Seductive Starts

by Courtney Milan

  Chapter Twenty

  GARETH FELT AS IF HE HAD AGED twenty-four years in the twenty-four hours since Jenny had left.

  He stared listlessly out the window as White droned on. The man’s voice was almost soothing. It was difficult to focus on the concepts—farming improvements. Agriculture. Portraits.

  Instead, he nodded his head and shut his eyes. He’d nothing to hold on to but this responsibility. It would eventually expand to fill the void.

  But perhaps it only seemed so empty because White had stopped talking.

  Gareth opened his eyes. “Any other business?”

  “Yes. A letter. It’s from a ladies’ school in Bristol.”

  Gareth paused. “Bristol? What the devil does a ladies’ school in Bristol want from me? Contributions?”

  “It’s from a Mrs. Davenport, sir. It comes roundabout, by means of the inquiries you asked me to make about a Miss Jenny Keeble.”

  Gareth fished in his pocket for his knife. His pocket was as empty as his life.

  It did no good to find the information when he’d lost the woman. She wouldn’t take his money, wouldn’t take him. “Never say that name to me again. Send her ten pounds and burn the letter.”

  White ignored this sally. “She writes a very sly letter, if you ask me. She says she knows of J—of the name I am not to mention. She was a pupil in her school, years ago.”

  Gareth inhaled. The odor of wood smoke was faintly comforting. Jenny. Just thinking of her made his ribs ache.

  It was madness, what she asked of him. He’d lost everything—his mother, his sister, his wistful desire for love—because of the obligation the title of Blakely imposed on him. If he were not, in truth, superior, that sacrifice would be meaningless.

  “White, can I ask you a question?”

  “Naturally, sir.”

  “Do you consider me wealthy?”

  White rubbed his head in puzzlement. “Yes.”

  “And I have an ancient and honorable title?”

  “Yes, my lord.”

  “And my looks—am I incorrigibly ugly?”

  White looked wildly about the room. But there was no escape; Gareth was his employer, and that gave him the right to ask impertinent questions. “I can’t rightly say as how I’ve taken particular notice, but your features do seem put together in the proper order. If I may take the liberty of conjecturing as to your next question, my lord, your personal odor is inoffensive.”

  Gareth nodded in grim acknowledgment. “That’s what I thought.”

  White crossed to the fire and pulled the screen away with an ungodly clatter.

  “What are you doing now?” Gareth asked crossly.

  “I’m burning the letter.”

  Gareth jumped to his feet. “No! Give it here. What are you thinking?”

  “I’m not thinking at all, my lord.” White smiled, privately. “I’m just following your express orders.”

  Gareth pointed a finger at his hapless man of business. “How the devil am I to find this woman in Bristol if you’ve burnt the address?”

  “But you said—”

  “Damn what I said.” Gareth snapped his fingers. “Hand it over.”

  White smirked with satisfaction and placed that last precious connection to Jenny in Gareth’s waiting hands.

  ONCE IT BECAME OBVIOUS Jenny could not stay in London, her life simplified. With no need to consider whether to stay or go, the question of money resolved itself. She’d kept only a few articles of clothing and one last, vain memento of the previous weeks. The vast majority of her household effects, she hawked for nine pounds.

  But she sold the ungainly bed Gareth had sent her for thirty-two pounds.

  When the last pot had been carted away, Jenny turned around in her front room. It was empty of everything except a lonely valise, packed with serviceable clothing. Her footsteps rang against the hard floor.

  Her forty pounds was spoken for already. She’d purchased passage in steerage on the regular packet to New York. It left in a handful of days; she’d have just funds enough to reach her final destination and see herself settled. Until then, there were beds in lodging houses. She had half an hour to say goodbye to this empty hole. Thirty minutes was too much time to fill with melancholy, and too little in which to make her heart release its grip.

  Twelve years later, she had nothing left. Nothing, that is, except herself. It was still there inside of her, that warm, still center. It had not vanished, and neither bank cashiers nor Blakely could threaten it.

  Jenny stood up and reached for her valise. But before she had adjusted to its weight dangling from her arm, a sharp rat-tat-tat sounded at the door. After two years, she knew that knock all too well. Her heart leapt. Jenny dropped her burden, dashed to the door and threw it open.

  “Mr. Carhart!”

  Ned peered into her room. His expression changed from solemn to bemused. “You’re leaving?”

  Jenny gave a nonchalant shrug. “There’s nothing to keep me here any longer.”

  “Going back home?”

  Jenny sighed wistfully. Home. She’d never had a home, or a family. She’d had lies and recriminations. Somewhere in the world, she hoped there still was a home for her. It just wasn’t here.

  “Cincinnati,” she said.

  Ned frowned.

  “It’s in America. I picked the name out of an emigration pamphlet. I had never heard of it, and so I suppose it will never have heard of me. Which is just as well. I need…”

  She trailed off. She needed stability. She yearned for it. She wanted a place where she could earn the respect and trust of those around her. And she needed to get away from this cage, where bloodlines and belongings trumped accomplishment. Here in London, the temptation of seeing Gareth again—of taking that easy path, accepting his offer, knowing what it would mean—was too great.

  “You need,” Ned prompted.

  “I need a fresh start,” she finished quietly.

  Ned nodded and shoved his hands in his pockets. He walked around the room, and Jenny wondered if he, too, was seeing echoes of his former entrapment.

  Finally, he looked up at her. “I’m to be married in a week.”

  “Congratulations, Mr. Carhart.” She looked down. They’d talked once before, about his antipathy for the state of matrimony. Marriage could not have been a hastily made decision on his part. But she did not know if they could fall back into the easy state of conversation they’d once enjoyed. She bit her lip, holding in the questions that bombarded her.

  But she no longer had the right to pry into his affairs. “Gareth is pleased, I’m sure. I hope you are, too.”

  Ned stepped back, a puzzled expression on his face. “So Blakely is Gareth and I am Mr. Carhart?”

  There was no real way to respond to that. No way, except the truth. “Yes. I give you leave to call him by his Christian name, by the way. Someone must continue to do so once I am gone. He needs to be reminded, you see, that there’s more to him than Lord Blakely. He’ll forget otherwise. And he mustn’t forget.”

  “Jenny,” Ned interrupted, “I came here to ask you to come to my wedding. It’s a small affair. Family only.”

  A lump formed in Jenny’s throat. “I couldn’t.”

  “Why not? I just asked you.”

  “No, I really mean that I can’t. My packet leaves in five days.”

  “Can’t you change to the week after?”

  She could. But there was another reason. “G—I mean, Blakely will be there. And I’m not part of your family, Ned. I wouldn’t want to intrude.”

  “You’ve faced my cousin before. Why can you not do so now?”

  Because I cannot bear to see him again. Jenny let out a sigh. “Must I really spell it out?”

  Ned searched her face and must have found the answer. “Really? Blakely?”

  She blushed, and bent to rummage in her valise for her one last memento. “That,” she said, straightening, prize in hand, “and he’ll likely set the law on me once he
realizes I absconded with his penknife that night in the gaming hell.”

  Ned stared at the elegant knife. The weapon was as much Jenny’s connection to Ned—loyal, trusting Ned—as it was to Gareth. Her memories of the knife were bound up with Ned. Ned stabbing the orange. Jenny piercing the cards in front of him.

  Ned speaking up, telling Gareth that Jenny was more his family than anyone else he knew.

  Jenny sighed wistfully.

  But Ned did not speak of the knife. Instead he said, “When I was very young, I told my mother I wanted an older sister. She laughed at me and told me that nature didn’t work that way. But a younger sister was not forthcoming, either. There was always only me. I have had my problems—of my own devising, you understand. And at one point, I thought there was no hope for me. No encouragement. Then I met you.”

  “I lied to you, Ned.”

  He reached out and gently took the knife from her grasp.

  “Sisters usually do.” He opened the blade and switched it, awkwardly, to his other hand. And then he held out his right hand. The knife scored his flesh, cutting a thin red line down his palm. Blood welled up.

  Ned held out the knife expectantly. “You told me to take this one step at a time. Well? Here I am.”

  Jenny hesitated. It was too much. He offered truth in exchange for lies. Loyalty, for fraud.

  And then he bounced expectantly on his toes, and he was impatient Ned again. Ned, who offered, quite simply, love for love. If she couldn’t believe she was worthy of it now, she might as well give up on the whole thought of finding any place on the face of the earth where she could command respect.

  Jenny’s fingers trembled as she took the knife in her left hand. The sharp blade slid into her flesh. At first, she didn’t feel a thing—not the cut, nor any attendant pain. Then Ned reached out and clasped her hand in his. He squeezed, and the wound stung. Her eyes smarted. Her heart swelled, and suddenly, her echoing rooms seemed neither desolate nor empty.

  She’d waited thirty long years for a little brother. It had taken him a while to appear, but he’d been worth the delay.

  “I know you’re leaving,” Ned said softly. “Truth be told—I’m not sure I can do this, either. Be her husband. Live a normal life.”

  A thousand reassurances swam through Jenny’s head. But he squeezed her hand. “I’ll manage,” he said. “At least now, I believe that.”

  “I’d rather see you happy,” Jenny whispered. “But I suppose I won’t see you at all.”

  “America. England. What does a little thing like a few thousand miles matter, among family?”

  “Nothing,” Jenny said. “It’s nothing at all.”

  GARETH’S JOURNEY HAD BEEN LONG and jolting, but after two miserable days on the road, he arrived.

  Three solid graystone buildings made up Elland School in Bristol. The trees on the grounds gathered naked, gray branches primly about their trunks, as if they were preparing for winter instead of participating in the spring that had arrived everywhere else. A few stray handbills were strewn about the streets, but not one dared mar the strict order of the yard. Even the cobblestones the carriage clattered over seemed laid in a geometric pattern. The formal grounds were in such contrast to everything Gareth knew about Jenny that it seemed impossible he would find any trace of her here.

  He strode to the main entrance and gave his card to the hunchbacked gentleman who answered the door. He was shown into a dim, drab parlor, the striped paper on the walls faded but clean. A coal-fire smoked fitfully in the hearth.

  A few books stood at attention on a shelf. Gareth peered at their spines. A Brief History of Western Etiquette stood next to The Rules of Precedence. The thin volume on the end was imprinted with the illuminating title of Forks, Spoons, Knives and the Proper Use of a Serviette.

  Gareth would have been willing to bet that Jenny, his mischievous, exuberant Jenny, had never set foot in the room.

  The door opened behind him. Of course, it did not do anything so uncouth as creak; instead, it sighed, a dim sound.

  “Lord Blakely. How can I be of service? What can I tell you of our school? Would you like to sit?”

  The voice was old. The words formed questions, but the tone was dry command. It was the voice of a woman who had ordered young girls for so long she knew no other way to communicate.

  Gareth turned. The woman who stood there was as exact as every other aspect of the school. Not one strand of gray hair escaped her precise bun. Her colorless face blended into the tired, pressed gray of her dress. Her lips formed straight lines, as if any bend or kink would offend her orderly nature.

  “You must be Mrs. Davenport,” Gareth said. “You wrote me.”

  Her eyes narrowed in disbelief.

  “In answer to the inquiry my man of business made,” he continued. “I’m here about Jenny Keeble.”

  It would have been gauche for Mrs. Davenport to show emotion. But the emotion she very carefully didn’t show—not even a hint of surprise that a strange man would ask after a pupil who attended her school more than a decade before—was all too telling. It was the decorous, hopeful blankness of a gossipy woman who had a scandalous story to tell, and who expected to receive a juicy tidbit in exchange.

  “Is there some problem? Is Miss Keeble…” Mrs. Davenport paused delicately.

  “Dead? Convicted? Wanted for fraud?”

  Mrs. Davenport’s eyes grew wider with every possibility Gareth listed. Satisfaction radiated from her.

  Gareth drummed his fingers against the leg of his trousers. “No. She’s not.”

  A subtle tension entered the woman’s shoulders. “Well. That child gave me more trouble than any other girl in my twenty-nine years here. If you know her, you know she has a predilection for…” Another delicate pause.

  “Lies,” Gareth supplied helpfully.

  “Mistruths,” finished Mrs. Davenport. “And indirection. Often involving money. But you seem to have news of her. I dare not hope she has adopted an honest profession?”

  Mrs. Davenport raised one perfectly formed eyebrow. Hidden behind the brittle cold of her censorious glare lay a spark of avaricious desire.

  “My God,” Gareth said. “You really are a vulture, aren’t you?”

  Her lips pursed. “If it would please you, my lord. Don’t take the Lord’s name in vain. There are young girls here, and they will repeat every last naughty word they hear.”

  “I’m here to find out more,” he said. Once he’d imagined that if he could uncover her deepest secrets, he’d be able to put her behind him. He didn’t fool himself that was still the case. Now, he just wanted to know. “What was she like? Who were her friends?”

  “Friends?” Mrs. Davenport scoffed. “A girl of her like doesn’t have friends among proper women. I made sure of that. I protested her admittance, I did. No good can come of girls with uncertain parentage. They come from shame, and can bring only shame upon themselves and those they associate with.”

  Gareth swallowed. “Do tell.”

  Mrs. Davenport looked off into the distance. “But she was a tricky little thing. She’d get the other girls talking to her, friendly like, every time she had half the chance. If I hadn’t watched, she’d have wrapped them all ’round her finger. She had them fascinated, she did. I told them over and over, stay away from that Jenny Keeble. They listened, mostly. But…”

  But Jenny had done her best to win them over anyway.

  “She was four when she came here,” Gareth observed mildly.

  “You can’t fight nature, my Lord Blakely. What’s bred in the bone will bear fruit in the character. What do you suppose happens to a girl who never knows her parents?”

  A girl who was lied to from the age of four and told she was formed for ill-behavior from birth? Gareth could only imagine. And yet…it hadn’t happened to Jenny.

  “I suppose,” Gareth said quietly, “you did your duty by the girl and informed her what to expect from life.”

  “Oh, yes,” Mrs. Davenport
said with relish, leaving little doubt about precisely how she’d performed that responsibility. “And—just in case—” She crossed over to a desk, shuffled around in a drawer. And then she pulled out a yellowing sheaf, the edges of the papers crackling. “There. I recorded all her misdeeds. I saved these, in the event I was ever asked to testify as to her character, and the magistrate was inclined to foolish lenience.”

  Gareth held out a hand. “She was damnably silent about her childhood.”

  Mrs. Davenport’s eyes narrowed, but she handed over the papers. “Language, Lord Blakely. Watch your language. Tell me, did she become a…”

  “A whore?”

  Mrs. Davenport sniffed. “Language! A soiled dove.”

  “She’s spent the last twelve years pretending to be a mystic with the power to foretell the future.”

  Mrs. Davenport raised a hand to her mouth, the proper picture of horror. “Not exactly a life of virtue. How do you know her?”

  “My cousin went to see her. I believe that over the course of their acquaintance, he paid her a good bit of money.”

  The woman’s face grew gleefully gluttonous. She clutched at her handkerchief. “Fraud! A felony, to be sure. Will she hang? Be pilloried? Transported?”

  Gareth glanced down at the paper in his hand.

  14 August 1815. JK told two lies and shirked washing behind her ears.

  He flipped through more pages, all filled with minor infractions. Some did not even count as that.

  12 May 1820. JK, sick with fever, infected three other girls. Likely intentional.

  Gareth had suffered his grandfather’s cold and cutting comments. But underneath his grandfather’s chill, there had always been high expectations. He’d always assumed that Gareth would, and could, perform his duties as capably and honorably as every Blakely before him. Money and rank had bought him every privilege.

  But Jenny had grown up in this cold place. Instead of a mother, she’d had this frightening woman who whispered lies about her, ostracizing her from the only companions who could bring her comfort. How desperate for affection must she have been, when she ran away at eighteen?