by Anna Cowan
He pulled back.
Glared at her.
‘Choose me,’ he said.
Kissed her again because he had to.
‘Choose me,’ he said into her mouth.
He moved his body away from hers – just enough so that he could bring his hands down between them. He pulled at the fingers of his gloves, but the silk clung too tightly to each finger, and slipped out of his every grasp. He remembered the rows of pearl buttons up past his elbows, and sounded his frustration into her mouth.
‘It doesn’t matter,’ she said, and oh, God, he had never heard her like this. Katherine unthinking. She could make anything happen when she spoke like that. ‘It makes no difference.’
His hands, silk-clad, took her throat captive and her hands closed around his wrists.
They stood knotted together, and kissed so deeply he worried in some small, sane part of himself that they would never come undone from each other.
‘I know she’s your family,’ he said at last, his breath tearing into the lit dust between them, ‘but choose me.’
He held her still as he licked her cheek, kissed the corner of her eye, rubbed his nose against hers.
‘Choose me,’ he said.
He knew he was unravelling, but all he could think about was Kit telling him to be himself, no matter how it frightened him.
‘Jude.’ The exasperation in her voice surprised him so much that he took a step back.
Light flooded the cupboard, and he thought for a confused moment that angels had taken an interest in this small, devastating event.
‘I swear I will cut off your prick with a fish knife,’ Lydia said, and pulled him out of the cupboard.
They had made a merry party on the way to the Abbey this morning. The walk back to the Manor was a subdued affair in comparison. Mrs Sutherland was tired by the long excursion, though she seemed happy enough to rest on Tom’s arm and fall a little behind everyone else. Crispin hovered by Jude, casting anxious glances over his shoulder until Jude snapped at him, ‘A devoted puppy is not at all my style. Hence the pig. Shoo.’ The oblivious boy gave him a grateful smile, as though Jude was actually being kind, and went back to join Tom and Mrs Sutherland.
Jude really did worry for him sometimes.
Kit strode ahead, at her usual pace, head flung back, arms slightly lifted from her sides. Like she was letting the world run through her fingers.
His pulse kicked up. He could reach her in a couple of strides.
‘Don’t even think about it.’ Lydia pulled his arm more tightly into the custody of hers. She wanted him to pack as soon as they arrived back at the Manor. Crispin, when he learned what had happened, had looked unhappy but said nothing.
‘— and because I am an incurable optimist,’ Lydia was saying, ‘and think there’s a chance you will listen. You are imposing on my mother. You have coerced my family to become players in your charade, so that we are now deceiving our own mother also. You have never denied yourself a single thing you wanted in your whole Godforsaken life, and for some inexplicable reason you now want my sister.’
She pulled him up short, and the rest of their party were either too far ahead or too far behind to hear. ‘You can’t have her,’ Lydia enunciated, very clearly.
‘My dear,’ he said, and cupped her face. ‘That is not for you to say.’
Lydia shied from his touch, and he stepped away from her. He didn’t look back as he walked away. He thought he understood, for the first time, why the hurt in her face might be enough to make Katherine choose Lydia over and over again. And he knew that it made no difference.
He came up beside Katherine and twined his fingers with hers.
Jude had commissioned a surveyor to come from Dennistoun to check the cleared entrance hall for stability. It hadn’t been used properly in close to a decade, and he wouldn’t risk anyone getting hurt. The side doors were completely obscured by the old gardens run to wilderness, and wouldn’t be cleared for another week.
When he and Katherine came through the kitchen door they stopped just inside, and didn’t let go of each other’s hands. Only Liza and one other maid were in the kitchen, taking tea. They stood and made themselves scarce when they saw that their employer and their mistress weren’t in any hurry to leave.
Jude reached out his other hand, and said, ‘Unbutton me.’
Her hands – those capable instruments – fumbled over the small buttons, and every pearl she slipped free counted down the time to Lydia’s arrival. Her mother and the lads would be close behind her.
‘Hurry, Katherine.’
He thought she must share his sense of urgency, because she didn’t show any sign of annoyance when he said this, only murmuring, ‘Hold still,’ as she worked the last buttons free. She peeled the glove off him like she was taking a layer of his skin.
Very gently, he stroked the side of her face. ‘Darling woman,’ he said, something deep and bittersweet like a plum in the back of his mouth. Her skin was slightly weathered under his fingers, but the bones of her face were fine – smaller and more vulnerable than he would have thought possible.
He couldn’t entirely interpret the way she looked back at him.
‘That is a very soft word, for a woman like me,’ she said finally.
‘Darling?’
Her skin heated under his hand. ‘Yes.’
His fingers ran down her crooked nose, across the ridge of her brow. He wanted to be able to pick her out, in the dark, from among a hundred faces.
‘You are the only person I’ve ever met who’s strong enough to bear the endearment and not diminish it,’ he said.
‘Your compliment to me diminishes everyone else.’
‘As it should. You matter more than everyone else.’
‘You’re a difficult man to like, Jude.’
He smiled, and tipped his head in towards hers. ‘You do like me though, don’t you? Just a little.’
The door shoved open, and Lydia swept in without looking at them. ‘If you could refrain from groping one another until I have left the room, I would be most grateful.’
When she passed Kit her fingers closed into a fist – unconscious and reactive, the way cadavers move when their nerves are manipulated. She opened the door to the hall and paused.
‘If you continue like this,’ she said without turning around, ‘Tom will write to BenRuin.’
She closed the door behind her and Katherine stepped out of his reach. She took up the knife on the table, plucked a potato from the bowl and began to peel it with the economy of long practice. He wondered if she was even conscious of her movements. She stopped all at once, as though she’d walked in on herself, put the knife back on with an exact sort of motion and leant against the wooden table where they hadn’t sat for days. A maid peeked around the door; one look from Jude and she left again. He had kissed Katherine. He should be kissing her again.
Her knuckles were white and red against the table. He couldn’t come near.
She looked up at him, finally, afternoon light spread across the plain fabric of her skirts. He had expected censure, or desire. He had not expected sadness – certainly not sadness freely expressed.
‘And so we wake,’ she said.
Kit tried to read for a while in the parlour, lounging on her beautiful new sofa. The sofa she would be able to keep, because the Squire had forgiven the bulk of her debt in return for the favour of having Violet introduced to society by the Duke of Darlington. He hadn’t liked it – Kit could see in the proprietary gaze he kept on her throughout most of the tea that he had to fight himself to agree to it. He would gain tenfold by it, in a material sense. Violet would make an excellent match – she was pretty and sweet and would make good use of the advantage. But the Squire had owned Kit’s wellbeing for a long time. He was so loath to give up his hold over her and the politeness she was forced into by him.
Still, he had given it up. A duke was a hard man to resist – even when he was no duke at all.
; She sat up, leaned her head back against the wooden edging, and closed her eyes. She would get to keep the furniture. At least there was that.
It would be enough.
It would have to be enough.
Crispin giggled out in the hallway, followed by a low murmur from Tom, and a scuffle. She pulled her Milton on to her lap, and forced herself to read one word, then another, and another. And when she forgot to read them in sequence she went back and read them again until they made sense.
‘She says that shade of green makes her feel bilious,’ she could hear Crispin saying, ‘and that I must be mad to think she would wear it in to supper.’ The boy’s affection was clear and true. No matter what Jude did, or who he was, or where he went, Crispin would not be made to live without him.
‘The cream?’ Tom murmured, to which came Lady Rose’s horrified voice, ‘Were you born without eyes, boy?’ from Ma’s old bedroom.
This was the lie they all performed for the sake of her mother, who did not know her own happiness was threatened. Who only had to be deceived until Jude chose to leave, and no longer had anything to do with them.
Lydia appeared in the parlour door, and Kit realised she had been staring at it, and dropped her gaze. Lydia crossed the room and sat beside Kit on the sofa. She took a deep breath and then expelled it like she was breaking something.
‘Kit, you know you cannot have him, don’t you?’
Kit’s fingers closed as tight as a dark, locked room.
Lydia swore softly. ‘This is what I was trying to tell you,’ she said, and she seemed to take no pleasure in being right. ‘There is no good way for this to end. There is only heartbreak. He is not for you.’
‘Stop,’ Kit said, and stood. ‘I understand. You don’t need to keep saying it.’
Lydia stood as well. She reached for Kit’s hand. ‘You don’t have to see him. He can be gone before supper.’
Gone.
She had thought she understood, but . . .
Gone.
She pulled her hand from Lydia’s – something ripping – and passed Tom and Crispin in the hall. She took the stairs two at a time and slammed her bedroom door behind her.
There was too much energy in her at first, and she shook her hands, rolled her shoulders, paced. When she could be still, she sat in the window seat, where he had sat for so many hours when he first came. She remembered him clearly – arms wrapped around himself, trying to breathe. He had been so closed when he first came, she thought, and then frowned.
She had not wanted to be moved by him. She held herself tightly, and understood for the first time why he did that.
She had been so closed when he first came.
It came after dinner. Tom begged a word with Lady Rose in a quiet voice, and Kit retired to the parlour with her mother and sister. Her mother took her customary place by the fire and closed her eyes, humming quietly to herself. An old dance tune, Kit thought. She took down Milton and curled up in Jude’s old armchair. She ignored the worried glances Lydia sent her way.
Lydia sat for a quarter of an hour, moving restlessly on the sofa, and interrupted Kit’s reading every couple of minutes. She stood, took a turn about the room, and stopped to gaze out the window. Kit had forgotten this about her. She was no good with sitting still, or reading, or keeping a contemplative silence. There was a fierce need to act in her sister that had landed them in trouble more often than not as children.
‘Do you remember when we found that old boat?’ Kit said suddenly. ‘It was out in the back field – by Manson’s – and we imagined the area had once been covered by an inland sea. It was the only explanation that made any sense to us.’
Lydia turned and leaned against the window frame, a faint smile on her lips. ‘Aye, I remember. It took us all morning to drag it down to the lake.’
‘Because you were adamant it was still seaworthy.’
‘And so it was.’
‘After we spent days repairing it. I swear we built a whole new vessel around the mirage of the old.’
‘Still. That day on the lake.’
The morning had been bright and sunny, despite the fact that it was October already. The three of them had set sail on the lake, trusting their patched-up vessel with all their hearts. They had taken dinner with them, and lain for hours in the bottom of the boat, looking up at the puffy clouds scudding across the sky. Telling each other stories. Eating. Singing. Dreaming.
It had begun to rain in the afternoon, and they’d almost lost one of the oars in their haste. They’d returned to the Manor muddy and cold, with no one to meet them at the door. Kit had made them a fire up in the old nursery, and dissolved sugar into hot water for their supper, making a game of it.
‘I wish we had not grown up,’ Lydia said, and came to kneel at Kit’s feet. Her voice was a terrible, unexpected supplication. ‘If we had only fought harder. We could have had more time.’
‘Maybe.’
Lydia’s cold, thin fingers found Kit’s knee. ‘Father’s gone now, Kit. I could – I could stay, and we could have that again. Darlington will have to go back to London. It will just be you, me and Tom, like it used to be.’
She looked down at her sister’s face, and didn’t know what she had said to make this happen. ‘We can’t go back.’
‘We can. If you will just let us.’
This was – God, this was a horror. ‘Lydia, listen to me. I wouldn’t wish what we lived with on any child. But you’re still here. You survived him. You have made the world adore you – you have a husband who wants desperately to belong with you.’
Lydia was shaking her head; all of her was shaking. ‘It’s not what was supposed to be. We were so much happier then.’
‘We were happy. And we were desperate. You are misremembering.’
‘Don’t tell me what I do and don’t know.’
‘It doesn’t matter what I remember. I doesn’t matter what you remember. It’s done. Gone.’
‘And we can have it again.’
Her sister had been coolly contained for more of her life than she’d been wild. Kit felt her like a malignance, her cold fingers lodging themselves in her flesh. She had to look away. She saw her mother, lying back on the sofa as if sleeping, her body a tight fist.
‘Kit, please —’
She stood. ‘I wouldn’t go back, if we could.’
Lydia stood to face her. ‘How can you say that to me? You loved me then.’
‘And I had to wash your body with cold water for eight long hours when you had a fever, because there was no one to send for a physician, and no money to pay him if he could have come. If we had remained as we were, we would have become savages. There would have been no place for us. No books for Tom, no wit for you. I would not choose that.’
Lydia started, and Kit didn’t need to look behind her to know the men had entered with Jude; strong hands came around her shoulders, a solid heat at her back.
‘Do you want me to take you away?’ Jude murmured in her ear.
She shook her head, and couldn’t articulate even to herself how much it meant that he had offered.
Tom stood by the fire, Crispin at his side. Nobody spoke.
It scared her, the quiet of grown men and women who had no chatter left to exchange. Far more difficult to continue this conversation, with an audience. She knew, from Lydia’s face, that she must.
‘We had the father we had – and we’re amazing, considering. Every single one of us. No, I wouldn’t go back.’
Kit looked up to Tom, to the mute horror in his eyes. It was a pain they each contained so well, so long as they each pretended it did not exist.
‘I am proud of you. If we had it to do over, I would still work until I was too exhausted to stand. Because I wanted better for you.’
‘That’s enough,’ Lydia said, and swept out of the room, banging into the side of the table as she went.
Jude’s fingers dug hard into Kit’s shoulders – a warning, a reminder.
Kit pulle
d herself from his grasp and followed Lydia out the door.
‘Lydia,’ she called, and the hope her sister couldn’t quite conceal pierced her all the way through. ‘You’ll sleep in Ma’s old room tonight.’
Lydia’s hands pressed tight, shocked, into her stomach. She nodded once – a jerky, graceless movement. Then nodded again, and three more times. Then she turned forcibly away, walked into Ma’s old room and closed the door in Kit’s face.
‘What have you done?’ Tom said behind her. ‘My God, Kit, what did you say to her?’
Tom – her other, better half – reached out to her and Kit grasped his hand. She wished there were something Tom could say to undo this mess. But he couldn’t. A duke stood between them now, and could not be cut away.
Kit left Tom standing outside the parlour and climbed the stairs to her room. She sat in the window seat fully dressed.
And waited.
Chapter Eighteen
When he came he locked the door behind him and she said, ‘I don’t want to talk.’
He watched her for a long, dark moment, then walked to the dresser. The whole day had been a statement of intent – of his desire to kiss and touch and be close. But he sat at the dresser, unhurried, almost indifferent. As though Lydia had never come, and this was like any other night when Kit had unlaced him and forced herself not to stroke his perfect white skin.
Perhaps he was making it easier for both of them. Impossible to know, with Jude.
‘Undress me,’ he said.
She stood behind him, a hand-span away from him, and plucked the pins from his wig, one by one. She pulled it from his head and hung it carefully from the mirror frame. Then she pushed her hand through his thick black hair, across his scalp. It was a rough, needy touch, and his head rocked forward beneath it.
She stroked down his cheek, down his neck, and stepped into him so that his back was a hard line against her body. She curled over him and began to unhook the front of his dress; he dropped his head back against her shoulder.