Untamed

by Anna Cowan

  The Duke took the Times from her and absentmindedly dropped Porkie out of his lap. He barely even frowned, reading it.

  ‘How can she have so much influence?’ Kit asked.

  As though he was commenting on the weather, the Duke said, ‘You didn’t think my cousin was the only one she was bending over for, did you?’

  The silent unease in the room turned distinctly cold. The Duke didn’t seem to notice, staring down at the paper. You could forget so easily, Tom thought, how dangerous he was. How he never quite saw people as people. Tom dared a glance at Kit, needing to know how she fared in the face of this. Wishing that it would teach her some caution.

  Kit hit the Duke hard over the head.

  ‘Git,’ she said.

  The Duke looked up at her, and the dangerous something that was gathering in the room abated a little.

  ‘Katherine,’ he said, ‘think. Harrington, Haverstock, Roskill. They all sit on the Committee.’

  ‘God, she’s been buying their debt – buying them favours. Is there any chance she could be successful? They’ll need only the flimsiest excuse, if she already owns their votes. But even she can’t prove something that’s not true, surely.’

  ‘Of course not,’ the Duke said, and folded the paper, discarding it on the sofa beside him. He picked Porkie back up and said into the pig’s nose, ‘She just wants to bury my cousin in scandal. And paperwork.’

  He was so obviously unconcerned with the news, that some of the fright eased out of the room, and Tom relaxed back against his chair.

  ‘The Earl of BenRuin,’ a footman said, skidding into the room. ‘The Earl of BenRuin was seen in Millcross. He’ll be here within the quarter hour.’

  That first instant, Jude had looked at her. He was pure fear – so stark with it, that Kit felt she would fight the whole world, if that’s what it took to make him feel safe again.

  And then he’d looked away, and he’d plunged the household into chaos, and she hadn’t been able to come near the centre of the storm, where he stood giving orders. He walked by Porkie without seeing him – almost tripped over him – and didn’t give an order to have the pig brought with him.

  It had grabbed her by the throat then.

  Too soon they were standing in front of the Manor, and Crispin was already in the carriage, urging the Duke to hurry, and Kit was saying, ‘What is BenRuin going to do to you?’

  Jude’s eyes were desperate, infinite, whole worlds within him and she hadn’t even begun to touch the surface of him.

  He kissed her hard – a bruising, horrible thing. And then he dug his fingers into her hands, and forced her to let him go.

  She stood out in the gloomy afternoon until she heard BenRuin riding up the drive, and then saw her brother-in-law, large on his beast of a horse, five men riding behind him.

  Jude was gone, and he hadn’t promised her anything, she realised, far too late. He’d gone back to London, where he was a duke, and entirely beyond her reach.

  Chapter Twenty

  BenRuin’s men stopped when they reached Kit, leapt down from their horses and bowed to her. She recognised one of them – Tobin – and he grinned at her, his hair a windy mess.

  BenRuin didn’t stop. His whole massive form was focused on one thing; he galloped right past Kit without even looking at her. She spun, and saw Lydia standing at the top of the Manor steps, looking defiantly down. BenRuin was headed straight for her.

  He pulled his beast up at the last moment, so that it baulked at the steps, hoofs clattering over the broken paving. BenRuin leapt down, greatcoat flaring, and was up the steps and standing before Lydia in a heartbeat. He seemed to be vibrating with the need to be closer to her, and for a moment she faltered. He drew breathlessly closer, and Kit thought the poor man might be trying to make himself smaller, less imposing. He reached out a paw and touched it, trembling, to Lydia’s face.

  Lydia held herself rigid, suddenly strange and graceless. Achingly vulnerable. BenRuin bent and said something to her and she looked sharply up at him, shook her head and smiled. Kit fancied she could see the icy reserve spreading across Lydia’s skin, the way frost covered a window.

  ‘Miss Sutherland,’ said Tobin in his clear Scots voice. ‘Might we stable the horses and beg some tea? We’ve been riding since early morning.’

  ‘God, yes, sorry.’

  She was glad of the excuse to look away from the Greek tragedy playing out on the steps. She had her own desperation to deal with.

  She led the men around the side of the house. BenRuin peeled off and joined them, and when Kit turned, Lydia had disappeared.

  While BenRuin’s men tended to their horses in the lee of the old stable, Kit went into the kitchen to talk to Liza. Jude had only taken two footmen with him, and she had to discover what orders the rest of the servants had been given. Would they be staying? Who would pay them if they stayed? And if they left, how would Kit and Liza, between them, possibly keep the house going now that they had so many more rooms to keep?

  The thought of picking up her labours again was crushing. But life had no interest in the feelings of Katherine Sutherland. There were servants to talk to, tea to organise and bedding to find, if BenRuin and his men wanted a night’s rest.

  It didn’t matter that upstairs in her room the sheets were still a passionate mess. It didn’t matter that less than an hour ago Jude’s head had been a trusting weight in her lap.

  The first thing she saw when she entered the kitchen was a little pig wearing a silk jacket, wandering about underfoot. One of the scullery girls pushed him aside with her boot, and Kit scooped him up out of the path of any more kicks.

  Tom looked around the kitchen door, his face stricken. He hesitated, then walked to her.

  ‘It wasn’t me, Kit,’ he said. ‘I swear it wasn’t me. He must have found out by some other means.’

  ‘It’s all right, Tom.’

  ‘No,’ he said, and pulled her in against him with a gentle palm around her nape, ‘it isn’t.’

  Lydia’s body had forgotten the trick of standing upright without thought. She had to consciously arrange her limbs against the window casement where she stood. She tried for insolence, but she couldn’t get it quite right. Her elbows were held too rigid, so she crossed her arms instead, only she couldn’t quite decide whether to hold them up against her chest, which felt awkward and too high, or against her stomach, which she felt made her look weak.

  It didn’t exactly matter, anyway. He wouldn’t look at her.

  Could you not have just stayed away from him? her husband had said to her.

  She stared at him – so huge, so barely contained, sitting in the old armchair Darlington had sat in most mornings, and making it seem a small, tatty thing. He’d found out where she was – found out where Darlington was – and immediately thought the wrong thing.

  Lydia couldn’t even look at her mother, who sat so quiet and still on the sofa and had refused to be dismissed.

  Instead she watched her husband’s hands, large and muscled, cradled in his lap in an oddly peaceful way. She remembered suddenly how he’d held her hand throughout their marriage service, though it wasn’t the done thing. In the month before they were married he would hand her in and out of carriages, and they had danced, often, and he had held her hand in the garden when they were allowed ten minutes alone. Each of those times they had been bounded by strict rules – he couldn’t hurt her, because there were careful eyes on them. So Lydia had let herself explore how his hand felt on hers. With a kind of thrilled horror she’d given herself over to the way his warmth swallowed her whole. And then when the dance ended, or their ten minutes were up, she could extricate her hand from his, and she was safe again.

  But he had held on to her during their wedding, and she had felt herself engulfed in the heat of him. BenRuin could hold her for as long as he wished; she was being passed into his ownership. She would soon be going home with him, where no one would dare intervene.

  There had been one
man, as it turned out, who had dared.

  Kit and Tom came in and BenRuin waited for Kit to seat herself. He looked at her, grave as a judge. And just below the surface there was rage.

  ‘You lied to me,’ he said to Kit, in that spare way he had. Nothing but hard truth, as he understood the truth. Lydia wondered if she had simply invented those glorious first weeks of their acquaintance, when his voice was soft and rich and he laughed at the smallest thing. ‘I asked you repeatedly to confide in me,’ BenRuin said. ‘You don’t understand what he is.’

  When Kit was living with them in London, she had treated BenRuin the same way she used to treat their father: she’d kept her face averted, voice soft, few words and all of those words of agreement. Lydia looked at her now – dark, angry and upright – and felt some stinging emotion that she couldn’t quite name. Kit said nothing, but her look was contemptuous.

  ‘Tell me everything,’ BenRuin said. ‘Leave nothing out.’

  Lydia watched her family close ranks against her husband. When BenRuin turned demanding eyes on her, she didn’t know what to do. Of everyone in the room, BenRuin was the only one who had managed to remove her from her father’s influence. But there were Tom’s cold feet pressed against her calves for warmth, and there was the way Kit had laughed this morning, as though everyone applauding Lydia just for being mentioned in a rubbish London broadsheet made her happy. There was the unguarded soft look on her mother’s face yesterday morning, when Lydia had glanced up from a book of sonnets that made no sense to her.

  Lydia said nothing.

  Something happened to BenRuin’s face, and she realised that despite everything he had thought she would stand with him. She opened her mouth, but he was quicker.

  ‘Bring me the upper housemaid,’ he barked to the footman by the door.

  No one spoke until the woman appeared nervously in the doorway and curtseyed low to BenRuin.

  ‘When did the Duke arrive here?’ BenRuin asked.

  Kit stood. ‘Charlotte, don’t answer —’

  ‘Be quiet,’ said BenRuin. He didn’t stand, and his voice was low. It was full of violence, and blood, and Kit sat and shut her mouth.

  ‘Answer the question,’ BenRuin said to the maid – and though he was almost vibrating with rage, he spoke evenly. Of course, none of this was the maid’s fault, and her husband was almost unbearably fair.

  BenRuin was focused on the maid. Lydia, Kit and Tom looked at their mother.

  ‘He was already here when we were asked to come from Redbrook. But . . .’ The maid looked between Kit and BenRuin, her face white. ‘He was in disguise as a woman, Milord.’

  Her mother’s face showed just for one moment the shock of comprehension. The pain of being made ridiculous. Then she became pale and vacant, and Lydia should have known she would show nothing, rather than everything. This was exactly how she had survived marriage to Abe Sutherland. By simply pretending she wasn’t even there.

  It only got worse after that. Admissions of how deeply the Duke had inveigled himself into the family. Carry-on with a pig in dress-ups and terrorising the servants when the coffee wasn’t hot enough. The fact that he’d been sharing Kit’s bed for weeks.

  Her mother’s hands didn’t so much as twitch.

  ‘Thank you,’ BenRuin said, his voice so quiet – and still it was the only noise in the room. ‘Leave us. No one is to disturb us.’ The maid bobbed a curtsey and hurried out.

  BenRuin fixed Kit in his gaze again, and though Kit didn’t drop her eyes, she was more subdued than before. Perhaps it was the first time she had truly seen her transgressions in this light. Lydia had tried to tell her.

  ‘Let us be absolutely clear with one another,’ BenRuin said to Kit. ‘You understand that this man has entered into sexual congress with your sister.’

  Lydia flinched, and wondered if he’d had to say it like that, so that he could say it at all.

  Finally Kit spoke, ‘I told you I took care of that.’

  For just a moment BenRuin lost his iron hold on himself, and Kit tensed. Lydia stepped away from the window. ‘Stop being such a bully,’ she said, making her voice as cold and contemptuous as she could, given how it shook. ‘None of us has your size or your strength. We aren’t criminals, and you cannot sit in judgement over us.’

  He stood then, slowly uncoiling.

  ‘As I am apparently the only sane person in this room,’ he said quietly, ‘I will do exactly as I please. Sit down.’ Then, ‘No, wait.’

  She waited, but he remained silent. They were all too tense for the moment to be exactly awkward, but for the first time her husband seemed uncomfortable with his size in this small room.

  ‘Is she telling the truth?’ he finally asked, without looking at Lydia. ‘Don’t make me beg you again. Just tell me. Have you stopped letting that bastard —’ His voice choked closed, but he remained standing.

  A week ago she would have said to him, The man is practically a god in bed. Give him up, husband? Are you mad? But last night Kit had chosen Darlington, and Lydia had realised, like a door slammed in her face that she and her siblings would never go back to what they’d once been. Ever. And she had remembered, through the long night, the first time she had danced with BenRuin, when she’d called him a barbarian and he’d taken her into a deserted corridor and said, Do that again, when she’d accidentally smiled at him, unguarded.

  ‘It’s true,’ she said. ‘I’m done with Darlington. I have been for weeks.’

  It was the first time she’d admitted to her husband’s face that she’d been unfaithful to him – that she’d let another man touch her, when she wouldn’t let him near. He had known it was true, beyond the shadow of a doubt, but she saw something break in him all the same.

  ‘James,’ she said, and he reacted like she’d hit him.

  For the first time she realised that she would never be able to make amends, and thought, No, wait, with a kind of witless fright.

  He contained himself, and looked away.

  ‘You understand,’ he said to Kit, ‘that he used you to escape London when the Marmotte scandal broke.’

  Kit nodded.

  ‘You understand that he made fools of your family – put their reputations in danger – and you aided him in doing it.’

  Lydia thought for a long moment that Kit would refuse to bow her head. When she finally nodded it looked painful. Lydia had accused her of the same, but now she wished . . . She didn’t know what exactly. That it didn’t have to be true, perhaps.

  ‘You understand that he made you feel he was one of you, but that his world is ten times – a hundred times larger than yours, and can absorb you,’ his broad hand gestured to them all without mercy, ‘in a heartbeat?’

  Kit looked as though BenRuin had reached into her chest and pulled out her heart.

  ‘Kit,’ BenRuin said, ‘you understand that you were a distraction to a bored aristocrat who ran away rather than face me?’

  Kit said nothing.

  ‘Is there any danger you might be pregnant?’

  Every part of her sister went sharp with shock. ‘I . . . no. I don’t —’

  ‘Did he enter you?’ BenRuin said, without any emotion. ‘Did he spill inside you?’

  Kit was flushed dark, but another dark thing entered her face. This is not yours to take, her expression said.

  ‘Katherine,’ BenRuin said, and he sounded tired down to his bones. ‘I can’t protect you if I don’t know.’

  ‘He didn’t,’ Kit said between her teeth, looking at BenRuin like a captive who promised bloody murder just as soon as she found a way to free herself. ‘There’s no chance. We never —’ she cut off, glared down at her hands.

  Lydia hadn’t changed so much. Part of her could still wonder, a little shocked, how Kit had made Darlington so vivid with joy, if he’d never even entered her, or spilled inside her. Lydia had never made him look like that.

  ‘Will that be all, dear?’ her mother asked mildly, and they all stared at her.
>
  ‘I . . .’ said BenRuin. ‘Just one last question. Where did he go? And do not lie to me again.’

  ‘Back to London,’ said Lydia. She had to give him something. ‘Crispin – Mr Scott told me. They’ll be back in Grosvenor Square by tomorrow morning.’

  BenRuin frowned, surprised, and Lydia didn’t know whether it was because she’d spoken up, or because Darlington had returned to town when it was going to be an unpleasant place for him.

  ‘Your men are in the breakfast parlour,’ her mother said. ‘Lovely room, we’ve just had it redone. I’ll be bringing them tea in a minute, if you’d care to join them.’

  The neat dismissal reminded Lydia that her mother was the daughter of an earl. She had never once spoken to Abe like that, sly and passive, in Lydia’s hearing.

  BenRuin gripped the back of the chair, but he bowed and left them. He cast one longing look back at Lydia and she fought against the familiar, stifling weight of it. She grasped onto the tiny new thing shining in her panic like a speck of gold in a sandstorm. That maybe she could survive choosing her husband, if Kit could survive choosing Darlington.

  ‘Mother —’ It was Lydia who stepped forward first.

  Her mother blinked, and straightened her skirts. ‘Did you want something, dear? I’ve said I will take tea in to Lord BenRuin and his men.’

  Sly and passive. Baffling.

  ‘Mother, we didn’t mean to lie to you. We couldn’t bear the thought of you being hurt.’

  ‘We thought,’ Kit’s voice was raw. ‘I thought it would only be for a week. I never imagined he would be —’

  Their mother made an uncomfortable gesture with her hand, as if it had lain still too long. ‘Do you think I object,’ she said, ‘to a duke in my daughter’s bed? I wish he had got a child on her, God help me I do!’

  She left the room.

  Kit stood and began fussing with throws and cushions, and her movements had all the grace of a broken mechanical thing. ‘Liza tells me the servants’ salaries have been paid to the end of the year,’ she said. ‘I can’t believe Mother – We can live quite comfortably. It will be just like it was before.’