Fiction: Sex, Marriage, and Other Weapons

By Hannah Shearer

 

Later – after the parlour in Cornwell House, when a soldier pushes his mouth to the nape of her neck and sucks so hard that the blood dances – and rises in a love-bruise against her skin, as if to mark her out – and causes her to whimper so disgracefully – Arabella remembers the conversation.

There is a talk every mother gives her daughter at a certain age. How to act around a man: eyes down, handkerchief dropped meekly for him to retrieve, demure but not skittish, accomplished but not clever. Arabella’s mother had said these things and then, sighing, sipped her tea. “It may be necessary to go further, of course,” she’d said. “If he is a fine prospect. At the right time, allow your hand to fall upon him,” she gestured, as if handling dog muck, “and move it, briefly. Then stop. Pretend you do not wholly understand what it is you are doing. And if he is titled let him put his hands on you. But for nothing less than a baronet. And not too much.”

“What counts as too much?”

Arabella remembers the sarcasm bloodying her voice. So she had been old enough to talk back by then. 

“Don’t be clever, dear.”

Another mama might have said don’t be foolish. Arabella had thought what a terrible complement, to be too clever.

There are tricks that a woman can use. They both know it. It is the Unspoken Thing. 

“You must make him believe you desire him without showing that you know what desire is.”

(A little knowledge is dangerous, Mother has always said.)

“And will I? Desire him?”

Mother’s lip curled against the rip of the teacup. “Don’t be vulgar, Arabella.”

(Men are different. Their needs are...an unfortunate reality. But I expect better from you.)

Of course, the act will hurt, Mother says, but it occurs only after the vows have been exchanged. No husband will cast her off if she cries out during the act. Unless she truly makes a spectacle of herself.

#

(Her mother wants the best for her. 

Arabella dreams of nothing but escaping her mother’s house. And yet: her mother wants the best for her.)

#

When Arabella recognises Mr Edmund Sandhurst at the Claythorpes’ ball she understands precisely what she must do – even when Sophia Hammond confides how he has been calling on her throughout the season. And when Sandhurst’s aunt mentions this flowering courtship Arabella hums thoughtfully. “So all that awful gossip about her father was just low, base talk,” she murmurs. “Oh, I am so glad for Sophia.”

Lady Sandhurst blanches. Her nephew does not dance again with Sophia for the rest of the season.

Arabella has always known that the only way for her to win at being a woman is by cheating. She has known since she was a child, examining herself in the mirror and waiting for her features to sweeten – there is in her something knifish, overly narrow and dark, there is in her something that is always too sharp. Sly and sneaking, her governess called it.

She is too thin, too small: Mother says she could pass for one of the thieves they hang outside the Newgate. In time her body slides towards that of a woman’s - begrudgingly, pityingly, no flesh to spare – but her character does not. She cannot be tender or sweet-natured. Her tongue is poison and glass and everything spiked. Within and without, she is full of sharp edges. Hard places. 

Arabella suspects Mother admires this. Why can’t you be more like your sister? she asks her sons, and Arabella hates the thrill this gives her, the skittish joy of a cat who for once has not been kicked. She sees her brothers’ expressions and knows they hate her. She knows she does not care.

She cannot win without cheating. Every day Mother has her maid pluck any stray hairs or blemishes from her person; every evening she has Arabella stand and recount her every interaction, sometimes swaying into the early hours of the morning. Sometimes Arabella concedes to these drills, sometimes not. Their house on Arundel Place turns tight with the sounds of their warfare. 

For twenty-five years she has been continuously brought a little closer to perfection.

Sometimes, when she is alone, Arabella thinks that if she turns very quickly she will still see her mother’s shade standing over her.

(She thinks Mother wants only what is best for me. 

She thinks I’d like to stab her through the eye with a pin.)

She cannot win without cheating.

Arabella does not feel guilty for what she has done to Sophia. There is no friendship between the women in their set; everything is up for grabs. And Edmund Sandhurst is the last surviving relative to his aunt, with her fortune and her house in Belgrave Square and her estate in Devonshire. He is not the most handsome, yet his eyes are fashionably dark and he has the clever features of a man confident in his own worth; it will be no burden to regard him from below in the marriage bed. 

And he is not the kindest. She could not be married to a good man. He would grow too disappointed in her, too quickly.

Arabella will never be the prettiest, or the sweetest or the kindest, but by God, she intends to be the richest. With a position none dare speak against, and a thick oak door she can fasten against her mother each and every night.

She cannot win without cheating. 

#

(In their youth Arabella would rifle through her brothers’ rooms and find the books under their beds: sticky-paged, plain-covered, certain passages underlined in angry blue ink. She eavesdrops on their conversations and discovers words like sodomite and blow and cunt. She presses two fingers tight inside herself: dry, hard, until she cannot stand it any longer.

There will be pain then. But she can manage pain.

Mother considers the entire act wholly vulgar. Surely, then, there must be some redeeming qualities to it.)

#

Matters progress. One day Sandhurst takes Arabella in his arms a little too lingeringly; when her hand falls upon him he stares, and then kisses her so hard his teeth chafe at her lower lip. The bruises where he grasps her do not fade for a week. Afterwards, Arabella tells her mother that there is nothing to fear, she has everything under control.

Whether Edmund Sandhurst will give her his fidelity, his honour, or his respect, Arabella does not consider. 

(“I wish you luck,” Sophia Hammond says, her eyes red-rimmed, “for you’re both as bad as the other.”)

He will give her his name and his wealth; that is all she requires.

(“Panting at the bit,” one of Sandhurst’s friends says at the gaming tables. “Or so we hear of the lady.” Arabella overhears her brothers speak of it: she carries on walking, her fingers stuffed into her ears.)

It is Lady Sandhurst who proposes the bargain: her ladyship is widowed and easily bored, she must have company and conversation, and the propriety of another person when she leaves the house. If Arabella serves as her companion for a year her ladyship will approve this impending engagement – and, moreover, make her such an allowance that will guarantee Arabella separate property for her own use in her marriage. The position is a step down – a humiliation, Mother says – but one which will guarantee her future. 

It is her mother’s contempt that convinces Arabella.

(A week later at the theatre Arabella overhears Lady Sandhurst laughing. “A rather wretched creature,” she says, “stupid and spiteful, you know the type. She won’t give him much trouble, mark my words!”)

(She doesn’t care what they think.)

(They can think what they like, as long as she wins.)

#

(At night Arabella lies back: rubbing herself, skin chafing skin, fruitlessly chasing satisfaction. Fumbling, panting. Frustrated. Pleasure flickers, raises its head, flees.

Later another mouth will play over her fingertips – suckling, tonguing enough to make her blush, softening passage still with her own wetness and then guiding such movement – and she will blush. Furious at her own ignorance.

Though her anger will pass. There will be other distractions by then.

Pain is likely, Mother had said. Love seems to mitigate it, though I shouldn’t hold out much hope for that, not with your disposition. But if you’re frightened of a little pain then I cannot help you, for pain is all there is in this world.

There will be the clipping of teeth against the white untouchability of her shoulders, the neat and pink curve of a nipple - her own insistent tugging at oh-so tuggable curls – and after all that talk, only a little tightness melting back into heat and aching and want. And she will wonder why it was no-one ever spoke of telling the good pain from the bad.)

#

Grand it might be, but Cornwell House is claustrophobia made up in fashionable red brick. Heat here collects in the corners: it lays upon Arabella like furs. The scent of jasmine from the garden rises up through her every day, and so smothers her.

Her role is simple: to stand like a target when Lady Sandhurst is bored and take whatever her ladyship might throw at her. Lady Sandhurst is passing fifty, with the arrogance of wealth: she has travelled, she is cosmopolitan, she is daring and educated. She has interests in prison reform and the votes of women, she has plans for the improvement of the working man’s moral character. On their daily walks they visit Kensington Barracks: Lady Sandhurst is writing a book proposing reforms for the common soldier, it will shock them all in Parliament, those great men will all faint at her nerve! She drops intellectual references into conversation that Arabella cannot understand and seems to delight in her confusion.

“I envy you, your ladyship,” Arabella says coolly. “I only hope when I reach such an age I can boast of such achievements.” They swiftly learn to despise each other: it is this, Lady Sandhurst says, that makes it fun. 

For propriety’s sake Arabella must sit, each day, in the officer’s mess while Lady Sandhurst interviews the colonel and junior officers and draws all sorts of conclusions about that most uncouth of beasts: the common redcoat. As for these enlisted men themselves? She draws her skirts close when passing them on the stair, to stop them dirtying her silk poplins.

“Don’t even think about it,” she overhears their sergeant, a strong-looking young man with a scornful laugh, saying to his men. “Pretty enough, but she’s a spoiled brat. Likely she’d rip your todger straight off.” Arabella, thinking of her mother’s particular brand of spoiling, entertains the fantasy of smacking him straight in the jaw.

She and Sandhurst exchange letters: short, undiluted. Only once does he make some comment about not every gentleman permitting his fiancé to live so near such rough soldiers. She responds, with contemptuous honesty, that as long as their table manners are equally rough he can be assured of her enduring low opinion of them.

(There’s something in the word. Rough. No lady would admit to knowing the implications. Arabella wonders what it would be like to be rough. To actively reach out and push warm flesh beneath her own. To scrape teeth against another’s body. To demand and to claim.

On her wedding night she will lie beneath Sandhurst as still as scattered flower petals. Doubtless it is what he expects.)

#

Occasionally she is sent to visit her family: she returns reluctantly, tight-throated, picturing Mother’s hands pinching at her upper arms, the scraping of pins stabbing through her hair. She endures her mother’s vinegar-dipped conversation, fleeting talks with her brothers. Was there ever a time the three of them enjoyed each other’s company? She cannot recall.

She does not believe her brothers even like one another that deeply. But sometimes she will watch them talking, drawn together as if caught by the tide, and she will ache. 

Their alliance is pure defensive strategy. It’s only fair, they must have decided. Baby Sister had thrown her lot in with Mother, eternal enemy; they, naturally, must therefore pool their resources. Arabella was the favourite. They would defy this natural advantage with superiority in numbers.

It's too late for her to correct their mistake. And why should she not utilise her position? They have the option of leaving, but her escape lies down the marriage aisle. If she must use their mother’s favouritism to get out, she will.

(Later she realises that favouritism is a short-sighted, childish word. Does the child favour the insect they pull wings from, simply because they pay it attention?) 

She travels to and from her family home escorted by Lady Sandhurst’s downstairs maid. Sometimes when they return the loud-mouthed sergeant is loitering at the door: her ladyship requires notes and records, the maid says, and sends for them direct from the barracks. His name is Sergeant Theodore Dawley, she adds, and he’s terribly handsome.      

Arabella imagines pinching her.

One day he salutes her with a half-smoked cigarette. “Your bloody mistress,” he complains. “She doesn’t half take her time receiving company.”

Arabella orders the maid inside and then glares. He isn’t even that handsome. Far too pleased with himself. “You should wait by the servants’ entrance.”

“I should be back at the garrison,” he retorts. “Not coming to heel whenever she gets bored.”

He’s quick, Arabella will give him that. And she can appreciate his frustration; it’s no fine thing, to have fingers snap with the expectation that you will come running. But then a soldier should be good at taking orders; she says as much, tersely, and he laughs and says she must have officers’ blood in her somewhere, to be so good at giving them. 

“Oh honestly,” Arabella snaps. “Smarten yourself up, can’t you?” 

He pulls himself to attention and rolls his eyes. Of all these things to endure, Arabella decides, being laughed at by such a man is surely the worst.

#

She should not speak to him again. Not in any sense other than the functional: she is, after all, of a class who knows how to get what they want. It’s only, Arabella realises with a miserable kind of plummeting, that she’s so lonely here.

The realisation is compounded by the knowledge that she’s been lonely everywhere else as well.

During the next visit to the garrison Sergeant Dawley, in passing, murmurs some courtesy-that-is-not-a-courtesy; before Arabella knows it she is snapping back in return. And just like that, a routine is built.

That she is happy to sink into a battle of wits with a common redcoat is both inappropriate and humiliating. But then there is no danger in it, he knows of her engagement – and he, well, there is nothing of him to appeal to her! And nothing that he can give her. He holds no power, and therefore no danger.

There is a currency that exists between men and women. She has been aware of it since she was old enough to bleed.

(Once, when Arabella had just turned fourteen, her mother’s cousin stood behind her and said what a fine young woman she was becoming. He put his hand upon her burgeoning breast. After a moment’s pause he said he would buy her some new sketching pencils, as they understood each other so well.

Arabella, already attuned to her parents’ marital warfare, said that she would prefer a broach. A big one, if he could. Her cousin said he’d always known she was a filthy little troublemaker – one who knew precisely what she was doing to a man, and he with a wife and child as well – but the next week he gave her the gift. And then Arabella had gone to her father’s study and in clear tones explained precisely what had happened.

Because she was Papa’s favourite, she was never left alone with her cousin again. And what was better, Papa let her keep the broach. 

Three months later Papa left. Abandoned the family home for private apartments in the more fashionable end of Belgrave Square: though the bills were still paid promptly and lavishly. Arabella could never blame him for leaving their mother. She just blamed him for not taking her with him.)

Arabella suspects Dawley takes amusement in their skirmishes. Something in the way his eyes glint, but then he is a martial man. Of course he must enjoy such things.

As for her? Such bickering is unfitting, of course. Bordering on the obscene. It’s only that she is lonely. And she does enjoy a fight. 

#

Spring gives way to summer, whose heat continues to build, threatening crescendo. Arabella spends her days trying not to let herself turn sticky with sweat. There is something dreadful in the pervasiveness of the liquid: it trickles between her breasts, the creases where her thighs meet her body. It reminds her of all the places of which a lady should be unconscious.

She would like to do something. She would like to fall into the sea, fully clothed, and fill her lungs with salt. She would like to slap Lady Sandhurst in the face. She would like to stand with hips positioned against the edge of old Lord Sandhurst’s writing desk and grind and rub and do everything awful until something inside of her breaks.

She wants to do something ruinous to herself. Mother always warned that encroaching nuptials turn certain girls foolish and light-headed. But dear God, when she pictures Edmund Sandhurst she feels nothing, none of this growing pain of want.

Pity her: it’s not even an officer, to compound her shame. In her increasingly restless mind such grubby tropes tropes abound: fantasies of enlisted man atop titled girl, rough mouth against debutante throat. She should be humiliated by it.

As it is, by the time she is fully aware of what is happening and who, precisely, she is wanting, she cannot think in clear-cut terms. Only abstracts: ache, pulse, skin, lip, want.

She makes excuses to avoid the garrison and more excuses still to visit: when Dawley is near Arabella must bite into her tongue until the blood comes. Is there a reason for this? Oh, his body is safe and sturdy and the rasp of his voice pleasing, but it’s not just that. She doesn’t know how to describe it. She feels sick with betrayal, that no-one thought to explain whatever it is that now lives within her.

Can he feel it too? She cannot believe anyone else has ever felt as she does now. Why did no-one ever warn that this could happen?

#

(Arabella was never taught the number of ways that one can say copulation: amorous congress, tupping, wagging, pearl-diving, tipping the velvet, the little death, the agony of bliss. Or that to mean love one might instead say all reason lost, distraction, despair.

Or how desire just means want, want, want.)

#

On a whim Lady Sandhurst sends for military records of pay; on stronger whim she visits a friend for the afternoon. It’s too warm a day for the trek, and by the time Dawley arrives he is seething. Arabella, rather helplessly, receives him in the parlour alone: there is no-one here to act as chaperone, she says, and he should not stay. Dawley snaps that he didn’t have to bloody well come at all.

She cannot say, I know what it’s like, to be ordered about on a whim. All she can do is have the maid fetch an iced lemonade, which the sergeant gulps down immediately. “Are they all like this?” he says curtly. “The people like yours, who take what they want and give nothing back?”

Arabella presses her lips thin. Belatedly Dawley mutters an apology and scuffs his boot against the patterned Persian rug splayed across the floor. It leaves a trail of dirt. The sheen of his uniform stands out hard against the fashionably arrayed parlour: she watches him shift about, trying to decide whether to make himself bigger or smaller against this alien setting. “It’s a fine place she has.”

“It is.” Nerves prompt her to add: “We will probably live here, myself and Mr Sandhurst.”

“Aha,” he says. Noncommittally. Her hands are clammy and warm; she wishes she had her gloves. They seem naked, lying in her lap like this. God, there should be other sounds: the maids working in other rooms, birdsong, even. Just something else, to fill this great impossible hesitation between them.

“Is he…nice?” Dawley asks, and then pulls a face.

“Better looking than you. Taller too.” Another scowl, it’s funny the things men value. “Wealthy, intelligent, and a respected member of the community.”

“Mm-hm.”

“I’m sure we will be very happy,” she adds.

“I’m sure you will.”

“And he is quite the gentleman.” Briefly the memory of blood at her lower lip flares.

“I can imagine.”

“Whereas I’ve heard,” she continues, why can’t she stop talking, “that in the garrison any sort of nonsense is permitted, and soldiers will employ any cheap trick to pull some poor woman into disrepute.”

“Oh yes,” Dawley says, peevish, dripping sarcasm, “your lot would have it that we never do any work at all. It is only ever drinking and gambling, and fellows pulling a woman into their laps, and sweet-talking her, and petting her hair –” He has become passionate with ire, and in the process puts his hand to her dark hair in mimicry quite unconsciously.

Pet. Arabella thinks. The cozening of a creature who only responds to a tender touch. 

They are both, now, completely still.

There’s such warmth coming from the curve of his palm. She swallows, tight. Tries not to lean in. “And?”

“And,” Dawley says, also striving for recovery. “And touch, like this.” He demonstrates, grazing his hand over the length of her neck. “And –” 

(Until that moment, he later explains, he had not even thought of stepping further. It had been a stupid and impetuous thing, a sticking up of two fingers against the people who were forever snapping their fingers, barking their orders. At her, for being so high-and-bloody mighty all the time.

And then he – aching still, daring, chancing his arm – had brushed his lips to the nape of her neck.

And then her sigh. Like the sound of falling. It had speared through him: some sort of electric pulse, some seismic calamity. Causing him to pull her close. Sink his mouth against her. And almost bite down, feverish.)

It’s she who wriggles, inelegant, to pull him down. His mouth to hers. 

Anyone might walk in and see them, there on that fine rug. Silence broken through with gasps, and the frantic sounds of skin over skin. When he first touches her she whimpers, and he – realising her ignorance, her want – cups a broad hand over her face, dots kisses beneath her ear, mumbles ‘I’ve got you, sweetheart, I’ve got you,’ clumsy with desire. Pressing slower, further; there is only a little tightness after all, and then her body relaxing so deliciously; she thought it would hurt, why doesn’t it hurt? His hands moving over her, blood racing, sensation flooding in like light.

Afterwards – after Arabella has cried out so sharp she thinks it must be heard in Arundel Place – Dawley pets her hair again. He holds her hand against the dampness of his chest beneath which his heart pounds. “Christ,” he whispers, “I think you’ve ruined me.”

Arabella might say the same. If it felt like ruination.

#

She is consumed with the meaning of words. Words like nibble – the grazing of teeth over her shoulder-blades, fingertips, the insides of her thighs – and pulse – the eager twitching of her parts between her legs – or breath – faltering breath at the point of crisis, hot pants over her throat, her breasts. Everything now can be distilled to the physical. 

There is the abandoned ice-house at the bottom of the garden, a study formerly used by Lord Sandhurst, endless guest-bedrooms, shadows behind trees. Every time Arabella is convinced she’s found some new trick her body can do.

Their favourite place is a poky guest-bedroom at the far end of the house: it’s here where they spend the most time, arguing and fucking. Sometimes they just talk, and Arabella marvels at how much fun that can be as well. It’s where Ted teaches her to sit astride him and take the lead, if she wishes. “You can do what you want,” he urges, skimming his fingers over the lines of her calves, her thighs, her back. “I want you to. Please.”

There is something about it that makes her body sing. That taking of command by her own body, that deciding of how hard and how fast and how deep. How Ted gapes at her as if she were something divine, as if she were meant to be like this.

She comes first, with a sharp cry, and watches almost hungrily as Ted reaches his climax. A shaking, gasping arc of spine and sinew. Amid the fading mist of pleasure Arabella thinks, I could hurt him like this. Reach down and grab his ballocks to twist, hard. Press her hand against that spasming curve of throat. Or else run straight to the garrison, up the rickety stairs to the officers’ quarters, and tell the colonel that an enlisted man put unwanted hands upon her. They’d believe her. She could cause ugly red welts to appear on his bared back and the burn-mark of a rope around his neck. She could.

Arabella presses a finger against the line of his jaw. There’s a raised mark where he’s cut himself shaving. She touches it almost shyly.

“You were looking at me funny,” Ted teases hoarsely.

“I’m sorry.” It’s not just the ugly impulse that unsettles her, but the power she holds over someone like him. “I’ll look at you like a simpering maiden the next time.”

He bursts out laughing: says she’s an odd one. “Feel free to look at me how you want.” Ted takes both her wrists in his hands and pulls her down. Come here for a cuddle, he says.

That’s another word that was never applied at Arundel Place, Arabella thinks. Cuddle.

#

(She never knew it was possible to laugh while abed either.)

#

In this place she turns to fragments. Thinks only in whisps of silk and bitten-off, staccato moans –

• of how Ted will push his head between her thighs and, with hands braced against her rump and half-parted lips breathing against her pearl, make her say every filthy word she knows – 
• of the shudder that passes through him when she touches the tip of her tongue to that delicate meeting-place between his collarbones – 
• of how his body feels like hot wax dripping down her hands, how she wants to draw her fingertips over the malleable warmth of him and write secrets over his stomach, his chest, his – 
• of the sound Ted makes when she puts her hand upon his prick: the lowest, sweetest begging sounds she has ever heard – 
• how it cannot be enough, this thing between them, it is never enough.

One day in a fit of madness Arabella takes Lady Sandhurst’s finest writing paper and writes fragments of want all over the page. I want you to lie back and give me your mouth, your cock, your everything. I want your tongue in my cunt and my fingers in your mouth and everything filthy and wild, I want from you. I can’t sleep without putting my hand between my legs and thinking of you. I think you’ve ruined me. I want you to ruin me more. She reads it all, and then throws everything on the fire.

This is how it happens: how control slips from you, and you end up twisting the knife deep into yourself.

#

When, in the garden of Cornwell House, Ted pulls her close and pants ‘I’ve been wanting to put my mouth on every soft place of you,’ Arabella hears herself whine like a stray dog that’s just been petted. Of all these things, that’s the one thing she can never forgive herself.

There’s no talk of love. It is a strange, marvellous freedom: love implies distortion, the rosy tint of glass making all things unclear, and she wants to be seen plain. Ted will call her a spoiled brat in the same breath with which he gasps on how much he wants her, and this is what she wants. To be loved is too much. It terrifies her.

As for herself? Does she at least love him, this man for whom she has so thoroughly ruined herself? But Arabella would not know how to recognise such an emotion if she tried. 

This thing between them has taken her from the place of shoulds and should-nots. She does not wish to go back.

It’s not just about their bodies. She has never so much as lifted a teacup without being told how to do it better; how is she now to cope with such freedom in every square inch of herself? When the body is permitted the liberty to squirm and writhe and want and fuck, what else might it be allowed?

She has never had a single desire before now without someone else holding it to the light to determine if it is fitting. So freed, she can barely think straight. This madness is not her fault. (She tells herself this, to spare her shame.)

(It’s not about their bodies. Except that it is.)

They both know it cannot last. Arabella can’t tell if this makes it easier, or harder.

#

Back home, her labours complete, Arundel Place is transformed. There is nothing but activity: this wedding is the culmination of years’ of planning, and her mother will see nothing but perfection here. Her brothers feign enthusiasm and Arabella pities them: they all know that once she is gone Mother’s aim will be refined, and her brothers set firmly in her sights. 

One evening Mother looks over the dinner table at her. “You have been acting very dreary since returning. I hope you are not so sullen in Mr Sandhurst’s company.”

“I assure you, I know perfectly well how to act around Mr Sandhurst.”

“You wasted a year of your life as that woman’s companion,” Mother says coldly. “Much has been invested in this betrothal, and if it fails your options will be limited. You’ve taken a gamble, and I trust you won’t squander it.”

“Do calm down, Mother. You’ll give yourself a nosebleed,” Arabella snaps, because she is right, she’s always right, her mother always knows to find the place that hurts, and she is nearing twenty-six, her appeal will not last forever, if Sandhurst fails she will have to start from scratch, she has invested too much into this and she cannot lose her chance to get out, she can’t – “Everything will be fine, I assure you.”

Mother returns to her dinner, but she looks unconvinced.

(Her concern, incidentally, is misplaced. Edmund Sandhurst pays his customary visits, enjoys his customary pleasures, and sees nothing of Arabella’s malaise. He sees very little of her at all.)

Ted does not disappear from her life entire. There are public places where she might slip away through the crowds, exchange fumbles in the corners of public gardens and behind marquee tents. One day he squeezes her hand tight, and she must look away to stop him seeing her expression.

“You know you can do whatever you want,” Ted says, tersely. It is the nearest he will ever come to asking her the impossible thing.

He’s right. She has never heard of a girl in her set being forced into wedlock, though Arabella supposes that does not mean it does not happen. Her mother is not a woman to whom ‘no’ comes easily. But then Mother would not risk the scandal of throwing her onto the street: she imagines being sent away to friends in the countryside or some dreary great-aunt in Edinburgh, with nothing but a pittance allowance from her father to comfort her.

Edinburgh! What a hardship to suffer, she imagines Ted scoffing. Her life will always be fur-lined. She doesn’t know what it is to go without, as he does; he does not know, as she does, what it is to understand that your life will never wholly be yours. They tilt at each other on entirely different axes.

She can do whatever she wants. But though she cheats at the game she remains shackled to it. How can she allow the security and comfort she has worked so hard for to slip from her grasp?

Arabella keeps her gaze steady as she looks Ted in the eye. “I know.”

#

(“I hope you bear a daughter first,” Mother says.

Arabella’s fingers twist in her skirts. The voice is full of pins, swilling spite, and there’s lightning to strike but she doesn’t know where. She digs her nails into the soft underside of her wrist. “I’m not sure I would like to have children,” she says. Emotionless. Automatic.

Mother fixes her with a single look. “Listen to me,” she says. “You will marry him, and you will make him happy, and your life will be everything we planned from the start. And when you bear his children, which you will, I pray to God you have a daughter as nasty and spiteful as you, so you understand what it is to be bound to such a creature as I am.”

There it is. 

It did not take much saying, after all.

Arabella would like to say I am engaged to be married to Sir Edmund Sandhurst, you cannot speak to me that way. But they both know that she can. 

Finally Arabella swallows, tight. “The boys always say you favoured me,” she says quietly. “Why is that?”

“I knew what it was to be in your shoes,” Mother says. “You may think I am hard on you, my girl, but everything I do, I do for your benefit. Now, do stop making a fuss and ring for the tea.”)

#

The dress, when it arrives, has such skirts that Arabella thinks she might drown in them. It lays upon the bed like a ghost, and she pushes her hands into the orgy of lace and organdie, up to the wrists. She imagines sinking further until the weight of the fabric heaps down upon her, until she is smothered by silk, drowning in her riches.

“You’ll be the most beautiful bride in London with a dress like that,” Bertrand lies.

Arabella is struck by the terrible impulse to dress her maid in this array of silks and wheel her out, all the way down to the church. Go on, she feels like saying. You’re perfectly safe; he won’t look at your face long enough to know the difference.

She gives an ugly laugh, wanting to thrust her face into the skirts and scream.

“Go,” she tells her maid. “Leave: I want to be alone.”

When Bertrand leaves Arabella winds the heaviness of fabric around her wrists. She pictures walking down the aisle and securing the future she has always wanted. She pictures walking out the door with nothing but the clothes on her back to fuck and laugh and talk and argue with Ted. She pictures walking out of London entirely, without thought for anyone else, and never looking back.

There is a terrible power in her body. There is something ghastly, truly, in knowing one has the power to do whatever one pleases.

You can do whatever you want. Arabella stands, threading fabric between her fingers and tugging and scratching and teasing, while an impossibility of futures yawns before her. Waiting to swallow her up.

 

 

 

 

 

Hannah Shearer is a British writer and historian currently working in London academia. She is an alumnus of the Write Like A Girl UK-based writing course. When she's not writing she can be found singing in her local choir, climbing, or getting lost in yet another book.