Tempered: Book Four of The St. Croix Chronicles

by Karina Cooper

  “Your fancies have always been fascinating,” he replied, but did not elaborate when I returned it with lifted eyebrows. “’Tis true enough that returning to London will bring with it consequence.”

  His gift for understatement drew my attention. I eyed him. “You don’t say.”

  “I can’t speak for the world on your right,” he continued, benevolently ignoring my sarcasm, “but perhaps I might soften the landing on your left.”

  “Oh?” I wiggled my toes, trapped beneath his leg.

  He stroked the top of my foot briefly, but did not linger. “My solicitors are currently engaged in an effort to annul your marriage.”

  That earned my undivided attention. I straightened, cheese forgotten. “You’re doing what?”

  “Annulment,” he repeated. “We are pressing church and crown to have your marriage negated.”

  I did not know how to feel about that. On the one hand, I felt as if I might be doing Compton a terrible disservice.

  On the other, something painfully like relief filled me.

  I could not frame any words around the shame and hope I battled with.

  Ashmore took my silence for inquiry. “Although you were married, your husband was slain before the wedding night. According to precedence, consummation is required for a legitimate marriage in the eyes of Queen and God.”

  I curled my lip at mention of the latter, but did not realize I did so until he sat up, leaning over to smooth his thumb against the corner of my mouth.

  “If your marriage is annulled,” he said quietly, not unkindly, “your inheritance reverts to me to hold, and you upon your majority. It will be as if it never happened.”

  My hands clasped against my chest, the cheese falling to the floor between us. I closed my eyes. “I feel…”

  How could I explain how I felt? I was not used to the concept, spending so much of my time wrapped in lies—of my own design and others’. “I feel as though I would like that very much.”

  “And?” A gentle coaxing.

  “And,” I repeated, whispering my shame, “as though I should be the most awful creature on this earth to want it so. Compton was a good man.”

  “A very good man.” His hand slid over my clasped fingers, squeezing gently. “You do him no disservice by ensuring you remain safe and protected.”

  Protected. The earl had wanted that for me. He had told me as much. In his dream of our future, I would grow to love him—a wish I wasn’t certain wouldn’t have come true with time, for he was truly a good man—and he would ensure I remained always safe. I would be allowed to pursue dreams of what ever scientific interests I pleased, to create a salon, to be a smart and clever wife.

  All I had to do was play the good hostess, to be a countess and all that it entailed. With the protection of his name and title, I could be more free than I had ever thought to be allowed.

  Without him, the title became a prison—his name a guilty verdict in the eyes of his grieving family.

  I nodded, the faintest dip of my chin, and his fingers brushed my jaw. “Eat,” he reminded me, nudging the platter closer to me.

  I opened my eyes to find no judgment upon his face, only a quiet concern. Although I was not positive of my appetite, I reached for a bit of bread.

  Once he was satisfied I would eat some more, he leaned back against the pillows. “There is no certainty that my solicitors will be successful, but there is a strong case.”

  I nodded. “Thank you for the attempt.”

  “No need. My duty is to you, as my ward.”

  “Duty?”

  As if suddenly aware in just what position he found himself, having spent the past hours engaged in scandalous behaviors with said ward, he flushed fiercely. I could not help my smile. “I have nothing that will make the drop on your left any gentler,” he continued, following through on my whimsical metaphor at the expense of my teasing. “To be perfectly honest, if you choose to return to London, ’tis best you don’t visit the lower streets again.”

  My smile faded.

  Ashmore touched the top of my foot. “There is danger there greater than any I may protect you from. I do not ask this lightly.”

  I opened my mouth to assert than I was more than capable of protecting myself, but the claim turned to ash on my tongue.

  I was not. I had learned that lesson at the expense of the well-being of so many of them what called me friend, and I was not certain I knew what to do with the knowledge.

  Returning to London without going below should be no hardship, for London above the drift was as large as below.

  Yet I could not imagine myself doing it.

  I looked up at my erstwhile guardian, eyebrows knotting over sharp scrutiny. “Why are you not lecturing me for all my choices until now?”

  He shrugged. “What will that accomplish?”

  “That sort of thinking never seemed to hinder Fanny.”

  His lips quirked into a neat grin. “I do believe that only makes my point, minx.”

  “I’m quite serious,” I said, though I battered aside a like smile with a quick wave of my hand. “Shouldn’t you be…I’m not certain what I mean to say,” I amended, humor draining as I searched for the words. “I’m certainly not a veritable paragon of Society’s virtue.”

  “Am I?”

  That earned him a silent lift of inquiring eyebrows.

  He folded his hands behind his head, turning his bare arms into a ropy frame of pale, tensile shadow. His gaze did not waver from mine. “Only you can choose your path. That you, as a woman, must struggle all the harder to be allowed to is your great burden.”

  An oddly aware statement from a man who had likely never labored to be recognized. I studied him. “That’s a rather enlightened view.”

  “I have spent too many years walking this world,” he said, now looking not at me, but the ceiling. “Good souls are easy to find, if one removes the blinders set by an ignorant majority.”

  “You don’t like London much, do you?”

  The shaped swatch of sideburn just at his jaw hitched as he allowed himself a crooked smile. “Not especially.”

  “Society, either?”

  “It has more disadvantages than not.”

  “What of India?”

  “A fascinating place,” he replied, “if one is able to step beyond Her Majesty’s frontier.”

  I wiggled my toes again, gouging them into his thigh. “I don’t understand.”

  He reached beneath his leg, extracting my foot to place it against his hip. Satisfied, his arms once more went behind his head. “I mean that the British Empire, like most civilized empires, find themselves utterly consumed with dominating other cultures in a bid to stamp out that which makes them different. To wit, less civilized.”

  “That’s seditious of you.”

  “Is it?” He turned his head to look at me, then, such seriousness in his eyes that all flippancy died. “There is a beauty in savagery that no gilded polish will ever match. I have seen things that would turn London’s peerage upon their collective ear if they so much as caught a scent of it.” Awed, I watched as his countenance turned to a passion rarely seen in those of my acquaintance. “I have watched monsoons drown a land for weeks on end, and crossed a desert so dry that no water flows for an eternity. People do exist in such circumstances.” His eyes flashed. “No. More than the mere tedium of existence, they thrive.”

  I could only stare, caught in a web woven of his husky tenor and that worldliness that seemed beyond his years. Such uncharacteristic disdain for the heart of Her Majesty’s empire caught me off-guard.

  I could all but touch the light of his fervor, it glowed so brightly from within.

  When I said nothing—unable to summon anything to say that would not break this spell—he turned his face again to the ceiling overhead. “There are sights in this world I count myself fortunate beyond measure to have seen, even while I know I will never see them again.”

  “You sound…” I struggled for
the word. “Wistful, I think.”

  “Do I?” This time, he reached down to encircle my ankle with his fingers. Reassurance, I think, though for him or for me, I could not be sure. “Perhaps.”

  We both fell silent, me with my thoughts and Ashmore possibly revisiting lands I’d never seen. I wondered if I might ask to go with him, next time he traveled. I could visit India, see those things he had spoken of with my own eyes. I’d always wanted to see the Orient, even travel as far flung as Africa.

  A good sky ship and an endless sky could take a lady far.

  Wasn’t it what I always wanted? Adventure, exploration.

  Freedom.

  But at what cost?

  The city I thought to abandon waited only a short journey away. In the blighted, poxy streets of London below the drift, those I had counted as friends now struggled. The gangs at war, Zylphia in hiding, and poor Fanny, lacking any information of my well-being.

  I thought of what it might cost to leave everything I had fashioned behind me; every consequence, every tangled knot of poor choices and culpability.

  I owed Zylphia an apology for the abominable way I had treated her—this was a truth I did not like to admit. She had done her best to care for me, and after Compton’s death, I’d turned her aside. I thought to save her life, and in my clumsy efforts, I pushed her into Hawke’s company.

  I had plunged my inept fingers into all that I stumbled across and left broken lives behind. This was my burden, that what I ate the tar to lighten, and I could no longer run from it.

  I looked up at the ceiling, mirroring his posture with my hands laced behind my head. The too-large sleeves of his dressing gown slid down my arms, baring my elbows.

  All that Ashmore spoke of seemed a dream, and an ephemeral one, at that—with no more substance than that what I’d taken from a pipe.

  I could not turn my back on them what needed me now. I could no longer run.

  It was in London I’d committed my most unforgivable deeds, and so it was to London I’d return. I no longer knew what it was to be a St. Croix, save to be a little mad, but it was time I do a greater service to the name.

  “Mr. Ashmore?”

  “Yes, Miss St. Croix?” A fallacy of politeness for the both of us, for we’d had long transcended such propriety and we both knew it. His thumb stroked across my ankle, again as if he wasn’t entirely aware he did it.

  I built no preamble for him. “I can’t go with you.”

  The thumb upon my ankle stilled. “I sense there is a greater purpose to this statement.”

  I lowered my gaze, looking across the narrow distance between us, to find him watching me instead of the shadows upon the ceiling. I favored him with a small smile. “I know you didn’t ask,” I said, “but I…” To my horror, an ache seized my throat. I cleared it, lest it turn to the tears I no longer could control. “I have always dreamed of adventure. I want nothing more than to see the sights you speak of.”

  His tone remained level as he said, “You dance around the acknowledgement of debts owed.”

  Damn his shrewd understanding. I nodded, because anything else might jar loose the tears threatening to overwhelm my efforts.

  His thumb once more took up that idle stroke, sending gentle shivers up my leg. “I thought it might come to that.”

  In that simple sentence, Oliver Ashmore—my guardian who had been absent from my life for so long—displayed a knowledge of my character that precious few had ever indicated a willingness to learn.

  The first of my tears welled over my lashes.

  “Oh, sod it,” he said upon seeing them, and surprised a snort torn from my aching chest.

  Chapter Thirteen

  I could not help myself. Though my tears ran freely, I laughed until my sides ached, bolstered by the warm sound of his own laughter as I blotted at my cheeks with the wide sleeves of his dressing gown.

  When the fit finally released me from its hold, both of my feet were planted upon his hip, and he lay back on his pillows with an arm draped over his eyes.

  His smile truly was a beautiful thing.

  I took a deep breath to steady my weary nerves. “I apologize,” I said, though lightly. “I can’t seem to get a grasp on my emotions.”

  “No need,” he replied, though less curtly than he’d said the words before. He did not remove his arm, but his smile remained beneath it. “’Tis expected. You will find harmony, in time.”

  The sooner, the better. I was not prone to tears, and the absence of them entirely in the wake of Compton’s death made me shockingly embarrassed to shed them. If I hoped to return to London, to hold my head up among those I wronged and work to salve the pain I’d caused in my wake, I needed to have better control of myself.

  Once more, we lapsed into a companionable silence. The lull of the fire, the sweetness of the company, dragged at my senses until I felt as though I existed within languid comfort.

  Whatever might happen after this time, I thought I might be able to bear it with some dignity.

  Ashmore stirred beneath my feet. “It was Hawke, wasn’t it?”

  My comfort vanished. My eyes snapped open, and I propped myself up on my elbow to ascertain what expression might accompany that matter-of-fact question.

  He had not moved. While he no longer smiled, I could see no trace of anger or disappointment beneath his arm either.

  My fingers splayed upon the floor beneath me, though it offered no greater sense of balance.

  How was I to answer that?

  There was only one option.

  “Yes.” The truth freed itself on a whisper.

  Ashmore said nothing at first, and I wondered if I had offended him. His chest rose and fell with slow rhythm, gilded prettily by the fire we lounged beside.

  Then, he lowered his arm, hand coming to rest just over his navel, and met my gaze direct. “You intend to return to London low for him?”

  “I hadn’t—” At his raised eyebrow, I let out a hard breath and fell back to my pillows. “How do you know what I have not yet worked out for myself?” I groused, nearly a snarl. Of all my pretty sentiments, I had deliberately avoided thoughts of the man I still owed a well-placed boot to the delicates. That I didn’t know what my reception might be, or even what I intended to do when I sought him out, was a truth I could examine once I was in London again.

  He had already done me a nigh unforgivable wrong. I wouldn’t dare call my willingness to hear him out—or force him to hear me out, every last word—a strength. All I knew was that I hoped to see him again.

  If he were to reject me, it might cauterize this wound I carried.

  “You are not so difficult to understand,” Ashmore assured me. “Regardless of all things, your sense of guilt is the greater burden to bear.”

  I said nothing.

  “I could tell you that what happened in the Menagerie that night was not your fault,” he continued, his tone thoughtful and slow. “You were merely a tool, used as a means to bring a greater concern to heel.”

  My memory of that night—even of most of the fortnight prior—was so unreliable as to be worthless, and I latched onto this assertion with honed determination. “What do you mean? What greater concern?”

  Ashmore was no man’s fool. “If I tell you, will you assume this burden as your own and let it weigh you down even more?”

  Damn him. One night in his bed, and he’d all but deciphered me completely.

  I sighed. “I already feel so much guilt that I’m swimming in its bitter brine. I don’t believe you can say anything else to add to it. Drowning is drowning.”

  “It’s that very resignation that gives me pause,” he replied, his voice quiet. “Cherry, I know how little you recall, and the longer you remain separated from the knowledge, the more a dream it becomes.”

  I flushed, though I could not fathom why. This was a matter of scientific fact; opium dulled the memory. Still, I felt embarrassed for it. “I’d prefer to know,” I said. I firmed my shoulders. “Plea
se.”

  It was Ashmore’s turn to sigh. “Very well. I said that you were merely a tool, and by my sources, I believe this to be true. You were not the goal.”

  “But my debt—”

  “A small one, in the greater scheme,” Ashmore said, shaking his head. The firelight glinted off his hair as he did, crackling into a copper gleam. His eyes remained steady. “Regardless of what it was, and I am not asking,” he added, “it doesn’t matter. In the end, what the Veil wanted was Hawke. You were the means by which they guaranteed his loyalty.”

  I scoffed at that. “They already owned him.”

  “Did they? Are you so sure?”

  Was I? For a long moment, only the crack of burning wood and the hiss of sap as it smoldered in the fireplace filled the air, and Ashmore kindly allowed me the opportunity to think on the matter in peace.

  Had the Veil owned Hawke as securely as I’d mockingly assumed?

  The question tore the wool from my eyes. Put in such a way, I remembered the lurid scars on Hawke’s back, placed there by the Veil in punishment for saving me from my father’s serum without the Veil’s permission. He had never said anything of it, leaving that discovery to chance and Zylphia’s loose tongue.

  Had his intent been just as pure when he offered me release from the debt if I married Compton? I hadn’t considered the consequences; I’d thought he spoke in the Veil’s place.

  If I dredged through all of my memories, if I looked even at the first true lie I’d ever caught him telling me, he’d done it all to keep me from the Veil’s sight, and out of the danger he saw that I did not.

  Perhaps, in contrast with the villainous role I’d painted him in, this new revelation cast him as too virtuous. Even if I allowed for ulterior motives, this new understanding of Hawke’s behavior was a jarring tilt to a world I was just coming to understand without smoke to soften it.

  I looked into the heart of the blaze, where the wood blackened and curled and the glow turned wicked blue—a narrow ream of azure flame, as scorching as the river of blue in Hawke’s mismatched glare.