Chapter Text
Now, with a vestal luster glows the Vale,
Thine sacred friendship, permanent as pure;
In vain, the stern authorities assail
In vain, persuasion spreads her silken lure.
Llangollen Vale by Anna Seward, written for Anna Butler and Sarah Ponsonby, the Ladies of Llangollen
It is not that I do not feel–
The words are stuck at the tip of her tongue, poised to jump the moment the opportunity presents itself. Eloise scans the ballroom, looking for a tell-tale swish of pink chiffon, and a coif of blonde curls, but Cressida is nowhere to be found.
“Unlike her to miss a ball,” she mutters, to no one in particular.
She’s sitting alone on a balcony overlooking the dance floor, having been forgotten by her mother the moment Lord Samadani whisked Franchesca off to the dance floor. Colin hadn’t been in the mood to come – he was acting so weird lately – and Benedict has disappeared god knows where with god knows who, so there isn’t even anyone to sneak a drink or smoke from. She will have to suffer through this ball entirely sober and entirely alone.
The theme, she thinks, is rather on the nose. Eros and Psyche. What a silly little myth. It’s her least favorite of the tales in Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Men and women always seemed to be making up convoluted reasons as to why they couldn’t be together. She much preferred the story of Jason and Medea – at least in that case, the tragedy was entirely the fault of the heroes themselves.
The thin click of heels on stone steps interrupts her thoughts.
“Eloise, there you are,” Cressida says, turning the corner into the balcony. “I’ve been searching for you all evening.”
“Should you not be careful talking to me?” she asks, with a scoff, thinking of Lord Cowper’s cruel words the previous day when Eloise had come to call on her. When she had once again tried and failed to get those stupid little words to leave her mouth. “I am that Bridgerton girl, after all.”
“You heard that?” She sighs and turns away, looking out to the ballroom only for a moment before once more meeting her gaze. “I apologize for my father.”
Eloise matches her stare with intensity, afraid to look away. “And I apologize that he is a bloody fool.”
“Eloise!” Cressida whispers, in a faint sense of scandal that easily dissolves into contagious giggles.
“If you need to keep your distance from me for a while, I understand.”
It’s a poke, a tease, a scare, a challenge. She wants to see if she’ll run away, given the opportunity. She wants to know if she’ll stick by her, regardless of her family’s talk. Eloise does not want to throw away everything on nothing.
Cressida is silent for a moment, once again not meeting her gaze. She takes a deep breath. Her eyes are glassy, maybe watery. Eloise gets the sense she is holding the weight of something giant, but she can’t tell what. The dismissed maid? Her father’s friend in Scotland? Her own dashed hopes for marriage this season?
“No,” she says, finally. “My father will have to endure it. Besides… He is a fool.”
They both laugh this time. Glances fluttering back and forth, unable to sustain it for too long. Eloise rubs her neck, looks away, and thinks of too many things to name.
“You are unlike many people, Eloise. How is it you have the courage to be so different?”
She gives a bitter chuckle. “It is not courage. I simply cannot understand why others do not see things the way I do.”
“And how do you see things, exactly?” She shifts in her seat, and stares at her, expectant. It's as if someone has set up a brilliant array of mirrors, to redirect all the light of the sun directly into her. An intense bright warmth. Near-burning.
“Well,” Eloise starts. “Since you have asked…”
Where to start? Where on Earth to start?
Should she mention Aristotle, his flawed description of woman as inverted man? Hildegard von Bingen? Mary Wollenstonecraft? Should she trace the lineage of thoughts on gender all the way back to the creation of the world? To Adam? To Eve?
Do not bore her. Start simple.
“My father had this book,” she begins. “This very old book from the time of King James. I found it in his study, shortly after he died, and I became obsessed with it. Because the thing about this book, besides being ornately decorated and illustrated, is that it’s full of maps that are totally wrong. Absolutely incorrect. And yet somehow, the men who made it, despite being well-educated and well-respected – and believe me, I have looked into them – really believed themselves to be right. Declared it boldly, proudly even.”
“And you laugh at them?” Cressida asks.
“No,” she shakes her head. “No, I am amazed by them. In awe of them. Declaring so loudly what they believed to be right, and being so fundamentally wrong in the process. It taught me early on, I think, that anyone can be wrong about anything.”
“And thus began your obsession with truth.”
“Yes. Well, that and… I was beginning to believe there was something desperately wrong with me.” She searches Cressida’s face, looking for any signs of recognition or identification. “Because, as you have said, I am unlike other people, especially other ladies. And it does not matter how I am poked or prodded or molded, I just spring back into my odd little shape after a certain amount of time. I can’t be helped.”
“Don’t say that!.”
“But it’s true, I can’t. And I think I’ve begun to accept that. Some people aren’t meant for…” she gestures around the room. “All this.”
“Then what are you meant for?”
“Another life.” She thinks of that house in the country she told Henry about, of books upon books, of wine and friends and a dog at her feet. She looks up at Cressida, who is staring at her with such certainty and intent and thinks about how nice it might be to share a life like that with her.
“Is such a thing even possible?”
“It is. It really is. As long as I never marry.”
“Eloise!” she seems genuinely shocked this time. “You cannot be serious!”
“I am. I am so tired of living in this game, this carousel of dinners and balls and promenades, where every single waking hour of mine hinges on the mere idea of a man. I am tired of centering them, of thinking of them so very often. I don’t even like most of them! And I know you don’t either. I want to take my life back into my own hands. And I think you should too.”
Cressida is smiling, in this devastatingly sad way that won’t meet her eyes. Her brow is furrowed. She’s shaking her head. “Eloise, I–”
“And can you imagine,” she continues, not wanting to hear whatever refusal is coming. “All the spare time there would be if we did not always have to think about marriage? The time we would have to read or exchange ideas or do anything that isn’t entirely for the purpose of ensnaring a husband.”
She’s looking away from her now. “That is interesting.” Her voice is cold and solemn.
“Isn’t it?” she tries.
“No, I meant…” Cressida points out to the dance floor. “Your brother is walking right up to Penelope and Lord Debling.”
Sure enough, Colin has appeared out of the shadows and is now sauntering up to the dancing couple in this absolutely impertinent way that makes Eloise want to go down there and hit him with her bag. Can he not see he is interrupting?
“We shall return to this conversation another time, yes?”
“Uh–” But Cressida is already off.
Eloise is left alone in the booth, with the bitter taste of failure in her mouth. What a fool she was to think Cressida would ever choose a life like that when the path of a lady is so much easier for her to walk.
Henry’s voice wafts back into her head again. Few ever get so lucky.
She needs a drink.
◆◇◆
She is not being a good or supportive sister, but she frankly cannot be bothered to try. Oh lovely, she wants to say but doesn’t. Another two souls whisked away into the hell of marriage.
It was stupid, she knows that now, to think she would have Colin and Penelope by her side forever, that if she removed herself from their trio, they would not inevitably fall into each other the way that men and women tend to do. The way Eloise simply cannot. But it truthfully does feel like there is a traitorous or incestuous edge to it. At the very least a cruel one. Like they’ve run off into the woods together to build a tree fort that reads “No Eloise allowed.”
It’s also sickening to look at them. Sneaking glances and touches when they think no one’s looking. Pretending no one can see the mark on Pen’s neck and Colin’s messed up hair and cravat. Pretending that this is all completely proper and completely right.
Oh, and then there’s the fact that everyone else seemed to know about this little dalliance already. Her whole family, grinning at each other like guilty children over the pairing up of her two best friends, acting as if they haven’t been lying to her this entire time.
Were they really lying? asks a voice in the back of her head. Or were you just not paying enough attention?
She knows, deep down, that the real culprit for her surprise is her own self-centeredness, her fleeting obsessions with one thing or another, just dragging Colin or Penelope — whichever happened to be nearby and available — along for the ride. She covers that thought up with a self-righteous fury that perhaps she did want to believe that men and women could just be friends, that everything did not always have to be about coupling up.
“I thought you would’ve been happy for them,” Benedict says, once everyone has gone home and gone to bed and it’s just the two of them, sitting in the kitchen with a bottle of wine, the lights down low.
“I am,” she tries.
He grins at her. “And everyone definitely believes that.”
“I will be, eventually,” she says. “You just have to let me… grieve it a little.”
“You really had no idea, huh?”
Eloise takes a long drink of the dark liquid. “Nope.”
“How did it go with–”
“Absolutely wonderful. Now that Debling’s free, she’s one pounce away from everything she’s ever wanted.”
“You speak of her like a lion, did you know that? Like a jungle predator.”
“I speak of her the way she speaks of herself.”
“Does she know how you feel?”
“Cressida Cowper knows very little about anything at all. Her only interests are getting herself a husband and achieving the human record for puffiest sleeves.”
“And you,” he points out.
“And for some godforsaken reason, occasionally me.” She lifts her glass up to his. “Cheers to that.” Then she clinks them together and downs the rest of her drink.
“Slow down there.” Benedict tries to pull her glass away from her.
She swats his hand away with probably more force than necessary. “Don’t touch me.”
“Someone’s in a mood.”
“It’s more than a mood,” she snips. “But if you want to diminish it to that, I will go ahead and put myself to bed.”
She stands and starts to move to the kitchen door. Her legs are a little wobbly. Benedict reaches to help her and she pushes him away again.
“Eloise, I didn’t mean–”
“Sure you didn’t.”
She pauses in the doorway, clutching it for some balance. “And if Mama asks, I am far too hungover to participate in any sort of wedding preparations. Thanks.”
◆◇◆
Eloise longs for those days in the country, when it was just the two of them, playing back-and-forth games of wit and chess in the fresh air. There was less reason there to pretend to be anything that they are not. Whatever the core of Cressida’s soul was, whatever elusive light she was hiding under all those layers of fabric, it seemed less put away there. Here, in the city, she might as well have put it under lock and key.
She sees her next at the modiste, the architecture of whatever fantastic sleeves are coming next being pinned around her thin arms in muslin. She’s standing alone when Eloise walks in, no Lady Cowper to be found.
“Oh, hello!” she says. “My mama just ran out, for a second. She’ll be back.”
“I’m sure she will.”
She scans the room for Madame Delacroix.
“She’s in the back, I think. Said she needed to get more pins.”
“Wow, look at you,” she teases. “Taking up all the pins at the modiste. Tsk. Tsk. What will the mamas say?”
Cressida cracks a small smile. It doesn’t reach her eyes.
“Are you alright?” Eloise asks her. “I haven’t seen you much since–”
“I’m fine,” she says. “Just redoubling my efforts now that Lord Debling has changed his mind.”
“Oh, he changed his mind, did he?”
“With a few careful words from me, he did.”
“Tell that to my brother.”
“Well, it’s partially thanks to your brother. His rudeness was… quite awakening.”
Eloise stares at her, a smile forming on her face. “You don’t know… do you?”
“Know what?”
“Lady Whistledown hasn’t–?”
“Hasn’t what?”
Eloise laughs. “That little minx. When did she learn to keep her mouth shut?”
“Do you know something I don’t, Eloise?”
“Would hardly be the first time.”
“Tell me.”
“Should I?” she asks, walking towards her in a slow, wide circle, letting her steps act as a ticking clock for Cressida’s impatience. “It sounds like it’s really quite the secret.”
“Since when have you stopped sharing your secrets with me?”
“Since I realized I enjoy watching you squirm.”
That hangs in the air for a moment before she realizes the full implications of what she’s just said. Cressida’s face flushes. She lets out an indignant, frustrated breath. “Fine,” she says, after a very long moment. “Don’t tell me.”
“But you want to know.” She steps closer.
“I never said that.”
“You didn’t have to.”
Eloise is two steps away from her now, a strange feeling of power and confidence surging through her. She closes the gap. Brings her lips just next to Cressida’s ear, thinking of the woman in red at Henry’s party, the shivers that went through her then. She wants to make her feel all of that tenfold.
“My brother is engaged to Penelope Featherington,” she whispers.
The words are not what matters here. What matters is the rise and fall of Cressida’s chest. The heat of her breath. That damned overpowering floral smell that has an almost intoxicating effect on her. What matters is the delicate little hum that escapes her pink mouth, the knowledge that she hasn’t even registered the words yet, too caught up in the closeness.
“Eloise…” she says.
“What?”
“You are being improper.” She doesn’t sound like she minds it one bit.
“Doesn’t sound like you’re complaining.”
“You said… You said you didn’t…”
“Since when have you ever given a damn about the words I say?”
Footsteps. Eloise jumps back from Cressida just as Madame Delecroix walks back in, a new pin box in her hand.
“Ah, hello Miss Bridgerton!” she calls. “When your mama said she would be sending one of you over for Miss Franchesca’s new gown, I was not expecting it to be you!”
“Me neither,” she says, sounding much too loud and much too guilty. She wonders if the modiste can see the flush on both of their faces. “She really had to strong-arm me into it.”
“What are your thoughts?” Madame Delacroix asks.
“On Franchesca’s new gown?”
“On Miss Cowper’s sleeves.”
“They certainly are.. Something.”
“You would prefer them gone?”
“I would prefer–” she looks at Cressida and loses her train of thought because the woman is frozen, staring at her with her mouth still open, still breathing just as heavily as she was a moment before. She looks ridiculous. Eloise is half-tempted to pull her into the back storeroom, and sit with her until she regains her composure. She’s trying not to give too much mental energy to what the other half of her is tempted to do. “I would prefer her sleeveless.”
“Ah! To show off her lovely decolletage! I see your vision! Miss Cowper, what do you think about that?”
Cressida blinks, coming back down to earth. “I think…” she tries. “I think Miss Bridgerton is probably right. She does seem to know me, sometimes, better than I know myself.”
Madame Delecroix clicks her tongue. “Mmm. But what would your mama say? Do you think she will be upset with me?”
“Oh furious,” Eloise assures her. “Fuming mad.”
“We wouldn’t want that.”
“No,” Cressida agrees. Eloise can feel her eyes burning into her. “Let’s not poke the bear.”
“How about I add a tie?” Madam Delacroix suggests. “Make them removable?”
“Oh that is absolutely delicious,” she says. “Please do.”
“Delicious?” Cressida asks, a playful tone to her voice that lets Eloise know whatever freezing affect her actions may have had on her is wearing out. “I believe that is a new word in your vocabulary, Miss Bridgerton.”
“Oh, not new. Just rare. I keep my compliments rather close to my chest, you know.”
She does not miss the way her eyes flick down to her chest at that.
Eloise hadn’t put much thought into what she was wearing today – she never does. Her ladies maids at this point knew that she would toss on whatever dress they handed her in the morning, unless it was particularly uncomfortable or flashy. However, Cressida’s glances, and her attention, are enough to make her want to hang a shrine to this dress somewhere in her room.
“I do,” she agrees. “Rather close indeed.”
“Here is the dress,” Madame Delecroix says, handing her a box wrapped with ribbon as if she isn’t very clearly interrupting something. “Let me know if your sister likes it.”
“I will,” Eloise says. She does not move.
“You heard the woman,” Cressida teases. “Get going. You’re being distracting.”
Distracting indeed, she thinks, sparing one last glance her way before acquiescing and exiting the shop.
◆◇◆
Cressida debuts the sleeves at the godforsaken engagement ball at the Featherington estate – an absolutely ruinous decision considering Eloise is already half at her wit’s end by the time the party even starts.
Weddings, in general, tend to be a sandbag on her soul. Every engagement ring on a young lady’s finger is another note in the funeral dirge of womanhood blaring in her mind. It’s worse that it’s Pen, it’s worse that it’s Colin, it’s worse that she’s Whistledown and he doesn’t know. She can’t be the one to tell him. She can’t. But he has to know. The anxiety over it has made her bite her nails down to the quick, and topped it off with a splitting headache that just won’t go away.
She’s worrying at her thumb again as Cressida comes up to her, wrapped in some lustrous golden fabric that hugs her curves, her new sleeves shaped with wire into the image of crescent moons that reflect every light in the room up onto her beautiful face.
“I wish she would let you wear your hair looser,” Eloise says, in place of a greeting, thinking of days in the country when they both were only half-trying to look presentable, when Cressida’s blonde waves spilled out from the weak hold of a single hairpin. Wild and free and different.
“Do you really?” she asks. “I didn’t know you had a preference.”
“I don’t.”
“Come now, we both know that’s not true.”
She glares at her. This is payback, it must be, for her actions in the modiste. There’s nothing that emboldens Cressida quite like a beautiful gown.
“Where’s Debling?” Eloise asks, tongue tracing her lower lip as she tries to pry her eyes away from the gold fabric.
“Not here yet, apparently,” Cressida sighs. “Lady Featherington said that he might not be coming at all.”
“Too broken-hearted?”
“Or perhaps just done with the charade.”
“Is that my influence I’m hearing? Don’t think you’ve ever called it what it is before.”
She laughs. “Mark my words, it’s still a charade I very much intend on partaking in. But there’s nothing wrong with being truthful.”
“So you see merit in my point the other day?” Eloise can’t help but let a sense of seriousness creep into her voice. There is more riding on this question, so much more. The weight of planets, of galaxies, disguised as mere small talk.
Precisely why she’d call it a charade in the first place.
“I see some, yes,” she says.
“But?”
“But I am not a Bridgerton, Eloise. I am my parents' only child– their only daughter. There is no cushion of extra children and extra money for me to rely on. No viscount brother or duchess sister to protect me. Your fantasy, your worldview… It’s a luxury I do not possess.”
“And they would benefit from sending you to Scotland?”
“They would benefit from no longer having to provide for me.”
“But, we could provide for ourselves–”
“Eloise–” Cressida grabs her arms tight. “You must stop this, alright? I am not a child. I am a woman. And I am going to be married, if not by Lord Debling than by someone else.”
It doesn’t make sense. It doesn’t. How can she be so coy, so involved one minute and so shut off the next? Ice and fire, ice and fire. The whiplash is too much, a numbness spreading out from her fingertips.
“And that’s it then? You’re just going to give up? Stop fighting?”
“I have been fighting my entire life. In ways you cannot even begin to understand. Do not patronize me.”
“Fighting for what?” Her laugh is mean, she knows that, but she does it anyway. “A proper husband?”
“For myself.”
“I do not think that is true. I think you are fighting for who you wish you were, because if you were truly fighting for yourself you would be fighting for the path that will actually make you happy.”
“Who says a husband will not make me happy?”
“Me! I am saying that. Right now. Because I know you, Cressida. I know there is a deep, frigid well of sadness inside of you that wouldn’t go away even if you married a prince. You could be in a castle and you would still be miserable because you would still be living a lie.”
“You don’t know that.”
“I do. Because it’s in me, too. It’s why we get along. It’s why we are the same.”
Cressida stares at her, brow furrowed, eyes hard. Hands still gripping Eloise tight. She didn’t realize it before, but she does now – she’s shaking. This beautiful, regal, frigid mess of a woman is shaking and holding her so tight and she’s doing it in front of everyone. Eloise hates the Ton, very suddenly. Hates every single debutante and mama with hungry eyes and loud mouths. None of them deserve to see Cressida like this. No matter what she’s done or said to them, no matter her sins. No one gets to see the ice queen crumble.
“Come on,” she grabs her wrist and begins to move off the dance floor. “Let’s go talk about this somewhere quieter.”
◆◇◆
She pulls her out into the garden, past a couple being very handsy behind a climbing ivy. There is no endgame or direction behind her steps, just the impulse to get away, to get them both away, before someone shatters the amber of the moment.
Eloise knows these gardens well, used to run around with balls and hoops and Pen following close behind way back when. Another life. A simpler time. Before anyone could’ve told her she wasn’t going to get anything she wanted. When the world was grand and open and boundless, when sirens lurked in the ocean and heaven and hell were just places on a map.
Now heaven and hell find their home in the orbit of her hand around Cressida’s wrist. In the quiet breaths they both take as they walk through the greenery. In the gap between what is and what should be, if the world was fair. In the parallel of her girlhood self, pretending to be a prince on a daring adventure to slay a dragon, chasing Penelope’s sisters with a stick.
She stops at the edge of that earth– the place where the hedge goes high. Here she finally lets go of Cressida’s hand and walks away from her, towards the hedge, hoping by the time she reaches the branches she will have figured out what she is going to say.
Eloise Bridgerton, at a loss for words. Some might be shocked.
When she turns around, she finds Cressida sitting on a bench, staring at her, arms crossed, frowning. One of her sleeves has come untied from the rest of the gown. A single crescent moon dangles at her armpit. Instead of speaking, Eloise picks up the little cables and weaves them back into the eyelets on her dress, trying her hardest to be gentle, to be reverent, even if they are ridiculous.
“Don’t bother–” Cressida says, stilling her with a touch of her hand. “I’m sick of them.”
Eloise gapes at her. “But they’re gorgeous.”
“They’re my mother’s idea. And I’m tired of carrying the weight.”
She nods, then undoes her work, loosening first one sleeve and then another until Cressida is standing sleeveless in the garden. The moon is bright and full overhead, and it falls through the trees onto her collarbone like a mosaic work of art, like stained glass. Like something ancient and holy. Like something to be worshiped.
“There,” she says, finally. “Isn’t that better?”
“Somewhat… Thank you, Eloise.”
“Now you can stretch your wings.”
She laughs. “My what?”
“Your wings. I’ve always thought you have the countenance of a very pretty bird.”
“You are ridiculous!”
“What I am,” Eloise starts. Here it goes. “Is a liar.”
Her smile falls. “What?” she asks, voice very small.
“I’m a liar.” She grabs Cressida’s hand and clutches it to her chest. “And quite a bad one at that, so I’m amazed you believed me in the first place. But it wasn’t nothing, the other night, in my room. I just lied and I said that it was because everything was so new and confusing and I didn’t want to mess things up or lose you before I had the chance to figure out what was going on with me.”
She pauses for a moment, to search her face. Looking for any hint or sign that this is all about to go terribly wrong. A tick of the brow or hint of a frown. Nothing. She keeps going.
“But I have learned a lot, actually, in the past few weeks. About myself, about people – women – like me, and it’s like someone has finally opened a window in the suffocating heat of this tiny little room we call life. I feel like I can breathe again, like maybe I never really could before. And I look back at that life that I had, that we are both supposed to have, and I simply can’t go back. I don’t care if that ruins me. I don’t care if that makes me a spinster and an outcast who will never be invited to a ball again. I don’t care.”
She takes a step towards Cressida. Another step.
“All I care about is you, Cressida Cowper. The woman who is brilliant and funny and so much kinder than she lets on. You have changed me. You have awakened me. And in that awakening, you have destroyed me, because now I would rather have lived the rest of my old life in ignorance than live another second of this new one without you.”
Her eyes are as big as the moon. An endless blue sea. She looks like she might be about to cry.
“It’s not practical…” Cressida breathes, but Eloise can feel the heat of her gaze, can see the rise and fall of her chest, the patterns of shadow swirling up and down her collarbone.
“Oh, shut up about practicality already and kiss me.”
She leans forward and brings her face to hers. Then kisses her hard, trying to punctuate everything she’s said with every move of her lips, her tongue. She presses her nails into her bare arms, an intensity building in her, every irritating cacophony of sensations colliding into one harmonic need to have her, to force her to think of her every day for the rest of her life. No matter her ultimate choice.
Cressida responds with a soft whine as she opens her mouth to her. She leans into her touch, nearly pulling Eloise off balance. Her hands wind their way into her hair, catching on that comb – that damned comb – and pulling. She feels like mud-clay in her hands, pliable and raw, begging to be shaped into something new. She would let Cressida make and unmake her a million times over if it meant she could just keep kissing her.
A heat pools in her belly, growing with every soft sound and sigh that escapes her lips. Eloise lets her hands wander lower, softly grazing the open skin on her back, longing to dig beneath the boning of her stays. She’s just slipped the tip of them under the fabric when Cressida pulls back.
“Do you know what you’re doing?” she asks, pupils blown wide. A light smile dancing across her flushed face.
“I’ll figure it out,” Eloise says, trying to remember bits and pieces of things she recalls from dirty jokes and glimpses of flesh at Henry’s party.
“Let me show you.”
Cressida pulls Eloise down onto the bench so she’s on top of her, skirts now pooling together in a mess of layers upon layers of fabric. She lifts up her knee and rocks into her, sending a jolt of heat through her body. She clutches one of her hands and brings it to her chest. Then brushes her fingertips across the soft skin of her breasts.
Eloise stifles her moan by moving her mouth onto Cressida’s jawline, her ears, her neck. Searching for a place to live, to stay. Only encouraged by her small noises. She kisses her collarbone, her shoulder. Then moves her mouth lower, to join her hand
“This is… a bad idea…” Cressida manages, somehow.
“Oh, I wholeheartedly agree.”
“Are you stopping?”
“Absolutely not.”
She slips a hand beneath her stays, taking advantage of the new lack of sleeves and catches her nipple between her middle and forefinger. Pinches. Rolls.
She has to cover Cressida’s mouth with her hand to stifle the sound that comes next.
They both stare at each other in fear, then fall silent, waiting to see if anyone heard. When no footsteps come, they dissolve into giggles. Eloise kisses her again, softer this time.
“While I admire your enthusiasm,” Cressida says, when they pull away. “Perhaps your brother’s engagement ball is not the time.”
“Then come away with me,” she tries, one more time. “I have money, more than just my dowry. I can take care of us. My family will take care of us.”
“And what of my family?”
Eloise smiles. “Tell them I am paying you very good money to remain my spinster friend and confidante forever.”
“They will say no.”
“We won’t give them the chance.”
◆◇◆
It is too easy to slip out of the back gate of the Featherington’s gardens, hand in hand. To walk by the line of carriages arm in arm. To cross the mall expanse of Governor's Square and enter the Bridgerton House. No one gives them a second glance.
Eloise has never enjoyed this part of being a woman – the part where she is invisible – until this very moment. She relishes her visible grip on Cressida’s arm, her guilty smile, her smudged lipstick, all blurred into the background by the outside perception of just very good friends.
When they enter Bridgerton House, Mrs. Colson smiles and offers them tea, which they very politely decline.
“I’m so happy to see you finally having friends about again, Miss Eloise,” she says, not bothering to stop them as they head up the stairs to her room.
“I am happy too,” Eloise responds and thinks more than you know.
When the door has closed behind them, she begins the work of un-making Cressida. Gently tugging off her dress, undoing the lacing on her stays, pulling her hair out of its intricate updo. All the while, she returns the favor. Layers of fabric falling away from both of them, one pretense after another, until it is just the two of them in their shifts in her small, dark room.
Cressida pulls her onto the bed and presses their mouths together. Eloise reaches beneath the soft cotton of her shift, clutching her hips in her hands. It’s different, like this, when there is so little between them, no fabric or boning to stave off the currents that shoot through her at every minuscule movement, every tender touch.
When her hands move lower, Cressida flips them so she is the one on top, grabbing Eloise’s hands and holding them down on the bed. She has the fleeting thought that this may be the most beautiful she’s ever seen her, red and gleeful and brilliant, and she can’t help the smile that crosses her face.
And then Cressida dips her hand beneath her shift, into those soft places she has never had much cause to think about before. Every sensation comes to a point at the core of her being, and in between the gentle, continuous curls of her fingers, she can just manage to breathe out her name, to look her in the eye and know for certain that she has never wanted anything more, before she falls apart in her hands.
“I hate you, you know that?” Eloise asks, after the comedown.
“Do you really?” Cressida looks much too pleased with herself.
“I do. Really truly.”
“Why?”
“Because how am I ever supposed to leave this bed now?”
◆◇◆
Anthony is not happy about the whole affair. It’s to be expected.
He’s barely been back twenty minutes before calling Colin into his office to give him a lecture. Eloise waits outside, trying not to laugh as her brothers shoot barbs back and forth, each trying to justify their own insane actions.
Colin passes her in the hallway on his way out. “Good luck,” he says.”
“Oh, I don’t need luck,” she assures him. “You’ve just made my job so much easier.”
She walks into the office to find Anthony standing beside his desk, fingers pinched around his nose. “I am gone for six weeks – six – and you and Colin decide that’s the best time to dip into your trusts and unbalance all our accounts?”
Naturally, he’s more upset about the money than anything else.
“Believe it or not, Colin and my actions have nearly nothing to do with each other.”
Anthony, never one for staying on a losing thread of logic, changes courses. “You don’t even know this girl!”
“You knew Kate for hmm… a month? Before you decided to marry her?”
“That’s different.”
“How so?”
“Because we are adults and you are–”
“Chaste? Virginal? Inexperienced?”
“I was going to say too young.”
“I asked you and Mama to hold my debut back another year. You said no. As far as I’m concerned, you signed off your rights to hold my youth over my head on the day you presented me to the queen.”
He’s quiet for a moment, thinking. “People will talk.”
“I know.”
“The things they say will not be kind.”
“They never are.”
“You don’t mind?”
“Nothing to mind if I just don’t listen.”
Anthony nods and looks her up and down. “Who are you and what have you done with my baby sister?” he asks.
“I self-actualized.” She smiles. “You should try it sometime. Besides, everyone’s pretty sure Colin’s wedding is going to need to be rushed anyway with the way those two are carrying on. So really, you should be thanking your lucky stars that all I am asking is to move into the country house with a lady friend and a stack of books.”
Anthony puts his head in his hands and massages his temples. “Fine,” he says, after a very long moment. “You can have the money.”
“Wonderful.” She gives him a big kiss on the cheek. “You know, you’ve always been my favorite brother.”
“I find that unlikely,” he mumbles.
◆◇◆
Truth is not a stagnant thing, but a force, Eloise decides.
It is more than a line on a map or a candid word. It is a cup of tea fogging up a cold country windowsill. It is the morning whine of dogs at the door, asking to be let outside. It is a path in the woods after a rainstorm, covered in leaves and debris, but still transversable with good shoes and a partner. It is about timing, and patience, and most importantly choice.
She finds truth every morning in the soft line of Cressida’s sleeping body next to hers. In a practical garden of beetroot and squash and sunflowers. In the clamor of good conversation over dinner with Pen, with Colin, with Ben. She even finds it in the curious looks from their neighbors when they pass by on horseback.
Good, she thinks. Question it. Question yourselves.
She knows now that she can never find truth by digging through books and pamphlets, that she will only be left with the fleeting remains of an almost. That no guess or hypothesis will ever get it close enough to stand the test of time. That they will all become dust, eventually.
Truth is, instead, a practice she adopts. Something she chooses every time she kisses her wife or goes running around the back woods in a pair of trousers. She chooses it in the back of the pews at Colin and Penelope’s wedding, pinkies linked with Cressida’s as the priest talks about an endless, holy type of love.
Eloise does not need any book or law or king to tell her that she’s made the right choice. She knows it in her bones. This is her future, her life. There is no other choice to make.