The Bluestocking

by Caldwell, Christi

  At least in silence.

  “I still do not see what the problem was with Mrs. Upton,” Gertrude whispered from the other end of the odd seating.

  “You would not.”

  And he did not. Most of the candidates to come before her had inspired the same unease in his belly that he’d ignored when Stephen had been a babe. The young governess Mrs. Upton hadn’t caused that disquiet, and yet . . . something had kept him from capitulating.

  Because if you hire her, it means Gertrude Killoran would no longer serve a purpose in your household.

  Yes, he was as mad as the world took him for.

  “Then, why was she a ‘no’?”

  God, Gertrude Killoran was nothing if not persistent. She’d not quit until she had an answer and the truth he could not give. “I don’t know, Gertrude,” he finally shot back in hushed tones. “I can’t tell you why.” Which was the truth. “Something about her . . . about the situation . . . did not feel right, and so I’m trusting that instinctual feeling that tells me that she was not the one.”

  For the first time since Mrs. Upton had taken her leave, that effectively silenced Gertrude. “I understand,” she said quietly in tones that said she very much did.

  Edwin took his gaze from Stephen and looked at the woman pressed against the curve of the odd chair they both occupied. He swept his gaze over her cheeks. “Years ago, I had reservations about the woman put forward as Stephen’s nursemaid. My wife”—he stared beyond the top of Gertrude’s head to the boy who had been, and would always be, his everything—“insisted that I disapproved because she had recommended the young woman for hire.”

  By that point in their union, their marriage had dissolved to a constant debate and fight about everything, from which social gatherings they would attend to who was hired to care for Stephen. “Had I trusted my instincts . . . ,” he whispered to himself, and a memory intruded.

  I said we’re hiring her, and we’re hiring her, Edwin. You merely want to control all decisions.

  It is not that, Lavinia. There is something I don’t trust . . .

  Pfft. You’d play the doting father. You, who visit your clubs and gaming hells.

  Edwin struggled to swallow around the wad that threatened to choke him with the weight of past regrets.

  If only I’d not conceded the point. If only—

  Gertrude’s hand covered his own, drawing him back from the agonizing path his thoughts had crept down. He stared at their entwined fingers, hers the most unexpected of lifelines. “It wasn’t your fault.”

  “It actually was all my fault,” he said, unable to keep the bitterness from spilling into his admission. It was the first time in the whole of his marriage and then the tragedy that had unfolded after that he’d taken ownership of that fact out loud. “I married where I oughtn’t.”

  She shook her head slowly. “I don’t . . . ?”

  “Oh, she was a lady. I was a lord. For all intents and purposes, it was a noble match that one would think any parent from the peerage would support.”

  “And yet hers did not?” Gertrude ventured.

  He’d been arrogant enough to believe Lavinia’s disapproving mother and father would come ’round because he was a nobleman . . . and their son’s closest friend. How wrong he’d been on every score. “They saw the young man that I was: a rogue who wagered too much. Who kept outrageous hours and visited gaming hells and, as such, was undeserving of their cherished daughter. They launched quite a campaign to dissuade her. Whatever she wished for from them, she received. The one thing she could not, however, garner in all our years of courtship and marriage was their approval.”

  “What happened?”

  “She wed me anyway,” he said, stating the obvious. And it had been the end of her life because of it. “She married me, believing she could bring them ’round to accepting our love for one another.” His lip peeled up in one corner in a derisive sneer.

  A boom of laughter went up from across the room, interrupting Edwin’s telling. They looked to where Draven thumped Stephen on the back. Laughing, his cheeks flushed red with amusement over whatever jest the pair shared.

  As if feeling their stare upon him, Stephen glanced over. He lifted his hand in a little wave before returning his attention to whatever question the cabinetmaker was now putting to him. He bore little resemblance to the snarling boy who’d entered Edwin’s household almost ten days ago. It almost gave Edwin hope that, in the years to come, they might forge something between them. When he’d never been able to maintain a bond with his son’s mother.

  “She loved you,” Gertrude murmured, bringing his gaze over to her. “Her family disapproved of you and fought your suit, and yet, she chose you.”

  “And hated me every day thereafter because of it.” The remembered pain of that had haunted him continuously over the years. That realization had left him splayed open, and even when the jagged sharpness of it had diminished, it had faded to a dull ache but remained. This time, the pain did not come. In its stead was a somberness to that admission. “And with good reason. I drove a wedge between her and the parents who meant more to her than anyone.” That realization of their place in the order of her life had held true even with Stephen’s birth.

  And it had only intensified his own resentment for the young woman he’d once loved.

  “Good reason?” Gertrude echoed. “Resenting you because her family disapproved? That isn’t how love is supposed to be.”

  “And how is that, Gertrude?” He leaned closer, across the curve in the chair, dipping his mouth near her ear. The scent of her filled his senses, delicate and enthralling. “Patient and kind? Neither jealous nor boastful nor proud nor rude. It does not demand its own way. It is not irritable, and it keeps no record of being wronged. It does not rejoice about injustice but rejoices—”

  “Whenever the truth wins out. Love never gives up, never loses faith, is always hopeful, and endures through every circumstance. Corinthians,” she stated flatly. “Yes, that is precisely what love is and means. All of it.”

  Clever bluestocking that she was, she would know verbatim the ancient words of the Bible. She knew everything from taming rodents to Egyptian kings and biblical texts.

  “Are you laughing at me?” she demanded.

  And he froze. I’m smiling. This time it had come so naturally, without a thought, and with him unaware of that slight twist of those muscles until she’d pointed it out. “Never, Gertrude.”

  Some of the tension left her narrow shoulders.

  He shifted, straining closer, hanging on to the words that hovered on her lips.

  “What your wife did at first? Standing up to her family despite their wishes for her? That’s what you do when you love someone, Edwin,” Gertrude said softly. “You love unconditionally and without a care of what the world says or thinks.”

  He chuckled. “I was once that innocent.” Back then, however, he’d not seen that. He’d seen himself as a scoundrel. Life had schooled him on the fact that there were many types of innocence. He’d been naive of the ugliness that dwelled in a man’s soul until Mac Diggory had burnt down his existence.

  A little frown hovered on Gertrude’s lips. “That is the first, and likely the last, time anyone would accuse me of being ‘innocent’ of anything.”

  Yes, he’d been of a like opinion. But that had been before. Before she’d revealed herself so very devoted to Stephen’s well-being and future and happiness. Before he’d found that she was a young woman who’d make a rodent into a pet.

  Gertrude rose and sailed around the tête-à-tête chair. She perched herself on the edge of his bench, stealing the corner. “You believe I’m speaking of a romantic form of love. Why? Because I’m a woman?” She didn’t allow him a reply. “I’ve never been in love.” She was better off for it. All love had left him was broken and empty. He’d not see Gertrude become that. “I’ve never known what it is to surrender so wholly to that emotion you knew with your wife.” Did he imagine a wistful
quality to her clear gaze? “The love I speak of, the kind where one will do anything, just to ensure the chance of happiness for another? Those are sentiments I understand, because I’ve felt them for my siblings. When you love, you do so with your whole heart.” Gertrude thumped a fist against her chest, knocking that pearl-set brooch affixed there.

  Edwin had never been loved that way. His parents had left his care to nursemaids and tutors and then happily sent him on to Eton and Oxford. When they’d died, within a year of one another, they’d been more strangers to him than family. His wife had been in love with the idea of being in love with him, but ultimately her parents’ disapproval had trumped all.

  His feelings and desires had been secondary. “Whether she loved me or not, she was still deserving of my protection.” It was the most basic, primitive offering a husband could provide for a woman. “I allowed that nursemaid into my household. And if I hadn’t, then even now . . .” He and Gertrude wouldn’t be sitting there, watching on as Stephen designed furniture to hide his belongings in.

  Gertrude covered his hand with hers and gave it a light squeeze, and he clung to that warmth that filled him, that human contact he’d been so long without. Only, there was something . . . more in her touch, too. Something terrifying that he couldn’t explain. “We do the best we can in every moment that we have.”

  “Indeed,” he murmured, “but it cannot erase the mistakes or regrets.”

  “No, it cannot. They’ll always be there. But if we cling to them, we’re living only in the past with no thought to the future.”

  Edwin again found Stephen. The boy knelt on the floor alongside an ornate carved mahogany bureau, deeply attending the cabinetmaker now giving a lesson on the compartments that had been designed into that piece. “I did not think of the future until you arrived,” Edwin whispered. “I’ve dwelled in the past and didn’t care what each new day brought.” Because there could be no surcease from the suffering. Edwin looked to a silent Gertrude, needing her to understand. “This”—she followed his deliberate stare over to his son—“is all foreign to me. Caring about tomorrow and another person’s tomorrow.” His throat constricted. “And I do not know if I can be what he needs me to be.”

  Gertrude’s clear, clever gaze lingered on his face. “That is why.” Her words emerged a breathless exhalation. “That is why you didn’t come for Stephen. It’s why you didn’t storm the clubs and demand to take him back.”

  A thousand denials sprang to his lips, but none slipped forward. Because they’d only be lies. Edwin briefly closed his eyes as his already unstable world shook all the more under him. My God. She is right. When the investigator he’d hired had first brought him the news of August’s existence, he’d been besieged, first by hope and then by mind-numbing terror. That fear had dominated logic and reason, and he’d been unable to accept that which had been laid out before him—that his son was, in fact, alive.

  He felt cut open and exposed before her, on display in all his vulnerability and weakness.

  For there it was . . . the reason he’d not rushed to that hated club and ripped down the damn door to steal back his son—because I’m a damned coward.

  He couldn’t move. He couldn’t so much as draw a breath through the shame of it.

  Who was this woman, that she’d chipped away at the defenses he’d built and read the secrets he hadn’t even known he’d carried?

  “I don’t . . . I can’t . . .” Form a proper response. For there was none to give. He was at sea, as he’d been for too many years.

  “You don’t have to say anything, Edwin,” she said in gentle tones he should take offense to, but that instead brought a desperately hungered-for calm. “There is no shame in how you feel. And Stephen and you can only both benefit from your sharing that truth with him.”

  “Tell my own son I didn’t want to get him?” he asked, his tone emerging more sharply than he intended.

  From across the room, Stephen and Draven glanced over.

  Gertrude waited until that pair returned their attention to the bureau before discreetly covering her mouth to hide her lips and mute her tone.

  “That’s not true,” Gertrude said with that dogged tenacity that shook him to the core. “If you didn’t want him, you would have never hired Connor Steele. You’d not have given my brother Broderick an audience. And you’d not have demanded your son be returned to you.”

  How methodical and precise she was. It spoke to a woman wholly in control of her thoughts and logic when he struggled to make sense of anything anymore. “Stop,” he said, his voice a hoarse command.

  But she was unrelenting.

  Gertrude scooted closer so their legs brushed. “You were afraid, Edwin. That does not make you a bad father or terrible person. It makes you human. Do you want to know, however, what does matter?”

  He managed a shaky nod.

  “What makes you a good, honorable father is that you call your son by his street name and not the noble one you gave him at birth. You are here now, when you’ve not left your household or wanted to leave your household . . . but you are here for him.”

  And when she spoke with that conviction, he could almost believe his worth.

  “We’re done!”

  They looked up as Stephen skidded to a stop before them.

  Seeing Stephen’s cheeks flushed, his eyes bright and unguarded, Edwin felt the first stirrings of hope for who his son might become. Knowing any hint of vulnerability would crush all those sentiments, he smoothed his features and allowed brother and sister to speak.

  “He has one more piece, Gert, and then my furniture will be all finished up.” My furniture . . . that small but significant mark of ownership in a world he now shared with Edwin. Oh, God. Edwin struggled to retain a tight rein on the swell of emotion . . . and felt his control slipping.

  Gertrude Killoran caught Stephen by the shoulders and said something to the boy, unwittingly allowing Edwin that much-needed moment to collect himself. It was a small victory, but any move away from his son’s icy loathing was a triumph.

  “We’ll have to ask Edwin,” Gertrude was saying, bringing him back.

  Edwin blinked and stared over at the expectant pair.

  “Stephen enjoys visiting Hyde Park,” she said gently.

  And just like that, the magic was shattered. “Hyde Park,” he repeated dumbly. Those grounds favored by the nobles, the same ones he’d relished riding through every early morn, at this hour would be teeming with lords and ladies, gawking at and whispering after the Mad Marquess. “I . . .” Cannot. All this had been a struggle . . . but this? Mingling amongst Polite Society? This was too much. “I . . .”

  Stephen’s earlier enthusiasm faded, and that joy was like a bright light being extinguished. The boy jutted out his lower lip and looked away . . . but not before Edwin viewed the disappointment there.

  Ah, Lord, he could sooner flay his own chest open than deny the boy. But then that had always been the way. He’d loved August more than anyone, with an intensity he hadn’t known was possible, and that love had not diminished with time or by their separation.

  “Very well,” he croaked.

  Stephen’s head swung back, and joy paraded across his features.

  And before his courage flagged, Edwin continued. “We can go to Hyde Park.” He glanced across the room and found Draven, his arms full, approaching. “Soon.” The smile slipped on his son’s cheeks. “There is just one more matter of business for us to see to here.” Ignoring the question in Gertrude’s eyes, Edwin gave his full attention to the cabinetmaker.

  Draven stopped before them. “It’s completed, my lord, as you instructed.”

  Edwin peered at the peculiar creation; constructed of painted wood and metal, the odd contraption featured a metal caged wheel.

  “What the hell is that?” Stephen asked bluntly.

  “A cage . . . ,” Draven answered, but then immediately clarified. “Of sorts, rather.” The builder set it down at the center of the tab
le for the trio to examine. “There’s the main area over here which functions as a house of sorts.” Resting his elbows on the table, Stephen leaned in and peered at the constructed piece. “Each level within contains a series of chambers and intersecting alleys.”

  “But what’s it for?” Stephen asked, opening the little latch door. He stuck his right eye against it and then shot a look over his shoulder, up at Edwin.

  Feeling Gertrude’s piercing focus trained on him, Edwin struggled with his cravat, that scrap of white satin suddenly choking him.

  The trio stared on. And he, who’d dealt with no one in so long he’d forgotten how to be around people, considered the door and escape.

  Draven replied for him. “His Lordship wished for a cage . . . that wasn’t a cage . . . for a rat.”

  Gertrude gasped, and unable to meet her eyes, Edwin studied the “cage that wasn’t a cage” intently.

  “A mouse,” Gertrude whispered. Her full lips trembled, and she touched a hand to them. “It’s for a mouse. You made me a mouse house.”

  And Edwin, cynical, scarred, and completely jaded by life, found his face going hot. Blushing. He was . . . blushing. “If you could please see the . . . cage delivered this afternoon, Mr. Draven.”

  As the other man nodded and stalked off, Stephen rolled his eyes.

  “Seems like an awful lot of trouble for a damned mouse,” his son muttered, hopping to his feet.

  Sethos wasn’t just a “damned mouse.” He was a creature that mattered to Gertrude, who felt an unlikely connection to him, and because of that and other reasons Edwin could neither identify nor care to try to explain, he’d wanted to do this . . . for her. He didn’t know why it had been so important . . . but it had. “Shall we be on our way?” he asked, wanting to end all further talks on the gift he’d had commissioned for Gertrude Killoran.

  It’s merely because she’s helped ease Stephen’s return. There is nothing more to my actions.