Page 46 of Felicity Cabot Sells Her Soul
“Ah,” Mercy said. “I believe I begin to understand. So he bettered himself. For you?”
She had thought so, at first. “I suppose you could say that he was my first real student,” she whispered. And it hadn’t even been difficult. He had soaked up knowledge like a sponge, always hungry for more. She’d helped him to improve his diction, his posture. Refined his manners. She had lent him books, which he had devoured like a man starving for them. Quizzed him on various subjects, improved his penmanship dramatically. “Eventually,” she said, “he managed to save up enough money to buy a few second-hand sets of clothing, and to have a proper haircut. And he applied for a position with a local bank as a clerk. I’m given to understand that the manager was impressed with his ability to work complex sums in his head.” And ever so suddenly, he had acquired a certain standing, a legitimacy that he had lacked before. Well on his way to beingsomeone.
Charity’s hand squeezed her shoulder; a gesture of comfort. Felicity wondered if she could sense that the story was nearing its awful conclusion, racing toward the heartbreak that loomed, shadowing her words in an undertone of misery.
“And then,” she said, and heard the odd little catch in her voice, “and then he was always working. Often well into the night. Our little meetings, which had once been so regular, grew rare. Once, I did not see him for well over a week.” He’d not come round on Thursday. There had never been a light within his window, never a response to a tap on the panes. “He’d goneto London on business,” she said with an awkward little shrug. “He’d simply forgotten to tell me. Proving himself had eclipsed all else. It was as if I had been shoved into a dusty corner of his mind, occupying his thoughts for scant seconds at a time…only when he was reminded of my existence.”
“Did you complain of it?” Mercy asked, with a lift of her brows. “I would have done. Strenuously.”
“Of course.” When had she started crying? Felicity scrubbed at her cheeks with her sleeve. “I sounded like a harpy even to myself but…I had built such dreams upon him. And I could see them crumbling before my eyes, every one.” And still she had held onto them desperately, even as they slipped through her fingers like water through a sieve. For far too long. “He’d outgrown me,” she said. “I knew it before he did. We had once been in perfect agreement, and then—we weren’t. He hadn’t yet establishedhimself to his liking; his employer was grooming him for further responsibilities which would not yet support a marriage. And then he told me that he was going to London. To live. To work.” The next step in the career that had become all-important. So much more important than she had been.
Mercy’s mouth dropped open in shock. “But—London? Your work is here,” she said. Her eyes narrowed. “Don’t tell me he hadn’t considered it.”
“Considered and disregarded,” she said. “I couldn’t hope to earn more than the tiniest fraction of what he could, after all.” But she had never thought her salary, however meager, had had the slightest bearing on the value of her work, on the importance of it. “He had promised we’d be married, that we would have a house and life here. And then, so suddenly, he’d reconsidered. He said he’d sendfor me,” she muttered. “In a year or two. When he was settled.” And that—that had been the end. The moment that last thread to which she had desperately clung had been severed between them.
He had meant to leave her, too.
“That cad,” Charity hissed. “And he expected you—what? To wait? To follow at his convenience?”
“It matters little,” Felicity said. “I couldn’t have gone, even had I been willing to make that sacrifice for him.” Which she hadn’t. Why should all of the sacrifices have been hers? “Father was still alive. Probably the chance was small that we would have ever encountered one another, but—” Just the thought set her heart into a panicked race. Even now, when the man was dead and buried.
“I understand,” Charity whispered. “And you would have been so very young, still. Had you even reached yourmajority?”
“Only just,” Felicity said. Though she doubted even that would have stopped Father from dragging her home by her hair had he happened to encounter her. Still she had been petrified by the very thought, paralyzed by it. “That was the end,” she said. “The end of us. He had used everything I had taught him, and then he abandoned the dreams I had once thought we shared between us to travel to a place I couldn’t follow. It happened a bit at a time. In casual dismissals of my concerns. In missed assignations.” Each thing that had slipped through the cracks of increasing importance, widening that fissure which had erupted between them. Until at lastshehad slipped through the cracks. “But then it was just…all too much. I think I knew it was coming. And still it broke my heart.” Because she had desperately wanted him to be the one that stayed.
“Of course it did,” Mercy soothed, and she reached out to wrap her arm around Felicity’s shoulders. “Ofcourseit did. And I am so sorry for it.”
Something in her—that wounded child that had longed so desperately for affection—simply relaxed into the comforting embrace of her sister and accepted the tears that she had never before let herself cry as an inevitability now. Perhaps they were the last remnants of the ice that had encased her, frozen just as she had once been, into a shield to protect her battered heart.
Charity’s elegant fingers smoothed her hair. “My poor darling,” she said. “When did he return, then?”
With a fierce sniffle, Felicity cleared her throat of the lump of emotion that had settled there and swabbed once more at her eyes. “What do you mean?”
“From London,” Charity clarified. With her free hand she gave a little fluttering gesture of her fingers, which Felicity assumed was meant to indicate the house as a whole. “Clearly he’s been back for some time, if he has got himself a house like this one with all of its accoutrements.”
Felicity’s brows knitted. “He never left,” she said. “In the end—in the end, he never went to London.”
For a moment there was only a stunned silence, as Charity and Mercy exchanged baffled glances. “Why?” Charity asked at last. “Why, if it was so much a part of his grand plans?”
“I have no idea,” Felicity admitted. “That night—that last night—was the very last night I ever spoke to him. At least, until I had to barge in upon him and make a devil’s bargain to save Nellie from a debtor’s prison.”
Another odd little look shared between them. “And you did not find that…strange?” Mercy asked, in a tone of hesitance.
“Of course I found it strange,” Felicity returned. “But it didn’t matter any longer. I had no use for his excuses, for platitudes and promises already broken once. He’d shredded my heart a piece at a time already.” And her trust along with it. Not for anything would she have given him the scraps of it again to desecrate further.
“But still you went to him,” Charity said. “When you were in need of funds, you went tohim.”
“I hadn’t time to go to anyone else,” Felicity said. “Nellie kept the accounting books. I had no idea what a precarious position she was in, what a precarious position the school itself was in, until it was very nearly too late to save it. Had she confessed to all of it a week sooner, I would have applied to you instead.”
“But you went tohim,” Charity stressed again.
“He had money!” Felicity said, with a wild little gesticulation of her hands. “And I knew—I knew he would give it to me.” Just as she had known that it would come with conditions. “I would have done anything to save Nellie. So I made a bargain.”
“But how could you know he would give it to you?” Mercy asked, her brows drawn.
“Because—because—” Felicity swallowed hard. Because he had never stopped trying. She’d sent back dozens of letters unopened. At first they had come every day, and just the sight of that neat penmanship which she had helped him perfect had boiled her blood in her veins. Each another cut upon the hundreds he’d already inflicted, day after dreadful day.
But the days had passed, and then weeks, and months, and years, and gradually those letters had tapered off. Once a week. Once a month. Once a year—and that had been the hardest to reconcile. He had learned, eventually, that his letters would never garner a response. That if she happened to pass him on the street, she would only turn her head away.
