She hadn’t backed down, merely raised her chin. “Then I will wait.”
“You don’t have a choice,” he said offhandedly, as if it were a sidenote and not the most devastating statement in the entire world.
Then he closed her door and left.
Eliza didn’t remember the wedding. In fact, those following weeks still felt like a blur. Perhaps that was on purpose, a way to make the pain more manageable.
Eliza had grown up with William and his vicious tongue, butwith marriage came the introduction of clumsy fists. Maybe it was because Kit was gone. Maybe it was because he hated how much she hated him. Or maybe there was no reason at all. Maybe William was just a sad, pathetic man who was grasping at straws to feel strong and important, and one of those straws just happened to be her throat.
“Uppity bitch,” he used to mumble, usually after he had come into her room unannounced and forced himself into her bed without another word.
Thankfully, he grew bored of her quickly. The relief was short-lived, though, as stories of her husband’s dalliances began to find her ear. Eliza had never expected him to be loyal, but she had expected discretion. Perhaps that was her mistake. Discretion required respect, and William never offered that. So she flirted. Any man who so much as looked at her got a smile, a laugh, anything to poke alive that part of her that had once felt vital and loved and worthy. It was always just that, a flirtation, a passing glance.
Then she met Geoffrey Williams, an officer from a regiment stationed nearby, and he had indulged her more than any man ever had. There was conversation and compliments over the course of the Season, until it all came to a head at a concert at Delaford. After the music was finished, he had asked for a tour of the gallery, and Eliza obliged, showing him the collection of family portraits and landscapes. At the end of the long room, he had taken her hand, pulling her close to the window so they were hidden by the curtain, and he kissed her.
It had been so long since she had been the recipient of affection that she hadn’t even thought of pushing him away until they heard a door close nearby.
“We should go,” she whispered.
“And where should we go, Mrs. Brandon?” he had whisperedin her ear. “Back to the party, or out to the garden? It’s your choice.”
Your choice. It was such an intoxicating proposition. When was the last time she had been given a choice? How much different would her life be if she had? And if this was it, the one opportunity she had to be master of her own life, then she would take it. So she chose the garden.
She let him take her, right there against the ivy-covered wall where she used to explore as a child. And as her legs went around his waist, as he forced her back up against the cold stone, she gripped his red coat and let herself imagine that he was Kit. That he had come back from his war and saved her from this loneliness, this desolate excuse for a life.
Afterward, she learned quickly that no one comes to save you. That when you end up pregnant with another man’s child, and your husband finds out and beats you to the point of almost killing you, then throws you out onto the streets, while keeping your fortune and your home, you must navigate that yourself.
For the briefest of moments, she had felt free. Yes, she had no money, no prospects, but she hadn’t worried. For the first time in her life, she had free will. She had a choice. And when she gave birth to a little girl a few months later, she was confident enough to name her Eliza, after herself, because men shouldn’t be the only ones allowed to honor themselves in their progeny. Because women’s survival was just as important.
But Eliza quickly learned that the world wasn’t designed that way. Where she thought she would have a choice, she soon found only condemnation. The responsibility of all those choices that had been made for her now landed squarely at her feet, and all she could do was take what menial jobs she could find to keep her andher daughter out of the poorhouse. But then the cough arrived in her chest, and even that became impossible.
She wasn’t Eliza Brandon, lady of Delaford House. She was just Eliza. And she was dying.
The physician said it was consumption, and by the time he came to see her at the small room she had rented in the East End of London, he said it was too far advanced to offer anything but prayers. Two weeks later she could barely get out of bed to take care of her baby, let alone find work. The bills accrued quickly, but there was nothing to be done. No one wanted to hire an unmarried woman with a small child, let alone one who was deathly ill. So she and her baby were hauled off to a debtor’s prison.
When Eliza was a child, she had thought dying young would be romantic somehow, like a character in one of her novels, but that was only because she thought it would always be inspired by romance, the ultimate genuflection to love. But no, this was just pain and loneliness and fatigue. A slow atrophy of life in a tiny room with a single bed and one stale meal a day. Not the ending she intended.
That’s where Kit found her, after she had been there for three months. The sickness had taken hold of her lungs, and she had begun to find blood in her handkerchief after a coughing fit. She had convinced herself that she would never leave that place when she heard that familiar voice again. “Hello, Eve.”
She used the last bit of her energy to turn her head, and there he was. Standing in the doorway of her dilapidated room.
“Hello, Kit,” she had said, tears already forming in her eyes.
Except he wasn’t her Kit anymore. He was Colonel Christopher Brandon, a moniker that brought with it new creases to his forehead, a sad turn to his lips. The voice that had always carried a hintof amusement was now grave, and his eyes serious. Had his military service done that? It had been only a few years, but then, she knew how much a person could go through in that period of time. Who knows what war and bloodshed he had been forced to witness.
But he had come back to her. She hadn’t asked how, and she didn’t inquire about the swiftness with which he had her out of that place, how much he had paid to clear her debts. She knew only that he smiled when he held her daughter and made her laugh. And for the first time in almost two years, Eliza felt hopeful.
A few days later, she woke up here, a cottage north of London. Being saved was nothing like it was written in her old novels. What had once seemed so romantic and sweeping was, in reality, quite perfunctory and logical. Her things were new, but she had no idea from where. There was a governess watching her daughter, but Eliza didn’t know the woman’s name. It was all so much better than it had been, but she also understood the motive even if Kit didn’t have the courage to tell her: It was in anticipation for the moment she was gone.
“I want to marry you,” he said one day as he sat beside her bed and held her hand.
She tried to smile, even though she barely had the energy. “I’m still technically married to your brother, you know.”
“Then I will force him to give you a divorce. I don’t care if it takes a hundred years.”
“I fear I don’t have anything close to that left.” She had hoped the words sounded light, like a joke and not a harbinger of doom. But she still felt his breath quiver from where her head rested against his chest.
After a long moment, she looked up and met his tear-lined eyes.
