Chapter Text
By the fourth hour of being Lady Kilmartin, Francesca had come to the conclusion that a wedding was, in its essentials, a very long piece of music performed for an audience who did not know the key, and that she was expected to play it from memory, without a single wrong note, while smiling.
The Bridgerton drawing room smelled of roses and warm candle wax and, faintly, of the ham that her younger brother Gregory had been guarding since the first course. Somewhere behind her the quartet Mama had hired was working through a country dance, and Francesca, who could not help hearing it, had listened to the second violin come in a quarter-beat late for forty bars and had felt something very close to physical pain.
That, she supposed, was as good a sign as any that she was herself. A bride was meant to be radiant, and she had been told a dozen times that she was, but the truth was that she felt like a pianoforte that had been freshly tuned and then left in a draught.
John stood at her side with his hand at the small of her back, so lightly placed that she might have forgotten it, had she not come to depend upon exactly that. He was a good man. She knew this the way she knew the order of the flats in E-flat major, without having to reach for it. He had never once asked her to be anything other than what she was, and he had never pressed her to speak when she did not wish to, and in a family where every sentence was a contest to be won he had seemed, from the first evening, like a quiet room she had belonged in.
She was quite certain that what they shared was love. She loved him as one loves a steady light left burning in a window, and if a small and unreasonable voice at the back of her mind had asked whether that was the whole of what the word was meant to hold, she had taught herself to let it go on asking without answering.
"You are doing splendidly, my dear sister," Eloise murmured from her other side, lifting her glass of wine so that it hid her mouth. "I have been watching you for an hour and I have not caught a single moment at which you looked like a woman who would rather be elsewhere, which is a feat, because I have looked like that woman since the soup."
"You have looked like that woman since you were nine years old."
"And I am consistent, which I consider one of my finest qualities." Eloise's eyes softened over the rim of the glass. "Truly, Fran, you are allowed to be tired. No one will think any less of you if you slip away to the morning room and sit in the dark for ten minutes, and if anyone does, I shall personally ensure Hyacinth spends the rest of the evening attached to their side."
Francesca was about to answer that she was perfectly well, which was true in every particular that could be measured, when John's hand left her back.
"I see my cousin has arrived after all," he said, his entire face brightening as he looked ahead. "I confess, I had begun to doubt she would manage it in time, with the roads from the north being as they are. Will you wait here a moment? I should very much like to introduce you."
"Of course," replied Francesca. "Where is-"
But he had already gone, threading through the guests with the quick, long-legged stride he reserved for moments when he forgot to be shy. She was left looking after him with the vague, pleasant curiosity of a woman who has just been told that she would be meeting her husband's cousin for the first time and believes that this is all there is to know.
She turned toward Eloise, already forming the first word of whatever she meant to say, when a laugh drifted across the room and stopped her cold. It was as though an unseen hand had closed around her throat.
Francesca went completely still, because she knew that laugh. She knew it far too well... Just like she knew the voice that followed it, low and warm with amusement, somehow reaching Francesca's ears through the somewhat crowded room.
"-I cannot decide whether I am proud of you or deeply ashamed on your behalf. Come here, I have missed you so much."
God help her, she knew that voice. She knew it as intimately as she knew the opening bars of the Ravel she had carried in her head for the better part of two years, the one piece she could never quite bring herself to set aside. She had heard that voice beneath the darkness of a garden in Bath, teasing her for being so insatiable. She had heard it break into laughter beside her. And she had heard it say her name slowly, softly, as though Francesca were something worth lingering over.
No, she thought, with perfect clarity, and the thought was not a protest but an observation, the calm voice of a person noting that the ceiling has begun to fall. No. It is someone who sounds like her. There are a great many women in England, and some of them must have a low voice.
She looked up to find John making his way back toward her, and when he came close enough, Francesca glanced beyond him to the woman at his side.
It was her.
The room did not fall, and the music did not stop, and nobody screamed, which seemed to Francesca an extraordinary oversight on the part of the universe.
Michaela was wearing a sequenced gown the color of red wine, cut close through the bodice and embroidered at the hem with gold thread. Her hair tied up in intricate braids Francesca had never seen on her before. There was a new thinness at her cheekbones, a hollowness that had not been there before, and beneath her eyes the faint shadows of a person who has been sleeping badly for a very long while and has become skilled at hiding it. But it was her, it was quite unmistakably her, and her eyes, those dark, steady, unreasonably expressive eyes, had found Francesca's face and taken it in with a single swift motion, like a hand closing over something precious that has been dropped.
It lasted less than a heartbeat. Francesca would have sworn to it in a court of law. Something passed across Michaela's features that was nothing short of anguish, and then, as though a shutter had been drawn down over a window, it was gone, and what stood in its place was a polite, curious, faintly mischievous smile, the smile of a stranger at a wedding.
Francesca's fingers had begun to tremble. She curled them into the folds of her wedding gown, and pressed her thumb hard against the side of her forefinger, round and round, until the skin burned.
"Francesca," John said, with such unguarded happiness that it was almost unbearable to hear, "It gives me great pleasure to introduce..."
It was almost as though he had left the sentence unfinished on purpose, and Michaela knew precisely when to step into it, perfectly composed, as though nothing about this moment unsettled her in the slightest.
"Michaela Stirling..."
John seemed to expect her to continue with the rest of her usual introduction, but when she did not, he glanced toward her. Michaela merely kept her mouth closed and her smile perfectly in place, offering nothing more.
Stirling, Francesca thought, her last name is Stirling.
She had known Michaela as well as Michaela had ever allowed herself to be known by her, and for whatever reason, this part of her stayed hidden. Francesca had been so afraid of asking anything at all, of turning the thing over to see the underside and finding that it was smaller than she had made it, that she had never said, And what is your family name, and where do they live, and might I write to you? Even though she had told Michaela all there was to know about her. She did not push for Michaela to do the same. She had let it remain a perfect, unexamined thing, and now it had a surname, and the surname was her own.
"A pleasure to make your acquaintance," Michaela added, sinking into a curtsy so graceful and so entirely correct that it might have been taught in a finishing school, and when she rose her eyes were brighter than Francesca had ever seen them.
"I... Um..."
Francesca had prepared for a great many things in the course of her life. She had prepared for the examination of the pianoforte at her first London recital, and for her debut, and for the long, exacting ritual of being looked at by a room full of people who wished to decide whether she was worth the looking. She had never once prepared for this, and so the words she had been taught for such occasions simply would not come. She stood in her wedding gown with her husband's hand resting lightly between her shoulder blades, and looked at a woman she had kissed beneath the summer stars, and could not produce so much as her own name.
Thankfully, Michaela was not easily rendered speechless, even when it felt as though her heart had split cleanly inside her chest and fallen somewhere beyond her reach.
"You must forgive my tardiness, Lady Kilmartin. The mail coach broke an axle outside Doncaster and I have not slept in a bed since Tuesday, so if I say anything improper, I hope you will attribute it to exhaustion and not to a flaw of character."
It was almost astonishing how easily the words still came to her, how naturally she slipped into that familiar, flirtatious ease. Except she noticed at last, as Michaela's eyes held hers, the strain living there, buried so far beneath that pleasant surface that no one else in the room would ever have found it. There was a plea in her face, bare and quick.
Please. Please. Please.
Francesca could not tell whether Michaela was asking her to speak, or to pretend, or simply not to demolish everything in front of John. Most likely it was all three.
She dragged air into her lungs. "I... Yes. The... the pleasure is mine... to make your acquaintance..." Another breath, slow, shaking. She was overly aware how how pathetic she sounded. "I hope that your journey was not... that you were not... Yes... It is.. lovely to meet you Mick...Miss Stirling."
She extended her hand toward her, for whatever reason, and realized only once it was already suspended between them that she had made a terrible mistake. She had no idea how she was meant to behave, what she was supposed to do with herself, or whether she still properly inhabited her own body at all.
Michaela hesitated before reaching out and taking Francesca's fingers into her own. Her glove was soft beneath Francesca's hand, yet even through the fabric she could feel the warmth of Michaela's skin and the faint tremor that passed through her fingers before disappearing into perfect stillness. She held Francesca's hand for scarcely three seconds before letting it go.
The smile on Michaela's face flickered, very slightly, and she began to fidget with her own fingers. She was very clearly unsettled, but she felt the need to keep speaking. "I have heard a great deal about you."
Francesca nearly laughed at how insane the sentence was.
"It is quite true," John told them, with obvious satisfaction, "I have already told Francesca far too many stories of the trouble we caused as children as well. If you can somehow be persuaded to remain in England longer than a fortnight, perhaps between the three of us, we might finally make a proper member of this family out of you."
"I should not count upon it." Michaela's eyes stayed on Francesca, steady and unblinking. "Lady Kilmartin here has known me for less than a minute, and already she appears sensible enough not to accept a hopeless charge."
Francesca felt her new title tighten round her throat each time it was spoken aloud, like a ribbon drawn a little too snug.
Michaela looked away from her first, and turned her head to Eloise with a bright, inquiring smile. "And you must be?"
"Eloise," her voice was as cool and level as a still pond, and she did not so much as courtesy. "Bridgerton. And I must say, I have also heard a great deal about you, Miss Stirling. I find that I had formed a very different impression."
As though Michaela had suddenly remembered herself, she finally offered the introduction John had been waiting for from the start. "I swear to you, every sordid detail John has spoken about me is a lie," Michaela's eyes flicked, for one brief instant, to Francesca's flushed face, and away. "The truth is far worse."
Despite herself, Eloise blushed. She was clearly flustered by the tone of Michaela's voice directed toward her.
Francesca's lungs seemed to tighten, and the room grew unbearably warm, as though she had stepped too near a flame that had always burned for her alone. Her mind slid away from the ballroom, unbidden, to a green afternoon in Bath, and Michaela lying in the grass with one forearm thrown over her eyes, laughing because Francesca had accused her of being wicked, and had then, within seconds, leaned down and proved the accusation true. It had not been much of an accusation, looking back.
John was going on about something else now, but Francesca could no longer follow it. Michaela had turned a little toward him, nodding, holding her smile in place like a woman carrying a full cup across a crowded floor, and Francesca stared at the side of her face. She had imagined this moment so many times that in the end imagination itself had failed her.
There had been a particularly cruel stretch of sleepless nights when she had pictured opening the door of the music room and finding Michaela waiting at the pianoforte, exactly as she had been on that last morning in Bath, and she had stopped allowing herself the picture, because it had hurt too much to look at.
Then she had met John.
She had noticed, almost at once, that he never demanded anything of a silence. He did not mistake quiet for unhappiness, nor try to pull conversation out of her because he was uncomfortable with the spaces between words. The first evening they sat together for nearly an hour without speaking, Francesca had gone home and told Eloise she thought she might have found the only gentleman in London who did not make her tired.
She cared for him, deeply. She had come to accept that love could look like that, simple and quiet and kind. Perhaps, she had reasoned, it had been a mistake to go burning up in the first place. She had decided that she did not wish to burn any more.
And now the fire itself stood scarcely six feet away, dressed in the very color of hot red flames.
Michaela looked at her again, and this time Francesca saw her gaze catch upon the little pendant at her throat.
It hung on a fine new chain, small enough that Mama had frowned at it that morning and asked if she would like to wear her grandmother's pearls instead. It was the wrong thing for a bride to wear, a cheap enameled trifle with one petal chipped, and still she had refused every other piece of jewelry put before her and kept it on.
Something passed over Michaela's face, too quick to name, and Francesca suddenly remembered a street seller's table, full of jewelry.
"You stared at this for ten minutes. I assumed it meant you wanted it."
"I stared because I could not decide what it was."
"It is a flower, darling. And it is now yours."
She had worn that small flower neckless beneath her dresses until the chain snapped six months later, and then she had taken it to a jeweler in Bond Street and had it mended, and told herself it was for the sake of the thing itself.
Francesca no longer could hear anything clearly. She heard, instead, the sound of her own pulse, a swift, stumbling rhythm she could not have notated in any time signature known to man, and the quartet's second violin coming in late again, and the thin, rising hum that begins in the ears before a faint. She thought with great firmness that she was going to be ill. She thought that she was going to be ill in the middle of her own wedding celebration, upon the Aubusson carpet that her mother had been so proud of, in full view of her family, and that nothing in her education had equipped her to survive it.
"Sorry," she heard herself say, in a voice so brittle that Eloise's head turned sharply beside her. "I find that I should like some air. Would you all forgive me? I... I shall only be a moment."
John turned to her at once, his brow was creased, and he lifted a hand as if to take her elbow. "You have gone white, dear. Let me come with you, you ought not to be alone if you feel faint, and I can ask Mrs. Wilson to..."
"No."
It came out harder than she intended. It came out like a door swung shut in a draught. She saw it land upon his face, the small flinch that he tried at once to smooth away, and the sight of it cut her more deeply than anything else that had happened that day, because he had done nothing, nothing at all, but be kind to her.
"Apologies," she said, more quietly, and laid her fingers for one moment upon his sleeve. "I simply need a few minutes by myself, and I cannot think while anyone is speaking to me, and I would be most grateful if you would let me go alone. I shall come back. Please stay and look after your... your cousin. She has come so far."
Francesca could not bring herself to look at Michaela as the words left her mouth. She kept her eyes elsewhere and swallowed hard against the ache gathering at the back of her throat, growing heavier with every passing second. It felt like the most difficult sentence Francesca had ever been made to speak. How was she meant to say it as though there were anything ordinary about this? Her husband's cousin was Michaela. Her Michaela. The woman Francesca had fallen in love with two years ago, the woman she had not seen since, standing before her now on the very evening of her wedding.
She crossed the room with the stiff, careful gait of a woman who has been told she must not run, past the long table and the pianoforte and her brother Benedict, who lifted one sharp eyebrow and said nothing, and went out through the tall doors to the terrace.
Francesca made it as far as the stone balustrade at the end of the terrace before her knees decided they had done enough for one day. She caught the edge of the ledge with both hands and held on to it, and found that she could not draw a breath that went deeper than her collarbones.
It was absurd. It was wholly and ridiculously absurd, for she was a woman of twenty-one who had stood before audiences of two hundred and played Scarlatti with her hands as steady as a surgeon's, and here she was, clinging to a garden wall like a child at sea. Her chest would not open. Every breath she drew stopped short, caught against some hard wall inside her, and the stays of her gown, which had been merely uncomfortable an hour ago, now closed around her ribs like the fingers of a fist. Black spots had begun to dance at the edges of her sight.
She pressed her forehead against the cold stone and thought, with a kind of distant, scientific interest, So this is how it feels, then, to die of a heart attack.
"Francesca."
Hands took her by the shoulders and turned her gently around, propping her against the balustrade.
Eloise's face swam into view, stripped of its usual teasing, her eyes wide and intent. "Look at me, sister... No, not at the garden, at me. Yes.. I am going to undo some of these laces, and you are going to stand quite still, and if anyone comes out I shall tell them that I am inspecting your hem." She worked at the ties between Francesca's shoulder blades with impatience and the hand round Francesca's ribs began, bit by bit, to ease. "That is better. Now give me your hands."
Francesca gave them. Her fingers were shaking so badly that they rattled against Eloise's wrists.
"I want you to play for me." Eloise turned her own arm over, so that the forearm lay bare and upward between them, pale in the dusk. "Right here. The Scarlatti, the one in D minor that you practiced for three months until Hyacinth threatened to set fire to the pianoforte. Start from the first bar. Do it on my arm. I want every note."
It was such a peculiar request that she might have laughed if it were possible. Her fingers, which had been trembling, came down upon Eloise's wrist almost of their own accord, index, middle, ring, and began to move.
She had no need to think. She had played it so many times that it lived in the bones of her hands, the quick running figure in the right hand, the steady drop of the left, the long, sliding descent that had taken her weeks to get even. Every note came when it was called.
Under her fingertips Eloise's pulse beat quietly, steady and warm, and she tried her best to match her breathing to it without being told, in for the rising run, out for the fall.
Eloise could see that Francesca was still struggling and knew she would have to do more to settle her. "Do you remember when we were children, and you would sit at the pianoforte before a performance with your hands gone quite cold, and you told me once that the thing to do was to count the rests? That the silence between the notes was also a part of the music, and that if you only treated it with respect it would not frighten you?"
"I do not," Francesca said, in a thin, breathless whisper, as her fingers slowed and wrapped around Eloise's forearm, "believe that I have ever said anything so sensible."
"You said it while eating a biscuit, which lent it a certain gravitas. Breathe in with me. Four counts. One, two, three, four. Hold it for four. That is a rest, Fran, that is simply a rest, and you are not to play anything at all until I say. Now let it out, slowly, as though you were blowing on a candle you did not wish to extinguish. Good. Again."
They did it again, and again, for what might have been five minutes or fifty. Gradually the garden stopped spinning. The spots at the edge of her vision shrank and faded. The air came into her in longer and longer draughts, cold and green and smelling of lilac, and with it came, horribly, the ability to think, which was the very thing she had been hoping to avoid.
"It was her," Eloise said at last, very low. She had taken ahold of Francesca's hands now. "Was it not? The one from Bath. Michaela."
Francesca closed her eyes tightly, scrunching her nose. "How did you know?"
"Because you told me her name when you came home, and then you did not say it again for a year, which is how I know that it mattered to you more than anything you have ever said aloud. And because John said it in the drawing room, and I was standing close enough to watch what happened to your face." Eloise drew a long breath. "I have never in my life seen you look as you did at that moment, as though a hand had reached inside you and taken hold of something vital."
"She is his cousin." The words came out ragged. "His cousin, Eloise. They are... family. John has spoken of her so many times and I sat and smiled and... and never questioned a thing, because I did not know I was meant to. She never told me it was Stirling... Michaela never.. I never asked if she had a family. We spoke of everything, of the stars and the piano and we.. we..." she broke off with a wounded sound before continuing, "...And neither of us ever said the plain, sensible things that one says to a person one means to see again... And now... now I have married her... her cousin. I have married him... And he is kind, and he is good, and he has done nothing at all to deserve a wife who looks at his family and wishes to be sick. I-"
"No, Francesca. You have not wronged him," Eloise cut in fiercely. "Listen to me. You have not wronged anyone, alright? You could not have known."
"Yes but I should have known!" Her voice cracked. "I knew her whole life, in pieces, like a puzzle with the picture lost. I asked her once where her people were from and she said oh, north, and made me laugh, and I simply let it be. And afterward, when I went home, I had a hundred stories and not a single direction. It is my fault."
She stopped, and Eloise said nothing, only held her wrists, and Francesca was dimly grateful, because there were things that could not be said with anyone speaking over them.
"I waited," she continued, at last, in a smaller voice. "You know that I did. For months. I sat by the window in the morning room, and every time the post came I went down the hall as if I had somewhere to go, and there was never anything. I wrote a letter and I had nowhere to send it. I thought of every possible thing that might have become of her. That she had been ill. That she had fallen, or that she had been married off by some dreadful aunt, or that she had only changed her mind and thought the whole of it a foolish summer, and was sorry. I thought of seeking out lady whistle down to write about her. Wanted, a young woman, Scottish, no surname, fond of the rain."
"I remember," said Eloise, and there was a catch in her voice. "I told you it would not be effective."
"You were right. You were so dreadfully right." A sound escaped her that was half a laugh. "And then I stopped. Not because I wished to. Because I could see that it was going to kill me, if I did not. I made myself stop. I made myself get up in the morning and practice my scales and answer Mama when she spoke, and after a year it got to be easier, and then John came, and..."
"And John was kind."
"John was safe." She said it, and something in her chest turned over. "Do you know, he never once asked me what was the matter? He would sit across from me without saying a word, and he never seemed to need me to fill it. He never asked me to talk about what I was feeling before I knew myself. He never looked at me as though I were a puzzle he was impatient to solve. I could be in a room with him and simply be, and it cost me nothing, and I had not known until I met him how much everything else had been costing me." She drew a long breath. "I do love him. You must understand that. I do. It is not a pretence. He is the kindest person I have ever known and I shall be a good wife to him, and I will not have it said that I did not mean it."
"Nobody is saying it."
"It is only that it has never felt like..." She stopped. "It has never felt like that. What I felt in Bath. It was as though someone had taken all the lamps in a dark house and lit them at once. I thought that was a thing that happened only in poems. I had no notion a person could feel it and go on living." Her voice dropped to a whisper. "I do not know what is wrong with me, or how it is possible that I can be so fond of... of her. I know that it is not natural to feel that way... I know that and..."
"Nothing is wrong with you," Eloise cut in, with such flat, immovable certainty that Francesca looked up. "I have said it before and I shall say it until I am old and cross. You fell in love with a woman. It is precisely as unremarkable as falling in love with anyone else, and a great deal less absurd than half the things this society asks of us, such as marrying a man because he owns a good estate, or standing in a ballroom for three hours in order to be looked at like a horse. There is nothing in you that wants mending. The only thing that was ever wrong is that the world has not yet had the decency to make room." She squeezed Francesca's wrists. "But I must say the other thing, too, as I said it then, because you would not thank me for lying. You cannot build a life on waiting for someone who left you no way to be found. Whatever she was, whatever she meant, she is here now, and for all we know she will have gone again by the end of the week, back to wherever she came from, and you will go on with John, and you will have to decide what you are going to do with what you feel."
"What am I to do with it? How am I meant to do this?"
"I do not know." Eloise's eyes were wet, and she did not trouble to hide it. "I only know that you must go back in there, stand beside your husband, and somehow make it through the rest of this evening without giving anyone cause to notice that something is wrong. And when you have properly slept and eaten and the world feels slightly less determined to torment you, we shall sit down with a pot of tea and decide what is to be done. Sensibly. Together. Can you do that?"
It was good advice. It was sensible and loving and exactly what a clear-headed sister ought to say, and Francesca knew it, and knew also that she would try her best to follow it, because she was a person who followed sensible advice. She had followed it all her life. It was how she had come to be standing on a terrace in a wedding dress.
"I can do that," said Francesca, although she did not at all think she could. She wiped her face with the heel of her hand. "And I can be a good wife to John. I will. It is my duty now."
"I know you will," said Eloise, and her eyes were wet too, though she would have denied it to the last. "You have never done anything by halves in your life, my dear sister. Now come. Let me see to your hair, which has lost a pin, and your face, which has lost... rather more."
Francesca laughed, and although she was still hurting, it helped. "I can only imagine how dreadful I must look."
"Nonsense. We share blood, sister, and I can promise you we shall always be handsome. In fact, I think tears suit you quite well."
Francesca rested her head briefly on her sister's shoulder and let out a small, wet laugh, and they stayed there under the stars until she could breathe without thinking about it.
Instead of going and finding another conversation, John was waiting by the glass doors when they came in. He stood with his hands clasped behind his back and his eyes fixed on the place where she had disappeared, and when he saw her the tension went out of his shoulders so visibly that Francesca was nearly crying all over again.
"Francesca." He crossed to her in three strides, and he did not touch her, only stopped close enough that she could feel the warmth of him and see how carefully he was studying her face. "I am sorry if I overstepped earlier. I only wished to be certain you were well."
"I am quite well," she replied, and heard how much steadier it sounded than it had an hour ago, and was ashamed of how easily the lie came. "I am the one who should be sorry to have given you a fright. It was only the heat, and Eloise has been most efficient in restoring me."
"That is a relief." He attempted a smile, and it was a brave, lopsided thing. "Would you like to go home now? It is growing late, and I think that we have done our duty to the ham. Your mother will forgive us, and if she does not, I shall take the blame entirely."
There was a perfectly sensible answer to that, which involved the dancing, and the cake, and the people who had come to see them married and who would notice if they left before the last of the candles had burned low.
"Yes. I should like that. Very much."
She had promised herself that she would not look across the room, and she kept that promise as one keeps a vow taken under torture, with her eyes fixed on the middle button of John's waistcoat, while he went to make their farewells. She endured Mama's embrace, and the hand that Anthony laid briefly on her shoulder, and the kiss that Hyacinth planted upon her cheek with a whispered demand for her to visit Bridgerton house every week. She did not see where Michaela was standing. She felt it, in the side of her face, a steady and particular warmth, and kept her gaze upon the floor until the carriage door had closed between them.
The Kilmartin carriage smelled of new leather and lavender water, and the rhythm of the wheels upon the cobbled street ought to have been soothing. John sat across from her with his hat upon his knee, and looked out of the window, and did not speak, and she was grateful to him for it with an intensity that very nearly made her weep again.
It was the same quiet that had lain between them on a dozen evenings before, the quiet of two people who found it easy to be still together.
Tonight it was like sitting in a room with the lid of a pianoforte closed, knowing all the while that it was full of sound.
Once they returned home, they were prepared for bed by candlelight, she by a maid who had clearly been told to say nothing and who said it with great skill, and he by his own valet in the room next door. When Francesca came in, in a nightgown of fine lawn that her mother had pressed upon her as though it were an heirloom, John was already in bed, propped against the pillows with a book open on his chest that he was not reading. He moved to make room for her with the touching awkwardness of a man who had been a husband for less than a day, and she slid under the coverlet and lay looking at the canopy, where the candlelight made small and trembling shapes.
"I hope that you are not cross with me, Francesca," John spoke, after a long while.
"Cross with you?" She turned her head upon the pillow. "John, why ever should I be?"
"For introducing you to Michaela like that." He said the name with such simple fondness that Francesca's stomach turned over. "I ought to have told you more, I think. I did write to her about the wedding, but I truly did not expect her to come. She has been so restless these past two years, never in the same place for too long, and I had thought that she might send her love and a dreadful present and leave it at that. When she wrote to say that she would make the journey, I was so glad that I forgot to mention it. It is not like me to be so careless."
"It was no trouble," Francesca responded to the canopy, and discovered that her mouth had gone entirely dry. "I am very glad that she came. She seems... she seems wonderful."
"She is truly the best person I know." John paused, letting the statement settle into the room before he went on. "I suppose I ought to tell you, since it will soon be plain enough, that she is to stay with us for a time. I hope you do not mind it. She had no fixed plans, and there is the whole of the upper floor standing empty, and I could not think of turning her out to an inn when she had come so far. Only for a few weeks, she says, until she has settled her affairs."
The candle flame bent in some small draught and straightened again. Francesca lay perfectly still. "Here..." she said, almost to herself.
"If you would rather not..."
"No. No, of course. Of course she must stay." It was the only thing she could say and she said it, and her voice sounded quite reasonable, which she found remarkable. "She is your family, after all. I should not dream of objecting."
He settled further into bed and reached for her hand beneath the coverlet, and held it. "Knowing Michaela, it may be three days or three months. She rarely makes a plan far enough in advance to find out whether she means to keep it.
Francesca's heartbeat began to climb. "Shouldn't we have offered for her to return with us in our carriage, then?"
"She had some business in town after the reception and said she would find her own way back."
"Business?"
"Mm." John closed his eyes briefly, already half lost to sleep.
Francesca waited, knowing she ought to let it go and unable to find the strength. "What sort of business?"
He glanced over at her. "I believe she is looking for someone, if I am remembering correctly." He yawned. "A woman she knew years ago. She was rather vague about it, but that is nothing new. Michaela could make the purchase of a loaf of bread into a state secret if she wanted."
Francesca could hear her heart beating in her throat. "Someone she knew in London?"
"I assumed so. In fact, she said if she found her, there was a chance she would not need to impose upon us for long."
Francesca's heart had begun to beat in a slow, heavy, disordered rhythm that she felt in her throat, in her wrists, in the soles of her feet. A woman she knew years ago. She knew how many women in England a person might lose track of. She knew how many of them a person might cross a continent in a mail coach to find. She knew, with the dreadful clarity of a person adding a column of figures, what the sum must be, and she closed her hand around John's and refused, with every particle of will she possessed, to let herself arrive at it.
It is someone else, she told herself. It is another family member, or a friend from school, or a lover from Edinburgh, or anyone at all in the whole wide world who is not you. She did not look for you. She did not think of you. She did not love you. And you are a vain and foolish woman to think for one moment that in a country of so many souls she has been searching for you.
"I hope that she finds who she is looking for," she said aloud.
"So do I." John pressed her hand, and then, with a small, tired sigh, let it go, and blew out the candle upon his side of the bed. "And I want to thank you for today. I know that it has not been easy for you, and I want you to know that I am very glad, and very fortunate, to have you as my wife."
"Of course."
"Goodnight, Francesca."
"Goodnight, John."
Francesca remained awake through the small, regular sounds of his breathing settling into sleep, through the midnight chimes of the clock upon the stairs, through the creak of a floorboard somewhere overhead, which she told herself was the wind and the settling of an old house, and which she listened to with her entire body. She lay awake until the moon had moved across the window and left it, and the room had gone entirely black.
At some point, without ever having decided to do it, she found that she was no longer in bed.
The floor was cold beneath her bare feet. She stood in the dark in her nightgown, with her heart going in her ears, and looked at her husband, who lay upon his back with his mouth a little open, sleeping the deep and untroubled sleep of a man with nothing upon his conscience. She watched him for some time. She searched herself carefully for guilt and found a great deal of it. She looked for tenderness and found some, real and warm, a fondness that she would have sworn was love at any other hour of any other day. And beneath both of them, rising steadily, implacably, like water through the floor of a boat, she found the thing that she had taught herself not to name.
She took the candle from the nightstand, and lit it from the last ember in the grate, and went out of the room.
The upper floor of the Kilmartin house was long and narrow, with a runner of faded Turkey carpet that swallowed the sound of her steps, and a row of doors on either side that stood shut like a line of sleeping faces. Francesca moved along it with the candle held low, and the flame made a small gold room around her that went with her wherever she walked.
The first door opened upon a bedchamber shrouded in dust sheets, the furniture hunched beneath them like sleeping animals. There was nothing in it. The second held a wardrobe and a narrow bed that had not been slept in since the last Earl had been a boy. The third was a box room, the fourth a nursery she could not bear to look at, and the fifth smelled of damp and of mice. She closed each softly behind her and went on, feeling both absurd and entirely without choice, like a sleepwalker following a thread through a maze, and all the while a small, cold part of her mind observed that she was a married woman of less than a day, wandering her husband's house at midnight in her nightdress with a candle, in search of something she had no right to find.
At the sixth door, there was light. It showed in a thin, steady line along the floor, and Francesca stopped with her hand an inch from the latch and stood there, hardly breathing.
The door was not quite closed. Through the gap she could hear nothing, only the faint, dry whisper of paper.
She pushed it open.
It was a pleasant room, larger than the others, with a high window and a small fire burning low in the grate, and upon the edge of the bed, with her back half turned and a single candle guttering upon the table beside her, sat Michaela. She had taken off her gown. She wore a plain linen wrapper, belted loosely, and her feet were bare, and her head was bent over a sheet of paper that she held in both hands as if it might break. All across the coverlet beside her lay others. There were dozens of them, scores, white and cream and a few gone yellow at the edges, spilled across the quilt in drifts, some folded and sealed and some left open, some covered to the margins in a slanting, hurried hand, and Francesca saw with a lurch of her heart that the nearest of them, the one that lay face up against the pillow, began with a single line of script and a name.
Francesca
Michaela looked up, and both of them froze.
The candle in Francesca's hand trembled, and a bead of hot wax ran down over her knuckles, but she did not feel it. Michaela's face was bare of every defence she had worn that evening, and what it showed was a weariness so deep and a longing so naked that Francesca could hardly look upon it, and she saw the exact instant at which Michaela understood that she was not dreaming. Her lips parted and the letter slipped from her fingers, falling softly to the floor.
Slowly, like a person who is afraid that a sudden motion might frighten away a deer, Michaela rose to her feet.
Francesca set the candle down carefully upon the dresser beside the door. She closed her eyes for the space of one breath and made herself count it, four beats in and four beats held, the way that Eloise had taught her, the way that she had once taught Eloise, and she told herself that she would not weep, she would not, that there was no force on earth that could induce her to weep in this room, in this house, on this night.
When she opened her eyes, Michaela had remained beside the bed. She did not speak. Her hands, which had been trembling, had gone perfectly still at her sides.
And for a while all Francesca seemed capable of doing was stare. Two years of questions crowded into her chest so violently that not one of them could make it as far as her mouth. Have you missed me? Did you look for me? Did you love me? Was I foolish? Was there someone else? Why are there letters with my name on them?
Michaela seemed to read some of them anyway. "I was hoping it was not true."
Francesca swallowed hard. If she tried to speak now, she feared the sound that came out might be a sob, and she refused to allow that, so she merely shook her head, silently urging Michaela to continue.
"I had hoped that you were not the woman marrying John." Michaela's voice shook, and Francesca had never once heard it do that. "I knew that he was to be wed. I knew her name was Francesca. But he never wrote your family's name in any of his letters, and by the time I returned to England I had persuaded myself that there must be a thousand Francescas in London, and that God could not possibly be so cruel as to make you one of them."
Francesca's eyes filled with so many tears that she could hardly even see Michaela clearly.
"I truly did not know what I might find when I arrived." A strained little laugh escaped her, though there was no amusement in it. "I suppose I had hoped I might find you on my own terms. That I had enough time to prepare myself for seeing you again. And when I realized that was not what was waiting for me..." She stopped. Her lips parted as though she meant to force the rest of the sentence out, but for once, the words simply would not come.
Tears were sliding down Francesca's face freely now. "You pretended not to know me."
Michaela shook her head, and her own tears came now, freely. "What would you have had me do? I saw you standing beside him in your wedding gown, Francesca." The name broke in the middle. She drew in a breath and pressed her lips together before she could go on. "My cousin was holding your hand, and he looked happier than I have seen him in years, and you were staring at me as if someone had struck you. I could scarcely announce to the whole room that I knew exactly how you looked with your hair wet..."
Francesca's breath left her in a rough exhale. "Michaela..."
"I know."
"You cannot say such things..."
"I know."
"You cannot come back into my life after two years and speak as though..."
"I know, Francesca." Michaela closed her eyes, and more tears fell. "I am trying very hard to behave as if I knew what to do."
That stopped her. Michaela had always known what to do, or had behaved as though she did. In Bath, it was Francesca who had hesitated. Michaela had reached first, and spoken first, and kissed first, and whenever Francesca grew frightened, Michaela had turned it into a joke until she could breathe again. Seeing her frightened now was worse than anger would have been.
Francesca looked toward the bed and felt her own anger arrive at once. "Why did you never send them?"
It was a cruel question, and she knew it. Michaela had known where to direct a letter to her. Francesca, for her part, had not known on what corner of the earth to begin looking for Michaela.
"The first was written the day I left," Michaela admitted and wiped some of the wet tears from her cheeks, "and I thought it sounded desperate. The second was much worse. After that, I decided I would wait until I had something sensible to say to you, and every time I tried, I wrote the same things in different words."
"What things?"
Michaela looked at her, and Francesca wished at once that she had not asked.
"I need you."
The room seemed to shrink around them. Michaela looked down at her fingers. "I was angry with you. I was angry with myself. I thought that if what happened in Bath had meant to you what it meant to me, you would find some way to come back, and when you did not, I told myself I had made the whole of it larger than it was."
Francesca stared at her in disbelief. "You cannot possibly be serious? I... I knew nothing about you. You never told me where you lived or what your name was... You vanished before I could so much as..." Her voice rose, and she stopped, glancing instinctively at the wall as though John might somehow hear them through it from the far end of the house. She lowered it again. "How was I meant to find you, Michaela? How?"
Michaela's face crumpled with emotions. "I know that now."
"You have always known it."
"I have had two years to understand everything I ought to have understood then, when I was behaving as though mystery were the same thing as freedom." She wiped beneath her eye again. "I thought that if you knew who my family was and what was expected of me, you would begin to see all of that when you looked at me. I wanted one place in the world where I was simply myself. I wanted one person who did not know whether I came from land, or money, or titles, or obligations. I wanted you to choose me without any of it."
Francesca could hardly breathe with how choked up she was getting. "I did choose you."
She regretted the words the instant they were spoken, but they could not be taken back. Not now. Not even with John's ring upon her finger.
"Every chance I was given, I chose you. I would have always..." She could not finish. Michaela was staring at her, wide-eyed and glistening, and she had to look away. She could not survive what was in that face. "I cannot do this."
Michaela took one step forward and stopped herself. "Francesca."
"No. I have a husband now, Michaela. Who loves me. Who chose me, the same way I chose him."
Michaela looked as if she were on the very edge of sobbing aloud, her chin and her lower lip trembling.
"And I love him."
Michaela's eyes dropped at once. Her breath caught painfully in her throat, the emotion rising so quickly that for one awful moment she could not tell whether she was going to be sick or break down entirely.
There was a silence long enough that Francesca could hear the flame wavering by the window.
At last, Michaela lifted her gaze again, tears spilling freely down her cheeks as she gave a small, trembling nod.
Francesca's chest drew tight. She wanted to leave. She wanted to stay. She wanted two years to run backward and return her to nineteen, when the worst tragedy she could imagine was leaving Bath without knowing whether she would ever see her Michaela again.
Michaela lifted her hand, and Francesca went still. For a moment she thought Michaela meant to touch her, but she did not. The hand stayed in the air between them, palm turned inward, pinky finger extended.
Francesca understood all at once, and the room blurred so that she could no longer make out what she was looking at, and could only remember.
It had begun as a joke. Michaela had devised it on a crowded afternoon when Francesca had been overwhelmed by a room full of strangers and too embarrassed to say that she wished to leave, and had slipped a hand beneath the table and hooked their little fingers together.
If I do this, it means you need not speak. You need not explain. I shall simply know.
After that, it had become theirs. Sometimes it meant get me out of here. Sometimes it meant find us somewhere private. In time it had come to mean I cannot say what I need, but please stay.
Michaela stood opposite her now with her hand shaking in the candlelight and her little finger held out.
Francesca folded without a second thought. One moment she stood by the door, trying desperately to remember that she was somebody's wife, and the next she had crossed the room so fast that Michaela scarcely had time to lower her arm before Francesca collided with her. She pulled her in so hard that they both staggered, and Michaela's arms came up around her and held, and held, with a fierceness that said she had been holding herself upright for two years with nothing but her own two hands.
The instant Michaela steadied her feet again, she buried her face into Francesca's neck and began to cry. Her arms closed around Francesca so tightly it almost hurt.
Francesca held on even tighter. "Michaela."
Michaela's voice broke against her neck. "Oh, God."
She cradled the back of Michaela's head in both hands. "I thought..." She tried to draw breath and failed, beneath a fresh sob. "I thought I would never see you again."
Michaela pulled her closer. "Francesca... I wrote to you so often that I began answering myself."
In that moment there was no space at all between then and now. There was only the unbearable relief of finding something she had grieved while it was still alive. Francesca pressed her face into her temple and breathed in as best she could through her streaming nose, lavender and woodsmoke and the sweet, sweet scent of the woman she loved, and the sobs tore out of her in great, ugly, helpless gasps, from some place beneath her ribs that she had been sealing over since June of the year before last. She wept from relief. She wept from terror. She wept because the woman in her arms was real, and warm, and alive, and had spoken into her neck in a voice that cracked clean across, and because she was a countess now, and a wife, and there was not one single thing that she could do about any of it.
Francesca could feel the damp heat of every breath against her neck, and the wet of Michaela's tears running down inside the collar of her nightgown, and the small, helpless shudders that moved through that shorter, softer body and into her own.
This is enough, Francesca told herself. This is as far as it goes. You have held her, you have wept, it is done, and now you will step back and say something proper and sensible and go to bed.
She did not step back. Her arms tightened.
The sobs thinned slowly, each a little shallower than the last, until there remained only the shudder that came after, like a note left ringing once the hand has gone from the keys. Then there was silence, and it was not John's silence, which asked nothing. It was thick and warm and humming, and every inch of her was listening to it.
Michaela's hand had begun to move. It traced slow, absent circles against Francesca's sides, and through the thin lawn she felt the whole breadth of that palm, the heat of it, the faint roughness at the base of the fingers that had not been there in Bath. She knew this hand. She knew precisely how it felt spread flat against her spine, and it was not the same hand. It had been somewhere without her. It had learned things.
You have a husband asleep at the other end of this house, said the cold, clear voice in the back of her mind, the voice of every governess she had ever had. Move. Move now.
Michaela's lips brushed her neck. It was not a kiss, hardly a touch at all, only the faint press of a mouth against the place where her pulse beat. Francesca's breath stopped in her throat. She felt Michaela feel it, felt her go still in her arms, and then very slowly the mouth came to rest there again and stayed.
"I cannot," Michaela whispered against her skin, so low that Francesca felt it more than heard it. "I know that I cannot not. I am only going to stand here for one moment more."
Francesca nodded her agreement and neither of them let go.
Her hands moved of their own accord. They slid down Michaela's back over the thin linen of her wrapper, finding the dip of her waist and the full swell of her hips, familiar and strange, warmer and lovelier and thinner than she had kept them in memory. She had remembered her wrongly. She had made her a shape and a voice and a warmth, slightly smaller than life, and she had not been able to remember how much of her there was. Take your hands away, she thought, quite clearly. Take them away this instant. Her fingers spread wide over Michaela's hips and pulled her in.
Michaela made a small, broken sound against her throat, and lifted her hands, settling them onto Francesca's shoulders. Her fingers curled into Francesca's nightgown and held on.
Then, abruptly, Michaela drew back. Only an inch, but Francesca let her go with a reluctance that frightened her. Michaela had to tilt her chin to meet Francesca's eyes, and Francesca saw how the tears had dried in tracks across her cheekbones, how the lashes were spiked and wet, how the candlelight lay along the high curve of her face like a thumb of gold. She saw the new hollows under her cheeks. She saw her mouth, which was trembling and slightly parted and quite unmistakably the same.
Do not look at her mouth. Look at her eyes. Look at the wall. Look at anything else.
She looked at her mouth.
"This is a terrible idea," said Michaela, almost conversationally. Her hand came up to Francesca's face and her thumb pressed at the corner of her lip. "I want you to know that I am perfectly aware of it. I have never in my life been so aware of anything."
"Then we are agreed." Francesca's lips moved against her thumb as she spoke. She felt the catch of Michaela's breath. "It is a terrible idea. It is quite the worst idea that has ever been had."
"Yes." The thumb moved, tracing the full lower curve of her lip with unbearable slowness.
Francesca's eyelids fluttered. Every sensible word she had ever been taught was lined up in her head like a row of soldiers, and not one of them was able to make it as far as her mouth. "You must stop that," she said unsteadily. "Stop touching me. Please."
"I will." Michaela's thumb did not stop.
She meant to push her away. She was entirely certain of it. She raised a hand to Michaela's shoulder with that single purpose in mind, and her fingers closed over it, and her thumb slid up the side of her throat, and she felt the leap of the pulse there, wild and shameless, matching her own.
Michaela's other hand slid down her arm to the wrist, and there it stopped. She lifted Francesca's hand between them, slowly, as though it were made of glass, and bent her head over it, and pressed her mouth to the inside of the wrist.
Francesca's knees very nearly went.
John, she thought, and it was like a hand laid on her own shoulder. John, John, think of John. She thought of him, truly, with a desperate, dogged honesty, his lopsided smile on the stairs, his book lying unread upon his chest. She held the picture in her mind like a shield.
Then Michaela's eyes fell on her fourth finger. The candlelight caught the gold band and held it. Michaela went absolutely still, and Francesca felt that warm body turn to stone against her own. Michaela's thumb brushed once across the ring, very lightly, and she began, with infinite care, to lower the hand.
"Tell me to go," she said, and her voice cracked clean across the middle. "Say it, Francesca. I do not think I can do it alone. I am too weak."
It was the moment. Francesca knew it with perfect clarity. Here, in the quiet, was the last place either of them could put it down and walk away, and she had only to open her mouth, and she knew every word it required.
Her fingers closed around Michaela's hand and would not let go.
"I cannot," she whispered. "God forgive me, I cannot."
She watched Michaela's face break. It was not relief and it was not triumph. It was something much closer to despair, as though she had been handed the very thing she had begged for and found it was exactly as terrible as she had feared. "Francesca," she said again, hopelessly, and leaned up further, and Francesca bent to meet her, and every sensible voice in her head went on shouting right up until their lips were a breath apart, and she heard it stop shouting only because it was drowned out by her pulse.
This is a sin, she thought, with perfect calm. This is a sin and a betrayal and I shall be sorry for it every day of my life.
"Please," she begged, and did not know which of them she was asking.
And the thread finally snapped.
Afterward, in the cold light of morning, she would try and fail to reconstruct how it began, who had moved first, whose mouth had found whose. There was only the crash of it, Michaela's lips on hers, hard and hot and desperate, and a sound that tore out of Francesca's throat and was swallowed whole. Michaela's hands were in her hair. Her own were now fisted in the linen at Michaela's back, hauling her upward until Michaela was nearly off the floor and rising into the kiss with her whole body, and Francesca bent over her to take it, her arms banded around her waist.
Stop, she thought. Stop. Stop, stop, and her tongue slid against Michaela's, and the thought broke into pieces.
She knew this mouth. That was the cruelty of it. She knew the exact way Michaela's lower lip caught between her teeth, the small helpless sound she made when Francesca's tongue touched hers, and her body answered before she could think, with a hot, drowning recognition. But the mouth had changed too. It was hungrier than she remembered, with something close to fury in it, as though two years of silence were being poured into her all at once.
Michaela's mind was shouting too, much louder. She is John's wife. She is his wife, you wretched, selfish creature, she is standing in his house in his ring, you promised yourself, you swore on your very life that you would not do this if she were his wife. And her hands, which had never in their lives obeyed her when it counted, pulled Francesca closer.
The belt of the wrapper gave way. Neither of them could have said who had undone it. The linen fell open and Francesca's palms found skin, hot and smooth over the generous curve of Michaela's waist, and slid down to her hips, and closed over the full heavy curve of her behind, and Michaela made a sound against her mouth that was very nearly a curse. Take your hands away, thought Francesca, helplessly, and squeezed, pulling her in so far she took three staggering steps backwards until the backs of her own thighs struck the edge of the bed.
"Fran," Michaela gasped into her mouth, "we cannot, we mustn't, your..." She could not finish her sentence. She did not need to.
"I know." Francesca was tearing at the ribbons of her own nightgown. She could hear herself doing it and could not stop. "I know. Be quiet. Do not make me think."
Michaela's fingers found the ribbons at her throat and ripped them. Something tore, and neither of them stopped, and the lawn went down over her shoulders and her breasts and the long lean plane of her stomach, where the muscle jumped beneath Michaela's palms like a struck string. This is the worst thing that I have ever done, thought Michaela, with her hands spread greedily over that taut, hot skin, and I am going to do it until someone makes me stop. She dragged her mouth down Francesca's throat and bit, not gently, where the shoulder began, and Francesca's head fell back with a gasp she did not try to smother.
Francesca fell back onto the bed landing atop the letters. Dozens of them, scores, crackling and sliding beneath her bare skin, pages with her name across the top pressing into her shoulder blades and the backs of her thighs, her hair spilled loose across the coverlet and over a hundred slanting lines of Michaela's handwriting. She lay there naked in the candlelight with her chest heaving, and Michaela, standing at the edge of the bed, stopped dead.
She looked. Francesca saw her do it, saw the dark eyes travel from her fanned auburn hair down over the pale body laid out upon those confessions, and saw something in Michaela's face go very soft and very wrecked. She's mine, thought Michaela, greedily. "God," she said, in a voice scraped raw. "Look at you."
Then, with a single sweep of her arm, she shoved the letters off the bed. They went in a hissing white cascade over the edge and onto the floorboards, and when Francesca moved, she swept the other arm across and sent the rest after them, until there was nothing beneath Francesca but bare linen and the heat of Michaela's body coming down upon her.
Michaela's mouth closed around her breast, hot and wet and ravenous, and Francesca arched with a cry and drove her fingers into Michaela's hair and held her there. Teeth grazed her. A tongue flicked and dragged. You will answer for this, thought some small, prim, hysterical corner of her mind, and then, I do not care, I do not care, I do not care. She heard herself saying things, ragged scraps of Michaela's name and God's, and Michaela answered with a groan that she felt through her skin and moved to the other breast, her hand sliding down the clenched muscles of Francesca's stomach and between her thighs without any pretence of gentleness at all.
She was wet. She was shamefully, helplessly wet, and she felt Michaela discover it, felt the shudder that ran through her whole body and the harsh breath against her breast. "Oh, Francesca," Michaela said, almost in a moan. "Oh, you are so very wet for me already."
"Be quiet."
"I am only..."
"Michaela."
Two fingers slid through the slick heat of her and pressed in, deep, in one smooth, ruthless push, and Francesca's back left the bed. Michaela's mouth crushed over hers to swallow the cry. She curled her fingers and set a hard, fast, rough rhythm, the wet sounds of it obscene in the quiet room, and Francesca clawed at her shoulders and raked her nails down the smooth brown skin of her back and heard Michaela hiss into her mouth. We are going to be damned for this, thought Francesca, quite coherently, and drove her hips up into that hand. Very well. Let us be damned together.
"Again," Michaela gasped. "Do that again, I have wanted..."
She did it again. She did it harder, and Michaela bit her lip and her fingers drove deeper, and Francesca came apart sobbing. It rolled through her in great, clenching waves, her thighs shaking around Michaela's wrist, and Michaela rode it out with her, murmuring against her throat, and did not stop until the last of it had wrung her dry.
And in the stillness that followed, for the space of one breath, the sensible voice came back.
Look what you have done. He is sleeping at the end of that corridor. You have a ring on your hand. You will burn for all of eternity for this.
Francesca opened her eyes and reminded herself, I am already burning. Michaela was above her, flushed and breathless, with her braids wild and her mouth swollen, and in her face there was exactly the same thought, the same naked horror, the same terrible understanding that they had gone over the edge and the ground was a very long way down. For one second, neither of them moved.
"We should stop now," said Michaela hoarsely. "That is, we should not have, but we..."
"Yes."
"I could still..."
"Yes." Francesca caught her by the shoulders. "But I cannot, Michaela. I will not."
Michaela was laughing and crying at once when Francesca rolled her. She landed on her back with a breathless sound that broke at once into a moan as Francesca's mouth closed over her breast. She took her time with nothing. She sucked and bit and dragged her teeth down the soft slope of Michaela's belly, her hands gripping those wide, lush hips and dragging them up against her, and Michaela's fingers tangled in her hair and pulled hard enough to hurt.
This is wrong, thought Francesca, kissing a slow, wet path along her hipbone. This is right. She put her mouth on the soft skin of Michaela's inner thigh and sucked hard enough to leave a mark.
It was moving down that thigh, hot and open and wet, that her mouth found the scar.
It was a raised line, an inch wide and the length of her hand, running along the soft skin high on the inside of the leg, and it had not been there in Bath. She would have known. She had learned every inch of that body in eight short weeks, by moonlight and candlelight and in the green dimness of a summer garden, and this was not part of what she had learned. It was new, and pale, and puckered a little at the edges, and for one terrible second the whole wild current of what she was doing stopped in her.
Michaela felt her go still. Her hand tightened in Francesca's hair, not to push, but as though she meant to hold her there. "Francesca..."
Ask her, thought Francesca. Ask her what happened, ask where, ask whether someone hurt her. She could not. She could not have borne the answer. She only lowered her head and set her lips to the scar, very softly, and then again, and again, kissing the whole length of it from end to end. She felt the leg tremble beneath her mouth. She heard a small, wounded sound above her that she did not look up to see. I was not there, she thought, with a pain so sharp it was almost welcome. I was not there, and I am here now, and I am not going to stop.
She turned her head and pressed her open mouth to the heat between Michaela's thighs, and the wounded sound became a cry. She is mine.
Francesca knew her way. Some part of her had never forgotten it, the place where Michaela's breath hitched, the slow, firm, circling pressure that unravelled her, the spots where her whole body flinched and then begged. But there was a roughness in Michaela's response that was new, a desperation that had no patience for tenderness, and Francesca gave her what she wanted, hard and wet and without mercy, her tongue and lips and the flat of her mouth working her until the thick, strong thighs clamped around her ears and Michaela's heels dug into her back. She slid two fingers into her and found her slick and clenching, and curled them, and Michaela made a sound like something breaking.
Make her stop, thought Michaela, wildly, from somewhere very far away. Somebody make her stop, make me stop, I am going to die of this, I am going to die in his house in this bed, and I do not care, God help me, I do not care. "Fran, I cannot... Oh God, Fran... Please... Please..."
She did not slow. She drove her on with fingers and tongue until Michaela's whole body went rigid beneath her, her back arched in a high, shuddering curve and her hand fisted in Francesca's hair, and she came with a long, cracked, sobbing cry against the pillow she had dragged over her own face. Francesca kept her mouth on her through the whole of it, tasting her, feeling the helpless pulse and flutter against her tongue, until Michaela went limp and sobbed and tugged weakly at her hair.
"Come here. Come here, come here, I need you..."
She went. Michaela caught her by the back of the neck and kissed her with a ferocity that tasted of herself, and tangled one strong leg around Francesca's waist and flipped her with a surprising, desperate strength, so that Francesca's back hit the mattress again and Michaela straddled her thighs. Her breasts swung heavy above her. Her skin gleamed with sweat in the candlelight, dark and glorious and slick, and her eyes were black and wild and wet. "I am going to hell," she said, quite lucidly, and moved between Francesca's legs, and settled her own thigh hard against her, and began to move.
They rocked against each other, skin on slick, scalding skin, and it was rough and clumsy and urgent, hips grinding, breasts crushed, mouths colliding open and gasping, Michaela's hand fisted in her hair and Francesca's nails digging into the full flesh of her behind to drag her down harder. The bed shuddered beneath them. The headboard knocked against the wall, and both of them froze for a single horrified heartbeat, and then Michaela whispered "God help us," and Francesca clapped a hand over her mouth and Michaela bit her palm, and they were both laughing and sobbing and not at all in control of either, until Francesca felt the tight, burning coil gather low in her belly and Michaela's rhythm stuttered and broke.
They went over together, and nobody made a sound at all, because neither of them had breath for it. They only clung, shaking, wrung out and shuddering, with their foreheads pressed together and their mouths open against each other's skin.
For a long time there was nothing but the sound of their breathing.
They lay tangled in the ruin of the bed with the single candle guttering on its table, and a finger tracing slow circles against her chest. Francesca's heart thudded under Michaela's ear, from a gallop to a canter to something very nearly steady. Michaela did not look up. She did not want to see what was in that face, nor to have it see what was in hers. All the voices that had never fully left had come back, one by one, now that there was nothing left for them to prevent. She lay atop Francesca and let them speak.
Outside the window, very faintly, the dark had begun to thin.
Francesca did not mean to sleep. She truly did not. She meant only to close her eyes for a moment.
When she next opened her eyes the window had gone grey.
It took her a moment to understand what she was seeing, the pale, cold, honest light lying over the dark, tumbled cloud of braids beside her on the pillow. Michaela shifted at some point and slept on her side with one hand curled beneath her cheek and her lips a little parted, and the sorrow had gone out of her face in sleep, so that she looked like the girl who had lain in the grass at Bath. Francesca looked at her and felt her heart turn over, and then she looked down at her own left hand upon the sheet, where the gold band caught the morning light and gleamed.
It was like being struck. All at once the whole night came down upon her with its full weight, every breath of it, every sound she had made, and she lay with her eyes wide and her lungs refusing to work and thought, quite calmly, I have done it. I have actually done it. In his house. On the night of my wedding. While he slept.
She had never been so afraid in her life.
Somewhere below a door closed. A tread sounded upon the back stairs, light and brisk, the sound of a housemaid coming to lay the fires, and Francesca was out of the bed before she had decided to move. She found her nightgown on the floor and dragged it on with shaking hands, and could not find the ribbon, and gave it up. Her hair was a ruin. There was a faint stinging at the base of her throat that she touched and then, with a wrench, could not bear to touch. She looked back once, and Michaela had stirred, and turned, and one hand lay open upon the sheet where Francesca had been.
She might have stayed. She understood that, standing there. She might have knelt beside the bed and taken that hand, and said the whole of what was in her heart, and let the morning find them however it would. It was the very thing that she most wanted to do, and she knew precisely what it would cost, and she knew that she would not pay it, not this morning, not as she was.
Forgive me, my love, she thought, and was not at all certain which of them she meant.