The Governess's Daughter by Mica Le Fox

Author:Mica Le Fox
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: lesbian romance, period romance, lesbian erotic, lgbtq, edwardian age, historical lesbian
Publisher: Mica Le Fox

Chapter five

The world descended into chaos at the end of that July of 1914 and our passionate affair suddenly seemed like a paltry matter as the country prepared itself for war.

We were in truth so deliriously in love that we failed to register what was building in Europe and Asia. But inevitably, realisation did eventually force itself into our world and we knew that our time would be at an end even quicker than expected.

With war clouds almost overhead and talk of u-boat attacks rife, Mrs Calder made a difficult decision and she and Eloise took the first available ship back to New York, leaving me hopeless and bereft. Everything I held dear departed one Thursday morning for the station, thence onto Southhampton and a transatlantic steamer, to sail away... never to return for all I knew at that time.

That’s not what Eloise said of course. In the days leading up to her departure, we lay wrapped in each other’s arms and legs, and she told me that she was mine until the swallows did not return and that she would come to find me as soon as ever she could. At the very worst, she would be twenty-one in four years’ time and her mother could not stop her from coming back. I was not, not, NOT to die before then and if the Germans came, I was to give them the three Berkshire sows to make sausages if it would save my life. I said it would break my heart to see my girls executed by firing squad but that if it came to it, I would.

But although our final hour together in the summerhouse, stolen on some pretext or other while her mother finished packing, was passionate and yearningly beautiful, it was also filled with tragedy. That is the conundrum, isn’t it? When one is desperate for a final act to be the most glorious and memorable, it never is and although we made love, I periodically burst into tears, causing us to stop and simply hold each other.

On the day she left, our parents allowed us to say goodbye alone and we covered each other with kisses, whispering that this was not the end and somehow we would be together once this mess was resolved. Then I stood and watched as she got into the waiting car and they drove away, her face visible in the oval rear window, looking back at me as the car went down the drive.

And that view, her beautiful face and dark ochre curls framed like a Victorian photograph in the oval of the car window, was the last I saw of Eloise Calder for many years.

Then we were at war and nothing was ever the same again. Within two years, I was married to Captain Edward Haughmond-Bly who I'd vaguely known as the son of a distant neighbour. At twenty-eight, he was nine years my senior and we were introduced by my grandmother, who was a friend of the Haughmond-Blys.

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