by Darcy Burke
“Useful property, that,” he murmured, pulling the paper from the stream and shaking loose a spray of drips. “Why aren’t you selling it?”
“The ink only disappears completely on sized paper,” Sophie answered, surprised that he seemed so familiar with her inventory.
“And on untreated paper?”
“Considerable fading, but traces of the writing remain legible.”
“That does limit the functionality,” Julian agreed, removing one of his gloves. “Do you think you’ll be able to improve upon the formula?”
“It’s possible. I’m not confident.”
Ceremoniously as when they were teenagers, Julian dug a hole in the winter-hard earth with one perfectly manicured hand. “May they rest in peace,” he murmured, tucking the letter into the hole before sweeping the disturbed dirt atop it.
“May they rest in peace,” Sophie repeated.
When Julian had first discovered her habit of forging letters from her parents to herself, she’d expected him to mock her. Instead, he’d added a step to the ritual. She tossed her letters into streams and rivers because her parents had died at sea. He’d suggested burying the letters, giving her parents the graves they’d never have.
Julian had claimed often, in the old days, that he fell in love with her the first time he saw her forge his handwriting. She’d fallen in love with him the first time he buried one of her letters. After resisting his pursuit for years, reinforcing her armor as fast as he could tear it down, she’d crumbled like cheap mortar.
“I thought you’d have given up this habit by now.”
“I had, mostly.”
“But?”
“But then Clive died,” Sophie admitted.
“You’re wrong about your father, you know.”
“Wrong about what?”
“Everything you wrote in your letter. Your father would never have advised you to keep your business.” Julian snorted. “He’d have hated to see you like this, dressed so shabbily, working from sunrise to sunset. If he were still alive, the shame alone would kill him.”
“You don’t know that.”
“I remember him, Sophie.” Julian met her eyes and Sophie quickly looked away, cowed and embarrassed. “What’s more, I remember your mother. She made an art of feminine delicacy. Saw herself as a gracious ornament to his household, and did her only work with a needle.”
Sophie reached up, caught herself, and forced her arms back down to her sides. Touching the scar only brought attention to it. He was so beautiful, and she was… spoiled. Like a fruit with a bruise on it, no longer good for eating. “And you think I should be more like my mother?”
“That’s not what I’m saying at all.” Julian shrugged. “If you want my advice? I don’t like Malcolm Roe, and I wouldn’t put my welfare in his hands.”
Sophie nodded, more reassured than she ought to have been.
A dog howled in the distance, long and plaintive. The stream chuckled. Julian sat on a flat, wide river rock, at an angle from her so she wouldn’t have to look directly at him. He always thought of things like that. “I was hoping the letter would contain some sort of confession. Instead… Are you leaving Padley because of me?”
Sophie snatched up the cloth napkin in which Mr. Allen had wrapped his pasties and folded it in half, then in half again.
“Wouldn’t it be better to sort it out?” Julian leaned in. “Can’t we talk?”
“About Clive?” Sophie shrugged. “If you insist.”
Julian sighed, picked up a pebble and skipped it across the stream. It bounced five times, the distance shorter with each jump, before finally sinking. “Do you remember the first time we kissed?”
“No,” she lied. She remembered a little. It had been summer, and they’d been sitting on the banks of a stream. She hadn’t expected it.
“I’d wondered how you developed your skill for forgery. It seemed such an odd skill for a young girl. But you’d never answer any of my questions, so I had to imagine the answers. I entertained the wildest notions. I wondered if your parents had been spies, if they’d died on a secret mission rather than a pleasure cruise. I wondered if they’d left you with some important duty to carry out in their place.”
Sophie smiled at her lap. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
“I did,” Julian answered. “You’ve forgotten.”
“Oh.”
“I’d been planning to kiss you for weeks. You know the local spar deposits?”
Sophie nodded. Miners dug for spar all over the county. The crystals looked like dirty, freckled quartz, sometimes tinted red or yellow. The crystals glowed when heated, milky-blue and sunset-gold, day and night together.
“I collected dishes and dishes of spar,” said Julian. “I had a grand plan to make a glowing trail and lead you down it, under the open sky at night, and then I’d kiss you while you marveled.”
“It sounds beautiful.”
“It would have been, if I could have managed the scheme. I made several trials of it, but the spar doesn’t glow for very long once it’s been removed from a direct source of heat. Even with servants to help, I couldn’t think how to time a kiss around it—I’d have had to rush the whole thing, and ruined the moment trying to make it perfect.
“So then I thought, well, maybe a whole glowing trail is too ambitious. What if I tried something more intimate? A little alcove littered with tiny glowing pebbles, and I’d say something like, ‘Sophie, you are my universe’.”
“You were going to say that?” Sophie smiled. It sounded like the old Julian—always trying to dazzle, putting on a show of one kind or another. That was the side of him she’d most loathed when he came courting, and what she’d missed most when he was gone.
“But then your aunt sent me down to fetch you from the stream. I think you were late for a piano lesson. And I found you bawling. Just… drowning in tears. I knew you grieved for your parents, but I hadn’t understood the extent of it. I had to comfort you. I had to make you feel better.”
And she had felt comforted. She had felt loved. But the memory was like something that had happened to another person. Distant, something she could describe but no longer feel.
“I thought the water would… take the letters to them. Even though I wrote the letters from them. Not from me.” Sophie laughed. “It doesn’t make much sense.”
“Our emotions aren’t logical,” Julian said.
Sophie hardened her tone. “Mine are, most of the time.”
“Then there’s no harm in talking about it,” he coaxed. “Tell me what you think I did. Don’t I deserve an explanation? A chance to tell you my side of the story?”
Sophie folded the napkin twice more, reducing it to a thick square which she squeezed between her palms. “This is why I wouldn’t see you,” she said slowly. “What you’re doing now. I knew you’d try to talk me out of it. Tell me you hadn’t meant it, or that I’d remembered everything wrong.”
“But—”
“I did, I must have done?” Sophie interrupted, smiling faintly. It was almost funny now, when even the ashes of her pain had been swept away and buried. It hadn’t been funny at the time. “I knew you could manage it, too. If I let you.”
Julian’s expression went blank and still. “If I’d done it, I’m sure I would have tried.” He paused. “But I didn’t. Sophie, it wasn’t me.”
“Anything else?” Sophie tucked her napkin into the basket she’d carried down to the river, along with the now empty crock of beer. Enough digging up a past she had no desire to recall. “I have work to do.”
“No,” Julian answered. “No. Wait—I’m on my way to the coroner’s next. Trying to piece together the hours before Clive’s death, when he took the poison, who might have been with him. How long were you alone with him on the afternoon that he died?”
“I’m not exactly sure,” Sophie answered. “About an hour.”
“And you wrote the note as he spoke? You didn’t plant it afterward?”
&n
bsp; “As he spoke,” Sophie agreed. “Every word, exactly as he wanted it.”
“I see.” Julian smiled. “Good afternoon, then.”
“Afternoon,” Sophie agreed.
§
Julian watched Sophie’s back, the narrowing curves of her torso graceful as the arms of a lyre, the flying ribbons of her apron streaming out with the wind. She didn’t look back. She didn’t wave when she turned the corner.
Julian thrust his dirtied hand with its now-ragged, black-rimmed nails into the river. The icy water burned, then numbed his hand. Fingers rapidly stiffening, he rubbed at his cuticles and the backs of his knuckles. When his skin looked clean, or clean enough, he yanked it out of the water and shook the drops free. The wind was just high enough to feel like a barrage of needles against his wet skin.
As usual, no good deed went unpunished.
Vasari Jones had mentioned Sophie’s habit of eating her lunch at the river’s bend on fine days, how she threw letters into the water. Julian had wanted some insight into the workings of her mind—and her potential guilt—but more than that, he’d wanted some sign that she came here in memory of him, that he still mattered to her.
But she’d shed him like a snake sheds its skin.
He’d grown up with Sophie. Children in a small village all knew one another. But he hadn’t paid her much mind until after her parents died. She’d been twelve, and, as far as he could tell, hadn’t stopped weeping until she turned thirteen.
And he’d been jealous.
He’d tried to convince himself that he was lucky. That he was better off not knowing what he’d missed, never knowing his parents—the stifling love, the crushing expectations. But he’d still felt obscurely guilty. Like a bad son. He never wept. He never visited their graves, though both were buried in Padley. He could only imagine what Sophie would have traded for such a blessing.
Sophie had emerged from her mourning changed, as though grief were a transformative cocoon and she a new-fledged butterfly. Or moth, more like. She stopped caring what other people thought of her, stopped doing what they expected. She felt no need to please anyone, ever, even years later.
He’d wondered what her secret was, that they could bear the same burden and respond in such opposite ways. And so after wanting her grief, he’d wanted her recovery. Her imperturbability, her self-sufficiency.
And then he’d wanted her.
They’d been at a dance at Broadstone Cottage. As usual, Sophie had hidden herself in a corner and buried her nose in a pile of papers, soiling her fingers with ink.
He bent over her seated figure. “Why won’t you look at me?”
Sophie shifted her pen to the bottom of the page she’d been writing on, scrawled a brief sentence, tore it loose and handed the narrow strip of paper up to him.
You are too beautiful to look at, it read.
“That’s my handwriting,” he said, dumbfounded.
“So you can’t show anyone,” she replied, gathering up her things and standing, her gaze low and steady. “I didn’t say you were nice.”
He’d fallen in love with her, then. With her full, almost childishly rounded cheeks and ancient eyes. With her skin so white it made the seed pearls sewn into the neckline of her gown look dull and dirty. With her unruly hair and sharp tongue.
He’d worked his way into her life—into her ink-making, into her grief, into her home, where her aunt and uncle welcomed him. He’d pursued her, and he’d won her.
But it hadn’t been enough.
And it never would be.
She didn’t even want to know the truth. She was so afraid of it—so afraid of him, for wielding it—that if he’d returned to Padley, well, now it would be her turn to leave.
How could he fight that?
Julian regloved his hands and set out to visit the coroner. One more task for the day, and he’d be done.
A bell above the door chimed when Julian opened the door to Dr. Loomis’s office. Padley’s sole doctor and designated coroner knelt before a young patient. He rubbed clear salve into the boy’s badly scraped knee, the pot open on the floor at his side and releasing its pungent, acrid odor into the surgery.
“Call out if you’re bleeding,” the doctor instructed without turning around. “Otherwise I won’t be a minute.”
“Don’t hurry on my behalf.” Julian winked at the boy, who gaped back at him.
Loomis paused in his application and craned around to give Julian a quick once-over. “You must be the new duke.” The doctor settled a gnarled hand on the plain wooden table the boy sat on, the floorboards creaking beneath him as he prepared to stand.
“Don’t get up.” Julian dropped into a chair by the door to cut short the formalities. The doctor had reached an age where he could be excused from the ritual of getting up and down off his knees all day. “We can talk when you’ve finished with your patient.”
“Thank you, Your Grace.” Loomis reached for a roll of gauze and unwound a stretch of it. He positioned the thin cloth across the bottom of the scrape, a patchwork of beading blood and glistening pus. The boy winced as the gauze soaked up the gelatinous salve.
“I make house calls, you know,” Loomis said conversationally. He looped more and more gauze around his patient’s leg, creating a thick layer of padding.
“My questions will only take a few minutes. Not enough to merit a trip all the way out to High Bend and back.”
“Questions,” the doctor repeated. He used his teeth to nick the strip and tore the rest with his hands, separating the roll from the bandage, then tucked the loose end into the layered casing he’d made. “About what?”
Julian looked pointedly at the young listener. Loomis gave the lad a solid clap on the back and sent him away at a trot. The bell jangled as the boy fled, and Julian grabbed the handle to ease the door shut without raising further racket.
“About my cousin’s death.”
“I stand by my verdict, Your Grace. I’m sorry for any trouble that His Grace has brought on you and yours, but I am not to blame for his misguided actions—”
“Of course not. My concern is that—”
“I don’t gossip, Your Grace, if that’s what you wish to know,” Loomis continued, puffing up his chest with affronted dignity. “I take my duties very seriously. I am obligated to give a true verdict and I did so in this case, as with every body I am called to examine. But if tongues have begun to wag—”
Julian interrupted. “I’m not worried about gossip. I only wish to inquire about certain details, information that didn’t feature in the letters I received.”
The doctor quieted, then cleared his throat. As close as to an apology as Julian was likely to get from the old codger.
“Thank you. You reported that the ninth Duke of Clive died by suicide, correct?”
“That’s right.”
“By poison, I was told?”
“Prussic acid.”
Cyanide. A common, and uncommonly efficient, killer.
Julian closed his eyes and saw Sophie’s face in his mind’s eye, her expression at the moment when he’d accused her of murder. Confused. Not particularly interested in defending herself. The very picture of honesty.
And yet everything she’d said had been a lie.
She’d said she’d spent an hour with Clive before he died—cyanide killed in fifteen, twenty minutes. She’d said Clive dictated the note. Prussic acid blocked the windpipe. Victims of cyanide poisoning couldn’t breathe or speak, let alone dictate letters. Clive would have been dead before he could convince her to pick up the pen.
“You’re sure of that?” His heart thudded in his ears. Perhaps Loomis had misdiagnosed the poison. How much experience could a country doctor have with cyanide?
“As sure as a man can be. His mouth stank of bitter almond.”
Acid burned the back of Julian’s throat. The scent of bitter almonds was, indeed, the most characteristic indicator of prussic acid poisoning. Julian opened his eyes again. Affected calm.
“Were you able to find any witnesses to describe his final moments? What did they report?”
“What do you need to know that for?” The doctor looked suspicious. “The man left a note. Fussing about the details will only keep talk alive, Your Grace.”
“And yet I ask nonetheless.”
Dr. Loomis sighed. “The ninth duke spent the hours preceding his death in solitude. This is to be expected, considering what he had planned. He remained undisturbed until he went into convulsions. All the thrashing about made sufficient noise to summon a servant, who alerted the family.”
“Convulsions? And then what?”
“Unconsciousness and death. By the end he’d gathered a crowd.”
“And how many minutes elapsed, do you estimate, between when Clive was discovered and when he died?”
“Five, ten? No more than that.”
Julian nodded. He couldn’t fault the doctor’s deductions. Bitter almonds. Convulsions. A speedy demise. Enough clues to feel very confident about his verdict.
Julian thanked Loomis. On the way back to High Bend, he searched his soul for the fangs of hope and found a toothless, crippled creature instead, pale and starving.
Sophie had killed the old duke.
Chapter 8
Sophie arrived at Iron & Wine the next morning in a miserable mood. The night before, Aunt Jenny had informed her that she would bring the carriage by at one in the afternoon. She expected Sophie to abandon her obligations and return to Broadstone Cottage early, to be fitted for a dress to wear at Peter and Lady Honoria’s wedding.
“I can’t,” Sophie had protested. “Not until the Dawes return from Derby.”
Of course, Jenny hadn’t asked why both Dawe siblings had gone to Derby—her aunt may as well have been allergic to information about the inner workings of Iron & Wine. Her theory, as far as Sophie understood it, went something like this: what she didn’t know, she couldn’t accidentally repeat at a social function.
“Well, Sophie,” Jenny had replied, completely undeterred, “The modiste has come all the way from London to dress Lady Honoria, and we’re lucky she’s agreed to take our appointment at all. There will be no change, and I’ll retrieve you tomorrow at exactly one in the afternoon.”