Harriet shouldn’t push. She shouldn’t be disappointed; she knew how it could be, trying to make yourself important to someone who was important to you. But the thought of Lydia being trapped in that little house, with its crepe and its sadness and its cold corpse paintings, was nearly unbearable. “Dinner, then,” she said, trying to console them both.
Dinner was utterly ordinary. Lydia, Harriet, Mrs. Crangle, Mr. Dixit, and Mrs. Goodfellow sat at the table; Mrs. Marwood had a plate brought up to her in her room. The food was plain and plentiful; the conversation trivial; the fire crackling in the hearth was merely a way of keeping warm.
It was one of the best nights of Lydia’s life.
She stole one more lingering kiss when Harriet walked her to the door, but then it was out into the night and the dark and the cold.
The hills loomed on either side, snow-dusted. The sky above was clouded, hiding the stars. Lydia’s breath puffed into the air, and her chest grew tighter with every step she took back toward Bickerton. By now her parents would have eaten, but they wouldn’t have gone to bed. One of them always sat up until she returned—her mother crocheting by lamplight, her father with a book. A blanket over their shoulders, as the fire burned down to embers. And no relief when Lydia returned, only impatience that she’d kept them so long from their rest.
Never mind that she’d never asked them to wait up. Never mind that she was past forty, that Bickerton was a sleepy rural village not notably beset by thieves and murderers, that Lydia had spent the greater part of her life fulfilling every duty her parents could think to ask from her. Never mind, too, that she wasn’t always sure they loved her except as a vaguely daughter-shaped thing that belonged to them.
The thought flared resentfully, as she watched a single snowflake pirouette out of the leaden sky.
If only there were more of them. A flurry, a whole blizzard of white flakes, sweet as sugar. They were past due for this decade’s storm. A real tempest, that would send her back to Thornycroft for shelter—for warmth—into Harriet’s arms and Harriet’s parted lips—
She stopped abruptly, her feet frozen to the road.
Safety. Was that the only thing she was permitted to ask for? Here she was praying for a blizzard, for the risk of dying in the cold, because it made the choice to go back to Harriet a matter of safety. What about wanting? What about happiness? Why wasn’t she allowed—no, why wasn’t she allowing herself to choose what she wanted, simply because she wanted it?
Who was really holding her back?
It wasn’t her parents, she could see that now. They would be cross if she stayed out all night—but what of that? Would they love her less? If so, then their love meant nothing. If not, what was the risk?
She’d been thinking of Bickerton—possibly all her life—as a place where there was no opportunity for courage. As though she had to be the cautious one, the fearful one, because Peter had been brave. She’d been trying to make up for his loss by being everything he wasn’t.
How foolish. She couldn’t heal the loss of her brother, even if her parents saw her for who she wanted to be: Peter’s death was a separate wound, a hurt that would always hurt. Not something she had to atone for, or a debt she had to repay.
All she was doing was wasting her own time. Her own life—not a day more of which was guaranteed. She could choke on a morsel of food, she could be struck down by one of any number of sudden maladies, or be mowed down by a runaway coach in the high street. She could—she glanced up at the sky—let herself freeze to death standing stock still in the middle of a road she’d traveled a hundred times or more, because she was so existentially flummoxed by her own idiocy.
She turned her back on Bickerton and started moving again.
The walk was even more agonizing now, her impatience making a quarter-mile feel like an endless trudge. But at last she emerged from the hills to see Thornycroft Hall ahead. Candles winked in a few of its windows on the upper story—Mrs. Marwood and Mr. Dixit, if she had to guess—but Lydia was drawn around to the right, where the ballroom loomed like a high and icy hall, with a single star flickering in its depths.
Lydia crunched across the stone patio and rapped at the glass door.
It was a long, breathless moment—but then Harriet was there, on the glass’s other side, a lonely taper in her hand and a look of astonishment in her eyes.
Lydia grinned, and gave a little wave.
Harriet pulled the door open with some effort and a screech of old hinges that ought to have killed all the romance in the air. “Am I dreaming?” she whispered, then shivered at the draft. “Aren’t you cold?”
“Not anymore,” Lydia said, and reached for her.
Harriet grasped her cold hands before they could touch skin. “Yes you are,” she said, sounding peevish, but failing to keep the smile from her lips. She pulled Lydia over the threshold, and pushed the protesting door shut.
Lydia stared up at the ceiling, where painted angels fluttered just out of reach of the light. She still held all her newfound bravery in her hands, but didn’t know where to put it. Harriet raised a single eyebrow. “I changed my mind,” Lydia said.
“I gathered that,” Harriet replied dryly.
Lydia turned and looked at her. “You changed your clothes.”
At dinner Harriet had been wearing a gown of deep burgundy wool in the stark and elegant lines she favored. Her night-dress was flannel, practical as Lydia might have guessed. But over it she’d put on a dressing gown of what could only be silk, blue-green with embroidered birds that fluttered life-size at the hem and vanished into pinpricks at the bust and shoulders. Deep-piled velvet in the same hue lined the cuffs and the long collar piece.
It was a luscious, extravagant garment that was made to be admired. “Expecting someone special?” Lydia murmured.
Harriet blushed beneath the scrutiny, and raised her chin. “How many years has it been since you danced here, Miss Wraxhall?”
“A decade at least.”
