Time & Tide - Original Wattpad Version

Chapter Twenty-Seven: In Which Jessie Witnesses History

Spring shaded into Summer, and we found lots of reasons to send Miss Brown and Mr. Edwards on as many errands as possible. Miss Brown took over my evening stroll to the markets, and I noticed that Mr. Cooper didn't walk her home after closing, and wasn't sure how to feel about that. That left me a bit smug that he wasn't just courting anyone, a bit sad that I'd lost my friend, and a bit angry because maybe I should have seen his regard for what it was, but he could also have spoken up.

Margaret picked up the newly renamed The Welshman's Daughters again and we fell back into the breakfast-edits-lunch-social time-chores-dinner routine. Slowly, wonderfully, I saw the conversations we'd had transform into plot points and characters in Margaret's books. Relationships bloomed, mysteries thickened, and the romantic subtext drifted nearer and nearer to the surface.

And where possible, Margaret and I spent cool water-colour mornings mapping the inside of each other's mouths, tasting and testing, whenever Mrs. Goodenough and Rose were out on business. I showed Margaret were to touch, where to tickle, where to pinch. We kissed and wrote, drank tea and napped leaning against one another on the sofa. Margaret became more confident in pursuing her own pleasure, and giving me mine. I felt warm affection full to bursting that she trusted me enough, wanted this enough that she let me teach her, day by day, slowly, slowly. We whispered "wife" in each other's ears and kissed each other's ring fingers.

The long humid days grew quiet, perfumed with the flowers brought in as posies from the little garden, and hushed with a sort of reverence for the intensity with which Margaret began to wield her pens. Margaret returned her days in the sitting room, excused from mending buttons and doing needlework, excused from planning meals and telling servants what to do, and managing the household accounts. I took over the math, and the menu planning, for Margaret was 'writing'. The word was spoken by everyone in the household with such a deliberate hush I wondered if they somehow knew; if they all had precognition of what Margaret would someday become, the way she would be known everywhere. If they could touch the future somehow as surely as I had touched the past, and knew what was to come.

My beautiful Margaret. I was bursting with pride in her and she hadn't even published anything yet. And I, as her faithful and ever useful companion, remained in the sitting room with her. I fetched tea when it was necessary, and sherry or wine when something more was needed. I managed the accounts from a little lap desk. I proofread 'foul drafts' and sprinkled drying powder on fair, recopied what needed spacing out in my fat, childish scrawl. My wrong-handed penmanship was abysmal compared to Margaret's, but I had the excuse of being able to type sixty words per minute. I had learned to compose on the computer, where penmanship meant nothing at all. And I was still trying to master not only a quill, but a quill in my unsteady left hand. We had joked about my penmanship, how uncommonly slow I wrote, how I left off the end half of some words and blotted most the rest with an unskilled hand at writing with quills. Margaret had to mend my pen every tenth sentence.

But I was making progress.

I was not surprised one afternoon to be presented with a new scene. In the manuscript, Evangeline spends several pages harassing William into paying attention to her – a trick that I knew well, had seen other girls use in bars and at clubs – by complimenting his penmanship. She and William descend into a bit of a bicker, and the scene ended with a charming and blunt riposte by Jane about the content, not the beauty of the letter being the object of admiration. I let the corner of my mouth curl up and glanced over the pages at Margaret. She wasn't even trying to pretend that she hadn't been watching my face for reaction the whole time.

"Har har," I said. Then I put down the papers and kissed her, right there, in the butter yellow puddle of morning sunshine.

Margaret's cheeks were primrose when I pulled back to lean rather lewdly and temptingly against the back of the sofa. I would never act this way in front of her family – no, this was for Margaret, all for Margaret. Her eyes roved, as I hoped they would, and I don't think she even noticed that she licked the corner of her upper lip.