Mrs. Brodie’s Academy for Exceptional Young Ladies

by Galen, Shana

  She pressed at her temples, a gesture he recognized as her sorting-out-a-plan maneuver. For an instant, he took hope that she was thinking up a way to come along, to lend comfort to a woman she’d always been fond of.

  “I hope she will be well,” Marianne said. “Of course you must go, and give her all my best. But, Jack—”

  “You could come along,” he blurted. “That is, you could come after the Donor Dinner. Visit your mother.”

  She looked around at her room. “Oh. No, I—no. I don’t want to go back.”

  Which was different from, I can’t go back. He wasn’t sure which was better.

  “Are you certain of that?” he pressed. “Two years you’ve been in this room as cook, and there’s not a drawing or book or trinket to show it’s yours. This looks like the room of someone who’s ready to leave, Marianne.”

  She lifted her brows, looking piqued. “It’s not. It’s the room of someone who expects to be left and who will get away before she has to bear the humiliation of it.”

  He understood what she meant. It all went back to eight years ago, when they’d been split apart. He tried pacing, gave up at the small width of the room, and stood before her. “Eight years ago, did you truly want to come to London? Or did you just want to get away from me?”

  Her mouth opened. Not a single word came out.

  “I see,” he said. “You can’t give me an answer, which tells me right enough what it is.”

  “Jack, all that was so long ago.” She stretched out a hand, the one he’d held just a few minutes ago.

  “It was, and yet it seems we’re not done with it.” He’d never considered before whether he blamed her for leaving Lincolnshire so abruptly, leaving him to deal with the sad families left behind.

  It seemed he did. He didn’t take her hand. As she let it fall to her side again, he spoke on.

  “When the banns were called for Helena and me, you could have stayed in your father’s home, but you were too proud and determined to do that, and you left for London. I think you don’t do anything you don’t want to, and you never will. I just wonder what you’ll want next.”

  “Not to be left behind again,” she mumbled.

  He set his jaw. “Your family was left behind, not you. And you’re not the only one who had losses.

  “Your mother wanted me to go after you,” he added. “Did you know that? She thought you’d be murdered on your way to London.”

  “Obviously, I didn’t know that. And just as obviously, I wasn’t murdered, and you didn’t come after me.”

  “I did. It just took me a few years, until I could be proper about the matter.”

  “Proper.” She laughed dryly. “Nothing we’ve done in this room has been proper.”

  “And how we’ve enjoyed it.” He returned her smile, feeling it as a reprieve. “As you might guess, your father argued your mother out of her plans. You were almost of age, he said, and he knew you’d had your life shaken up. He told her he’d have friends of his in London check on you.”

  “Which friends?”

  “Ah—I don’t know. Does it matter?”

  “I—no, not really. But I did go away, and I can’t ask him now. I can’t ask him anything ever again.” She sank onto the bed, as if weighted by the years that had passed.

  He crouched before her. “I couldn’t have given up love, our love, for any reason but love. Not money, not greed, not security—nothing for myself, because with you I had enough. But for love of my family, I could. I had to.”

  “You made the sensible choice,” she said. “I know that. We’ve discussed that.” She looked at him with eyes like emeralds. Like spring lettuces, costing too dear. Like leaves on the trees he was missing. Like a mossy stone, perfect for skipping, on the banks of a pond near his home. “I haven’t seen the sea in eight years either. At home, I would be able to go to the sea and put my feet in the sand.”

  Home. He pounced on this, thinking of what would appeal to a cook. “And collect mussels and catch fresh fish.”

  She rolled her eyes. “I would leave the catching to the fishermen, cold as the North Sea is. But you’ve a good thought. Cookery in different parts of England is—or could be—much different.”

  That hadn’t been his thought at all, but he let her credit him for the insight. “Then you’ll come with me?” He let himself hope.

  “I was only musing. No, I won’t be going back.” She shook her head. “Will you be returning to me?”

  God, this room was hot. How would she get any sleep in here tonight? “As soon as I’m able. Though I can’t know when that would be, because of my mother’s health. You must see that.”

  She laid a hand on his chest—to feel his heartbeat, he thought, but no, she was only pushing him back a small distance so she could rise from the bed. Jack stood, knees and ankles popping as he rose from his crouch. Yet another way the years had left their mark.

  Her fingers became busy, tucking strands of hair beneath her cap. “What you’ve said ought to sound like a promise. But instead, I’m left wondering—when were you going to tell me you are leaving? All I have is my kitchen, Jack, and you made me look a fool in it.” Her hands dropped, her voice lowered. “You made me feel foolish.”

  “I don’t like telling you things you won’t like.” He knew this was the wrong thing to say as soon as the words left his mouth.

  “Don’t you? You don’t like telling me you’ll be leaving me for a perfectly understandable reason, or that you’ve hired a generous number of servants to replace you and make my job easier?”

  “Well.” When she put it that way, his thinking was stupid. “I was afraid that when I left early, it would remind you of eight years ago. And so I wanted to—”

  “To make certain of it?” She rounded on him, filling the small room with her anger. “To make certain you caught me unawares, left me unprepared and gaping in the place I ought to feel safest? Hearing another’s name called in the banns in church with yours. Having servants file into my kitchen expecting to be put to work. Jack.”

  She was shaking now. He reached out a hand to her, but she batted it away. “Jack,” she said again, her voice cracking on the syllable. He hardly recognized the sound from lips that had spoken his name so many times. “Jack. Is this your way? Solve your problems at my expense? Buy your way out of a promise? Never tell me a truth you think I won’t like, until it can’t be ignored and it shatters my life?”

  Clearly, they weren’t talking only about the kitchenmaids anymore.

  He shouldn’t feel as if he were in the wrong, should he, for leaving to visit his mother? Yet he did, because his departure was so much…more. There was always more, always another layer of emotion old and new.

  Damn love, damn devotion. It was ridiculously complicated, and with all he had learned in life, he’d never mastered how to talk about it.

  “You don’t trust me,” she said. “You don’t trust me to understand. You don’t trust me with the truth of your life. All we have is make-believe and strawberries.”

  Stung, he replied, “That’s terribly unfair. We have cabbages too—all right, this isn’t the time for a joke. But, Marianne, I’ve done what I thought best. My parents never loved each other, which is why my father was so adamant that I make a marriage for gain. My best friend ran off to London eight years ago and wrote to everyone but me. Those things are real, as real as this room. And if I hid the truth, it was because I couldn’t bear to lose you.”

  “But you knew you would then. Wedding someone else has that effect.” Her tone was dust-dry. “So really, yes, you didn’t trust me to understand that you might have obligations to others besides me.”

  She moved past him to put a hand on the door’s handle. “That was a large matter. This is a small one—at least, I hope it is, and your mother will recover. But if you don’t trust me in matters large or small, then we haven’t any foundation for being together. So you needn’t return after all.”

  She sounded so cold. A
ll business, as she might with a new kitchenmaid she wasn’t sure she had any use for. And he realized, “You haven’t really forgiven me, have you?”

  She let her arm fall to her side. “You told me from the moment of your arrival that you aren’t sorry for any choice you’ve made. If you’re not apologizing, then what is there to forgive? There’s no wrongdoing on either side. There’s only what had to be then and what can’t be now.”

  “What do you mean, it can’t be?”

  “I belong here. You belong there, three days’ travel north, with your uncomfortable truths hidden in your pockets until they don’t fit anymore. So it’s clear that we don’t belong together.”

  No. This couldn’t be it. This couldn’t be it. “You’re ending it? After all this time waiting?”

  “You haven’t been waiting for me. The person who leaves isn’t the one who waits, and you left me the moment you agreed to marry someone else.” She smiled, but it was nothing like an expression of joy. “I left for London years ago. Now it’s your turn to walk away. Odd how I am the one left behind, whether I depart or show you the door.”

  How was she so calm? He was a roiling mess of feelings that he couldn’t put a name to. “You say that as if I mean nothing to you. When the kitchenmaids arrived”—damn those kitchenmaids—“I was trying to tell you how I feel about you. That you’re my choice, and I love you.”

  “You are certainly free to do that. I can’t change your feelings. Nor can I make you trust me, or think of the power you have when you hold someone’s heart and dignity in your hands.” She turned her back to him, tracing the line in the door where two boards were joined.

  “I hold your heart? But you never said—”

  “Forget what I said or didn’t say. What I’m saying now is what counts. I won’t let you ruin another place for me. I won’t place my trust where it isn’t returned.” She was turning the handle now. “I have a life here, one that I created myself, and I don’t have to rely on you. I shouldn’t have let myself do it at all.”

  “But I want you to. You can.” He knew she would hear the words as hollow.

  Indeed, she shook her head. “The only thing I ask of you is to leave if you’ve a mind to. And don’t plan to come back again.”

  She opened the door of her chamber; the air of the kitchens was comparatively cool on his face. She pushed past him and, with skill and speed, took charge of the four new maids.

  She didn’t trust him anymore, and it was his own doing. If his heart was cracking into bits, that was his own doing too.

  He drew himself up. Retrieved his hat and coat. And then, because he’d never been able to deny Marianne anything but his hand in marriage, he obeyed her wishes and left.

  Chapter Seven

  AFTER THREE DAYS IN his carriage, Jack was a mass of thwarted energy and wonderings and worries. As soon as the wheels turned from the main road and rolled past the low red-brick wall that edged this side of his property, he was knocking to his driver to pull up. Then he was opening the door, bounding down, arranging to have his things brought on to the main house, and haring off to the dower house.

  The Grahames had always owned a great deal of land, though it hadn’t produced well until the Wilcox money had allowed for improvements in drainage. Now, as the carriage trundled on along the graveled drive to Westerby Grange, he cut through tidy fields and passed beneath trees, fresh and spring green. Here and there, the land was still wild, and he slopped through the edge of a waterlogged fen. Thinking, wondering, with every pumping stride. Had it been worth it, leaving London and Marianne? Was his mother well? Had he done right?

  A small distance separated the dower house from the main building, and Jack’s path had been the most direct. Let the carriage make its ponderous and proper way; he’d thunder through one more copse and—there! The smaller copy of the Grange was square and sturdy red brick, with a bowed front, and…and thank God, there was no black crepe swagged over the windows. If Mrs. Grahame was gravely ill, she yet survived.

  He strode to the front entrance, now feeling every bit of the heavy sog of his abused boots, and caught his breath before he thumped the knocker. The butler who answered wore his usual uniform of severe black and white, his usual mien of unflappable politeness.

  “Mr. Grahame, good afternoon,” said Trilby. “May I say, sir, welcome home?”

  “You may, with my thanks,” Jack said, still slightly winded. “Is my mother well?”

  “She is almost herself again.” The butler stood aside to welcome Jack into the little entrance hall. Trilby, a long-loved and now elderly servant, had moved from the main house to the dower with Jack’s mother upon his marriage. Jack trusted the old servant’s report more than his own mother’s account of her health, which was likely to be offhanded and vague so as not to worry him.

  Perhaps he’d inherited that hide-the-troublesome-truth quality from his mother.

  With Trilby’s reassurance, Jack let out a great breath. It released the tension within him, though it left him hollow and dissatisfied. If he’d known…if he hadn’t left London…

  Would it have mattered? Or would he have ruined his chance with Marianne soon enough, in some similar way?

  Trilby would never raise his brows or demonstrate impatience, but the way he hovered close was an unmistakable nudge. “Would you care to join Mrs. Grahame and Mrs. Redfern in the drawing room? Miss Grahame arrived perhaps ten minutes ago, and tea has just been served.”

  Miss Grahame—that meant his sister Viola. Maybe it was for the best that he’d walk in on all three women at once. He could greet them all, then leave with his duty done, and they could get on with their gossip about him.

  Taking the hint from Trilby, Jack entered the drawing room and faced the trio of familiar faces that turned his way. There was Marianne’s mother, Mrs. Redfern, a spare and tidy woman almost crippled by rheumatism, but still with the strong chin and bright eyes she’d bequeathed to her three daughters. Viola, Jack’s elder sister, in her usual half mourning, with wide and shrewd gray eyes and her light hair in a low knot. And in her favorite chair, surrounded by cushions, was Jack’s mother, as round and wrinkled as an apple beginning to show its age and still just as rosy. Her once-black hair was now heavily salted with white, and it curled as tightly as Jack’s would if he didn’t keep it cropped short.

  True to the butler’s word, she looked well enough. She was tired, that was clear from the cushions supporting her, but her hands on her cup and saucer were steady. Her voice, when she greeted Jack, was clear.

  And then began the interrogation.

  “Jacob Elias, you’ve come all alone?” She craned her neck to look behind him. “No Marianne with you?”

  Jacob, ugh. Elias, double ugh. “I rushed back to see how you were,” Jack explained. “Marianne still had work to do in London.”

  Mrs. Redfern’s shoulders sank. “I’d wished to see her again, very much.”

  She wasn’t the only one, though all three women knew that. Jack had journeyed to London on impulse, he thought, but not a one of these widows had seemed surprised by his plans. Instead, they’d all told him a more ladylike version of, It’s about damned time, and, Put a ring on her finger, and, You sapskull.

  “Why on earth are you here without her?” Jack’s mother asked. “I was only sending you news. I didn’t ask you to return home. Why didn’t you just write?”

  “What does my daughter look like now?” asked Mrs. Redfern. “Is she well? Did she send you with a letter for me?”

  “What did you do to ruin things with Marianne?” Viola demanded.

  Jack rolled his eyes. “Can’t I have tea and cakes before you sling all these questions at me?”

  “Fine,” said his mother. “But you have to sit on the jackal.”

  Strange though it sounded, this statement made perfect sense to Jack. His mother, flush with funds and independence all at once, had completely redecorated the dower house in Egyptian style a few years before. Her chair, striped in a
bright gold and blue silk, nestled in a corner of the small drawing room. Near at hand was a scroll-back settee of startling crimson on which perched the other two women. Which meant the only other place to sit was on the larger-than-life seated jackal of black-painted wood.

  Not for the first time, Jack sat on the back of his near-namesake and patted its pricked ears. “Two sugars, please, Mother,” he said. “I’m tired out from the trip. And in answer to your questions—as you see, Marianne’s not with me. Mrs. Redfern, she’s well and strong and beautiful, and she cooks like a dream, and I’m a villain for not getting a letter from her.

  “And I didn’t write for news, Mother, because…I wanted to see for myself that you were all right.” He’d come to see how his mother did, just as he’d gone to London to see Marianne. He didn’t want to write to people when he could see them for himself.

  He just wished he hadn’t had to leave one person behind to see the others.

  She handed over his tea with a smile. “It’s a good thing you cared enough to come. I had a few bad days of it and complained unendingly.”

  “You weren’t that bad,” allowed Mrs. Redfern. “But there are many reasons to be grateful you’ve recovered.”

  “You haven’t answered my question,” Viola said. “What have you done wrong?”

  “Why must I have done anything wrong?” He gulped tea, taking strength from its heat and sweetness. “How do you know we’re not betrothed and I’m not deliriously happy?”

  All three women looked at him in pointed silence.

  After a moment, he relented. Balancing his cup beside him on the jackal’s back, he said, “She thinks I don’t trust her. So she’s done with me.”

  All three women looked at him in accusing silence.

  Viola was the first to break it. Sighing heavily, she stood, which meant Jack did also. “Walk me back to the Grange,” she said. “You can explain everything on the way.”