Julianna’s smile turned to outright laughter.
Speaking of Brighton, I am resolved to write a poem per day on my holiday. When I return, I shall mail you the whole stack.
I jest. I shall choose the best of the bunch and toil away at it endlessly over the next several months and talk about it so incessantly and oppressively that you lose patience and command me send it to you—which I shall then do, of course, as I always have and always will do whatever it is you command, my dear friend.
Farewell for a fortnight. Brighton will be less bright without your letters.
Yours,
Effie
Julianna, letting the hand that had been holding the letter fall on the bed, resumed her starfishing. Oh, how she was going to miss Effie.
But she was being ridiculous. It was a fortnight! How many letters would they normally exchange in a fortnight?
She’d meant the question rhetorically, but she could check. She sat up and extracted from beneath the bed the box in which she kept Effie’s letters. She added this latest to the front—she filed her letters in reverse chronological order.
The answer, over the last fortnight, was four letters from Effie.
Their correspondence had not always been so frequent. She pulled the first letter, from the back of the box, dated five autumns ago. She hadn’t started keeping Effie’s letters until after they’d forged a friendship beyond their relationship as editor and writer. She remembered the day this particular letter arrived. She’d realized, with a shock as bracing as an unexpected clap of thunder, that Effie had, somehow, become her closest friend. And a woman keeps letters from her bosom friends in a way an editor doesn’t from her writers.
She returned the five-year-old letter to the box and pulled out the next one. It was dated three months later. She pulled out some more. The gaps between letters grew smaller as the months and years wore on. Presently, Effie was writing her twice a week. She was replying only half that frequently, but that was only because of the expense.
She put the box away. Julianna would miss Effie, but she could endure a letterless fortnight.
’Twas a pity much of that fortnight was going to contain very little work to do. Certainly, there were numerous small tasks she could complete, perpetually neglected matters she always shoved aside in favor of more urgent demands. She could tidy the office, for example. Start planning with Charles, one of her engravers, for the next few months’ worth of engravings.
She slumped back on the bed, less a gleeful starfish this time and more a mindless one. Starfishes, she imagined, were probably quite stupid.
But perhaps not so mindless, not so stupid, for an idea arrived. Arrived with such force she felt almost as if someone had slapped her.
It was a wild notion. Very unlike her. Impulsive and profligate and irresponsible.
She was back up in a flash, scrabbling under the bed, deeper this time, fanning her arms out until her hands made contact with worn leather.
She extracted the pouch and counted her money, the coins she typically pinched so tightly.
Did she dare?
Dear Amy,
I’ve decided to seize on my period of forced idleness and pay Mother a visit. I haven’t been to Reading since Easter, and even though it has been two years since the late Mr. Glanvil’s passing, Mother is still so melancholy, drifting around the halls of that drafty house with only the servants for company. She never could stand to be on her own.
I expect I’ll be back Wednesday of next week at the latest, though perhaps sooner—you know how Mother and I tend to rub along well enough for a few days but then find ourselves in a conversational morass that sometimes necessitates a premature departure in order to preserve the geniality of future relations.
My point is that I’ve gone to Reading, and I don’t know when I will be back, except to say that it shan’t be later than Wednesday next.
Your sister,
Julianna
One of the benefits of being mindless, Julianna considered, as she hastily packed and hailed a hack, was that one needn’t stop to question one’s spontaneous choices, or to fret about having lied to one’s sister. One simply moved through space, more body than mind, a starfish drifting in the waves.
And when one arrived at the Blossoms Inn, one merely had tocount out one’s money for a return ticket on the London-Brighton coach and find a bench on which to wait for the departure of said coach.
It wasn’t until they were underway that Julianna’s logical mind reawakened. As it fired to life, the reality of her uncharacteristic decision began assailing her. Her breathing became shallow.
What had shedone?
