The answer was that she had spent a quarter of her savings on a ticket to Brighton!
Julianna was saving to buy a printing press. Or, she corrected ruthlessly, shehadbeen. Even without contributing to her sister’s household, Julianna’s salary was so low that it would take years for her to save enough. And who knew how much lodging in Brighton would cost?
If she’d wanted to be profligate, she could have spent a considerably smaller sum on postage. She could have written Effie as often as she wanted, letting her thoughts spill onto a second page without regard for the increased cost.
Well, it was too late now. She attempted to put her extravagance out of her mind and to resign herself to a seaside respite in Brighton.
How would she find Effie?
And assuming she did, then what? Was she going to be ill-mannered enough to gate-crash her friend’s holiday? Intrude upon her family? Or her circle of friends?
Julianna did not know with whom Effie was traveling. For as intimately as Julianna knew Effie, their friendship existed in a bubble. She knew the contents of Effie’s heart, but she didnotknow the contents of Effie’s day-to-day life. Effie talked about her sister, Sarah, but not a great deal, and she referenced her parents only in the vaguest terms. When Julianna probed, her inquiries went unanswered. Effie’s next letter would contain a poem, or a pressed leaf, or a vastly amusing anecdote, and the question would be forgotten by both of them.
Julianna had, uncharacteristically, not been so circumspect with the details of her family situation. She had confided in Effie about her frustrations with Mr. Glanvil—with both Misters Glanvil. Effie knew that Julianna felt like an interloper in her sister’s household. And when Effie had inquired about whether Julianna had ever considered marriage as a solution to that particular problem, Julianna had written a very long letter explaining why she hadn’t and wouldn’t.
In short, Julianna had sliced open her chest and allowed Effie to see her heart. To see the tender, beating core of her.
While Julianna couldn’t quite bring herself to regret how forthright she’d been—surprisingly, the slicing open of her chest had brought a kind of relief rather than the pain she might have expected to follow from such a surgery—she did sometimes wonder if the degree of her openness had had an inverse effect on the degree of Effie’s.
Euphemia Turner was hiding something, and Julianna was almost certain she knew what it was: her friend was of noble birth, and she didn’t want Julianna to be made unsettled by the knowledge of such. There was much evidence supporting this conclusion.
Effie’s vagueness with respect to her parents.
The fact that she sometimes wrote to Julianna from Cornwall and sometimes from London—and she never cross-wrote her letters, and they always came in envelopes that doubled the price of posting them.
How apparent it was that she’d had an excellent education. The daughters of working men did not, generally speaking, have Effie’s knowledge of and knack for poetry.
And, most damning of all, the bank reported that Effie had never cashed any of the drafts Julianna had sent her in payment for her work.
Julianna felt as if she and Effie were sister birds living in adjacent but separate cages. They knew each other’s song intimately, but there were bars between them.
Julianna wanted to know what her friend was hiding, because she wanted to know her friend, to know her with no veils or equivocations—or bars—between them, but she had, historically, feared that to inquire too directly, to allow her curiosities to shade into demands, would cost her the friendship. She had considered pressing the matter anyway, attaching a disclaimer:If you are the daughter of a peer, I shan’t be angry or alienated or envious. You’ll still be you, and I’ll still be me, and nothing will have to change.
Except she knew that wasn’t true. Effie surely did, too. Society wasn’t like that.Lifewasn’t like that. Daughters of peers were not bosom friends with women like Julianna.
Which no doubt explained why neither of them had suggested they meet in person, even now that Effie had been resident in London for so long. Julianna had considered it, had even had quill poised over paper to propose exactly that, ready to risk her most important friendship.
Something always stopped her, though, something beyond the possibility of Effie’s not being entirely who she pretended to be. Julianna couldn’t quite put it into words, but it had something to do with a feeling of foreboding that overcame her when she thought of actually meeting her friend in the flesh. As if it might change everything.
She was being nonsensical. She shook her head. It was time to stop this madness and meet Effie. So, yes, Julianna was going to gate-crash her friend’s holiday. Not for long. She did not intend to be rude. Just long enough to open the doors to the adjacent cages and say hello properly. If there were consequences, she would bear them. She could no longer live in this limbo.
That settled, she began to consider what her strategy ought to be. Where would she look for Effie? And what about the more immediate problem that Julianna did not know what Effie looked like?
Well, she corrected herself, she knew what Effie looked like, to a point. She had described herself: long dark hair. Different color eyes—one blue and one brown, which would certainly aid in endeavors of identification should Julianna get close enough to her friend to look into her eyes. A tendency toward the fanciful when it came to her wardrobe. A fondness for old-fashioned court shoes. The latter was more evidence of Effie’s being highborn, for who but an aristocrat would wear such gaudy and impractical shoes if she had to actuallydoanything in them?
Sometimes Julianna asked herself how it was possible that her closest confidant, her dearest friend, was a person she had never met. But it didn’tfeelthat way.
To be fair, it wasn’t as if Effie had a great deal of competition. Julianna was, due to the nature of her employment, friendly with a great many people. She wrote scores of letters each month to assign stories and deliver editorial instructions. She was friendly with the banker who issued the drafts with which she paid her writers. She was friendly with the woman who worked at the receiving house where she posted her letters.
Friendlywas not the same asfriends.
Julianna did not have friends. Not the way Amy did. Amy took tea with her neighbors and visited the shops with Arthur’s brothers’ wives. More than once, Julianna, having heard peals of laughter from the drawing room, had entered it only to cause the roomful of ladies to go dead silent.
What if she couldn’t find Effie? What if she got so close but had to return home as far away from Effie as ever? What a waste of her money. Her time. Her sentiment.
By the time the coach stopped at the halfway point, Julianna had made herself quite melancholy.
They alit for a short respite, and she walked around the yard of the coaching inn and gave herself a stern talking-to. What was done was done. Her money could not be unspent. Time could not be unwound. Therefore, she must put her mind to having an enjoyable holiday, regardless of whether she managed to locate Effie.
