Page 35 of The Secret Identity of the Lord's Aide
“Of course you do,” Everett said, halting at a fork in the garden path. One fork sneaked beneath a brick archway, which perhaps led to the exterior forest. The other fork snaked along the other dead plants, crunching away in the breeze. “I saw the look on your face in that ballroom. You feel the entrapping of British society. Understand that this world shoves us forward to realities that aren’t entirely our own. Wives, companionships, children: what’s it all for? It’s certainly not for the beauty of love.”
“You sound like a romantic,” Nathaniel said. Although, when he said this, he heard his mother saying it, instead. It certainly wasn’t from his own mind.
“Perhaps I am, Nathaniel,” Everett said. “But in fact, I’ve been in love with the same woman since I was a man of just twenty-two years old.”
Everett’s eyes shone with the moon. Nathaniel tried to make sense of this statement, tried to remember Everett with one woman or another during courting Season. But he drew only a blank.
“Who is she?” he asked.
“You probably wouldn’t know her.” Everett sighed. “I met her when I was travelling with my family to Brighton. She was working at the house of my father’s old friend, painting portraits of several of his daughters. She had an immaculate ability to capture whoever she was looking at in a way that froze time. I would watch her for hours, just behind her shoulders, noting the curvature of her neck as she tilted her head this way, that way. God, I could have watched her paint forever.”
Nathaniel sensed the heaviness of the story already. He took a step back, marvelling at the weight of everyone’s secrets.
“Did your father know you were watching her?” Nathaniel asked.
“Absolutely not, no,” Everett said. “I had to sneak off to watch. We both knew it was wrong. She’s several stations below me, comes from nothing. But one afternoon, when no one was in sight, I kissed her. Kissed her! Completely tearing through every last rule of propriety. But at the time, at the age of 22, I hadn’t a care in the world. And she kissed me back, Nathaniel. She all but fell apart in my arms.”
Nathaniel felt a rush of emotion from a fountain he didn’t quite understand. “But you must have known, then, that class isn’t everything …”
Everett gave him a sneaky smile. “Why, Lord Linfield, I would have never thought someone of your status would say such a thing. Never in my wildest dreams.”
Nathaniel blinked, trying to rid the image of Lady Elizabeth, seemingly continually at the brink of his mind. “What happened next?” he said, trying to dart the conversation away from topics regarding him, or his emotions.
“It’s strange,” Everett said. “It’s strange how time passes, but your heart still clings to ideas and feelings and beautiful things. I left that house when I was 22 years old, knowing full-well that I could never be with Nelle. Never in my wildest dreams could she become my wife, no matter how much I wanted that sleeping form beside me every night of my life. But I took to my pen and paper after several sleepless nights and wrote her letter after letter, all of which she returned. In the letters, we talked about how we will surely find a way to be together one day. My status couldn’t be the single thing that kept us apart. And as the months went by, I forced myself to consider ways to impart the news of my love to my father and mother. I struggled with it. Practised to myself in my room.
“But that all changed when I received her next letter. You see, her older sister had been promised to a man of a higher status, a man in London, but her sister had been overtaken by an illness and had been crippled. For this reason, her father had offered her, my Nelle, to this Londoner. Immediately, I flew into a rage, demanding to know who this man was. This man who was going to take my Nelle. But she refused to tell me
“I knew that Nelle would be living out her life perhaps streets away from me, in London, and it absolutely petrified me. Throughout the next few years, I drove myself insane, thinking that nearly every woman I spotted on the street was her. I was stricken with grief, knowing she couldn’t respond to my messages. That she couldn’t be a part of my life. So, a few months after the tragedy befell your father, I ran off to India, then to China. I considered other ways of living. I wondered if I could ever take an Asian wife,” he said, almost incredulous at his own story. “But as the year went past, I knew I needed to return to England.”
“And what of Nelle?” Nathaniel asked, hunching his shoulders forward.
“When I arrived home, it took me perhaps two weeks to send out a man to discover her whereabouts,” Everett said, sounding world-weary. “And he discovered that her husband has since deceased, that he left her with a three-year-old child with golden curls, just like Nelle. The man told me they couldn’t be more alike in manner and in looks. It makes my heart break, knowing that Nelle is all alone in that big mansion, her daughter fatherless …”
“And your family certainly wouldn’t approve you marrying a widow,” Nathaniel murmured, feeling his stomach harden with sadness.
“You said it, old boy,” Everett said, his voice no longer jocular. “And so, I find myself here. At another godforsaken ball. Waiting, waiting. For what? For another Nelle to walk into my life? I don’t believe that will ever happen.”
Nathaniel felt the words flow out of him, then. “What you’re feeling about this girl is a decade old. It’s worth your time to uphold it. To go and find her. To tell her.”
Everett blinked at him, incredulous. Through the gaping pause between them, the air filled with the swell of string instruments from the big house. Everett’s smile was sneaky and wry, like a teenage boy’s.
“You old romantic, you,” he said, chuckling. “I never would have pegged you as such. Tell me. Who is she?”
Nathaniel shook his head, pretending not to fully understand the question. “She? No, goodness. There’s no one in my life, Everett. Nothing of the likes of dear Nelle.”
“Nathaniel, I’ve known you a long time. And to put it simply, you’ve always been a bit of a dunce in matters of the heart,” Everett said, arching his brow. “There’s something up with you. Something that perhaps you can’t put into words yet.”
Everett snapped his hand across Nathaniel’s shoulder, making Nathaniel’s firm frame shake a bit, back and forth.
“I owe you a similar bit of advice, then,” Everett said, his eyes glittering. “I owe you a feeling of resolution, which is what you’ve just given me. Whatever it is—whatever this feeling is, dear Nathaniel, follow it,” Everett said. “For I watched the plague take countless people across India. I watched Chinese people starve at the side of the road. I came home and saw that same look of fear and loneliness in my own people, the people of England. We’re all slowly dying, or else getting to it far too quickly. Explore this. Whatever it is.”
Nathaniel and Everett walked back to the party after that. Everett sneaked his way through the foyer, back towards the carriage, leaving Nathaniel with only another firm handshake and a wink. “I simply can’t stay a moment more. Not when she’s out there,” he told Nathaniel.
Nathaniel forced himself to remain. He forced himself through countless conversations with his father’s old friends, grinning and then frowning in a strange pattern to translate his worry and his interest. When he was introduced to their daughters, he bowed his head low and said he was grateful for the opportunity to meet them—and that certainly, yes, they should arrange a dinner together quite soon. But his words were hollow. And he couldn’t help comparing each and every debutante with Lady Elizabeth.
Could they possibly hold a conversation like Lady Elizabeth? Could they tease him, teach him, extend his mind in ways like Lady Elizabeth could? He felt frighteningly certain they couldn’t. They were young, bright-eyed, optimistic—perhaps the sorts of women Nathaniel might have appreciated when he was a much younger man.
Now, he wanted so much more.
