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"soil, soil" by tegan and sara & my dearest enemy by connie brockway
You already know that I love letters and letter-writing. I write a lot of long emails to people, and it’s one of my greatest joys. I was talking about this with a friend recently, but I rarely feel that anxious refreshing-the-inbox feeling, waiting for either good publishing news or bad publishing news, because I maintain one inbox and I get something good in it almost every single day (usually not publishing-related at all!).
I also love epistolary novels or books that feature correspondence prominently — one reason I wrote The Art of Catching Feelings the way that I did, with the emphasis on them getting to know each other via text messages! When I was at that Powell’s Bookstore Romance Day event a few weeks ago, I read a letter from Connie Brockway’s historical romance My Dearest Enemy out loud at the “Lusty Letters”/“Love Notes” portion of the evening, and I wanted to share that letter with you and tell you a little more about this book, which is one of my favorites.
This is going to be quite long, so settle in! Or else skip to the end or don’t read it at all lol, I am not the one to tell you what to do.
My Dearest Enemy opens with a letter, which is a nice way of letting us know to expect that correspondence will be a big part of the book. This one is from Horatio Algernon Thorne, and accompanies news of his death. He wrote on his deathbed to his nephew, Avery, and basically says, “I bet you thought that when I died you’d be put in charge of your cousin Bernard and that you’d get Mill House like I promised you, but you’d be wrong.” In fact, the sour old man says, Avery would be the worst kind of guardian because he’s both headstrong and temperamental but ALSO a weakling and a poor specimen of a man, and what child needs that, especially one like Bernard who already seems prone to “feebleness.”
He does at least, I guess, give Avery a chance to redeem himself. If he can get his shit together, in five years he’ll become Bernard’s legal guardian. And also in five years, he can get Mill House — provided the temporary mistress-of-the-house Horatio has put in place for the intervening years, Lillian Bede — hasn’t turned a profit with the property.
So, in other words, don’t worry. You will get your house, because a woman wouldn’t be able to do any such thing. You’ll just be a little humiliated and emasculated first.
Ah, but Lily is not one to back down from a challenge. She met Horatio years ago, when he came to pay respects after her father, his brother-in-law, had died. He’d given her money, which she used to attend one of the new women’s colleges, where she “discovered that a superior education did not necessarily translate into superior employment.” (Ha! Sorry, I had to quote that line directly because it was just too good.) He was distressed when he found out she’d aligned herself with the suffragist movement, which is why he came up with this scheme to put her in charge of Mill House. She has to give up her suffragette activities and basically take up guardianship of a grown man by paying his useless nephew Avery an allowance every month, but she’ll have a chance to keep the property if she can turn a profit on it.
So, in other words, have fun pretending to take on a man’s place and responsibilities for five years, but you’ll soon see you’re not up to the task.
This novel — as you can probably already tell from the set-up — does have a lot to do with gender roles in it, sometimes in ways that can feel a little dated (this book is 26 years old!). But I also think there are ways that the characters subvert those gender roles — in fact, it’s a crucial theme in the book. There’s also something refreshing about how openly the book does contend with gender, where it’s not trying to pretend anything different. The book starts in 1887, which is an interesting time for a historical romance, I think. Later than the more common Regency, but still before the 20th century . . . there was so much in flux in society around then.
Lily is POSITIVE that Avery will come out of the woodwork to contest this bizarre will, but Horatio’s daughter-in-law Evelyn (who lives at Mill House with her son, Bernard, the very cousin that Avery wasn’t to be trusted with the guardianship of), assures her that he has already left for Africa. Basically he decided, fuck it, if I’m deemed unworthy then I’ll just go have myself some grand adventures while I wait the five years for the house that should rightfully by mine.
So Lily takes over the management of Mill House, which includes Evelyn and Bernard, and Horatio’s middle-aged spinster daughter Francesca, and more servants than Lily thinks are needed. She immediately gives a speech about how she’s going to cut superfluous positions and how women’s work will be treated with just as much respect as men’s, and the butler is like, “I don’t approve them communist tactics in my household” and Lily is like WOW thank you for making my job easier, you can be the first one dismissed.
Lily comes across a painted portrait of Avery, age seventeen, and kinda can’t believe that THIS is the dude who could possibly threaten her ability to keep the house. “I mean he looks like a sullen sort of weed —” she starts to say to Francesca, before considering that maybe she shouldn’t go around insulting him even if his portrait makes him look all knobby wrists and deep-set eyes. She decides that Avery’s grand adventure now is an obvious attempt by him to thwart her sending on his allowance — a requirement of the will — and that she will not be bested by him.
Hence their letters are born. Avery receives the first while he’s in Congo with two of his friends, Karl and John, who are SO amused by the fact that Lily tracked him down to send him his quarterly allowance and a sarcastic little note. “Should you find this inadequate to meet your needs, I suggest you learn to need less,” she says before signing off. Of course his friends are like, she sounds hot, and Avery says if she’s so hot then why is she championing women’s rights and writing me sarcastic little notes instead of going out and getting herself a man. I TOLD you there was gender stuff in this book, but I also know that Avery is going to get what’s coming to him so I find myself having fun with it.
Lily also mentions that Bernard enjoys hearing Avery’s tales of adventure, so he starts writing directly to the boy, too, and sending little mementoes of his travels. Since Bernard is away at school, Lily is often the one who receives these gifts and passes the messages along.
In this way, years pass — with Lily finding Avery wherever he is to send him his allowance, Avery writing back with stories and trinkets for Bernard. I love how excited his friends always are for Lily’s letters — they hang on her every word, tease Avery about her, and although he comes up with some blustering reply you can tell he enjoys their “literary boxing match” as he calls it and is equally thrilled to hear from her. And similarly, you can tell that the stuff he sends for Bernard is for the kid but also kinda for Lily, to keep her apprised of all that he’s been up to.
At one point, Lily writes that Bernard has been suffering from some lung troubles, and that she wishes she could withdraw him from the strict school he attends but Horatio made it very clear that the boy was to stay there. “It is abominable that in this country a dead man has more power than a live woman,” she writes. “You will doubtless disagree.”
But Avery doesn’t disagree. In fact, he thinks back on his own childhood, his own lung troubles, how Horatio was also quite unwilling to let him benefit from any “mollycoddling.”
I love this slight turn in the book so much, because we see them start to have a shared interest and goal, even if they’re not expressing that quite yet. They both really care about Bernard, and want what’s best for him. And partially that comes out of both of their childhoods — Lily’s where she was an illegitimate child to a “love match,” where she felt superfluous to her parents and was very conscious of the societal attitudes toward marriage and women and children that made her life as a “bastard” quite lonely. And Avery’s where he was considered a “weakling” as a boy, discouraged from showing any emotion or struggle that might be read as less than manly. It makes both of their situations now make so much sense — why a home of her own would be important to Lilly, where she is in full control, and why Avery would want to prove that he’s up for any adventure before coming home to claim the home he feels should be his.
And then Lily gets another letter from Avery. It reads:
Adversary Mine,
Karl Dhurmann died yesterday. We were dog-sledding across the Greenland snowfields. He wasn’t far ahead. Twenty yards or so. One minute he was there, the next gone. He’d fallen into a crevasse that had been breached by a drift of snow. It took us the day to retrieve him.
I thought you should know he died. He often stated his intention of marrying you. Your letters made him laugh and laughter was rare for Karl. He’d lost everything and died without country, home, or family. But you made him laugh.
I think he would want you to know he’d died, and I thought perhaps you would spare him a smile for his ridiculous intention of marrying you, for his appreciation of your letters, or for whatever reason you like. I am not a religious man and your smile is as close to a prayer as he’s likely to come.
I literally can’t even type that without getting a little choked up! One thing I love about the way it’s structured, the way it’s written, is that repetition of the fact that Karl died and Avery thought he would want Lily to know. There’s such a quiet desperation to it, like when you’re writing more than you’d meant to say maybe, like you’re trying to make sense of what you’re saying as you’re saying it and you think if you try to stick to the facts it will make it less vulnerable but if anything it makes the depth of your feeling stand out even more.
Another thing these letters brilliantly do is pass TIME, because there is going to be almost five years before the start of the novel and when Avery and Lily finally meet in person, and we’re just skipping along. We’re already in 1892 by now, Bernard is writing to Avery to tell him he BETTER offer Lily his protection if she ends up losing the house, and Avery is like fine, I’ll come home a couple months early. Just to see what’s going on over there. Just because I’m tired of wandering around. For no other reason. Certainly not because I’m curious about this woman who’s been writing me letters for years.
Lily thinks when he arrives that it’s Bernard, home early from school, and so she greets him in the library with the cheerfulness of an indulgent aunt. Let’s eat some bonbons! What do you want for your birthday! Here, let me greet you with a hug!
But no! It’s AVERY, and of course his first thought when he sees her is whoa, Lillian Bede is stunning, his second thought is I mustn’t let her get the upper hand by showing that I think so, his third thought is wait is she wearing BLOOMERS?!?! (Lily is a modern woman!)
For Lily’s part, she doesn’t recognize him at first because he strikes her as SO different from that awkward teenage portrait, a fact which miffs him a little bit even though it shouldn’t. She can’t deny her own thrum of attraction, either, although she similarly does not want to let on that she feels it — “His voice made her feel all smoky,” she thinks, which is a line I always like. It takes her very little time to reach the romance novel-logic that this means she should plan to spend AS MUCH TIME WITH AVERY AS POSSIBLE, you know, to cure herself of the brain fever.
A side background plot I enjoy is about the staff of the house, who are now almost entirely made up of single, pregnant women who Lily is hoping to help. There’s also the hilariously named cook Mrs. Kettle, who is determined to start setting out the fine china and serving only the best now that Avery is back home, which sets Lily’s teeth on edge. Meanwhile, Avery sees the feast being laid out for dinner and is like, hoo boy if she spends money like THIS she must be running the estate into the ground. The maids are always giggling around Avery, too, which he finds so amusing and strange.
One thing I rather like about Avery’s character is his sometimes . . . obliviousness, for lack of a better word. He spends his first days at Mill House wearing clothes that are much too small for him, since he’s filled out since he was there last, and has no idea that that might be contributing to the way the maids all react to him. At one point, Francesca tells Lily that Avery is a gentleman more out of honor than etiquette, and I love that about him — he desperately wants to do the right thing but he’s actually quite clueless about social norms, thanks to his isolated childhood and then his nomadic ways in recent years. In this way, he’s actually a great match for Lily, because although he *knows* that, on paper, there is something objectionable about her wearing bloomers or being an independent woman, he doesn’t actually judge her for any of it and in fact it makes him respect her all the more.
(Lily calls her more masculine garb her “rationals,” by the way, which I think I may start adopting.)
One day, they all decide to have a nice little picnic, where Bernard takes the opportunity to corner Avery once again on what he’s going to do to ensure that Lily is taken care of if she ends up not winning the house. Lily, for her part, is deep in the romance novel logic spiral of “if only I could have one kiss then obviously all this sexual tension would disappear.” Lily is busy thinking about this and what it would take to get him to just kiss her when Francesca observes that, when it comes down to it, Avery is really quite a shy man. He could regale them in person with stories of his travels, but he doesn’t! He seems reticent to talk to women!
“He doesn’t seem to have any trouble voicing his opinions around me,” Lily says, and Francesca is like, uh yeah, I’ve noticed. Francesca basically says, you know you’re a hedonist at heart and why are you letting this man get you in such a STATE, you know what you should be doing with him. (As a side character, I also really enjoy Francesca with her worldly seductress ways! She’s a perfect BFF-type character to egg Lily on.)
There’s lots of good back-and-forth between Avery and Lily, which I am TRYING not to get too in the weeds with because I’m already aware that I’m only 1/3 of the way through this book as it is, but at one point he’s like “I don’t think anything” and she mutters “As suspected” and he’s like “I meant” — stated with formidable calm “that I do not have an opinion.” That part always gets me to chuckle.
The neighbor, Mr. Martin Camfield, pops by with his two sisters, which is significant on a couple levels. For one, your boy Martin is OBVIOUSLY angling for something from Lily — her hand in marriage, her to sell Mill House to him, WHO KNOWS but he’s a scheming bastard. It’s also clear that he’s never brought his sisters to meet Lily before — because she’s illegitimate and thus beneath the introduction — and has only done so now to introduce them to Avery, who is a gentleman. Avery, to his credit, doesn’t like this shit AT ALL. When he finds out that invitations have come addressed to him but pointedly left out Lily, he’s like, “Surely not your invitation, though. I could only attend your ball if you invited all of us” and they basically have to smile and nod like of course, that’s what they’d planned all along.
Before we get to the ball tho, Avery and Lily need to go visit the estate manager together, this sour old man named Drummond who Avery is like “ah, he’ll remember me fondly, I knew him as a boy” and Lily is like, “good fucking luck, this guy’s an asshole.” On the walk over, they pass by the stables, which are Lily’s pride and joy because she LOVES horses. She makes a point to rescue a bunch of old race horses that might’ve been turned into glue otherwise.
What she doesn’t know is that Avery is super allergic to horses. Like, it turns out that fact — plus some garden variety asthma — was pretty much the reason for his “lung troubles” as a youth. So there’s this scene where they go to visit the stables and she thinks he’s getting SO EMOTIONAL over the fate of these beautiful beasts:
She tried to read any hint of mockery in his extraordinary blue green eyes. She couldn’t. They were suspiciously reddened around the edge and the sheen of moisture dazzled their blue-green color to brilliance. Realization hit her with the force of a blow. Avery Thorne was struggling to keep his emotions in check. He’d been touched . . . no deeply moved by these horses’ story. She stared at him in mute amazement.
Ha! This might be my favorite part in the entire book that’s not a letter. The idea that she thinks he’s so moved by these animals and really he’s just . . . having an allergic reaction. Brilliant.
They decide to take a shortcut to get to Drummond’s, which necessitates going over a fence. Avery and Lily get caught in another one of their Battles of the Sexes, where he wants to help her over like a gentleman would and she’s like, I’m an independent woman thank you, then he says well she’s a lady, and she’s like haven’t you been paying attention I’m illegitimate I’m not a lady, and he’s like you’re a lady, and then she’s like would a lady do THIS and she kisses him!
It’s a great kiss. She’s laying it on him and he’s INTO IT but also very conscious that he shouldn’t touch her or he knows it’ll all be over and the spell will be broken. Don’t touch her. Don’t touch her. For God’s sake, do not touch her, he thinks, and then suddenly she comes to her senses and is like what the fuck am I doing? and she pulls away so fast she ends up falling right off the fence rail.
“I didn’t touch you!” he shouts at her and she shouts back, “I know that!” and starts thrashing on the ground lololol this whole imagery KILLS me
He’s basically like, that wasn’t very sporting of you to just accost me like that and it’s only fair if *I* get to take my own potshot sometime in the future. (Romance novel logic!) She reluctantly agrees that that seems fair, but she’s MORTIFIED that she went and kissed him like that.
More things that make me like Avery, for all his “I’m a man, damnit” posturing: when they go visit Drummond, he very calmly and matter-of-factly asks questions about what they’re talking about with the sheep, and admits he has no idea about these things. So he’s not as arrogant as you might think, and is in fact quite willing to admit his own ignorance, which is an attractive quality! And then Drummond is whining about how he wished he could work with Horatio again, who left him alone to just do his job, and Lily makes a crack about how “the world lost a regular Damon and Pythias when the Almighty separated you and Horatio” and Avery bursts out in very genuine laughter. I appreciate when the love interests find each other legitimately funny! It’s one of my favorite things!
After Drummond, Avery goes to pump Francesca for some information about Lily and the neighbor Martin Camfield because your boy is JEALOUS. If she’s kissing him like that, what might she be doing with Martin?! (This, by the way, is one of my least favorite attributes of an “older” historical romance novel, but it’s so ubiquitous in them I almost can’t hold it against any one particular book. Basically, the idea is that if a woman kisses you and seems halfway decent at it, you immediately have to be like JUST WHO HAS SHE BEEN KISSING.) I do like a bit of jealousy. I don’t like it when it veers near slut-shaming. But I enjoy this conversation between Avery and Francesca mostly because he’s so awkward in the way he keeps trying to talk to her about it, to the point where she has to be like, I do wish you’d stop talking in monosyllables, what is it you wish to know about “her and him?” Francesca is a tiny bit a shit stirrer and I’m here for it.
Francesca is also there to set Avery straight on a few points. For example, just how hard Lily has worked to get Mill House, including getting down on her hands and knees to clean the floors herself when they’re understaffed. “You didn’t imagine three pregnant, overindulged little maids did all the work in this house, did you?” she says. “Man, look at her hands!”
Lily is a contradiction to Avery, and that’s part of why he can’t get her out of my head. “When I see those dilapidated nags she cares for, I wonder why would she risk her future for some broken-down race horses? What makes a hardheaded, unsentimental opportunist do something so utterly insane? And then, most importantly, nearly a year ago she wrote me a letter that —” he stops himself here from saying that saved my soul and just says it meant a good deal to him. But he just doesn’t understand how she can be so caring and also so calculating as to take this house he was promised as a boy.
Let’s talk about Mill House for a minute. The way it’s described in the book, I stg *I* fall in love with it. I’d throw my hat in the ring for Mill House. It sounds pretty unassuming, like it has quite a few flaws actually, and then a few nice features like a beautiful stained glass window and proximity to a pond. It’s more that the house obviously means a lot to both of them, and so you could see why they would each fight so hard for it when they feel like it’s their only hope of a home and symbolizes so much beyond that.
Avery takes Bernard out for a swim in the pond — for Avery’s part, because suddenly he feels like a dunk in some cold water is just what he needs if ya feel me — and they get to talking about Lily. Bernard is very earnest, describing how much he hates suffering from his asthma, and how much Lily has done for him like teaching him how to swim. He also renews his plea to Avery to make sure Lily is taken care of, only this time he has an even better idea — what if Avery married her?
The very IDEA sends Avery into such a tailspin that he needs more cold swims, he goes to London to see a tailor about his too-tight clothes, he basically needs to do anything he can to get Lily out of his head. He even takes to working with the sheep like a regular farmhand, if it means some mindless manual labor. That’s how Lily catches him one day, raddling (?) the sheep in the pond, and she’s all what are you doing here, and then that crotchety old Drummond is like what what are YOU doing here, and they get into one of their classic little battles where Drummond is being a misogynistic ass and Lily doesn’t want to stand down and doesn’t even appreciate Avery’s help when he tries to tell Drummond to shut up. When Drummond finally leaves, there’s this passage:
Lily watched them go, unable to mask her anger and frustration before returning her gaze to him. She hitched her chin a degree higher, daring him to voice his sympathy, ready to find yet another skirmish with another adversary. He understood pride, too.
Suddenly he didn’t want to fight her.
“Lily.” He extended his hand.
I just love this part. I love that he really SEES her in this moment, that he gets where she’s coming from and he wants to be a friend to her.
Of course, it doesn’t last long. They get into another little spat, and since they’re by the pond — we knew it was coming! it’s like Chekhov’s pond! — she ends up falling in, and then she gets caught on something and he has to rescue her for real. Listen, I love a rescuing-from-drowning scene! Maybe it’s because I imprinted on Anne of Green Gables I DON’T KNOW but I live for this shit!
Post-rescue always means their clothes are sticking to them like a second skin and he’s on top of her YOU KNOW TO MAKE SURE SHE’S OKAY, and in that vulnerable position she’s like, Are you going to take your potshot now? That question seems to upset him (he’s a gentleman!) and he rolls off her, but then he’s like FUCK IT (I love when my man is like fuck it!) and kisses her until her knees give out.
While Lily and Avery are finally acting on that tension you know they’ve been dying to act on this whole time, weird shit is going down at the house. A valuable vase broke earlier, and now that stained glass window also shattered (which, I know it can be fixed, but! bums me out! It was a feature!). Lily is starting to get seriously worried that she won’t be able to show a profit with Mill House, and so all this will have been for nothing.
There’s a bad storm, and in historical romance world, you know what that means. Of course our star-crossed lovers both can’t sleep and are going to find each other in the dark house. They have a very tender, open conversation — she realizes from some scars she can see through the open collar of his shirt that he really was mauled by a tiger, a claim which she’d thought was bogus in his letters. And then she tells him about her family.
Lily’s past explains a lot about her. Basically, her mom was already married before meeting Lily’s dad, but he was a piece of shit and when she left him he made sure she’d never see her children again. So Lily — born later to another man — was illegitimate by virtue of the fact that her mom was still technically married to someone else. That raised Lily with a lot of Thoughts about the way that men use children as “property” against women, how few rights women have in marriage, and how it would even be better to have an illegitimate child in the eyes of society because fuck society than to shackle yourself to a man and put yourself through all that.
Which . . . she’s not wrong! This is why I was saying earlier that some of the very gendered stuff in this book doesn’t bother me quite as much as in some other books of a similar era, because at least in this book those gender roles are very much a PART of the story!
Of course, this puts her at odds with Avery, who prides himself on living up to gentlemanly standards and who is really a man desperate for a family of his own. He can’t fathom putting your child through the stigma of illegitimacy if you had any other choice, so to him, it is selfish to have a baby out of wedlock if you could’ve found a way around that. To which Lily is like, yeah, A MAN WOULD SAY THAT, you’re the one who holds all the power! And he’s like, well, if you love and trust someone, then surely — and she’s like, it doesn’t matter, dude, that’s how the law works!
It’s a great argument because you see immediately how they are completely at odds with each other, and how they’re not only talking about Lily’s past but also around their own future. They both say some harsh things to each other and probably could’ve kept going if they weren’t interrupted by the library door crashing open and one of the maids screaming that another of the maids is about to have her baby, c’mon, help!
They have a brief ceasefire as they have to work together to birth this baby — er, babies, since it turns out to be twins! And to be fair, Lily does most of the work. The mother screams at Avery to wait in the hallway and he’s a bit bemused because he always thought she liked him, but like NOW IS NOT THE TIME, AVERY. Of course, once he’s holding the first sweet little baby in his arms, he’s struck by the thought of everything he would do to protect a baby of his own, and Lily is struck by the same thought and so there they are, back to their standoff.
In the days after, the new mother is back to adoring Avery and calling him her “tower of strength in her time of need,” and he’s like this woman is delusional, my god. He runs into Bernard and has a sweet conversation with him where Bernard confesses he wants to be an actor. Bernard is also, as he’s consistently been since the start of the book!, very concerned about Lily’s future and wants to know if Avery’s given any more thought to marrying her. “She doesn’t value any of the things I value,” Avery says, his voice desolate, “Lily Bede doesn’t value anything I am, anything I have done, anything I will do.” And Bernard is like, oh I don’t know about that, and takes Avery to a room in the house where Lily has laid out all of the artifacts that he’d been sending Bernard during his travels as carefully as if they were in a museum.
The book doesn’t dwell on this quite long enough, in my opinion! I could’ve hung out in this scene a little more! Because I do like the idea that she took so much care with all of those things he sent, this proof to him that she held his correspondence dear the same way he did hers. But either way, I also just like the idea that this house has this cool little museum room in it now.
FINALLY we’re at the Camfields’ ball (hadn’t you almost forgotten about that invitation?). Avery is looking around the room for Lily and then he sees her dressed — no, undressed, he thinks — in some “horrifying erotic-looking thing of sheer black silk tissue over a gleaming underskirt of flesh-colored satin.” Your boy’s EYEBALLS ARE COMING OUT OF HIS HEAD. He’s never seen Lily like this! Man, I love a “he sees her looking hot and his brain short-circuits” moment. (Why I wrote Asa seeing Lauren in that red dress ;) ;) ;))
At one point, Avery can’t find Lily OR the host Martin Camfield, so he goes in search, half-expecting to find them caught in some assignation somewhere. Instead he runs into Martin on his own, and ends up asking him outright what his intentions are toward Lily. This whole time, Avery has obviously been jealous of what he sees as Martin’s interest in Lily — interest he can’t tell if it’s reciprocated or not — but Martin blanches and basically says, oh her? No way, man, I just care about the house, I wouldn’t marry her because I’m a gentleman and she’s a bastard, I wouldn’t even take her as my mistress because I’m a gentleman — and then he doesn’t really get to say anything else because Avery punches him in the face.
There’s a tender scene in the carriage on the way home where Lily says, you didn’t have to do that, and Avery is like, I don’t know what you’re talking about, and Lily tells him that she knew all along Martin was just sidling up to her to make a play for the house, and she wasn’t drawn up in any of his games. She thinks it’s very sweet that Avery stood up for her tho, when he thought Martin was playing with her affections. They almost kiss — she kisses his palm, his mouth is at her temple — and then right as he’s saying, “Dear Lord, Lily. You set me a —”
“Fire!” someone yells, and come on. I appreciate that comic timing. Connie Brockway put a decent amount of that in this book, and she’s so good at it. Just moments where I can really see the physical comedy (her thrashing on the ground after kissing him!) or hear the comedic delivery (“you were my tower of strength” coos the maid who was SCREAMING at him the night before).
But sorry, enough of that because there’s a fire! In the stables! Lily is immediately worried for her beloved horses, and Avery vows to rescue every last one of them. He saves her horses, but then she has to save him, which she does by ingeniously attaching a harness to his feet and dragging him out. It’s all very dramatic! She realizes she loves him and she can’t lose him! She begs him to wake up and shout at her! He wakes up just enough to tell her he’s a gentleman and he never shouts at women!
In the days after the fire, while Avery is still recovering, Lily thinks all has been lost. She’s certainly lost any chance she had at keeping Mill House, since the repairs will negate any profit she might’ve made to fulfill the terms of the will. And she feels like she’s lost Avery, because without the excuse of this house between them, what’s to keep them in each other’s lives? Francesca tries to give her some advice by basically saying, he’s in love with you, dummy, then “No. That’s wrong. Not in love . . . he loves you. Simply. Deeply. Unhappily.”
(I love this idea of someone being unhappily in love! Torture me a little bit!)
Evelyn (that’s Bernard’s mom, I realize I haven’t mentioned her as much, and technically she has this suffragette leader woman Polly Makepeace she’s always hanging out with but I cut her right out of the story for simplicity’s sake, sorry! their little side buddy comedy moments are quite cute!) also decides she has to Do Something about this Avery/Lily mess, and so she decides that she, Bernard, and Polly all need to pack up and uh . . . go to town! That’s right! No, not the close town, the one farther away! Because they want to . . . see the sunrise over the harbor, that’s it!
So now Francesca has left, the rest of them have all abruptly left, and Avery and Lily have the house to themselves! Whatever shall they do?
Look. We are on Chapter 24 and there are only 28 chapters and an epilogue so they can’t afford to waste any time and they know it. They barely have time to be like, “why the fuck did everyone leave so fast?” before they’ve locked eyes in the hallway and they are kissing, she’s begging him to make love to her, and that’s exactly what they do. They do it all night.
In the cold light of morning, they’re back to square one, only now it’s WORSE because they’ve admitted their love to themselves (but not each other), they’ve consummated that love. He wants to get married and doesn’t see why she won’t, she reminds him about the laws, he’s like fuck the laws why don’t you trust me more than the laws, I won’t ever leave you or stop loving you. In final desperation he even says, fine, be my mistress if that’s what you want, just stay with me here at Mill House.
But of course it’s still an impossible position. Even if he promises they’ll make sure there are no children from their illegitimate union, she knows he really wants children and she wouldn’t want to do that to him.
So that’s it. He says he’s going to leave and they’ll see each other at the solicitor’s office in a month when the five years is officially up. She says no, I’ve lost, I see no reason to go to that, so I guess this is goodbye.
The house feels empty and sad after Avery leaves, and Lily does a lot of cleaning and moping (if that’s not a mood). She’s surprised when a visitor is announced, hopes at first it might even be Avery before she realizes no, it wouldn’t be him. But it turns out to be . . . his friend John! Remember, the other one he went adventuring with, along with Karl? John is of course just delighted to finally meet the famous Lillian Bede from the letters, and really doesn’t read the room AT ALL that her mood isn’t super of the “let’s reminisce about old times” sort.
But he’s just blundering forward, happily telling her about how much they all loved her letters, how Avery would read parts of them aloud but kept others all to himself. He describes how Avery once told a prince he was unsuitable for marriage and had it on good authority from “Miss Lillian Bede of Devon, England,” and that the prince laughed and said she sounded like his wife.
He also says, “You saved his life there, you know.” He explains that Avery turned so inward after Karl’s death and really blamed himself, and that it was only Lily’s letter that pulled him out.
But the biggest surprise is that John . . . assumed she and Avery had already married by now! “It’s just . . . well, after the letters, I’d assumed. It seemed so obvious that you were both . . . courting. And when I got his address and realized it was the same as yours, I assumed.” He’s embarrassed when she corrects the record on that point, and finally seems to get that perhaps he was ill-advised to drop by unannounced and take such familiarities with her. She gives him the address of where Avery is staying, and sends him on his way.
After John leaves, Lily goes upstairs to Avery’s room and comes across THE letter. The one she wrote after Karl’s death, the one that’s been referenced all this time, the very one that I read aloud at that Powell’s event! I adore it so much because it’s not a love letter, not really. It’s friendship and grief and forgiveness and all kinds of things, but not a traditional love letter. And yet it is VERY MUCH a love letter. Here’s what she wrote to him:
My Dearest Enemy,
I am concerned.
Your last letter did not contain your usual compliments and flattery, but was terse. What am I to think? Have I lost my most valued foe to his grief? No. You simply must not allow your loss to ripple across the ocean and continents to become mine. It would be most ungentlemanly.
Allow me for a minute to take hold the flail which you have lain against your back. You mustn’t castigate yourself for your friend’s loss. Even for you, this is a bit overweening.
Would you stand in Charon’s boat forever, wresting his oars from him to keep your comrades on these living shores? And who would do that service for you, Avery, and would you want it done? Or would you resent anyone who barred you from taking even one step on a path upon which you’d set your foot? I daresay we both know the answer.
You say Karl Dhurmann died homeless, without county, and alone. I know this to be patently untrue. You were there, Avery. Karl Dhurmann sustained many losses: a house demolished, a family killed, a country destroyed.
But in your company he’d found not replacements for those things, but alternatives. Did you not call him “brother”? Who knows better than you and I how closely that word resembles “home”?
You tell me Karl had chosen me for his wife; well then I refuse to lose both antagonist and suitor. I have too few relationships to relinquish any of them — most especially those which have demanded such an intellectual investment as ours.
So let me claim his widow’s role and say that which a loving wife would surely avow. Karl died as the result of an accident which no one could prevent. He died in the fullness of his years, in the course of pursuing his own life, not fleeing it, and leaves behind those who have wept for his loss. May we all have so satisfactory a eulogy.
Now, my dearest enemy, I have done more than smile, I have shed my tears. It is past time that you shed yours, too.
Your own,
Lillian Bede
Whew. I MEAN. No wonder he showed up to that house already most of the way in love with her! No fucking wonder! The gentle teasing, the way she used humor to bring in a little lightness, the way she obviously knows him well enough to know he wouldn’t want to be “ungentlemanly” and to point out that he wouldn’t like a friend beating themselves up on his behalf any more than he’s been doing it now. The way she knows about Karl, and treats him and his memory with the warmth of a friend. The way you sense her own loneliness in the letter, the way her heart has always reached out to his — as two people who’ve never felt truly at “home” anywhere, who feel alone in the world.
The line that usually gets me to start crying is the “You say Karl Dhurmann died homeless, without county, and alone,” and I was pretty proud of myself for getting through it during the reading with mayyyyybe a bit of a shaking voice but nothing more than that. I was not as proud of myself for flubbing “Charon,” which I’d watched several pronunciation guides in preparation to make sure I didn’t fuck it up lol. I took this very seriously!!!
Anyway. This is THE letter, the entire reason I’ve spent hours typing out so many words about this fucking book (affectionate).
Avery shows up at Mill House one last time to dump a bunch of money on Lily’s desk. That’s all of it, he says — every cent of allowance she ever sent him while he was traveling around. He tells her she can use it to fix up Mill House and she has it, it’s hers, she won it fair and square. Of course her pride makes her throw in his face that this is probably just money for her services, which he does not like at all, and she tells him she doesn’t want Mill House, he can keep it. He wants to know what she’ll do, then, and she says it’s none of his concern. To which he gives a speech I just love:
“The hell it isn’t! Everything about you is my concern . . . I don’t give a bloody damn if I never share your bed, your name, or your house — you are still my concern. You can leave, take yourself from my ken, disappear for the rest of my life but you cannot untangle yourself from my — my concern. That I have of you, Miss Bede, for that, at least, I do not need your permission.”
Avery leaves, passing Bernard on his way out, and of course the boy is beside himself that it’s all worked out this way. He thought Avery promised to take care of her! He thought they were going to get married! It comes out that BERNARD was behind all the mysterious things happening to the house — the broken vase, the window, the fire — not that he intended for any of it to go that far or cause that much danger (in the case of the fire, which got out of control). He just wanted to set Lily back so that Avery would take ownership of Mill House and then Do the Right Thing by letting Lilly live there as his wife. The book does a good job of making you really feel for Bernard and like him, because even when he basically confesses to arson I’m like awwww he was just trying to make things okay!
Bernard collapses — a mixture of his lung troubles and the heightened emotions, I guess! — and she shouts for help and Avery comes running. It’s seeing his concern and care for Bernard, how gentle he is with him, that it really hits Lily that Avery hasn’t been saying all the shit he’s been saying out of some stubborn Man Posturing. He is someone who loves deeply and fiercely, and of course he wouldn’t like the idea of anything less than a traditional family unit so he could offer his full protection and support to those he loves.
So Lily tells him she loves him, that she does trust him, that she wants to be with him forever as his wife and the mother of our children. And LOOK this obviously does not fix any of the systemic issues which ARE STILL VERY MUCH THERE, LILY WAS NOT WRONG ABOUT THE LAWS, but . . . this is a romance novel so it’s nice to know that these two characters at least will be all right.
The book ends with an epilogue showing Lily and Avery happy with their brood of children and all the other side characters gathered in one place, including “Uncle Bernard” who is publishing a book of love letters between Avery and Lillian Thorne. And I just ignore this part because personally I would want my private letters to stay private but THAT’S JUST ME. It’s a cute idea for an epilogue.
Okay! That’s it! This was a super long one, so if you’ve hung with me, thank you! And if you’ve only skimmed until your eyeballs hit the part where I said it was over . . . haha, also thank you. TL;DR: My Dearest Enemy was very formative for me, and I love the letter she wrote him about Karl in particular.
(I would not put anything I’ve ever written on par with the greats who got me here, but I will say that the paragraph in Daphne’s final apology DM to Chris in The Art of Catching Feelings that *also* always gets me to cry is the one that starts “You hold yourself in such tight control.”)
I love this song “Soil, Soil” — everything off The Con, really — especially because it is so much about correspondence, that need to respond to someone right away, that desire to sometimes write everything you’re feeling and bury it deep in the ground where no one ever has to actually read it. So much of The Con is about communication, craving it, missing it, which is probably why it’s one of my favorite albums. But more on the miscommunication trope later, as I’ve always promised lol.
Here’s my favorite live performance of “Soil, Soil,” because you can really hear all the emotion in it:
As one very final note, tomorrow I will be . . . at the Marlins game! There’s a pre-game bookish panel and book swap event, and you can buy a ticket to that which includes a ticket to the game itself afterward. If you’re in the Miami area, come out!
And now I’m going to let you go because I HAVE to, this is so fucking long, Substack is yelling at me!
Currently reading . . . I just finished Unmask Alice by Rick Emerson, which is all about the alleged fraud perpetrated by the “editor” of the supposedly anonymous teen diary that became Go Ask Alice. I have to say, I never read the original book or had any feelings really on whether it was fiction or nonfiction, what might have been behind it, whatever. And then (of course, you had to know this was the origin!) I listened to the You’re Wrong About episodes about the book, and I had to know more so I went on this deep dive. It’s pretty fascinating! I also love reading true crime where the crime at the center of it isn’t a murder, and that’s basically what this book is. I did think it was interesting (to put it politely) that at the end of a nonfiction book about how squishy the term “nonfiction” can get, the citations amounted to . . . go make your own phone calls if you don’t believe me. Just because I can also find the information you found doesn’t mean you shouldn’t disclose where you found it, Rick!
watching . . . Because of a They Might Be Giants song (Everything right is wrong again/just like in The Long, Long Trailer/All the dishes got broken and the car kept driving/And nobody would stop to save her), my family decided to rent the referenced movie from the library. I LOVE renting a movie from the library! It just hits different! I love having to wait for it to come in, I love driving to go pick it up, I love having a physical disc for the next couple of weeks.
If you haven’t seen it, The Long, Long Trailer is basically about Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz as two newlyweds who decide to buy a trailer as their first home and are driving it across the country on their “honeymoon.” This movie is STRESSFUL tbh, because so much stuff happens — hidden costs they hadn’t anticipated (a trigger point for me, this gets me SO anxious), the difficulty of backing a trailer into a driveway, the danger of hauling a trailer over an 8,000ft elevation mountain. It’s also HILARIOUS and had me actually gut-laughing several times. For example, when Desi goes to pick Lucy up to carry her across the threshold of their new home, but all the nosy neighbors at the trailer park get involved and before you know it, they’re helping him bodily haul his wife with a “hurt ankle” and grabbing the epsom salt and inviting themselves over for dinner and slipping Lucy a sleeping pill to help her get comfortable. I was like, doubled over.
listening to . . . Same as last week tbh! You’re Wrong About episodes when I’m doing the dishes or playing Happy Color (my two biggest podcast-listening times); and then The Cranberries for working at my desk or driving around. I’m living my best!
Haha the sheep-raddling scene sounds a little like the sheep-cleaning scene in the 2015 Far From the Madding Crowd (I’m not even sure that was in Hardy's book but…similar vibes)!
I came to romance reading later on and I tend to avoid older books because of the datedness you mention (so many controlling alpha dudes framed as attractive ugh). This one sounds so good though! I’ll have to seek it out.
I have seen The Long, Long Trailer but it was ages ago. I remember it being pretty enjoyable, especially a ridiculous scene where a salad is being prepared in the trailer WHILE IT IS MOVING!