All That Remains Unsaid

The ink would not dry fast enough.

Eliza Morland sat by her bedroom window with the letter spread on the slant of her writing desk, watching each stroke of black glisten stubbornly on the paper. Outside, the light was already thinning. The afternoon was slipping towards evening, and with it the last of her nerve.

She pressed the heel of her hand against her chest, as if she might hold her heart still enough to write the final lines.

The pen trembled.

My dear Thomas, she had written at the top, then stared for a full minute at the single, damning word in the middle. My dear.

He had never been hers.

“Eliza.” Her mother’s voice floated up the corridor. “Pray tell me you are dressed by now.”

Eliza flinched and hunched over the paper as if caught in a forbidden act. “In a moment, Mama.”

“A moment will not do. Lord Ashcombe’s carriage has already turned in at the gate.”

Of course it had. Lord Ashcombe was never late. Lord Ashcombe did not sit for half an hour debating the moral implications of signing Yours affectionately versus Yours, always.

Eliza stared at the page. The nib hovered.

You will already have heard of my engagement.

She scratched the words out. Ink splashed the margin like a bruise.

“What am I doing?” she whispered.

Marrying a man twice her age for the sake of the estate, her father had said. Saving the family from ruin, her mother had added. Being sensible. Refusing the young man who had stood beneath her orchard’s bare branches in last year’s snow, hat in his hand, voice shaking as he asked whether he might speak to her father on his return from London.

Her father had never returned.

There was a carriage accident on the Great North Road. After that the debts had come to light, one after another, like stones slid aside to reveal an infestation beneath. Creditors. Notes scrawled with interest rates she did not understand. Endless conversations in low voices that ceased when she came into the room.

Then came Lord Ashcombe’s offer.

“You must see how generous it is,” her aunt had insisted, as though generosity and affection were the same thing. “He will keep your brothers at school. Your mother in this house. You will be secure, Eliza.”

Secure, yes. Locked behind a gate.

She dipped the pen again, ignoring the way her fingers shook.

My dear Thomas,

By the time you read this, everything will be arranged. I ought to have told you sooner, but there has been so much confusion in the house, and I could not—she paused, then scratched out—I did not know how to begin.

Perhaps you have guessed already. You are sharper than I ever was. Do you remember the day you first called me so? When you brought that wooden puzzle to the orchard, and I solved it in a minute, and you stared at me as if I’d performed magic. You told me then that my mind was sharper than yours would ever be, though I have never believed it for a moment.

She smiled at the memory, in spite of herself.

She forced her thoughts back to the page.

My mother has accepted an offer on my behalf. Lord Ashcombe of Halesford. The announcement will be made at supper this evening. I know what you will say, that I should protest, that I should insist upon my own choice. But we cannot always behave as we wish, Thomas. This is not a romance novel.

Her throat tightened. She swallowed hard, blinking away the blur in her vision.

I write not because I expect anything from you, but because I cannot bear that you should hear it first from a notice in the paper. You deserve better than that, if only from me.

Downstairs, the front door opened and closed. Men’s voices drifted up: the low rumble of Lord Ashcombe’s, the higher, careful tone of her younger brother, Henry, likely apologizing for the muddy state of the drive.

“Eliza!” Her mother’s voice again, closer now. “You must not keep him waiting.”

“I am coming, Mama.”

She hurried the pen along the page.

You once asked whether I believed in duty over inclination. I did not answer then. It seemed an abstract question, something we might argue over at the tea table.

It is no longer abstract.

The nib scratched lines into the paper. Her hand was too heavy. It would blot if she was not careful. She paused to breathe.

There is a kind of affection that looks like sacrifice. That is the kind I must offer now. To my mother, to Henry, to the house I have loved since childhood. I am not noble enough to pretend it costs me nothing.

Her hand stopped.

A horse snorted in the courtyard. Somewhere, a groom shouted. Boots crossed the floor below her room, firm and heavy. It was Lord Ashcombe’s stride.

She had minutes left, at most.

“Eliza Catherine Morland.” Her mother’s voice came from behind the bedroom door now. “Open this instant. There is mud on the drive and Lord Ashcombe’s coach is in danger of sinking. He is in the drawing-room.”

“Yes, Mama,” Eliza said. “I only ask for a minute or two more.”

Her mother huffed before the sound of her heels retreated down the corridor.

Eliza shut her eyes for a moment. Then she wrote the last lines in a rush.

Please do not come here. My mind is fixed, though my heart may not be. You must not make this harder than it already is for either of us.

Do not write to me. I would not be able to answer.

You have been the dearest companion of my youth. That will not be erased.

She hesitated before the closing.

With more esteem than I can express,

Eliza.

She folded the paper with trembling fingers. The seal she pressed into the wax was not her own—her signet had been taken downstairs along with her other jewellery to be inspected by her future husband’s housekeeper—but the generic Morland crest would do.

She wrote Thomas Reed, Esq. on the outside in a hand that wavered only once.

There was no time to dress properly. She took only her shawl from the peg and rushed down the servant’s stair to the side door with her letter clutched in one damp hand.

The wind snatched at her hair the moment she stepped out. The sky was piled with grey clouds, and the air smelled of rain and wet earth. The stable yard echoed with clatter and movement: grooms leading horses, a boy wrestling with a reluctant pig destined for the kitchen.

“Miss Eliza?” Will, the youngest groom, blinked at her, eyes wide. “You ought to come round by the front. His lordship is—”

“I need a favor,” she cut in. “At once.”

He glanced towards the house, then back at her. “Miles has just ridden out to fetch the farrier. One of the bays cast a shoe on the drive. If it’s an errand for the stables, I can—”

“It is not for a horse. It is for Mr. Reed at the vicarage.”

Will’s brows lifted. “The vicarage is miles away, miss, and Miles took the good gelding. The road’s also near washed out this week.”

“Then I will pay you double.”

He scratched the back of his neck. “With old Samson gone lame, we’ve only the old mare left, miss, the slow one. I can’t promise the letter will reach in—”

“It must reach him before six.” She lowered her voice, conscience prickling at the lie. She had no idea whether the exact hour mattered, only that every moment did. “He is expecting it.” Another lie. “It is the utmost importance.”

Will looked torn between curiosity and the ingrained habit of obedience. At last, he nodded. “I’ll send Ned. He knows the back cut through Miller’s Copse; that’ll save some time.”

“Thank you.” She pressed the letter into his roughened hand, then caught his sleeve. “Will—do not show this to anyone. Not even Ned. Not my mother, not Henry. No one must know I have sent it.”

“Yes, miss. I’ll see to it,” he said, swallowing. “You look like you’ve seen a spectre.”

I have. It is the ghost of the life I will not have.

“Please,” she whispered. “Hurry.”

He ran across the yard, shouting for Ned.

Eliza stood there a moment longer, shawl flapping, hair coming loose in the wind. The grey stone walls of Morland House sat behind her. Beyond the stables, the fields rolled down towards the river, green and deceptively peaceful.

Her life had never felt so small.

“Eliza!”

She turned. Her mother was on the terrace with one hand clutching the railing, the other pressed to her bosom in an attitude of offended propriety.

“What are you doing in the yard without a bonnet? Lord Ashcombe is waiting for you.”

Eliza drew the shawl tighter around her shoulders and forced a smile that did not quite reach her eyes. “I am coming, Mama,” she said, and turned her back on the sight of Will saddling the old roan mare.

***

Thomas Reed had known, in some quiet, stubborn part of himself, that this day would come.

He had known it when rumors first reached the village that Lord Ashcombe had taken to calling at Morland House. He had known it when he saw the new carriage at the gate, gleaming black with a freshly painted crest, and when the housekeeper at the Hall came to church in a new shawl of such splendor it could only have been a gift.

He had tried not to imagine the girl who had once knelt in the snow beside him, both hands cupped around a half-frozen bird, promising with fierce sincerity that they would save it together.

He had tried not to remember the way Eliza had looked last spring in the orchard when petals rained around them, eyes bright as she told him she had received a book of essays from the circulating library and he must read it at once because it would infuriate him.

He had tried not to think at all, because thinking only led to the same impossible question. What could he offer her now? He was neither wealthy nor titled. His prospects depended upon a distant uncle’s goodwill and his own ability to secure a position somewhere more promising than a country vicarage.

This past winter, he had stood in that same orchard, hat in his hands, and asked whether he might speak to her father. She had laughed—nervous, breathless—and touched his wrist.

“In time,” she had said. “When Papa returns. We have both our lives before us, Thomas. Surely the world cannot change so quickly.”

The world had proved otherwise.

He stared at her letter for a long moment before breaking the seal.

When he unfolded the paper, her scent rose faintly from it—lavender with a hint of the lemon soap she favored. Rain had smudged one corner, but the words were still legible, neat and precise despite the tremor he fancied he could feel in each line.

He read.

With each sentence, the ground seemed to shift beneath him.

By the time he reached the part where she wrote of duty and affection, his hands had curled around the edges of the paper so tightly the skin across his knuckles whitened.

There is a kind of affection that looks like sacrifice.

He could hear her voice saying it with that hint of irony she used when quoting something she did not entirely believe.

By the time he reached the end, the ink blurred.

He might have wept, had the outrage not burned so hot in his chest.

Please do not come here. My mind is fixed, though my heart may not be. You must not make this harder than it already is for either of us. Do not write to me. I would not be able to answer.

If she truly wished distance, she would not have written at all. To pretend otherwise was madness.

He crossed to the window in three long strides. The rain had thickened into a fine, relentless curtain, blurring the outlines of the trees. Somewhere beyond the hedgerow lay Morland House. He folded the letter once and shoved it into his pocket. Then he snatched his coat from the chair, shrugged it on, and strode out into the rain without a hat.

By the time Thomas reached the lane that led to the front gates, the rain had soaked through his coat and plastered his hair to his forehead. Mud stuck to his boots in heavy cakes. He was dimly aware that he looked a fright, but the thought hardly mattered.

What mattered was that he reached her before—

He stopped.

The gates stood open.

On the drive beyond, a cluster of carriages waited in an elegant line: Lord Ashcombe’s crest gleaming on the nearest, others belonging to neighboring families. Liveried footmen moved back and forth, their chatter rising above the patter of rain.

The announcement, then, had already been made.

Thomas’ breath caught.

A footman he recognized—Jem, who had once slipped him a slice of cake after a parish fair—spotted him at the gate, then quickly looked away.

Thomas stepped forward anyway.

He reached the gravel sweep in front of the house just as the front doors opened.

Music spilled out first. It was the lively strains of a country dance played by a small quartet in the parlor. Then came the guests, moving in a rustle of silk and polished boots.

Lord Ashcombe emerged at the top of the steps, tall and severe in a dark coat and an immaculate cravat. Beside him, hand resting lightly on his sleeve, stood Eliza.

For a moment Thomas could not move.

She wore pale blue silk the shade of a spring sky. Her dark hair was swept up and pinned with pearls. A simple necklace glinted at her throat.

She looked older, somehow. Not in years, but in the set of her shoulders, in the unnatural stillness that she displayed like a calm born of surrender, not peace. Her gaze flicked across the carriages, the footmen, the rain-darkened drive, and landed on his face.

She froze mid-step.

Ashcombe followed her gaze. His jaw tightened by a fraction. He said something low under his breath, but Eliza did not appear to hear.

She took one step forward. Then another.

Mrs. Morland’s hand closed around her daughter’s wrist.

“Compose yourself,” Thomas heard her hiss. “Guests are watching.”

For one reckless moment he considered striding up the steps, letter in hand, and pulling Eliza aside. He would ask her whether this was truly what she wanted. He could already feel her hand in his, the last chance he had to alter the course of both their lives.

But her letter lay in his pocket. Her plea rang in his mind.

Please do not come here. My mind is fixed, though my heart may not be.

He remained where he was.

The footmen began ushering guests into their carriages. Lord Ashcombe descended the steps with Eliza on his arm, moving toward his black coach with the ease of a man who had carried out such duties for years.

As she walked, Eliza’s eyes swept the drive once more.

Their eyes met.

Sound fell away.

He wanted to shout across the space between them. To tell her she was not alone in this choice, that her burden did not absolve him of wanting her. Instead, he reached into his pocket with numb fingers and drew out the letter.

He held it up, just enough for her to see the familiar paper.

Her eyes widened.

For one heartbeat, he thought she might wrench herself from her mother’s grasp and run to him, pearls and propriety be damned.

She did not.

She lifted her chin instead and turned toward the waiting carriage.

Thomas lowered the letter and stepped back beneath the elm’s shadow.

As soon as she climbed inside, the door closed with a soft thump. Horses snorted. Reins snapped. As her carriage rolled past, Eliza turned her head once more.

Through the veil of rain on the window, she seemed almost unearthly. Pale and radiant. Her beauty sharpened by the very act of sitting beside a man she did not love. Her fingers lifted and she touched the glass. Slowly, she traced the faint curve of a heart in the condensation.

He pressed the folded letter to his lips, then to his chest.

Wheels crunching on gravel, the carriages rolled away before thudding on the lane. Their lanterns bobbed in the darkness, growing fainter with each turn of the wheel until they were nothing but smudges of light swallowed by the rain.

Thomas stood very still, listening to the silence they left behind.

At last, he turned from the gates of Morland House and began the long walk back to the vicarage with her letter pressed close beneath his coat. It was the sole flicker of warmth he had left in a world that had never felt so bitterly, impossibly cold.