Running

You might say I was running. Running from my parents, from expectations and commitments, from trouble and responsibility. You might say I was running when I ran smack into her.

She was running too, mind you. From an arranged marriage to a man twice her age, from her parents’ insistence that girls were good only for bedding and breeding. They were old-fashioned, see, an old family with old money and older values. She was running from them when she ran smack into me.

We both knew her parents would never approve. I was the penniless second son of a cloth merchant, whose future consisted of staying home and caring for my parents in their old age while my elder brother carried on the family business. I was good for little else after the way I’d disgraced myself.

Seeing her gave me hope of starting fresh somewhere new. Seeing her gave me a secret, something to hold onto.

I, in turn, gave her hope that not all men were old, decrepit, and or lewd. She had never seen so much as a scullion or gardener’s boy, despite living under the same roof with several. The family butler, the only male she’d had contact with other than her father and brothers, was an elderly Frenchman who treated her like a princess in front of the family and like a very expensive whore otherwise.

It was mere chance that allowed her to enter our shop accompanied by nurse and dressmaker, mere chance that my mother knew the two chaperones from childhood and took them aside to chatter, mere chance that I happened to be at the counter at that moment.

She’d snapped her fan open to modestly cover her face as I tried unsuccessfully not to blush. Thoughts of a linen and wool clad Lucy Maybridge vanished in puffs of smoke as I took in the fine lace-edged kerchief tucked into a yellow overgown embroidered with bunches of lilacs tied with green ribbons. The detail and workmanship of her clothing spoke of light-fingered seamstresses and Belgian nuns going blind over tiny stitches done by candlelight. My first thought was that such adornments were compensation for an ugly face, but silk embroidery and Indian cotton lace were nothing to what I could barely see through and around the painted paper fan.

I silently cut the required lengths off the bolts of fine cloth that my mother shoved under my nose. I could almost see what each length would be made into. The heavy, pale pink damask would be quilted and pleated into a petticoat. The Chinese brocade would cover a stomacher. The gauzy, floral-printed silk that one of Father’s friends had smuggled from India would be made up into an overgown, lined and trimmed with the bright blue taffeta.

It was a wedding dress, I realized. She was clothed richly, but not so richly as she would be in the material that I was cutting, the very finest stuff we kept locked away in the back of the shop, with only scraps on display. And the amount of the pink damask I had cut would make a petticoat able to fit over the largest panniers in existence.

I glanced at her again, searching for clues as to whether she truly was to be a bride sometime soon. The paper fan had disappeared, and her face was not radiant like my brother’s wife’s had been. No, she looked sad, as if going to the funeral of a friend.

My mother finished her goodbyes to the nurse and the dressmaker, and the two women hustled their charge out the door, both heavily laden with packages.

I asked my mother who she had been. Mother explained what she had gleaned from the nurse and dressmaker, that she was the daughter of a noble house, due to be married soon. I asked why she had looked sad, and Mother shrugged. Perhaps she doesn’t like the groom, she said.

It was tragic. I immediately began making plans—foolish, foolhardy plans that would never work and would get the both of us jailed and me hanged. I could find the house and trick my way inside, then carry her off. I could wait by the church and kill the groom as he went in, then carry her off. I could pretend to be a highwayman as they left the church for his home, attack the coach and carry her off.

She was too beautiful and sad for me to stop thinking about her.

I actually tried a variation of the first plan. Disguised as a flower-seller in one of my sister-in-law’s frocks, I managed to talk the cook into letting me see the young lady’s room when she was out. I put a note I had written just under the bedspread, giving my name and address.

She wrote back, amazingly enough, informing me that the cook could be trusted and that I was welcome to see her any time she was able.

What followed was the secret relationship I mentioned earlier, with me working late at night and finally finishing a frock of my own so I wouldn’t be borrowing my sister-in-law’s. How I hated that frock, and loved it because it allowed me to see her.

We made plans together—plans that were not quite as ridiculous as the ones I had made myself. She could pretend to be ill and we could bribe the doctor to later proclaim her dead, then I would attack the funeral train with my friends (I did have friends, didn’t I?) and the two of us would run away to America or Europe. Or she would find some way to lose her nurse while on a shopping trip, and we would meet somewhere and run away to America or Europe.

America or Europe. The ability to start fresh somewhere new, with her as my wife and no one to know the difference. It was silly, but it gave me something to dream about.

It would never work, of course. But it was nice just to talk to her, to smell her and know that she was near me, to delight in the moment and not think about how soon it might change.

If we were running, we were running together.