The Stowaway

XXXVI

"...I told him a story of two people. Two people who shouldn't have met, and who didn't like each other much when they did, but who found they were the only two people in the world who could possibly have understood each other." Jojo Moyes, Me Before You

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XXXVI.              

Eliza felt more miserable than ever, as though she had taken fifty steps backward in her efforts to return to normal, now that Katy had left.

The emptiness inside her chest, which she had been trying so hard to fill, had reared its ugly head, and she felt now worse than ever.

Of course, it had been five years now since she and Katy had lived together properly, but it had been so nice to have the constant support that was her sister, while also distracting herself in her nieces, and gushing over her new nephew.

Eliza busied herself with a task that she had been putting off for months. The clothing that Tom had loaned to her when she had first gone aboard the Atlantis had been sitting, laundered, in the back of her wardrobe since very soon after she had arrived home.

She set to work cutting every dart that she had sewn in, and unhemming the cuffs of the breeches and the shirt.

Not that she was surprised, but she was only more grieved when the garments returned to looking more like male attire.

And so she did the only other thing that she thought would make her feel better. For the next several hours, Eliza tore out pages of her once favoured romance novels, screwed up the paper, and threw them at the ceramic basin on her dresser. Page after page after page, most missing, and several bouncing out, but it did the job to keep her mind from crying over something that she could not change.

A while later, her door abruptly opened, and Eliza looked up from her seated position on the floor to see Katy standing there, baby Harrison in her arms.

"What on earth are you doing?" Katy asked in astonishment. "Why, it looks as though it has been snowing in here!"

Eliza had been through three of her books, and it did look as though she was sitting in and amongst a great blizzard. "I thought you had left!" Eliza replied, though overjoyed that Katy had returned. She leapt to her feet to greet her sister again.

"We had, of course, but Rachel forgot her doll, and thought nothing of the nine miles that we had already travelled before insisting that we return for it," Katy said dryly. "With a newborn, my nerves would not stand a child's tantrum, though I know if Harry were with me, he would have used this as a teaching moment, in order to make Rachel more responsible. I suppose I am soft in allowing it seeing as she is only four years and a half."

Eliza selfishly, and sheepishly, thought that she might hide something of Rachel's the next time Katy was to leave, just to stretch out her stay another day or two. 

"I hope it will not be a terrible imposition to Mr and Mrs Banes that we stay another night. The horses ought to be rested, and we might set off again tomorrow," Katy said awkwardly, as though she truly believed that they would mind.

Eliza knew her parents would have her permanently if it were possible.

"Where are they?" Katy asked curiously. "The servants tended to us, but I have not seen either of them about before I came to your door."

Eliza frowned. Were her parents out? She had not ventured out of her bedroom since that morning. But then she supposed it was odd that her mother had not been visiting with her frequently. "I suppose they must be out," Eliza assumed, "but I have no idea where they might have gone."