At first, she’d been frightened by the prospect. Like so many women of her social standing, she wasn’t equipped to know what to do about anything much, other than her needlework. And menu planning, and how to set a table and make guest lists and attend church and participate in church bazaars with a few cakes her cook made and please her husband. She didn’t know how to read her husband’s financial ledgers or publish a gazette or ask complete strangers for help.
Hollis walked into the master suite of rooms she and Percy had shared in their marriage. They’d never had separate bedrooms, like so many couples in Mayfair. They had needed to be with each other. Through a door on the left was his dressing room. Through a door on the right was hers. They’d come together in here. This is where they’d reviewed their day, planned their future, read their books. This is where they loved.
The room looked exactly as it had at the time of Percy’s death. Hollis hadn’t thought much about it until a few months ago—she supposed it was one way of keeping him with her. In fact, his personal things were still on the bureau—a pocket watch he meant to give to Eliza to repair. A few coins, a handkerchief neatly folded. For the longest time, Hollis couldn’t bear to even think of changing a thing. It felt as if removing a single item was removing him. But now it seemed...maudlin.
She walked to the bed and lay down, fully clothed, and stared up at the dark blue canopy above her head. It matched the dark blue draperies. The color, the heaviness of it all, had been Percy’s choice. Hollis would have preferred something lighter and airier.
The chaise before the hearth, on which they’d made love on lazy rainy mornings, was collecting hats and gloves now. There was a desk and a wood-and-leather chair against a wall, and Percy’s Bible was tucked neatly into a corner. Hollis got off the bed and, with her hands on her hips, she looked around the room. It was beginning to look a little drab.Shewas beginning to look and feel a little drab.
Her heart told her it was time to change. She’d loved Percy with all her heart, but what was the point of clinging to things? It didn’t ease the loss. That had dulled all on its own, no matter how hard she’d tried to cling to his memory. Now, the idea that she’d clung to it for as long as she had made her sad. She was still a living, breathing thing. She was a person in her own right. She was not Percy’s appendage.
It was time she changed this room to reflect her.
Just as she’d changed the gazette. That’s what she’d done when she’d heard her family’s whisper,What to do with Hollis?She’d understood that forging her own path before one could be forged for her was the challenge, but it was one she had to accept. She would be forever grateful to herself for it, too. The good Lord knew it would have been so easy to let her father and Eliza determine what was best for her. It would have been so easy to listen to Caroline and Beck tell her what she needed to do.
It hadn’t been easy to refuse their offers of help, especially when she’d had to force herself to go through Percy’s office and open his drawers and read his notes and see what he’d left behind of himself.
She’d found things that had brought her to her knees, like the ribbon he’d taken from her hair when he’d first begun to court her. She remembered that day—he’d stuffed it into his pocket and declared it a good-luck charm. She’d found a small jeweler’s box, tied with another ribbon, and a diamond brooch inside. Was it for her birthday? Their anniversary? She read the ledgers into which he painstakingly entered the numbers of gazettes printed, the page lengths, the printing costs, the paper costs. His figures were so small and neat that when she rested her cheek on the ledger after one long night, she’d dreamed the tiny figures had danced their way into her skin.
And then there were the men upon whom Percy had relied to publish his gazette. The printers, the distributors. When Hollis had gone round to inquire about carrying on, they had looked at her with skepticism and disbelief. Or worse—some of them had laughed.
It was hard, it was aggravating, but Hollis had learned so much about herself in the process. She’d learned how to speak up for herself. She’d learned to ask for things she wanted and not to fold at the firstno,because the first answer was alwaysno. She’d learned that in the next life, she would like to come back to this earth as a man, with all the confidence and bravado that was granted to that sex by the mere virtue of being born.
She had changed the gazette, had seen it grow to tenfold the circulation Percy had ever enjoyed. Would he be proud of her? Or would he be scandalized by the sorts of things she printed? Her memories of Percy, of knowing him like she knew herself, were fading from her marrow. She remembered specific things about him, and she remembered moments they’d shared. But she couldn’t any longer remember how she felt when she was with him.
She walked to the chaise, pushed aside two hats, and sat heavily. Ruth had made a fire for her. The cold was seeping in through the windows. It would be Christmas soon, another one without Percy or Eliza.
Her challenge now was learning to live alone. Percy was gone. Eliza was gone. Caroline was gone. And from the sound of it, Pappa would be gone, too. Even Donovan was gone. Notgone,really—he hadn’t said it, but she suspected something or someone held his interest. She supposed it was to be expected. He was a young man, a handsome man. But she wasn’t ready to stop needing him.
Nevertheless, Hollis liked a good challenge. She very much enjoyed trying her hand at something new, to see how far she could go before she was pushed back. Mr. Shoreham was a challenge. Mr. Kettle was a challenge. But living without her loved ones in her daily life was the hardest of all challenges.
And then there was Mr. Brendan. He was a different, exciting sort of challenge. He was a nut she had to figure out how to crack.
The fact that he, and only he, had given any credence to the idea of a coup had thrilled her. She’d even suspected Donovan of humoring her when she spoke of it. But she was convinced something was happening—there were just too many odd little things that didn’t make sense and couldn’t be explained away. Why would those two gentlemen speak of it at all? What about those four soldiers? Oh, but she would dearly love to send word to Mr. Brendan that she was right about that.
A thought occurred to her—perhaps she ought to pay another call to Mr. Kettle to see what he knew.
She imagined Mr. Brendan’s unusual amber eyes full of doubt when she told him that the four soldiers had come to harm the king. She imagined the furrow of his brow, the set of his square jaw, and how his eyes would change and fill with admiration when she laid out a logical case for her theory.
She was looking at his hands tonight when he spoke. His attention was so intense, as if he feared he might miss a single word. He gripped his knees as she spoke. They were broad, big hands. And the way he looked at her, as if trying to see into her, well... Hollis had had enough of the rum toddy to have a momentary lapse in judgment and imagine that piercing gaze and a hand on her breast.
The salacious thought fluttering through her brain had surprised her greatly—she hadn’t thought of any gentleman like that. Donovan, perhaps, but that was only pretend. Mr. Brendan was the first man since Percy’s death who had stimulated her inthatway. And once the notion had escaped the box she’d locked all such notions into, it had spread. It was now taking over her thoughts.
Yes, she would very much like to look at Mr. Brendan again. Surprise him. Hand him information that was both useful and would cause him to look at her so intently again.
She felt warm just thinking about it.
THENEXTMORNING, Ruth came into her room and drew open the drapes. Weak sunlight filtered across Hollis’s face. With a groan, she sat up, pushing hair from her eyes. “Good morning, Mrs. Honeycutt,” Ruth said cheerfully.
“Morning,” Hollis muttered. She was not at her best upon waking, which was why Ruth always brought her hot coffee and toast to break her fast and to give her a moment to adjust to the idea of living. Percy used to say she was a bear in the mornings. Or had she said that about him? She couldn’t rightly remember.
After Hollis had her coffee and toast, Ruth returned and asked, “All better now?”
“All better,” Hollis agreed. She stretched her arms overhead and yawned. “I’m going to the foreign secretary’s office today.”
“Are you? Good day for walking, but there’s a nip in the air.” Ruth disappeared into her dressing room and returned, holding up a dark blue brocade gown with white piping. “What do you think?”
Hollis eyed the gown Caroline had made her. “It’s tight, that’s what I think. But then again, everything is.” She suddenly recalled her supper two nights ago. Donovan had gone out for the evening, as he was doing increasingly, and it had been just her. She’d eaten a plate full of food and more. Come to think of it, she couldn’t remember tasting any of the food. She’d sat there with her chin in her hand, mindlessly lifting the fork to her mouth and back again.Good Lord.She really had to find something better to occupy her than food.
