by Anna Cowan
She looked up at Lydia when she said this.
For a moment it hung before her, so that she could reach out and take it. Not her childhood back, but something else. All of them together again without Abe Sutherland taking up the air they needed to breathe. Long days in the countryside, no one to tell them what they could or couldn’t do.
Then Tom said, ‘I’m selling the Manor. I’m going to go to London.’
Benruin’s men rose when he entered the room, smooth and coordinated as five muscles in one deadly body. They had seen him wounded more times than he could count. This was . . .
They hung back, unsure.
He sank into a chair and closed his eyes. ‘I’m going to have to send her to Scotland. I think it will kill me otherwise.’
He heard them sit again, and their silence kept him company, the way it had when they lay on the muddy grass on nights cold enough to freeze the piss before it left your body, and they couldn’t sleep because one of them might never wake up. It was the kind of silence you could trust with your life. It was silence to keep a man sane.
It was not what he wanted to build his life on.
After he was done with all that blood he had needed something bright. He had feared he would never be warm all the way through again. And there she had been, her face fierce and delighted when she’d said, ‘My Lord, nothing about money offends my sensibilities,’ as he’d bargained for her hand in a deserted corridor.
He had fallen in love with her when he realised that she never stopped talking.
The door opened and he forced himself to sit like a civilised human being when his mother-in-law entered, carrying the tea. Two footmen followed with sandwiches and sweetmeats. Their showy livery made him feel that unclean fingers were stroking his organs. That man had dared to come here – to leave this sign for him, clear as day. You cannot protect your family from me. And more insidious, the guilt that Darlington had provided for them where he hadn’t. Lydia had forbidden him to, after Abe had gambled her marriage settlement away. He had understood her hurt. She had achieved the marriage her father had groomed her for, and her father had thrown the connection away in a matter of days. But even so, he shouldn’t have let her stop him.
He had still been trying to please her, he thought with a grim smile.
‘Eat, dear boys,’ Mrs Sutherland said. ‘Eat. You look like a pack of famished dogs.’
Tobin – always the easiest of them in company – grinned at her and grabbed a sandwich from the plate. ‘It’s a long time since a woman poured my tea for me,’ he said, which was a horrible lie.
Mrs Sutherland looked pleased, though, and stayed to pour tea for all of them. When she brought a cup to James she smiled wistfully and said, ‘You remind me of my husband.’
James went cold, and for a moment he couldn’t make his fingers work to take the saucer from her.
‘He was a big man, too,’ she continued, completely oblivious to his distress. ‘He didn’t always realise how much stronger he was than other people. He didn’t mean it. He never did.’ She frowned, and said almost absentmindedly, ‘It was hardest on Lydia, I think, after Mr Sutherland wanted to watch over her all the time. On my husband’s wishes I went to share with Kit upstairs and Lydia slept on the cot in his room. She was a wilful girl. Never knew when to stop talking.’
‘Excuse me,’ James said, and distantly heard the crash when his teacup hit the floor.
Tom was talking about Crispin and London and writers’ salons, and Kit couldn’t make sense of any of it through the buzzing in her head.
‘Kit?’ he said, and she looked up and realised Lydia had left – it was just her and Tom sitting across from each other.
She looked into his eyes that were identical to hers, and neither of them spoke. It was so familiar, being in this room with Tom. It was unfamiliar that there were things they didn’t know about each other now – and that some of it they would tell each other, but some of it they wouldn’t. She would never have even considered that Tom would sell the Manor. Sons did not sell what their fathers had passed down to them if they could help it. She had thought it suited Tom to be shut away in his room.
‘Come and live with me in London,’ he said, moving forward in his seat and catching her hand in his. ‘Wherever I live it’ll be smaller than the Manor, but that suits you and me. Mother can live with Lydia – I’d say it’s her turn, wouldn’t you?’ Tom looked a little guilty when he said this, but couldn’t help smiling.
‘I’d say it’s about time Ma went back into society,’ Kit said, finding her voice at last. It sounded odd. ‘Lydia can send her off better than we can.’
The last of Tom’s reservations seemed to disappear, and he smiled at her, a kind of nervous energy thrumming through him. ‘It’s going to be wonderful, Kit. Crispin said he’d introduce me to Sir Walter Scott and you’ll be able to go and see Babbage give a paper, instead of just reading about it in that fool Rushworth’s report – you know you always scribble so many corrections the report’s practically illegible afterwards. We’ll see Mother when she’s not too busy socialising to remember she has children. We’ll have a couple of servants, even – we’ll bring Liza with us if you like – so there won’t be so much for you to do. Lord, Kit, we can go and drink coffee where Byron was drinking coffee but two months ago. Crispin says the likenesses don’t come even close to capturing how magnificent he is. Er, that was Crispin’s word. Magnificent.’
Tom ground to a halt, and the spectre of the Duke of Darlington was between them, because if Byron was magnificent, Jude was cataclysmic.
‘It will be a good life, Kit. I know this is your home, and I know I should have asked you – you deserve that from me, but I couldn’t – I had to.’
Tom was right. It would be a good life. She could be so much more independent in London. Tom would need her less, and a smaller house would need her less. She would be close to interesting people who read the things she read. And maybe she would see Jude at the occasional party, or pass him on the street, and maybe eventually even that would be painless.
It would be a good life.
But Kit was going for spectacular.
She stood and felt it spill from her. Tom stood as well, and smiled at her a little uncertainly. ‘Then you’ll come?’ he said. ‘You don’t mind?’
‘Oh hush, Tom,’ she said. ‘I’m not going to come and live with you. Don’t you see what this means?’
His expression said that he most emphatically did not.
‘None of you need me any more. This house won’t need me any more.’
‘But, Kit, what will you . . . I don’t understand.’
Kit’s body was reckless with light, and she laughed. ‘I’m coming to London, brother. Only this time I’m not going to wear pale silk that ill-becomes me, and I’m not going to pretend at manners I don’t have and always come up short. I’m going to London on my own terms.’
She looked at Tom, and felt savage. ‘Darlington is mine,’ she said. ‘He’s an idiot if he thinks any different.’
Tom staggered back and sat. ‘My God, Kit, the man’s a duke. I don’t think you understand —’
‘I do.’
‘If you make a spectacle of yourself – if you make a play for him and you lose – christ, it’ll ruin you. There’s no coming back from that.’
‘Our father put everything on the table,’ she said, ‘and he lost.’
She looked down at her brother, who was so dear, and no longer needed her. She wouldn’t be hurting any of them. She was free to ignite.
‘I am not going to lose,’ she said.
BenRuin found his wife sitting at the piano, plunking out random, desultory notes. His first instinct was to rush to her and hold her safe and tight in his arms and never let her go.
He ruthlessly crushed his instincts.
‘Lydia,’ he said softly, and stopped a few feet within the door.
She turned, startled, and said, ‘I never learned to play properly.’
She turned back to the instrument, and plunked at the same note over and over. ‘I expect I don’t have the patience,’ she said. ‘I’m not a very patient person.’
‘You learned to ride as if you’d been born to it.’
‘Yes, but that’s different,’ she said, and the straight line of her shoulders began to seem less of an effort. ‘That’s doing. Not . . . I don’t know, thinking, learning.’
‘It would be a shame,’ he said carefully, ‘if you’d married the man with the best stable in Britain and all you wanted to do was sit and read.’
That plunking note was starting to get on his nerves, but he didn’t dare move or speak.
‘Why haven’t you ever taken me to Scotland?’ she asked out of nowhere, and he wondered guiltily whether she had overheard him earlier.
All he said was, ‘Right after you asked for a dress made entirely of jewels you told me you intended to be the biggest snob who ever lived, and that you would set foot in the wilds of Scotland when hell froze over.’
The plunking stopped, and she spun around. Laughed without meaning to. A blush was spreading in patches across her chest, colour high on her cheeks. ‘I . . . do not remember saying that.’
‘I do. Every word.’ He smiled tentatively at her, and when she didn’t go blank in response, his thundering heart tripped over a beat, stumbled, started up again louder and faster.
‘Do you —’ His voice came out so rough and unsure that he had to stop, clear his throat, steel himself to begin again. ‘Do you want to come with me, when I go next month?’
She did go blank then, and he cursed himself. He had never thought – not for a second – that he might remind her of her bastard father.
She stood, and walked as far from him as she could go in the room. He made himself step out of the way of the door, so that she needn’t feel she was trapped in here with him.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘You’ll want to stay in London. Of course you can,’ he choked on the words, ‘you can stay in London.’
Stay for some other bastard to seduce you, he thought, and nearly put his fist through the wall. Maybe the answer wasn’t to send her to Scotland, but to stay there himself, and never come back to this godforsaken country. But he had to appear in Parliament – for his people, if not for himself. And he couldn’t order Tobin back to Scotland, when Mrs Church would accept him any day now.
She watched him, as distant and inanimate as a statue. And then she was . . . different. ‘I, ah,’ she said, then glared at him. ‘I want to come to Scotland.’
He couldn’t speak.
‘And I want to cut off all my hair,’ she said, jutting her chin up, daring him to say anything.
He thought of the long, golden waterfall of it. He thought of those early months when he’d still thought he could get her used to him, when he would let the whole, gorgeous length of it spill through his fingers and his huge body would thrum with need, and she would close in on herself and breathe quick and frightened into his room.
‘All right,’ he said.
‘My hair is naturally curly,’ she said. ‘Actually, puffy is probably a better word. Kit says I must have come from a dandelion seed, which is a terrible thing to say, but in all fairness it’s not entirely inaccurate, either.’
James almost slid down the wall, he went so weak with relief. She was . . . chattering. To him. With some effort he nodded, gave a murmur of encouragement, tried very hard not to do anything stupid.
‘It takes hours out of my day to keep it like this,’ she said. ‘Did you ever hear anything so ridiculous? I have better things to do. Besides, you’re going to take me riding in Scotland, and I’m going to keep up with you no matter how fast you go, and I can hardly do that if I have miles of hair weighing me down.’
He didn’t understand why she sounded as though she were daring him to contradict her – as though she were attempting to browbeat him into wanting her company. He had never wanted anything else. He thought he’d made that abundantly clear.
And every single time she’d turned cold.
‘I need to ask you something.’ He almost didn’t continue. It was so sweet, so precious, this conversation. But he didn’t want just one conversation, he reminded himself. He wanted a lifetime of her.
‘I know that your father made you sleep on a cot in his room. Did he —’ God, it was an impossible thing to ask. All the blood had left her face, and James thought of blood pouring in a hot gush over his blade and his hands, and he made himself continue. ‘Did he touch you? Is that why it was . . . how it was when I bedded you?’
She was shaking. She looked so unbearably young. He felt sick, and had to brace his hand against the wall. All those times he had kept trying, and she . . . And he . . . Oh, God, no.
She shook her head, and once she started it seemed to take her a while to figure out how to stop again. ‘No,’ she said; her teeth were chattering. ‘He d-didn’t. He never. I sometimes heard him in the night, and h-his bed was so close to mine, and I knew he watched m-me. But . . . no. He never touched me.’
James pushed his back against the wall, closed his eyes, closed his teeth against the animal howl trying to claw its way out of his chest. She had trusted him enough to tell him. He had to be a gentleman. It was so hard to think past the burning desire to press his fingers into that bastard’s body – past the resistance of skin, and flesh – to find his veins and his nerves, and to rip them so that he heard the tear of it and the tear of agony through Abe Sutherland’s throat, so that he could savour it and hear it forever. He breathed.
He breathed.
She had trusted him. He was not a beast.
He opened his eyes again and tried to smile and didn’t quite manage it. She was still pale, still shaking. She looked warily back at him.
‘And your family,’ he said, ‘none of them intervened.’
‘No.’ She put her hand out, as though to stop forcibly whatever he was thinking. ‘Kit tried. She tried and he beat her until she couldn’t stand, and I never let her try again. No one ever tried again.’
‘After we married,’ he said slowly. ‘You thought – oh, God, you thought that you were trapped with me, the way you were trapped with him.’
She shrugged a little awkwardly, looked uncertain.
He made himself as calm as he could, before he said, ‘I will never touch you when you don’t want to be touched. I will never hurt you. I will never keep you anywhere against your will. Lydia, I am not —’ That she could even think he was. ‘— not your father.’
She swallowed. ‘I know,’ she said, and her voice was a scrape, a whisper. She didn’t sound entirely convinced.
So why did you let Darlington touch you, he wanted to howl. He didn’t. She was a grown woman, and he would have to ask her, but not when she was so exposed that she looked wrecked and bloodless.
‘I love you,’ he said, and she flinched. Biting back a frustrated growl, James forced himself to bow at her, civilised. ‘I’ll find you before we leave,’ he said, and left.
She would come with him to Scotland. He held on to that one thing, and wouldn’t let himself think of anything else.
Chapter Twenty-One
‘He asked after you again last night,’ Lydia said, when she wandered into the breakfast room. She looked tired. She was impeccably dressed and bare-footed. She patted her hair self-consciously, and Kit realised she’d been staring again.
Kit shrugged and went back to eating toast and reading the paper. ‘Good.’
‘I don’t think you understand,’ Lydia said, heaping food onto her plate. ‘James was with me all night, and Darlington still came over to ask about you.’
James. Lydia had been calling her husband by his Christian name since they left the Manor two weeks ago. She didn’t quite have the knack of saying it without betraying her own awareness of saying it. But she persevered anyway.
Stubborn Lydia.
Soames entered with a fresh pot, and tried to blend into the wallpaper on the far side of the room.
‘Don’t worry yourself, Soames,’ Kit said, without looking up. ‘You are safe from me today. I’m busy.’
‘What do you have planned?’ Lydia asked, sitting around the corner of the table from her and plonking her bare feet unceremoniously into Kit’s lap.
Kit stole a sausage from Lydia’s plate and said, ‘I’m going with Tom to look at some houses, then we’re going to a lecture at the Society. You could come if you like.’
‘Er, thank you, but no.’
Kit smiled again, because Lydia trying to be polite to her – instead of saying something like, I’d be more likely to say yes if you’d invited me to sit about and share anecdotes about our toenail clippings – was glorious to behold. Lydia apparently thought she was being nice. Kit figured it’d take another week or two before Lydia was outright rude, and she couldn’t wait. It was how she preferred things.
Lydia cleared her throat and then looked nonchalantly down at her breakfast. Her hair wasn’t quite as wild as it had been when she was a child. It was like a choppy sea around her beautiful face. It suited her.
‘I’ll probably go riding with James later,’ she said. ‘He’s asked me at least three times. Any more and he’ll begin to look pathetic, and I simply will not countenance being married to a pathetic man.’
She grinned wickedly up at Kit. ‘Not like you. You’re going to regret it for the rest of your life. I once heard Darlington weep – actually weep – when he was told there was no coffee to be had. Ha!’
Tom had spilled Kit’s whole mad scheme to Lydia before they left the Manor, with the desperate hope that Lydia would be able to talk her out of it. Lydia had stunned them both by shrugging and saying, ‘Of course she must.’ It was as though, in waking from her dream of their childhood, she had seen Kit clearly for the first time. And liked what she saw.