by Millie Adams
He was counting on that. He was counting on an amorous hedgehog to have made this easier for him.
Currently, he felt enraged with the whole of the species.
‘Never mind.’
‘I was kept inside most of my childhood. Yes, I did grow up in the country. But in truth, I mostly grew up in Bybee House. I spent a great deal of my childhood in bed in my room.’
An orchid.
The thought bloomed in his head and took root.
Beautiful. Fragile.
Needing a firm, guiding hand.
He gritted his teeth. ‘What were your ailments?’
He had never truly discussed this with Kendal, as it was not his concern. Or, hadn’t been before. ‘I need to know,’ he said. ‘I need to know, so that I understand how best to care for you.’
‘I have been just fine these many years, Your Grace.’
‘You are in my care,’ he said. ‘And that matters to me. I take care of what is mine.’
‘I do not...belong to you.’
‘The Church of England would see it differently.’
‘My breathing. My throat would become very tight, and it would become nearly impossible to take a breath. And any illness of the lungs always... Progressed. Badly. I would get very hot and... They would have to bleed me.’
‘And now?’
‘It is not so frequent. I have not had a true attack of it in years.’
‘That is a terrible way to spend a childhood,’ he said.
‘I learned to find ways to appreciate it,’ she said, her expression deathly serious and hard as stone. ‘I hated the bleeding at first. But I would imagine that it was making me stronger. That it was draining away the bad, and that the pain was fortifying me in some way.’ She got a strange, faraway look in her eyes. ‘And I remember the first time I escaped from the house. And I exerted myself in ways I was not permitted to. I ran through a field. My breathing did become quite hard, but I hid it. I enjoyed it, even. For it was a mark of freedom. And while I was running I fell. But the pain that I felt then was the most real thing. The ground biting into my skin. It was my consequence. Mine. And it was... Somehow wonderful.’
He felt frozen in the moment, not because he was uncertain, no. In these matters Briggs did not traffic in uncertainty.
No, he wanted to stop and linger in it. In the spark it ignited beneath his skin.
The way she spoke of pain. As if it transformed her.
Gave her power.
He knew that feeling. He was not the one who received, but the one who gave. The feeling of absolute control—so unlike how he’d always felt otherwise.
The world had felt wrong for him. Everything in it insensible. He’d had little control over his moods. He’d found solace in his obsession with botany, then in growing flowers himself. Cultivating something with his hands that was both delicate and difficult.
When he’d got older he’d begun to fantasise about women. Controlling their pleasure in the way he controlled the bloom of an orchid.
He had never considered that Beatrice might be the one who understood, but there she was, explaining the piece of pain she experienced in a way not even he had ever heard.
And he was held transfixed.
Of the strange expression on her face, and of the deep, yawning hunger that he could feel it open up inside him.
‘And your breathing now?’ he asked, doing his best to move past this moment. ‘How is it?’
‘Mostly manageable. I rarely have incidents now. I have not been sick for many years. The doctor does fear that my lungs are weak. Because of that he feels...carrying a child, giving birth...is something I likely cannot survive. That is why. My lungs.’
‘And your susceptibility to other illnesses, I imagine.’
‘Yes,’ she said, her voice sounding distant. ‘I imagine.’
‘And that is why you’ve never seen hedgehogs rut,’ he said.
She wrinkled her nose. ‘Rut. That does not sound pleasant.’
‘It is not. To watch hedgehogs do it.’
He was walking a thin line. And he knew it.
Like when he’d held her to him last night.
‘It is oversimplified,’ he said. ‘To reduce it all to the creation of the child.’
‘But they are connected,’ she said, pressing. ‘That does make me feel better as it makes me sense that there are perhaps less things that I do not know about.’
She had no idea.
‘Or so much more,’ he said.
‘That is not cheering.’
‘You may find none of this cheering in the end. Have you ever kissed a man?’ He sensed that she had not.
‘No,’ she said, her cheeks turning pink.
‘Not your friend James?’
She looked away. ‘I told him I was not in love with him.’
‘Love does not always matter when it comes to issues of attraction, I’m afraid.’
‘All of this is confusing.’
‘It is,’ he said. ‘Sometimes deliciously so. There are times when you want a person you may despise. When you might want someone who is utterly forbidden to you.’ Treading on the line now, Briggs. ‘Does he make you feel warm?’
Her eyes went round. ‘Warm?’
He cursed himself even as he moved to the seat beside her in the carriage. ‘When he is close to you,’ he said, lowering his voice. ‘Do you feel warm? Flushed?’
She drew back, her eyes getting wide. ‘No.’
He was meanly satisfied by that. ‘He is your friend, then.’
‘I said,’ she responded, her voice breathless.
And it was not fair. For he was a terrible rake and he was pressing the limits of it here with her, and of his own self-control.
Were his tastes in shagging more mainstream he would be an even more incorrigible one. As it was, he had to be selective about his partners. He knew how to make a woman want him. He could make her understand. But what was the purpose of it? What was the purpose when...? This was not what he had been tasked with. Not at all.
‘I feel warm sometimes when you’re near me,’ she said.
Dammit.
‘Now?’ he asked.
‘Always,’ she whispered, as if it were a revelation.
And he tried not to think of when he’d had a handful of her buttock. How round and supple it was. How perfectly it fitted his palm.
How she’d felt leaning against him on the swing.
How that dress lovingly showed the curve of her bosom.
‘If I were to kiss you,’ he said. ‘It would increase. Quite exponentially. And you would understand. You would want to be closer to me. I to you. And it would feel the most natural thing in all the world to remove anything that stood between us.’
‘I don’t...’
‘Clothes.’ He was torturing himself, and he could not say why.
He preferred to mete out pain, not be on the receiving end of it.
‘I knew that naked nymphs had something to do with it,’ she said, looking up at him, as if in a daze.
‘Naked nymphs?’
‘I saw a book. In my father’s library. In his collection. There were...’ Her cheeks turned pink. ‘Naked women. Nymphs. Running from men.’
He bit his own tongue. To remind himself why he needed control. ‘Yes. They were running to preserve their virtue, I have a feeling. For if the men caught them, had their way with them...’
‘You speak in more veiled metaphor. Have their way with them. I wish to understand. What it means.’
‘You are familiar with the ways in which men and women are different?’
His wife had been given a basic bit of education from her own mother before they wed. He had not had to explain everything to her. Beatrice... Beatrice would have to have everything explained to
her were they to have a true wedding night. And they were not.
But he had always liked to tease flames. He didn’t know why he was suddenly taking the torture, rather than giving it.
Though, Beatrice was not untortured.
‘I have seen anatomy,’ she said, sniffing. ‘Drawings. In science books. And, of course...statuary.’
Ah, the naked limp statuary. Which would give her no real idea of men at all. At least, not of him.
She does not need an idea of you.
‘The purpose of the difference is that we fit together,’ he said. ‘And that is the way in which you create a child. But it is more than that. It can be much more than that.’
Her eyes rounded, her lips going slack. ‘What more?’
She sounded dazed, and she sounded fascinated, and he truly wished she were neither.
‘Pleasure.’ He looked at her, and he did not break her gaze. ‘Pain. Which for some is quite near to the same thing.’
Her blue eyes glistened with something then, a keen interest he wished to turn away from. But could not. ‘Is it?’
‘Yes.’
‘Briggs...’
They were saved by the fact that the carriage arrived at Maynard Park. He did not much believe in divine intervention, but he was going to have to give serious consideration to it at this moment.
The old place was grand, he had to admit, but he had no real fond feelings for it. He had not had the happiest of childhoods, and then he had not had the happiest of beginnings as a man. He’d had the interior renewed, and had ensured the gardens were revamped as well, and had seen to the installation of a greenhouse.
It didn’t completely erase the memories of what it had been like to grow up here.
And you keep your son there. Locked up like the prisoner you once were.
He pushed that thought away.
It was different.
The driver manoeuvred the carriage to the front of the grand entrance hall. It was all stately pillars in marble. Not to his taste. And yet it was his. And it felt in many ways as if it spoke to a great many things that he was. A great many of the wrong things.
He assisted his wife from the carriage, unwilling to allow the footman to place a finger on her. His possessiveness was unfamiliar. He was accustomed to it in the context of an interlude with a woman. After all, that was a hallmark of the dynamic. But he was not accustomed to it when he was fully clothed. And he wondered... He wondered if he might find a strange sort of fulfilment from this. From caring for her. Having her.
Even if only in this regard.
He escorted her to the front of the house, and the door opened, his butler a firm and imposing presence.
Mrs Brown the housekeeper was standing just there, smiling warmly. ‘Your Grace,’ she said. And she made her way to Beatrice and clasped her hand. ‘Your Grace.’
‘Hello,’ Beatrice said, suddenly looking awestruck and shy.
‘Do not worry,’ he said.
And he could feel her calm next to him.
‘I am Mrs Brown. I’m the housekeeper.’
‘I’m pleased to meet you,’ Beatrice said.
And then he heard a great howl echoing through the halls. Beatrice startled.
‘No need for alarm,’ Mrs Brown said, smiling. ‘It is only that he’s having to change for dinner. He did not wish to stop what he was doing.’
‘William,’ he said. ‘That’s my son.’
‘Is he well?’
‘Yes,’ Mrs Brown said. ‘He is quite all right. I assure you.’
But there was something worried behind her eyes, and he hated to see that.
As much as this...discontentment in his son chafed against something inside him.
‘Welcome to Maynard Park.’
Chapter Six
Beatrice woke up, her heart thundering. It took her several moments to realise where she was. She was in Briggs’s house. She was Briggs’s wife.
She was sleeping alone. In an unfamiliar bedchamber. And she could hear a sound that was like howling.
She turned over and put her pillow over her head, trying to drown out the haunting sound, sleep tangling with reality until she was on the moors running from a ghost, rather than safe beneath the bedclothes.
When she woke her eyes felt swollen and she felt gritty and bruised.
She took breakfast in the morning room, and did not see Briggs.
She had a small meeting with Mrs Brown, standing in the hall nearest the entry, and made arrangements to plan the menu for the week.
Beatrice had to admit she found that cheering, and hoped that she found the food at Maynard to be to her liking. It was not as if she was fussy, but she enjoyed nice foods rather a lot.
Her pleasures in life had been small, always, but very deeply enjoyed.
She went into the library and found a copy of Emma, which she had read before but had quite enjoyed. She tucked it under her arm and there was an attractive illustrated compendium of birds, and she added that too.
She took them back to her room and looked around the space. It was elegant, the walls a blue silk, with matching blue silk on the bed, trimmed with gold. The ornate canopy had heavy curtains, though she couldn’t see why she should need to draw curtains back in this isolated room that only ever contained herself or her maid.
She deposited the books at the foot of her bed and went back out into the hall.
And that was when she saw him for the first time.
The boy.
He had unruly brown hair and slim shoulders. He was very slight, his expression sulky.
William.
This must be William.
The boy turned and went back down the hall. Towards the sound of the late-night howling, she realised.
* * *
Over the next few days she spotted the boy in the house a few times, but never Briggs, who seemed to ensconce himself in his study at the early morning and not...un-ensconce himself until well after she was ready to retire for the evening.
And sometimes at night, she heard that howling.
One word came to her each time she saw that child.
Loneliness.
She knew it well. She was living it now.
When she crawled into bed on her fourth night at Maynard, her fourth night as a wife, she tried to read Emma. And could not.
Because in those words she looked for any...anything she might be able to recognise. Longings, feelings. She could not...find herself in those pages.
Briggs did not want her. Not really. He did not care if she was here or at Bybee House.
She felt no giddy joy over marriage and could not care at all about the marital prospects of the silly girls in the novel.
She set it aside and stared at the ornate ceiling of the canopy, her eyes tracing the lines of the gold crest there.
Was this to be her life? Not any better or altered than that life at Bybee House?
No. She would...she would not allow it.
And that was when the howling started.
She got up from the bed without thinking and raced to the door. She cracked it open and held herself still there, waiting. The howling grew louder. And she walked out of the room, making her way down the cavernous hall. It was a huge home. Not unlike Bybee House. Though less Grecian in style. She had noted the frescoes painted on the walls; they were a bit more vivid than the ones to be found there.
But it wasn’t the frescoes that had her full attention now. It was that sound. Like a wounded animal.
William. She knew it was William.
She raced towards it, not thinking. And pushed the door open. It was another bedchamber. A child’s room. And the child was on the floor, dressed in his bed clothes, weeping and thrashing.
He had not met her, not yet. They had only seen each other from a
distance, and she hesitated to make a move, for she would be a stranger to him. But no one else was here.
So she raced towards him and dropped to her knees. ‘William,’ she said.
But he said nothing in response. He only kept screaming and crying, twisting to get away from her. It took her a moment to realise that he was sleeping. Sleeping, and lost to reason. Lost to any sort of reach.
‘William,’ she said softly, reaching her hand towards him, her heart contracting painfully.
She had never experienced anything like this. But when she was a child her body had been in agony sometimes. And she had felt as if no one in the room could truly reach her. As if she was living in her own space, where there was only pain. And she had learned to place herself there firmly, to find a way to endure it. But it was always lonely. There was never connection there. There was never a space to be comforted.
There was only enduring.
And she broke, for this boy. For this boy who was experiencing that now.
This boy she saw alone.
She lurched forward, just as he retreated to the wall, hitting himself against it. She grabbed hold of him and pulled him against her body, holding his arms down, holding him still.
‘Be still,’ she said, making a shushing noise. ‘Be still.’ She held on to him tightly. ‘You are well. You are safe.’
It took a time, but eventually the screams quieted. Eventually, he surrendered to the way that she held him.
He was not alone now.
‘Be at peace, William,’ she whispered.
Silence descended, finally. He was damp with sweat and breathing hard, his exhaustion palpable.
She held him against her breast, swaying back and forth, some instinct guiding her.
The door opened, and she could see it was Mrs Brown.
‘Your Grace,’ she said. ‘I apologise. You should not have been disturbed. It took me a wee while to rouse myself...’
‘Does this happen often?’ she asked, already knowing it did, for this was not the first time she’d heard him.
‘Yes. He has nightmares.’
‘I have heard him...upset like this during the day as well.’
‘It is not the same. He is easily...angered by changes in his routine.’