Summer
Her father’s house was broiling: the kind of Sussex summer’s day that flattens the world with relentless sunshine and narry a wisp of wind. The golden light squeezed in through the shutters and around the front door frame; soon the staff would throw it all open in the hopes of a breeze, but for now everyone in the house baked in half-light, trying to hold onto the last remnants of the morning’s coolth.
Her mother would be in a bath by now, water changed every hour; there she would stay until sundown. She spied her father’s back as he stepped into his study, but the door closed with a rather final-sounding click, and she knew he didn’t want to be disturbed. Her brother had left home ages ago and hardly ever visited. She was left to her own devices. Alone.
Amelia threw open the front door and staggered out onto the grounds. Was it cooler outside or in? She couldn’t tell. She should wear short pants; they were cooler. But no, she didn’t wear short pants any longer, she should wear… dresses. Why was that so hard to think of? It was so damn hot. She looked down at her body. A waistcoat and trousers? Of course. This is what she wore at her father’s house. She couldn’t very well wear a dress here.
The sheep were out grazing in the south lawn, a mottled white cloud spread across the ground instead of up in the blazingly blue and perfectly clear sky above. She skirted around them, half-listening to their muttering bleats, as she strode down towards the welcoming deep green shade of the brook. Surely it would be cooler there.
It wasn’t.
At least not appreciably. The water babbled and rippled, the dappled shade scattered patches of dark and light across the ground. The air was close, damp, and cloying. She followed the course of the water, the stream growing wider and deeper, the ground squishing underfoot. In the best of times, the fishing pond was her idyllic retreat from the rest of the world. Now it was a swamp.
Amelia stood on the muddy bank, peering down at the water, caught in confusion for an indeterminate stretch of time. She’d like to go for a swim. Throw off her clothes and leap naked into the bracing water. Did girls do that? Why didn’t she know if girls went swimming? That seemed like something she would know, since she herself was…
Wet slapped across her forehead. Something must have splashed into the pond. Amelia leaned into the cool water dripping down her face. A miraculous breeze, one that did not stir the trees around her, played across her damp skin, providing the barest shred of relief.
A plaintive bleat interrupted the moment, and Amelia, frowning, looked down to find a sheep struggling through the mud towards her. She looked up and around; the rest of the herd was nowhere in sight.
It was young; no more than a yearling. Careful with her own footing on the squelching ground, Amelia bent over, trying to redirect it up the slight slope to the grassy lawn above. It wasn’t cooperative. After nudges and shoves and no small amount of slipping in the mud, Amelia lifted the suddenly-surprised animal up and over her shoulders.
She trudged up the bank and across the lawn. It was so hot. Her trousers were painfully tight. With the beast’s legs dangling around her face, she could see nips and spatters of blood across them. She craned her neck around, cheek buried in the yearling’s spare wool and against its warm flank, and saw more wounds around its face and neck.
Amelia reached the edge of the herd, slung the animal off her shoulders and back onto the ground. It scrambled to its feet, bleated once, and bent over to graze. Only a moment later, however, a ram shouldered its way through the flock and shoved the yearling away from the herd.
“No, stop,” Amelia cried, hands thrust forward, but she couldn’t grip the ram’s coat.
The ram battered the yearling twice, nipped at its face, and bleated angrily. The yearling fled, faster than Amelia could chase.
She turned to scowl down at the ram. “You little shit.”
Amelia wasn’t equipped to chase down and return the yearling, so she scanned the short horizon of the manor grounds. Yes, there. Groundskeepers, two of them. Maybe one of them was the shepherd, Hawthorne. They were speaking with a gentleman, by his dress. His back was turned to Amelia, but it only took her a moment to recognize the shape and breadth of her father’s shoulders.
She set off to speak with them, but they didn’t seem the grow any closer. She hastened her pace, she ran; the men seemed to slide away farther from her. She called out—
Wet pressed against her forehead again. Cool water trickled over her cheeks. She staggered to a stop, huffing in the heat, settling back to sit on the grass, to lay down. She sighed in relief as the wet was replenished, another wave of chilly water now trickling back into her hairline, pooling inside her ears. Was her head resting on a sheep? She didn’t care.
Elizabeth murmured something, and Amelia made appreciative noises. She couldn’t quite form words, but she hoped she could convey the sense of, “Yes, please, more of that.”
Instead she got dizzy and the ground seemed to wobble and spin underneath her. A lock of sweat-plastered hair was stuck to her face and she couldn’t seem to brush it off. Amelia pushed herself up onto hands and knees, blearily looking across the grounds, and that’s when the first kick landed in her belly.
She cried out in surprise, only to be answered by jeers and shouts. Schoolboy shoes smashed into her stomach, into her thighs, into her crotch. They really liked kicking her in the crotch.
She couldn’t tell how many boys surrounded her; she wasn’t even sure they had a definitive number. They were just a mob, and they were kicking her in a circle, which was generally considered one of the highlights of formal education. They shouted insults at her; they shouted encouragements at each other; occasionally they pointed out to a friend the best place to stand or the best place to kick.
They left her broken and sobbing on the ground, which is where she stayed for a long while. She crawled across the lawn to the house, finding every foot or so another patch of cool grass to press her face against.
At some point hands reached under her arms and lifted her up; she was carried inside. One or more voices called for a doctor, and he materialized, either a moment or a day later.
He was a spare, compact little man, in a punctilious suit in a strange and foreign cut. He wore spectacles and a trimmed moustache. He spoke with a pinched Roman accent. He was Dottore Bruno.
Bruno pushed his face into Amelia’s, prying open each of her eyes in turn and palpating her throat. He made concerned sounds and spoke to someone just out of sight. He brushed away the sweaty lock of hair, and for this single gesture Amelia would be grateful to him until the end of her days.
“There are two approaches to medicine,” Dottore Bruno said, or had said. Perhaps it was a day later, and they were having supper. Brunno sat at her right hand, ladling soup into her bowl.
“The first,” he said, every word clipped and precise, “is that all bodies are essentially the same: same organs, same functions, same rules by which they all operate. We are united in a common humanity; we are all easily comprehensible in that humanity; and we are, each of us, nothing special.”
She sipped her soup; it tasted a lot like horse piss. But at least it was liquid and cool. She was so thirsty.
“The second is that every body is particular, idiosyncratic, and capable of its own singular beauty.” The doctor smiled; it was clear which approach he favored. “There are patterns and themes, of course, but every body interacts with and participates in those themes in its own way. The goal of medicine then, indeed the goal of all our lives, is to unlock every body’s signature beauty.”
The good doctor loomed over her again. Were they even at the table any more? Dottore Bruno floated above her, spinning slowly along with the rest of the room. “The first approach is veterinary,” he said. “Humanity as a herd to be managed. The second, though, is symphonic: the cultivation of each individual potential to join the chorus of all, lifted in song to glorify the universe.”
Music swelled around him as he rose up into the bedroom ceiling, and Amelia was in the midst of an opera, a whole concert hall of musicians hidden somewhere underneath her bed, and the whole universe sang along with her. It went on and on, for hours, for days, for years, and Amelia was a part of it. She was beautiful and she was singing along with everyone else. She cried, and her tears were part of the music, too.
Eventually, though, the grandeur faded and the heat rose and thirst turned her throat to ash. She thrashed her limbs; something or someone tried to restrain her, to hobble her. The schoolboys? Why didn’t the schoolboys want to sing along with her? One pounded a fist down, over and over, between her legs. She aimed a kick at where his face should be and connected with nothing but air. But her tormentors seemed to scatter away into the darkness.
She lay there, burning, thirsty, crotch aching, alone and hopeless. Wet pressed against her forehead again; no—someone, a person, pressed something wet and cool against her forehead. Perhaps she wasn’t alone. She tried to ask who was there, but the words wouldn’t come. Her lips didn’t want to move. It was so hard just to breathe.
She gathered up all her focus, concentrating for what felt like hours. Finally, she pushed herself up to sitting.
She was in bed. She was in a bedroom. She was in her bedroom, in her father’s house. The window was open to the night air, drifting in only a touch cooler than the glowering heat trapped inside the house. False dawn glimmered on the horizon.
Amelia slumped out of bed to the window, pushing her head and shoulders outside, hoping to cool off. It didn’t work. Frustrated, she ducked back inside, wrenched off her thick nightgown and kicked it into a corner. She bared her naked breasts and shoulders to the silver light of the moon. What would Mother think, she sniggered absently, trying to distract herself from the heat that she could still feel radiating off her skin.
A sound echoed up out of the house behind her, and Amelia pulled her head back inside. She stood stock still in the middle of the room and listened.
It was Elizabeth. Crying. Somewhere near, but muffled. Amelia’s heart leapt into her throat. Her friend.
Was she in the next room? Amelia went out into the hall and one door down, running half-naked down her father’s halls, but she didn’t care. She threw open the door, but her friend wasn’t there, either. Lizzie alternated between short bursts of sobs and little mewling sounds and sniffling. Was she behind one of the servants’ entrances? Amelia tried the door but it wouldn’t budge. She pressed her ear up against the door.
“What is it, dear?” came Ashbourne’s voice, all gentle solicitousness. “She’s fine, or will be; the doctor said she’s on her way to recovery.”
“It’s not that,” his daughter sniffed. “It’s just… oh Papa, I’m so ashamed.” Ashbourne said something mollifying, but Lizzie was having none of it. “I’ve sat here thinking the cruelest thoughts, Papa. That finally something was hard for her. Everything else came so easily and so quickly, and…” She blew her nose. “I’ve been jealous, which I know is silly, but that doesn’t keep this… sick green want out of my heart. Oh, Miss Pirie would be so disappointed in me.”
“Miss Pirie’s standards are insurmountable,” Ashbourne chuckled, and Lizzie’s sniffles were muffled, presumably by his embrace. He said something else, something too low for Amelia to hear through the door.
“I haven’t been a good friend,” Lizzie said, with an air of vehement remonstration, disagreeing with her father’s soothing. “I’ve been friendly. Because I ought to. The lady of the house. I wanted to be friends, I did all the things a friend would do. But all of that despite… oh Papa, despite the most vicious thoughts.” Here she collapsed again into sobs, her father murmuring to her, and slowly the sound of their voices faded away and Amelia wasn’t pressed against the servant’s door, anymore.
She was in London, on a busy thoroughfare. The muggy heat of the town surrounded her, swallowed her, threatened so suffocate her. She was just down St James’ street from her father’s club. And there he was, up ahead in the press of bodies. She pushed forward, shouted his name. He kept walking away. He mounted the steps to the front entrance of his club, nodded to the doorman, and slipped inside. Amelia stopped in her tracks. She wasn’t a member; she’d be turned away at the door.
But she stood there on the street, contemplating the entrance to the club and the doorman who studiously ignored her presence. Absently she twirled her parasol on her shoulder as she thought.
Why did she want to go in there in the first place? She’d been in there before, as her father’s guest. It was dark inside, lit by golden lamps reflecting on burnished wood, everything obscured by clouds of cigar smoke. He had led her through the halls and rooms, greeting various gentlemen of name, introducing her but never looking back to her, never taking in her face. He wanted to show her where he went when in town, where she might go if she joined the same club. He never once paused to ask if she wanted to be there, then or ever.
She remembered men roaming the halls or perched on armchairs, glowering at each other in always-unspoken challenge. She never wanted their company; she only wanted his. But he lived in this world of contests and challenges, and in that world she lost to him every time. Her endless losing streak and therefore lesser status was such a foregone conclusion he never even bothered to face her.
Amelia wrenched herself out of memory and turned away from the gentlemen’s club. Across the street was a coffee house; sitting at the window was Lizzie. Amelia dashed across the street, skirt billowing around her feet, and flung herself into the seat opposite her friend. Amelia smiled and said, “I’ve been looking all over for you.”
Elizabeth looked up in surprise and laughed. “Have you, now? Been ranging all over looking for me?”
“For ever so long,” Amelia agreed, nodding, and looked back in confusion at her wrought-iron chair, which had somehow sprouted a pillow roll. The more she looked at it, the more it became clear that the chair was actually her bed. She looked back at Lizzie, sitting at her bedside. One hand held a washcloth over a bowl filled with ice water.
“Quite the adventurer,” Lizzie giggled. “For what it’s worth, I think you are the first person in the world to try laudanum mixed with horse piss.” She set the bowl aside and leaned over Amelia’s bed. “Oh, it is so good to have you back, my dear.”
It came back in fragments rather quickly. They’d returned to Uskweirs. Ashbourne had sent for the surgeon. He’d arrived: an Italian named Dottore Bruno. Ashbourne welcomed him to his table, where he proved himself a lively conversationalist. But he waited until they were not eating to describe his career creating castrati for the opera houses of Europe, how he had fled the fighting and ended up in England of all places, and how his skills could benefit Amelia.
“It’s a little late to make you a soprano,” he’d said, “but you’ve done very well on your own. Your voice is beautiful.”
Amelia blushed then, and blushed now, in her bed.
Lizzie filled in the rest. The surgery was completed to Bruno’s satisfaction, but the next day Amelia came down with a fever. The wound became inflamed and infected.
“No no,” Elizabeth said, holding back Amelia’s own questing fingers, reaching for her crotch. “It’s fine, now, but you mustn’t disturb the dressings.”
“Fever,” Amelia breathed in fear. Fever and infection had taken Anthony. She raised the back of her hand to her own forehead, as much good as that would do. “Is it?”
Lizzie leaned forward to place her own, cooler hand beside Amelia’s. “Broken. Which is not to say you’re ready to get out of bed. The good doctor says you’ll need a few weeks of rest even after the fever abates.”
“How long have I…?”
“Fifteen days,” was the response. “We very nearly lost hope.”
“But you didn’t,” Amelia said, struggling to reach forward and take Lizzie’s hand in hers. She remembered fragments of the conversation that she must have overheard between Elizabeth and her father. She squeezed her hand as best she could. “You have been an excellent friend to me, Lizzie. Truly. Both through this ordeal and the months before. I am so incredibly lucky to have you.”
The girl blushed and looked away. “It’s what anyone else would have done.”
“Bullshit,” Amelia spat, and coughed a bit. Then she tried again, with a little less vehemence: “Bullshit. You have gone above and beyond any expectation of compassion or hospitality. You have been such a friend to me, and I treasure you and your friendship more than anything.”
Lizzie giggled despite her blush. “More than anything? Even more than you treasure your breasts?”
Amelia rolled her eyes and settled back against the headboard. “Elizabeth Randall, I treasure you greater than even my tits.”
