She could take the dress off. It felt oddly like salt-starched, soggy muslin against her skin now, anyhow.
When she stood and paced across the room to drop the pins in the little bowl on her vanity table, she spotted the envelope tucked under it.
For Hattie.
Her heart gave an aching, little lurch at Willa’s handwriting, her hands trembling as she released the pins with a tinkling series of clinks into the little holding bowl.
She ought to read it, she knew.
She wondered if any of the others had read theirs yet.
The only contents anyone had spoken of, at least in her hearing, came down to that curious gold ring.
Mea culpa.
She frowned, snatching up the letter and marching back over to her bed as she loosened the ties on her bodice. She flicked the wax seal apart and tossed it on the rumpled covers as shepulled the dress over her head and worked at the strings of her half stays, looking at the way the letter peeped tantalizingly over the flap of the envelope, spiky writing showing through the thin paper.
She kicked the dress and stays into a pile, shaking her hair free, and climbed in with the letter, her shift breezing pleasantly over her body underneath.Bare in, she thought, twisting her lips as she pulled the sheet of paper from its envelope and unfolded it carefully.Baron. Barren.
The handwriting hit her like a gong in the center of her chest.
She’d have known Willa’s pen anywhere. In any language. On any parchment.
For a moment, the writing itself seemed to swim, meaningless and narrow, just slashes of ink on the page as memories battled up against the tide of the shapes they made.
Had it really been seven years since she’d gotten a letter from this woman? Had it really been that long?
They had all written to one another feverishly in the beginning, when adulthood had pulled them in half a dozen sparkling and thrilling far-flung directions. Weekly, Hattie would rush to the post from her tour of the Continent with that erstwhile chaperone, onto the year she’d spent trading herself as a research subject in exchange for access to study at a Swiss university. They would all write, back and forth, bubbling over with enthusiasm for all the new things life was offering.
It was only as the years had started to pass that the letters had slowed. They’d slowed and slowed and eventually stopped.
And she had not noticed at all.
Hattie gave a shaky little sigh, blinking away the veil of warm, salty regret that had welled over her vision, and shook her head.
Here was one last letter, anyhow, she reasoned.
Whether she deserved it or not.
To My Darling Harriet,
This is the first letter I am writing with the thought that I might someday be dead. It is an odd thing to ponder, isn’t it? But I will be, so must we all at some point.
When I met with Mr. Harcourt this afternoon to discuss my wishes for the things I carried in this life and their fates upon my demise, I had only one wish at the outset: that you, my girl, would be my primary heiress.
I told him Hattie should be baroness. I want nothing less.
And he had, of course, laughed in that way of his and told me I was being a ninny. Perhaps he would have kept laughing, if we hadn’t gotten to a particular clause concerning the house itself, which holds a deed apart from the demesne.
Ah, but you aren’t the only clever one, are you, Hattie? I have my talents too. And you shall be baroness, which was my wish, after all.
I know you might be cursing my name in the wake of the reading of my final wishes and wondering what matter of madness had overtaken me to bind you to my nephew forever. I shall tell you—it is the madness of a life lived long enough to have gathered some degree of wisdom about matrimony.
You and Elias always had a strange dynamic between you. You followed, curious and eager, while he bristled and hid and glowered. I really did not wish to send him away, for I knew it would turn into something else entirely if the two of you were allowed to blossom into young adulthood in one another’s company.
But alas, sometimes the demands of necessity force us out of our plans and wishes.
I only take comfort that I can meddle now, from the Fields of Elysium, and that one day, you shall go to my grave, sit upon the bench next to it, and tell me I was right. Below the dirt, on that day, I will smile, as I am smiling now.
