“Is it possible youwillfeel better? Perhaps the dreams are coming now that the dam is open, but the water supply is limited? Perhaps it’s spring and the water is high, but by summer the riverbed will be dry. Perhaps you merely need to survive the current flood.” She shrugged. “I am no expert. As I said, I have never had a bosom friend like that.”
Except you.She wanted to say it aloud but held back for reasons she couldn’t articulate.
The thought wasn’t quite correct, anyway. Effie was a bosom friend, but hewasalso something else, wasn’t he, if she was being honest with herself? One didn’t kiss one’s bosom friends the way she and Effie had kissed.
One didn’t turn into a mindless starfish around one’s bosom friends.
Effie had been correct when he said that they were “different sorts of friends.”
“I should like you to meet Olive,” Effie said, drawing Julianna from her ruminations.
Julianna wanted to ask Effie about what was going to happen when they were back in London. She would meet Olive, and then what? They could hardly carry on the way they had been here, lazing about and bearing their souls, interspersed with the occasional kiss or ardent embrace.
Could they?
She and Charles had, for quite some time.
But no. Effie was the heir to an earl. One didn’t carry on with the heir to an earl. The heir to an earl needed awife.
And . . . there it was. Julianna couldn’t get a breath in. The truth had pushed all the air out of her body. Earlier, she had observed that she couldn’t understand why she had been so hurt by Edith, why her departure after that lovely summer had inflicted a wound that felt so much graver than garden-variety heartbreak. It had to do with marriage. Julianna had spent so much time thinking about marriage, even if only to resist it. She didn’t want to marry. And even if she’d changed her mind on that front, shecouldn’thave married Edith.
So to have Edith flit off and marry her gentleman correspondent, to so easily assume the mantle of a conventional life, her “transgressions” with Julianna erased by her easy embrace of matrimony. . . well, yes, that explained a great deal to Julianna about her own mind. All that anger, at both Edith and at society.
And it explained what was going on here. Like Edith, Effie would eventually leave Julianna behind. Perhaps he wouldn’t do it as blithely as Edith had, but he would have to.
Julianna blew out a breath, a bit overcome by having hit on a truth she hadn’t realized was buried inside her.
But she could not betray this truth. None of this was Effie’s fault, not even the fact that if they were to embark on a long-term liaison, he would one day leave her to marry another. He was as constrained by societal mores as she was. Perhaps more. At least she had her magazine.
The magazine above all.It had never felt truer, or more important.
“Olive would be exactly the sort of reader to appreciate your travel accounts,” Effie said, apparently oblivious to Julianna’s swirling thoughts. “She has a passion for traveling, a passion that has mostly gone unindulged. She did recently accompany her sister and Archie on their honeymoon to Italy, though.”
Julianna told herself to set aside her revelation, at least for now. It wasn’t going to do any good to dwell on it at the moment. Besides, her inner editor had perked up. “What part of Italy did Miss Morgan visit?”
“The north. Lombardi and Piedmont.”
“Did she see the Shroud of Turin? If so, would she be willing to write an account of it?” Julianna had been thinking that one way to satisfy Mr. Glanvil’s increasing interest in “moral” content—by which he meant biblical content—might be to disguise it as travel reporting.
“She did, and I believe she would be delighted to do so. However, I must warn you that she maintains some rather unconventional opinions as to the origins of the shroud. Some—not I, mind you—might even call them blasphemous opinions.”
“All the better!” Julianna refrained from applauding but only just. “I shall write out a brief and have you pass it on to her, and if she is agreeable, she can send me her reflections directly. I will of course outline the terms. I don’t pay first-time writers very much, but if she will accept . . .” Baroness Cartworth’s report on the Lake District aside, Julianna was not accustomed to having members of the aristocracy write for her. “She probably doesn’t mind how much I pay.” Julianna could pay Miss Morgan half the magazine’s monthly budget and it would be a crumb to her.
“Oh, no, I think she will mind exceedingly. She is . . . Well, it’s not my place to say, but I don’t think she would object to my telling you that she is saving up for something.” He paused. “Not unlike you.”’
“You are referring to my fantasy of purchasing a press.”
“I am indeed, but I wouldn’t consider it a fantasy.”
“It was always thus, but it became even more so when I took leave of my senses and came here.”
“We need to move you out of the hotel!” Effie exclaimed. “How foolish of me not to think of it earlier. You can’t be paying for it when you’re staying with us.”
“I can’t stay with you!”
“Why not? You are my sister, and everything is very proper.”
“I know, but—”
