The Voice Upstairs by Laura E. Weymouth

Author:Laura E. Weymouth
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Margaret K. McElderry Books
Published: 2023-10-03T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER FIFTEEN EDISON

Goodbye. Thank you for coming. We’re sorry about all this.”

Edison stood near the Grange’s wide front doors, shaking hands and bidding farewell to a sporadic stream of guests. Kitty’s would-be suitors; her sharp, glad friends; the class-bound worthies of the county—everyone was leaving. Lady Summerfield had insisted they all be turned out of the house before retiring to her own rooms with a bottle of laudanum. Lord Summerfield, who generally served as the family’s bulwark in times of trouble, was nowhere to be found.

Which left only Ed.

Once there would have been Peter to take the reins during a crisis like this one. Though Edison was too innately different from his brother to have ever gotten on especially well with him, there was no denying Peter had performed the role of lord of the manor well. He managed upheaval proficiently, always knowing just the right thing to do and the right thing to say. Peter had been an expert in understanding and fulfilling the requirements of his class.

And Kitty—she’d seemed all foolishness and gaiety, but there was steel at her core. After Peter had been killed, Ed knew she was the one who’d held the family together, forcing them gradually back into some semblance of life and lightness through sheer force of will. She’d written to Edison every day that he was entombed in that wretched hospital, assuring him it was temporary, coaxing him to do as Lord Summerfield asked and own up to his shortcomings, even if it was a lie. What did it matter, Kitty had told him, so long as he regained his freedom? So long as there were two of them at the Grange again? She needed an ally, she said. She couldn’t stand being left to manage the Grange and their parents alone.

Those letters had been the most truth Ed had ever had from his sister, at least since she’d put childhood aside. They’d stripped away her veneer of levity, revealing an underlying loneliness and desperation. He’d given in at the hospital more for her than for himself, and come home to find everything all at once the same and horribly changed.

The Grange ticked on like a well-oiled machine. Lord Summerfield was as masterly and absorbed in matters of business as ever. Lady Summerfield as distant and reserved. Kitty as laughing and seemingly carefree. Nothing different, and yet beneath it all they were in pieces.

Now Ed stood in further ruins. It was just him left to step into the place his brother and sister had filled, and which he’d always felt himself entirely unfit for. And while Peter’s death had not been such a blow, Kitty’s hit so hard that it had barely begun to hurt. Instead Edison was left numb, knowing that when the lack of feeling wore off, he’d find a gaping hole had been carved straight through his center. An irreparable wound, like the crimson track that ran straight through the Grange itself. It wasn’t the sort of thing that would ever really heal, but something you had to learn to live with.

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