I congratulated Miss Julia on her engagement, and listened as she talked at length of the wedding plans. All the while, I felt Miss Amherst—Eliza—watching me, and when at last there was a pause in the flow of her sister’s words, she said quickly, “Miss de Bourgh—I was hoping to show you my new gown.” Her hand was hot around my wrist as she pulled me up the stairs and down a short corridor. We walked as quickly as decorum allowed, and she sent an arch look over her shoulder at me before opening her chamber door.
Inside, I had only a moment to take in the green bed curtains and soft gold carpet before she kissed me, the hard wood of the door at my back, the softness of her body pressed all along my front. The room was silent but for our working mouths. I was heavy and full as storm air; and then Eliza’s thigh pushed between both of mine, dragging my shift against my skin, startling me into an entirely new knowledge of myself.
And shiver every Feather with Desire.
When she released me, Eliza stepped away, the back of her hand against her reddened lips. “I . . . did not mean to be quite so . . . forward,” she said. Her cheeks were flushed enough to disguise even her vivid freckles.
I pushed myself away from the supporting door, and found to my faint surprise that I was quite able to stand on my own. “You did nothing,” I said, breathless with my own daring, “that I have not longed for you to do these past days.”
“Interminable days,” she said, and reached for me once more.
“Am I much disarranged?” she asked a little later.
I looked up at her, woozy and disbelieving. “Beautifully,” I said. A few pins were loosened; anyone who saw her now would think she had been riding hard through the country, or napping with restless dreams. I was like a dreamer myself, caught in a world that did not seem entirely real.
She laughed, touched her hair and her bodice, then pulled up her legs so they were tucked around her and smiled down at me with such affection that I could not endure it for long.
“Mrs. Fitzwilliam once told me you are very accomplished,” I said, for want of anything better.
Eliza collapsed onto her back and blew out a breath. “I suppose I am,” she said.
“She said”—and now, to my bemusement, my voice teased—“that you were quite the most accomplished girl at school.” I rolled onto my side. Her proportions were as generous as her laughter and understanding. I reached out a hand, and though I was not quite audacious enough to touch her so intimately as I wished to, I took a coil of orange hair that had sprung loose from its pins and let it run through my fingers like strands of silk thread.
Her eyes closed as, emboldened, I let my fingers drift to explore her apple cheeks and the short, hard bridge of her nose; the indentation between nose and upper lip, furred like lamb’s ear leaves; the lips themselves, wide and smooth; the small hard knob of chin, all but lost between the roundness of cheeks and the slope of her throat. “It came rather easily to me,” she said. “I should not say so, but almost everything we learned bored me.”
“Not so surprising, I suppose, from a devotee of Mary Wollstonecraft.”
Her lips turned up under my fingers, though her eyes remained closed, reddish lashes nearly invisible. I wanted to count the freckles on her face; I longed, with an explorer’s insatiable, questing desire, to know whether they existed elsewhere on her body.
“I suppose,” I said, stroking the side of her throat—there were freckles here, but only a few—“that it is also unsurprising that you would choose to . . . spend time with . . . a woman who has no accomplishments at all.” Her pulse fluttered under my fingertips, as frantic as my own.
It was the closest I could come to asking her why she seemed as drawn to me as I was to her.
She pulled away, eyes opening. “That,” she said, “is a very roundabout way of speaking for someone so frank as you.”
I bit the side of my lip; shook my head.
“Oh, Frank,” she said, emphasizing the word so that it sounded more like a name. “I like you very well as you are.” She curled herself around me, wrapping me in her arms and legs, tucking her face into the nook between my shoulder and chin. “I’ve never quite . . . fit,” she said against my skin. “I can pretend quite well—sometimes I suppose I am not pretending at all. But school was nearly all pretense for me, years of it. I was merely lucky that it was easy to pretend, for I did not have to work very hard to learn the lessons they pressed upon me.” Her arms tightened around me, and she dropped a kiss on the tender spot just behind my jaw. “I fit here, though,” she murmured.
I relaxed back against her. I never fit, either, of course; but I lived most of my life in such a strange state, and so secluded from the wider world, that I never quite understood what it was I was supposed to be fitting into.
But still: “This is not . . . usual,” I said, though with a questioning rise at the end of the last word; for I truly was not certain. I should be certain; but there was so much of the world that I had not encountered, even then.
Eliza sat up, and she looked as guarded as I felt whenever I remembered Miss Hall’s reaction to my absurd proposal. “No,” she said. “I suppose it is not . . . usual. If, that is, by usual you mean—what is generally accepted. But did we not—that is to say, unusual is so much more interesting, is it not?” She smiled, but it was false, possibly the first false expression I had seen her wear, and by it I understood that she was as terrified of frightening me away as I was of frightening her. I rubbed my lips together without meaning to; they felt larger than usual, swollen from being pressed to hers.
“There are others,” she said, a touch too quickly. “Other women who—and men, too. And we ladies are the lucky ones, for we . . . for the consequences of being, ah, found out are not so grave for us as they are for gentlemen who prefer one another’s company.”
I could not fathom what two men might do together. But everything, everything was so new; and if two men felt together even a small measure of what I was experiencing now, I could not wonder at their pursuing it. There was damp, again, between my legs, just as there had been on the night of Lady Clive’s ball, welling as mysteriously as dew on night-grass; a great, unsolved puzzle of my own body that I was determined to decipher.
Eliza spoke to fill the silence, leaning earnestly forward.
“There are ladies who live together as husband and wife,” she said, keeping her eyes on mine.
“How do you know about such things?” They were hardly within the scope of gently bred ladies’ educations. I thought again of John and his club; how women could not walk down the street there, let alone enter the club itself. I only knew this because I asked, once; my cousin and Mr. Watters spent so much time there that I could not help but be curious about it. Mrs. Fitzwilliam looked aghast, and then laughed in an affected manner.
“Those places are the purview of men, my dear,” she said, as if that were all the answer required. Which, I suppose, it was.
“There was a story in the newspaper,” Eliza said. “It was one Papa would not read out to us, and so it interested me all the more. A pair of women—a wife and a husband-wife, who goes about in breeches and cravat and beaver hat. Can you imagine such a thing?”
I could not imagine her in such garb, with her love of a well-fitted gown; and yet, even as I thought this, all at once I suddenly could. The breeches and stockings would show the shape of her calves, hidden now under her layers of gown and petticoat and shift. Her hips and bosom would offer a challenge for a fitted coat; but a proper seamstress could rise to it. She flushed as if she could hear my thoughts, and I covered my face until helpless laughter enveloped us both.
I touched my own body in the darkness, and thought of Eliza, slipping a hand under the thin fabric of my chemise to explore the skin of my thighs and the rough hair between them. Tentatively, my fingers sought out the shuddering, shocking place I’d discovered when Eliza’s leg pressed it. I imagined that my hand was not my own; wondered what someone else would feel as she touched me. My belly was no longer a hollow to be filled; my hip bones were a little cushioned. I bled now with a regularity that was strange to me; there was a rhythm to my body that was absent when it was not properly nourished. But my breasts were still small, not quite filling my cupped palms.
I’d seen the way men’s eyes dipped to a lady’s bosom and then back up, taking in the sight in genteel sips, the same way they would sip at a glass of good claret. I had done the same—indeed, at the ball, I found my eyes flitting from female form to female form, quite impervious to the charms of the men. But I thought that the impulse to drink in the particulars of other women’s bodies, my admiration for Mrs. Darcy’s vigor or Miss Hall’s long fingers, was simply another of my drops’ peculiar effects. But perhaps I was simply not made to admire male figures. And Miss Amherst—Eliza, Eliza!—had experienced the very same impulses.
This was, I thought, how husbands and wives must enjoy one another. A natural impulse—Nature’s great Command, as Mr. Thomson wrote. But never, ever had the sight of a man made me feel so questing an inclination.
I cringed from the thought of Miss Hall’s stillness when she understood where my inclinations lay. Every muscle in my body turned stiff and miserable with the recollection. And then, like a tonic, I thought of Eliza—bright and quick, bold and yet as nervous as I, myself—and my limbs relaxed, my belly softened. The taste of her lips and teeth and tongue; the fear and desire writ clearly upon her face. Something pulled and pulled behind the bones of my pelvis, taking me back to Brighton, to the ineffable, surging waves of the sea; but these waves were not cold. They warmed me, thrummed over and through me until at last I let myself be carried along by them in a great rush.
Surely, I thought after, slack and bewildered, turning my face into my pillow; surely there could be nothing so terrible in these feelings if someone like Eliza felt them, too.