Another knock, then Harriet’s voice: “Isabel? Please open the door.”
She lowers the knife. If she stays quiet, Harriet may leave again.
“Isabel?”
There’s an itch in her throat. She fights it, but eventually it comes out in the shape of a cough behind her hand.
“Isabel? Please, I must speak with you!”
No, you mustn’t,she thinks. Not now.
There’s the sound of hands moving against the door and then the latch inside lifts. If only she had put a lock on the door.
Harriet’s face is pale in the doorway. Relief washes over it when she spots Isabel. “Oh, there you are. I knew you were in. I checked the garden.” She opens the door wider, steps through it, catches sight of the hair on the floor, the hair in Isabel’s hand, the knife. Both of her hands go to her mouth. “Oh! Whatever are youdoing?”
“That’s none of your concern,” she says.
“You’re cutting your hair!” Harriet says, stepping closer. “Oh, but you’re doing it all wrong.”
“I—what? I beg your pardon?”
“You’re taking too big a bunch at a time. That’s why it’s so uneven,” Harriet says. “You’ve been hacking at it, haven’t you?”
“Sawing, rather.”
“You’ll want to take only a very little and slice through it quickly, if you want it to look a little neater.” Harriet lifts up a strand of hair no thicker than a piece of string. “No more than this. Here, let me do it. You’ll never be able to do the back properly yourself.”
Before Isabel can protest, Harriet takes the knife from her and begins to cut her hair. “How do you know this?” Isabel says. “You weren’t taught by a barber, were you?”
Harriet giggles. “Would that I were! I once cut off rather a lot of my hair. It was far more difficult than I thought it would be. After the first few minutes of fruitless hacking, I realized cutting it in small sections was the key.”
“Thank you,” Isabel says as the first strands of hair drift to the floor. “Why did you cut your hair?”
“Oh, as a sort of protest, when my parents promised me to Sir Hugh. I was fourteen. I thought if I cut my hair, Sir Hugh wouldn’t want me anymore.” She giggles again. “Poor Sir Hugh. I must’ve looked a fright. I wouldn’t know—my parents banned me from using a looking glass for a year, until the wedding. By then it had grown back a bit. Sir Hugh didn’t mind in the least.”
“You were very young,” she says.
Harriet half shrugs. “Not much younger than you.”
They’re both silent. The only sound is the scratching of the knife as it goes through the hair. A small mountain of it covers the stone flags at her feet. She feels strangely unworried about this, as if her fears for Jack blot out all other concerns.
Harriet says, “I could’ve done worse. Sir Hugh has always been good to me.”
“You could’ve married a naval officer who got killed at the age of twenty. Or gotten engaged to a smuggler.”
Harriet smiles. “How I hated the thought of marrying him, though. Poor Sir Hugh, I hope he never realized. He was so much older than me and so terribly forbidding and stern. He still is, of course; you’ve seen him.” She lowers the knife and says, “So you see, Isabel, I do know a bit about loneliness. I experience it every day in my marriage.”
“I’m sorry,” Isabel says, in spite of herself.
Harriet resumes her cutting. “Yes, well, so am I. I’m sorry I didn’t let you explain after I got that letter. Sir Hugh was terribly angry that I should’ve befriended someone with such a—I’m sorry to say it now, but such a tarnished reputation. He feared it may reflect on my own. I…I thought I agreed with him, but I have missed seeing you these past weeks, and I see now I have done you an injustice by not giving you the chance to tell your side of the story.”
“I spoke very harshly to you just now,” Isabel says. “I apologize, Harriet.”
Harriet says, “I deserved it. I knocked again just now to tell you that. However, I didn’t expect to find you trying to cut your hair! You’re lucky I came in. You may have cut yourself if you tried to do the back on your own.”
“Aren’t you going to ask me why I’m cutting it?”
Working on some strands at the back, Harriet says, “I’m sure you have your reasons. I confess you’ve piqued my curiosity, but I feel rather as if I have forfeited the right to ask. There is one thing I should like to ask you, however, though I don’t know if you’ll care to answer.”
