December 2nd, 1894 — Early — Greengrass Home

Ford had been sitting in the hallway between his open bedroom door and Jemima's closed one for more than seventy-four minutes. He didn't know how much more. Seventy-four minutes ago was when he'd gotten up to retrieve his pocket watch; the night before that stretched timeless. He was watching the hands tick as he leaned against the wall beside Jemima's door and thinking. Most recently he had been debating the merits of fetching some kind of breakfast before he knocked on Jemima's door. Not for himself, but for her; his stomach felt as though it would never be ready for food again, but he could put together a tray to present to her without much time or effort. He had gone through pros and cons. In the positive category, it might demonstrate some degree of thoughtfulness; and having food available might prove a suitable distraction if the conversation they needed to have turned uncomfortable. On the other side: it could come across like he was trying to buy her trust, or her love, or her silence, and whichever she interpreted it as, a breakfast would have been a cheap price indeed.

The second hand ticked around and completed another circuit. Ford decided against breakfast. He suspected this was not the right decision. Probably both options were the wrong decision. Every choice he'd been thinking about, all night long, was like that.

He ached for Tycho, who would probably never want to talk to him again. He wanted to sleep, or better yet to crawl into his bed and then suddenly cease to exist, subsumed in pillows and sheets. Obviously neither was an option. He had responsibilities; things he'd broken which could probably never be fixed, but which he still had a duty to stitch together as best he could.

He watched another minute tick by on his watch. An earlier point of consideration had been when do I go in? It was a complicated question. He didn't know what to say yet; he never would. He wanted to let Jemima sleep, if she was sleeping. He didn't want to make her wait too long, if she was fuming. Plotting. Climbing out the window. He had eventually decided on a time that seemed reasonable enough and had been watching the pocket watch count down towards it ever since. He still wasn't ready to face her, but according to his watch it was time.

Ford stood up, feeling sore from sitting so long in one position, and knocked lightly on the door. "Jemima?"

---

“No,” came her answer, muffled – not by sleep but by the way she was lying in bed, body turned away from the door, curled into herself and her face pressed half into a pillow. Jemima hadn’t slept since, at least not more than in strange dozing snatches a few minutes at a time, and startling awake whenever reality swam back into her thoughts again. It didn’t matter how far she tried to avoid recalling it: any thread of thought unspooled far enough came back to it, the mess of her whole existence. The person her husband was, had been the whole time – manipulative, merciless, a compulsive liar to the core. And she may not have been able to guess at his betrayal or his sexual deviance, but it was her own fault, really, for not admitting to herself sooner that he was a liar, when she had witnessed him do it.

At some stage she had had another fit of crying, the revelations of tonight washing painfully over her again. Jemima doubted it would happen again: she felt empty of tears now, exhausted and depleted. And she still didn’t know what to do. Or, rather: she knew what she was supposed to do (endure, live the life she had invited for herself), but she hadn’t yet gathered the will to do it. She hadn’t even gathered the will to leave her room.

If Jemima had had the energy left or a less nauseous feeling inhabiting her stomach, she would have dragged herself up to lock the door – but as it was, she didn’t move. Maybe he would give up and leave her alone. It would be easiest for them both. (She hoped he would understand, implicitly, that she didn’t want to see him, that she had nothing to say to him now.)

---

Fair.

Ford frowned at the space on the carpet where he had been sitting, weighing the merits of resuming his position there and picking some other near-distant point in the future to try again. He couldn't blame her; if he were in her shoes, he wouldn't want to talk to him, either. He had little faith that delaying would ease anything, though — just as he expected he would never have figured out what to say, he expected she would never be ready to listen to him. It still had to happen, and sooner rather than later. The house was going to be waking up beneath them and people were going to start going about their daily routines, and Ford was going to have to have something to say to them. He could pretend to be ill to get out of work, but it would seem odd to say Jemima was, too. And probably she didn't care; had not circled back around to thinking about how things would look or what people would think, but eventually she would. She had said last night: this was her house, too. Her life. Her family, technically speaking... though perhaps not for much longer, depending on what she had decided.

He sighed and shifted his weight from foot to foot. He had decided not to sit down again, but he didn't know what to say to convince her to let him in.

"Jemima," he said after a very long moment of silence; his voice was more tired than anything else. "We really do have to talk."

---

Silence – she waited, motionless and listening. No warning of the door opening; but no sound of a more distant door, nor footsteps on the stairs. In spite of herself, her resolve not to care, her chest tightened.

She shifted onto her back, her head still heavy on the pillow, gaze on the ceiling. Somewhere outside her door, Ford said her name again. Was there anything he could say now that was not just rehashing the events of earlier? Would he attempt to apologise again, explain? Jemima couldn’t fathom anything he added would convince her to think differently, or make going on more bearable. Somehow, though, that helped: she wasn’t afraid of anything he wanted to say, then. Her mind was made up; this room, her heart, could be a fortress as well as a prison.

“Then talk,” Jemima said – the only concession she would make. She didn’t get up from her bed, did not open the door, did not turn her head. “I don’t have anything to say to you.”

---

It wasn't much of a concession, but Ford recognized that he wasn't entitled to any bigger one. He had been hoping not to have this conversation through the door, though. It was nothing short of a miracle that neither of his siblings had come up to interrupt them last night, given they both had demonstrated a past propensity for nosiness; if he had to speak through a door, the odds of one of them overhearing were higher, which meant the things he could allow himself to say would be greatly restricted. (He had no intention of ever letting someone else overhear a phrase like last time I was inside you, and nevermind that he'd had no choice in what Tycho said last night at all).

He waited a beat, then hesitantly tried the door when it was clear she was making no move to open it. It wasn't locked. He was relieved, but knew better than to read into the gesture anything other than heedlessness on her part. He slipped into the room, barely. He didn't actually want to be here, to intrude, to invade her territory, so he stayed pressed against the door as he shut it, taking up the bare minimum amount of room.

She looked terrible. He felt guilty for thinking so when he was the author of this, guilty for even looking at her at all when she had not told him to come in, but he seemed incapable of pulling his eyes anywhere else. Like watching a train wreck.

"We have to talk about what happens next," he said. Logistics; keeping the situation under tenuous control. Perhaps also something of an olive branch: they did not have to talk about last night... though as he considered it, he wasn't sure it was much of an olive branch, in the end. He would have just as much difficulty talking about last night as she did, and was no more ready to do it. "I need to know," he continued, with a slight waver to his voice despite his attempts to keep it level, "if you're planning to leave me."

---

In her peripheral vision, Jemima could see him standing there, hazy, by the door. Feeling observed, and thus too helpless by half, she angled her head slightly away, focusing on the window instead. She was tired; she felt almost too wrung out to be able to think about what happened next.

But she did try.

Was Ford afraid of what she might do in retaliation? If she had any power here, Jemima hardly felt it – because yes, she could ruin him, perhaps, if she wanted, but what good would that do her? She could not think of a way to tell the world who he was and what he had done without tarnishing herself in turn. Her name was tied to his for better or worse. The coatroom affair, the rumours. A divorce added to it would be an explosive scandal in itself. Or, if by leaving he meant only an unofficial separation – no one would read it for what it was. The visibility of any such distance would only prove that she had been a hussy all along, and had had her deserved comeuppance with a broken marriage.

If she were separated, she could never remarry. If she were divorced and known to be blameless, still no one would want to marry her, not after everything. So she would be alone. Alone forever, and yet ten times worse off in reputation than she had ever been as an unfortunate, graceless debutante. And her family would find out the truth one way or another, if she tried to escape this for her old life. Jemima might be able to lie to people who didn’t know her, but to her family? They would get it out of her. And as if she had not tried their patience enough already this year: she hadn’t forgotten the looks on her parents’ faces, the way they felt they had salvaged the situation with this marriage, the way they had been so fatally disappointed in her. If – she swallowed – if they knew this, their hearts would break all over again, whether by her or for her. She didn’t know what they would do, but she could not make them suffer the stain of relation to her and to Ford by extension, drag everyone through the gutter again.

And – she could not do that to his family, either, who were presumably innocent and unaware. Ruining Ford in turn might be justified for what he had done to her, but – tearing down Grace and Clementine and Noble and Verity with him felt like too cruel a vengeance. Jemima had caused enough people pain already: she didn’t want to cause anyone else more. Not when.... Not when she was certain of being miserable either way.

“How can I?” Jemima said dully, having unravelled the steps in her brain, shaken out the consequences as far as she could see them. So if she stayed, well – her marriage was broken. But then, it had been broken to begin with. “Who does that help?”

Him, maybe. He would feel less guilty if she were gone, and he was free again.

---

Ford had been mentally steeling himself for her answer for a while, preparing for either yes or no. Her staying was better for him, obviously, but if she had resolved to leave then at least there would be some triage that could occur thereafter. If she was determined to leave he didn't need to waste his time trying to placate her or explain himself; he could focus on damage control. And he could ask Noble for help, close ranks — Noble would hate him but Noble would help, because the survival of their family would depend on it. If she was determined to stay then he couldn't tell Noble anything; couldn't violate her trust yet again and so soon. But the threats were different, if she stayed. She wouldn't out him to society if she were going to stay married to him, and while she might hate him they would necessarily remain, at least in some dimensions, allies.

Her answer wasn't a yes or a no, but something worse. She was staying, but without resolve. They were not allies in anything, at least not yet. This was uncharted territory — since before their marriage they had mutually determined to make the best of things. Now she seemed determined to nothing except laying in bed.

"No one," he agreed. He hesitated, unsure if it was wise to express any sentiment at all in the moment, but eventually ventured: "I'd prefer you stayed."

---

She had thought she had no energy, no willpower for anything – she couldn’t cry anymore; she had been hollowed out – but as it turned out Ford’s attempt at talking stirred a few faint embers of her rage alight. She shifted upwards, body still curled up but closer to a sitting position, her head propped up against the pillow and the headboard. “I’m sure,” she scoffed, with acid sarcasm. Of course he didn’t want her to leave and tell people – that was obvious. There was no pretending it had anything to do with her presence here or otherwise.

It was only because she had a question, and wanted to see his face to prevent him lying that she turned to look at him now. He seemed pale, and drawn. Hesitant. Uneasy. (Not that it mattered: she couldn’t let herself find any sympathy for him now.)

She fisted her hand into the bedsheet, considering him with as unyielding a stare as she could manage. She wasn’t sure if it came off that way, or just doleful. “Does your family know about you?” About you and Tycho, she meant; about his preferences. She couldn’t imagine that they did – they would not have bothered to try and seem fond of each other before the wedding in front of his sisters, if they had been aware of something like that. But if they didn’t, as she suspected, then presumably Ford wanted her to keep his secret for him. To pretend that nothing out of the ordinary had happened.

---

He could feel the cynicism radiating off of her like heat from a fire, but he couldn't fault her for it. She didn't have to believe him. He'd known better than to say anything, anyway. There were too many pragmatic reasons why he might have wanted her to stay for her to read into the statement any sort of emotion. And it was a senseless preference, anyway, irrational and inexplicable; it didn't matter if she stayed. She was never going to forgive him.

Ford could tell he was going to hate her question before she asked it. It was written all over her face — she intended the question to hurt. She had no shortage of ammunition by now, so he expected she would be successful. He held his breath anticipating it, and then his face darkened on hearing it. Did his family know about him? No specification of what she meant. Of course it was obvious, but the phrasing still rankled; as though this was all there was to him, the only thing that mattered in weighing his value as a person. Noble had reacted the same way.

"No," he said, tone clipped. Noble had found his letters, but that didn't mean he knew everything. He didn't understand anything, and he had been clear about that from the start. He knew there had been somebody, before the wedding — he didn't know who, and he didn't know about anything that had happened since, and Ford had never intended to tell him. And aside from Noble, he was practically a stranger to his family. They didn't know he'd been in love, they didn't know he'd committed crimes, they didn't know the lengths he'd gone to and the sacrifices he'd made for them. They lived with their own versions of him, invented and altered to suit their needs. Verity thought he'd deflowered Jemima in the coat room and then only agreed to marry her on threat of death; it was the reality she needed to sustain her prolonged anger. Grace thought he didn't love her, didn't believe in her, had been eager to be rid of her, which was the fantasy she needed to gather up the grit to live away from home. No, no one knew about him — no one knew anything. Jemima didn't know about him, either. "What do you plan to tell them?"

---

No. No, not unless anyone had heard her shouting last night, the altercation as it happened – but no one else had come upstairs to investigate, so she had to imagine still no.

Plan, he said, he kept saying plan – as if she had planned any of this! As if she had made any progress searching for some neat solution to the situation, and not just had a few hours to wallow. As if she weren’t operating entirely on emotion, on impulse, trying to survive one moment to the next while the world spun far, far out of her control. Ford was the one who wanted to talk about this – surely he was the one who had plans?

“Nothing,” Jemima mumbled, shrugging helplessly. (Once again – who would that help? That was only dragging more people into this misery.) “I won’t say anything. You can tell them we just had an argument, if you like. About – something else.” Anything else. Something stupid, something small. She couldn’t think of anything they would have argued about, particularly. “Or don’t say anything, and we’ll just...” she trailed off, undecided. Pretend to be okay. Lie. Carry on. Whatever he wanted.

---

Nothing, she said — she seemed almost unsure about it, given her posture, but some of the tension leaked out of his shoulders all the same. She wasn't going to leave, and she wasn't going to say anything. It was more than he had dared to hope at the beginning of the night. Of course she would still hate him, and the close-held cut hidden beneath the vest could kill you just as surely as any other kind of wound, particularly if left to fester and rot — but if she wasn't going to blow up everything right now, then at least that bought him time to think about what to do with all the rest of it.

He might have to invent an argument, if anyone had heard the noise last night, but if by some miracle they hadn't then he'd rather not. Too many unnecessary lies, too many stories to keep straight; they would have to corroborate the details of the pretended fight, in case it was asked about later, and he didn't need to ask to know she didn't have the energy or willpower to do that. He pursed his lips briefly, considering how the rest of the day might play out below, what he would need to do in order to get them through today — the next, and the next, and the next would have to come later. "I can tell them you're sick," he suggested. "So you don't have to come down until..."

He left off with a lame shrug. Until she was feeling better, until she hated him less, until the end of time?

---

Sick. That was – fine. She felt sick enough that she almost believed it herself.

“Okay,” she said. “Later. I’ll – feel better later.” It wasn’t going to be true, but maybe she would finally manage to sleep in the interim? It would at least have to take a few hours to look at least slightly presentable again. So she would try to brush her hair, wash her face, wait for her puffy eyes and the throbbing headache to go down. Get dressed, and ignore the tumult in her head and in her stomach, and carefully pack away her hurt and her anger to somewhere it wouldn’t be seen.

Ford sounded as deflated as she felt. It didn’t feel like any progress had been made or anything really resolved, but – they seemed to have decided something. Was that it, the conversation over? Jemima supposed if she set aside all her feelings, there was only hollow-eyed acceptance left to fill the space.

“I’m sorry I eavesdropped,” she dredged up, with some effort. (Whatever this was, it was practice for what she would have to do later in front of his family – be outwardly civil and internally contrite, pretend to be naive to everything again.) In truth, Jemima wasn’t sure how sorry she was. It would have been easier for them both to carry on if she had known nothing, and kept knowing nothing, living happily in the dark, but, bitter as it felt to have ripped apart his life by opening that door – at least now the scraps of hers were grounded in reality.

---

She said she'd feel better later, and Ford was so relieved and grateful he could have cried. It was a lie, obviously. He recognized her situation too well too have thought it anything else. Heartbroken, distraught, entirely overwhelmed — but with the grim recognition that things still needed to carry on regardless, and so some semblance of stability would have to be aped until it could be achieved. He'd done this. Dissolving the estate while he was still reeling from his discoveries after the death of his father. Planning the wedding while in the middle of a prolonged goodbye to Tycho that would never feel sufficient. He knew how difficult this was, but how necessary. He hadn't expected her to understand. It was the kind of thing he wouldn't have expected from Grace, or Clementine, in a position like this — but Jemima had never let him down, actually, since their initial agreement to make the best of things; she had always been everything he could have asked for in a wife, and always picked her part up without hesitation or protest, so maybe it was uncharitable for him to think she would have failed in this.

Her next statement caught him off guard, however. "Are you?" he asked before he could think better of it. Ford certainly was — sorry she had to live with knowledge she would never be comfortable with, and sorry she had found out that way, and sorry for each of the specific words Tycho had used, and sorry she couldn't have seen Ford at least resist the lure towards adultery a little more forcefully. But he had not expected her to be sorry about it, and it wasn't as though she had done anything wrong. This was her house, after all; she had a right to be in its hallways whatever time of day or night she chose. It was Ford's fault, in the end, for having opened the window.

---

She had been trying to believe it as she said it, but of course it had been too flimsy for him to take for truth – it was only a few hours ago that she had been screaming at him in the other room. She was trying to be sorry, at least. She always seemed to do this, somehow, inserting herself where she was not wanted, overstepping, unable to stop, always doing the wrong thing or saying it –

“Well, I –” she swallowed, “I’d rather you had...” But there was no other way to finish that sentence than with an apologetic shrug. “It doesn’t matter.” She leaned harder against the headboard, focusing on the feeling of the top of it digging into the back of her neck in defeat. I’d rather you had told me, Jemima could have said, and although she wished he had been honest from the start, laid out the situation plainly, she probably would have been crushed and horrified all the same. But at least it would have saved him the secrecy, and stopped her building up her hopes (I’d rather you had learned to love me), wishing for it to all work out in impractical ways, ways that were much too good to be true.

But she’d seen that she had also made it worse for him, with the person he had loved – she could picture Tycho’s face at the end, and if she hadn’t been hurting so much herself, Jemima might have hurt for them too. In spite of the anger, there was a seed of guilt there, some real regret. But she couldn’t explain that to Ford now, she couldn’t look him in the eye about that or take it back, it had happened, it was done. All she could do now was – was try not to be too sorry for herself. Try to be a better person. Not be the first one to give up on their sorry pact about making the best of it, maybe.

Besides, other people lived in unhappy marriages and still found ways to be happy in themselves, didn’t they? Jemima was sure they did, she was sure it was possible.

---

He had been expecting well, no, actually I'd rather not know or something like it. Her actual response was a surprise to him, even if she didn't finish it. She'd rather he what? From his perspective it had never seemed like there were any choices. Nothing he might have done differently. He clearly would not have told her about Tycho — that put Tycho at an unfair risk, depending on how she reacted. Even in the abstract he had never considered telling her anything, because what would it help? But Jemima was pressing herself back into the headboard like she wanted to become part of the wood grain and had left her sentence hanging in the air. Ford thought of the tenor of Noble's laughter when he'd come home drunk and they'd fought; the immediate derision in the face of Ford's assertion that he was doing his best by Jemima. A stone formed in his stomach.

"It's not something you could fix," he said, not necessarily talking only about his being in love with someone else but about everything he had never once considered telling her, everything he had presumed it was his duty as her husband to protect her from. "It would just make every day that much worse, knowing about it. Is it — was I wrong?" he asked plaintively. The tables had turned and he was the one seeking reassurance. He had never considered telling her any of these things — not when they married, not as they grew closer, not even as Noble berated him for it, because Noble had been drunk and stupid and at the end of the day Noble was not the one who had done all these things Ford had done in order to survive; they weren't his secrets to tell. But now there was a stone in his stomach and he was mentally pleading with Jemima to take it away, to say no, I suppose you did the best you could; no, keep your secrets.

---

She didn’t know what exactly he was talking about, here – not something you could fix. How he felt, or the mess of their marriage, or something else? After all, she had been reminded there was something more he wasn’t telling her – something he hadn’t even told Tycho, the apparent love of his life. Something he had married her to keep quiet.

God. It must be bad. Jemima hugged her knees to her chest, desperately swallowing down the temptation to cry again.

Maybe this was his attempt at a warning, trying to dissuade her from digging any deeper – maybe she ought to understand that he had only been trying to protect her feelings all along – but Jemima couldn’t help thinking this might not have felt so hellish without the added humiliation of realising what a fool she’d been for the nine months prior. That he had been living in one reality, mourning people he’d loved and things he’d lost, and she had been blundering though beside him, blind to every façade. She looked at him, grave and pleading. “I don’t know. Do you think it’s any better to find out that you’ve been living in some – some delusion?”

(Their marriage might have been a makeshift thing, but at least they had both known that part; that was different.) “And I’m sure I can’t fix anything, I know I’m a burden, believe me –” she said, breathing in deep, so as not to break down again and prove that she obviously couldn’t take the truth; that she was no better than a pawn to be moved about a board, or a child to be coddled and falsely comforted. “But if you know things and can’t even tell me... what have I got, Ford?”

If this was her life, and Jemima couldn’t help him at all? She must be useless indeed. Her husband couldn’t love her, but that he couldn’t confide in her, couldn’t rely on her or even be honest? Surely that was worse than anything else there was to unearth.

---