Of course, as a child, she didn’t know it was love. All she knew was the warmth that flooded her body when she saw him, the almost euphoric high when he returned home from a long spell at school. She never knew when—the household staff barely looked at her for most of her life, let alone shared information about their employer’s family—but for a child who didn’t see the malice behind it, their silence only added to the almost unbearable anticipation of the moment when she would be caught by surprise in the library, in the middle of a book, or halfway up one of the trees in the walled garden, and she would hear Kit’s voice call out to her again. And then she would be filled with such fierce affection that she didn’t think her pulse would rest until she was able to see him, take his arm, pull him along on another adventure.
Another moment came to her suddenly, so vividly that her breath caught. She was sixteen, sitting along the banks of the small stream that ran along the far edge of Delaford’s walls. The air was filled with the smell of the freshly turned dirt as the sun peaked through the branches of the towering oaks along the opposite bank. But most of all, she remembered him, standing there on the banks, his shirt undone at his neck and his dark hair so long and messy it almost covered his eyes.
“?‘O! how joyful it is to tell of happiness, such as that of Valancourt and Emily!’?” Eliza quoted from her small leather-bound copy ofThe Mysteries of Udolpho, which sat in her lap as she extended an arm out toward the landscape beyond. “?‘To relate, that, after suffering under the oppression of the vicious and the disdain of the weak, they were, at length, restored to each other—to the beloved landscapes of their native country,—to the securest felicity of this life, that of aspiring to moral and labouring forintellectual improvement—to the pleasures of enlightened society, and to the exercise of the benevolence, which had always animated their hearts; while the bowers of La Vallée became, once more, the retreat of goodness, wisdom and domestic blessedness!’?”
“Blessed indeed,” Kit had said flatly, throwing a stone and watching it skip over the water.
“You’re missing the point,” she said, ignoring the grating sound of the bird cawing from the other side of the stream. “It’s about theemotion. What is love if not a lens with which to view the world?”
“And what else does the lens have to say?” he asked, barely curbing the small grin on his lips as a bird across the field let out a strangled cry.
Eliza paused, looking down at the page and frowning. “Nothing. That’s the end.”
“Didn’t you like it?”
“Of course. I love it. I just never understand the endings to books like these.”
He paused. “How so?”
“When the stories say ‘they lived happily ever after’ or insinuate that the rest of their days were lived without sadness or strife”—she closed the book—“that doesn’t sound happy. It sounds rather boring.”
“Would you rather their love be tested annually?” Kit said with a smile.
“No. But surely the authors can end such stories with more realistic aspirations.”
“All right then. What would be your happily ever after?”
“I’m not sure,” she said, considering. “Maybe just that life goes on. Joy doesn’t have to be grand or perfect, but pleasures that we can all attain. Like Christopher Marlowe wrote, ‘Comelive with me and be my love, / And we will all the pleasures prove, / That Valleys, groves, hills, and fields, / Woods, or steepy mountain yields.’?”
Kit watched her, his expression unreadable, like he was seeing something in her that she hadn’t meant to reveal.
“?‘If these delights thy mind may move,’?” he murmured, almost to himself. “?‘Then live with me, and be my love.’?”
She smiled. “That’s not the next line of the poem, Kit.”
“I know, Eve,” he replied, his eyes still locked on her so intensely that it felt as if her heart would stop.
Perhaps that was why, with her breath labored and the end so near, this memory had come to her. Because that was the moment she knew. She was his Eve and he was her Kit, and they were in love. They always had been. Nothing in the world felt more natural than that.
Yet, she hadn’t said anything. It felt too precious, too sacred to share, even with him. So she kept it a secret, thinking she could lock that love away in her heart so no one would find out.
How naive she had been.
“You’re in love with her, aren’t you?” William had asked his brother one evening, then scoffed. “How pathetic.”
Eliza wasn’t meant to hear it. She had merely been hoping to steal a book of poetry from the library’s mezzanine unnoticed. It was only once she was in the room, her hand creeping up to the leather-bound copy of Spenser, that she paused at the voices below.
“I’m not sure why it should concern you either way,” Kit’s voice replied from somewhere below.
“You can’t possibly be so stupid,” William replied with his typically venomous tone. “Father intends for me to marry her, not you. It’s the entire reason she’s here.”
Silence descended.
“Have either of you bothered to ask what she wants?” Kit finally asked.
“Why the hell does that matter?”
The statement was punctuated by his slithering laugh.
