“I don’t think so. While I certainly considered myself on friendly terms with both Charles and Edith, my desire for them felt . . . independent of that bond.”
A terribly urgent question began coalescing in his mind. “Did you . . . remain friends with your past lovers?”
“With Charles, yes. We remain fond of each other, though the ardency has bled out of our connection.”
“And Edith?”
She shrugged. “Summer ended, and she left. I had hoped she would write, but she didn’t. I was terribly sad for a while.”
Effie hated how jealous her words made him. He hated that hecould intuit that “I was terribly sad” was Julianna understating the depth of her connection to Edith, and her dismay at its rending.
He forced himself to set his feelings aside and attend to hers. “One hears of gentlemen who are romantically inclined toward one another. They may live as friends. I suppose ladies might manage a way to do the same.”
“Yes. I had . . . imagined a future in which that might have been the case.” She pressed her lips together. “But when we parted ways, Edith was resigned to her fate, which at that point she believed was marriage. ‘Resigned’ is not even the correct word. I did not realize that she was corresponding that summer with a gentleman she had met briefly at a house party the previous Christmas. She was looking forward to meeting him again at the same party that year.
“She has three children now, I am told, and lives very happily in Somerset. I’m sure she never thinks about our ‘transgressions’—that was her word for what had happened between us.”
Effie had made an involuntary squeak, one he hoped conveyed his vicarious affront at the word Edith had chosen. Heartbreak was one thing; being left so blithely by someone who was planning to step immediately into another life was quite another.
“Yes,” Julianna said sadly—his squeak must have done its job.
“I am sorry,” he said quietly. It was only partially a lie. He was sorry she’d been hurt, but he wasn’t sorry that her heartbreak had made her available: to write to him, to edit his words, to lie with him.
She smiled sadly. “Effie, you really are the most generous-spirited person.”
“Come now.” She would not say that if she knew about the discreditable, greedy things he was thinking.
“I never imagined telling anyone this. Not only that I have given myself to a man, but that I have given myself to a woman.”
“And you have given yourself to me.”
“And I have given myself to you.”
“As I have given myself to you.”
“Indeed.”
He almost didn’t want to ask, but he had to. The only way to discharge this knife-edge feeling of envy, was to speak openly. To ask the question he wanted answered rather than swallow it in fear. Still, in order to brace himself for what he was almost certain would be the answer, he phrased his question as an observation: “But you won’t keep me.”
She placed a palm on his cheek. “I am sorry, I won’t. I can’t.”
It was not unexpected. He told himself he couldn’t be hurt by having a future he had never counted on taken away from him.
He further told himself not to think of the future at all. Another of Julianna’s maxims was relevant here, and he recited it back to her: “There is only now.”
“Yes.” Her smile struck Effie as a little wistful, though perhaps he was only seeing what he himself felt. She rolled away from him, and he wanted to tell her not to do that. He wanted to take her hand and place it back on his cheek.
She had lifted a candle, and she was gazing at the mantel across the room. “It is very likely past midnight, but it is too dark for me to make out the time on that clock. I am imagining you skulking out of here like a character in a Gothic novel. I think you shall be very well suited to such a task.”
He suspected she was trying to lighten the mood.
It didn’t work, but he pretended it did. He smiled and held out his arms and she set down her candle and rolled into them.
“It is a theatrical challenge I shall embrace, though ’tis a pity that if I am to be successful, it means I shan’t have an audience.” He spoke blithely and tried to make his heart light, too.
When she fell asleep, he knew he ought to go. And he would, just not yet. He slid off the bed and tiptoed to a small desk covered with papers. He smiled. She’d been here only a matter of hours, and already her editorial ephemera were everywhere.
He found paper and a quill and, arranging himself so he had a view of her, got to work answering a letter.
