Love and Other Consolation Prizes(44)

“I’m so sorry…” Madam Flora whispered as she stared at the tea-stained wall. She looked at Maisie and began to sob. “My sweet little girl.”

“It’s okay now, Mama,” Maisie said as she helped her mother from the bicycle to a velvet settee.

Ernest watched as Maisie melted into her mother’s embrace, gently rocking back and forth. Then Madam Flora dried her eyes and regained a modicum of composure. She held her daughter at arm’s length, touched her hair appraisingly. She seemed somewhat confused again as she said, “Look at this one. I know you. You’ll always be my little hummingbird.”

Miss Amber interrupted. “Just drink your tea, my love. I’ll always be here for you.” Then she glanced at the others in the room, pointing with her chin toward the door and whispering, “Out.”

Ernest felt a hand at his elbow as Mrs. Blackwell pulled Maisie and him out of the room. He watched Madam Flora recline on the scarlet settee, eyes closed, burying herself in a flocked quilt and Amber’s arms as the door closed.

Mrs. Blackwell turned on her heel and disappeared down the servants’ staircase. Maisie slowly sank to the floor, her legs splayed across the dark red carpet. Ernest sat next to her, and they rested their backs against the wainscoting, hip to hip, hearts still racing. Ernest felt his hand touch Maisie’s. Her fingers were shorter than Fahn’s, and her nails had been polished, shining like pearls, for last night’s soirée. She quickly placed her hands in her lap. She and Ernest stared at the closed door in silence, listening to the two older women cry.

Ernest didn’t know which was more confounding, the thought of Madam Flora frantically riding a bicycle to nowhere, the image of the two tragic women cradling each other, or Maisie May showing a vulnerable side. He wanted to speak, but Mrs. Irvine had once told him that a gentleman should never ask personal questions of a lady.

Yet Ernest didn’t want to move. He didn’t want to ruin this moment with Maisie, let alone abandon her. In the month he had known her, she’d been perfectly distant, so far away—angry. Now that they were here, and even if only under duress, he realized that there was a part of her that was so different from Fahn. Unlike Fahn’s, Maisie’s affections weren’t freely given. They had to be earned.

And so they sat in silence.

From the corner of his eye, Ernest could see Maisie wiping an occasional tear. He could hear her sniffling, until the grandfather clock downstairs chimed and she finally drew a deep breath and spoke. “Can I ask you something, Ernest?”

He nodded.

“Do you know what a Boston marriage is?”

Ernest shook his head.

“A Boston marriage is a kind of arrangement where two old spinsters live together,” Maisie said. “What do you think of that kind of marriage?”

Ernest stammered, “I’m…I’m not sure what…”

“I used to wish that my mother would leave here. I’d go to bed dreaming that Flora would find a man—a husband for her, a father for me. I used to imagine that we’d run away, that we’d escape all of this and have a normal home, become a family, and that she’d see me as a real daughter—that our life would be as simple as the families you see in photographs.”

But you are her real daughter, Ernest thought.

She answered before he could speak. “I think the days of hoping for that are gone.”

He tried to change the subject. “Miss Amber is a bit of a porcupine, but beneath that outer layer, she doesn’t seem all that bad…”

Maisie snorted a laugh and wiped her cheek. “You know, Mrs. Blackwell once drank too much kitchen wine and let it slip that Miss Amber had spent a year down in Lakewood at Western Washington Hospital—it’s an insane asylum, you know. That’s where she got the idea for the bicycle. Mrs. Blackwell said that they sometimes treat madness with exercise. But we can’t let the great dame, the all-important Madam Flora, be seen on the street like this, can we? They’d lock her up for sure.”

Ernest sighed.

“For a while I assumed Amber had worked at the asylum,” Maisie continued. “But then I heard how she’d been a patient instead—diagnosed with what they called a diabolical obsession. They said that she was somehow ‘inverted.’ I didn’t know what that meant at the time, but I figured her condition out later. She’d been given the electric cure and later forced to have relations with all the men there, including her doctor, until she declared herself well and was finally released. I don’t know if that’s better or worse than what I heard they did to the diabolical boys.”

Ernest winced when she made a scissor-cutting gesture with her fingers.

“I have never understood what my mother saw in her,” Maisie said. “But I think I understand now. What do you think?”

Ernest hesitated. “I don’t understand much…” He chose his words the way a man on thin ice chooses his footing. “But I understand how sadness can make some people bitter, or angry.” And he was starting to understand Maisie’s mistrust of men in general and him in particular.

Maisie looked at him, and he wondered for a moment if she somehow knew what he was thinking. She smiled, sadly.

“And I definitely don’t know anything about Boston marriages,” Ernest said, “or Seattle marriages, or arranged marriages, or plain ol’ normal, I-pronounce-you-husband-and-wife marriages, for that matter. But I know devotion when I see it.”