FORTY-FIVE

It was then I realized I loved him to distraction. Before, when I had heard that phrase, I had never known what it meant.

And now I did.

Before, I always had separate boxes for the various areas of my life. Here is my husband. Here is my child. Here are my friends. But now I was consumed with him, by him, he was everything, every moment of my waking and sleeping. He had spilled over into all the other boxes, refilling them so fully that the previous inhabitants had all been pushed aside.

And I did now have the brave example of my grandniece before me.

Was there some way I might get out of my predicament? Now that he was—miraculously!—free, was there not some way I might find my way to a life with him?

I chewed on this bone until it became white and dry in my mouth.

What, I finally concluded, could I possibly have been thinking of?

There simply was no solution.

“Perhaps there is, Emma.” Chance whispered the words, leaning across the narrow table at Sommers Tea Room to do so. “Are you quite certain you have thought of everything?”

It felt odd, seeing him with that feminine French wallpaper behind him, but he had said he wanted to know what my “life without him” was like, and, peculiarly enough, Sommers was as representative of this as anything else. He certainly could not come to my home; he certainly could not go visit my friends. Still, anyone I knew might come upon us here—a sister-in-law, a woman friend, since men did not often come here—and this act nearly qualified as being the most foolish risk we had committed yet. After all, I could not even pass him off as one of our set, if someone claimed later to have seen us, since his dress was so, well, shabby. And further to be talking about what we were talking of…

“I cannot just go to live with the man I love,” I whispered back.

He leaned back in his chair, folded his arms in a very ungentlemanly fashion, legs stretched out in a posture not normally seen in Sommers.

“Why not?” he asked coolly.

“Because,” I said, with more decisiveness than I would have imagined possible, given who I was with, given how much I feared losing him.

Fortunately, he chose not to take offense at my tone, chose not to press me for a more reasoned explanation; but rather, leaned forward again, re-creating the sense of intimacy I hated ever now to lose.

“Since you say you cannot just come live with me, and I see I must accept that—at least, for now—perhaps we might discuss alternatives?”

Even though he had presented it as a question, I knew it was not.

“Very well,” I conceded.

“What about divorce?”

True, husbands were known to divorce their wives. “So—what then exactly?” I asked. “Allow John to catch me out, so he would be forced to file suit against me for criminal conversation?”

He merely raised his eyebrows at me, encouraging me to go on.

True, it was within John’s means to afford such a costly civil suit, I explained, and yet, it hardly seemed within the bounds of any of our characters to be party to one. “Not to mention,” I added, “that you, named as the seducer, would be required by law to pay restitution to John for what you have stolen from him.”

Neither of us spoke the words aloud—that given Chance’s lack of funds, such a legal notion was absurd—but it hung in the air; the fact of the matter was, he quite simply could not afford me.

“Please direct me,” I asked, so he would perhaps be persuaded to think the only thing preventing the adoption of this course was not just his relative poverty, “how would I contrive such a thing? Leave letters where John might find them?” I had told Chance before that I kept his letters, all of them, in various hiding places around my house. “Allow Lucy to see something she shouldn’t, that she might give evidence at trial?”

His eyes spoke my own feelings. The idea was absurd.

“Not to mention”—and here now he seemed determined to help me talk my way out of this path—“the public embarrassment that would be sure to attach itself like a barnacle to all concerned.” He put a hand to his cheek in mock womanish horror. “Good God! What would your mother say?”

Truthfully, I had long ago given off worrying about what Louisa had to say about anything. But that by no means meant I wanted to hear any of it.

“And,” I finished up for us, “even if John were to divorce me, I would be left with no money to live on.” Which was completely true. Although a settlement at the time of our marriage would have provided a fund that could not be touched, one that I would be able to use now for Weston and myself, I had foolishly—romantically—refused one. Romanticize in haste; repent seventeen years later.

So divorce was not a possibility. Which was really fine, since I didn’t have the stomach for open displays of pronouncement anyway.

Chance spoke. “I have heard, of late, rumors of an alternative to divorce.”

“Oh?”

“Yes. Apparently, in some circles, ‘wife-selling,’ inspired by a reference in one of Mr. Hardy’s novels, has taken hold.”

Every time he made a literary reference, or clearly understood one of mine, it caught me back, given the appearance of his clothes.

“It sounds somehow…Scandinavian,” I said. “How does this ‘wife-selling’ work?”

Chance proceeded to explain that the highest bidder in such a suit might be the wife’s lover, the entire proceedings viewed as an entertainment as well as an agreeable way for all parties to resolve their dispute without becoming mired in the legal system, this despite the fact that the sales themselves were prohibited by law. At any rate, it was difficult to picture John, with his well-developed sense of propriety, taking part in such an undignified play. Nor did I particularly relish the notion of myself as chattel, despite the fact that, as a wife, I pretty much well was. As for Chance, again, even had he the inclination, he certainly did not have the funds.

“So,” Chance sighed, a rare sound, “no divorce; no wife-selling.”

Well, I supposed, thinking to myself, I could just pack my things and leave, couldn’t I?

What—leave the only world I had ever known? Leave my home? Leave my son?

The first two would be easy enough. But the last? Such a thing was impossible.

There was nowhere to go.

Chance must have seen the look of despair that crossed my face then, for he reached across the table, covering my clenched fist with his hand.

“Do not worry so much, Emma. I am sure there is a very simple solution; we merely have not arrived at it yet.”

I so wanted to believe he was right. Impulsively, acting as though there were not a whole roomful of people around me, I moved to cover his reassuring hand with my other one.

But I snatched it back, directly I heard the questioning “Emma?” spoken in Constance Biltmore’s tentative voice.

Apparently, Constance was finally back from her stay in the country.

Despite Chance’s reassurances about there being a solution out there somewhere, I remained convinced there was nowhere for us to go, that we were already all we could ever hope to possibly become.

In my despair, trapped inside a box I had helped to build up around myself on all six sides, I retreated, making the box yet smaller still. I took to my bed, claiming vague and incapacitating ailments. It was some time before something occurred that made me want to rise up again.