I’m at the threshold when, behind me, my father says suddenly, “It was Persephone.”
I glance over my shoulder. “What?”
He has his elbows resting upon his desk, fingers pressed into his forehead. He still wears his wedding ring, a thin gold band he must have had polished recently, for it shines. “Or . . . no, it had to be Persephone. She misspelled it in every letter.”
“What are you talking about?” I ask.
“That was the name of the ship she was on,” he replies, then lowers his hands and nods once. The matter settled. “The Persephone.”
3
Louisa sends a card the next morning, and I call upon her after lunch.
Imogene, the woman Edward has lived with for almost a decade, gives me a hug at the door, which I struggle to react to like I’m being embraced and not stabbed. “I heard you had quite a day yesterday,” she says, rubbing her hands up and down my arms like she’s warming me. “Was your father cross with you?”
“He . . . wasn’t pleased,” I say, the grandest understatement of the generation. “Where’s Lou?”
“In the library,” she says, though her hand on my arm is guiding me the opposite direction. “But Edward wants a word with you first. He’s in the dining room.”
Oh God, how can one sentence inspire so much dread? I start to sweat, though I’ve just stepped in from the spring chill.
Edward is sitting alone at the long table, unwigged and running a hand over his shorn hair as he reads a stack of documents spread before him. He looks up when I knock, and I realize that, atop all those pages is my Everyman pamphlet.
“Adrian!” He beams when he sees me, and I smile back. Somehow, in spite of being best known for rallying social reformers and raising hell in the House of Commons, Edward is still the most likeable man anyone knows. He’s been arrested four times, twice put in solitary confinement, and can swear extensively in each of the four languages he speaks. But he’s also easy to make laugh, and is also sincerely interested in any conversation on any subject with almost anyone. When he and Lou came for tea after we were first engaged, my mother walked him around her gardens for almost an hour—far longer than he had likely expected when he asked about her hydrangeas. I was ready to make apologies for her enthusiasm when he returned to Lou and me, but before I could, he said, with real fascination, “Did you know that pumpkin squash can be pollenated with a pipette when necessary for reproduction?”
Now, he stands for me as I enter his dining room, his smile too wide for his face. “How are you? Did your father give you a bad time about yesterday?”
“A bit,” I say. The sight of my pamphlet has momentarily distracted me from shuffling through possibilities of what it is he wants to speak to me about, which range from You did not protect Louisa from the law; neither did you adequately stand up for our cause of reformation, rendering you completely useless to I changed my mind and decided you have ruined my sister before your wedding and I will now castrate you in the middle of the table; please lie down and hold still.
As unlikely as the latter seems, my rabid-dog brain still gives it a good shake. Edward knows I often spend the night, and after a decade of him and Imogene living together unwed, I could challenge him on the grounds of both willful ignorance and hypocrisy. Though the plausibility of a worry has never stopped me from asking it to dance.
“Would you sit down for a moment?” Edward gestures me to the spot beside him at the table. I don’t pull the chair out far enough and end up wedging myself into the gap between it and the table. I accidentally ram my shin into one of the legs and have to bite my tongue to keep from groaning in pain.
Edward folds my pamphlet so the title is visible, then holds it up for me to see. “Louisa had these printed for our rally last month at the Saint James Workhouse. She didn’t mention you wrote it.” He pauses, like I might confirm this. I do not, so he presses on. “I assumed she was the author, though between you and me, she doesn’t write this well.” He glances quickly at the door, to make sure she isn’t within hearing, then grins conspiratorially at me. “Don’t tell her I said that.”
I stare down at the dark polished wood of the table and dig my nails into my thigh. “It was a lark.”
“I wish anything I wrote on a lark was half as good as this.”
“It’s not good.”
“I think it’s brilliant. Lots of people do. We had more requests for it than we had copies printed. Most people had already heard of it before we offered it to them. I heard about it being read aloud in front of the Old Bailey last week.”
I wonder momentarily what he would do if I went completely boneless and slumped to the floor beneath the table, then slithered away on my belly, out of the house and into the street, and no one ever heard from me again. I don’t like his praise. I don’t want it—somehow it only makes me feel more rotten about my work, like it’s a drunk friend I have to make excuses for. “I’m sure they only took them to be polite.”
“They took them because you have important things to say, and you say them so well,” he says, and I curl my toes inside my shoes. “It’s a skill to condense complex subjects into digestible talking points while staying conversational and witty.” He beams at me, the apples of his cheeks rosy, and I wonder if Edward is ever unsure what to do with his hands, or feels too tall and like his own body fits him poorly.
“Was your father’s request for your acceleration to the Lords approved?” he asks.
I debate for a moment whether I’m more anxious about his potential response to the truth, or the idea of lying to him. “We decided it wasn’t the right time.”
He knocks his knuckles on the table. “Damn, I was hoping to have you for the vote. You would be on our side, yes?” I try to look at him but panic at the last second and end up raising my face and then fully closing my eyes like a loon. It’s too much to hope he didn’t notice, and when I open my eyes again, he’s running his fingers along the creased edges of the pamphlet. “Does your father know that your politics lean so strongly toward the Whigs?” he asks carefully.
“No,” I say quickly. I wasn’t planning to make that known until after he was dead, and even then, I hoped to be radical as quietly as possible. Lou’s and my arrest rather spoiled that, though if Father remains dedicated to the notion that ignoring something will make it go away, I am more than willing to be ignored.
“Hm.” Edward sets the pamphlet on the table between us, then leans back in his chair and surveys me. “Well, if we can’t have you in person, perhaps you’d allow me to read this in the House of Lords when the bill is presented?”
Oh God, this is so much worse than being castrated. I can feel red blotches rising along my neck. “What?”
“The bill I’m supporting—the one for restructuring bail fees for the magistrates who run the workhouses? It seems likely it will pass in the Commons, and if it does, I’ve been granted permission to speak on it in the Lords. It’s a small step, but it will open the conversation of larger reforms to the workhouse system. This pamphlet about the Saint James Workhouse and what you’ve seen there firsthand would make compelling evidence that may convince several—”