Isabelle and Alexander by Rebecca Anderson (new books to read TXT) 📗

shopkeepers and household workers. Charlotte smiled a great deal at Edwin and almost never at Isabelle. Ed held his wife’s arm, as was proper, and continued to be attentive to Isabelle. There was nothing of which to complain, but she felt the shift in their relationship, and it left her feeling lonesome and, somehow, frightened.

Edwin was a married man. He would always be her first and favorite friend, but the recognition that his romance, his choice of wife, and his altered situation had driven some kind of wedge between them pricked at Isabelle’s heart. Or, Isabelle thought, I have done so. She was not naïve to the probability that her own situation must cause some of the distance between them. After all, she’d married first.

But Edwin had been a constant in her life. As she walked down a busy street half a step behind Edwin and Charlotte, she felt unmoored by the shift. She was no longer his Belle, and he was no longer her Ed. He belonged to Charlotte now, first and forever. It did not take long for Isabelle’s thoughts to move forward from there: if Ed no longer adored her, how could she imagine being loved by anyone? Had she somehow become unlovable?

The disappointment Alexander had spoken of reared up inside her, but not for the reasons he had supposed.

She was a passable beauty, but not an exceptional one. She was from a respectable family, but not an exceedingly wealthy or important one. She was fairly charming and witty, but her occasional impropriety must cause embarrassments. She could converse in a parlor, but when was she last in any but her own or the Kenworthys’? Startled to discover that she was, in fact, no more than ordinary, Isabelle realized she ought to expect nothing beyond ordinary happiness. Nothing beyond common attention, consideration, or courtesy.

Perhaps she simply did not deserve to be excessively happy.

Her heart gave a lurch, and she felt the truth of the thought.

Simple joys were likely all the pleasures in store for her.

Recognizing moments of delight from the months of her marriage must now be a deliberate action.

This unanticipated separation between her heart and Edwin’s gave her a shudder of sadness. Not for the distance but for the surprise. How could she have not expected this? Anyone could have told her that the nature of their relationship would change with her marriage and with his. She had a husband. He had a wife. And their friendship had always been a childlike delight. They were no longer children.

Well, then, she told herself, here is the life I now live. I shall make the best of commonplace contentment. She would carry on. And she did not need to wait for a drastic change in her life. She had some power to create further happiness in her marriage. And she must take note of such flashes of contentment so they did not go unnoticed.

Edwin turned to ask her about a tree filled with a few songbirds, and she placed a smile on her face as she described what she had learned about the birds most common to the north in late winter.

After sharing what she knew, she drew a bracing breath.

Was that so difficult? she asked herself.

Her question remained unanswered.

That evening at dinner, the family was served a thick and hearty stew along with soft bread rolls, a meal Alexander could manage to feed himself with his limited arm motion. He did not in general seem to mind Isabelle’s help with his meals, but the addition of company must, by nature, make it more embarrassing to carry on in their new habits of the preparation, delivery, and eating of meals.

Isabelle was pleased that Edwin spoke in his usual companionable manner, reporting to Alexander on the sights and sounds of a city he had quickly come to enjoy.

“Of course, in the company of two such women as my Charlotte and your Isabelle, how could a man not become particularly fond of any place? I imagine I would by now be as fond of a damp corridor or a dragon’s lair were I to experience it with these two.”

Edwin’s manner had changed so little in the months Isabelle had been gone, but something was different. It took most of the meal for Isabelle to realize what it was. Having experienced so little conversation in the months of her marriage, she had come to treasure every word, every comment, each syllable as a thing of great import.

Listening to Edwin filling the room with nonsense, although sweet and charming nonsense, she wondered if this was how he had previously spoken. Had there always been so little of substance to his remarks? Remembering her own prattling on the carriage ride to Wellsgate, she blushed. Had she seemed as frivolous as this? It occurred to her now that Edwin, her dear Edwin, might be silly.

At the traitorous thought, she looked round the table, searching each face to glean any change in aspect. It appeared to her that no one else recognized her new discovery. Charlotte spoke only as manners demanded, Alexander was as uniformly quiet as ever, and Edwin needed only an audience to carry on performing his monologues.

Oh, dear, Isabelle thought. This will never do. She knew herself well enough to know that once planted, this idea—any idea—would grow in her mind into a fact, and the fact would solidify into the truth about her darling friend, whether it was real or not.

She roused herself to respond to Edwin’s latest comment about how winter at the Lakes had been far superior, socially, to any winter in his memory. Isabelle made an agreeable observation and then turned the conversation to letters from her mother informing her that a great deal of the warm clothing and cotton blankets her parents had purchased recently were made with Osgood fibers.

Alexander glanced up at her, a look of surprise on his face.

“I wonder,” she said, “if the two of you would be at all interested