Page 20 of Bella Darcy is on the Run

Bella waited, but Aunt Lydia had already returned her attention to the page in front of her. When she noticed that her niece had not moved, she went on. Lydia waved vaguely at the papers. "Monday is generally for pamphlets and petitions. Tuesday is abolition, Wednesday we assist at the Cornwall Society for the Education of Young Women, Thursday is devoted to women requiring assistance out of unfortunate circumstances, and Friday is flexible. We go where we are needed. It is my great passion alongside my artistic endeavours. She gave Bella a wide grin. "You did not think I spent my time by the sea embroidering and attending to my correspondence did you? Your mother and aunts could attest to my failure to keep up with my letters."

Amelia looked up from the page she was reading. "We do our best to be useful. Although the Reform act has extended the vote to more men, women are still largely a decorative adornment in our society. In our own small way, and in our own small corner of the land, we try to be useful and to take a stand for those with even less of a voice than we enjoy."

"What are you wearing?" said Bella, before abruptly covering her mouth with her hand. The thought had tripped out before she had a chance to soften or delay it.

Mrs Gossling let out a high, reedy laugh, and her aunt Lydia and Miss Blaine quickly joined in the gaiety. Bella looked from one face to the other, feeling for the moment that she had not arrived in Cornwall so much as on another planet entirely.

"Sit, child, sit," said Mrs Gossling. "We are an unconventional society, and I suppose, on the surface at least, I am more unconventional than the rest. I spent a great deal of time in India with my dear, late Archibald and picked up some of the customs and dress. You would be surprised how much easier it is to move about the world without all the restrictive clothing the English insist upon. The good people of Falmouth are rather used to my eccentricities, and so shall you become."

"I always think you look very becoming," said her aunt Lydia loyally.

"Indeed," added Miss Blaine. "Now do sit down and eat. Nothing good ever came of standing about with your mouth agape, unless you have some great desire to catch flies."

Merry laughter rang out again, and Bella was soon absorbed into a comfortable chaos the likes of which she had never experienced before. Breakfasts with her family could hardly be called formal, but there was a clear order to them. Everyone knew her role. Her father read from the paper while receiving her mother's gentle barbs with fond affection, Kate buried herself in some large and likely very dull tome and Mina sketched or chattered, usually both at once. It was the comfortable hum of a family breakfast, familiar enough that Bella could have predicted almost every moment. This was something else entirely, all overlapping chatter and good-hearted disagreement, interspersed with grand plans and furious note-taking. She enjoyed it enormously.

After breakfast, Lydia announced that she had several errands to complete in town and asked Bella if she would like to accompany her. Bella agreed at once. Clara had already made herself at home below stairs and, when Bella went in search of her, she found her sitting at the kitchen table with a cup of tea, listening with great interest as the cook related some local scandal. She left them to their gossip and collected her own bonnet before heading out in the fresh morning air.

The morning was bright and breezy as she and Lydia made their way down the hill towards the centre of Falmouth. Bella had been too tired and worried to truly absorb the town the day before and she delighted in the bustle of the place, which seemed to gather around them with every step. The road dipped steeply between crowded houses, giving her brief glimpses of blue water and tall masts beyond the rooftops, while carts rattled past and sailors called to one another further down towards the harbour. Women wheeled barrows piled with fish, bread, vegetables and all manner of other goods, calling out their wares as they went, and by the time Bella and Lydia reached the busier streets below, she hardly knew where to look first.

Lydia appeared to know everybody. She had barely left her own street before she was stopping to enquire after somebody's mother and receive a lengthy account of a neighbour's bad leg. Bella followed along beside her, increasingly amused. "You know half of Falmouth, Aunt"

"Oh, more than half, I should think. I have been here for years." Lydia waved cheerfully at a man on the opposite side of the road. "That is Mr Pascoe. His wife makes the most excellent seed cake."

Bella laughed. "Do you never miss Hertfordshire, or your family?"

"Oh, sometimes of course. I miss everyone dreadfully when I think about it too much, so I try not to."

They continued down the hill, Lydia pausing to peer into the window of a milliner and comment on the inferiority of this particular vendor's ribbons before they continued on.

"Why did you come here?" asked Bella, observing her aunt from under her lashes.

"Oh, I suppose because it was far away from everyone else. Goodness, that sounds terrible when I say it aloud." Lydia gave a little laugh. "It was only that everyone was so concerned about me. Everyone had an opinion on where I should go or what I should do, and I suppose I wanted to find my own way and create a new life away from the expectations of my family and, well, the general scandal that had come to be associated with my name."

Bella had been nodding along placidly, feeling that her aunt's plight matched her own rather well, but she stopped short at the word scandal, causing Lydia to be pulled back a little where she still held Bella's arm.

Lydia laughed merrily. "Oh, my dear, please do not tell me you are unaware of the scandalous story of Mrs Wickham."

"I... that is, I had no notion. I knew that you married young and that your husband was perhaps not well liked by the family, but that is all."

"I was sixteen when I met Wickham and thought myself terribly in love. We ran away together."

Bella stared at her. "You ran away?"

"Indeed, I did. I thought myself the heroine in a romantic novel."

"No one ever said a word. Not Mama, nor Aunt Jane, nor Papa, nor Uncle Charles."

"I suppose they thought it a kindness. Your aunt Kitty would have told you everything in a flash. She did love to gossip." Lydia's smile softened. "Oh, I miss her."

They walked on a few more steps before Lydia continued.

"I suppose the short version is that when I was sixteen, I ran away with a no-good lieutenant called Wickham, whom I thought myself desperately in love with. It very quickly transpired that my dear Wickham was mostly in love with himself. After several rather torturous years living in the north and turning the other cheek to his gambling, drinking and more than one whisper about his behaviour with other women, he finally met his end. He was called out after a dalliance with another officer's wife and died from the wound. And so my life had to begin again."

The information was delivered so matter-of-factly that Bella hardly knew what to think. "I am so sorry. That must have been so difficult. I had no notion. I would not have asked if I had known. I hope I did not cause you pain."

"Oh, my beautiful Bella, there is no pain in it now. A little regret, perhaps." Lydia squeezed her arm. "You see, I ran away because I thought I was going on some great grown-up adventure, but really I was running towards something that did not exist and giving up choices I did not know I might one day want."

Bella waited quietly for her to go on.