Lars falls asleep against the headboard before I’m through a single chapter.
Hours later, Hal escorts me home at the end of our third night. After drinking and dancing, after secret kisses in the satyr’s garden. We avoid main thoroughfares, though at this time of morning no one’s in our way but fellows as eager for shadows as we are—or the police.
I’m sober and cold by the time we’re a block from my family’s townhome, but my insides feel clean and light while my hand is in his. I walk as if my feet lift off the ground of their own accord and catch myself smiling too widely. When I pull Hal against a building, he smiles, too. The first hint of purple in the east reflects in his eyes. “I’m going back to school tomorrow.”
In Ohio, I think. Wittenberg University, where his mother’s father endowed several scholarships for farmers’ sons as he himself had once been. “So far.”
“You must be going to university soon. Apply to Wittenberg.”
I smile bitterly. My brother goes next year, but me? “My father would never.”
Hal kisses me softly. “I’ll have to come home more often, then.”
What are you doing? I want to cry—and I don’t know if my desperate question should be addressed to him or to myself. Hal is the heir to an estate that might as well be a kingdom and that comes with responsibilities like marriage. How can he speak as though he and I have any future?
A tiny voice reminds me that he could marry me, but the thought pricks my eyes with tears. I don’t want to be his dress-wearing, child-bearing hostess-wife. I want this! Suits and dark gardens, wild kisses that I can choose, that I can initiate. This mad power.
“Don’t cry, O.” Hal brushes my eyelashes.
If only I could explain the different ways men look at me when they believe I’m one of them.
Instead I say, “I’ve never felt this way. Don’t go.” I put force into my voice. I square my shoulders. I am strong.
“God,” he breathes. “If anybody found us now, like this”—his fingers slide behind my ears—“they’d murder us.”
I kiss him, jerk him against me. Into his ear, I order him, “Write to me, Hal King. Tell me everything there is to know about the man I’m in love with.”
My head tingles with my own boldness, my sudden declaration.
“It’s been a whole life in three nights,” he says, putting his arms around me. I fold my own arms over my breasts, trapping them between us, hiding my truth.
It’s mid-November, two weeks since my Hal has been back at school, when Mrs. Shay brings the post into the sitting room at teatime. She hands Daddy several letters, Mother her Parisian fashion magazine, and Lars two letters: one with the scrawling hand of his friend Markham, and the other smaller and blue. The address reads Mr. Polonius, the Younger. With a curious frown, he doesn’t wait for the silver opener but slides his finger under the flap instead. It’s one sheet, folded in half, and from the settee beside him I can’t see enough to recognize the writing.
But Lars’s frown only becomes more pronounced, so much so that Mother asks, “Whatever is the matter, dear?”
“‘Doubt thou the stars are fire; doubt that the sun doth move; doubt truth to be a liar; but never doubt I love,’” my brother reads. “It’s a love letter.”
“Oh, God!” I snatch for it, but Lars tucks it against his chest.
“Ophelia?” Daddy stands up to tower over me.
I bite my bottom lip. “It’s for me.”
Mother sips her tea, lifting the china slowly and setting it back with just as much care. We all wait for her, though I suspect I’m the only one whose heart is melting down into her stomach. She says, “Who is it from, Lars?”
“There are only initials. H and K.”
My hand trembles as I hold it out, palm up. I’ll not beg.
“Wait.” Daddy gently touches my hair. “Darling, we want your happiness. Tell us this boy is a suitor, tell us who and perhaps we’ll let you write back.”
The fire crackles behind me, the only sound but for my dying, rushing blood.
“H and K,” Mother says. Her gaze scours me, appraising me as she would the wardrobe of her best friend and rival, Mrs. Tealy.
Lars unfolds the letter again, reads silently over it. “If he wrote it himself, he’s educated. A poet, but no poor artist. ‘Thine evermore, whilst this machine is to him, H.K.’ That machine his body?” My brother pouts his mouth as he ponders the mystery of poetry, never his forte.
“Oh, please,” I say, flapping my hand. “It’s meant for me, not all my family!”
“Why would he send it to Lars?” Daddy asks.
My voice is too shrill. “Perhaps because he thought my brother could be trusted to secretly pass love notes between us.”
Hurt jerks Lars’s brow low, but I can’t stand it any longer. “Hal King. It’s from Hal King,” I say, balling my fists into my dress. I’m done for. Doomed. I shut my eyes and wish for the full moonlight to transform my face and body, for the sun to set forever.
But silence reigns in our cozy sitting room. I peel my eyes open and look at my family: Lars is surprised but still hurt, Daddy wears a slowly dawning expression of glee, and Mother is pensive, as if she’s never seen me before.
I use their distraction to take the letter from Lars’s limp fingers and flee to my bedroom.
There’s never any doubt I’ll be given permission to write back. He’s too rich to ignore. My only requirement to my parents is that the letters be private. Anything they might’ve felt about propriety was ditched in favor of dreaming that their daughter might marry into the powerful King family. It isn’t that we aren’t well-off enough, for Daddy’s father and grandfather both garnered huge wealth shipping along the first railroad out West, and our name has been a part of New York’s rosters for nearly two hundred years. But even at that, Poloniuses are always second-in-command. A mayor’s right hand or the clerk to the state’s governor. Kings don’t marry subordinates no matter how rich or well bred.
Until now, is the promise whispering in my parents’ dreams.
I write to Hal. Oh, do I write to him. I tell him everything there is to know about me, only edited to keep out details such as that the specific moment I realized I preferred Tennyson and the sharp wit of Mark Twain came when I happened to be embroidering. I write about my own dreams: traveling and studying, dancing in Paris and climbing the Pyramids in Egypt, that I’d even like to learn to read the ancient pictographs. Wouldn’t it be lovely, H, to write these letters in complicated hieroglyphics? Perhaps we will make our own language, my prince.
He writes back with poetry: long, complicated poems about the nature of life and what comes after death, on mankind and fear and what makes us into cowards or brave men. I repeat them to myself over and again, until I can recite them from memory. I write, What will we do, my prince? How will we live and love? And Hal King replies, We love beyond all things, beyond material considerations.
Beyond our bodies and our sex? I ask.
I love you for your poetry, and for your mouth and your eyes. All these human bodies come with mouths and eyes. But few men I have known, no, nor women, neither, have had in them such poetry as you.
For my mouth and eyes, for my poetry.
And as weeks pass, I slowly begin to share some lines of our poetry with Lars, for he delights in puzzles and rambling philosophy. He knows I forgive him, though I can’t quite say it in case he decides to pay too much attention to me when the sun sets.
For yes, I still go out. I put on my suit and shiny shoes, button up that tight vest, and knot the slim blue tie at my throat. I walk alone through the streets with a cigar, stopping sometimes at a club, but mostly roaming the darkness, my coat pulled to my chin, hat low. Ice and snow make barricades, but they are no more fierce than the barricades tightening around me as every night passes. As it grows nearer to Christmas, when I know Hal will come home, and what will happen when I see him again?