“There was a time,” Lady Caroline was beginning again. Eliza tried not to listen, but . . . “When I thought I would love her for the rest of my life. But that was before I met you.”
Eliza heard Margaret give a little sob and her heart squeezed with bittersweetness.
“You as well?” Margaret whispered. Her voice was shaking.
“Of course me as well,” Caroline said, in an impatient way that was so quintessentially her that Eliza smiled, despite herself. “I have been waiting—”
But Eliza would never know for what Caroline had been waiting—for reasons Eliza could not hear, though she could well guess at, Caroline’s words broke off abruptly in the middle of her sentence. At the very bottom of the stairs, Staves the footman crossed the hallway and just as Eliza was about to wave him away, he redirected toward the kitchen.
The quiet from within the parlor lingered for one, two, three more beats then, “I leave for Paris next week,” Caroline said softly.
“Paris?” Margaret said.
“I have finished my novel,” Caroline said. “I am hopeful of publishing this year. Paris was always my plan.”
“Yes . . . of course,” Margaret said, though she sounded as if the breath had been knocked out of her. “Perhaps when you return . . .”
“Come with me,” Caroline said urgently. “You can practice your French, properly, and see Paris, and if we get bored we shall simply go to Brussels or Frankfurt or wherever.”
Eliza pressed her hand to her mouth, willing Margaret silently—but as powerfully as she could—to say yes. To seize such a future as Eliza had not been able to.
“I cannot,” Margaret said. “My family . . .”
“You would give up a chance at happiness, with me, for a family you cannot stand?” Caroline demanded incredulously.
Eliza privately agreed.
“They would never forgive me,” Margaret said. “And I would have nothing to fall back on if you and I—”
“You would have Eliza, would you not?”
Yes, Eliza thought fiercely, she would.
“It is not just that. How would it—how would we . . .”
She sounded very young, all of a sudden, as she stammered.
Caroline sighed, and her voice gentled. “To our friends—to those we trust—we might tell the truth. And to the rest, we would just be very, very good friends.”
“And we would be accepted, by society?”
“We would be discreet, of course, but Paris is more liberal than London.”
“Discreet enough to avoid rumors?” Margaret said. “To keep the secret from even the servants?”
“I trust my household wholeheartedly,” Caroline said, a faint note of reproof entering her voice. “There will always be those who will not receive us, if they suspect, but I did not think you cared so much for others’ opinions.”
“I do not,” Margaret protested quietly. “There is just so much to consider . . .”
“I have so much to show you,” Caroline said. “Margaret, come with me.”
Eliza imagined Caroline would be holding Margaret’s hands entreatingly—as she herself had done to Somerset, as Melville had tried to do to her. She squeezed her eyes shut against the memories.
Say yes, Margaret.
“I do not know,” Margaret said, her voice small. “I . . . I must think. Can you delay going, even a little?”
There was a pause so long that Eliza half wondered if it would ever be broken.
“I have spent a very long time, waiting,” Caroline said. She sounded very tired, all of a sudden. “I vowed never to do so again.”
“You must understand my concerns,” Margaret entreated. “Tell me you understand.”
“I do understand,” Caroline said. “But I cannot stay. I cannot wait.”
“Not even a little? For me?”
“I love you, Margaret,” and now there was a fullness to Caroline’s voice that spoke to tears. “But I just . . . For once, I should like to be chosen first.”
“But—”
A long pause—a kiss?
“I hope we meet again,” Caroline said.
“Don’t—don’t go!”
“I must.”
The sound of footsteps upon the floorboards. Eliza sprang from her guard up to the next landing and watched as Caroline exited, pausing outside the door a moment to breathe deeply. And then she left.
Eliza walked slowly down, feet as heavy as her heart. Inside the room Margaret was sitting alone upon the sofa, eyes dry but face very pale.
“Are you . . .” Eliza began, hardly knowing what she meant to ask, but Margaret shook her head.
“I am all right,” she said. Her voice was very high. “I am all right.”
“Very well,” Eliza said. She sat down next to her.
“I am all right.”
“It would be all right, if you were not all right,” Eliza said very softly.
“She would not wait for me,” Margaret said, voice very constricted.
“She cannot stay here, if she is to publish again,” Eliza said. “Her life would be made too difficult.”
“I know,” Margaret said, her chin wobbling. “I just . . . I just thought I was going to be braver.”
And Eliza might not have felt, these past days, any real sense of who she was anymore: whether she had been right to refuse Somerset, whether her love for Melville had been at all real—but before all of that, she had been a friend. That she had not lost. She leaned over to wrap Margaret tightly in her arms and Margaret—who Eliza had not known to weep since she was ten years old—burst into great, gulping tears and pressed her face into Eliza’s shoulder.
“I do not want to be in Bath anymore,” she said into the front of Eliza’s gown. “I just can’t be here anymore.”
“All right,” Eliza said, squeezing her tighter.
“I don’t,” Margaret said again.
“All right.”
“Can we just go? Anywhere else?”
“Of course,” Eliza said; she would have agreed to anything Margaret asked, in that moment. “Of course, I shall think of something . . .”
Her eyes fell upon the billet Lady Caroline had left on the table—the acceptance from the Royal Academy.