Lucy paused in her spot in the center of the grotto. “You must miss her very much.”
Aunt Kelmarsh went utterly still, staring at Lucy.
Lucy looked back, her face calm, her eyes soft.
Tension crackled in the air, making Catherine tense her shoulders and bite her tongue to silence questions.
Aunt Kelmarsh sent her one flicker of a glance—and straightened, lifting her chin in the air. “She was my very soul.”
Lucy nodded, as if this were a perfectly expected reply, and went back to admiring the grotto.
For a heartbeat, Catherine was too stunned to move. Then memories washed over her, of all the years Aunt Kelmarsh had spent with Mother at Ruche Abbey. Picnics in the summer. Walking together every evening at twilight. Letters flowing back and forth whenever they were separated by so much as a single day. As she watched, the light flickered and shifted, the blurred lens of a young girl’s notice sharpening into the more precise view of mature adulthood.
Of course it was a love affair. It had been love the whole time.
Catherine’s shock broke beneath the weight of this truth, leaving behind only the embarrassed feeling that she should have seen it properly long, long before now.
Her aunt was watching her warily. As soon as Catherine was able to meet her eye, Aunt Kelmarsh said: “They don’t let you have anything whole, you know. If you don’t follow the pattern. You have to find your happiness in bits and pieces instead. But it can still add up to something beautiful.”
“Even if it all comes to nothing,” Lucy said, ducking past an arch to peer at the shell-studded dome above her, “what else are you to do? Sit around being miserable and bemoaning the ways of the world?”
Aunt Kelmarsh snorted genially. “The ways of the world aren’t so permanent as they say, my dear. It was quite different in the last century. There were times and places one could be open and free about such things.”
Lucy’s smile was knowing. “And there aren’t now?”
Aunt Kelmarsh pursed her lips, amused. “If you know where to look for them.”
“Or who to ask, apparently.”
Aunt Kelmarsh put on her most mysterious air, humming innocently.
Lucy laughed.
Catherine was having trouble finding her footing in the conversation. She felt as brittle and stiff as the leaves of the willow beside her, their edges sharp with ice, every little lick of wind making them shiver. She’d known marriage could exist separately from love—it had taken less than a year for her own affections for George to wither like a plant unwatered—but she had never openly acknowledged that the reverse must be true as well: love could exist—could even thrive—quite apart from the paper forms of marriage and classifications of sex. It was all at once appalling that she and George had been bitterly bound to one another in the sight of the world, while these devoted souls had had to cloak their joy and hide it behind walls and walks and secret gardens.
Aunt Kelmarsh might have been a stepmother, instead of an aunt.
It was a thought to break the heart. Catherine valued family all the more for having so little left of it. She knew an embrace was not to her aunt’s taste, so instead she tucked her arm in Aunt Kelmarsh’s and leaned gently into the older woman’s shoulder. “Thank you for bringing us here,” she said softly.
The older woman’s cheeks were red with more than the wind. Her lips curved in relieved affection. “I’m glad to know you appreciate it for what it is.” With one more glance at the bright oranges and golds of the shell grotto, she turned Catherine around on the path. “Now, let us get out of this cold and into Cook’s best brandy punch.”
“Can you serve brandy punch in April?” Catherine asked.
Aunt Kelmarsh chortled. “My dearest girl: who’s going to stop us?”
Catherine and Lucy took their leave much later than they’d anticipated, bundled up in the sunset light with hot bricks at their feet and their cloaks wrapped tight around them. Lucy soon fell into a doze: Aunt Kelmarsh had indeed been generous with the brandy punch. Lucy’s bonnet was slightly askew, and a tendril of her dark hair had come loose and trailed down her cheek. She stirred slightly now and again, lips murmuring things that weren’t quite words. Catherine made herself comfortable in the opposite seat and finally opened up the box with the thoughts she’d been hiding away for most of her existence.
The inescapable truth: women could fall in love with other women.
Strange indeed that an idea could change your life so completely, and yet fit in so perfectly with all that came before. She felt the force of it in her very bones. It was less as if her biography were being rewritten, and more as though Catherine were suddenly able to read the other set of lines that lay crosswise on the familiar page. The way the curve of one woman’s waist had made her heart race. The elation when that Italian viscountess with dark hair and sparkling eyes had laughed at Catherine’s teasing. It was desire, the same as she’d felt for the attractive men she’d known, and some sly part of her must have recognized this all along because she had put a great deal of effort into keeping these thoughts and impulses from seeing the light of day.
And for what? For a proper, unhappy marriage and a proper, lonely widowhood. She’d taken a lover after George’s death, simply because she could: she was stranded, temporarily exiled from England by the uncertainty of the wars, and her sudden freedom from George’s constraints had sparked her into reckless rebellion. She’d drunk too much champagne, flirted outrageously with an embassy secretary, and embarked on an absolute tempest of an affair.
Then, at the one-year mark, her lover had gone down on one knee, and Catherine had been forced to break off the liaison. She had not known until he asked the question how deep ran her horror of putting herself once more under a man’s legal, financial, and emotional control. Her lover had been shocked, and angry. The parting had been bitter on both sides, and Catherine had not repeated the experiment. Better to remain alone, if seeking physical comfort led to one party’s raised hopes and everyone’s ultimate painful disappointment.
She’d believed she could bear a widow’s loneliness more peacefully than the misery of a bad marriage. But that was like choosing whether hemlock or belladonna was the better poison. In the end, they both sapped the life from you.
That same sly voice whispered to her now: if she had an affair with a woman, she wouldn’t have to dread the specter of marriage at all.
