She paused, the burning edge of her rage slightly spent, realising she should probably avoid completely destroying her reputation.
‘Oh, don’t worry. You can tell me. I’ve never liked that godawful woman. Besides, if Agatha Best’s got anything to do with it, we’ll all know soon enough.’
‘Man-stealing,’ Etta explained. She could feel her anger rising again just at the memory. ‘She was my friend, but she took Max Stanhope – who is, you know, the most handsome, cleverest,themost amusing man in the country – she took him into the hall and she kissed him just when she knew people would be walking there. And I just caught them, along with her mother, and, oh, the bloody Bramleys. There were multiple witnesses.’
‘Oh, there were, were there? And I suppose you, young lady, wanted him for yourself?’
Etta wiped an angry tear away. ‘Of course I did! Who wouldn’t? He’s the most fascinating, kindest, the most – I don’t know,comfortableman I’ve ever met.’
‘And heir to an ancient, prestigious marquessate, of course.’
‘Look, he can’t help being a posho, can he? Poor sod.’
She picked up her plate again, dejectedly stuffed half an eclair into her mouth, and kept talking.
‘Look, I gotta go. My mother has finished her conversation and I need to ask her to call our carriage. Sorry for unloading onto you. I bet this’ll come back and bite me in the arse just like everything else.’ She handed the stranger her plate. ‘Try one of these. They’re delicious. Besides, I’m sweet enough already.’
Chapter 45
1818
Etta didn’t sleep that night. She lay transfixed by the note Bessie had brought her in Clarissa’s fine, swirly handwriting:
Etta,
I will not apologise for what you saw last night. I must be married, and quickly, before my youth fades. The time we have spent together with Lord Stanhope and the courtesy he has shown to even one such as you tells me he will be a kind and decent husband.
I know you may find yourself unable to move past this, and that we can no longer be friends after my engagement to Lord Stanhope, but I hope you will one day find it in you to wish me happy.
Clarissa
So that was it, then. The only man who knew and could understand her full story was gone forever.
The man she loved. There was no doubting it now. Her whole heart and body screamed out for him.
But Max was as trapped as she was, if not more. He had been caught with Clarissa and she’d had them drummed into her enough by now to know that Regency rules dictated he would have to marry her even though the double-crossing bitch had duped them both. Lady Best would no doubt ensureeveryoneknew about the pathetic smooch in the hallway.
Etta rolled back over in bed and stared at the wall, crumpling Clarissa’s rage-inducing note in her hand. She’d never really had a long-term relationship, but she’d had lots of short ones and had never had any problems ending them. Breaking up with someone because they had been caught in a hallway kissing someone else and now must marry them wasn’t really a 2023 problem.
It had been a while since she’d even thought of 2023. It was almost hard to believe she’d ever been a single woman, completely independent. Hard to remember the wild period of travel she’d been on after Dad had died, when she’d skipped a month of lectures and just caught the first flight to Paris with a backpack and caught train after train around Europe, grieving not only the dad she’d had but the dad she’dwishedshe’d had. But her grief had followed her.
Etta sat up in bed, the solution obvious. She didn’t have to feel how she felt; she didn’t have to endure this. The solution was right in front of her: the bracelet. Just break the damn bracelet!
She scrambled over to her knicker drawer, but it was nowhere to be found. Ten minutes later she’d emptied out every trinket box and drawer in her room.
She was panicking, she knew. And the panic just swept over her again and again as she realised what a trap she’d been caught in all these months. She might have been havingfun at parties, wearing pretty dresses, playing the piano as much as she liked and sparring with Maria Marley, but if she thought about it, she didn’t actually have any autonomy in this age, did she? She couldn’t marry the man she loved. She couldn’t vote, she couldn’t have a bank account, she couldn’t even go on a bloody walk without a chaperone! She was chattel.
But she was still Etta Moore underneath it all, wasn’t she? She didn’t need to break some stupid bloody magical bracelet to escape. She had feet and arms and a brain of her own. And she could still speak French, right? She surveyed her room. There were no bars on her four-poster bed. No chains on her legs. What, precisely, was stopping her?
She had more to pack this time – her dress wouldn’t fit in a backpack, that was certain – but maybe this time her grief wouldn’t fit in her baggage. Maybe that, at least, she could leave behind.
As she sat in the crowded carriage later, stuffed between a sleeping elderly woman and a younger man awkwardly desperate not to touch her, Etta felt a large pang of guilt. It was far, far worse than the time she’d stolen a Mars bar after school as a child. Then, she’d felt so much guilt she couldn’t eat it and had buried it in a plant pot instead. Her dad had found it six months later.
This was definitely her darkest day. Etta had stolen from pretty much everyone.
She’d known she’d need money, but not how much – she so rarely spent any that she still wasn’t sure how it worked. So for that, she’d ransacked Charlie’s study and her mother’s dressing table.
She needed clothes – normal clothes, not the soft, thin clothes of the rich. So, she took a trip to the laundry and pilfered some of the servants’ clothes. Etta had felt like the worst kind of criminal as she crept around the house before dawn. It was by far the most dreadful thing she had ever, ever done in her life. She felt almost as detached from her actions as she had during her first few days in 1817, when she’d still thought she was living in a dream.
