We could not, of course, see one another privately every day, but we could, and did, keep our servants busy running notes between John’s house and Cavendish Square. And between letters, we took moments together like thieves, wherever we could be alone even for an instant. Our chamber doors muted any sounds we made, and our palms did, too; we pressed them to our mouths—to each other’s mouths. We muffled laughter around our own fingers; we swallowed down one another’s moans.
Even when we were in company with others, we were sometimes bold enough to steal touches. The curl of little fingers as we walked together in the park, hidden from view by the curtains of our skirts; the press of slippered feet under a table. Her arms solid around my ribs, lifting me so my toes came up off the floor—just the quickest snatch of warm touching cheeks and the tickle of her lips over the pulse at my throat before she set me down again and continued on her slow and decorous way down the corridor toward her music room, which had been our destination. Only the self-conscious roll of her hips and the smile she tossed back at me—quick as sunlight on water—betrayed that anything unusual had just occurred.
Eliza had slim silver furrows running along the insides of her thighs; and the outer curves of her breasts; and her hips and belly, rounded as the sloping hills of Kent. Learning of their existence, I could not stop stroking them, fingers dragging lightly up and down and back again. “Like tree bark,” I murmured; and she batted my fingers away.
“Tree bark! What—am I so rough?”
I smiled at her. “Not rough,” I said. “But they make a pattern—see? Like the skin of oak trees.” I traced one furrow across her breast until it ran into another; and then I circled her areolae, which were darker than my own, and wider, the skin impossibly tender. Looking at them, I thought of flower petals; when I said so, she laughed.
“Of course you would,” she said.
Each of her breasts filled my hands, paler than the rest of her, the only part of her body, I had at last discovered, not peppered with freckles. Released from the confines of her stays, they gently dropped, their own weight pulling them down to hang against her ribs. My palms curved instinctively, forming cups to hold them; and the smoothness of her nipples went pebbled as a riverbed.
“You truly are peculiar,” she said, catching my hands and holding them more firmly against her, so that her breasts swelled up over the top of my thumbs as if my hands were a corset. “I think you would make a perfect resident for a hermitage. I can see you now, clothed in a gown of moss, your hair snarled, odd lines of poetry falling from your lips like prayers.” She kissed the plane of my chest. “Do you truly see bark and petals when you look at me?” she whispered into my skin.
I hummed a little. “Well. It isn’t all I see.”
Another kiss. “It makes me feel . . .”
My chest tightened. “Like flora?”
“Mmm.” Her breath a vibration, loosening the muscle of my heart once more. “Lush .”
In her letters, she copied out poems and asked what I thought of them; she mentioned articles in the newspaper, and requested my opinion, and I nearly laughed at the surprise on John’s face when I asked if he would keep the paper for me when he was through with it.
I was reminded bittersweetly of my yearslong correspondence with Miss Hall; a similar eagerness filled me whenever John’s butler brought me a folded letter in Eliza’s neat hand. And yet, there the similarity ended, for unlike Miss Hall’s, Eliza’s letters spilled over with generous measures of herself. She was liberal with her thoughts, her feelings; and there was an urgency to her questions for me, as if she could not know me quickly enough.
She told me that she detested Mr. King, Julia’s intended, for the dismissive way he spoke to her sister.
The only benefit to woman’s constrained circumstances that I can see, she wrote once, is that men often look upon us as they do children, never guessing at the thoughts and passions that run through our minds and hearts. If I must marry—and I fear I must—I pray that my husband will be very stupid.
If only I had been born a man! I think I’d have liked to go into business, like my father. Regardless of what society thinks of manufacturing as a means of earning an income—my father loved the challenge of it. I hated school so very much. Not the other pupils, for they were mostly lovely, but the course of study . . . ! If I have girl-children, I will have to find some unlikely, progressive school, of which my husband will no doubt disapprove; or else found one, myself. Let them learn to use their minds, as men are taught to do.
Miss Hall never opened herself to me. For all the years we were together, as governess and pupil, and young lady and companion, even as the difference between our ages came to feel slimmer and slimmer and as her initial frustration with me began to fade, I had to work for every scrap of understanding I had of her. I wondered, now, whether she was always so reticent with everyone, or if she somehow sensed the attraction I felt, even if I did not fully understand it yet, myself.
Eliza was entirely open. She spoke her thoughts, and wrote them, too, trusting me with her truths, however socially unsuitable. She laughed too loudly when mirth overtook her. She spread her thighs and let me right inside her very body, where it was warm and seeping wet as the ground after a rain. I smelled her there as I always wanted to smell the earth, close and intimate, my nose in the hair between her legs. It was darker than the hair on her head, and coarser than the hair on her legs and under her arms; though I loved to smell her there, too, where the faint traces of rosewater that clung to her wrists and throat were buried under the scent of Eliza herself.
No matter how I turned the question over inside my head, I could not account for how easily I accepted the gift of her candor; nor how I allowed myself, from our earliest meeting, to be so forthcoming with my own thoughts and feelings. I felt easy with her from the first; it was the sort of easiness I had never experienced before. It took all my usual disquiet and smoothed it away like the tide over the sand. It made me willing to speak of things I’d never spoken of before—my nighttime visitors; the anger that rose in me with frightening strength when I thought about my mother.
It made me willing to try things, even when I hadn’t the faintest idea what I was doing; even when my attentions tickled instead of pleased, leaving Eliza with her fist pressed to her mouth to stifle her laughter and fat, delighted tears spilling down her cheeks. Instead of turning thorn-prickly, I laughed as well; and when our laughter faded, tried again.
Eliza’s watercolors were exquisite, delicate. Perfect renderings of what she saw. Landscapes; dogs; vases of pinks. I looked at them all, one after another, and then, half-teasing, said, “What else can you do?”
She cast me an irritated look and then, half-defiantly, half-laughingly, she showed me the embroidered linens she had made for Julia’s wedding trousseau, the stitches so perfectly even that even Miss Hall would have been impressed, the design a complicated interweaving of thistles and flowing leaves.
I kissed her. “What else?”
She murmured to me in French, sentences that would have made her schoolmistress blush. I was pleased that I could understand her, even if my own clumsy responses made her snort, more like a barnyard creature than an accomplished young lady. She played for me, three songs one after the other, and sang, too, her voice almost as resonant as the voice of the singer at a concert I attended with the Fitzwilliams and Mr. Watters. That lady’s voice had made me think impiously that if only she had sung weekly at our church in Hunsford, I might have grown up with a better understanding of the Divine than I gained from a thousand tepid sermons.
But Eliza suddenly struck her palm against the pianoforte’s black-and-white keys, jarring discordant notes ringing out in the air.
“None of it matters, ” she said in a mutter.
I approached her slowly. “What do you mean?”
She stared down at her fingers, curled into fists. “I do not . . . love any of this. In fact, I rather hate it all. And it—it is the same as fashion, which I love despite wondering if I have been trained to care about it. I cannot decide whether my feelings are true—whether I truly dislike needlework and painting and—or if perhaps I would find joy in it had it not been forced upon me, and other endeavors discouraged.” She rolled her knuckles along the keys, a little looping melody.
I touched the pianoforte’s shining wood top. My own feelings were knotted as the threads of my embroidery projects, all those years ago in the school room. “Is it pointless?” I said slowly. Eliza looked up at me, and I hastened to add, “That is—is art, of any kind, pointless ?” My thoughts were on the voice of the concert singer; how it raised me up, higher and higher, until I was floating above the crowd in their spindly chairs. It was all the joyful freedom of my drops with none of the mindlessness. It was transcendence.
She listened silently as I tried, ineloquently, to explain. “What of your beloved novels?” I said at last. “Cannot a well-played song transport a listener the same way a reader can be transported by a well-penned story?”
Eliza was a portrait of misery. “I just . . . want something else,” she said.
I swallowed down my frustration, though it tried to lodge itself in my throat. “And I envy your skills. So very much.”
She wrote me the following day.
I did not mean to negate your experience by bemoaning my own, dearest Frank, she said. It is only that, sometimes, I cannot see a way out, and I find it hard to be cheerful.
Out of what, she did not say; but I supposed she did not need to. I bit the inside of my cheek, glanced up at Mrs. Fitzwilliam, who sat across from me on one of the drawing room’s elegant chairs, sewing and humming a little to herself.
If only ladies did not require the presence of other ladies to move freely through the world, I wrote back later. My cousin and Mr. Watters leave the house whenever they wish, in each other’s company or entirely alone, at any time of day or evening. Their strides are long and full of purpose. And why should they not be? For men are told from boyhood that they have charge of their lives and of the world. Whereas I cannot walk down St. James’s Street, where John’s club is located, without being assumed to be a lady of low reputation.
I had a friend once. She called me exceptionally fortunate and urged me to take control of my estate and my inheritance. I am beginning to think I might have the strength to do so; but I hardly know where or how to start.
Her reply was swift and clipped; I felt, rattling through it, the same choking frustration I’d felt with her.
You’ve relations who manage their own grand estates; surely they can provide guidance, she said. Start with small things. Ask them.