by Anna Cowan
He kept the pages and replaced the Shakespeare.
He found every one of Beaumaris’s novels in Miss Sutherland’s collection – even The Atavist, which was eagerly awaited in town, but wouldn’t be in the shops till next week. She could only have been given it by someone who received early editions from the publisher. He thought of what he’d discovered about Mr Thomas Sutherland before he came here: the boy had regular correspondence with a solicitor’s office in London. The packets he sent were often thick – two hundred sheets or more. He thought of the boy’s ink-stained fingers and . . . what a delightful notion.
He pulled that title out from the others. Its green leather jacket still had the acrid whiff of dye and its surface was unmarked. Every page looked well read already, though, and it fell open to certain pages more readily than others. He read the inscription: To Katherine Sutherland, April 1816 from her dear friend.
Darlington’s fingertips thrilled against those words. Uncomfortable – compelling – the idea of being that woman’s dear friend.
He pulled the crocheted blanket from the bed and discarded it on the floor, then piled the bedcover up on the window seat and tried to lose himself in The Atavist. He hadn’t read it yet. Lately he hadn’t been able to fall into the quiet absorption that reading required.
He threw the book down after twenty minutes. It was useless. Silence was not what he needed.
But of course, he couldn’t lace himself into his new wardrobe. He pawed through the cases that had been stacked in the hallway outside Miss Sutherland’s room and tried not to feel that he’d suffocate on the volume of material, and never find what he was looking for.
He did find it, though. And then he went in search of Katherine Sutherland.
Chapter Seven
Kit uprooted another bunch of carrots from the dark, pungent earth and threw them in the basket. She shifted her weight and looked up at the sky. It was going to start raining any second, and she hadn’t picked any kale yet, or fixed the rough cloth around the lettuce patch. Damn snails were eating up her garden. Liza, bless her heart, hadn’t had a free second to see to it while Kit was in London, and neither Tom nor Ma would have spared the vegetables a thought.
Sometimes they were all Kit could think about.
That had been one part of London she had enjoyed. The way vegetables turned up on the table as though by magic. She dug back into the soil as the first fat drops hit her exposed nape. She paused just long enough to pull her shawl up over her hat and then continued on to the end of the row.
Carrot soup for supper.
Again.
The desserts – those sculptures of fruit encased in jelly balancing atop cake that was more air than cake – those were another of the things she was going to miss about London.
She shook the dirt off the last bunch of carrots, threw them in her basket and leapt to her feet just as the skies opened. She ran to the kitchen and couldn’t help a childish whoop as she shoved open the door with her shoulder and plonked the basket down on the table.
‘I’ll have to go out again,’ she called to Liza, shaking her shawl out and hanging it, for what good it would do, before the fire. ‘Those snails’ll be on my lettuce the second the rain —’
The Duke stood in the doorway, and Liza was nowhere to be seen.
‘Don’t let me stop you,’ he said. ‘I might even come with you, if you introduce me to your pigs.’ He made a humming sound and came closer to her. ‘Your lettuce, your pigs . . . You are particular about your things, aren’t you, Miss Sutherland?’
He was wrapped in a padded dressing gown with high, furred collars and clutched a mound of peacock-blue silk to his chest. He wore a wig, at least, though this one was white. The dark slashes of his eyebrows were made more vivid – his eyes, normally dark, almost black, looked bright blue.
‘You’ll need to help me into these first, though,’ he said, holding out the silks.
‘You can’t wear that in the rain.’
‘According to whom?’
‘A sweet lady called Common Sense,’ she said, managing finally to turn away and find her shears and twine. ‘It doesn’t surprise me that you and she are strangers.’ The small axe, she’d need that, too.
‘Then give me one of Tom’s jackets, and I’ll wear that to protect my clothing.’
‘You can’t wear a man’s jacket,’ she said, rounding on him. ‘My God, sometimes I think your intellect is inhuman, and at other times —’
‘Kit, do you remember which —’ Tom walked in from the hallway and looked up from the book in his hands. ‘Oh!’ He went wine-red and the book stuttered from his hands to the floor. ‘Excuse me,’ he said, fumbling to pick it up.
‘Please, Mr Sutherland,’ said the Duke, his voice husky and convincing, ‘don’t let me frighten you from your own kitchen. I am covered all the way up.’ He threw the heap of the peacock-blue dress onto Kit’s kitchen table – another thing that’s mine, she thought – and pulled up a chair. He crossed one leg over the other, lazy and graceful, and patted the seat beside him. ‘Do give me your company, Mr Sutherland. Your sister insists on going out into the rain and says I mayn’t accompany her. And I see you are reading Fielding, who I feel is an old friend. We may take him as a mutual acquaintance: “The same animal which hath the honour to have some part of his flesh even at the table of a duke . . .”’
He quoted Fielding with good humour – he was making fun of himself, not Tom – but she couldn’t bear it. Nor the dawning interest on her brother’s face.
‘Come to the parlour,’ she said, rinsing her hands in the pail by the door and drying them on her smock. ‘I’ll help you into your dress and you may come out with me.’
Tom had his book securely in his grasp again and had come unconsciously closer to the table. It wasn’t his fault. The Duke pulled everything about him into slow orbit.
‘Kit, are you sure Lady Rose should go out in this weather?’
‘The rain won’t melt her,’ she said, and opened the door to the hallway. She held it open for the Duke, smiling sweetly at him the whole while. He smiled back – a small, quick thing of the lips – gathered his dress back up and followed her. ‘Please excuse me, Mr Sutherland,’ he said.
Kit avoided Tom’s eye as she closed the door behind them.
‘Why don’t you want me talking to your brother?’
‘I should have thought that was obvious. Put the dress over there. I’ll go up and see if I can find a serviceable pair of shoes. You can get yourself into your underthings, at least.’
‘You assume I’ll harm him,’ he said, not moving from where he stood. ‘Does it not seem possible to you that I might provide him with conversation that interests him – that he might welcome the company, and another well-read mind?’
‘My brother has me!’ she said. But that was childish, and not quite what she meant. And she feared he might think her brother was one more thing she thought she owned. ‘My dirty hands don’t mean that I don’t read, I mean.’
‘What do you read?’ he asked.
‘You don’t believe me?’
He made a small, impatient sound. ‘Your bedroom wall is kept upright by books. Of course you read. I was hoping you might tell me what you read, and if I have read it, too, we might enter into dialogue. You might disagree with me, and then I would have a chance to investigate your opinion and argue my own and maybe we would learn something from one another.’
She considered him – curiously vulnerable in undress, clutching his disguise to his chest. For a moment it was hard to force him into the role of seducer, villain, blackmailer. ‘You are not a man to learn new things, I think, or change your ways.’
‘And you are not a woman to change your mind once it is made up. I see. We would have terrible arguments, you and I, and never get anywhere by it.’ He walked to the sofa and draped his dress over it. His back was to her when he dropped the dressing gown from his shoulders.
‘Excuse me.’ She left the room and to
ok the stairs two at a time. Tom called out to her from the landing outside his room, and she came back down to his door.
‘London’s made you soft,’ he said, smiling his quiet smile, one finger marking his page. ‘You’re not usually out of breath from one flight of stairs.’
‘No. Did you need to ask me something, before?’
‘Found it.’ He held up the book.
He studied her, and she wished for once that he didn’t know her quite so well. ‘What is it? Our guest, there’s something wrong, isn’t there?’
‘Why do you say so?’ God, how could she explain it? That extravagant woman out there is really a duke and he’ll ruin us if we don’t put up with him? And by the by, it’s possible he means to seduce me right beneath your nose?
‘She . . . seems very attached to you.’
‘Oh, Tom,’ she said, and laughed. Whatever the Duke planned, affection for her had no part in it. ‘Of all things, no.’
Tom smiled, embarrassed, but his eyes were still worried. ‘She watches you – all the time. I have the sense she always knows where you are in a room, and when you aren’t she watches the door and is impatient.’
‘I will admit that she’s impatient, but the rest of it’s rot.’ She shook her head and turned to leave.
Turned back. ‘Tom.’
‘Mmm?’ He was already lost again in his book.
‘You don’t . . . You’re not . . . You’re not lonely, are you? Stuck out here with just me and Ma for company, I mean?’
He looked, suddenly, as uncomfortable as she felt. One Sutherland stuck in a doorway, the other on the landing. Sutherlands didn’t talk about things. They just got on.
He shrugged – a combination of mouth and shoulder that tried and failed to express something. ‘We’re lucky to be here. With each other. To . . . have what we do.’ He nodded, awkward-lipped, and closed his door.
She ascended, less quickly than before. They were all right, living in the old Manor together, until one of them tried to look just below the surface of things. Then they had to pretend they had seen nothing so that the surface smoothed out. And they were all right again.
She opened her bedroom door, forgetting for a moment, and tripped over her crocheted blanket.
‘God damn it!’
She picked it up, the fabric familiar between her fingers. She and her mother had spent hours sitting together in front of the fire, speaking of this and that whilst they crocheted the squares. That had been just after Abe Sutherland died, and when they began the blanket their smiles had been tentative and rare. Finishing it had been a kind of triumph for them.
She replaced it on the bed – saw the slide and disorder of her books, her Shakespeare wedged on top of the last Edinburgh Review she’d been able to afford, ruching its cover into a crease.
On Monday, when she saw Angus about the meat, she would ask him to teach her the filthiest word he knew. And then she would have a name to call the Duke by.
Kit hammered the last picket into the muddy ground with the back of the axe, then looked up through the rain and nodded to the Duke. He picked up the next piece of cloth and threw it to her. It landed with a wet thud just out of reach. She closed her eyes, letting the rain shut out everything else for a moment. Opened them again and sank her knee with a thick squelch into the earth so that she could reach the cloth. She ignored the cold in her fingers and sewed the heavy material quickly into place with twine and a wool needle.
She stood and gestured for him to follow her.
‘Wait!’
The day had grown dark, though it was only approaching noon. The rain made his voice – and the wet, sorry blue of him – indistinct. ‘Are we not to go in now?’
‘Step where I step,’ was all she said. If a duke couldn’t see order in a pile of books he was most certainly not going to see order in a vegetable garden. She nudged her way into the old shed and hung up her shawl and hat on the peg by the door.
Christ, it was good to be out of the rain. The shed was only small, and it housed three pigs; their grunting breath and the sweet-rot smell of their feed filled the air.
The Duke came in after her, dragging his waterlogged skirts. He looked so miserable huddling under the old blanket from the parlour that she relented and stepped forward to lift it off his shoulders. His eyes followed her movements, and she was close enough to see how his long black lashes were slicked together into clusters. His skin was white, with patches of fierce-blooded red.
She wondered what it would feel like to lean in and kiss him. It was, at her best guess, what he wanted.
He would be cold, instinct said. He would flinch away from you.
She hung the blanket beside her hat. ‘My pigs, as requested.’
‘H-have you n-named them?’
She turned, clutching the pitchfork. She still had to bring the firewood in so that it would dry by this evening – and she should already be in the kitchen helping Liza with supper. But she had to feed up the pigs because Angus was coming on Monday, and now —
‘Do you feel a chill, Your Grace? I don’t like having you here, and I don’t feel that I need hide my feelings, but I can’t let you get sick. I could hang for that sort of thing.’
‘Absurd g-girl. No one’s going to hang you. I’m f-fine. Just need to be out of the rain. Does it alw-ways rain in the country?’
She looked him over critically in the dim light, and his shivers seemed to be subsiding. ‘You should go back into the house.’
‘All there is f-for me to do in the house is misunderstand your cataloguing system. Let me s-stay. Tell me the names of your pigs.’
‘I don’t name’em,’ she said, getting the tines of the fork right under the straw and rotting food and mulch closest to her. She turned it and started on the next part, working quickly. She was going to feel it in her back and arms tomorrow. Tom was right, she had grown soft in London.
‘Why not?’
The biggest sow nudged Kit’s legs with her blunt nose. ‘Get out of it,’ she said, shooing her off with the flat of the fork. ‘They’re not pets, Your Grace. That one,’ she pointed to the young boar, ‘is going to be butchered on Monday.’
‘Good God, why?’
‘He’s almost two months old and we don’t have room to house him elsewhere through winter, or the time to train him to service the sows if he turns out randy.’
A choking sound, over the din of the rain and the movement of her pigs.
‘Sorry, Your Grace, I’m out of the London habit. You did ask, though.’
‘I’m not embarrassed by your speech. I was thinking that some young men of my acquaintance could use lessons on how to properly service a woman.’
She dropped the pitchfork.
‘We may talk of pigs servicing one another, but not humans?’
‘No!’
‘Why not?’
She looked up into his laughing face, and almost said it: Because you and I are humans, and there is something complicated between us.
‘I need to bring in more compost from outside,’ she said, and stalked out, forgetting to put her hat and shawl back on.
Darlington and the pigs considered each other. The sow who’d been nosing around Miss Sutherland settled herself in the corner against groaning slats of wood. She was enormous. A beast. Her hide looked like something you would clean your boots on, and her teats sagged, misshapen, onto the newly turned muck. It seemed impossible, but at thirty-one years of age he had never seen a pig like her. A real pig. He had a vague memory of petting a pretty little pink creature wearing a lace collar when he was a child – a manicured thing brought out to please the small Viscount d’Auton.
This sow’s head was almost the size of his torso, and her . . . piggy eyes watched him, her ears like sails testing the wind. Had he heard a rumour once that pigs ate human flesh?
He had forgotten the other large pig, which appeared suddenly and snuffled his skirts.
The noise he made, leaping aside, startled the sow a
nd her hammy legs kicked her bulk against the walls as she struggled up.
The wall broke with a sound that drowned out the rain.
Darlington had heard women compared to bedraggled kittens before, when they’d been caught in a downpour. Miss Sutherland, when she entered the shed pushing a barrow full of decomposing food scraps, her hair hanging long and plastered to her head, looked nothing like a kitten. Her dress and smock clung to her, and the hair was slick beside her face. She was pared back – all that might have been floss or sugar about her had melted away and left the hard, uncompromising core. Only her lashes became poetic when wet, conceding some relationship to stars.
‘What the hell is going on here?’ She let the barrow fall with that casual, wiry strength of hers. The neck of her jacket and shirt were open, so that he could see the water running down thick strands of hair, plastered to her skin.
‘You need a better shed,’ he said, gesturing to the gaping corner, where water was already spilling through.
She stared at the hole as if it had been made in her own person.
‘It’s unfortunate, but you can have someone fix it.’
‘Who?’ she said. ‘The pigs? You?’ She closed her eyes and he heard one decisive breath in, one out. Her shoulders straightened, her face cleared. It was an exhausted kind of strength. He wondered if one day she would reach for it and it would be all gone. ‘You go back inside. Get out of my way.’ She didn’t even look at him. She pressed her already muddied knees into the filth of the sty floor and inspected the hole.
‘Fuck,’ she said, and he felt it from his scalp to his toes. He was not a prude, but he’d never heard a woman say it.
He would not be sent away from her.
She shooed the curious pigs out of her way, then picked up the small axe back from where she’d left it by the door. He caught her wrist before she could leave.
She rounded on him, and there was none of the something-unsaid that was normally there between them, even when she was short with him. There was just impatience, and a mind preoccupied with a matter in which he had no part.