Page 28 of Atone, Adonis

His gaze met hers. “No.”

She narrowed her eyes, readying her retort, but as before at the altar, some fleeting look crossed his features—something unguarded and gone almost at once. She might have thought it was longing if she didn’t know better. If Frederick Sedgewick wasn’t the Earl of Chester. But she knew he wanted for nothing. And what was longing but wanting what you could not have?

“Sit and eat,” Thomas said to her. “Fred can go if he likes.”

She turned away from her husband, hearing him inhale sharply as if he meant to say something more. Something cutting, no doubt. But instead he swung his cloak about his shoulders and strode out, the door snapping shut behind him, as it always did.

“Running away, as ever,” she muttered.

“Would you rather he stayed?” Thomas asked.

“No. Of course not. But it’s no dream to be discarded like yesterday’s rubbish, either.”

“No, I suppose it is not. But look on the bright side, sister. You’re a Countess now. He will keep out of your way and your—” Thomas’s cheeks flushed and he didn’t finish that sentence.

“Keep out of my what?”

“Nothing.” He gave a rattling cough that Julianna almost thought sounded forced. As if coughing weren’t the one thing Thomas had in abundance.

“Tom?” she asked but when he turned away from her and coughed again, this time blood flecking the handkerchief he clutched in his hand, she said, “Take it slowly, Tom. It’s been a long day.”

That night, long after the dishes had been cleared and the nurse had coaxed Thomas back up the stairs, Julianna sat alone at the little table with the bride cake no one had eaten. It was a tall monstrosity of a thing—surely overambitious for Farrow Cottage—iced with a thick layer of gleaming white sugar that had been worked into stiff peaks and scalloped borders. Someone— Fred’s chef, no doubt—had brushed the icing with a faint dusting of gold leaf that caught the lamplight.

At the cake’s crown perched a pair of sugar figures, a bride and groom no bigger than her thumb. The groom stood straight and impassive, one arm stiffly bent. The bride’s face was smoothed into a pleasant, vacant smile, her painted eyes forever lifted up and gazing at her groom. She plucked the woman from the cake and held her in her hands.

The rest of the cottage was quiet if not exactly peaceful. It had been too busy a day for anything as prosaic as peace. Upstairs she could hear Thomas turning in his bed and the nurse’s faint footsteps as she too readied herself for sleep.

She moved her hand to set the bride back onto the cake but at the last moment popped the woman into her mouth instead. The rush of sugar made her teeth ache but she bit down anyway and tried to savor it. Sugar was a luxury after all and not one she was accustomed to. But it was too sweet, too much, and she swallowed it down rather than spitting it back out.

Outside, wind worried at the eaves and she feared a storm might be brewing. It was the middle of April and Dorset was located in the south of England along the coast, but still the weather would not let up.

Julianna rose at last and climbed the stairs, stopping at the narrow space outside Thomas’s door where she sometimes slept. She leaned her forehead to the wood, listening to him breathe, and let the exhaustion roll through her in a silent wave.

Married, she thought, and still alone.

A WEDDING NIGHT DIVIDED: SEDGEWICK AT THE INN, FARROW AT HOME

The Poisoned Quill – May 2nd, 1860

Printed on Cheap Paper for the Dearly Interested

My Dearest Readers,

The deed is done. The Earl of Chester has secured himself a wife in Miss Julianna Farrow. A lady whose ambitions have made themselves much clearer than her affections. One trusts she finds the title satisfactory, if not the man.

Rather than accompany her husband to Sedgewick Manor or Chester House, the newly minted Countess elected to remove herself to Farrow Cottage under the ever-convenient pretext of attending her invalid brother. The groom, meanwhile, was left to contemplate matrimony in solitude.

A license may ensure a ceremony, it seems, but it cannot compel a wife.

To secure a coronet and yet avoid the customary duties attached to it requires a particular kind of calculation—one Miss Farrow appears to possess in abundance.

Naturally we shall continue to watch the Countess, whose conduct promises to be far more instructive than her vows.

Ever Yours in Suspicion & Swift Judgment,

E.S. Mallory

Editor-at-Large, The Poisoned Quill