by Rose Lerner
She took off her bonnet.
He tried to not want her. If he could just find a part of himself that didn’t want her, he’d know what to say and how to make it sound natural.
He couldn’t even find a part of himself that could breathe.
He stepped back, but that put him squarely against the wall. She wasn’t short, exactly, but even in her pattens she had to put a hand on the wall for balance and strain up to kiss him.
He shut his eyes, hoping he’d want her less if he couldn’t see her. “Miss Reeve, please—” It was supposed to sound unmoved, maybe even gently amused. It didn’t. He put out a hand to hold her off, but it was too late. His hand went right past her.
Her mouth was on his.
He could feel her heat against his cold cheeks. She wanted him, she’d chosen him, and now he knew that her hair smelled like jasmine. Her lips were warm and a little chapped, and her breath puffing into his mouth was a small intimate thing. It had been so long, so long since anyone touched him and it had been a bad week and he couldn’t breathe.
You chose her for Rafe. She was Rafe’s, she was going to be Rafe’s wife—
He pushed her away, gently. He wondered if she could hear his heart pounding. Her brown eyes were coffee-dark with passion. “I do like you.” He sounded almost normal—unless he was jug-bitten with lust and could no longer judge what he sounded like. “You’re good company and you’re beautiful, and I’m a lonely man. But I’m a friendly man too; you mustn’t think it means more than it does. I could say the same about a dozen women I’ve met this month. Rafe—it means something, when Rafe likes a person. He’ll be good to you.”
It was the truth, but she didn’t look convinced, simply uncertain and assessing, as if he were a flat she was swindling and she was deciding how far to push him. She nodded. “Talk it over with your brother. See what he says.” She bit her lip. “If you really aren’t interested, and he is, I’ll consider his suit. I—I very much want that money.”
Ash knew gently bred women weren’t any less coarse than anyone else. Somehow, he was still startled at how straightforwardly she bargained, at how little pretense of maidenly modesty she made. He liked that she didn’t pretend.
He liked her far too much.
He’d thought he had at least another fortnight with his brother while the banns were read. He’d hoped for even longer. He’d meant to keep his promise to Mary, and take her to see her sister for Christmas.
Rafe would have to do it for him. Ash wasn’t going to ruin this. It was time to say goodbye.
“Rafe, I’ve got to talk to you,” Ash said, thinking that he’d rather never talk again than say this. Rafe followed him out of town to where the fields stretched empty on either side and the muddy road was deserted. He said nothing when Ash kept walking, either.
When they stopped, he would have to say it. This was the last time he and Rafe would ever walk down a road side by side, matching their strides together with the ease of long practice.
Eventually, his feet slowed. Rafe stopped when he did and waited, a faint line between his brow the only sign of his nerves.
Ash had to put this exactly right. The moths in his ribcage had spread up his throat into his skull and were now squeezing into his fingers and toes. “Miss Reeve has said that she would prefer to marry me.”
Rafe blinked, then shrugged, spreading his hands wide and laughing a little. “I’ve no objection.”
“I know.” Ash couldn’t help smiling at him. “But I don’t think I can do it. You saw me today. I’m out of twig. I could bring off being her future brother-in-law, but weeks of courtship—I won’t manage it. She’s said if I’m not interested, she’ll likely accept your offer. I think we should stick to the original plan.”
Rafe frowned. “As you like.”
“She’ll be embarrassed to be around me now, I think. This is the biggest deal we’ve ever done and it’s in the palm of your hand. I don’t want to risk souring it.” He took a deep breath. “We should part company now.”
Rafe gaped at him.
“You take the money. Buy yourself a new life.”
Rafe flushed, his brows drawing sharply together. He never responded well to surprises from Ash. “Now?” he demanded. “You told me—”
“There’s something I have to tell you before I go.” Ash talked over Rafe because he couldn’t hear him anyway. The words went in his ears and got lost in the flutter of moths. Would he even be able to say it? He’d opened his mouth to bring it up hundreds of times over the years.
Surely Rafe would be happier not knowing. It was cruelty to tell him like this, to tell him and then leave him to try to understand on his own. Ash could make up another lie, something shocking but forgivable. My father was hanged for murder, maybe.
How could Ash bear telling Rafe and leaving him? What would be left to connect him to his brother then?
He tried to take another deep breath, but his lungs wouldn’t expand. “I’m sorry, and I love you, and you will always be my brother.”
“I know that—”
“That isn’t what I have to tell you, though. That’s just a true thing.” He’d planned this so many times. He’d tried to think how to make Rafe understand, how to twist the facts around so they didn’t look so bad. He’d given it up for a bad job. “We don’t have the same mother. We don’t have the same father either. I stole you.”
Chapter Seven
Rafe froze, his mouth open and about to speak. Then he laughed, as if Ash were lying, as if Ash were playing some cruel practical joke. “Ash, I know you’re angry, but—”
“It’s the truth. I told you I’d got too fond of my own lie once. That lie was ‘we’re brothers’.”
“But—but how—” Rafe’s flush deepened into crimson incomprehension. The expression was so familiar. All of Rafe’s expressions were familiar. Ash had brought him up from a baby.
He’d had no right, and he’d always known it. “I’ve told you about working for Izzy Jacobs the bodysnatcher and his gang.”
Rafe nodded.
“That was after my mother died.”
“No. No, it was before—”
“She died when I was five.” Ash had said when I was eight so many thousands of times that the truth seemed as unfamiliar and new as a lie. Rafe stared as if Ash’s face were undergoing a similar transformation, as if without changing at all he had become unrecognizable.
Ash’s tongue felt numb and swollen, but it kept on shaping words. “I told you sometimes we took bodies from the workhouse. Well, once, one of those women had a child. You. You were about a year old. I liked you and I took you.”
“My name—” Rafe’s deep voice scraped painfully in his throat. “My name isn’t Rafe Cohen?”
“It is if you want it to be. I wasn’t born Asher Cohen either, but it’s my name now.”
For some reason that made Rafe look angrier than anything else. “Your name isn’t Asher Cohen?”
“I changed our names when I left Izzy’s gang. He would have looked for me. It’s nothing but a name, what difference does it make?”
“So my name isn’t Rafe Cohen,” Rafe said slowly and angrily. “And I’m not Jewish.” His voice cracked on the last word.
Rafe was the one person Ash had never wanted to steal from. He’d taken everything anyway. “Your name is Rafe Cohen and you’re Jewish,” he said, as if he could make Rafe understand that if he spoke with enough conviction. It had always worked before, or Rafe had been willing to pretend it did. “You weren’t born those things, but you are now, same as you’re my brother—”
Rafe shook his head in terrible, heavy denial. Ash was only this moment realizing that a part of him had hoped Rafe wouldn’t think it was so bad.
“What is my name?” Rafe demanded. “Who am I?”
“I don’t remember.”
“You don’t remember
, or you won’t tell me?”
“I don’t remember. It was a quarter century ago, and I was nine years old. It was something—a common Gentile name, John or James or—I think it started with a J.” He hadn’t tried to remember. He’d wanted to cover his tracks.
“My—my mother’s name?”
“No.”
“What happened to her?”
Ash bit down hard on his lip, silently begging Rafe not to ask that, not to make him say it, not to care.
But Rafe cared about everything. “Tell me!” he roared, face red and fists clenched and tears in his eyes. This was why Ash had brought them out here, so Rafe could lose his temper.
“I left her with Izzy.” There was nothing else he could have done. That didn’t seem like much of an excuse.
Rafe made a choked, despairing sound.
“She was dead,” Ash said. “He couldn’t hurt her. Nobody could hurt her.”
Rafe pulled Ash’s mother’s handkerchief from his pocket and stared at it. His mouth contorted with revulsion. “So you gave me this, when you knew my mother was in pieces on some medical student’s table.”
“You asked me for it.”
Rafe shook from head to toe. It was a curiously blank movement, as if he were trying to find something that would be angry enough and couldn’t, as if nothing could encompass the magnitude of this moment. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
“I meant to. I meant to tell you when you were old enough to keep a secret—no one would have let me keep you if they knew. Then I meant to tell you when you turned thirteen, then when we left London, when you were twenty-one, and—I couldn’t.”
“You were afraid I would leave.”
Ash nodded.
“Now I know how a flat feels.”
“No,” Ash said. “No, I never—”
“I knew it didn’t make sense. I knew we didn’t look alike, that I wasn’t circumcised—but you told me my father was a goy, you told me our mother died in childbirth and no one bothered to arrange for a mohel, and I believed you even though it made no sense because I trusted you. When you never trusted me.”
It wasn’t like that, Ash wanted to say. But it was exactly like that.
“We’ve done this to people all over England.”
“We don’t take more than they can afford to lose,” Ash said desperately.
“You don’t know what anyone can afford to lose!” Rafe was shouting again, a thick, growling, whining sound that Ash had always hated because it meant that he’d let things get out of hand. “Maybe faith and self-respect were things they needed, things they couldn’t live without!”
“We couldn’t live without food.”
“I would have stayed with you,” Rafe said. “I’d stay with you forever if we could have been honest, if we could be honest—”
“I am not honest,” Ash said flatly. “It’s not in me. I don’t want to be honest, any more than I want to be a Christian, or a gentleman. I’m not ashamed of who I am.”
“Is honesty in the blood, then? I thought you said blood didn’t matter. I thought you said we were brothers.”
“For—” For Christ’s sake, he almost said, but Rafe hated him to use Christian oaths. “I didn’t say that. You’re from the East End too. You’re the second-best swindler I’ve ever met.”
“Blood has nothing to do with it.” He looked at the handkerchief, and Ash could see that he still wanted it, that it still meant something to him. “People choose. You can pretend all you like that this was fate, or luck coming back around, or whatever makes you happy. But you chose this. You made this happen all by yourself.” His face closed, and he held the handkerchief out with a deliberate motion.
Ash knew that nothing would change Rafe’s mind now. He took the handkerchief and slipped it into his own pocket. It felt right, as if he’d never given it away. He didn’t like that it felt right.
Rafe rubbed angrily at his eyes. “We’re not doing this to Miss Reeve. I’m telling her the truth. She deserves that. Then I’m leaving. Don’t go back to our room until after six o’clock. I’ll be gone by then.”
Ash made one last convulsive effort. “Rafe, please—”
He was glad, in a way, that Rafe ignored him. That please had been unfair. If Rafe wanted to go, he should go. And he did. He turned and walked away down the road. Ash watched him. This might be the last time he would ever see his brother, and he didn’t want to miss any of it.
About a quarter of a mile away, Rafe crouched down, a dark spot on the pale road. He put his elbows on his knees and his fists against his forehead and knelt there.
Ash’s skin crawled with the knowledge that there was absolutely nothing he could do to make Rafe feel any better. There never would be again.
The moths died inside him, one by one. Dead moths were more disgusting than live ones; they carpeted his stomach with their faint, tickling weight.
Ash’s knees buckled and he gagged. He did his best not to waste the luncheon he’d paid for, but up it came, leaving him empty. Bile and cooked pears lingered on his tongue.
When he stood, Rafe had passed out of sight.
Lydia took dinner with Reggie Gilchrist at the Drunk St. Leonard. He spent most of the time talking about how expensive it was to set up a new household. He might as well have been shouting, Don’t sack me!
Lydia had helped Jamie copy out Poor Richard’s Almanack once, and she still remembered the axiom, If you would keep your secret from an enemy, tell it not to a friend. It had struck a chord with her, because she had lived by it all her life. Mr. Gilchrist was making her nervous, reminding her that too many people knew the truth. The town’s faith in the Reeves hung by a thread. She shouldn’t have told Mr. Cahill, either, though that had worked out to her advantage in the end. She hoped.
She leaned in and interrupted Mr. Gilchrist’s amusing story, delivered with anxious eyes on her face, about the offensive Whiggish habits of his mother-in-law. “Have you told anyone?”
Mr. Gilchrist blanched. He hid his face behind his mug and choked on a mouthful of ale.
“Who?” she hissed.
“I was drunk,” he said pleadingly. “I had just found out, I thought I was going to lose my place—”
“You still may,” she snapped, despite knowing she couldn’t dismiss a man with a new bride. Especially when said bride was a daughter of one of the most prominent Whiggish families in the town, who would seize any opportunity to blacken Lydia’s name.
“He was a stranger.” Mr. Gilchrist looked miserable. “He said he was passing through. I’ve actually—I’ve been wanting to warn you that he may be a fortune hunter. Only I didn’t—”
“Only you didn’t want to tell me that you had betrayed my confidence.” Actually, it would have been impertinent in him to give her that kind of advice in any circumstance, but she was in no mood to be fair-minded. “Wait a moment—who do you mean?”
“Mr. Cahill. I told Mr. Cahill.”
So this is what feeling faint is like. There was a tingling in her neck and everything looked bright and shaky, as if the distance between objects had skewed. But after a few moments, her head stopped swimming. Her hand, when she reached for her teacup, was perfectly steady. She wasn’t really faint then, merely indulging in melodrama.
How bad was it? Mr. Cahill must have had his eye on her for his brother from the beginning, but that wasn’t a crime. People did want their brothers to marry rich wives. Mr. Gilchrist had put a solution to her problem in her way. She ought to be thanking him.
She felt awful, though: humiliated and sick.
Mr. Ralph appeared in the doorway of the dining room, a huge dark shape limned in silver-gilt winter light. It was only when he stepped forward and the door swung shut behind him that she could see his face. He had been crying, and he was coming towards her.
Could he be upset she h
ad preferred his brother? She had no reason to think his heart particularly engaged, but men didn’t like to be rejected. It made them angry and vindictive. Whatever the cause, it was in her interest to prevent a scene. “Sir, you look ill!”
She stood, calling to the barman, “Would you show us to a private parlor and bring up some tea and brandy for Mr. Cahill? No, no, it’s quite all right, Mr. Cahill, Mr. Gilchrist and I have finished our dinner.”
Mr. Gilchrist gave Mr. Ralph an apprehensive look, but he straightened up and said, “Would you like me to accompany you, Miss Reeve?”
Lydia was touched. Mr. Ralph could not be literally twice his size, but it struck the eye that way. “No, but thank you.”
“I shall wait here in case you need me.” He gave Mr. Ralph a minatory glare that went, Lydia thought, quite unnoticed by him.
When the door of the private parlor shut behind them, Lydia stayed by it. Mr. Ralph looked around the room suspiciously. “Anyone could overhear us here.”
The same thought had occurred to Lydia, but there was no help for it. “If you have something to say to me, sir, here will have to do. I had rather speak with you in earshot of other people just now.”
His bloodshot, blank eyes focused sharply for a moment on her face, then slid away. It came to her uncomfortably that he was not as straightforward as he seemed. But he gave in, taking a chair with an exhausted thump. Even seated, he filled the room. “Come here.”
“I had rather not.”
“I don’t want to be overheard.”
Was it a threat of blackmail? Reluctantly, she drew near him.
“My brother and I…” He whispered so softly she had to lean in still farther, turning her eyes away so as not to see the individual beginnings of a blond beard glinting on his cheek. He swallowed, a jerky blur in the corner of her eye. “We’re swindlers. We grew up in a thieves’ kitchen. We aren’t gentlemen, we aren’t Cornish, we aren’t even Christians.”
“Not—not Christians?” she whispered back foolishly, as if that were the most shocking thing he’d said. Could it really be true? But why was he so upset? Surely not because she had preferred his brother.
