“Pray never mention it again; I have already forgotten it.” I sensed Miss Jackson’s eyes upon us, but perhaps this was only my imagination; I was not going to look. “I hope all is well at the bank, and whatever is happening there will not interfere with the visit of your sister. She is due in town soon, is she not?”
“How kind of you to remember. She will be here soon.” He paused and smiled down at me. “She does not go out into company so much, at her time of life, but I will make certain that she and I come to call on you.”
“I will be honored to call on her.” A first visit among new acquaintances is a delicate dance of status; his polite implication that I in some way outranked Jane Austen struck me as absurd. “And what do you mean by ‘her time of life’? Surely your sister is not an antique, sir? Is she not younger than yourself?”
“I only meant that she leads a quiet life these days, and is not much in want of new acquaintance. But she will make an exception for you; rely upon it, she will.”
“I would not have her do anything she does not wish.” He seemed in a hurry to order her around, but perhaps I was overthinking; this was hardly a topic I could be rational on. I needed to stop talking about it before my obsession became obvious.
“Oh, she seldom does, never fear. But what of you, Miss Ravenswood? Have you made any more explorations of London since I saw you last?”
“I am afraid I have been chiefly planning this dinner since then.”
“Indeed! Such domestic trials can be all-consuming, can they not? I do not understand how women manage it all; they are truly the stronger sex. Without my faithful housekeeper, Bigeon, I doubt I would eat, or be able to find a clean shirt, after two or three days.”
“I am sure you understate your own resourcefulness, sir.”
“Maybe only very slightly.” He smiled and held my gaze.
WHEN THE DOOR CLOSED ON OUR LAST GUESTS AND LIAM AND I turned to walk up the stairs, I heaved a sigh. I did not want to give a dinner again soon; it had been a success with a high price in stress. I hoped I would not have to, if this one had accomplished its mission of honoring our new friends and showing them we knew how to behave. “It went well, I thought.”
“No major disasters.” Liam was untying his neckcloth as we returned to the drawing room. “Henry Austen was definitely all about you.”
“Is that good or bad?” Two floors away I could hear a faint splash and clatter of dishes being washed, before I closed the door.
“That depends on whether you are Miss Jackson or not.”
“So you noticed that. I thought maybe I was imagining things.”
We stood in front of the fire. I felt calm and relaxed, as if an enormous weight had been lifted from me. “Your little speech on manumission—I don’t think I could have recalled all that on the spot.”
“How fortunate you did not have to.” He stretched his arms, cracked his knuckles, and rubbed his eyes, as if releasing all the accumulated tensions of the evening.
“Do you ever have the feeling—” I stopped.
“What?”
“It sounds crazy, I know. Sometimes I feel like I am forgetting my own life, entirely. As if it was something that happened to someone else. And that we really were in the Caribbean, and came here on a ship, and . . .” I paused. And are brother and sister, I had been about to say, but realized I did not believe that part. I am an only child, but I felt certain if I’d had a brother I would understand him better than I understood Liam, who remained a closed book to me.
“It happens all the time to actors. Even in a normal situation, when you get to take off your makeup and put on your usual clothes and go home between performances.” Liam pulled his wig off, dropped it on the mantel, and ran his hands through his short dark hair. “This thing always makes me feel like I have lice. And about twenty years out of style.”
“I was in Mongolia for nine months, volunteering after the earthquake. That was the longest. And at the end of it, my own life had come to seem unreal. But not like this.”
“You were still allowed to be yourself.”
“Maybe that’s the difference.”
After a pause, he said: “When the ladies withdrew, Henry Austen began trying to interest me in an investment scheme involving a canal in Cornwall. A surefire twenty percent a year, he says.”
“So that’s what men talk about when we leave, business? Ugh, great. Just don’t give him too much.”
“No fear.”
WITH TWO HANDSOME MATCHING BAY HORSES, A GROOM-COACHMAN, and a secondhand but elegant landaulet, we entered another social realm, of people with nothing better to do than go for drives: for pleasure in the parks, or more purposefully through the crazy streets of London. We’d done lots of shopping here—for cloth, provisions, writing supplies, parasols, reticules, fans, ribbons, a rented house—and it was mostly a source of anxiety, with so many ways to get things wrong. The carriage, though, was all pleasure: I found the blur of motion astonishing in a world where the default speed was walk, the danger scary yet exhilarating.
Servants remained a challenge. For the style we were supposed to be living in, I’d known from the start that we needed more; two women and a man were all the Dashwoods of Sense and Sensibility had when they went into Devonshire to survive on five hundred pounds a year, the emblem of downward mobility.
True, Tom, the ex–climbing boy, had responded to having enough to eat for the first time ever by pitching in wherever he could, helping Mrs. Smith with kitchen tasks like pot scouring and spit turning and helping Grace with everything. But he was a little boy, and Grace was overwhelmed, even so. Apparently she was doing a bad job with the dusting, or so I overheard Jencks telling her in a low but poisonous tone early one morning. Coal scuttles sometimes ran empty; once or twice she failed to make my bed, so I began to make it myself.