FORTY-EIGHT

Emma is sleeping with another man.”

“Could you repeat that again, please? I am certain I could not have heard you wholly right the first time.”

The original speaker had been Constance, her voice all atremble; the second, John.

They were in his library and I was standing just outside. I was still in my white nightgown, the lace-trimmed sleeve exposing my hand, still raised to knock on the door that was an inch ajar. I had been planning on asking John a question concerning Cook’s question to me about dinner: Chicken or fish? It seemed I could no longer make even such simple decisions on my own. I lowered my hand. What mattered that now? I ask you. Chicken or fish?

“Emma is sleeping with another man.”

There were the same damning words again. Had it come so quickly to this?

“I see,” said John, “I did indeed hear you right the first time. Can you tell me, please, what exactly it is you are talking about, Constance?”

I heard her tell him then, in a voice that gained in strength as though to speak the words made the speaker stronger by the second, heard her tell him everything exactly as I had told it to her.

When she finished, John was silent for a very long time.

I waited, barely breathing, to hear the reply. When it finally came, the tone was severe.

“What you are telling me is most interesting and very serious, indeed. Can you tell me what you are hoping to gain?”

Constance told John about Charles’s increased gambling.

“I do not want to betray Emma,” she stuttered, “but I feel I have no other choice. I need to get away, but I need money. If you would give me enough, just enough to move away to some small town somewhere, where nobody knows me, where I may have a chance to start over again…”

“Yes?” John spoke insistently into the silence in which her words had trailed off. “If I provide you with the funds to start this new life you claim to need, you will do what exactly?”

Her words came out in a rush. “Then I will go away and I will not make your family the laughingstock of all of London.”

“Which you will do if I do not do as you ask?”

She said nothing in reply. Perhaps what she had done already had required all the bravery left in her possession.

John’s next words surprised me with their gentleness. I could almost see him taking her softly by the elbow, steering her with delicacy toward the door.

“Let us speak no further of this right now. You have said so much today, I am sure you will understand my need to digest it all before proceeding. How about if we agree on this?” It was as if he were making a suggestion to Weston that if he would only finish his meat, there might be ice-skating in his future. “I will think carefully on all you have told me and get back to you in a week with my response. Can you bear, do you think,”—and here I thought I heard his words take on a slight sarcastic edge—“to remain for just one more week with this tyrannical husband who you claim treats you so ill?”

She stuttered that she supposed she could live out just a week. “But once the week is up…” she stutter-warned.

“Oh, yes,” he soothed. “Within a week, you will have the answer you need.”

As they came out of his library, moving toward the entryway, I flattened myself against the wall behind the library door.

I was making my way back to my bedroom, the question of chicken or fish left still undecided, when John’s voice stopped me.

“Were you looking for me just now, Emma?”

I must have murmured at least something in reply, but I cannot now remember what.

“Very well, then, my love. Do you have a moment for me now?” He held open the door of his library, his posture a demand rather than an invitation. “There is something I wish to discuss with you.”

I could not refuse.

Meekly, uncharacteristically so, I sat in the chair before his desk. It felt strange, vulnerable, to sit there in my white gown, nothing even covering my feet as I waited for the blow to fall.

He looked at me with a deeply puzzled expression, as though seeing me for the very first time.

Oh no, I thought. Here it comes.

“Why are you dressed like that?” he asked. “You should have at least put on a dressing gown. After all, what would the servants think if they saw you walking around in that thin gown, with nothing to cover it?”

What could I say—that I had been too depressed that lifetime ago that had in reality been a mere half hour, when the most important thing on my mind had been chicken or fish, to bother with proper clothing or what anyone might think?

But he shrugged his own question off, not waiting for my answer as I tucked my naked feet under my body for protection as I listened to him talk, as he repeated to me everything Constance had just related to him, everything I had related to her.

I waited…and waited…and waited…

And then I heard the most astonishing sound: John laughed.

He laughed! “Is not that”—he clapped his hands together, his mirth such that he could barely get the words out—“is not that the most absurd story you have ever heard?!”

I would guess my facial expression in reaction to this outburst was more wincing grimace than smile, but John, apparently, chose to take it for rueful assent.

“It was all I could do,” he said, “not to laugh in her face!”

“And the absurdity is…?” I led him now, feeling more brave myself now the immediate crisis had passed.

“Why, of course, you as well as I can easily see what the absurdity is here. No sane person would ever release your prisoner.” He still called him that. “His crime was too vile.” He paused briefly, considering. “Well, if he committed it, of course.”

I was almost too afraid to ask, but ask I must. “What will you do?”

“Do? Well, I suppose first, I will need to talk to Governor Croft.”

He must have seen the look of horror on my face, for he immediately moved to my side, taking my hands in his. Unbidden, I had a picture of him and Lucy together, flinched, but he only held on to my hands tighter.

“Oh, no, Emma, no! Please do not believe for even a second that I give any credence at all to Constance’s absurd story. But, to tell you the truth, it is so bizarre, I feel the need to make certain the prisoner is still where he is supposed to be. On reflection, I am sure you must have merely told her of your correspondence with him and she has decided to use that to her advantage by rewriting the story large. But what if he is loose? He knows your name, knows where you live, knows you are a sympathetic ear—what if he were to seek you out? Oh, no, I could never live with myself if something were to happen to you because I had been incautious somehow. I must investigate this further.”

I saw I could not dissuade him. Now all I could do was brace myself, try to come up with something against the day he learned Chance was free. The doom had not come today. But, if not today, then it must surely come tomorrow or on yet another tomorrow.

He laughed again, startling me. “But oh,” he wiped at his eyes, “poor Charles!”

Poor Charles?

My expression must have said as much, even if I had not spoken the words aloud, for John replied to it: “Yes, poor Charles. Can you imagine being shackled to that madwoman? Someone should lock her away in an attic! Oh, I know, you who are always so charitable will say that is very uncharitable of me. And I suppose you are right. She does deserve our sympathy, poor misguided thing that she is.”

He thought for a moment, then went on. “Naturally, I will have to speak with Charles about this.”

“With Charles? But why?”

“Because she is his responsibility. And because, apparently, that last ‘rest cure’ of hers in the country did no good. On the contrary, I do believe she has returned much worse.” John considered: “She has probably been spending too much time with one of those spiritists. Charles will probably want Gammadge’s cousin to provide her with a sleep-inducing tonic until her current spate of madness subsides. Or, better yet, return her to the country until she shows herself fit to live among civilized society again.”

The subject over, as far as John was concerned, he picked up a copy of the Sphere from his desk and continued his perusal of it. Presumably, Constance had rudely interrupted his reading.

“It says here, my dear, that Newgate Prison is to be demolished. Hmph. How long do you think it will take them to get around to doing that?”

I left him to it and snuck away.

Why had Connie not shown John her bruises, as she had me? They were her bodily proof something horrid had happened to her. Even, if by some perverse stretch, John proved reluctant to believe his friend Charles had caused them, he would have been forced to acknowledge Connie had not manufactured the physical harm she claimed had come to her.

But Connie, of course, would never have done such a thing before John. She would have been too timid, too scared of fighting against the overwhelming tide of propriety, as she would have needed to in order to expose to a man, not her husband and not her doctor, parts of her body that were covered by clothes. She could never have rolled up her sleeves, pulled down her collar for John as she had done for me.

I could, of course, have proved to John she was in her right mind. I could have simply told him about the bruises I had seen. He might think I was joking at first, but eventually he would believe me. But I could not tell him that now, not after what she had told him, not after what she had tried to do.

Did I blame Connie?

No, I did not blame her.

But I could not save her now, either. Perhaps there had once been a time, long ago, to help her and I had not seen it. Now I could see where help could be given and I chose not to give it. She would be sent away to the country again, and I would be safe from her accusations. In a sense, she had brought this on herself. If I was to save one person here, it had to be me. And, so, I said nothing.

She should have shown him the bruises.