by Emily Larkin
Chapter Thirty-Three
Miss Toogood made an appearance at the luncheon table. She seemed as calm and unflustered as ever—certainly Newingham and the girls saw nothing different about her—but to Octavius’s eyes she looked pale and tired. Fragile.
After luncheon, he drew her aside. “Pip . . . Miss Toogood, are you all right?”
“Yes, thank you.”
“Can we talk?”
“We do need to talk.” Her expression was somber. “Will you meet me in the schoolroom in an hour?”
Octavius spent the next sixty minutes pacing the schoolroom. He didn’t have particularly warm feelings towards schoolrooms in general; they’d been the scene of thousands of hours of tedious lessons, far too many quizzes, tests, and examinations, plus the occasional painful punishment, but until this moment Octavius had never felt actual dread in a schoolroom. This afternoon, he felt dread. Miss Toogood’s expression had not been encouraging.
Please don’t let her have changed her mind about marrying me, he prayed as he paced, but when she entered the schoolroom and closed the door behind her, exactly one hour after luncheon, he knew that she had. He didn’t need to hear her say the words. He could see it clearly on her face and in the way that she stood—the set of her shoulders, her hands clasped so tightly in front of her.
“I’m very sorry,” she said, “but I can’t marry you.”
Octavius took a desperate step towards her. “I wasn’t going to kill him. On my word of honor, I wasn’t!”
Miss Toogood shook her head. “That’s not my only reason.”
“Then why?”
“We’re too different. Our backgrounds are too different, our values are too different. I should never have accepted your offer. I beg your pardon. The fault is mine entirely.”
Octavius opened his mouth to tell her just how wrong she was, but Miss Toogood continued: “We think we know each other, but we don’t. Not at all. We’ve seen each other’s public faces, and that only briefly. I don’t know who you truly are, and you don’t know who I am.”
“Then we’ll wait a few months, get to know each other better—”
Miss Toogood shook her head again. “We’re too different. A marriage between us would never work.”
“I disagree.”
“We’re too different,” Miss Toogood repeated. “I’m sorry, but I can’t marry you.” She opened the door and stepped out into the corridor.
Chapter Thirty-Four
Lord Octavius didn’t try to speak with Pip at dinnertime, nor did he attempt to talk to her afterwards, which was a relief, because she was still shaken from the day’s events, and not only shaken but exhausted, and any discussion between them would undoubtedly end in tears on her part and anger on his and she didn’t have the resilience to cope with either of those things, let alone both.
But even though Pip was relieved that Lord Octavius didn’t attempt to speak with her, she was also a little surprised. She’d expected him to try to fight for his vision of their future.
That evening, when she was climbing into bed, someone knocked quietly on her door. Pip froze, residual terror clenching in her breast. Go away, she wanted to call out; instead, she cautiously said, “Who is it?”
“It’s me, Octavius.” The voice was unfamiliar, and female.
Pip hesitated, the blankets clutched in her hands. She didn’t want to talk to Lord Octavius. Her emotions were disordered, her nerves were raw, she kept wanting to burst into tears, and somewhere deep inside herself she was still shaking.
“Miss Toogood?” that female voice said. “Please? I just want to speak with you for a few minutes. I promise I won’t stay long.”
Pip was tired and upset and she’d said everything to Lord Octavius that needed to be said, but he wasn’t a bothersome barrow boy to be shouted at through a door; he was the man who’d asked her to marry him, and as such he deserved the courtesy of being spoken to face to face.
She climbed reluctantly out of bed, twitched the bedcovers back into place, donned her robe, tied the belt tightly, and went to the door.
That soft knock came again. “Miss Toogood? Pip? Please?”
Pip tapped her thumb and forefinger together—once, twice, thrice—to give herself the forbearance to listen to whatever it was that Lord Octavius felt he needed to say and the emotional strength to not burst into tears while he was saying it. Then she unlocked the door.
A woman stood in the corridor, illuminated by the chamberstick she held. She had dark hair and dark eyes.
Pip stared at her. At him.
Lord Octavius was dressed identically to Pip in a nightgown and robe, but the nightgown was surely a nightshirt and the robe had masculine lines and . . . and that was Lord Octavius, standing at her door, in the shape of a woman.
Lord Octavius as a woman looked a lot like Lord Octavius as a man—the same black hair, the same brown eyes—but he also looked vastly different. His jaw was narrower and his mouth smaller, his lips fuller and softer, his nose almost delicate. The angle of his cheekbones was familiar, though, as was the directness of his gaze. “Miss Toogood,” he said again, in a voice that was light and feminine and yet somehow held his intonation. “Pip. Please may I speak with you? A few minutes only, I promise.”
Pip had intended to send him on his way politely, but she couldn’t stop herself from staring at him, this woman who was actually a man, and while she was staring at him, she found herself opening the door wider and stepping back.
Lord Octavius entered her bedchamber.
Pip closed the door and turned to keep him in sight, still staring. A woman’s long hair, a woman’s hips and breasts, a woman’s small hands. A woman’s face. Dear Lord, his face. So different, and yet so unnervingly familiar.
And then, belatedly, she realized that she’d invited Lord Octavius into her bedroom and that conversation was inevitable. Or rather, that argument was.
Her exhaustion came rushing back, accompanied by a sinking feeling of foreboding.
Lord Octavius glanced around the room, his gaze skipping over the bed and the washstand, the trunk and the valise, the hatboxes, before coming to rest on the only unoccupied section of floor: beneath the window.
He put the chamberstick down on her dresser, crossed to the window, and sat on the floor there, his movements not quite feminine and yet not quite masculine, either. “Five minutes,” he said, in that familiar-yet-unfamiliar voice.
“Five minutes?”
He nodded. “Five minutes of rational discussion between us.”
It was impossible to refuse when he was already in her room, sitting on her floor, looking up at her expectantly.
Pip hid a sigh. “All right,” she said reluctantly.
Something infinitesimal altered in his face and in the set of his shoulders, a barely perceptible easing, and Pip realized that he’d been afraid she’d refuse to speak with him.
Lord Octavius gave her a tentative smile and nodded at the bed, clearly expecting her to sit upon it, but Pip didn’t feel like sitting on her bed while a man was in her room, even if he was a man who looked like a woman. She’d rather pretend the bed wasn’t there. She went to the window and sat on the floor, as far from him as she could—which wasn’t far—and tucked her nightgown and robe carefully around her legs so that not one inch of bare skin showed.
“Rational discussion?” she said, for want of anything else to say.
“Yes,” he said. “You were correct this morning—perhaps we haven’t known each other long enough to understand one another’s values. I’d like to rectify that with some rational discussion.”
“Discussion of our values?”
“Yes. You first. What are yours?”
Pip hid another sigh. A discussion about their values wouldn’t change the fact that they were too different for a marriage between them to ever work. Nor would it change the fact that Lord Octavius had almost killed a man that morning.
He waited silently for her to speak, his eyes fix
ed on her face.
“I dislike violence,” Pip said bluntly. “I don’t want to ever kill anyone, and I don’t want to marry someone who could kill anyone, either.”
Lord Octavius’s eyebrows twitched faintly, and so did his lips. “This is one of the things I like most about you,” he said. “You don’t wiffle-waffle.”
Pip didn’t reply, she simply looked at him and waited for his response.
He returned her gaze. Long black hair hung over his shoulder, and he was strange and familiar at the same time—a woman she’d never met before, but also the man she’d been on the verge of marrying. “Would it surprise you if I said that I don’t want to kill anyone either?” he said.
Pip frowned, and opened her mouth to remind him that whether or not he’d wanted to kill Mr. Donald, he’d been within moments of doing so, but he held up a hand.
She closed her mouth.
“I didn’t intend to kill him,” Lord Octavius said. “I honestly didn’t. I don’t know what happened. One moment I was confronting him and he was saying the vilest things about you, and the next . . .” He shook his head. “It just happened, and I’m glad you stopped me, because I don’t want to be a murderer any more than you do.”
Pip eyed him.
Lord Octavius sighed, and even though he had female lungs and a female throat, the sigh still sounded like him. “But however much I don’t wish to be a murderer, it’s clear that I’m capable of it.” He looked down at his lap, at the brown and gold brocade of his robe, and then back at her. “I think all of us are capable of it.”
Pip frowned again and inhaled prior to disagreeing, but he held up a hand again. “I want you to imagine something.”
She regarded him for a moment, still frowning.
“Imagine that your father’s still alive, and you live together in a cottage half a mile from Chipping Campden.”
Pip felt her brow wrinkle in confusion. Chipping Campden?
“One day your father’s tending his roses and you’re hoeing the vegetable patch. A man comes along. A vagabond. He’s crazed with drink, and he knocks your father to the ground and begins to give him a hard drubbing.”
Pip’s shoulders tightened.
“You have a choice. You can run for help—or you can fight the man off with your hoe. What would you do?”
“Fight him off,” Pip admitted.
Lord Octavius nodded. “You hit him as hard as you can, several times, and in the heat of the moment, with all the fear and anger you feel, it’s possible you might even kill him. But you wouldn’t intend to kill him. All you want is to protect your father.”
Pip bit her lip, and gave an unwilling nod.
Lord Octavius sighed again, the sound so oddly him despite his female body. “That’s what happened to me this morning. In the heat of the moment I lost control of myself. When I saw him in your bedroom, when he said those things about you . . .” His lips compressed tightly. He shook his head. “I lost control. I didn’t mean to kill him, it wasn’t my intention . . . if you can bring yourself to believe that.”
Pip found that she could almost believe it.
Lord Octavius met her gaze squarely. “Not killing people is one of my values.”
It was impossible to doubt him. She saw sincerity on his face, heard sincerity in his voice. He was speaking from his heart, or perhaps from his soul.
“This morning was a . . . an extreme occasion. My emotions overmastered me. But the thing is, Pip, I can’t promise it will never happen again. If someone ever tries to harm you—or if they try to harm anyone in my family—then I’ll do whatever it takes to stop them. That’s instinct, not reason. But I think it’s an instinct we all have. Perhaps it’s stronger in me than in you, perhaps it’s stronger in men than in women, but it’s there in all of us. If someone hurts you, I’m going to protect you, even if that means I have to kill them. It’s instinct. It’s my instinct.”
Pip bit her lip and considered his words, and decided that he was correct: it was instinct to protect those one loved. To the death, if necessary.
“I don’t want kill anyone. I truly don’t. But I might one day . . . if circumstances require it.”
And if circumstances required it, if something dreadful enough happened, Pip might kill someone, too. She nodded soberly, and then she tapped her thumb and forefinger together three times. Please don’t ever let that happen, she thought. To me or to him.
Lord Octavius didn’t notice those three little taps. He shifted his weight slightly, smoothed his robe over his knees, and said, “Do you remember when we were up on the hanger and the girls told us Rumpole had hit their brother?”
Pip nodded. The scene Edie had painted was burned into her memory: Amelia Rumpole on her deathbed, begging her husband to put land aside for a dole, ten-year-old Archibald offering to crawl the acres for her, the baron hitting him.
“Afterwards, when we were walking back, I said I’d like to punch Rumpole.” Lord Octavius paused. “Do you remember what you said?”
Pip did remember. She looked down at her lap and pinched a fold of fabric between her fingers. “I said that it wouldn’t bother me in the slightest if you did,” she admitted reluctantly.
Lord Octavius didn’t say anything. It appeared that he was waiting to for her to say even more.
Pip thought back to that afternoon on the hanger. “Occasionally violence feels as if it might be justifiable or . . . or even beneficial,” she admitted, even more reluctantly. “Which isn’t to say that it actually is, just that it feels as if it might be. But not very often. I believe it’s always better to solve problems with words rather than violence . . . except that it’s not always possible. Sometimes words are of no use.”
Words were of no use when dealing with men like Lord Rumpole and Mr. Donald. Remonstrances, rebukes, entreaties, pleas, appeals to their better natures—none of those would make any impression on the Lord Rumpoles and Mr. Donalds of this world.
“Discourse is preferable to brute force,” Lord Octavius said.
“Yes.”
“Defensive violence is justifiable, but offensive violence generally isn’t.”
Pip thought that through. “Yes.”
“I was right to hit Donald, but wrong to throttle him.”
“Yes,” Pip said again.
His face twisted for a moment, and then he burst out: “But it doesn’t feel wrong. It still feels—here—as if it was right.” He pressed his hand to his chest.
“Do you wish you’d killed him?” Pip asked.
Lord Octavius’s brow creased. He thought for a long moment. Pip had the impression that he was weighing things in his mind. Right and wrong. Justice and vengeance.
Finally, he shook his head. “No.”
She could hear the truth in that word. Lord Octavius must have heard it, too, for the frown on his brow smoothed away and he smiled wryly. “I was right to hit him, but wrong to almost kill him.”
“Yes.”
“We agree on that score, too, then.”
“Yes.”
His smile faded. He looked at her, his gaze resting on her face, his expression serious. “What other values would you like to discuss?”
Pip plucked at the fold of fabric, twisting it between her fingers while she thought about values such as kindness and honesty and integrity. “Our values are probably very similar,” she admitted finally. “But our backgrounds and our circumstances aren’t. We’re too different. We might think that we’ll suit, but we don’t know each other well enough to be certain.”
Lord Octavius nodded, as if he found her statement reasonable. “Very well, what would you like to know about me?”
Chapter Thirty-Five
“What? Now?” Pip said.
Lord Octavius nodded. “What would you like to know?”
Pip looked down at her lap. She twisted the fold of fabric she was holding into a tight little corkscrew. What did she want to know about him? And was now really the best time for such a discussion?
Yes, her heart told her. Now is the time.
Pip undid the corkscrew of fabric and smoothed her robe over her knees. She looked at Lord Octavius, this woman-man seated beside her. He was watching her. She saw hope in his eyes and nervousness in the way his hands were clasped together. He hoped she would talk with him, but feared that she wouldn’t.
“Do you gamble?” she asked.
His posture didn’t change, but the way he held himself did. She almost visibly saw him relax. “Card parties sometimes, but gambling dens, no.”
“Do you live within your income?”
“Yes.”
“Just within your income, or—”
“I live well within my income,” he said. “I’m not a wastrel, if that’s what you’re asking.”
It was what she was asking, so Pip nodded and said, “What are your drinking habits?”
“I’m not a drunkard, either,” he said, with a smile. “I went on the occasional spree when I was younger, but now?” He shook his head. “Are you worried that I’m frivolous and dissipated and shallow? Because I’m not. At least, I don’t think that I am.”
Pip didn’t think he was, either. But he was privileged and he didn’t have a vocation, and while that shouldn’t be an issue, for some reason it was.
Lord Octavius must have seen something on her face—doubt? hesitation?—for he said, “What is it?”
“I always imagined myself marrying a man with a vocation,” Pip admitted. “Someone who wanted to help people and who made it his life’s work. A clergyman most likely, or perhaps an apothecary or a doctor.”
“Ah,” he said, a little sadly. “My circumstances offend you.”
“They don’t offend me,” Pip said. “It’s just . . . I wasn’t looking to marry a nobleman.”
“Because to you I am frivolous and shallow.”
“No,” she said. “Of course you’re not.”
“Compared to a clergyman or a doctor or an apothecary I am.” His lips twisted briefly, and she couldn’t quite identify the emotion that went with that little grimace. Wryness? Regret? “I used to think life was a game, but this past week . . . being here, trying to teach Rumpole his lesson, it hasn’t been a game at all. It’s been frustrating and difficult, but it’s also been . . .” He paused, clearly searching for a word, but he just as clearly didn’t find it for he said, “Yesterday, when I was in London, I suggested to my brother and cousins that we use our magic to help people.”
