Beyond Her Reach - A Bridgerton Story

Chapter 5: A Decision, Made

The morning after the evening with the spare room incident (as Eloise privately called it) she told her mother that she had found herself ill with something only serious enough to keep her in bed for the next day or two. To Eloise's surprise, her mother allowed her to stay in bed for the day, even though Eloise had caught a glint of something misplaced--suspicion?-- in Violet's eyes. Her mother may be curious if Eloise was playing up her illness to excuse herself from socializing for the day, but she said nothing, mercifully letting her daughter spend the day in solitude. Truth be told, Eloise herself was unsure if her insistence on being sick had been a falsehood or not. She felt fine, she supposed. Well. Fine enough.

Laying in bed and staring up at the ceiling of the room, Eloise tried and failed to avoid thinking back to the night before. Perhaps it would have been better to have gone about her day as normal with at least a few activities that could distract her mind from thinking of George Walker's face contorted with disgust, from his presumptuous words and that look of his that made her feel invisible. But when she finally gave up resisting the memories from the night before, her mind's breaking dam did not drown her with memories of Mr. Walker, but of the moments after he had stormed off. Eloise thumbed the dark ribbon she had fallen asleep holding as the memories of Lady Montgomery flooded her, the feeling of her silk and skin against a cheek, the way her hair had touched her collarbone when she had taken it down to forfeit her ribbon, the way her perfume smelled as they held one another. Eloise felt her brow furrow as she tried to identify the scent. It wasn't a common one like those she and Penelope had tried making from garden ingredients a few years ago, nor was it one she recognized from the shops: rose, lemon, or lavender.

In collecting memories through senses, she remembered the smoothness of Vera's hands as the woman had helped Eloise to her feet. Her cheeks flushed at the thought of Vera finding her in a spare room with a wrinkled dress and hair askew. Eloise could now admit to herself that she had wanted, rather badly, for Lady Montgomery to see her in the new dress and painstakingly arranged hair. For her to see Eloise as elegant and sophisticated rather than as the errant girl who hid from dancing in gardens, who needed rescuing and who didn't know how to tell a star from a planet in the night sky. And yet, while Eloise was, in some ways still, embarrassed about Vera discovering her and deciding she was a girl in need of rescuing rather than an elegant young woman, Eloise could not make herself feel ashamed for accepting Vera's help. While the mysterious Lady Montgomery, Eloise knew well by now, had the ability to be brutally cold and wickedly honest, she had been so terribly gentle and so openly fond that Eloise found herself smiling at her ceiling as she remembered Vera's lips quirked up into a little smile that made her look young enough to be entering her first season.

Eloise played back the memories of the night before, eventually turning her efforts to trying to figure out where she had lost her ribbon, when she was finally interrupted by her stomach, the dull ache having turned into a sharper pain of rumbling hunger. She thought briefly about ignoring it, but her temperament, even she knew, was not one of patience, and after a few moments of internal dialogue about the pros and cons of sneaking into the kitchen, she hopped out of bed, deciding that starvation would not add to her current melancholy. Ideally, Mama would be busy, Eloise thought as she pulled on a dressing gown, and she would not be subjected to answering any questions about the night before.

Quietly padding down the stairs, Eloise made it to the kitchen undetected, helping herself to cheese and bread that had been left over from someone's breakfast. Eloise sat herself up on the wooden table on which vegetables were cut, grateful Mama was not around to scold her for sitting so as she ate.

She could hear her mother speaking distantly, probably in the sitting room with a friend or two. Eloise's heart lurched at the thought of someone bringing gossip from the night before, but she calmed herself quickly with the memory of heads turning to watch Vera, her head high and hair undone, as Eloise herself made an unnoticed escape from the spare room. No one had noticed Eloise, of that she was certain. And George Walker was too proud to have gone and told anyone about her rejection of him. She was safe from controversy, she reminded herself, continuing to eat past fullness until her mother's raised voice carried from the sitting room just enough to catch the end of a sentence.