too." Ray had sat down in the other chair to tie his shoes. "My father and uncle have an auto body shop, and we were down there all the time. My brother still is."

Ray brought an effortless masculinity to his character, something that he had off camera as well. Alec had it too. Jenny remembered how the pair of them had looked when she had come into the room, so thoroughly comfortable with themselves as men. Was Brian like that? Did he have that certainty at the core of his soul?

No.

She had to face it. This wasn't a case of copying a few mannerisms, an occasional quirk of personality. Fourteen years of knowing Brian had gone into the creation of this character. That's why she had never felt comfortable writing for him, because she hadn't been willing to face that she had based him so closely on Brian. Lydgate was Brian.

And Lydgate was an awful person.

She would get rid of Lydgate, that's what she would do. She would kill him so she never had to think about this again. She could do that. She was head writer. The network wouldn't like it, but if she fought, if she held fast, she would get her way.

Or she could rewrite the character, make him nice. The cast would be bewildered; the fan magazines would jeer at her, but she could do it. This was her show. The network might own it, but it was hers. She could do whatever she wanted. It was hers.

So she wasn't going to ruin it. She would do what was right for the show. Alec Cameron's performance was right for the show, and she would give him what he needed.

* * *

The day was over. The cast and crew were leaving. They were all going home. She dreaded going home. Brian would be there. He was an expert at conciliation. He could smooth anything over. But what did that solve?

She put her key slowly into the lock. The front door to the house opened into a little enclosed foyer. Beyond the inner door were the narrow stairs and a passageway that led back to the kitchen—Brian's perfect blue-granite, bleached-pine kitchen. Jenny could smell the slight vinegary scent of fresh paint.

He had been so supportive when she had been developing the show. He had encouraged her ambitions. But what about after the miscarriage when she had again needed support and encouragement? He hadn't known what to do or say. Ambition was fine—she was allowed to be ambitious. Misery was a no go. He couldn't handle misery.

He was at the kitchen counter, making dinner, a lean, willowy man in trim jeans. He looked up from the chopping block. "Hi." His voice was pleasant. His voice was almost always pleasant. "We're doing vegetarian tonight, all sorts of eggplant things. Is that okay?"

"Sure."

"The tile turned out well, didn't it?" He used the butcher knife to point to the new backsplash. "I think we made the right choice on the grout color."

"It looks great." Why hadn't he asked her about her first day back at work? Why wasn't he looking at her? How important was the color of the grout?

She sat at the kitchen table, listening to the sounds of him work—the quick, soft rush of water in the faucet, the muffled thud of cabinets opening and closing, the sharp clicking of the electronic pilot light on the burners.

Lydgate was incapable of intimacy. Behind his magisterial facade was a black-ice selfishness. Brian didn't have the duke's grandeur. In its place was his placating, surface charm. What lay beneath was the same. Her fictional creation forced her to acknowledge the truth about him.

She had been hoping that when he felt better about his career, their relationship would be more satisfying. But that wasn't going to happen. He would never comfort her, he would never take care of her, he would never speak openly to her about his feelings. He didn't know how. Brian would never be completely honest with her because he didn't know how to be honest with himself. It would always be like this.

My Lady's Chamber

Script Episode #96

SUSAN: But Amelia, my dear cousin, you don't love Lydgate. To spend your whole life with someone you don't love...

AMELIA: What else can I do? This is what Aunt Emily and Uncle Varley think is best. I must trust their judgment. They are the only family I've known.

SUSAN: I can believe this of Uncle Varley, but Aunt Emily... she and Lord Courtland—

AMELIA: (SHARPLY) Susan! (THIS IS FORBIDDEN GROUND) Our aunt has the finest character in England.

SUSAN: I know she does. Of course she does. I'm not saying... but she can't help who she loves.