‘You looked as though you were crying. But then I thought, no, not Georgie. Nothing makes her cry. She’s too brave. But funnily enough, it helped me to think you might almost be on the verge of tears. Because it meant that you were going to miss me as much as I was going to miss you.’
She shook her head in disbelief. ‘But you didn’t miss me. You forgot all about me the moment you left Bartlesham.’
‘You are wrong. I missed you very much indeed. And I was hurt, very hurt, when you appeared to break your promise to me.’
‘What promise?’
‘To write to me.’
‘What? But I did! That is, I didn’t!’ She groaned inwardly at her clumsiness of speech. ‘Why are you trying to twist everything round?’ she hissed furiously. ‘I kept my promise. You were the one who didn’t write to me.’
‘Oh, I wrote to you,’ he said. ‘Every week. Even when I received no reply I kept on, in the hope that your letters were delayed by...bad weather, or something.’
‘What?’
He carried on speaking though his mouth twisted with bitterness. ‘Then I began to think you must just be too busy out riding, or swimming, or fishing, to want to sit down and write. I struggled to forgive you. I reminded myself you’d never been much of a one for sitting down and applying yourself to anything of the sort. Surely, I kept telling myself, she will at least send me greetings for Christmas. But Christmas came and went, and there was nothing from you, and I ate my solitary Christmas dinner, far from everything I’d known, wondering how you could be so...’ he drew in a sharp, pained breath ‘...so cruel.’
‘But I wasn’t. Edmund, I did write.’
‘And then it was my birthday.’ He carried on as though she hadn’t spoken. ‘And still no word from you. And I was halfway through my weekly letter to you, when I saw that it was more or less an inventory of the wildlife I was discovering on the island and it struck me that it was probably so boring, that all my letters had been so boring, that it was no wonder you hadn’t written back. That you probably didn’t know how to reply without revealing what a bore I was. Not when you’d never had it in you to dissemble.’
‘No,’ she grated, horror struck. ‘I would never have found any letter from you boring, Edmund. And I had never found you a bore. Surely you must have known that? Why, you were so clever. Noticing things that nobody else did. Like the differences between all the beetles we found in the woods, which everyone else just...crushed, if they bothered to think about them at all. And I did write. More than once a week. At first...’
He nodded, grimly. ‘Yes. I expect you did. At first. But then you gave up, didn’t you?’
‘Well, yes, because I thought you’d forgotten all about me. And I started thinking that perhaps, before, you’d only tolerated me hanging around you when you’d been so ill, because you were so bored.’
‘No,’ he said vehemently. ‘That was not how it was between us.’
‘But then what—?’ It felt as though she was experiencing yet another earthquake. ‘If you wrote to me—’ When his face tensed up, she hastily amended her statement. ‘I mean, where did your letters go? And what of mine to you? If you didn’t receive them...oh! I gave my letters to my father to post. Are you trying to tell me he...he didn’t send them? Any of them?’ It felt as if someone had just punched her in the stomach, to think Papa might have started betraying her as far back as that.
‘That I cannot say. What I do know is that my tutor used to collect all the mail that arrived at St Mary’s. To begin with. And I gave my letters to him to post.’
‘So it was him. It must have been him.’ She heaved a sigh of relief. It had been bad enough that Papa had married a woman who’d imposed such a strict new regime upon their household. When he’d turned a blind eye every time his new wife had beaten her. For things that had never been crimes before.
‘But...why would he have done it?’
‘Obviously because he had instructions to that effect.’
‘What? Why? Why would anyone want to make you so miserable? And me? It doesn’t make sense.’
‘Yes, it does, Georgie, think about it.’ He leaned forward. ‘Don’t you recall Mrs Bulstrode’s reaction that day she found us in my bed with the hangings closed?’
Georgie winced. ‘She called me a trollop. I didn’t even know what a trollop was. Not until much later.’ When Wilkins had got Liza into trouble. And then, from the names flung about during Liza’s dismissal, she had worked out that a trollop was a girl who spread her legs in the stables so that a man could use her like a brute beast.
‘I heard her berating you all the way downstairs. I’ve already told you that, at the time, I just found it amusing. But recently, I discovered,’ he said, looking uncomfortable, ‘that she carried tales of that escapade to my mother. And that my mother subsequently took action to...separate us from one another.’
‘But why? Why go to the lengths of...sending you so far away and stopping us from keeping in touch at all?’ She pressed her hand to her head, which was throbbing at the struggle to make sense of what Edmund was telling her. ‘Why didn’t someone just explain to us that it was improper? And why it was improper?’
‘Because Mrs Bulstrode believed that we were past the stage of needing explanations.’
‘What? What do you mean?’
‘Georgie, think about it. She drew back the curtains to see your skirts hitched up round your waist, while you have to admit I was wearing only my nightshirt.’
‘But I only drew the bed hangings round because I wanted to fill the air with colour for you. Like...like putting flowers in a vase, rather than strewing them all over your room. Which would have happened if I’d just let the butterflies out to fly where they wanted.’
‘I suspect they would all have headed for the window, and arranged themselves decoratively across the panes,’ he said pedantically. ‘Not that it wasn’t a splendid idea of yours,’ he added, reaching out his hand to pat hers. ‘I never forgot it. Even when I had persuaded myself I hated you, I remembered the joy you brought me that day and couldn’t turn my back on you entirely.’
‘You hated me?’ Her stomach lurched. ‘What had I ever done to make you hate me?’
‘You broke my heart,’ he said.
‘I...what?’
‘You weren’t just my friend, Georgie. You were my sunshine. My joy. You were too young, probably, to feel the same about me, but...the truth is, I loved you. When you didn’t write—or to be more precise, when they made me believe you hadn’t written—I was devastated.’
‘Oh, Edmund. Oh, no!’ She turned her hand over and gripped his as hard as she could. He returned the pressure, his face working.
‘The only way to survive the devastation,’ he grated, ‘was to twist what I felt for you and turn it around into hatred. When I returned to Bartlesham, for that short spell before I went up to Oxford, all I wanted to do was hurt you. So when you tried
