FORTY-SEVEN

Feeling more bereft than before, I returned to my bed, returned to my ruminations on the subject of someone I could confide in. Surely, I could not tell Lady Collins about Chance. I had seen how she reacted, suspecting John might be the father of my maid’s child. If she would condemn him for an infidelity, despite her seeming independence and modernness of thought, would she not equally condemn me?

But what of other friends—was there not one person I could trust?

There was no one.

“Emma?” Constance spoke to me as if one of us might be dying. I had not heard her knock. “John said it would be all right if I came in.”

When we had run into Constance that day in Sommers Tea Room, stunned, I had not introduced her to Chance; and, oddly enough, she had not asked. I suppose, perhaps, having a mind as confused as Constance’s purportedly was now, it was conceivable she was incapable of grasping everything that was going on around her.

“May I…?” she asked, indicating the chair at my vanity, which she pulled over to the side of the bed before I could answer.

Even this close, I could not see her very clearly. Although John had opened the drapes that morning, perhaps hoping some light might serve to elevate my mood, I had ordered Lucy to shut them again as soon as he was gone, closing my mind to the picture of the two of them together.

“Ever since I have been back, Charles has been…worse,” she said, a mere shadow, in so many ways, beside me.

I struggled to a more upright position against the pillows. “Worse? How so?”

She proceeded to explain that while Charles had always been a gambling man, he had lost quite a considerable sum in the time she was away. And now, even though she had returned, he showed no signs of stopping. In fact, she suspected one of the reasons he sent her away in the first place was that he wanted to be free to do as he liked, to lose everything if it suited him.

“I know you and I are not…close,” she said, “but I have always felt a certain kinship with you. In fact, I should have liked to write to you when I was…away, but Charles would not permit it.”

I thought of the awfulness of a husband who would not even allow his wife to write to whom she chose. What isolation Constance’s life must be.

“It is all right,” I soothed. “You do not need to explain to me the need to talk with another person. Please, tell me what is wrong.”

Constance had always been a hesitant speaker, with a tic here, a stutter there, but her time away, meant to be a rest cure, had only served to make these tendencies more pronounced. In fact, I would not have been surprised to learn she carried a double scent bottle on her person: one of those cylindrical vessels of colored cut glass the more delicate ladies carried, pairing a perfume bottle with a smelling-salts container for dizziness spells.

“And all of his losses, that is not the worst,” she tic-stuttered now.

“What could possibly be worse than a husband who loses piles of money and then sends his wife away so he’ll be free to lose the rest?”

“This,” she said, rolling up, with effort, the stiff sleeves of her gown.

In the dim light, she edged up, moving close to me, so close she was just a mere hand’s breadth away. In irregular rows up and down her arms were bruises, so ugly and so many they could not all be accidents.

“And this,” she said, using one hand to pull down the high collar of her dress.

Now she moved her head so it was directly above mine and I was confronted with the prospect of her neck, like a lover preparing for a kiss. But this was not about a kiss. Rather, what I saw revealed to me now were more bruises, in the shape of fingers, at her throat.

I felt my breath catch. “Oh, Connie…” I had not ever called her that before, could think to call her nothing else now.

I wondered if there had ever been a time when I might have done something, said something that would have kept this horror from visiting her. It is not that I was accustomed to thinking of myself as being so very powerful, but it did seem as though there must have been, should have been, a single moment when a word said differently, an action taken differently, would have altered everything that followed.

She readjusted her clothes. “It is all right,” she said. “It does not hurt so very much, after one gets used to it. Sometimes, though, I do not think I will be much longer for this world. I suppose I only sought to tell you because”—and here she shrugged her embarrassment—“you know—a burden shared is a burden halved. I suppose I also thought it would make it more real somehow, as though I’m not just some insane woman like my husband and the rest of the world think I am. There are times when I wish I were a braver sort of woman. If I were, then perhaps I would be able to kill Charles before he one day kills me.”

“Oh, Connie,” I said again, not completely taking in her last sentence, preferring to focus on what had come immediately before; but, inside, I was also thinking, Oh, Emma—a kindred spirit!

And so, I told her, of course. I told her everything.