NaNoWriMo2007
an excerpt

Personally, she’d had enough of being a project back in London. It had started with her mother and sister who had tried desperately to undo the mistakes made in Cecily’s childhood. She had naturally fallen in with Fred, as there was no one else closer in age. He had happily tolerated her for many years, but Robert had remained his most serious playmate until one fateful day when Robert was 12 and decided that he needed to be more responsible. He had refused to go along with one of Fred’s schemes, but Cecily had been more than happy to. From that time on, they had equal standing in Fred’s eyes, and Fred became her boon companion. Much of her education resulted from the fact that her parents had quickly found it was the easiest way to distract her from trouble and simply let her attend Fred’s lessons. Cecily had devoured everything put before her and enjoyed the singular position of a male encouraging her to pursue her desires as strongly as any man.

The year before Cecily came out, her mother and sister realized that a dreadful mistake had been made. At sixteen, she had acquired an impressive amount of knowledge about a score of subjects and knew more than many men who had studied at university. Even more problematic, she was more than willing to speak her mind about any of these and seemed to think her opinions were as valid as any man’s. The Wytherlok women tried everything they could think of to induce Cecily to act like the other women of their circle. Elizabeth, newly a mother and now full of her own opinions about proper parenting, blamed Fred and proposed that Cecily come live with her for a summer to help care for young William. As Cecily had absolutely no interest in children, especially the offspring of a sister she’d never gotten on with, the arrangement lasted only a week before Elizabeth sent her back home in a huff. As Cecily reasoned when it was all over, since Fred’s absences while at university had failed to make her more manageable, the squalling infant was no more likely to accomplish anything. As the season loomed, her mother could only pray that some sense would suddenly come over her daughter like the light of God over St. Paul.

Cecily had never liked St. Paul, who she blamed for being one of the earliest historical figures to repress women. Instead of humility washing over her, she began to proselytize the creation of colleges for women. After all, boarding schools had existed for a century, so it was not a question of women being educated away from their families. Men simply feared what would happen once women achieved a higher education. While Cecily might have viewed her youthful self as silly in her first season, few around her saw it that way. Engage in a conversation long enough with her, and Cecily would inevitably begin campaigning for women’s education, citing a college in Oberlin, America that granted women degrees and urging that the fledgling Girton College in Cambridge be accepted. Women thought she was pretentious, men thought she was charmingly naïve, and Cecily found them all to be beyond hope.

In her first few years, she did manage to make some female friends who swore that they were bosom friends. Cecily doubted the accuracy of this title, for she still felt closer to Fred, but she at least knew better than to say so. As the years passed, and they married, they took it upon themselves to find Cecily the perfect husband so she could join them in marital felicity. No amount of argument could convince her friends that their charity was unnecessary, and each viewed the qualities of a perfect man through their own preferences rather than what Cecily might profess to like in the men about her. Numerous attempts were made to throw her together with gentlemen of their acquaintance so that they might fall in love, but aside from the occasional scandalous flirtation in empty rooms and shadowy gardens, nothing ever developed but resentment. Cecily grew tired of her friends’ endless machinations, and they in turn felt put out by her obvious lack of effort in seeing the good qualities of the men they found for her. To them, she was being ungracefully obstinate about finding the right man, and now that they were having children, they felt their commonalities dwindling. At twenty-one, Cecily was not the only unmarried woman of her year, but she the only one with looks, charm, and money.

Sensing that her time of eligibility was drawing to a close, the men in her family began to assert their influence. Robert had already departed for Tokyo, and Fred was the despair of the family, but her father and eldest brother still had pull with the men in their circle. Unlike the innocent efforts of her friends and occasionally her mother, her father and Daniel’s attempts were far more concerted. In their mind, Cecily’s opinion of the matter amounted to very little, and Cecily found herself fighting to remain unmarried. During this time, more than one man seemed to be under the impression that she had been promised to them by her family, and it took considerable skill, and sometimes assistance from Fred, to convince them that she was not really the kind of wife they were looking for. She narrowly averted more than one scandal, and by the summer of 1979, had developed the strange reputation of being cursed in love and marriage among the women and a deceptively bad investment among men. Her parents were furious, but even they had little idea of what lay ahead