“Do you generally go around incurring debt?”
“Quite a lot, actually. I don’t pay my engravers until after they’ve done their work.”
“I see. However, is it not—”
“I already have a man interfering in my business. I don’t need another.” She took a breath. She’d interrupted him twice. She was exercised over this topic, but there was no need to be rude. She was merely a bit frustrated because they had corresponded on the matter, back when she thought they were both women. Back when she thought he understood.
But hedidunderstand, didn’t he? Effie understood her perfectly well. He understood her in a way no one ever had.
She made to apologize for the interruptions, for her shortness of tone, but he did not appear bothered. “When you say you already have a man interfering in your business, you are speaking of Mr. Glanvil?”
“It’s not that I don’t understand the need to balance art and commerce. I understand it very well. I would go so far as to say that striving after that balance is one of my favorite things about my position. About ladies’ magazines—mine in particular but also in general. But Mr. Glanvil is overly fixated on the commerce side of things. He fails to understand that an entire issue devoted to, for example, tips for keeping house would no longer be a magazine but rather a manual.”
“Youwerespeaking of Mr. Glanvil.”
“Yes.” She paused. Oh. Oh, dear. “Did you think I was talking aboutyou?”
Effie shrugged. “Well, Iamhere forcing my way into your business by insisting on posing as that husband you don’t want.”
“No, no. You are biddable, and you always seem to know exactly what I want to do, to hear.”
He winked. “I aim to please.”
She wasn’t expressing herself well. “You are . . . different from everyone else.”
He mock-preened. “I should think so!”
He had been in jest, and he was in a lighthearted mood, so she didn’t press the matter, but Effiewasdifferent from everyone else. Unlike so many men, Effielistened. More than that, he seemed anxious to hear what she had to say. Having met him in person, she could even say that he appeared at times to hang on her every word.
Perhaps that was how Effie had come to know her, in the way she’d just been thinking she so appreciated. It wasn’t that complicated when one thought about it: if you listened to a person, carefully and for long enough, you grew to know them.
So why did it feel rather like magic?
She told herself to be careful. She had felt this way once before. She refused to get stars in her eyes over someone like Effie. She refused to get stars in her eyes overanyone.
They walked in silence for a while. It was such a lovely day. She’d enjoyed nothing less than a coup when it came to having talked her way into a tour of the Pavilion. And then in having convinced Lord Marsden to write about it. He would do an excellent job; she suspected the result would be one of the magazine’s great stories for the ages.
Finally, and not least, she was walking arm in arm with the person she considered her closest friend. That was the important part, not magic or anything so melodramatic. Effie was her closest friend, and they had found each other.
It was a good day.
“Here we are,” she said as they arrived at the Old Ship. “It’s more elegant than any inn I’ve seen.” Of course, she hadn’t seen many.
“I find myself dismayed that it isn’t shaped like a ship.”
“How would a building be shaped like a ship?”
“How would an English palace be shaped like the Taj Mahal?”
“I take the point. I’d like to drop my notebook in my room before we dine.”
Effie nodded his agreement, and she gestured for him to follow her, half waiting for someone to stop them, to stand in their path and proclaim their “marriage” a sham.
If they were on a ship, it was smooth sailing: they made their way to her room unmolested.
She spared a momentary thought, as she unlocked the door, for the disorderly state she’d left the place in. Julianna was not a natural housekeeper. She may even have left a shift hanging over the back of a chair. She tried to tell herself that surely Effie’s regard was not contingent on her tidiness or lack thereof, but a competing thought got in the way. The notion of Effie seeing her shift was . . . doing something to her.
“Are you all right?” he asked as he followed her inside.
