“With a name like that?” Simon exclaimed.
“What is wrong with the name?” Effie, a bit indignant, asked.
“Not a thing,” Archie said soothingly. “It’s merely that it sounds somewhat feminine.”
“An appreciation of beauty being an ability limited to the fairer sex?” Effie shot back, his affront growing. But he stood down. They meant no ill, and their way of thinking was commonplace, if baffling. “Regardless, yes, I did not know it was a women’s magazine until it was too late. I imagined that, like you, Miss Evans would assume her readership was exclusively female and therefore that I was, too. I should have corrected her when I sent in my second poem, but I was afraid she would reject it.” He heaved a sigh. “Eventually, I became less concerned about the poems and more afraid that she would rejectme.”
“You talked at the end of our trip last year about needing to get back to Highworth because you were waiting for an important letter,” Simon said. “Was it from Miss Evans?”
“It was indeed. I was waiting on an editorial assessment of a poem she had agreed to print. She had written to accept it but said that she wanted to let it simmer and would write again in a week with her thoughts. That is a particular phrase of hers. ‘Let it simmer. ’ Isn’t it clever? Think how much better a soup tastes on the second day, having had longer to simmer.”
He caught an amused glance shared by the others. He wasn’t sure what was so diverting. “I was certain the letter had arrived in my absence, and I wanted terribly to read it, and also not make her wait too long for my reply.”
“Why hadn’t you simply told her to write to you at your London address?” Simon asked.
“I’d spent the summer at Highworth, and she had been writing me there. I did consider writing and telling her to reach me in London from that point onward, but I worried about the possibility for confusion. What if she didn’t get my new direction in time and she sent her thoughts on my poem to Highworth while I was in London?” He paused. “And honestly, I didn’t want to be in London at that point.”
“Why not?” Archie asked. “You used to be quite devoted to the entertainments of the city.”
“I didn’t want her to know who I was. Well, sheknowswho I am.”
She knew him in all the ways that mattered, as well as the boys did. Perhaps better. “But I didn’t want her to know I was noble-born. I had been representing myself as a country . . . person. To suddenly mention a second home in Town would have outed me as not a country . . . person.”
“But you’re in London almost exclusively now,” Simon said. “So you must have outed yourself as not a country person, if not as a man.”
“Yes.” He was confusing them. “In the last year, our correspondence has become much more voluminous. Whereas it generally took a letter a week or two to come or go from Highworth, in Town I can drop a letter at a receiving house in the morning knowing she will have it in a matter of hours. I also realized that while I hadn’t given any thought to the cost of all these letters, it was costing her twelve pence to send one to Highworth. In London, we can use the penny post and it’s only three pence.” For a single sheet, which was all she ever sent him. “And when I learned that she was saving for a printing press, I came to understand that writing to me was very dear for her. I could no longer justify time spent at Highworth.”
“But you aren’t tempted to see her?” Archie asked. “Now that you’re both in London?”
“Did you not hear what I said? She thinks I’m a woman!”
“Yes, but could you not see her from afar?” Simon queried.
“Skulk around as if I’m the main character of a novel of intrigue you mean?” Effie said tartly.
“You sounded rather keen on doing just that a while ago.”
“Yes, but that was merely as a holiday diversion. Idolove dressing up. This is different.”
In truth, he had considered the idea and discarded it. So many things could go wrong. To begin with, he did not trust himself to see her from afar and not swoon in the street where he stood.
But more elementally, what would it get him? Heknewher. He couldn’t have her, but heknewher. Seeing her would only make the yearning, the unrequited longing, worse.
Julianna had a few precepts she seemed to live by, or at least they functioned as aphorisms she frequently quoted. One of them wasYou can’t miss what you don’t let yourself want.He had tried, these recent months, to keep that one in mind.
“Why is it different?” Simon asked.
Effie didn’t know how to explain it to them without making himself pathetic—though he wasn’t sure why that mattered. Hewaspathetic. “It’s a bit like your not wanting to see the Pavilion just now, Simon. You didn’t want to see it casually, in passing. It wouldn’t be right. It wouldn’t be enough.”
“Ah. I understand.” Simon paused. “But the difference is, I will eventually see the Pavilion in all its glory. I will be satisfied.”
“Yes,” said Effie. “That is precisely the difference.”
* * *
After their evening meal, Effie took Leander upstairs to put him to bed. He stood in front of the cage and said, “I am in love with a woman named Julianna Evans.” He said it several times over, varying his tone. He wasn’t sure what his aim was in trying to get the bird to say it back. Was he merely trying to reinforce the creature’s expanded syntax, and if so, why now, on night one of an Earls Trip when his friends were waiting for him?
Did some perverse part of him want to hear out loud how hopeless his cause was?
