“It is so,” she insisted. “I want to wear gowns of my own choosing—I am sick of being such a dowd—and I want to paint all day if I so choose. And I want to spend money as frivolously as I like!”
Eliza could not seem to stop, the words spilling out of her.
“I want to light fires in the daytime and to go where I please, and most of all—most of all, Margaret—I want to have married the man I loved, not the one duty required. But I did not. And nothing can change that, so you’ll forgive me if, after a lifetime of being denied every single one of my desires, I seem defeatist now.”
Eliza gave an angry swipe at her eyes. Mrs. Balfour had her wish for tears at last, but it was far too late for them to be of any use.
“Well,” Margaret said, after a short silence, “you may not be able to achieve all of that, but in your own establishment, you could certainly try—”
“They would never let me,” Eliza interrupted. “I am a widow in my first year of mourning. The rules . . .”
“E-li-za,” Margaret said, drawing out each syllable in remonstration. “You are not mousy little Miss Balfour, anymore. You are a countess. You own ten thousand acres of land. You are richer than our whole family put together. Isn’t now the time to break the rules?”
Again, Eliza found herself staring at Margaret. Nothing she said was wrong, exactly, but the way she had arranged the facts, to make it seem as if Eliza now held some power . . . It did not feel true.
“This is your chance to finally have a life of your own,” Margaret said. “I cannot bear you to waste it—oh, what I would do for such an opportunity!”
Margaret was leaning forward now, her hands clasped tightly before her, and Eliza wished, suddenly, that the fortune could have been gifted to Margaret, not her. For Margaret, braver, cleverer—and certainly more outspoken than Eliza—would surely make the most of such a chance. She deserved it, too. Deserved more from life than being shipped around the family to look after their various children, overlooked and unimportant—trapped, indeed—as the last unmarried sister. It might not be said aloud, but Eliza knew their family considered Margaret irredeemable, on the shelf: a spinster. It was not fair.
The injustice of it all began to burn in Eliza’s chest, hotter than the brandy. “Obedient and dutiful,” her husband had called her in his will. “Incapable of causing a raised eyebrow,” Somerset had announced to the whole room. And that is how everyone had always seen her. It was the chief reason the late earl had wanted to marry her in the first place, perceiving Eliza’s timidity to be proof of her malleability—and in all the years of their marriage, Eliza had never once given him reason to disbelieve this. But perhaps Margaret was right. Perhaps now was her chance. Perhaps now was their chance.
“I could not do so alone,” Eliza said slowly. “To live alone would be most improper.”
“Oh, society is positively riddled with spinsters and widows that you might invite to act as your companion,” Margaret said, dismissing this at once. “Any respectable female would add to your consequence—I would come, but Lavinia is with child again.”
“Lavinia is a shrew,” Eliza pointed out.
“But a very fertile shrew,” Margaret said. “As soon as the child is born, she will require me, and my mother will insist I go and—and that will be the end of that. You will have to do this without me.”
Without Margaret, Eliza’s resolve would crumble within a week.
“When is the child expected?” Eliza asked.
“Mid-April, all being well,” Margaret said. She looked at Eliza contemplatively. “Though . . . Lavinia will not need me until then.”
“If I wrote to your mother,” Eliza said, “begged your company for three more months . . . ?”
“Just until the baby comes,” Margaret said, a smile beginning to form around her lips. “Three more months is not so great a request.”
A silence lay between them for a moment.
“We would have to be very, very careful,” Eliza said.
A veritable grin now spread across Margaret’s face.
“I am serious, Margaret,” Eliza said. “If the Selwyns catch a whiff of impropriety, they will start caterwauling about the morality clause. We need to think of a reason we are not going to Balfour—one everyone will accept.”
“Where shall we go?” Margaret asked. “London?”
“London . . .” Eliza said wistfully. Eliza had barely visited the metropolis since her own first (and last) Season. She imagined herself and Margaret living there, free and independent to take in as much art and as many museums as they liked. In May, it would be the opening of the Royal Academy’s Summer Exhibition, a sight Eliza had not seen since she was seventeen . . . But no.
“It cannot be London while I am in full mourning,” Eliza said. “We would be in immediate disgrace.”
“Another town, then,” Margaret suggested. “A town, with enough entertainment to occupy us, even if you cannot attend any public occasions. What about Bath?”
Bath. Eliza considered it.
“Yes,” she said at last. “For I believe there is entertainment to be had there of a quiet nature and I could say I had been prescribed a course of the waters by the doctor. No one would know it was a lie.”
“I will visit the libraries, and attend concerts, and meet interesting new persons,” Margaret said, voice dreamy.
“Yes, indeed,” Eliza said. “And I will . . . I will . . .”
Eliza’s voice faltered, doubt crept in. In her mind’s eye, all at once appeared Mrs. Balfour’s disapproving expression, and Eliza wilted under the imagined glare. She would be so disappointed. Her father, too. Eliza bit her lip and looked up to her grandfather’s painting, hanging upon the wall—that tiny, brave boat that remained afloat only by overwhelming effort. Margaret made a gentle encouraging noise, as one might soothe a spooked horse, and Eliza took a deep, deep breath.
“While I will become . . . a lady of fashion?” Eliza suggested.
“Yes,” Margaret said at once.
“And I will paint,” Eliza went on, firmer now.
“All day if you should choose it.”
“And—and I will never again marry for duty!” Eliza said, throat very dry all of a sudden. “That—that is behind me, now.”
Across from her, Margaret swept her glass up into the air.
“Now that is a toast I like,” she said. “To Bath!”
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