by Carrie Lomax
Harper met his eyes. Richard could not have made it clearer that he was plotting against his brother. In that moment, Harper knew implicitly that she was nothing more than an obstacle in his quest to usurp his brother’s inheritance, and that he would not hesitate for a single second to ruin her in the process of ruining his brother. Richard did not care whom else might be hurt.
Harper went to her room and poured a splash of water into her washbasin, her stomach turning as she splashed cool water on her face. She had learned the hard way that appearing before her patients’ families in a state of dishevelment did not enhance her already-questionable professionalism. After patting her damp hair into place, she followed the sounds of raised male voices down the hall to the earl’s study.
The door was ajar. Harper paused just outside, listening.
“When are you going to see reason and have Edward sent away?” bellowed Richard, pacing before the fireplace. “First, he runs half-naked over the rooftops of London, then he climbs the walls and runs about like a savage here at Briarcliff. This has been going on for weeks, Father. Miss Forsythe’s presence is worse than useless — ahem. Miss Forsythe.”
Richard looked every inch the future earl, his brow properly furrowed in outrage at his older brother’s purported villainy. Edward, on the other hand, stood near the window, looking as though he was one second away from opening it and making his escape. His shirt hung half-untucked, his trousers rolled at the ankle, and he was bereft of cravat, waistcoat, jacket, and stockings, much less shoes. Dirt smudged his legs and arms. There was no avoiding the fact that he looked like a farmhand.
Charles brightened at Harper’s silent entrance.
“It’s Doctor Forsythe,” Harper reminded Richard coolly. It was now or never. She had to decide whether she was going to help Edward or leave. But if she stayed, whose interests was she serving? Her own, or her patient’s?
Richard rolled his eyes. It was almost as if he could hear her thoughts.
“It is my professional opinion that Lord Edward is no danger to anyone. Incarceration would be inappropriate and would set back the progress that Lord Edward has already made,” she began. “Do recall, Mr. Northcote, that your brother has survived a series of ordeals that would have broken a lesser man.”
“It’s Lord Northcote to you, Miss Forsythe,” Richard snapped.
“I beg pardon. Upon your brother’s return, I understood that the courtesy title had reverted to the eldest son.” Harper curtsied. There was nothing to fault in her actions and words, but Richard’s grimace told her just how much the salt of her words stung.
Lord Briarcliff wearily indicated his eldest son. “Richard believes that Edward is a danger to the staff.”
Aha. Perhaps Edward had been onto something. His meaning hadn’t been altogether clear, but he had been trying to warn her. The subject of their discussion continued staring out the window, still as a statue.
“And, quite possibly, to you, Miss Forsythe,” the earl said quietly. “I have every faith in your ability, but I must also consider how the world views this most peculiar arrangement.”
Harper shook her head. “I don’t understand. We agreed that it was not an issue.”
“Your youth and your sex make you a prospective victim of Edward’s depravity. Do recall that he has lived amongst savages these past fifteen years.” Richard’s pitying tone reminded Harper that her entire livelihood depended upon her devising a strategy for managing Richard. Right now.
“I assure you I am not at risk,” she replied sternly. “Lord Northcote is not depraved.”
“Yes, if anything, your brother is at risk from Miss Forsythe’s advances,” the earl interjected.
Startled, Harper turned to the earl. “Your lordship?”
Wearily the earl waved her away. “Yes, I understand. Peculiarity of the circumstances and all. I haven’t forgotten the incident in the tree yesterday.”
Harper took several shaky steps to where Edward remained by the window sill. She was going to lose everything – this opportunity, the asylum directorship, any chance of a career.
“Edward, I trust you will not allow my temporary lapse of judgment to interfere with the excellent progress we have been making toward your restoration to full health,” she said with all the sincerity she could muster.
“I’m not sick,” he countered automatically. “Does this mean you take it back?”
“The peck on the cheek? Yes, of course.”
“That’s too bad, I quite liked it.”
Silence descended. Shocked, Harper gaped at him. It was one thing to say such things in private conversation, but before his family? Bizarrely, he seemed sincere.
Richard began to laugh.
He thinks I’m a joke, she realized with a hot rush of fury. Richard thinks I’m nothing but a spinsterish, desperate fool. She pasted a brittle smile on her face as though she were in on the jest, and not the butt.
“You see, your lordship?” she said to the skeptical earl. “Edward has regained a very British sense of humor. Surely this is progress indeed.”
Harper’s voice betrayed no hint of the humiliation crushing her lungs. You are a lonely spinster with an idiotic attraction to a man so distant from you that he might as well live on another planet. Nothing in this world will change that fact.
The earl, visibly fatigued, nonetheless seemed bemused. The vise around her midsection released. Air sucked into her lungs. Two breaths steadied her. Richard’s intentions were clear. He wanted his brother locked away. Harper understood that this was just a skirmish in a war she stood little chance of winning.
Richard had power, money and influence on his side; she had what little virtue was accorded unusually-employed women and her wits. Odds were good that unless she could get Richard out of the way for more than a few days at a stretch, she was going to fail spectacularly at rehabilitating Edward into polite society. And if Richard succeeded at provoking his brother to violence, his brother was finished. She would be fine as a lonely spinster with no employment prospects of any sort and the kind of blackened reputation accorded women who spent time alone with men. But Edward? He would be destroyed.
Worse, Edward didn’t appear to have registered the damage his comment had done.
It occurred to Harper that she hadn’t asked him whether he wanted to be the earl. What if he didn’t care about the title?
“Returning to our original topic. Mr. Northcote, you implied that the staff perceive a threat in Edward’s behavior. Can you be more specific?” She narrowed her eyes. Given the state of alarm amongst the servants she had overheard in the hall, it would not take much effort from Richard to fan the flame.
“The female staff in particular fear for their virtue.”
“Why?”
Richard scowled. “He can access any area of the house from the exterior. Several maids have reported him watching them.”
“Lord Northcote and I have discussed how his unorthodox methods of egress and ingress are unsettling to others. Haven’t we?”
Edward ignored her, still staring out the window at nothing. She poked her elbow at his side. He nodded curtly. Harper fought a surge of hopelessness. She could not change someone who did not want to change. Then again, this was longer than she had ever yet observed him to remain in an uncomfortable setting without fleeing via the nearest exit. Credit where credit was due.
“Edward has agreed to refrain from climbing in and out of windows, effective immediately,” Harper continued. “Tomorrow we shall address his perpetual state of dishabille. I consider this quite substantive progress for such a brief period of peace as I have had to work.” She cut Richard a sharp glare. Harper bobbed a curtsey and exited the room with her chin high. She resisted the temptation to linger at the door, though Richard began arguing the instant she left the room. As soon as she was out of earshot, Harper’s feet turned faster, racing for the sanctuary of her room.
Chapter 7
Edward did not go out the window. He star
ed out into the summer afternoon for some time after Harper had left the room, listening to his brother rage as he fought the impulse to go to her and soothe the stricken expression away. Richard’s words had hurt her. Or his. Edward had a feeling it was the latter. His father poured a glass of something alcoholic and sat beside the fireplace, rubbing his forehead.
Having let him out of the cage in which he had arrived, Richard now wanted to lock him away in an asylum. What would it feel like, being locked away from the sky, from the air? How would he live without staring at the stars for the comfort that came from knowing that somewhere in the world his people were telling ancient stories about the same bright lights?
The pull to return to his people was waning. While this cavernous manor house felt as foreign as ever, he had begun to realize that the idea of commandeering a ship and sailing back to Brazil was highly unlikely at best. He did not have the knowledge or money to get to a ship and sail home—and he wouldn’t, unless he inherited the earldom.
Edward had long forgotten that there were elements of England that weren’t so terrible. Like the weather, which in summer was warm but rarely hot, at least if one wore the proper degree of clothing. Years ago, after he had been accepted into the tribe, he had forced himself to stop dreaming of his homeland. Since Miss Forsythe’s arrival, he had started boxing his memories of Brazil. Soon they would be packed into a corner of his mind, and then what?
The endless idleness of aristocratic English life gnawed at him. There were no hunts to prepare for, no children to teach how to use a blow dart, no traditions to capture in carved tooth and bone.
“You’re still here, Edward?”
Edward started. He had forgotten all about his father’s presence. “I am.”
“Pour yourself a drink and sit with me awhile.”
Edward pushed away from the window and went to the chair, foregoing the drink. He had never had a chance to develop a taste for the stuff and it smelled vile.
“You so resemble your mother,” Charles said, peering at him.
Edward didn’t know how to respond to that, so he remained silent. Conversation didn’t come easily, although when he was fighting with Dr. Forsythe, he managed to get the words out. His father looked disappointed.
“I wish you were more like her. It nearly killed your mother when she received news of your disappearance. She wanted to leave your sisters behind to track you down herself. I wonder if we would have found you sooner if she had.”
The sadness in his father’s voice made his heart sink. We’ll never know, he thought. It occurred to him that this was a step forward, conversationally, so he said it aloud.
“No,” his father replied sadly. “We won’t.”
Since Edward couldn’t think of anything else to say, the conversation petered out. No wonder his father treated him like a child. He richly deserved his father’s disappointment. A seedling of shame sprouted in his breast.
Although she had tried to frame it as a choice, Edward knew that Dr. Forsythe was wrong. There was no choice, not with Richard conspiring to imprison him. His brother may have initially opened the cage that Edward had been delivered in, but now he was hell-bent on shutting Edward away again, this time for ever.
There was only one path to survival. The alternative was no future at all.
He had once learned to be a hunter. He could learn to be a gentleman.
It had been fifteen years since he had tolerated itchy wool and choking cravats, but he could learn to do so again. His feet would adapt to being enclosed in hard-soled shoes rather than moving silently over the ground. In the jungle, his life had depended upon stealth. Here it depended on self-presentation.
The hall ended, and Edward turned away from his past, toward his future. Now he walked with purpose in the direction of the doctor’s room.
He stopped at Miss Forsythe’s door. There was silence from the interior. He raised one fist to knock, but hesitated.
Unbidden, his knuckles rapped twice against the door. His feet, under different instructions, twitched in preparation for flight.
Shuffling sounds emanated from the room, barely discernable. Had the house not been utterly silent and he not standing mere inches from the door, it would have been impossible to hear them.
The door opened.
Edward forced his body through the opening, forgetting his resolve to be gentlemanly.
“Yes, your lordship?”
Forsythe’s eyes were pink around the edges and bright like watered seedlings. Tears lent her an air of vulnerability that made his gut twist. Tendrils of hair had escaped her braid to brush her temple and the nape of her neck.
Edward swallowed. Up close, her skin had a velvety texture. Her elegant nose perched above pretty lips and a stubborn chin.
“I won’t be confined,” he declared, though it was not the message he’d come to deliver.
She yielded the door another inch. Edward pushed past her, occupying the small, bright bedroom as he had done hours earlier. This time he observed the green-sprigged coverlet and trimmed pillowcases, the tastefully impersonal painting on the wall. It was a guest room for temporary residents, infrequently occupied and easily transformed into a study, or a child’s bedroom, with a change of furnishings. The only hint of its current occupant was the writing set and the neat stack of papers on the desk.
A little ball of tightly wadded paper lay at the bottom of a waste basket beside the desk. The fury in that crumpled rag paper made him itch to reach for it. If he smoothed it out and deciphered its contents, he might better understand the woman standing tight-lipped before him. Edward wondered whether anyone had tried to see past the drab clothes and straight spine to this soft-hearted woman beneath.
“What do you plan to do to prevent confinement, Edward?” she asked.
“I…” The paper would tell him what he wanted to know. At least it would give him an insight, some clue to what drove her to fight for a beast like him. He wanted that scrap of discarded paper like a starving man craved sustenance.
“I’ll do anything. I want to live up to my birthright.” He paused. “I don’t know how to get there.”
Determination squared her slim shoulders. “You get there the same way anyone achieves anything in life. You work for it.”
* * *
The next morning, Harper’s pencil scratched quickly over the page of her plain treatment journal, leaving a precise graphite summary of the morning’s progress. About ten feet away, Edward and two farm laborers lifted heavy stones, smeared mortar over them and fit them as neatly as possible into the existing patches of missing rock. The sun was getting high, and summer’s warmth had prompted all three men to remove their shirts.
Edward, of course, had gone first.
At first, she’d moved to tell him not to. But he wasn’t harming anyone, there was no one to see for miles around, and she hadn’t seen the point of embarrassing him.
Instead, Harper sat on the meadow and enjoyed the view. The field stretched around and beyond them to the arms of the sky. Cloud puffs trailed after one another. She watched them for a while—anything to keep her mind off the sight of Edward’s muscular back and the ridges that bunched across his abdomen.
A grasshopper landed near her skirt. Harper observed its striped body for a moment before it sprang away.
She picked up her journal and made a few more notes, omitting any mention of nudity. Harper glanced up at the men. She found her attention lingering on her subject and forced herself to turn away.
If she was overworked at the asylum, at least she’d never been bored. There was always something more to do. The tedium of watching men work was tolerable only with furtive glimpses at Edward. Stop watching him. You cannot afford the distraction.
With her pencil, she turned to the last page in the journal and sketched a wildflower growing a few feet away. Then she sketched the grasshopper, or another grasshopper, that had popped back into view. Against her better judgment, Harper’s pencil began traci
ng the lines of three men working on a fence. Quick marks sketched the outlines of bodies, two average, one larger. The two average figures were mere gestures. Harper spent some time detailing Edward’s body in plain graphite. A stone fence stretched into the distance.
Edward’s image held a large rock at shoulder-height, his arms bent, the better to capture his narrow waist and the curve of his…Harper dropped her pencil. She had seen those buttocks. Naked.
She unbuttoned the very top button of her bodice. Warm air escaped, yet she didn’t feel cooler. Edward was shirtless not twenty feet away. Harper was there to observe him. Maybe she should take advantage.
For a while, she did. Every few minutes she dutifully scribbled a line in her book so that it wouldn’t be obvious how she was ogling Edward. Lord Northcote, if she wanted to be proper. She didn’t—Harper enjoyed the easy friendliness developing between them. He had a lifetime of your lordships ahead of him.
A dark shadow fell over her scribbles. A large male form settled on the grass next to her, inches away. The journal leapt from her hands and landed face-down in the grass.
“I startled you,” Edward commented. “Sorry.” He picked up the journal with one sweaty hand. Harper reached for it. He held it away, flipping through the pages. “It’s about me. That means I get to read it.”
“It’s my journal.” But she didn’t protest, because it wasn’t her journal, not really. It was his record. He had a right to know what she was writing about him. Harper squirmed as he left damp thumbprints on her notes. Rivulets of perspiration ran down his neck, tracing the veins standing out from his muscled forearms.
He smelled of sweat and dirt and man. She watched a droplet trace the long muscles of his neck, pooling momentarily in a ridge of scar tissue before continuing its journey to the well of his right clavicle.