Forcing each step forward, Nora made it into the house. She managed to assure William that she was all right and convince him to stay down with Christopher, and then she convinced her legs to carry her alone up the stairs, and along the corridors to her father’s room, even as the thick walls pressed in on her, their modern plaster failing to lighten the crushing weight of the ancient stone behind it.
She passed the corridor that led to her own room, which had become her prison, and didn’t turn her head. Aimed directly at her target, she achieved it and stood before the heavy double doors of her father’s room. The bedchamber of the Earl of Tarrin.
Her hand wouldn’t reach for the doorknob. All her memories of her last year at home wound around her like venomous vines, binding her arms to her sides and her feet to the floor.
It had been barely more than a year that her father’s love for her had turned to poison, and her love for him had turned to … what? Not hate. She’d always loved him; she loved him still. Her love had become a ghost of itself, dark and haunting.
This house was full of ghosts.
But she was not one of them.
With that thought, she grasped the knob and opened her father’s door.
Aunt Martha was seated in a heavy armchair near the window, reading. When Nora stepped into the room, she set her book aside and stood.
“Oh, Nora! Oh, my dove, I’m so glad you’re here!” She held out her arms, and Nora went into them, sighing. Her heart eased a bit; her aunt was a safe corner in a frightening place.
With her head resting on Aunt Martha’s shoulder, Nora saw her father. He lay on crisp white linens and, like a ghost, his complexion was nearly the same shade as the pillows he lay upon. His hair had gone completely white as well. He seemed thirty years older than he was.
“Oh, Father,” she breathed, stunned.
He slept, but even in sleep, his countenance was a twisted caricature. The left side of his face drooped as if his head were made of wax and had been left too long near the fireplace. His mouth sagged open on that side, and a rivulet of saliva ran from it, to a cloth laid on his chest, clearly for the purpose of catching that stream.
Aunt Martha set her back and went to her brother. She used the cloth to dab at his cheek and chin, and then laid it neatly out again. “I’m sorry you have to see him like this, dove. But I’m so glad you’ve come in time. It’s all he wants in the world, to see you again.”
“This can’t be me.” Nora swallowed back fresh tears. “I can’t have done this.”
Her aunt grabbed her hand and clutched it hard. “It’s not you, Nora. You haven’t done this. If anything more than simply the failing of his body can be said to be the cause, it’s Oliver’s torment for what he did.”
“But he wasn’t sorry. When I left. He said he wasn’t sorry.”
“If he did, then it was a lie—one he told himself as well.” Aunt Martha sighed and drew Nora away from the bed. She made her sit in the other armchair and took her place again. “You know how important duty and honour are to your father. He can see only one way to do his duty, to show his honour—the way it’s always been done. His love for his family, and his duty to his title, he never understood how to show both, or which was more important. For him, honour is love. He turned from me when I had my troubles, too. Not because he didn’t love me, but because he thought he hurt me more to ‘encourage’ me. It took me a long time to forgive him for that. If your mother had lived, perhaps I never would have. But after she died, he needed me. You and Christopher needed me.” She turned and considered the frail figure on the bed. “Your father’s torments are not your fault, Nora. They’re his own. And they’re of this strangling world we live in that demands that every flower bloom alike but ignores the rot at the roots. You were right to leave it.”
Nora turned to her father. With the sag of his face, he seemed distressed even in sleep. “May I sit with him alone?”
“Of course, dove. Is William here as well?”
“Yes. In the library, with Christopher.”
“I’ll go and say hello. If you need the nurse, simply ring.”
She nodded, and Aunt Martha patted her shoulder and left the room.
For several minutes, Nora sat where she was, watching her father sleep, sorting her thoughts, reckoning with her feelings. Then he made a gurgling, groaning gasp, and his right hand twitched. His eyes opened.
Nora stood and went to the bed. Without thinking, she caught that spasming hand—it was cold and dry as a dead leaf—and she held it. “Father.”
His right eye focused, but his left eye didn’t join it. That one, bedded in a drooping socket, looked off to the left somewhere.
But the right eye saw her, and Nora saw him recognise her and understand that she was here. His right side tensed, and his hand clasped hers so hard her knuckles cracked. “Nnnnnn. Nnnnnnn. Nnnnnrrrr!”
She sat on the bed at his side and wrapped both hands around his, ignoring the pain of his clench around her fingers. “I’m here, Father.”
“Nnnnnrrrr. Nnnnnrrr. Ssssss.” As he tried for the last word, spittle sprayed around his mouth. Nora let go with one hand and wiped his lips with that cloth on his chest. Increasingly agitated, he tried to turn his head away, and she stopped trying to clean him up and let him try to speak.
“Sssssrrr. Ssssrrrrreeee. Nnnnrrr. Ssssrrrreeee.”
He was sorry; he was telling her he was sorry. Nora bent over his hand and kissed his knuckles. Tears fell over his cracking skin. “Thank you. I forgive you.” She looked deep into his eye. “My life is good, Papa. I’m so very happy now.”
“Llllllvvvv. Mmmmmkeeeee.”
“And I love you. I never stopped.” She laid her head on her father’s chest.
He died a few hours later, quietly in his sleep. Nora never left his side. Perhaps Christopher had been right, and he’d been holding on just long enough to make things right between them.
After it was over, she left Christopher alone with him. She stepped out of the room for the first time since she’d gone into it, and found William there in the corridor, sitting on an uncomfortable chair against the wall. He stood at once and simply held out his arms, catching her as she fell into them, holding her as she wept.
Always with her. Always what she needed.
The next days passed quickly and, strangely, unremarkably. Few features stood out in her memory as they planned the Earl of Tarrin’s funeral and Christopher grappled with the reality that now the title was his, and the responsibilities that came with it.
The day before the funeral, Christopher came into the library, where Nora and Aunt Martha had been sorting through condolence cards, and dropped the day’s edition of the Evening Telegraph on the desk. “Do you know this woman?”
Nora turned her head to read the headline: ‘SUFFRAGETTE OUTRAGE AT THE DERBY.’ It ran above a large photograph of the track at Epsom Downs. The day before had been Derby Day, and the stands were full of spectators. On the track were horses and jockeys obviously mid-race. In the foreground of the photograph, a horse was down, and two bodies lay prostrate on the track.
As Aunt Martha gasped, Nora snatched the paper and brought it round the desk so they could both read the article together.
“Oh, dear Lord, it’s Emily,” Aunt Martha moaned. “What has she done?”
“So you do know her.” Christopher was angry. “She very nearly killed the jockey.”
Nora knew Emily Davison a bit, certainly by reputation. She was among the bravest and most militant of the suffragettes, so much so that the WPSU had disavowed her. Nora had met her once, in the tiny sitting room of Maude’s flat.
It was Emily who’d thrown the first rock wrapped with suffrage slogans. It was Emily who’d burned the post boxes. On Census Day in 1911, she’d hidden in a cupboard in Parliament to protest the census. She’d been imprisoned again and again, hunger striking every time. She’d been force-fed almost fifty times. No one fought harder for women’s right to vote than Emily Wilding Davison.
On Derby Day, she’d walked onto the track during the race, carrying a banner, and stood before the King’s horse. Her body was one lying on the ground in the photograph.
“Is she all right?” Nora asked, reading quickly to find the answer. The article was not kind to her, but buried in the outrage and condemnation, Nora found the answer: Emily was alive, but terribly hurt and comatose. “Oh, I hope she recovers.”
“If she does, it’s the rest of her life in prison she’ll face. She could have killed the jockey—she could have caused a terrible pileup and hurt them all.”
Christopher had been bad-tempered since their father’s death. Besides the grief of their loss, he faltered under the strain of his changed circumstances. No longer could he be the playboy, the handsome rake with limitless resources and few cares to weigh him down. Now, he was the Earl of Tarrin, and this ancient manor, with all the duties that attended it, was his.
Nora thought of Alice Paul, who was close friends with Emily Davison. Sometimes a bruise is the most powerful statement there is, Alice had said, that night at dinner. If that were true, what kind of statement had Emily made? How much power did it have?
She had her answer nine days later, on the day Emily Davison was buried. She’d lived two days after the Derby, but the injuries to her brain had been too severe. She’d died on the day Nora and Christopher buried their father. The jockey had sustained only minor injuries.
In London, five thousand women walked with her casket as it was moved between Victoria Station and Kings Cross. Nora was there, walking amongst the other suffragettes—all dressed in white, with black armbands around their left arms. Most wearing purple, green, and white sashes, or medals, or white silk roses.
The sidewalks were packed with people, as had been the case at the Women’s Procession in Washington only a few months earlier, but these spectators were quiet and respectful, for the most part. This was a funeral procession, and they had the decency, no matter their opinion, to offer respect for the dead.
Aunt Martha walked at Nora’s side, a white rose pinned to her chest. It was her first time in public as a suffragette. Now, Nora was experienced enough to understand the tremendous bravery her aunt had found to walk in public during this procession. She knew the inside of Holloway Prison—more pointedly, she knew the inside of Bethlehem Hospital. Considering her aunt’s greatest, most dangerous secret, what she risked in making this part of her life public and taking on that scrutiny was commitment to Bedlam for the other part of her life—and the same risk extended to Sylvia Everham, her aunt’s true love, also walking in this procession.
In her naïveté, Nora had been impatient with her aunt. Now, in her wisdom, she linked arms with her and offered her strength and support.
She didn’t need to understand why her aunt loved whom she loved to understand the power and rightness of a love like that, no matter what the world thought.
At St. George’s church, the procession paused for a memorial service; Emily’s actual funeral and burial was meant to be a very private affair. For this mass of mourning women, this waypoint would be their service.
Nora discovered herself to be a celebrity in the cause, despite her time away from England. In addition to the story she’d told before she left, she was also a survivor of the Titanic disaster, and she’d made a name for herself in the American movement.
Mrs. Pankhurst had been arrested that morning, a victim of the Cat and Mouse Act, which allowed hunger striking prisoners to be released until they were well again and then re-imprisoned.
Nora had been asked to speak in Mrs. Pankhurst’s stead. She’d known Emily Davison only barely—that meeting in Maude’s sitting room, and a brief time in prison together, of which Nora had few clear memories. But she knew the cause, and she knew the fight. So she stood before the full church and sought out the faces that would give her strength: her aunt. And her husband. Always with her.
Toward the front of the pews, she saw another face that gave her strength, one she hadn’t seen in years. Kate, the friend who’d once been her maid. And Maude, right beside her. They were well. All would be well.
Kate smiled up at her with a tiny wave of greeting, and Nora took a deep breath.
“I buried my father last week. Our last years were difficult, because he could not understand why I fought so hard against the bonds my life had placed on me, and I couldn’t understand why he tried so hard to stop my fight. But we made our peace before he died. It was my father, in fact, who let me learn how to think for myself, who gave me the chance to read widely and know as much as I could absorb. For most of my life, he answered all my questions and sent me out to find more. It wasn’t my father who tried to bind me, though I blamed him for it. It was the society we live in, which had bound him, too.
“My father introduced me to many great thinkers. I first read Rousseau in the library of Tarrindale Hall. Rousseau wrote, ‘I prefer liberty with danger than peace with slavery.’ That sentence has been echoing in my mind since I first had word of Emily’s sacrifice. That is what it was—a sacrifice. I’ve heard her act condemned. I’ve read the screeds against what she did. But those are disagreements with her tactics. No matter what anyone says about what she did, the why should not be a matter for dispute. Emily Davison lived her whole life fighting for justice. She understood that liberty with danger was far preferable to peace with slavery, and she refused to be a peaceful slave. She gave her very body to the cause, more than anyone else in the fight. She was our consummate soldier. Today, we’re here to honour her sacrifice. But tomorrow, we must continue her fight.”
After the service, before the procession continued on to Kings Cross, women surrounded Nora to shake her hand. From that throng emerged Kate, and Maude right behind her. She embraced them each.
“Are you well? Are you safe?” She peered hard at Maude, who bore a long scar through her eyebrow and into her cheek. That mark was new to Nora. “Are you well?”
“Aye, I’m well. Not so well as you, milady.” She grinned. “Landed on a lily pad, you did.”
Nora smiled back. “I supposed I did, yes. May—may I ask after Amy and Pauline?”
Maude’s grin broadened. “They’re home, with my man. Got ‘em back last summer, thanks to the Roses.”
The Roses. Aunt Martha. Nora lifted her eyes and found her aunt. They shared a quiet smile. William stood at Aunt Martha’s side—close enough to keep Nora safe, far enough to give her room.
“I’m so glad.”
“I’ve somethin’ for you, milady.” Maude reached into her sleeve and pulled out a small, folded square of paper, so tattered and worn it was as soft as cloth.
Nora knew what it was at once, and tears rushed up and slid from her eyes as she held out her hand for William’s note, the one he’d left her long ago, so she’d know his love was true, even as he’d disappeared.
“Came across it in a box from when my old flat was packed up. Folded up in the finger of a glove. I kept it, thinkin’ if ever I saw you again, you might want it, seein’ as it was special enough to keep safe.”
“Thank you, Maude. You were right.” She hugged the woman who’d risked much to bring a stranger into her home. Then she turned to her former maid. “And you, Kate? How are you?”
“I’m well enough, milady. It’s good to see you back, and so strong. Will you be staying now?”
Nora looked back up and found her husband. He’d heard the question, and she saw it reflected in the deeps of his hazel eyes—without judgment or bias. He simply wondered, and she knew he would be with her whatever she decided. Surrounded by these British women, outside St. George’s, she reflected on this time back in her homeland—and on her years dwelling on its soil.
It wasn’t her home. It hadn’t been since she was a girl. As a woman, she’d never found her fit in this world. This was the place where she was Lady Nora Tate, and she’d worn that title like an iron shackle. It was in America that she’d become the woman, the person, she was meant to be. Nora Frazier.
She smiled at her husband and turned to her friends. “No, I’m not staying. We’ll be going home soon.”
“I’m with you.” Nora squeezed William’s hand. “It frightens me, too. But I think we need to do it.”
William was pressed to the wall as if his body had been nailed to it. “I know. I know.”
They were three days into their voyage back to America. Nora had bid farewell to her brother and aunt, who’d promised to make their way to California for a visit before the year was out. For her part, Nora wasn’t sure she’d ever go back to England. She supposed she might, at some point. But the only allure it still held for her was her family. Her home was California.
They’d spent the first days of the voyage as they’d spent the entire trip to England—in the belly of the ship, away from views of the water. Nora’s anxiety about sailing wasn’t as acute as William’s, but she was skittish and flinched at each odd sound or heave of the ship. The ghost of the Titanic lurked in every corner. She, too, was happier where she could try to pretend they were on solid ground.
Both of them tired of fear and trauma hanging on their lives like barnacles, they’d decided to take their past in firm hands and set it aside. They’d made it all the way to the deck before William’s nerve gave out, and here they were, fifteen feet from the railing that was their destination.
He huffed. “Shit, I fucking hate this feeling.”
“Your mouth dives into the gutter every time you feel it.”
He managed a smirk. “Does that offend you?”
“Fuck no.”
His eyes flared wide open, and he laughed. His amused surprise climbed over his anxiety and tamped it down, and he squared his shoulders. “All right. Don’t let go.”
“I won’t. Don’t you let go.”
“Not a chance.” He took a step away from the wall, and they eased their way, one step at a time, clutching each other, all the way to the railing.
Once there, Nora felt all right. Her nerves calmed, and her fear lifted away and sailed off. The salty air in her face, the breathtaking sight of the vastness of the world, the slight arc of the horizon, it all calmed her. It felt right to be so insignificant an organism in such a marvelous miracle as the world was. She knew now, more clearly than most, how little, and how much, she mattered.
She stepped close to the railing, leaned on it, looked down along the hull. “Oh, William, look.”
A step or two behind her, William’s eyes were shut tight, and he was barely breathing; his chest heaved in short, shallow jerks. His hands were clamped around hers and made her fingertips throb. She stepped back to him and kissed his hands. “Look, my love. Come see.”
His eyes peeled carefully open. “Jesus Christ.”
“Come see.” She pulled him the last step to their destination, and he wrenched one hand from hers and clutched the railing.
“Fuck. Fuck.”
“Look down.”
“I can’t.”
“Please. For me.”
He made a sound almost too quiet to hear, like a moan he’d tried hard to hold back, and he looked down.
His gasp was his first deep breath since they’d come onto the deck.
“Orcas,” she said. A whole group—was it called a school?—swam alongside the ship, racing with it, at least a dozen gorgeous, sleek, black-and-white beasts skimming through the ocean, breaching the surface in spectacular arcs. To them, this ship was just another beast in the ocean. To them, the ocean was home.
Nora let go of William’s hand and held the railing. William did the same.
“We’re almost home,” she said.
“Yes, we are.”
“I wonder how I would go about becoming an American citizen.”
“Nora?”
When she turned, he was staring right at her, his anxiety entirely forgotten.
“Women have the vote in California. California is my home. You’re about to run for office. I want to be able to vote for you. I want a say in the people and laws that govern me. Someday, all women will be able to do the same, and I want to be an American when it happens.”
He let go of the railing and reached for her. She stepped into his arms and sighed as he wrapped her close and bent over her, claiming her mouth, giving her his. They stood in the middle of the ocean, holding only each other, and the world shrank to nothing but them.
Nora gasped as her bare chest hit the wood-paneled wall of their stateroom, and William’s bare chest slammed against her back. He grabbed her wrists and drew her arms wide along the smooth walnut, and she moaned as the hair across his muscular torso rasped over her skin. Lord, he made her ache. Her body, her mind, her soul—it all grasped and clamored for his touch. His erection probed at her lower back, and he flexed his hips, driving his need at her.
Since that afternoon, when they’d made it to the railing and shared that beautiful, passionate kiss, forgetting for those moments about anything but each other, William had made a few more advances in his battle against his anxiety. They’d even had dinner that night in the first-class dining room, surrounded by windows that looked out on the ocean—and afterward, they’d taken a stroll, albeit brief, and tense, on the deck and admired the stars.
Those stars, like twinkling jet stones on black silk, had been a bit fearsome for Nora, who’d fought off a disorienting overlay of memory on the night. But she’d held on to William and kept her place in the world.
And then he’d pulled her to their stateroom, and they’d torn each other’s clothes off. Nora doubted her gown had survived the frenzy.
“God, I love you so damned much,” William gritted against her ear. His hands slid over her arms, down her sides, swept in over her belly and up to her breasts. “I want all of you, everywhere, all the time.”
His fingers closed on her nipples, and Nora cried out at the beautiful, familiar shower of colourful sparks that flashed before her eyes and flared through her nerves. She rocked her hips backward, pressing her bottom against him, feeling his hardness push and slide into her cleft, thrilling at the rough grate of his groan.
“Nora, fuck.”
“Yes, fuck.” That word had left her lips for the first time in her life earlier in the day, and she found she liked the shape and weight of it in her mouth. “Fuck me,” she said now.
“Jesus.” His bare foot brushed against her instep, and he kicked her legs wide. She felt his tip, velvet and granite, pushing at her entrance, and she arched her back, opening herself for him. As he slid into her, she threw her head back and moaned.
He twisted her hair around his fist and drove his hips hard into her, slamming against her bottom, filling her to the brim. She cried out and reached back to grab at his thighs and encourage his frenetic, almost punishing pace. Each of his powerful surges forward slammed her shoulder into the wall.
She loved it when he fucked her like this, hard and sweaty and feral. Pure instinct and need. That they were doing it now, on an ocean liner in the middle of its passage, felt like the closing of another door of their past. And an opening of a new one to their future.
Oh God, she was close. Ecstasy fluttered in her belly, just out of reach, flaring higher with each thrust of his powerful body into hers. She heard him nearing his own crescendo; she knew the sounds of it, and the feel of it in the way he touched her, moved within her.
“Will—“ she gasped as his rhythm picked up a new speed, the one that would bring them to their finish. “Will-iam. Don’t … pull out. Stay… in me.”
His body stuttered and went still. “What?” he gasped.
She wanted his child, and she was ready. She was the woman she wanted to be. Going back to England had made her sure of it. Standing at the railing with him, watching him surmount the high hurdle of his trauma, she’d known the time was now.
But at this particular moment, she could hardly speak over the need for breath. “I’m ready. I want … I want to know our child.”
His body sagged onto hers. “Nora.”
“Are you not ready?” She’d assumed that he was waiting for her.
He pulled out, and she gasped in shock, then again as he turned her around. “I’ve been ready since the day we married. If you’re sure.”
She slapped that beautiful chest of his. “I know my own mind, Mr. Frazier. By now you should know better than to question that.”
“That I do, Mrs. Frazier. I know it well.” He grinned and picked her up. When she hooked her legs around his hips, he slid himself back into her. He pressed her against the wall again and fucked her hard.
He came a few strokes after her release completed, and when he did, inside her for the first time, he held her tightly, his face pressed to her neck, and she felt his completion in every part of her body.
What magnificent closeness, to have him in her arms like this, inside her like this. To think she’d been missing it all this time.