His knew his sister was considered a diamond of the first water and all that. But he simply saw her as Violet: he saw her as a child with tangled dark curls and bright eyes, all laughter and mischief and offhanded cleverness and falling down and following him and his brothers. Someone he’d played with and teased and looked after and loved his entire life.
“I imagine it’s not as simple to run away with Gypsies as one might think,” he offered finally, conversationally.
“They won’t take me,” she confessed glumly.
“Imagine that.”
“I might have been of some use,” she groused.
Miles saw the healer Leonora Heron cast him a look and heard her mutter something in Rom. It sounded to him like a vehement disagreement.
“Did you stay here all night?”
“No. I arrived this morning,” Violet told him. “Mrs. Heron kept me in her tent for a time.”
Miles turned to the Gypsy woman. “Thank you for looking after her, Mrs. Heron.”
“You are welcome, Mr. Redmond. I have one of my own, you see.” She sent him a long-suffering look. Commiserating about recalcitrant girls.
Behind them, a cluster of bright Gypsy horses tossed their heads, approving of the breeze, seemingly approving of the fact that they would be off again soon, entertaining other pockets of England, men riding their backs the way birds bobbed ocean swells. Horses who lived with Gypsies became Gypsies, too, Miles supposed.
He saw the direction of Violet’s gaze: Samuel Heron, who was a now a grown man and handsome, and clearly reveling in being both. Samuel glanced toward Violet warmly, but gave a start when he encountered Miles’s ferocious unblinking stare. As effective as a spiked wall.
Samuel hastened toward the horses.
“Did you know Gypsies consider the gadji unclean?” Miles offered mildly. “It isn’t personal, really. It’s simply a cultural belief.”
Violet watched Samuel go. “Ironic,” she said glumly, “given that I am so very clean.”
Miles lowered his long frame and sat down on the ground next to his subdued sister. He whipped his coat out behind him, leaned back on his hands and sighed. “Why?” he asked simply.
When it came to Violet, Why? was nearly always a rhetorical question, but asking it had become a tradition of sorts between them.
“Why?” She turned to him, a picture of wide-eyed innocence. “Whatever do you mean by—”
“Enough, Violet.” He said it so firmly it nearly qualified as snapping. She blinked in astonishment. “Tell me the real reason you ran away. Do you even know? Was it Samuel Heron?”
Violet opened her mouth to speak, then paused, looked into his face, and frowned. Then caught herself frowning and the frown eased away. She was always careful about inviting lines to etch themselves upon her lovely visage.
“You look weary, Miles.”
He cast a baleful glance at her. But her surprise sounded genuine, not a diversionary tactic.
Late nights with Cynthia Brightly. “I wonder if it has anything to do with my sister disappearing.”
She flinched. The word “disappear” had an unpleasant connotation in their family.
They were quiet again.
“No,” she said finally. “It had naught to do with Samuel Heron. Not entirely. Though he is handsome. He’s different. You should know about different.” Her sidelong glance was accusing but it lacked conviction. “He’s…” She sighed. Pushed a wayward strand of hair out of her eyes. “It had naught to do with him. I’m not sure I know why I did it, Miles. That’s the truth.”
Miles was tempted to give her a hard shake.
“Violet…let’s suppose you had left with the Gypsies. Had just…vanished into the night, and we never saw you again. Do you have any idea what that would have done to Mother and Father? To…all of us? Do you honestly mean to tell me that this doesn’t matter to you?”
She began to cry. Quietly at first, so he wouldn’t know it, and because Violet hated to be messy about things, and she wasn’t sentimental. But they were genuine tears. And they soon became the messy sort, replete with sniffing and gurgled sobs.
He suffered along with her. He’d never been able to bear her tears, from the moment she was born. But he didn’t “There, there” her, or pat her back, or hug her. It was good for Violet to cry tears that weren’t meant to be anything but tears. Tears that merely meant genuine grief and frustration, not a means to make someone—usually a man—so uncomfortable he would do absolutely anything she wanted.
So he let her cry. And felt every single one of those tears as surely as if they were his own.
And eventually she pulled out one of her spotless handkerchiefs and dabbed daintily at her eyes. Violet was invariably, astoundingly, crisply neat. He wondered how she did it, as she was active enough.
“I’m sorry to worry you, Miles.”
“I know,” he said gently.
“It’s just…I miss him.”
Him being Lyon.
“I miss him, too.”
“I hate him for leaving. I hate her”—Violet had managed to thoroughly demonize Olivia Eversea, and refused to even utter her name, as though its mere utterance would conjure a devil—“for making him leave. Everything was lovely, and now everything is ruined. Ruined and quite odd.”
Miles didn’t know about ruined. They had all managed to stagger on somehow; Redmond life continued in all its forms, mundane and profound. Laughter and arguments and feuding and the making of money continued. But he did agree with the “quite odd.” And he didn’t know whether his brother had left or whether something had befallen him, and he wasn’t certain whom to blame. It was an odd sensation, this not knowing, like falling and falling and falling and never knowing where or when or if one might land. A different sort of gravity seemed to apply to their family now.
“We don’t know what really happened, Violet.” He said this to her again though he’d said this so many times it had begun to lose all meaning and sound strange to his own ears, the way any word might if you stare at it for too long. There were moments, he confessed to himself, when he hated Lyon, too.
But he was tired of humoring Violet; thanks to a certain house party guest, he’d acquired a taste for bald honesty. His sister’s recklessness took place against a backdrop of entirely taken-for-granted love and protection. She expected to be scolded, rescued, punished, and pampered no matter what she did, and not once had her brothers or her parents disappointed her. Her recklessness required no real courage, as such. And it was, as Cynthia had pointed out, an indulgence of a bored and willful girl who didn’t have the faintest idea how to channel her energies.
And it was an expression…of loss. Loss of family, loss of certainty, of equilibrium.
“Do you truly think Olivia Eversea could actually make Lyon do anything, Violet? Lyon? You know Lyon.”
“She broke his heart.” Violet made this sound like the most sinister of crimes, and as though a broken heart was the sort of debilitation excusing all manner of behavior.
“We don’t know this, either. It’s all conjecture.” He’d said this a thousand times before, too.
They watched the Gypsies, including Samuel Heron, cluck to the horses, begin saddling the ones they would ride out of camp and settling harnesses over others. Rolls and trunks were being lifted into wagons. The tents would come down next, like flowers blooming in reverse.
“Miles…” Violet said this with uncharacteristic trepidation. She took a breath. “It’s just…sometimes I don’t think it’s enough.”
This was a faintly alarming statement. He swiveled toward her. “What isn’t enough?”
She went abruptly quiet. As though saying those words aloud had unnerved her. As though she hoped he would forget about them.
He half suspected he knew what she meant. It was just as Cynthia had said: Violet was intelligent and bored and restless, and nothing in Sussex, or even London, would satisfy her.
He simply didn’t know what to te
ll her. She was a woman. And a Redmond. This rather firmly delineated her options.
“I do miss Lyon, too, Violet. But he isn’t here. And I know I am not him. I can never be him. I wish I could, but I know I can never make up for the fact that he’s—”
She’d turned sharply and was looking up at him in such blank astonishment that he stopped speaking.
“What is it?” he asked irritably.
“Miles, don’t you know that we would fly apart without you?” She looked truly bemused.
“We?”
“The Redmonds,” she said, as though he were slow-witted child. And no one had ever spoken to him that way. “All of us.”
“Well, I suppose I’m now the…Heir Regent, if you will. Given Lyon’s absence, my role has changed and I’ll be expected to—”
“No, Miles.” She was genuinely impatient now. “For heaven’s sake. It was always you. I recall…well, there is something boring and scientific you tried to explain to me once…a theory about a certain force that keeps the moon up in the sky and hugging close to the earth rather than flying off into space?”
“Well, that would be gravity, I suppose, for a beginning,” he supplied wryly. Wondering where she was headed with this.
“If you say so,” she allowed dubiously. “But that’s you, Miles. You’ve always been that. If you had been the one to leave, we would all go flying apart, cartwheeling off through the solar system. Papa is so absorbed in making money and hating Everseas and impressing everyone. Mama cares only for us and for the house and for the things she buys. It’s enough for her. And I love both of them, I do. Lyon was so busy being wonderful, being the heir, you know, learning the business, making everyone proud. And Jonathon is Jonathon, and—well, what I mean to say is that Lyon might be the sun in all of this, but you’re the earth. You allow all of us to be who we are, because of who you are. Solid. Looking out for us. We can count on you. We all know it, you know. I think even Father does. And then you went off to the South Seas, which seemed very exotic, but even that was so scrupulously planned, and we knew you were going…but I never doubted for an instant that you would return to us. Not one instant. Because that’s who you are.”
Miles went still. He was immensely discomfited. Imagine Violet, of all people, arriving at such a conclusion. He wasn’t certain what to make of it. He wasn’t certain he entirely liked what he’d heard, either. He shifted with uncharacteristic restlessness.
“Did the Gypsies teach you profundity overnight, Violet?”
“Ah, see, I’ve embarrassed you.” She was quite pleased. She smoothed her dress over her knees and smiled. Getting the better of Miles happened so seldom.
They were quiet together.
“How did you find me?” she asked.
“I asked discreetly, in case you were concerned. In other words, the entire party of guests does not know you attempted to run off with the Gypsies. In case that matters to you. Miss Brightly suggested I might find you here.”
Violet nodded almost approvingly.
“I like her.” She said this almost defiantly. Deliberately, as though she’d expected to provoke him with the observation. “I do. Cynthia.”
“Why do you like her?” and Miles sounded once again like a scientist. Even-toned, genuinely curious. But his heart thumped peculiarly. He wanted to hear someone else talk about her.
Violet thought about this. “She’s very clever, you know. She’s very…alive. She’s quite pretty. She’s a good deal of fun. I do believe she’s fearless. And our parents most decidedly do not like her. Those are the reasons.” Violet smiled wickedly.
He suppressed a smile. No mention of kindness, or goodness, all the other fashionable attributes young ladies were supposed to admire in one other.
All the qualities Lady Georgina radiated. All the qualities he appreciated, too.
But there was no mention, either, of honesty. Or passion. Or true courage. Or complexity. Or…kindness.
He supposed it wouldn’t have mattered what words Violet used. He knew now that language was insufficient to describe what happened to him when he was near Cynthia Brightly.
Violet turned to him.
“You don’t like her, either, do you?” she pressed. “You should see your face even now. You’ve gone so dark. You’re so thunderous when she’s about. And it’s so unlike you to be rude. I saw you speaking with her yesterday, Miles. You looked…impatient. I have never in my life seen you like that. She is my guest. She cannot help that she has no family at all. We must be kind to her.”
Imagine Violet observing this. And sounding reproving about it.
Unbidden came the image of a pair of shoulders almost imperceptibly squaring against the light of a window. As if adjusting a burden that had just awkwardly shifted.
He felt again that peculiar pierce in the vicinity of his breastbone, that familiar restlessness.
Who looked after Cynthia Brightly? Cynthia Brightly.
He didn’t think she was fearless. And this is what made her courageous.
And then he thought of what she might be doing now: doubtless toting up the assets of each of the guests in order to decide where to fully direct her charm in order to gain what she wanted. He’d been right from the very beginning: the two of them were not so very different in that regard. They would each do what they needed to do in order to get what they wanted.
“I haven’t yet decided what I think of her,” he said shortly.
This wasn’t a lie. And as this sounded very like something Miles would say, Violet accepted it with a one-shouldered shrug.
“I like Georgina, too,” she said, generously. “She’s very nice. Always has been. You’re going to marry her, aren’t you, Miles? She’d suit you.” She said this conciliatorily. “And that would certainly please Papa.”
Miles felt a pressure, an irritation, welling. An irritation encompassing every woman he currently knew, including Lady Middlebough, who’d been extraordinarily patient, and whom, by God, he would see—in her glorious bare entirety—tonight.
He ignored his sister’s question and pushed himself to a standing position.
“Well, then, Violet. Will you please think before you set off to do something rash?”
“I don’t think that I can promise that, Miles. Thinking takes a good deal of time. You do more than enough of that for all of us.”
She was flippant, entertained by herself. She expected him to laugh.
And suddenly he was furious.
“For God’s sake, Violet. Do you want to break my heart?” The words were out of his mouth before he could reconsider them.
His sister’s mouth dropped wide. Her eyes bulged with shock.
“What… what a thing to say, Miles! I’ve—I’ve never heard you speak of broken hearts before.”
Ah, poetry had other uses then: shocking his recalcitrant sister into stammering. It was admittedly very funny, but beneath his amusement sizzled irritation. I’ve a heart, too, he wanted to say. I’m not just gravity. I can be furious. I could do something rash. I could suffer torments.
Violet remained speechless. She’d leaned back a little and was squinting at him, as if to draw him into focus. To ascertain that it was actually Miles speaking to her.
“Just think again before you do something, Violet. You’ve a brain, for God’s sake, and when you display evidence of it, I am equally shocked. Please recall your brain can be used for something other than preventing the wind from making a whistling noise through your ears. In other words: think.”
“Or I’ll…or I’ll ‘break your heart?’” She sounded as though she was quoting him, and she still sounded incredulous.
He sighed. Miles could not for the life of him imagine the man who could possibly manage Violet, or turn her into the woman he liked to think she could become. She had all the finest qualities of the Redmonds, magnified and run amuck.
“Very well,” he said finally. “Yes. You very well might break my heart the next time you do something rash.
Would you like my broken heart upon your conscience?”
She continued staring at him, and suddenly produced a frown. Perhaps she was attempting to picture him as a broken man, he thought, stumbling about in a state of internal chaos she’d caused. As she stared, she almost unconsciously raised her hand to smooth the frown dents out from between her eyes.
She exhaled finally, resignedly, and turned away again, looking toward the horizon. “Very well, Miles. I shall endeavor to think. But only for you.” Her wryness was intended to disguise the fact that she meant it.
My bloody maddening sister loves me despite herself. He disguised a smile.
“Oh, wait, Miles.” Violet peered at him. “Look at that. One of the buttons on your coat is loose.” She reached over and gave the dangling silver button a flick with two fingers. “You should have your valet see to it. Isn’t that a Weston coat? They normally sew buttons on with steel. What have you been doing to it?”
Writhing on settees with maddening, cheroot-smoking female guests.
Violet would notice his loose button. In some ways, her vision, her way of approaching the world, was like his own: precise, detailed. But channeled, obviously, in very different ways.
“Thank you for pointing it out. I’ll see to it, lest I offend your sartorial senses.”
She smiled a little, but the smile faded as trepidation set in. She cleared her throat. “You won’t tell Papa about…this?”
“No. And Jonathon probably won’t tell Father, either, of course. Do realize, however, that he will know you’ve tried to run off with the Gypsies, which means he now has something new with which to blackmail you.”
Violet snorted. “Jonathan hasn’t nearly as much on me as I have on him.”
This was interesting, and one day he might want to press his sister for details. Not today, however.
Miles stood and brushed at the back of his coat. He’d grown chilled simply sitting for a short time. He reached down, seized Violet’s hands and hauled her to her feet unceremoniously. Then he waited for her to shake out her skirt, took her hands back in his and rubbed them hard. They were very cold.
And then he released them, exasperated.
Like No Other Lover Page 21