FIFTY-TWO

Lucy?” I summoned her, violently drawing the drapes myself on a new day.

Since the day when she had, in rapid succession, told me about and then lost the baby, we had not said another word about it. She had always been polite enough and agreeable enough with me in the past, as dictated by both her position and disposition, but there was a gentle tenderness in her mien whenever she was around me now. It was as though she were eternally grateful, not only for not being judged harshly, but also for not being judged at all.

“Yes, madam?”

“I need you to pick out a suitable dress for me. Mmm…best make it the violet one. Then, I need your help with my dress and my hair. I’m afraid I have not eaten as I should recently and I am not as strong as I would like.”

“Yes, madam.”

“Then, when we’re done here, you can summon a cab for me.”

“Not the carriage, madam?”

“No. If John returns early from his stroll, he might want it. I should not want him inconvenienced in any way.”

I felt the mud squelch beneath the toe of one booted foot as I was handed down from the cab, and I wondered I had not thought of this sooner.

Of course, he could not come to me in my home; had in fact only been there that one first time. Our couplings were so rare, stolen in the most peculiar of places, too rare for me to stand the tension without causing a state of near madness. And I did know where he lived. Why, then, could I not go to him?

The air in the street was filled with odors I was unaccustomed to: food that smelled like nothing I would ever want to eat, human waste, the leavings of too many animals—all of it stale. The sound itself was a shock as well: the sheer loudness, noises from pain and anger and drunken joy, the whole discordant din a mock symphony of life as I knew it. And, as I looked out from the cab, I saw too many reminders of the Boer War: cripples, whose lives would never be the same, some driven mad by what they’d seen in a land too far from home.

“Damn Liberal busybodies!” I heard one cripple scream. “They all ought to lose their legs.”

“What are you talking about?” another man demanded. “Stupid fool. It was Labour and the Liberals what wanted to save your legs.”

“You don’t know…”

As I stepped to the ground, a woman brushed against me, and it was all I could do not to reel back from her in revulsion. She could have been my age, but looked much older, a hard life bending her back, most of her teeth gone, the stench from her mouth giving me to believe she was not long for this world. Her twisted smile at me seemed to carry the knowledge that only fortune had separated her life from mine and the further knowledge that, in time, who knew whose fortune would prove greater?

I shook off the uneasy feeling she had given me, turned back to the cab. Asking the driver to wait, I paid him in advance for two hours’ time.

Later, I would recall the neighborhood where Chance resided in cringing detail. How could civilized people live like that? Surely, no one would if there were any other choice. But standing in front of the door, hand raised to knock—finally here!—I no longer registered the filth of the street, the door finish that was more peel than paint.

“You surprise me, Emma.”

I had not heard him ascend the steps behind me.

Reaching past me, he opened the door. “Did you want to come in?”

Hand yet raised, hoping to still the sudden racing of my heart, I entered ahead of him.

I am sure that, had I imagined the reality of it at all beforehand, I would have conjured up the meanness of his daily surroundings. The floor had no coverings with which to supply warmth to the coldness of the bare wood. Walls that I supposed might once have been some shade of white were stained with the residue of coal smoke that had not sufficient ventilation, and in one corner was the scorched evidence of a small fire; although, how long ago such a fire might have occurred, one really couldn’t say.

There was a plain wooden table that could have held four chairs, but only had one; a single plate, a single spoon, a single fork, and a single knife were placed in front of it. There was a narrow bed shoved up against the wall with sheets that looked none too clean. At the head of the bed, a little up and to the right, was a window, covered by a lace curtain—remnant of some previous occupant, perhaps?—that was so threadbare as to offer only a token protection against either the late-day early-winter sun or the outsiders’ inclination to stare in.

True, it had to be a sight better than a prison cell. But by how much?

Still, it did not matter.

I turned to him. The look on his face indicated he had been closely watching me as I registered my temporary surroundings, his daily ones.

“Forgive me,” I said, feeling a sudden odd formality as though I were visiting a near stranger, not the man I had done so many things to and with. But it did feel strange being here, for the very first time on territory wholly his and not at all my own. “I have never thought to ask before: What are your plans for employment now?”

It may seem odd this had never come up before; indeed it felt strange to me to be asking him such a question. But in the relatively few times we had been able to meet, we had not been much for talking of practicalities, nor even in our frequent letters. In fact, the only business we ever spoke of was what to do about my husband and how to meet and meet again.

His smile was somewhat wolfish as he made a step toward me. In those small quarters, a step was all it took for him to loom over me.

“Is that what you came all this way down here for, Emma, to inquire as to my future prospects?” He reached out a hand, moved the hair back from my neck. “That is not something with which you need concern yourself. I am more resourceful than perhaps my past record might indicate. You should have no doubt: I will land on my feet.”

“Actually,” I said, steeling myself, “that is not what I came for.”

I told him then about how John had checked to make sure he was still in Hollowgate, how John said Governor Croft had informed him Chance was still there and would be for life.

“How is that possible?” I demanded. The question had been gnawing at me.

When I first began to speak, Chance looked stunned, but now his features settled into a confident smile.

“It is obvious,” he said, “is it not?”

“It is?”

“Yes,” he said, “of course. You told me before about Constance telling John everything and about how John intended to learn more from the governor. Naturally, I wanted to protect you from exposure, so I did what any man in my position would do.”

“And that was?”

“I went to the prison and bribed the governor. As I’m sure John can tell you, what with all his research, it is amazing how easily corruptible prison officials are, more so even than those in their care.”

Now it was my turn to look stunned. Where had he got the money?

“Surely, you must realize by now, Emma,” he said, as though answering my unasked question without really answering it, “there is nothing a man wouldn’t do for a woman he truly loves.”

He lowered his head to my neck, lowered my body to his bed.

Clothing was rapidly removed. I felt as though I were riding the wave even before we’d had the chance to properly begin.

The bed was softly lumpy in some parts, hard as marbles in others. The sheets were of the overused variety such that no amount of effort, and it did smell as though some effort had been recently made, could redeem them. Recollecting the afternoon later on, as I lived every moment over and over and over again, I could have sworn I remembered feeling something crawling on parts of my skin that belonged to neither of us.

It did not matter.

I arched my back to better meet him, felt myself squeezing and releasing for the first time in a controlled pattern that was uncontrolled as well, in that it seemed as though my body had become a thing of itself, possessing its own designs, wrapping my naked legs around his hips as though I might keep him there forever. I felt the nerves beneath the surface shatter apart in the fragments I now knew so well, wholly satisfied yet in the next instant regretting it bitterly as the fragments reintegrated into the whole.

It did not matter.

He did not stop. Pushing both of us forward, onward, I felt the wave start again, moved to turn away, felt his hand, his real hand, forcing my face to stay open to his.

Sweat in winter; what a peculiar thing.

And on and on.

Flinching only when he turned me over, filling a new hollow, charting a territory where no explorer had ever gone before.

And on and on.

His hair was disheveled. The light was disappearing from the day. He pressed his forehead to mine. “I do love you, Emma.”

Leaning across me, he parted the near-useless curtains on the dying sun, the bustle of the street. Several hours had passed; the cab was no longer there.

It did not matter.

I wanted one thing that was my choice—not society’s, not my parents’, my husband’s, my son’s, but mine—something I could claim for myself.

But how could I ever have that something?

After all, people would forgive a woman for leaving a drunken husband, they would forgive her for leaving a beating or a cheating husband. But no one would understand if she left a good husband.

Previously, I had not told Chance about what I had learned concerning John and Lucy. Perhaps I thought that, somehow, hearing that another man had chosen another woman over me would somehow make me seem less attractive, less desirable, less like a thing worth winning. But I steeled my courage and told him now.

His response surprised me. “Are you sure”—he smiled as he located papers and tobacco—“it was John?”

I shook my head, not in denial, but in incomprehension. “Who else could it be?”

What other men had been in my house in recent months besides Timmins? Chance himself had been there, but that had been long ago.

“No, of course,” he said, “you are right.” Anger settled on his features. “John should not have misused you in that way.”

His anger warmed me, swept away any fears he would think me a woman a man could easily be unfaithful to.

Then I told Chance about John’s intention to use our story as part of his new book about gossip. I told him how strongly I felt about that.

And Chance told me that there was only one choice left that still remained to us:

My husband must die.