He was gone by the time she woke the following morning. It wasn’t the earliest instance when he had left before dawn, so she hadn’t thought too much of it. But then his absence continued the day after, and the day after. Two weeks later, she sat in front of the dying fire in their small apartment, trying her best to think of where he could be, when she noticed something buried beneath a month’s worth of ash and embers. She was almost thankful she didn’t have enough money to pay the maid to clean out the fireplace or she would have missed it. A small white corner, like a piece of paper half hidden under the soot. She used the long poker to pull it out from beneath the grate. After a few moments, she had it close enough to the mantel that she could reach for it with her bare hand, but she didn’t need to. She could already tell what it was. She recognized her handwriting, the swiftness with which it was written.
Her letter to Charlotte.
Willoughby had never sent it.
“Coward,” she whispered at the glowing embers, tears in her eyes.
The reality of her predicament hit her quickly then. Her friend had never received her instructions, had never delivered her note to the Colonel. No one knew where she was, what had happened over the past few months. Now she was a pregnant, penniless girl in an inn that had yet to be paid.
But she didn’t have time to wallow.
She ran through her limited options, then eventually went to the desk, wrote out a note, and hurried outside to find a postrider to deliver it to Delaford House in Dorset as quickly as possible. She used her most charming smile to reassure the impatient landlord that her husband had simply been delayed and would be there by the next day with payment, that there was truly no need to call upon the authorities. Wouldn’t he like a song or two on the piano? She knew a wonderful jig.
The next day, after a restless night alone, there was a frantic knock on her door at the inn. Eliza rushed to it, tears already falling down her cheeks as she flung it open and found a disheveled Colonial Brandon staring back at her.
The look in his eyes was not anger, as she had expected; there was only sadness. Such utter sorrow that, for the first time, her guilt overshadowed her pain.
“I’m so sorry—”
“Stop.” He held up his hand and pulled her in for a tight hug. “Eliza, it will be all right.”
No, it won’t, she thought. But she didn’t say it. She just let him usher her outside and into his waiting carriage.
She had been at Delaford House only a few days before she heard the staff gossiping. And a few days later, their whisperswere confirmed by a letter from Charlotte, with news from their friends in Bath.
John Willoughby was in love with someone else.
Eliza tried to get information about the young woman—her name, her family, anything she could. She thought that perhaps facts would help it make sense, and sever her connection to him. Alas, they didn’t. She learned the woman was named Marianne Dashwood. She lived in a cottage on the outskirts of Barton Park, just a few miles from Delaford. And she was beautiful and curious, clever and bright.
Eliza couldn’t hate her. In truth, she sounded like someone she would have quite liked. Perhaps someone she would have been friends with.
If only that were the way the world had been architected. One where women’s voices were adhered to, where their opinions were respected and their choices were trusted to dictate the future ahead. Perhaps then Willoughby would have listened to his aunt and proposed marriage to Eliza. Perhaps Eliza could have been the one to spurn him. Perhaps she could even have met Marianne and told her of her history with the man, and the two of them could have laughed at his expense. They could have truly become friends, one at Delaford and one at Barton Park, and they could have visited and together warned her daughter of such men in the world.
But it wasn’t.
So here she was. Repeating mistakes that felt inevitable, simply because she had no other option.
For all the talk of women’s irrationality and extreme emotions, it was the Colonel who was in London now, challenging her former lover to a duel. It was Willoughby who had followed his whims to another woman as soon as real sense was required. Menreacting only to emotion, while the women stayed home, carefully planning for the aftermath.
As she walked the halls of the Colonel’s home, forced to avoid the outside world and their judgmental words, her hand absently cradled her swollen belly. That long thread of women who had come before was about to get a bit longer, a line thrown to the future in the hopes that the next woman might know what to do with it. That it might be better for her, then.
Maybe, in that way, it wasn’t an ending, really. Eliza had made mistakes, but her baby could have a chance at happiness. At love. At independence and choice and everything her books had once promised her. The need for it came from somewhere bone-deep. Maybe she could carry her mother’s name, but also something deeper, an instinct that had been passed down to her, too, which Eliza now began to listen to.
She could do it on her own.
Thankfully, it was winter, which meant Eliza could keep the pregnancy a relative secret under blankets and thick dresses while she made arrangements. She could hide it from the staff at her uncle’s estate quite easily under large wool blankets while writing letters, setting things in place. By the time the leaves started to peek out on the branches of the apple trees in the garden, and Colonel Brandon was down to just his very trusted help for the start of summer, Eliza knew it was time to share her plans.
“America?” Colonel Brandon asked one day, looking up from his book. The weather had warmed and the sun was out for the first time in days, so they were both sitting outside in the gardens.
“Yes,” Eliza replied.
They couldn’t keep this secret forever. She knew it was only a matter of time before a rumor spread—Did you hear? Like mother,like daughter—and she would be cast out of proper society, taking Colonel Brandon along with her. She could never allow that to happen.
“But I’ve already made arrangements,” he replied patiently. “You will go to the country, far away from prying eyes and news of Willoughby’s—”
“You once told me of a family connection, an old friend with some prominence in the Americas, in New York,” Eliza interrupted, desperate to shift the conversation forward. “The Van Rensselaers.”
“Yes,” Uncle Brandon said, sitting up straighter. “It’s been many years, but yes.”
