The Blakelys’ cook had a young son named Simon, a rosy-cheeked child who grew into an earnest young man. At six, he had been Helen’s playmate. By sixteen, the two were very much in love. Helen heard her father grumble that the boy had no ambition, content to live a quiet life in the village, having declined William’s offer to serve as head coachman or groom. But Helen found such quiet comforting, and noble. She admired Simon’s love of the land, the common people. She admired his ability to be happy. Helen had only vague memories of her earliest childhood, that time before her family was moneyed, but in them she remembered her mother as kinder, her own life more free. With Simon, she felt seen. She felt valued for more than her mastery of manners. Every chance she found, she slipped away with him, at first exploring the forest and village, and then spending hours simply talking, until words turned to touches, and the two shared stolen moments in the wood.
The youngest of the Blakely daughters, Helen was the last to be given her dowry, but the day did finally come when a man with means and title required a wife, petitioned her father, and was promised her. The transaction was presented to Helen as a joyous one, her mother clucking and kissing her, her father beaming with pride. Helen—who until that very moment had lived in blissful denial of her role as William’s pawn, who’d seen her mother and the governesses’ instructions as the enemy, her father as ally, who knew of William’s ambition, but had always believed his love for her to eclipse any love of fame and title—felt her heart tighten with panic. William had always praised his daughter’s needlework, her poetry, the striking figure she cut in her favorite dress. He had laughed off her mother’s concerns that Helen spent too much time out of doors, claiming that as long as her complexion didn’t suffer, he saw no harm in a child of his enjoying the gardens, the sky. Surely, thought Helen, his love meant that her needs would be considered, her unease about the match would be addressed.
But as preparations for the nuptials continued, Helen found that her concerns went unheeded.
“He’s so old,” Helen said of her unwanted paramour, “past fifty.”
“Nonsense,” said her father. “He can handle a healthy young girl.”
“I haven’t even met him,” whispered Helen. “I don’t know him.”
“He was here at the house several months ago, attending your mother’s birthday celebration. The gentleman in red. You remember.”
“I don’t,” said Helen, close to tears. “I don’t remember. I can’t marry him. I certainly don’t love him.”
“Love”—her father chuckled—“has not a thing to do with marriage.” He folded the letter he’d been writing, the heated wax dripping like thick burgundy blood. As he stamped the Blakely seal, he spoke more firmly than he had before, settling his daughter’s fate: “And you’ll do as I say.”
“I won’t,” said Helen. She froze, afraid of her own brashness. Stone-faced, William slowly rose, menacing as he came around the desk. He stood still for a moment in front of his daughter, and then slapped her.
Helen recoiled, her empty hand flying to her cheek, which had never before felt her father’s wrath. William grabbed her other wrist and twisted.
“You will,” he said coldly before leaving Helen there in his study. “Your new husband will be here tomorrow.”
Helen’s cheek stung from the blow. Her wrist was raw. She was too stunned to cry, and instead felt an utter blankness. This could not be her life; she could not stand it. Helen imagined the emptiness she’d feel as she climbed into this older man’s carriage, as she looked back for a last time at the lengthening drive. She imagined suffering through his dinners and balls, his age-spotted hands upon her body, being smothered by his sweaty, hirsute chest. Helen shuddered. If only I could stay a child, she thought. If only we were simpler, hadn’t come into such money.
The thing to do, of course, was to escape to Simon. Run immediately to his house in the village, despite the distance, the rocks tearing her slippers, the midsummer heat, and collapse into his thick, hardworking arms. She pounded her fists against his front door, inhaled the comfortable, acrid smell of him when the door opened.
“What’s the matter?” Simon asked, but Helen could not answer through the sudden gush of tears. He led her into the house, rubbing her back, pushing the hair from her eyes—touches more tender for the novelty of happening not out in shaded forest but the candlelight of his home. When Helen had recovered herself, she squeezed Simon’s hand so tightly that he thought she would draw blood.
“We have to leave.” Helen’s voice was hoarse from crying. “We have to leave now.”
“Hush,” Simon said into her forehead. “You’re safe here with me. We can work it all out in the morning.”
“There isn’t time. We must go now.”
“It’s all right,” whispered Simon, “we’re together. It’s late. Try to calm yourself. Try to sleep.”
She stayed that night, for the first time, on Simon’s straw mattress, traced her finger across the curled hair on his arms. She welcomed him inside her, the pressure painful at first, but then comforting, making her whole.
Helen was content to cut all ties to the Blakelys, stay forever wrapped in Simon, live off hard, honest work, and raise his child. Her renunciation complete, she fell asleep against the slow swell of his chest.
She awoke some hours later to the sound of angry voices, the heavy wheeze of horses, the wails of Simon’s mother.
“They are coming,” said Simon.
“Who?” Helen grasped his hand, squeezing it white.
“Your father. Your brother. Men from the house.”
Helen dressed herself as quickly as possible. The men burst through just as she slipped a final sleeve onto her shoulder, but before she could work out the intricacies of her heavily boned bodice, which she’d only ever laced with housemaids’ help. She let it drop to the floor with a clatter, her underdress displaying the pert fullness of her breasts.
AT WILLIAM’S INSTRUCTION, Simon was dragged to a tree at the edge of the forest. Helen’s mother made her daughter watch as they tied Simon’s wrists to level branches, tore his shirt from his back, exposed the flesh and muscle, rippling and brown. The titled man who had won Helen’s hand sat atop his horse some distance away, watching, a bland expression on his face.
“You mustn’t make a sound,” said Helen’s mother. “Act either pleased with his capture, or as if you are too startled to care.” She pinched Helen’s arm.
Helen’s throat was thick with tears, her body motionless.
William’s valet hit Simon with a knotted, nine-tailed whip. At first Simon was silent, bit through his lip to bury the pain, but as the lashing continued, he could not help but shout.
Once Simon had been reduced to a whimpering mass of blood and pus, once his back was a long rug of woven welt marks, the man with the whip stepped back. He turned to William.
“Will that do?” he asked gruffly.
William was silent and still. He looked at the diminished Simon for a cold, endless minute before asking his daughter’s betrothed.
“Is it punishment enough?” William’s voice showed no emotion, did not betray his own sense of whether justice was fulfilled.
Helen clasped her mother’s hand. The horseman, her fiancé, cast a long last look at Simon. He took a military pistol from his coat.
HELEN WAS GIVEN a month to prepare her trousseau while the fiancé awaited her back at his estate, a six-day journey south of Urizon. She did not cry. She did not beg her parents’ lenience, or forgiveness. Instead, she moved about the house in a permanent haze, stuck in the lost place between sleep and wakefulness. Salt in her tea, slippers on backward. One morning she took one of the hunting dogs out past the yard, brought him on a tether down into the forest. Climbed a tree and made herself a noose.
At first, when she opened her eyes, Helen thought herself caught, stuck somehow between her life and what came after it, a bit of bread lodged in the back of a throat.
“Simon?” she whispered.
She heard only the trees rustling around her, moving to hide the great house from her view.
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