by Mia Vincy
“Oh heavens,” Cassandra said. “I completely forgot she was here.”
And he felt proud of himself for that, at least.
They helped each other tidy up and dress. Cassandra went through the motions, and was grateful to have motions to go through. How comforting to have something sensible and practical to do. The world felt strange, yet normal. Her body felt unfamiliar, yet natural. And to dress with a man felt completely new and ages old.
Yet somewhere amid this new familiarity, awkwardness sprouted and grew.
The letters, of course.
They still sat on the table, taking up too much room. She picked them up and held them out.
“It’s all right,” she said. “I already knew you loved her.”
He took the letters, considered them. “It wasn’t a love match, but we were friends.” He glanced up. “I wrote these to her after she died. I missed her.”
His dark eyes were tinged with anguish, an old sorrow, a new anger, and she belatedly grasped the full horror of their theft.
“And they stole them! I swear, Joshua, if you don’t shoot them, I will.”
He brushed a finger over her cheek. “Don’t bother. They’re not worth it. We’ll finish them easily enough.”
She had made a royal mess of his cravat, and he went to the mirror to retie it without seeking her help, so she did not offer it. Instead, she watched him peering at his reflection as though tying his cravat was the only thing on his mind. How curious people were: that they could experience something like that—that lovemaking that made the world splinter and dance—and then settle into domestic routines as though nothing at all had passed.
Although she was not sure what had passed. Certainly, she did not know what happened next. The world outside that door was demanding her attention and she wanted to be alone.
“How did you meet her? Rachel.”
“Her father was John Watkins, who owned the manufactories where your father found me a job as an errand boy,” he said, looping the cloth efficiently around his neck. “I worked my way up, and by the time I was nineteen, I was a senior clerk and Watkins was grooming me to take over. He had no succession plan because Rachel was his only child, and she was twenty-seven and unwed, and until me he had not found anyone suitable. She wanted to manage the business but Watkins didn’t take her seriously, and she felt the men who courted her didn’t either. She offered to marry me if I let her run the factories with me.”
“And did you? Let her run them?”
“I’d have been a fool not to. She excelled at it, knew every inch of the business. Watkins never realized how much she had to offer. Even when we were doing well, he thought it was all me.” He finished up the imperfect knot, patted it, and shrugged. “It still stuns me,” he added, turning back to her. “How much is wasted when men decide that certain babies are worth nothing because of their birth or class or sex or skin? How much do we all lose, as a nation, as humans, by dismissing people simply because they are not like us?”
“Like what happened to you.”
“What the blazes are you on about now?”
“I mean, you were a lord and then overnight the world decided you were worth nothing, but you proved them wrong. You could have given up, or become bitter. But you learned and now you want to make the world a fairer place for others too.”
“You think that I…But I’m just…” He made a frustrated sound and scrubbed his hands through his hair. “I’d better go.”
“Will you…” She paused. “I suppose I shall have to cancel my evening plans, spend the evening with Lucy and Emily and figure out what to do about them. Will you join us for dinner? I mean…”
“I don’t know about dinner,” he said. “But I’ll come to you tonight. If you’ll have me. Once is not enough.”
Joshua went about the rest of his day with renewed vigor, until finally it was night, and time to go to her. He made love to her properly, with no fabric between them—with nothing between them but the candlelight.
And when the candles were out and he held her against him, their skin so close he could not find the edges, he listened to her breathe and stared into the darkness and said, “Rachel and I had a son.”
She jerked out of his arms. It was too dark to see her expression, which is why he’d told her in the night.
“I didn’t know,” she said. “Papa never said. You never said.”
“It never came up in the conversation.”
“Oh, maybe when I expressed my desire to have a child? You might have said, ‘I already had a child and I lost him’.”
He pulled her back against him. She gave him her weight and did not argue anymore.
“He was barely five when…” He closed his eyes in the darkness. “One day he was fine, then he was sick, and then he was gone. There was nothing we could have done differently. Just one of those things. One of the ways the world likes to laugh at us, to remind us that we are never in control.”
“I’m so sorry.”
“I don’t want your sympathy.”
“Too bad. You have it anyway.”
His heart beat too fast, and he was too hot, suddenly, but if she noticed, she didn’t say a word. She stroked his chest, soothing him, and soon he calmed.
“What was his name?” she asked softly.
“Samuel.”
He focused on her hand, the warm pressure skating over his ribcage, resting familiarly on his belly.
“What was he like?”
He had pictures, no words. She moved, her hair feathering him, her mouth finding a spot just above his collarbone.
“He was a little whirlwind,” he said. “He wouldn’t walk if he could run or jump or skip. He wanted to know everything about everything. I never realized how much I didn’t know, until I had to answer his questions.” He stared at the dark, seeing those images of the past, fearing he would lose them. “Bram sent this tiger-skin rug from India: his idea of a joke. Rachel thought it was horrific, so of course I used to put it out on the floor to annoy her. Samuel loved it. He’d have long conversations with it, and we’d find him asleep on it, hugging the tiger’s head. We called him our little tiger.”
When he stopped, she did not ask him anything more, but waited patiently for him to speak again.
“After he died, Rachel…She needed something to do. We had housing for all our workers—following Robert Owen, you see—but she became obsessed with providing decent housing for everyone in Birmingham, fixing up derelict buildings. One of those buildings collapsed.”
“Oh heavens. Joshua.”
“I razed them all. Built them anew. It didn’t bring either of them back.”
Here in the dark, with her, the world receded and he felt he could tell her anything at all. She stroked his hair, and he let her comfort him.
And as he drifted off to sleep, he had the odd thought that maybe the void inside him had nothing to do with the loved ones he had lost.
Chapter 19
Joshua came to her the next three nights too, sliding naked under the sheets with wicked words and teasing hands. She marveled at his passionate response to her, and her fevered response to him, at the way their lovemaking left her feeling at home in her own body as she never had before.
Afterward, they chatted quietly. He spoke of his businesses and associates and ideas; she spoke of her friends and garden and Sunne Park’s famous pigs. Fearful of breaking their fragile accord, she never mentioned their families, their past, or their future; neither did he.
Most of all, they never spoke of children, and though she dared not mention it, she secretly wondered if she might already be with child, for they made love two or three times each night, sometimes him on top, and one time he turned her over, and other times he pulled her on top of him. “Riding rantipole,” he called that, and teased her for being lazy, and demanded to know why he had to do all the work, and urged her to ride him faster, which she found difficult when she was laughing.
“Be greedy with me
,” he whispered to her. “Be greedy and selfish and rude. Do as you please, take what you want, and for mercy’s sake tell me if I do something you don’t like.”
They slept wrapped around each other, but he awoke early and she awoke alone. During the day, they went their separate ways, but at odd moments—usually highly inappropriate moments—a memory of their lovemaking would flash across her mind and heat her insides, and she would think that she did not recognize herself. Which she also knew was a lie.
It made her feel stronger, somehow. She felt more equal to dealing with the swollen household and to waging their social war.
And to putting up with her sisters’ ceaseless complaints. About how London was boring, and Cassandra was selfish, and how, Lucy grumbled on the fourth day after their arrival, as the three sisters sat in the drawing room, “it is utterly stupid that we came all the way to London and we cannot even go to Vauxhall Gardens.”
Lucy stopped tearing through the pages of a magazine and threw it across the room. Apparently, she found that diverting, for she immediately threw another.
“Or the theater,” Emily chimed in, her tone sounding more like Lucy’s every day. “It’s stupid not to go to the theater.”
“You’re not meant to be in London at all,” Cassandra pointed out for the thousandth time, as she sorted through the gratifyingly large number of invitations, deciding which would be of most use. “Letting you go out would be like rewarding you for misbehaving.”
“So we must stay locked up like scullery maids while you go out all the time,” Lucy said.
“Not at all,” Cassandra said. “I would never lock up a scullery maid.”
“No wonder you do not want us here. You want to enjoy town without us.”
Enjoy? This social whirl, and the effort of making herself popular, was exhausting.
But her social campaign seemed to be working. The impending trial was earning her hundreds of hours of gossip, as society and the press debated which party was telling the truth, and battle lines had emerged between Bolderwood supporters and DeWitt supporters.
The Bolderwood camp spun a story of a naive wife and wicked seducer, with the noble husband willing to forgive his wife for her foolishness but determined to punish the seducer for his crime. It was a fine and convincing tale, but Arabella, who had appointed herself general of the campaign, reported that the DeWitt army was stronger, for Cassandra was well-liked, her parents had been adored, and everybody disapproved of Lord Bolderwood’s elopement in the first place. Furthermore, gentlemen wished to remain on Joshua’s good side, as he was their connection to industry and the new money that it promised, and when Joshua joined her at evening events, the consensus was that Mr. and Mrs. DeWitt were fond of each other.
Unfortunately, their grandmother had not changed her mind about taking Lucy, but she supported Cassandra by loudly discrediting Lord Bolderwood and rallying her own allies. Privately, the duchess had opined that Mr. DeWitt should settle the dispute outside of court; Cassandra had politely but firmly replied that her husband would not do that, as the allegations were false.
It would be a waste of breath to point out to her sister now that Cassandra’s primary aim was to smooth Lucy’s entry into society. For reasons Cassandra could not fathom, Lucy had decided that Cassandra was a villain.
“I can go out freely because I’m a married woman,” Cassandra said. “If I could trust you to behave, Lucy, you could make your debut and get married too.”
“Married woman, my foot!” Lucy sneered. “Do you two even talk to each other?”
“Why don’t you get a marriage of your own before you comment on mine?”
“I like Joshua,” Emily volunteered.
Good,” said Cassandra. “So do I.”
It was perplexing how much she liked him now. It had seemed so simple when she first suggested children: He would bed her, it would be unpleasant but she would get with child, and then they would return to their separate lives. That they would part was still inevitable, but she feared she would miss him. Perhaps he would visit her at Sunne Park. Perhaps they could meet in London each spring, and she could have a passionate affair with her own husband.
But he was giving her what she asked for; she had no right to ask for more. When the time came for them to part, she vowed, she would not say a word.
“Mr. Newell knows a clerk at Drury Lane,” Emily said abruptly. “He offered to take me backstage, and I could meet the actors and actresses and playwrights, and show someone my plays.”
Cassandra stared at her. “Meet actresses? Please wait a few years before you destroy your reputation. For now, stick to amateur dramatics and remember you are the granddaughter of a duchess.”
“Which does us no good at all,” Lucy said and sent another magazine skittering across the floor. “Where is this precious duchess anyway?”
Before Cassandra could find an answer, the butler appeared at the door.
“A caller, madam,” he said. “Her Grace, the Duchess of Sherbourne.”
“Good morning, Cassandra, my dear,” their grandmother said as she breezed in, stylish in a sky-blue gown and matching turban. She ignored Lucy and Emily, standing prettily, and immediately launched into a speech.
“You have gotten what you wanted: Congratulations,” the duchess said, with her pleasant smile. “Setting your husband on mine, so now Sherbourne says that I must abandon my own interests for you, for it’s only thanks to his investments with Mr. DeWitt that he can pay for them. I abhor this vulgar emphasis on money, but such are the times in which we live.”
“I don’t understand, Grandmother.”
“Oh, don’t feign ignorance, dear. You know what I’m talking about: Your husband demanded that I do your bidding or Sherbourne will be cut off. You are more cunning than I realized, and I concede it was well played, but I would rather you did not exercise such ploys against me.”
A sweet pleasure radiated through her as she understood: Joshua had secretly intervened to help her, and now, it seemed, her grandmother would take Lucy after all.
And Cassandra had promised to return to Sunne Park when that was done.
The pleasure faded, replaced by a hollow disappointment. By helping her, Joshua ensured that she and her sisters would be gone sooner and his life would go back to normal.
Well. This was what they had agreed. This was what she had wanted. She could not blame him if she kept changing what she wanted.
“My schedule is less busy anyway,” the duchess went on. “For now Sherbourne says I spend too much time with Sir Arthur. Where is she, then?” Her eyes fell on Emily. “Not that one, she’s too young.”
“I’m fourteen!” Emily protested.
“Hush, Em,” Cassandra said.
“You don’t look a day over eleven and ought to be in the schoolroom. Really, Cassandra, you should…” The duchess spread her fingers in a gesture of defeat. “No concern of mine. If I take an interest, you’ll expect me to drop everything for that one too. Do send the child away, though.”
Emily looked stricken and Cassandra silently cursed their grandmother. But this was Lucy’s moment. One sister at a time.
“Emily, dear,” she said. “Perhaps you can talk with Grandmother another time.”
“Why can’t I stay?” Emily looked around, hurt. “Lucy! Tell them I can stay.”
But Lucy was feasting her eyes on the duchess and said nothing.
“Fine.” Emily stalked to the door. “I shall be in the nursery playing with my dolls. Off with their heads!” she yelled and marched out.
Cassandra resisted the urge to go after her. She dared not leave Lucy alone with the duchess.
“You must be Lucy. I see you are a beauty, indeed.” With uncharacteristic demureness, Lucy sank into a deep, graceful curtsy. “With those looks, men will not notice if you speak gibberish. Is it too much to hope that you have some interest in the classical world?”
“Old Greek and Roman things?” Lucy said, with an eye-roll. “So bo
ring.”
The duchess’s mouth tightened, and Cassandra repressed a sigh. Why, oh why, did Lucy have to break things? She had told Lucy of their grandmother’s fascination.
But Lucy had not finished.
“All those Greek temples and Roman statues and so forth,” she said. “They are all so bland and boring and white. Imagine living in a world where every building, every statue, and every item of clothing is the same color. It would be like a nightmare.”
“Go on,” said the duchess, her head cocked with interest.
Cassandra looked back and forth between them. She could not tell if Lucy was expressing a genuine opinion, or if she was being cunning, and it occurred to her, yet again, that she did not know her younger sister at all.
Lucy smiled, all earnest innocence. “I have always thought it would be marvelous if they were painted bright colors. But, of course, everyone would say that is vulgar, wouldn’t they?”
“‘Everyone’ should not talk about things they don’t understand,” Her Grace said, her eyes bright and sharp. “My dear friend Sir Arthur Kenyon maintains that the ancients did paint their temples and statues in bright colors, but that the paint has come off over the centuries. Others say he is full of nonsense, but time will show he is right.”
The duchess beamed at Lucy, who briefly met Cassandra’s eyes and did not give away a thing.
“I shall launch you at my ball next week,” the duchess announced. She turned back to Cassandra, her mouth pinched. “If that meets your demands, madam?”
“We are grateful, Grandmother,” Cassandra said, ignoring her tone. “When this matter with Lord Bolderwood has passed, I shall return to Sunne Park. Would Lucy be able to remain with you?”
“If she comports herself well at the ball, then yes, I shall see her through the Season. You know my view on the matter of Lord Bolderwood, but like your father, you refuse my advice. I suppose you will come running for my help again when you need it.”