Longreach was the house of Sir Percy, Benham’s brother. Sugar-bought, like everything they own. Madame and Benham were invited there to a party. She wanted to bring her own dresser, she said, since Benham was taking Casterwick. Now she’d no longer have to put up with the long-toothed girl Lady Catherine insisted on giving her, with the cold fingers.
We drove out to Wiltshire in a hired carriage, leaving at dawn and stopping twice to change horses. After a day’s travel, Longreach loomed ahead, spread across the landscape. Sprawling and broad-shouldered. A snaking line of elms led to the front door, and inside was all velvet and polished wood and brass. Their rooms looked out onto the lawn. Soft towels had been set out on the washstand, and little pink soaps carved into roses. As soon as we arrived, I unpacked the trunk and her portmanteau, and then she had to be dressed for the fireworks dinner. We were late, and had to rush, and afterwards – wanting to be anywhere but the long corridor where the visiting maids were being kept – I slipped outside and wandered down to the garden, gravel crunching beneath my feet. I kept myself to the side of the path. Hundreds of tiny lanterns swung from the trees. The sky was heavy and purple, and a smell in the air reminded me of the mint Phibbah grew at Paradise. Glasses and laughter tinkled out from the ballroom, where the doors had been left open.
Sir Percy’s guests drifted out, and I hid myself behind a stand of trees. Flashes of silk, among the black suits, like oil on water. Ladies in their dresses, gentlemen in their tails. Here were the people the world tells us to admire. I pictured their tinkling laughter choked off by the fear of being whipped, like dogs. Standing in the kind of heat that closes your throat, glancing up at a sun that might kill.
They could not do it, I thought, looking at them. Not even for an hour.
I was angry, yes. So would you have been; so would anyone. The real madness would have been if I had not been angry.
I looked and looked, but could not see her. Then footmen in bright livery came down the pavilion steps to hand out blankets and shawls and I turned away. The dark was split by one crack of light after another, until the whole sky was cleft by light, and the air filled with fireworks, battlefield noises that seemed they’d never end, ribbons of smoke, drifting like ladies in a park. I put my head down and walked quickly towards the lake, keeping myself hidden behind the stand of trees. Some distance away, I sat and curled my hands in the grass, took a slow breath. We are friends, then we are not. That is her world. I will never belong. It was what novels and romances had done to me. It was what she had done. The water lay ahead of me, wide and flat and black. I shut my eyes to it.
Footsteps behind me crunched like apples.
‘Here you are! I saw you slip away.’ She tramped over to me, dragging her skirts. She sat down, following my gaze out to the lake. The long path was lined with hedges. ‘In the morning we will see the primroses here,’ she said, ‘that we cannot see in the dark. There will soon be beds of lavender, by the boat-house, and later geraniums and peonies. You should see them. Well – you will see them! English spring is beautiful, you will see – the only thing that makes it worthwhile to live through the winter.’ She fell silent and I said nothing. ‘Sir Percy’s groundskeepers stock the lake with creels of fish to get ready for these parties, you know,’ she said. ‘Imagine. Pouring fish in just to hook them out! He might as well have them bring out the china service and line the dinner plates up on shore. When I first came to Longreach, I realized I had married into a family who could have anything they wanted. I was just one more thing poured out of a creel.’
She waited, again, for me to say something. I gave a jerk of my head, fumbling with my thoughts.
She lifted a hand to play with one of her diamond ear-bobs. ‘You are a woman of few words.’
I raised my eyes, braved the sight of her. ‘What did Mr Benham say?’
‘What?’
‘When you told him you were a fish.’
‘Oh,’ she said. She laughed. ‘I did not tell him that! I told him they might as well pour the fish from basket to plate and he said, “Now, Meg, where would be the sport in that?”’ She looked out across the water.
‘Won’t you be missed?’ I nodded towards the ballroom.
She leaned closer. ‘You are cross?’
‘I am nothing.’
‘Non. You are something, Frances.’ She reached down, plucked at a blade of grass. ‘But . . . you are not happy.’
I shrugged. ‘That’s a small word.’
I turned my palm over, dug my thumbnail into it, thinking. I looked up, and held her gaze, and did not look away. ‘What we did,’ I blurted. ‘We have not even spoken of it. As if it never happened.’
She blinked.
‘And it is sending me mad.’
Oh, I knew I should not have spoken to her in that way. She was my mistress. But I could just as soon stop my own breath as hold the words back. I felt as if my heart was packed tight as gunpowder. I’d had enough of silence, of endless wanting. Of knowing my place, and staying in it.
‘I –’ She twisted her fingers among the grass stems, plucking and plucking until she pulled one loose and lifted it to bite at it.
At last, she spoke. ‘What we did . . . It was wrong of me.’
Behind us, the murmur from the ballroom, like water over rocks. She pointed towards the lake. ‘Scoop a thimbleful of that lake under a microscope and you’d see a thousand beings in it. A world in a drop. All frantic, dizzied, colliding . . . dying . . .’
My head thumped, like something beaten against a rock. ‘So?’
‘So. There are some things that cannot be brought into the light, Frances.’
‘Then let it be done in the dark!’ I cried. ‘Only let it be done.’
She turned to face me again. ‘You are a surprise.’
‘I don’t want to be a surprise.’
She laughed. ‘You are so grave . . .’
‘You’ve done it before.’
She hesitated. ‘Yes.’
A picture of Hephzibah Elliot. Watching, always watching. But, perhaps, behind that, another picture also. The one of the boy whose mistake had been to become a man.
‘With one of those other quality ladies?’
She rested her hand on my arm. ‘You are a quality lady.’
A cry rang out, behind us, and made me jump in my skin.
‘Fox,’ she said. I let out a breath, and the soft cloth of her voice wrapped around me. Kerseymere. Jersey. Silk. ‘A thing like this . . . can be warm and dark, in the beginning, delicious . . .’
‘You make it sound like molasses.’
She laughed again. ‘Even more delicious.’
Then she pulled me to her, breast to breast, leaned us against the splayed tree trunk, made her thumb a lever on my lip. ‘Open.’ My mouth parted wide as the lake, and she kissed me on my lips. Her mouth bitter as almonds. Laudanum. I saw my buttons weave in and out of their hooks, I saw her fingers, working their way down the front of me, I felt air on my breast –
Then she bent her head and took my nipple in her mouth. I jerked like somebody wasp-stung. My back struck tree bark.
‘What?’ she said. A frown tugged her brow. She pulled back.
I shook my head. The world peeled back to black sky and black branches. Bare and lonely and cold. Stars like chipped ice. Through the open windows, across the grass, came pops of laughter, like the corks from their champagne. Then she caught me and held me fast and kissed me again, and all went quiet.
‘Well,’ she said. She gave a thin laugh and stepped back and brushed her hands on her skirts. We stared at each other. ‘Well . . . I . . .’ She looked towards the house.
‘Go,’ I whispered.
I went in a few minutes behind her. Past the silent trees, down to the long hallway behind the kitchen where the pallets for the visiting maids had been lined up, like dinner plates on a shelf, and I lay on mine, which had been rolled out beside that of a plump girl who smelt like cheese, and who asked me if I’d come down with any of the Londoners.
I felt Madame’s narrow hands hot around my waist, and all down the length of my shivering flesh I felt her mouth, though it had only touched me in two places. Lips and breast.