The gradations of emotion visited upon her were a shocking revelation.
Misery made an icy, windswept tundra of her gut. While the corrosive envy was more like a fever; her head fair throbbed with it. Watching the guileless, trusting Mrs. Locksley effortlessly charm and perhaps effortlessly find happiness again in an eyeblink churned that windswept misery tundra into a cyclone.Shewas not plagued with doubt and fear and a history full of bad choices and unsavory twists and turns. None of that nonsense shaped any of Mrs. Locksley’s choices. And who wouldn’t want this simple creature? What could be more soothing to a man like Lucien?
And there were oh, so many reasons to loathe herself: She loathed herself for the envy, which Mrs. Locksley did not deserve. For her own weakness, when she’d thought she was so very beyond any of that.
That was the other revelation: that she could so thoroughly, thoroughly fool herself about what she wanted and what she felt. She who was soclever.
Enough was enough.
“I’ve amal de tête,” she whispered to Delilah, finally. “Will you extend my apologies to the guests?”
She slipped from the room under cover of happy chatter.
She got as far as the sitting room at the top of the stairs.
And then she’d sunk onto their little worn settee and dropped her face into her hands. Gordon the cat rubbed her shins a few times but she could not seem to move even to scratch his back. So he returned to his basket.
She was uncertain how long she’d sat just like this. She was dimly aware of the house growing quieter. And then she heard Delilah’s footsteps on the stairs. Even then, she couldn’t seem to raise her head again.
“Well, everyone has gone up to their rooms. What a pleasant even... Angelique... oh, my goodness... you are... you look... Do you need a tisane?”
Delilah sounded deeply concerned.
Angelique shook her head rapidly but she did not yet lift it because it was still the weight of a cannonball, suddenly.
She heard Dot’s light, quick step on the stairs, and her voice came with it. “Wasn’t that fun, Mrs. Hardy, Mrs. Breedlove? She’s so fetching and so sweet, Mrs. Locks—”
“Dot, Mrs. Breedlove’s dinner isn’t agreeing with her. Would you go and get her a tisane from the kitchen please? Something for... indigestion. And... ask Helga to brew a brand-new one.”
“But that will take a long time, Mrs.—”
“It’s just what Mrs. Breedlove needs.”
This was all Dot needed to hear.
She was off at a canter down the stairs. She likely would be gone for some time, which was the point. Neither one of them could bear to drink Helga’s tisanes.
Angelique felt Delilah’s hand settle gently on her arm. “Angelique. Do you want to tell me what is troubling you?”
Angelique took a long breath.
And then her mouth opened. To her horror, what emerged was:
“I do not want to feel feelings.”
It was the unadulterated truth in the moment, anyway. If not completely accurate. The feelings shewasfeeling now were causing her great suffering.
She fanned open the little screen of hands to discover Delilah regarding her with alarm. As well she should after a statement like that.
“Apart from the things I feel now, mind you,” Angelique added more reasonably. She sighed at great length, which seemed to release some of the terrible weight sitting on her chest, and put her hands back into her lap to take up her mending. “I feel pleased when our rooms are filled with satisfied guests and we are making a profit. I am pleased that we will soon be hiring footmen, and I’m even a little pleased at imagining the uproar this will cause among the maids. I will be beyond pleased if I feel safe and certain here every day, and I shouldn’t like to feel anything more than that. Ever.”
Delilah took this in with a complicated expression.
“Well,” she said carefully, “I’m not certain ‘pleased’ counts as an emotion. I’ve always thought of emotions as things that buffet you a bit, like the wind makes a full carriage sway. It requires a little... finesse... to steer through them. Even the happy emotions. They always require a bit of adjustment and balance. Or like walking along a fence rail. It’s what keeps life interesting.”
Angelique half smiled. “I did that as a girl. Walked a fence rail.”
“So did I.”