‘Mother said you were here. Would you care for some tea in the parlour?’
I had gathered as much information here as I was likely to, and perhaps Miles knew more than he realised.
He blushed with consternation when it became apparent that Aurora had gone upstairs to rest and we were left unchaperoned. Quite what he thought we were likely to get up to in a room facing onto the street with an open door in broad daylight, I wasn’t sure, but it didn’t seem the time to mention that I had been in far more intimate situations with a man.
‘H-how kind of you to ask after the servants. I’m afraid they’re very shaken.’
‘I don’t blame them. It’s hardly the kind of thing one expects, working for a family like yours.’
He nodded. ‘We are all upset. To have something so horrible happen just outside our front door – and to know she was stealing from us.’ He shuddered. ‘It doesn’t bear thinking about.’
I found myself agreeing with him. Of course, one rarely knew what really went on behind closed doors in families of quality. And yet I had come to think of Aunt Emily’s house as a sort of refuge, away from the filth and secrets I had found elsewhere.
‘Do you think she stole from all of you?’
He shook his head. ‘I don’t think so. F-Father kept everything in perfect order – the army, you know – and he’d have raised merry hell if any of his belongings had gone missing. I’m not sure I have anything worth stealing. Alisdair inherited my grandfather’s signet ring and things like that – I have a rather nice set of cufflinks and a chessboard, but I don’t think they’d be as easy to sell.’
Perhaps I should have felt bad that Alisdair had inherited the lion’s share of the family heirlooms, especially when he stood to inherit so much more on Colonel Greene’s death. Instead, one thing Miles had said had my interest well and truly piqued, and it was nothing to do with his family or the murder.
‘You play chess?’ Perhaps the heavy raincloud of this marriage, should I be doomed to undertake it, would have a silver lining.
He nodded, his face lighting up. ‘Would you like me to fetch the set? I’m not terribly good, but I do enjoy it.’
And so I found myself seated opposite my fiancé, becoming more intimately acquainted with him than I could ever have imagined. To my surprise, we were fairly evenly matched, and with the distraction of the board he relaxed somewhat and we found ourselves talking easily. He was a cautious player but a clever one, and I realised that despite his awkward silences in company, he observed far more than I had expected.
When left to his own devices, Miles wasn’t a bad conver-sationalist and was far happier to listen than talk, although he had nothing of substance to tell me about Wilson other than that she had been prepared to weather his mother’s occasionally stormy moods.
As I swooped in to checkmate him with a rook, he smiled.
‘We should start keeping a tally,’ he said. ‘And then when we’re old and grey and too arthritic to hold a chess piece, we can add it up and see who’s the winner.’
Reality came thudding down. A pleasant afternoon with a game of chess was one thing, but a lifetime? Even if both our games improved substantially – and they would have to, if we didn’t want to expire from boredom – it wasn’t a foundation for a marriage. Or at least not the kind of marriage I wanted.
He flushed, seeing my expression. ‘I’m sorry. I know our families arranged this. I know I wouldn’t have been your first choice.’
I bit my lip. ‘Marriage wouldn’t have been my first choice, Miles. It’s nothing to do with you, not really.’ I looked at him closely. ‘And would I really have been yours?’
‘I-I . . .’ he stammered, blushing tomato red to the roots of his sandy hair. ‘I can’t inherit if I don’t marry. A stupid clause in Father’s will that he could write out but refuses to. He’s so obsessed with keeping the family name going, especially when it didn’t look like Frances could give Alisdair a child. She lost two babies before this pregnancy and Father always said she looked too frail. But I want to be married,’ he said quickly. ‘I know that isn’t the fashion for men to say, but I do. I want a wife, I want a home. I want someone who looks at me the way my mother looks at my f-father.’
I couldn’t help but smile. ‘Why, Miles, you’re quite the romantic.’
‘Aren’t you?’
I shivered, although the day was warm. ‘I used to be. I’m afraid that now I’m just a pragmatist.’
‘A good thing for a doctor,’ he offered.
‘It’s a quality less prized in a wife.’
He sighed. ‘I may not be the man you dreamed of back when you thought of romance, but I’ll be a good husband, I promise. You’ll learn to love me.’
Although I knew he meant well, my blood boiled at his words. ‘Why do people keep saying that? Love isn’t something you learn! It just happens, whether you want it to or not.’
He nodded, as though I had confirmed a suspicion he had been nursing.
‘There’s someone else.’
I felt a jolt pass through me, electric and awful. I had said nothing, not mentioned Merchiston’s name once. Had he seen something in our interaction the night of the murder that gave us away? How could he, when all there was between us was the shared memory of one almost-kiss?
‘I know there was someone in London. I-I know you’re not a virgin, Sarah. My father told me. He said that it would help – at least one of us will know what we’re doing.’ He laughed bitterly.
So I was marrying a man more innocent than I was. The one thing designed to save me from eccentricity and immorality, and even that was unconventional.
Well, if he was being blunt, then I could be too. ‘Don’t young men of good breeding typically get inducted into the amorous arts before marriage? Or do your romantic notions hold you to higher standards than mistresses and tarts?’
‘Were you this forthright before your studies, or do they cover plain speaking in your lectures?’ He sounded a little impressed.
‘A personal failing, I’m afraid.’ I smiled. ‘The professors try to beat it out of me, but I’m afraid I’m incorrigible.’
‘At least life will be interesting.’ He sounded as though he were looking forward to our future, and I felt like the worst cad imaginable knowing that I was doing everything I could to evade it. ‘But since you asked – my father took me to certain establishments, introduced me to all manner of women there.’
‘That’s appalling!’
My fiancé shrugged. ‘I’m not sure if he was more worried that I was a simpleton or a sodomite.’ He paused, looking horrified.
‘I know what that means, Miles,’ I sighed. ‘But feel free to pretend that I don’t if it makes you feel better.’
‘Anyway, I had a horribly awkward few hours in an establishment off Leith Walk, where I left as unsullied as I walked in.’
My eyes widened.
‘Don’t look so relieved,’ he muttered. ‘Everything still works. I, ah, checked.’
The image that provoked would linger unwanted in my mind for some time. ‘Well. That’s . . . um . . . that’s jolly good for you,’ I said in a strangled tone.
‘I’ve shocked you!’ He looked delighted. ‘The blunt and terrifying Dr Gilchrist can be shocked.’
‘I’m not a doctor yet,’ I reminded him. ‘Not ever, if our parents have their way.’
‘Like I said, I’m a romantic. And I knew I wasn’t exactly the man she wanted to spend the night with, so it seemed kinder to both of us not to bother with the pretence. We talked about the weather; I paid her handsomely and never returned.’
He was kind. I thought of the men at Madame Ruby’s brothel, the men who had used Lucy with little care as to whether they took her fancy. She would have been grateful for someone like Miles, a gentleman in the truest sense. A gentleman who wanted nothing more than a loving wife and a family, and I could give him neither.
He grimaced. ‘I’m sure that makes me frightfully dull in your
eyes.’
‘What did your father say?’
‘I lied. He clapped me on the back, told me I’d become a man at last and paid for a month of . . . ah . . . company up front.’
‘You went back?’
‘Once a week.’ He grinned. ‘That’s how I became so good at chess – and a variety of card games with obscene names. If I do forfeit my inheritance, I suppose I could try and make my fortune at gambling.’
‘And you never . . .’
‘I couldn’t. Not like that. Father would say it was womanish of me, but I . . . I need it to be with someone I trust. Someone I love.’ He paused, and I knew what was coming next but could not stop it. ‘The chap in London . . .’
‘He didn’t . . . I wasn’t . . .’
‘In love with him?’
‘I thought I was, for a moment. Or that I could be. But he wasn’t the man I thought he was at all. Frankly, I never want to set eyes on him again. My affections don’t lie elsewhere and I’m not nursing a broken heart.’
‘So the only thing I have to compete with is that.’ He nodded in the direction of the university. ‘I’m not sure how I stack up against a building.’
‘It’s more than a building. It’s freedom. It’s making my own choices – making my own money! It’s never having to be beholden to another person again.’ I paused, wondering how much I wanted to open up to him ‘If you want the truth, I’m envious. My . . . encounter was less than ideal. Honestly, I wish it had never happened and I had never met him. Please don’t think I’m pining for a lost lover, because nothing could be further from the truth. But there were . . . consequences.’
‘A child?’ His hand hovered over mine for a moment, before tentatively resting on it. It was the nicest response I had had to my horrid story.
I shrugged, the gesture belying the deep seam of pain his question prompted. ‘If there was, the poor thing thought better of being carried by such an unfit mother. I don’t blame it – I wasn’t particularly keen on living either.’ I remembered the fall down the stairs that was never an accident, remembered my mother watching and not moving until I lay dazed in the hall. The blood the next day that could have been the remnants of my violation or just my final menses before the butchers at the asylum got hold of me. ‘In any event, I can’t . . . Miles, there was an operation. An ovariectomy, it’s called.’
He stared blankly. Clearly his ignorance of the carnal arts extended to how babies were actually made.
‘The part of me that lets me bear a child – they took it out.’ Tears stung my throat. ‘They took it all out. I can’t give you a family, Miles. I’m sorry.’
He let go of my hand and I was unaccountably sorry for it.
‘Then you’re the perfect choice. A bandage of respectability for the defective son, without the risk of bringing another runt into the family litter.’
So my barren state suited both parties. Anger flared inside me. How dare our families use us to mop up their own scandals? Pair off the untouchables and then shuffle them off to some family estate in the country so that their lives would no longer be blighted by a slut and a . . . Whatever cruel name I could conjure up, I couldn’t use it, not even in the privacy of my own mind. Miles deserved more than that. Maybe I did, too.
‘No wonder my family was so keen to snap you up,’ he continued. ‘You’re everything they could have wanted. You have a family desperate to marry you off to the first man who’ll have you and utterly incapable of passing on our mutual peculiarities.’ His harshness took my breath away. He laughed. ‘Did you really think I would have chosen you? A bluestocking who spends her days cutting up bodies? I know it must gall you, Miss High and Mighty Gilchrist, that I’m the best you could get, but my parents’ choice doesn’t reflect terribly well on me either.’
‘Then call it off,’ I said through gritted teeth. ‘Say you don’t want damaged goods.’
‘If I do that, I lose my inheritance.’
‘And if we marry, I lose everything! I’ve worked damn hard to get here. Do you know how many female doctors there are in Britain? One hundred. And most of them had to study at women’s colleges, not darken the doors of establishments like Edinburgh. I wanted to go to the London School of Medicine for Women, you know. I wanted to stay with my family and friends and have everything I ever wanted. Instead, I’m here, at one of the best medical schools in the world. Some say it’s more competitive than Oxford, but they let me in. With my lack of feminine virtue – my lack of anything that makes me truly a woman in society’s eyes – I passed the examinations with flying colours. But that doesn’t matter, because you need your . . . your fucking inheritance!’ He was goggle-eyed at my profanity. ‘This is what you’re hitching your marital wagon to, Miles. A cursing harlot who knows more about the human anatomy – of both sexes, mind – than you ever will. And even if my mother pulls me out of university kicking and screaming – which she will if she has to – I’ll still know it all. I’ll have worked harder in my first year at Edinburgh than you have in your life.’
I stopped, breathing heavily and appalled at what I had said. It was true, every word, but that didn’t mean it wasn’t cruel.
We sat in shocked silence. To my surprise, Miles spoke first.
‘I’m sorry.’
I smiled wryly. ‘I was about to say the same thing.’
‘I didn’t mean it – not really. Just because I didn’t choose you doesn’t mean I’m not happy that my parents did.’
‘You’re a hell of a lot better than I would have expected from Aunt Emily.’ He fought a smile and lost. ‘I don’t suppose . . .’ I trailed off, wondering if what I was about to suggest was entirely proper. ‘If all this goes ahead – you wouldn’t teach me one of those obscene card games, would you?’
By the time Aurora came downstairs, we were helpless with laughter. She seemed bemused but relieved, and when they insisted on sending me out in the family carriage, I accepted even though I knew the sight of it would cause me to be soundly mocked by my peers.
I dashed from the carriage across the quad to where the others were waiting, then brought us all to a crashing halt like dominoes as I stared at the last person I expected to see standing amongst the grey stone buildings with the first snowflakes starting to fall.
My mother had arrived.
Chapter 8
Seeing her in the cloistered environs of the medical school was strange, as though she had been pasted on like a picture in a scrapbook, against a background where she didn’t belong. My hands went to my skirts, frantically trying to brush off any trace of blood, formaldehyde or ink. I felt her eyes rake over me, taking in the brown twill coat, the poplin blouse, and the heavy leather bag in my hand bursting with textbooks and papers. She stood in the quad, a vision of London society in among the sweat and stone of Edinburgh’s future professional classes. A stranger might have interpreted her curious gaze as interest, but I knew that her mind, every bit as analytical as my own, was cataloguing everything she saw and filing it away for future criticism. A future that was imminent, and involved me.
I raised my gaze to meet hers and she smiled. There was no friendly wave or movement to approach the daughter she hadn’t seen in a year. I crossed the cobbles towards her, and kissed her weakly on each cheek, feeling her chilly flesh beneath my lips. It was the weather, I told myself. She must be freezing. But she felt like a marble statue – beautiful, but cold and unbending.
‘Mother! We weren’t expecting you until Friday. Aunt Emily said you couldn’t get away.’
‘What could be more important than my elder daughter’s engagement?’
I felt the eyes of my fellow students watching us.
‘You must be Mrs Gilchrist – how lovely to meet you! Sarah has told us so much about you.’
God bless Thornhill. She could have been at a tea party, rather than dashing between lectures. My mother took her in with a searching glance and I was relieved when she passed muster.
‘Mother, this is Alison Thorn
hill. Of the Northumbria Thornhills. Her father—’
‘Owns one of the largest cotton mills in England. A pleasure to make your acquaintance, Miss Thornhill. I met your parents at a fund-raiser several years ago. They never mentioned that their daughter had her heart set on studying medicine.’
If Alison saw Mother swallow with distaste at the mere mention of the word, she feigned obliviousness.
Mother looked around the quad, scrutinising the other girls. ‘Good Lord, is that Julia Latymer lurking in the corner?’
My rival looked like a fox caught before hounds. I wondered if Julia’s secrets had reached my family’s ears just as mine had reached hers. Edith sank into the shadows, and much as I had no love for Julia’s surly sidekick – or whatever she was – I felt sorry for her. Then again, it wasn’t as though I was rushing to introduce my fiancé to people.
‘Julia, my dear.’ Latymer’s reception was considerably warmer than mine had been, but I could still detect the note of ice in my mother’s words. The Latymers were a bohemian, progressive sort – exactly the type to send their only child off to join a scandalous profession. We had had very little to do with them in London, our social circles overlapping in places like a scientific diagram – not distant enough to be strangers, but certainly not enough in common to claim a close acquaintance.
The pair exchanged stiff pleasantries until Julia was sensible enough to claim a prior engagement and fled. I had never seen her scared before, and it was an unnerving experience.
Mother glanced down at me and frowned. ‘You’re not wearing your engagement ring.’
‘I didn’t want to accidentally drop it in a corpse mid dissection,’ I snapped. Why couldn’t I stop myself from provoking her? Less than five minutes in her presence and we were already at war.
She huffed. ‘Well, we should be off. Where’s your hat? You girls really can’t be running around half dressed.’
The Unquiet Heart Page 7