The Waltz

The house in Mount Street is narrow and tall and painted the color of cream, and the footman who opens the door is so handsome you nearly apologize to him.

"Miss Lidcote," he says. "Her ladyship is in the library."

Of course she is.

You follow him up a staircase hung with pictures that are not ancestors: a ship in a storm, a woman reading by a window, a sketch of a horse that looks as if it was done in five lines by somebody who loved it. The house smells of beeswax and orris root and, faintly, of ink. Your mother allowed this visit on the understanding that it is a call of politeness, fifteen minutes, with Sukey waiting in the hall. Sukey is now in the kitchen being fed cake by somebody. You heard her laugh.

The library door opens.

It's bigger than your father's back parlour and better lit, and it's full. Shelves to the ceiling, a ladder on brass rails, books lying open face-down on the window seat and the hearthrug and one balanced on the arm of a sofa as if somebody abandoned it mid-sentence to answer the door. You tilt your head to read the spines nearest you: Wollstonecraft, Rousseau, a French title you're fairly sure your mother has burned a copy of, Fanny Hill bound innocently as a book of sermons.

"Don't look at that one," says Yseult. "Or do. But not in front of Mrs. Tuke."

She's at the far end of the room, in a lilac morning dress with the sleeves pushed up, moving a chair. The carpet has already been rolled back against the wall. The floorboards are bare and pale and gleaming.

"Mrs. Tuke," Yseult says, "this is Miss Lidcote. Miss Lidcote, Mrs. Tuke, who has been with me nine years and disapproves of everything I do."

There's a woman in the corner you hadn't noticed: grey-haired, dressed in black, sitting very upright with a piece of mending. She looks at you over a pair of steel spectacles.

"Not everything, my lady," says Mrs. Tuke. "I approved of the time you went to bed early."

"That was a fever."

"I approved of it nonetheless." Mrs. Tuke returns to her mending. "Mind her feet, miss. She leads like a cavalry officer."

"You count," says Yseult.

"I don't."

"You're counting now. Your lips are moving. One, two, three. Stop it." She has your right hand in her left, held up and out, and her right hand is flat between your shoulder blades. Through the muslin you can feel the warmth of it. "Look at me, not your feet. Your feet know where they're going."

"My feet have never known where they're going in their lives."

"Then they'll learn to follow. That's the whole secret of the waltz, Ava. Somebody leads, somebody follows, and both of them pretend it was their idea." She steps. You step. You don't tread on her. "Better. Again."

There's no music. Mrs. Tuke hums, flat and slightly too fast, without looking up from her needle. It's absurd. You're turning in a widow's library to the sound of a lady's maid humming, and the room goes around, books and window and fire and books, and Yseult's face stays still in the middle of it like the one fixed point.

"Talk to me, Ava," she says. "Men like a girl who can talk while she dances. It makes them feel they've chosen someone with resources."

"What should I talk about?"

"Anything but the weather. Tell me about your father."

You miss a step. She catches you without seeming to, a small adjustment of her hand at your back, and you're turning again.

"He collected books," you say. "That's all he did, really. He was supposed to manage the estate and instead he sold it, piece by piece, for first editions. My mother has never forgiven him."

"And you?"

"I grew up in his library. I learned to read on the floor of it." You're not counting anymore, you realize. "He'd give me anything. Gibbon at ten, Montaigne at twelve. He said there was no such thing as a book a girl shouldn't read, only books a girl hadn't read yet."

"I'd have liked him."

"Everybody did. Nobody lent him money twice." You turn under her arm; your skirts swing out and settle. "There are three thousand of them now, in our back parlour. My mother means to sell them at Michaelmas if I'm not engaged."

Yseult's hand tightens very slightly on yours.

"And if you could keep them," she says. "What would you do with them?"

Nobody has ever asked you that. You hear yourself answer before you've decided to.

"I'd open a room," you say. "A reading room. Not a circulating library, those are all novels and gossip and a man at the desk who looks at what you borrow. A room for women. Where they could read anything, anything at all, and then sit down together and argue about it out loud, without a husband in the corner coughing." You stop. Your face is hot. "It's a silly idea."

"It's not a silly idea." She says it flatly, as a fact. "Where?"

"Where?"

"Where would you have it? London's too expensive and too watched. Somewhere with a great many bored, clever women with a little money and nothing to do with their afternoons." Her eyes narrow, thinking. "Bath."

"You're laughing at me."

"I've never been more serious. Ask Mrs. Tuke. I'm frightening her."

"Terrified, my lady," says Mrs. Tuke, humming.

You laugh. You can't help it. Yseult's mouth curves, and she turns you faster, and the room spins, and for a moment you are not counting or watching or apologizing for anything, only moving, held, light, your hand in hers and her hand at your back and her face close enough that you can see the comma of the scar at the corner of her mouth, and you think, very clearly, oh.

Yseult stops.

Not gently. She simply stops, mid-turn, and lets go of your hand, and takes a step back, and then another, as if the floor between you has become very hot.

Mrs. Tuke's humming breaks off.

"That will do for today," Yseult says. Her voice is perfectly pleasant. She doesn't look at you. She looks at the clock on the mantel. "Your mother gave you fifteen minutes and we've been an hour. Pym will see you down."

"Did I do something wrong?"

"No, Ava." Too quick. She picks up a book from the sofa arm and looks at its spine as though she's never seen it before. "You did it exactly right. That's the trouble with good pupils. They make one so tired."

She does not look tired. She looks like somebody who has walked into a door in the dark.

Your mother asks how it was. You say polite. Kezia sends a note demanding every detail; you answer with three lines about the furniture. You eat dinner. You read the same page of Madame de Staël six times. You go to bed and you lie there in the dark with your hand open on the counterpane, palm up, where hers was.

At a quarter to midnight there's a tapping at the area steps below your window.

You put on your wrapper and go down in your bare feet, past the kitchen where the fire is banked. Sukey is already at the area door, yawning, holding a folded square of paper sealed with lavender wax.

"Footman from Mount Street, miss," she whispers. "The handsome one. Said to wait for an answer."

You break the seal right there on the cold flagstones. Her handwriting is quick, slanting, black, like a woman running downstairs.

You trod on my foot twice and on my composure once. Same hour Thursday?

Y.