“And what about you?”
Emily shrugged. “I just wanted a little time to myself, that’s all.” She closed the book and stood up, her gown rustling softly.
Nottingham was struck by how mature she looked, how poised, more a woman than a girl now. She carried an air about her, he thought, a kind of lingering sadness mixed with ill-formed bitterness, and he didn’t understand where it came from. Emily began to walk to her room.
“We’ve been at odds a bit, you and me,” he began tentatively, and she turned to face him, a small smile on her lips. “I don’t like it, you know.”
“Neither do I,” she replied sadly.
“Well, I’m pleased to hear that,” he laughed, relieved and surprised at her reaction. “I was beginning to think you hated us all.”
“Sometimes I do,” Emily said with the blunt, weary truthfulness of youth. She came back and sat on the chair, facing him. Her eyes were glistening as if tears were beginning to form. Nottingham reached across the table and put his hand of top of hers.
“We don’t like to see you unhappy.” It was the truth. He wanted everything for her. He just wondered if she could see that.
“Sometimes I just feel there has to be more to life than this.” She waved her hand around the house. “Do you know what I mean, Papa?”
“I’m not sure I do,” he answered honestly. All this seemed ample to him, everything he could have dreamed of and more.
“Well…” Emily took the time to be exact with her thoughts. “What’s going to happen to me? Maybe I’ll make a respectable marriage, the second son of a merchant or a farmer, perhaps? Or if not I’ll probably end up as governess to some awful child. That’s the way it works, isn’t it?”
“Something like that,” he agreed. At least she had a candid view of life, he thought.
“And if I marry I’ll have children and grow older and that will be my life.”
“But a life lived in comfort,” he pointed out.
“Comfort, charm and genteel surroundings.” She uttered the words as if they were vile.
“They’re a lot better than starving, believe you me,” Nottingham told her with complete conviction.
“I’m sure they are, Papa.” She caught the look in his eye and added, “Really, I do believe you. But what will I have done with my life in all that? Where will I be?”
“You’ll be at the centre of a family. People will love you and you’ll love them.”
“And I’ll take care of the household accounts, play with my children and supervise menus with the cook.”
“What’s wrong with that?” he asked in bewilderment. To most women he’d known, even to Mary, a life like that would seem to be paradise. But paradise, he knew, could be lost.
“Nothing’s
He shook his head, wondering why she’d changed the subject.
“Five. It’s my very favourite book. Do you want to know why?”
“Of course.” He was genuinely curious.
“Because he gets to build his own life. There’s no one to say he should be doing this or that and something needs to be done at such a time. He’s on a desert island but he’s free.”
“It’s just a book, Emily,” he told her.
“But books have ideas, Papa.” Her fists were clenched so tight that her knuckles were white. “When I’m reading it I’m on that island and I’m free, too. He gets to feel, he gets to
“You’re young still,” Nottingham started, but she cut him off.
“I’ll feel differently when I’m older? Maybe I will.” Her face was flushed with pinpoints of colour and she ran a hand through her hair in a gesture that reminded him eerily of himself. “All I know is that I’m young now and this doesn’t seem enough. I want love, I want some passion in my life.”
“And you’ll have it, I promise you,” he tried to reassure her. They’d never talked like this before. For the first time he started to believe he might understand her, and he felt closer to her than he had since she was tiny, in apron strings. “Things like that happen in their own time, Emily.”
“But that doesn’t help me now, does it?” she asked plaintively.
“No,” he admitted quietly, “it doesn’t.”
So now he knew why she hurt, but he had no idea what to do about it. She was right about her future, that was the way society worked, and there was no respectable place for women outside that — unless you were rich and titled. He looked at her sympathetically, but couldn’t find any honest, comforting words.
“I wish I’d been born a boy,” Emily said finally.
Nottingham gave a small smile at her innocence.
“Because boys have freedom?”
She nodded sharply.
“I’ll tell you something,” Nottingham confided. “It only looks that way.”
“What do you mean?” she wondered, her attention engaged.
“A man gets married, they have a child, often five or six,” he explained. “Who do you think has to earn the money to feed that family? Who has to find a job that pays enough? Aye, it’s the wife who’s looking after the children all day, but it’s the man who has to make the brass. That’s responsibility, not freedom.”
“But you can go where you like, when you like, stay out drinking until all hours…”
“True enough,” he conceded. “And there are plenty who do. But let me ask you, would you want a husband who did that?”
“No, of course not,” Emily answered. “I’d expect him to be more considerate.”
“So then, if you were a man, you wouldn’t be like that,” Nottingham said after a moment. He was remembering his own father, a man who’d been anything but considerate to his wife and son.
“I suppose not,” she agreed slowly.
“Drinking and whoring doesn’t make someone a man,” Nottingham said with quiet conviction, “and don’t you ever forget it.”
“But whores can become ladies. Moll Flanders — ”
“You’ve read that?” he asked sharply.
“Yes — ” Emily began, but before she could continue the door opened and Mary and Rose bustled in.
“I’m sorry we’re late,” Mary said in a merry voice. “We were talking and lost track of the time. Good Lord, we need more light in here. It’s almost pitch black.”
“That’s all right,” Nottingham told her. “Gave us time for a chat.” And he winked at Emily.
Later, after the girls were in bed, Nottingham and his wife sat by the dying fire. He was dozing intermittently, jarring awake as his chin fell on his chest.
“So was it daggers drawn earlier with Emily?” Mary asked.
He shook his head. “Not at all. Not even a cross word,” he answered happily. “We could have talked a lot longer.”
She raised her eyebrows, not quite believing him.
“Then that’s a change.”
“She’s just beginning to learn that the world is a smaller place than she’d hoped.” He hesitated, then asked, “Do you ever feel like all this isn’t enough?”
“All what?” said Mary, confused.
“This.” He groped to put the idea into words. “Me, the girls, this house. Don’t you ever feel your life should be more than that?”
“Ah,” she replied with gentle understanding. “So that’s the problem. I’m content with this, Richard. I always have been. It’s easier now than when we started out, but I was happy then, too, you know.” She reached over and took his hand, her fingers lightly stroking his palm. “But I knew what I wanted and I got it.”
“Emily’s different.”
“I suppose she always has been.” Mary sighed and started to lose herself in the past. “She was never one for
