Sussex, May 1813

  Amelia woke without the warm weight of Theresa in the bed beside her. It took her few confused minutes to realize her lover was across the room, sitting by the window and watching the morning sun spread across the estate. She was beautiful there, in the sharp angled sunlight with one of Amelia’s shawls wrapped around her shoulders. Amelia admired her silently for a long while before wishing her good morning.

  “Good morning,” her lover responded, distracted, and then asked, “My dear Duchess Regent, how much is the duchy worth?”

  Amelia rubbed the sleep out of her eyes. It appeared the day was eager to get started, making her own preference for lounging in bed irrelevant. “You mean the estate?” she asked. “Technically the duchy’s not really worth anything, monetarily.”

  Theresa shot her a warm smile full of fascination. “Yes. The ducal estate that is synonymous with the duchy, which you have an adorable way of seeing as a wholly disparate thing. How much is it worth?”

  “Well,” she responded, trying to goad her brain into motion, “it can’t really be liquidated. Large portions of the estate are entailed to the title, and the value of much of it depends on ancestral rights that would not be transferred in any sale. So it’s impossible to really ennumerate the assets.”

  “That sounds like a dodge embedded so deep in the status quo that you lot don’t even notice you’re using it,” Theresa chided in good nature. “Let me ask it another way: how much income does it bring in?”

  Having just gone over the numbers with Julian, and then having gone over them again with the boys, Amelia had those details at her mental fingertips. She told her, itemizing out the estate proper as well as the investments and bonds that were tied to the estate’s finances.

  Theresa Chesterley’s eyebrows tried to float off of her face. “More than I expected. Orders of magnitude rger than my own little trust.”

  “Well,” Amelia tried to say reasonably, piling up pillow roll and cushions behind her on the headboard. “That sum supports the five people in the house, the staff of twenty-two, and hundreds of people attached to the estate in various ways.”

  Her lover wobbled her head side to side again. “But still. I can’t help imagining what good I could do with a sum of that size. It’s just where my mind immediately jumps when it hears the number.”

  “I don’t think that’s unreasonable,” said Amelia with a soft smile. She knew the numbers could be intimidating, and the st thing she wanted was to make her lover feel embarrassed. But she also quietly resolved not to mention the duchy’s other estates, either.

  Theresa’s lips twisted mischieviously. “Do you know how many looms and frames we could destroy with that?” she asked, and then continued dreamily. “How many schools we could build. How many ragged little girls on the London streets we could teach to read?”

  “Mother does a great deal of work with the unfortunates of Brighton,” Amelia offered, but then immediately shook her head. “It hardly compares with what you’re imagining, though, I’m sure.”

  Her lover smiled across the room at her, amused and wistful. “Not really, no.” She looked about to say something else, and then shook her head. “My duchess, you look lovely over there, all tousled and cozy.”

  Amelia opened her arms to her lover. “We have a little time before breakfast. Come cozy up and I’ll tousle you.”

  Having had their horse ride the day before, Amelia and Theresa took the boys for a walk after breakfast. Under a copse of willows, Theresa finished her history of London, complemented by a double handful of jelly tarts she’d tied up in a handkerchief. The boys were vocally appreciative of both, to Amelia’s bemused gratification.

  They returned to the house for luncheon and Theresa excused herself to attend to her correspondence. Amelia took the boys to watch the workers at the ice house, knowing that after not going the day before, they’d both be adamant in going today. They settled on a slight rise above the build site, watching the workers bustle about their business. She’d brought along paper, pencils, compass, and square, and cajoled them to work out the surface areas of the nascent building’s sides. With Eustace she went further, itemizing out the cost of lumber.

  “It’s a great expense,” the boy opined. “I wonder why Youngest even wants it built.”

  Amelia tried to hide her smirk at the spread of her strange sobriquet to even the boys. “I take it you’ve never spent a summer in Sussex. It gets so hot that an iced drink feels like the most welcome luxury in the world.” She smiled indulgently at the two of them. “And if you are very good and Lady Suffolk is very generous, there might occasionally be ice cream for dessert.”

  “We cannot have ice cream,” Gregory informed her, “until we are grown.” He delivered it like it was a basic fact of life.

  Amelia lifted an eyebrow. “Why do you say that?”

  “Mother told us,” the boy answered readily. “Ice cream is bad for boys.”

  “Father brought some home once, packed in blocks of ice,” Eustace said, and looked up from the doodle on the margin of his paper. “He wanted to celebrate: a big investor had signed on to his canal scheme.” His eyes slid to Gregory, and then back to Amelia, expression deadpan. “And Mother expined to us how it was a treat we might get to enjoy… when we were grown. Mother and Father ate it all up that night, since it would not keep.”

  Their governess nodded reasonably, and balled up her fist under her skirt so hard it hurt.

  She brought the boys back to the house; she sent them to their dinner. She changed for her own dinner and waited at the adjoining door for Theresa to do the same; she tried as best she could to ogle her half-naked lover properly, but her thoughts kept skipping away. Dinner was quiet and reserved. Amelia knew better than to trust herself with anything more than minimal conversation with Iris across the table.

  By the time dinner was over and her anger had not dissipated, Amelia knew that she was going to have to do something about it, was going to have to have a very strained and complicated conversation with the woman, and so before she disrobed for the evening, she marched her way down the hall to Iris’s door.

  You cannot lie to your children, she thought furiously. They need someone to believe, someone they can trust. They can not figure out, as Eustace pinly had, that the adults in charge of their very well-being were petty and greedy and willing to lie to cover it. Without a foundation of trust upon which to build their lives, they’d spend their days in mistrust, doubt, cynicism, and, eventually, dissipation.

  The door was half-open, with the py of firelight rippling out through the gap. Amelia rapped on the door smartly.

  “Come in,” sang the woman inside gaily, and Amelia pushed inside without registering, in her own anger, the woman’s tone of voice.

  She came through the door and there was Iris Sommerset, stretched out across her bed, as naked as the day she had been born. The dy’s back was to Amelia; without looking behind her, she beckoned with one arm. She chuckled, low and sultry, and purred, “I’ve been waiting.”

  Before Amelia could say anything—or more accurately, before she could turn around and creep right back out the door—that space was filled with the strapping shoulders of a man backing into the room, carrying a tray. “Iris, love, you can’t leave this door quite so open,” he chortled, a touch louder than a whisper. “Else somebody will find out we’re—well hello there.”

  Horace, the new coachman, or new Master of the Stable, properly, who wasn’t properly new anymore anyway, had turned around and spied Amelia where she stood without a single idea in her head as to what she should do. For his part, he hooked the edge of the door behind his heel and swung it shut. His lips crooked into a delighted little smirk. “Is it the three of us for the evening, then?”

  “What are you—holy hell, what are you doing in here?” hissed Iris, who’d turned over and was now gring daggers at Amelia.

  The girl in question put up her hands and directed her eyes at the floor. “Excuse me, I’m— so sorry,” she babbled. “Iri— I mean, Lady Marbury, I only intended to speak with you about the boys’ education; I knocked, you said come in…”

  Horace gestured from Amelia to Iris and back. “So this is not a special surprise for me,” he observed, with no small measure of cheek. He set the tray on a conveniently near vanity.

  “How dare you barge in here,” Iris seethed at her, but it was pinly all bluster. Amelia dared to gnce up and the woman was blushing from top to toes. “I’ll have you sacked for this!”

  “No, midy, I don’t—” Amelia struggled to cut through, for the first time in months having trouble keeping her voice in check. Finally, she blurted, “Iris, I don’t care.”

  That, at least, got the dy to pause. The firepce popped and crackled.

  Amelia pushed into the silence. “I’m not going to tell any one,” she said, making eye contact with the naked woman. “I have no interest in telling any one. Whatever you do, with whoever you do it… I can’t see how it would ever be any of my business.”

  “Well that’s refreshing, at least,” Horace remarked, settling onto the chair before the vanity.

  But Iris narrowed her eyes at Amelia. Still standing there and completely unashamed at her nudity, which Amelia would find rather impressive ter, when she had regathered her wits. The dy studied her for a long moment, and then her face rexed minutely. “Oh, I see.”

  “We can talk about the boys tomorrow—”

  “You think you’re above all this,” the dy accused. “The pure-hearted governess, virginal and dedicated to higher purpose.”

  A snort forced itself out of Amelia’s nose. She was hardly virginal, but that was more complicated than she had any interest in expining here and now. “Midy—”

  “You’re lucky, actually,” Iris sighed, and then she was smiling, but the expression in her eyes was sour. “You got to escape the marriage trap. Nobody told you that you’d have to wed, nobody forced you onto the market, nobody made your whole life dependent on signing your whole life away.” Her voice turned sharp and vicious. “Never got fucked, never learned to like it, never needed it when you weren’t supposed to have it anymore. Got to float above it all.”

  “It’s not like that, midy,” the girl assured her, backing towards the door, now. “I am not above anything. Which is why I have no cause to judge you. The heart wants what it wants,” she said with a gentle shrug. “And you’re not hurting anyone.” She realized she was babbling, and stopped.

  Iris just stared at her, uncomprehending.

  Amelia found the wall, reached out and opened the door. “Please just… enjoy your evening.”

  As she slipped backwards out the door, Horace ughed. “Oh, trust me, we will.”

  By the time she returned to her own room, her breath was ragged and her forehead slick with worry. Worse, she could feel ughter bubbling up inside her, distinctly at odds with her pounding heart. She closed her door and leaned up against it, trying and failing to calm herself.

  “There you are, Duchess,” Theresa said, stepping through the adjoining door. She was half-undressed, in stockings and shirtsleeves, comfortable and ready for a quiet evening in. But the smile on her face dropped as soon as she took in her lover across the room. “Whatever is the matter?”

  Amelia shook her head, as if she could simply dismiss the entire encounter. When that didn’t work, she expined, “I just had a… difficult interview with Lady Marbury.”

  “About the boys?”

  A pale little ugh escaped her. “We didn’t even get to the boys.”

  Theresa had crossed the room and took Amelia up in her arms. “Then what? She’s upset you.”

  Amelia let herself fold up against Theresa, grateful for the support and warmth of her. She buried her face in the crook of her lover’s neck and shook her head slightly. “It’s nothing.”

  “It’s not nothing if it has my Duchess Regent this agitated,” the woman responded reasonably. Amelia imagined that she was pcidly facing the door, talking to it like a person, while Amelia clutched at her. But the woman didn’t say anything further, content to simply hold her.

  It took Amelia some time before she peeled herself back off of her lover. Her face came away damp; she’d been crying into Theresa’s colr, somehow without even realizing it. She was guided to the bed, where she sat down, hands in her p.

  “We had a… confrontation about something else, it’s.. irrelevant,” she started. She’d told Iris she wouldn’t tell anybody, and she meant to stick by that. “But in the course of it, she said—” Here her voice crumpled and she had to take a moment to quell the sob that was trying to bubble out of her chest. “I swear, Theresa, it is such a silly thing. It’s nothing.”

  Theresa only put one finger under Amelia’s chin and lifted, making calm, steady eye contact from where she stood before her. “Tell me.”

  And that was it: there was no way that Amelia wasn’t spilling everything, now. So she took a deep breath to steady herself and said, “She said I was lucky that I’d never marry.”

  “Ah,” was all her lover said, although not without sympathy.

  “And I want to,” she went on helplessly. Theresa had said to tell her, so she was telling her. It was all coming out, now. “I want it so much it hurts, sometimes. I am so happy being myself, being Amelia, I can’t even begin to articute it. But the thought that… becoming me, getting to spend the rest of my life as me, that that has… walled off the possibility of spending the rest of my life with—” She looked at the floor. “With someone I love. It’s too much to even contempte, sometimes.”

  Chesterley squatted before her, her expression built out of weary compassion. “Women like us don’t get that,” she said gravely. “Although the women not like us don’t get the dream of marriage, either, because it’s rarely the safe and loving partnership it’s supposed to be, but. You don’t need me to rant at you.” She sighed, and said with the weighty air of a inescapable conclusion, “Some things just aren’t for us.”

  “Lizzie took me to visit the Ladies of Lngollen,” Amelia said with a pale little smile. “Have you been? Have you met them?” When Theresa shook her head, she said, “They’re lovely. Two dies in love with each other and with the life they’ve built for themselves.”

  “Two noble dies,” Theresa pointed out gently, “of considerable wealth. That’s not—” She didn’t say it, but it was pin that she was about to say “us.”

  “Not as wealthy as all that,” Amelia corrected, shaky with hope. Were they really talking about what she thought they might be talking about?

  But that had been the wrong thing to say. “Wealthier than I am or ever will be,” her lover said, with a new edge to her voice.

  “My perspective is biased,” the girl said quickly, apologetically, backing away as fast as she could from the topic that they weren’t talking about, wouldn’t talk about, couldn’t talk about. “And anyway, I have a long history of wanting things that I can’t have, and wanting more than is healthy.”

  Theresa took Amelia’s hands in hers and put on a smile, generous and gentle and entirely a choice rather than a window to her own heart. “We can still find happiness, Amelia. I promise you. Women like us… we find our own ways, we find our own purpose, we find our own work. And the lives we build may not look like what other people expect a life to look like… but they’re still happy lives. With purpose.”

  Amelia leaned forward, broke Theresa’s hold on her hands, and embraced her. She let herself be comforted, let her tears be wiped away, let herself be taken to bed, and held, and loved.

  But in the morning, she woke to Theresa quietly packing. They shared light conversation over breakfast, not talking about the night before or the bags packed that morning. In a shadowed nook off the side of the foyer, her lover quickly kissed her goodbye and hastened out the door.

  miriamrobern