After the Wedding (The Worth Saga #2)(58)
She read the court’s account again and again—first, she thought, to learn what was happening and how she could do better. Then she started reading it with her crochet hook in hand, thinking and wondering and crocheting without truly knowing her own thoughts.
She imagined that she was Miss Laney Tabbott, born a century and a half before, betrayed by the man she loved. It was easier to imagine herself angry on behalf of someone else than to think of her own situation. The anger she felt for Miss Tabbott was almost unbearable.
So she crocheted and she imagined.
She imagined herself facing the ecclesiastical court and giving testimony as Miss Tabbott had undoubtedly done.
Camilla wouldn’t beg for them to not annul her marriage with a man who clearly didn’t want her. No; Camilla as Miss Tabbott would wreak maximum embarrassment.
“No,” she imagined herself saying with confidence, tilting her wrist just so. “Of course we didn’t consummate the marriage. He wanted to, but I took one look at his private parts, and… Syphilis, you understand. Poor thing.”
They said that hell had no fury like a woman scorned, but they were wrong. Women were scorned again and again and again. It was only after the seventieth scorning that they let loose a fraction of their righteous anger. Frankly, men had no idea how lucky they were that any woman was rational at all.
Day after day, Camilla honed Miss Tabbott’s speech, muttering it to herself as she paced in the library or as she walked through the little clumps of trees along the riverbank. She honed it as she crocheted, finished her scarf, and ripped it apart again for yarn.
She wasn’t sure when she started delivering her own words—when, instead of the sordid details of Miss Tabbott’s unwelcome ruination, she started talking about what had happened to her instead.
“I just wanted to do what was right,” she told a stand of willows. “I was trying to do what was right, and they ruined me.” She thought of the look on the rector’s face. “They made me feel shame for my friendliness, for my willingness to trust others. They made weaknesses of my strength.” Her eyes stung with hot tears, and she clenched her hands together.
“I won’t let them,” she said blindly, through the hot veil of her tears. “I won’t let them have me. I won’t let them make me weaker or stupider. I’m not going to let them take me away.”
She imagined Miss Tabbott standing at her side as she spoke.
Three days in, she looked at her crocheting and thought of old Mrs. Marsdell—the woman who she’d tried to impress by learning to crochet.
Adrian had told her that she should try to look back eventually. Every time Camilla thought of Mrs. Marsdell, she remembered those sniffs and suspicious looks. Camilla had opened her heart, and…
And she’d learned to crochet. The feel of yarn beneath her fingers gave her strength; the activity let her think in ways that simply sitting did not.
She had tried to give, and giving had made its own form of return. Once she started thinking of it that way, she could look back a little more. Camilla had read a book of fairy tales to Baby Angela; when times were hard, she still thought of women who kept on going, even when there was no reason to do so. Camilla had learned to kiss from Larissa. She had learned to put a square sheet on a bed from Kitty.
Camilla was a collection of things she had learned from the people she had loved. They hadn’t loved her back, but she’d taken everything she learned with her any way.
All this time, she thought she’d found nothing all those years.
She looked up from the chair in her room, crochet hook in hand. A mirror stood on the wall; she eyed her pink-flushed cheeks. Love hurt, but… Love had shaped her, too.
It would this time as well.
Adrian was going to walk away one day. But if the past were any sort of guide, she wouldn’t leave him empty-handed.
What would she take from him?
If she could choose…
If she could choose anything, it would be that confidence she had seen so often seen on him. Could she learn that? She considered it, and she watched him, wondering where that wellspring of braveness came from.
* * *
It took Camilla five days to make friends—across the span of a hundred years—with Jane Leland, opium drugged heiress and Miss Laney Tabbott.
It had taken her seven to read their accounts so often that she knew what she and Adrian needed for this annulment—proof, absolute proof, indisputable proof.
They didn’t yet have it.
It had taken her ten days to think about going back—about really going back. She pushed the thought away the first time it intruded, then the second. If it had been just her own future at risk, she wasn’t sure she could manage it.
But for Laney Tabbott, for Jane Leland… For the women who had not had a chance for justice, she thought she might be able to try. The men who had hurt them were long gone, but if she did nothing, Bishop Lassiter would one day maybe sit over a question of annulment. Rector Miles would hear from women who had been injured by men on a near-weekly basis. There was no justice for the dead, but there were too many women still living in need of kindness.
For Laney and Jane, Camilla allowed herself to imagine that she had the courage to act. She imagined herself walking into the household. The long-dead women would walk invisibly by her side, present only in her imagination.
The first time Camilla imagined going back, she cried by the riverbank; she didn’t let herself consider it for another two days.