Something sharp cut right through her chest, the feeling so horrifying that she glanced down to see if a knife hilt was sticking out from between her ribs. She saw the swell of her breasts, encased in white tulle. She was wearing this fluffy thing for him. A cold sensation rose inside her, all-consuming like the tide of an icy sea. She couldn’t seem to see very well.
“No,” she said, looking at him, trying to clear her vision by blinking. “You never gave the impression.”
“Well, that’s a relief,” she heard him say. “Little Tipsy Head. You were my best chum up there in that windy place, you do know that, don’t you?”
Chum. Chum?
Steps sounded outside the library. Charlie ducked and stilled.
“Let’s get out of here,” he hissed when all was quiet again. He dropped the Ivanhoe on a side table.
“You did say we should marry,” she said when his hand was on the doorknob.
His head jerked round to her. “What?”
Her mouth smiled, making light of it. “In the artifact room. The day you came to see the stone from Alexandria.”
Charlie frowned. “Why, I was nine years old when I said that.”
“Twelve. You were twelve.”
His confused expression did not change, and she understood that whether nine or twelve, he had been a child and only an imbecile would put stock in the word of a child.
“You said our estates would have made one grand estate,” she added, loathing herself as the words came out of her mouth.
Charlie’s inane smile returned. “Indeed, they would have made a grand estate. But aren’t you married to your books in any case?” He cracked the door open and listened into the corridor. “Come. Let’s go back. Do me the honor of a dance?”
She couldn’t move. One step out of this room and she’d fall into an abyss, a world without Charlie. I can change, she wanted to say. I will sew my book pocket shut. Just don’t leave me, don’t leave me. You are my only friend. She followed him down the corridor. A group of his friends, brimful with punch, poured around the corner and absorbed them. Somehow, Charlie and she became separated.
She never remembered how she returned to the Campbell town house. Her mind was racing round like a mad rat in a cage. Had there been a magical phrase that could have set the wheels in motion in her favor? A gesture she could have made to change his mind? She should have told him that she loved him. Her journey to Applecross passed by in a fog, and the days blurred together while she lay on her bed in the tower room, next to his letters. She had been useful to him. Chum. As a woman, she was deficient in his eyes, missing some vital component to be considered for the wife role. Her uncertainty in how to be in such an ill-fitting body was apparently visible to outsiders. It confirmed it: something was wrong with her.
Her father came to her room and sat in the chair while she had her face buried in a pillow. He wanted to know if Charlie had done something to her, something he ought to discuss with Charlie’s father. No, he had done nothing. He wasn’t interested.
“It feels as though I’m dying,” she sobbed. “I wish I were dead.”
The earl was shocked. “Child, such violent emotions are not normal, not healthy.”
He would know. She had heard him howl the night Mama and the baby had died.
The next day, Wester Ross told her she would attend a boarding school in Switzerland.
“It’s an etiquette school for ladies,” he added when she was too stunned to speak. “Your mother wasn’t here to guide you. Mrs. Keller and her teachers will help you to become a proper woman.”
She glared in disbelief. “I’m not going there.”
He gave her a gloomy look. “It would break my heart to force you,” he said. “However, don’t think that I won’t.”
An iron band seemed to snap around her chest, and it tightened until all air was squeezed from her. She fell back onto the bed.
“If I were the only person in the world,” she said to the ceiling, “how would I even know I was a woman? Who would tell me? Who would make me? I would just be me. Why can’t I just be me?”
The earl was quiet for a moment. “An interesting hypothesis,” he then allowed. “But no one is ever just themselves.”
It occurred to her that he looked old; he was barely forty but there were grooves bracketing his mouth and his dark curls were shot through with gray. Perhaps that was why she had relented. She still had left Applecross feeling betrayed, with two dramatic conclusions in her luggage: