“Because you told Ravenclyffe. That was not months ago.”
His lips pressed together, his eyes fixed on her hands where she clutched them together before her. There was no sign of the purple flush. She wondered what that meant. Probably, she realized with a sinking sensation, it meant that he was not ashamed.
“What do you want me to say?” he asked her quietly.
More than anything the secretary had told her about him, this made her want to weep. “Whatever I want to hear, that is what you will say? There is no truth for you, there is only what gets you what you want.”
“Fine, the truth.” He was a little angry too. “You’ve known for weeks I’m a fake. And you know where I came from. What do you think my first instinct was, when I found all these superior gentlemen with more money than sense? It’s what I know. I hadn’t planned on using it unless I had to. In case the honest work dries up, there has to be something else. I do it without even thinking. It’s like a bad habit.”
She gave an incredulous laugh. “A bad habit! Yes, it is a very bad habit, to steal thousands of pounds.”
“Well obviously I haven’t managed to habitually get that kind of money, have I? And I haven’t taken it now even when they’re trying to give it to me. No, I’ve been drawing little pictures instead of taking their money – and I haven’t hidden that from you. I told you what I am. You just heard what you wanted to hear.”
It was true. She had deceived herself a little. He had told her that he could be doing things much worse than the gossip papers. When she’d wondered what else he had tried to keep hidden, he had said – what? That there were only harmless things which he preferred she did not see, from before. Just details, he had called it. Such easy audacity, to think of stealing thousands of pounds as just a detail.
It didn’t matter, though. She didn’t really care about the money or the stealing. She had already decided that. She knew very well what wicked, malicious men were like, and he was not that. He only did not know a different way to be.
She felt like she could not breathe in the sudden quiet after so many heavy words. It was horrible, that they were such friends and that she loved him so much, and yet there was this sudden distance and silence between them.
“Tell me your true name.”
Now the purple came up his throat, swift and vivid. It caused a terrible little twist of her heart to see it.
“Mason is all I know. It’s either the name my mother gave me before she died or it was my father’s name. Or maybe my uncle just gave it to me. I guess I could have taken his name when I left, but I never wanted to. So I’m just Mason. It’s as true a name as I’ll ever have.” He moved his eyes over her, the same look as he gave to the oil paintings at the exhibition – like he was memorizing her, taking in every stroke and every line. “I’m a fool, aren’t I? Thinking I could marry you when I don’t even have a name. But I thought… I thought I’d like to just stop. Just be me. With you.”
Oh, he had stumbled onto it – the exact thing she wanted to hear. But there was a reason why she had hesitated, why she had not immediately said yes to him, even if she had not understood it until now.
“I would like that too. But you cannot continue this way. You call them honest work, the pamphlets, but for me they mean I must lie to my friends. This cannot be your work if we are together. Over and over, to turn around and find some new lie you have invented – I will not live like this. And you should not live like this.” She took a step toward him, to make him hear her, to make him look at her and understand. “You are meant to be a true artist. To study with masters, like I have said. Why do you turn from it? This is the honest life you must make.”
It was so obvious to her, but he looked at her like she had suggested something unthinkable. She could feel the stubbornness coming into her face. He would act like he always did – like this idea was so impossible and his talent was so small and she was so silly to think this way.
Already he was giving her that skeptical look. “It’s just that easy, is it?”
“Who has said easy? It will not be easy. It will be very hard and it is even possible you will fail.” She dismissed that with a wave of her hand. “You will not fail, but it is possible. This way you live now, always running and always lying – that is the failure. Do you not see, mon amour? You are in the wrong life.”
He was looking away from her, his mouth tight and his jaw clenched. She prepared herself for more of his disputing, more denials that he could not be what she knew he was supposed to be. But when he finally answered, he did not say any of that. He took a deep breath and asked, “What if I don’t want to? What if I just got some other kind of work – I don’t know, driving a carriage or something? As long as it’s safe and respectable, would that be enough?”
Her mouth dropped open in mild disbelief. She walked to him and gave a little push to his shoulder. “What is this? I am supposed to think you make these pages and pages of beautiful things because you want to hide them? I see your face when you show them to me. I do not believe you if you say you do not want it.”
His face was full of caution and reserve, and she hated it. She had not fallen in love with some careful, sensible man. She had fallen in love with Mason, who said risqué things to make her laugh and never bowed and drew pornographic flowers and pulled her into a hidden niche so he could have his way with her while genteel ladies played whist in the next room.
“You should not be in this small and shabby life,” she insisted. “There is very much more in you.”
He let out a scoffing breath. “You’re telling me to get out of my small life? You?”
“Yes, me.” She scowled. “Why should it not be me?”
“What have you been planning to do with your life, Marie-Anne? Same as you’ve done for years, I bet. Same as you’ll want to do after this. Hide away in your village.”
“I like my village!”
She meant it, but even to her own ears it sounded like a thoughtless reflex, a child’s defensive response. He was looking at her differently, like she had said something very stupid and he was determined to set her straight.
“You listen to me, now. You lived your whole life in adventure until Richard died. Learning English as a child so you could come here, and when that plan was dashed, you took yourself to Paris. Even there you made the best of it, and when some wealthy English lord invited you to run away with him, you did.” He looked at her like he could not believe she’d called his own life small. “Now you just sit still in your little village for years. Is that who you’re meant to be?”
“I am very happy in my little life.” It came out mechanically, like she had said it a hundred times to herself, because she had. She had always believed it.
“Right.” His voice was heavy with irony. “You’re happy.”
There was a horrible, pressing feeling in her chest. She did not like this, any of it. They were not supposed to be talking about her. He was supposed to say he loved her enough to change everything, to chase a dream and hope for more. He was not supposed to point at the smallness of her own life, and make her see how she had kept it small on purpose.
She was still looking for words when the door to the library opened. She took a step away from Mason to see that it was Amy, who looked startled to find them both there with such serious looks. Joyce was behind her, but lingered just outside the door.
“Marie-Anne, there you are.” Amy hovered at the threshold, obviously uncertain of her welcome. “I’m so sorry to intrude. Have you spoken with Phyllida today?”
“No,” she said faintly, suddenly overcome with a terrible sadness. These fresh, young Shipley girls and their romances – how well it had all worked out for them. Why could it not be as easy for her?
“It’s only that after luncheon, I went to our room and found some of her belongings are gone. It looks as if she’s packed a bag, but no one has seen her leave. No one has seen her at all since breakfast.”
“She is not with
her hermit?”
Joyce’s gently exasperated voice filtered in from the corridor. “We have no hermit, dearest!”
“Lady Huntingdon believes it is Mr. Hill who often comes to the hermit’s cottage. He is a farmer.”
“Aha!” Marie-Anne could not resist a little burst of triumph. “I said he was a farmer! And so did Mason, didn’t you?”
She glanced to see him give a nod, but he did not speak. He was looking at her in that way again, like she was framed in a gallery and he must drink in every detail before it was time to leave.
“Regardless of who he is, Phyllie isn’t there.” Amy chewed her lip. “We argued and she did threaten to go back to London. I worry she might have taken herself there, but I can’t imagine how.”
Normally Marie-Anne would have asked what they’d argued about, purely for the entertainment. Now, she did not care at all. She wanted them to go away, all of them, and take all of their silly problems and bad poetry and questionable philosophy – and hermits and farmers and manners and money and all their utter nonsense with them. And for once she did not wish she could run to Bartle and be left in peace there. She only wanted to be left with Mason.
“I am sure she will appear,” she said to Amy, not bothering to hide her impatience. “I need only two minutes, and then I will help you to look.”
“Oh, of course! Pardon me, I’ll go now.” Amy hastily backed out and of the room.
But when she was left alone with Mason again, she found she did not know what to say. She only looked at his hands where they hung at his sides. They did not look how she imagined an artist’s hands should look – not fine-boned and elegant and smooth. Mason’s hands were large and a little rough, the hands of a workman. There were freckles on the back of them, and tiny golden hairs.
She picked one up and lifted it to her mouth to press a kiss against it. “You are afraid,” she whispered to the warm skin beneath her mouth. “Oh, my Mason – will you not find a little courage, to be with me?”
He didn’t answer for what felt like an eternity. The pulse in his wrist sped up, and she could feel him turning warmer. “Marie-Anne.” She looked up, hopeful, but there was an apology in his face. “I can’t be that. I don’t know how. Can’t you understand?”
She couldn’t. Not really. She only understood that he would never leave his old life behind him, as long as he refused to choose a new one. It was too much of a habit, like he said.
She let go his hand and sighed.
“I do not want to be with a thief and a liar. Or with a man who pretends to be a simple working man, and lies to himself about what he is meant to be. Maybe I can learn to do it. It is possible, because I love you very much.” She shrugged. “But I do not want it.”
She turned and walked to the door. He didn’t try to stop her. Even when she hesitated, even when she closed the door and waited on the other side, he didn’t say a word to call her back. Moments and choices, he had said. This was a moment, and this is what he chose.
Coward. He was a coward and a cad and a scoundrel, and she loved him anyway.
For an embarrassingly long time, she stood in her room and did nothing but stare at her feet. “I think we may be finished with each other,” she said to her toes. Were they finished? Probably they were. It would explain why she felt so wretched.
A memory of her old friend Aurélie came to her, one of the unhappy memories near the end of her life. She had spent her last hours in her sparse little room in the heart of Paris, dying slowly of a sickness that the doctor said her lover had given her. She had been abandoned by a faithless man who had tired of keeping her, but still Aurélie loved him. Until her last breath, she believed he would come to her.
It had been an important lesson for Marie-Anne, to learn that love could bring such great joy and still be so very cruel. “Oh ma chérie,” her friend had smiled. “It is my greatest hope for you, that you will know what it is to love like this one day.” But for Marie-Anne, her greatest hope was not that she would love anyone so completely; it was that she would be loved, as well and as much as she deserved, by whomever she gave her heart to.
She could not stay in this room. Without consciously deciding to do it, she found she had begun to gather her things. It was very haphazard, and she stopped her aimless movements to sit on the bed with some stockings and her comb in one hand and her bonnet in the other. She was avoiding looking at the wall with the panel.
Maybe this person she loved was not real. Maybe he had invented it, as he had invented so many versions of himself – a custom-made lover.
What a terrible thought. Oh, this was the worst part of coming out of a love-induced fog: the doubting. She would like to go back to Bartle, and sit in her little cottage with a loaf fresh from the bakery and Helen beside her, neatly listing all the facts and applying reason to the problem as though it were a theoretical matter.
“Oh, I am very stupid!” she said aloud to the room. Helen was in London. Marie-Anne had completely forgotten. She did not have to wish for her friend, she could simply go to her. It would not take two hours to get there, and before she had finished the thought Marie-Anne was ringing for the maid. If she left now, she could be there by nightfall.
As the maid packed a few things, Marie-Anne scribbled a note to Amy explaining that she would send word if silly Phyllida had run to London, and would see the sisters at Dahlia’s dressmaker in a few days, as planned.
Dear Joyce looked concerned but hastily instructed the coachman to prepare for the journey at once, and in very short order Marie-Anne was standing in the drive saying a quiet farewell.
“You need only send word that you would like the rest of your baggage sent on, and I shall see to it, my dear. I know how devoted you are to Helen, and the summer is almost at an end.”
Marie-Anne nodded, afraid she might burst into tears if she tried to say how grateful she was for her friend’s understanding. “I might come back. I do not know,” she said. Oh, and now the tears were threatening anyway. She pressed her fingertips under her eyes in an effort to hold them in by force. “I do not seem to know anything anymore.”
“I daresay you know a few things with certainty.” Joyce patted her arm comfortingly. “Perhaps you should dwell on those, and the certainty will spread.”
In the carriage, she tried to do just that. It didn’t work at all, because her first thought was how she was certain Mason was a very great artist, and that made her angry at him for not believing in himself – which led her to be angry at everyone who ever bought a gossip pamphlet, and even more angry at his uncle, and the entire state of Kentucky, and quite possibly all of America. After that she spent the journey mired in resentment and misery, which brought her no certainty at all. It only exhausted her.
By the time they reached Summerdale House, the sun was almost down and she felt like she hadn’t slept in a month. A surprised Collins met her at the door, and told her that the Summerdales had only just left for a dinner engagement and would not be back for several hours.
“But your room is ready for you, madame, if you would like to retire early. Shall I have a tray sent up?”
She stared at him, mystified. “How can my room be ready? Even me, I did not know I would come here!”
“Lord Summerdale confided to me that you might visit, madame, and instructed me to have a room prepared. I’ve had Cook make the seedcake you favor in anticipation of your arrival, if you care for some refreshment?”
This orchestrated solicitude proved entirely too much for her. “Oh Collins,” she said with a trembling lip. “I am going to be very improper now.”
And she put her head on his shoulder and burst into tears. Consummate professional that he was, he showed no surprise or dismay at all. He only patted her shoulder in a fatherly way and offered a handkerchief, while quietly instructing a footman to carry her things up to her room.
Money did not buy everything, but it could provide very great comforts when one’s spirits were low. She had hot tea and a
hot bath and a hot brick in her bed. A maid brushed her hair and the cook kept sending up more little treats to try to tempt her to eat. Really, Marie-Anne reflected, if she could have one magical wish, it would be to give this level of pampering to everyone when their heart was broken. It should be required by law, in fact.
In the end, she could not keep her eyes open and fell asleep before Helen and Stephen came home. She had very strange dreams that she did not care to interpret, all about flowers as big as her head with petals the color of Mason’s hair. Perhaps she should have eaten something. When she woke in the morning, it took her a moment to remember where she was. As soon as she did, she threw on her clothes – the old dress she had worn in Bartle, because it was the kind that did not require a maid’s help. She ran down the stairs with slippers on her feet but her hair trailing down her back, because she did not care at all how she looked. She only wanted her friends.
She found them in the dining room, sipping coffee.
“Marie-Anne!” Helen was joyous at the sight of her, and stood from the table to come to her. “You’re the best kind of surprise, whatever are you doing here?” Marie-Anne was already embracing her with a kind of fierce desperation. “My goodness, I’ve never seen you dressed so carelessly. Collins said you arrived just after we left and Stephen pretends he knows nothing but–”
“Oh Hélène, everything is dreadful and I missed you terribly and I will hate Norway forever!” She could feel Helen laughing at this passionate declaration, even as her friend squeezed her with an almost equal enthusiasm. “Has your husband told you nothing about Mason?”
Helen pulled back to look at Marie-Anne’s face. “Told me what about Mr. Mason?”
“I did not wish to worry her unduly,” Stephen said. He was standing behind Helen now, a worried look on his face.
House of Cads (Ladies of Scandal Book 2) Page 25