I sidled up to him now and tried to hold his hand.
“I need to speak with you in my study.” Edmund shook me off. “It’s important.”
“Couldn’t we speak in bed?” I asked. I hadn’t ventured there yet lest my affections be taken for lust. Perhaps one day things would be as they should and he would come to me.
“No.”
“Very well.” I quit the room and hurried up the stairs ahead of him to show willing.
It was only when I reached the top that I realized Edmund was far behind and pausing between steps, using the banister for support.
“Do you need me to help?”
“Go into my study and clear a seat for yourself, Lydia,” he said. “Do not mother me so.”
Despite my efforts a few days previously, his study had returned to a state of disarray. The chair opposite Edmund’s was hidden under papers. Torn-out pages from sporting journals covered the desk. I didn’t disturb the pile on the chair but perched on a clear corner of the table. That way Edmund and I could be closer.
He sighed when he saw me up there, my legs swinging like a girl’s, but did not scold me. Instead he sat and, once he’d recovered his breath, reached with deliberation to grasp one paper. How he distinguished between them was beyond me. He drew it to him with the air of a lawyer. “Lydia, yesterday you may have noticed that I was gone for some hours—”
“Yes, you were surveying the estate with Tom Sewell and some of the laboring men in preparation for the harvest. You told me so,” I said. Did he think I’d forgotten?
“No, Lydia, I was not,” said Edmund, putting on his spectacles and examining the paper. Whatever it said was more interesting to him than I was.
I stilled my legs. “You were not?”
A few moments ago, I’d been full to bursting, suffering the uncomfortable tightness that accompanied the hour before Marshall removed my corset at the end of the day, but now my stomach felt empty, like it was folding back on itself, hollowing me out.
“I took advantage of the mild weather to ride to Thirsk,” he said, without raising his head.
I flicked through a mental catalog of the people we knew, trying to identify whom Edmund might have visited in the town of Thirsk, but failed to find a likely candidate. It was typical for him to keep things from me, but yesterday’s outright deception was something new. I’d thought him to be on the property when he was miles away and on an errand that was as yet opaque to me.
“What if something had happened to you?” I asked, because I could not voice my real objection. My voice was quavering, balanced on a knife edge between anger and tears.
“I can ride a horse, Lydia,” said Edmund, looking up from the paper and raising his voice too.
We both knew that while this was true, he couldn’t ride as he once had, with energy and confidence and power. That was how Ned and Bessy had developed their own love of horses, by clinging on to their father as he jumped hedge after hedge. I couldn’t bear to watch back then, certain they would fall.
“I went to Thirsk to consult with a Dr. William Ryott, a physician. Dr. Crosby knows him well.”
Ryott. The name stirred some memory, but I could not place it.
“But Dr. Crosby is our physician,” I said, my tone flat now.
“I wanted a second opinion,” Edmund said, with a shrug. “Crosby is hardly the territorial sort, and Mother had recommended Ryott especially.”
“Your mother?” I interrupted him. “I might have known she was behind this.”
“My mother is not part of this conversation.”
“But she is, isn’t she?” I said, sliding off the desk. A few pages tumbled to the floor in my wake. I didn’t retrieve them. He shouldn’t live in such chaos. “She always is. There is no escaping her.”
“One’s family is not something to be escaped, Lydia, but—” Edmund paused and studied my face as if searching for something. “But perhaps that is what you think?” he said slowly, as if this was a revelation to him. “You wish to be free of us? Of me?”
“No, Edmund, no,” I said, anger giving way to a rush of fear that turned to tenderness. How to tell him that without a husband, without him, I’d be a leaf caught up in a storm, a ship without anchor?
“No matter.” His voice was small and sad. His eyes were fixed again on the paper. “Dr. Ryott was most helpful. He listened to my history, let my blood, and recommended a tonic to improve my constitution.”
“Did he tell you to prepare for…?” My question trailed off.
Edmund shook his head. “No need for you to panic. He plans to visit here in the next months. To call upon me as a friend, you understand, not to treat me as his patient. I insisted. But on my ride back, it struck me that one day, you and the children must manage without me.”
No need for you to panic. He was frightening me for nothing.
“Edmund, you are younger than me,” I said. I rarely admitted this. “I won’t entertain this morbid humor.”
“You must.” Edmund grabbed my arm and tried to force me to sit again. “And so, tonight, I wish to talk to you of my will.”
“Your will? At eleven at night?” I was veering between annoyance and alarm.
“Lydia, be reasonable.” He was almost shouting now. “For the last couple of months, you have fawned over me and dogged my every move. But tonight, when there is something I actually want from you, you protest. It is intolerable.”
Edmund had noticed my efforts. He just didn’t care. Dart after dart, piercing my pride. And I had thrown away Branwell, who noticed even the slightest change in me, and parsed my every sentence as if it were a line of poetry.
I nodded.
“Should the day come before Ned’s majority, you must look after everything. See this little red book? Accounts. Consult it when wages are due or to pay the old servants their pensions. And use it to record your own spending. See, here in the margin, the date, the payee, and the amount, in pounds, shillings, and pence? And here, the opening and closing balance? Ensure that you note to yourself where you could be more economical.”
“Edmund, I am not a fool,” I said, tipping the book shut. I had my own money, after all, from a small inheritance. Had he forgotten that I kept accounts with milliners and dressmakers and had never kept them waiting for their dues? “Was this what you wished to tell me?” The only thing worse than Edmund’s silence was when he insisted on speaking so far from the script I would have written for him.
“No, Lydia.” He drew another paper to him. “About the will. Charles Thorp will be the executor.”
His brother-in-law? An unsurprising choice, but should Edmund die before his mother did, he might as well have crowned her directly.
He handed the paper to me. I scanned it, but unless I was misunderstanding the elaborate prose, there was nothing in here that was unusual.
“I don’t understand,” I said. “Is there something in here that should seem strange to me?”
Edmund stood and strolled to the window. “Some husbands, Lydia, are draconian in their last wills and testaments.” He paused.
Was he about to threaten me?
“But I want you to know—need you to know—that I will not be.”