“Yes,” he said, and he didn’t know which statement he was agreeing with—that he could start the January letters, or that January would be the start of a new year. He decided on the latter. “A new year.”
A new year in which everything would be the same as ever. He would still be behind his glass. In his cage.
Oh, such maudlin comparisons. He would have laughed at himself were he not so deep inside his own overwrought metaphors. At least he wouldn’t be meeting his watery end in a painful drowning.
“Goodbye, Miss Evans,” Effie said, suddenly needing this leave-taking to be over. Addressing her so formally hurt him, but sometimes a smaller hurt had to be tolerated in order to protect against a greater wound.
Well, he’d already sustained the greater wound. Perhaps the smaller hurt was a way of dressing the existing laceration, staunching the bleeding.
What he hadn’t banked on was that it would hurt her, too. Her eyes filmed with tears. She pulled herself together quickly, though: she straightened her spine, adjusted her posture, and said, “Goodbye, Lord Featherfinch.”
Yes. Itwaspainful, wasn’t it? Julianna had referred to him as “Lord Featherfinch” a few times, but it had always been in company, when it would have been improper for her to have used anything but his title. In those instances, she’d been talking about him, to the boys.Lord Featherfinch told me you were staying at the home of one of your friends.
What do you make of Lord Featherfinch’s theory, my lord?
She had never addressed him directly by his title.
He couldn’t truly be upset, though, could he? He had started it.
After a long moment of silence, Archie stepped forward and helped Julianna into the coach—she was the last passenger to board, and everyone was waiting on her.
The coach rolled away, and that, apparently, was that.
“Do you want to talk about it?” Archie asked gently, as their own conveyance rumbled off.
“Do I want to talk about what?” Effie said—disingenuously, he knew.
Archie raised his eyebrows.
Effie sighed. “I’m not sure what there is to talk about. Everything has unfolded as expected.”
“What does that mean?”
“Julianna and I cannot be together, for all the reasons I enumerated when we first spoke on the matter.”
“And nothing about the past week changed any of those reasons?”
“She certainly seemed not to mind that you were a man,” Simon said with a smirk, “and if I recall correctly, you identifiedthatas an ‘unscalable obstacle.’”
Effie moved his mouth into the shape of a smile, because that was what one did when one’s friend said something amusing—he was attempting to follow Olive’s advice about acting. “Indeed, but I am still me, and she is still her, and that is that.”
Effie had the novel experience of wishing the holiday would end. Usually, he dreaded returning home. Usually, being with Simon and Archie, wherever they were, felt more like home than Number Twenty Berkeley Square.
Now, though, with several days of holiday yet before him, he longed for the silent, sterile halls of the London house. For the sanctuary of his bedchamber within it. Would he take down thechartreuse-sky painting? He would have to. It would hurt too much to look at it.
Would he return to having the nightmares? They had been absent here, but was that because someone, be it Julianna or Archie, had always been sharing his bed? Or did he dare to hope they were permanently gone?
So many questions.
He pasted on another of Olive’s non-smiles. “Mrs. Mitchell tells me there is a Druidic stone of some note nearby. Shall we go see it?”
The boys both eyed him skeptically. They hadn’t excepted him to suggest a benign outing.
But what would a happy person do on holiday? A happy person would go see a stone in a field. What else? A happy person would catch up on his correspondence—his real correspondence, not his pseudonymous, advice-dispensing correspondence.
By which he meant he would write to Olive.
He probably ought to write to Julianna, too. He had said he would. He’d urged her to resume their correspondence, even offering to pay for it. He had, at the time, thought of writing to her as a lifeline. She didn’t want him as a lover anymore, but, he’d reasoned, they could still be friends. Correspondents.
