by Rose Lerner
“How did you behave?”
She flushed. “I hid it very carefully. I didn’t want anyone to guess.”
“Not even the objects of your affection?”
“Especially not them.”
“Why not?”
She wasn’t sure she could explain the panic that had seized her at the idea that someone might see the truth in her face, in her laugh, in the way she angled her body. “I didn’t want to be pitied or mocked. I wasn’t pining, or even particularly miserable, and I hated the idea that someone might think I was.”
He nodded, considering her. “You have to let go of that too. Folks expect people in love to behave in a particular way. Maybe if you were really in love with me, you wouldn’t show it. But you can’t afford to play it that way now.” He paused. “I suspect it might embarrass you if I thought you really were falling for me.”
She hated the very idea. Even nodding in agreement made her squirm a little.
“I promise not to think it. No matter what you say, no matter what you do, no matter how besotted you may appear to be—even if you sink into the role so thoroughly you begin to question your own feelings—I’ve swindled before. I’ll know certain-sure it’s part of the lie. All right?”
She nodded again, bizarrely reassured.
He frowned. “Maybe it isn’t a good idea for us to go to bed together. When you’re exposing parts of yourself to view like this, it’s important to keep something back, to help you feel safe. You’re new to swindling. You probably need to hold more back than I do.”
Frustration burned hot in Lydia’s chest. It was a familiar feeling, one she almost never allowed free rein, as it had no purpose. She wanted to ask him how many women he had pretended to love—not because she was jealous, but because she thought it would hurt him. That wouldn’t get her what she wanted, though. He was lonely. He wanted to feel as if they were two of a kind. She smiled demurely at him. “I’m a quick study.”
He gave a crookedly surprised smile, his eyes crinkling admiringly. “You’ve got nerve and a cool hand, I’ll give you that. Just be careful. Take care of yourself, because no one else will do it for you. No matter how good my intentions might be, you can’t count on me to look out for you when all my self-interest goes the other way.”
His meaning didn’t immediately strike her, and then it did—he wanted to take her to bed too. “Does it?” she asked, to be sure.
He laughed a little. “You have no idea how arousing I find the idea of you pretending to be besotted with me.”
The sensation of power was what she had always liked best about flirting. Now an even headier sensation joined it: the expectation of fulfillment.
Lydia left her armchair and came to stand beside Mr. Cahill. He sat at one end of a bulging, inlaid and be-scrolled Baroque sofa, which had gone hopelessly out of style in the fifty years since its manufacture. “When I updated this room a few years ago, I tried to modernize this by recovering it.”
She kicked off her slippers. It was impossible to tell if he was looking at her feet, or at the pale green and white stripes on the silk upholstery. “It wasn’t a great success, but the sofa is so comfortable we couldn’t bear to part with it.” In particular, it was at least eighteen inches deeper than an elegant modern one would be. When she sat beside him and leaned her head on his shoulder, she could pull up her legs and feet after her with perfect comfort. He had been outside recently enough that the fabric was not quite warm against her cheek.
He went very still. “It’s a fine sofa.” His bare hand rested on his thigh in the center of her field of vision. She laid her smaller, paler hand atop it; his fingers tensed, shifting beneath hers in tiny jerks. She slid her fingers between his and held his hand, her nails resting against the wool of his pantaloons. Ignoring his taut muscles, she breathed in. She liked the way he smelled. Was that a vulgar affront to all the men and women who had striven to form a polite, rational England out of the bawdy past? No, she decided. Manners mattered. They enabled people to live comfortably together with all these animal urges safely hidden.
She lifted his hand in hers and kissed his fingers one by one. He drew in a long, audible breath through his nose, his shoulder rising and falling against her temple. Abruptly she was filled, not with lust, but with affection. Tears pricked at her eyes, and there was an achingly sweet pressure against the inside of her ribs.
She was trying to act besotted, so that was right. Tentatively she let the emotion grow, groping her way along the curve of her instincts. He knew it didn’t mean anything.
She turned his hand over and kissed his palm, then his wrist. Sitting up, she pressed his hand to her heart and met his eyes. “Do you feel that?”
The moment trembled in the air between them like a wire strung taut, and even so the corner of his mouth twitched. She doubted he could feel a thing through all her clothes. She tamped down her own smile. He nodded solemnly.
“It’s yours,” she said.
His lips parted. His chest heaved, and there was such hunger in his face—his eyes were bright, as if with tears or fever—
He whooped with laughter, the exhilarated sound smashing the moment into buoyant, giddy shards. “You are a quick study. There, wasn’t that as good as the real thing?”
“Better. Less messy.” She couldn’t stop smiling. He was right, she had made herself feel a lot of mild, friendly things, but she had never summoned up something so intense within herself. She had known lying was safe, and satisfying. She had never realized it could be fun.
His hand was still on her chest. He pushed her down on the sofa and bent over her, kissing her and still laughing, giggling almost. She kissed him back, feeling drunk. “I don’t mind a little mess,” he said, making it wicked with his tone.
She flushed bright red, suddenly conscious of the slick wetness between her legs.
“That embarrasses you?” He shook his head. “I’ll never understand gentlewomen.”
She turned it over in her mind. “It’s more like fear than embarrassment. Fear that you won’t think I’m a lady anymore.”
He propped himself up above her on his forearm, clearly delighted. It occurred to her that he must have picked up everything he knew about being gentry through observation. He had never been able to ask anyone directly before. “Ladies have bodies like other women,” he said.
“Yes…” She couldn’t think how to explain it. “It’s as if…as if one is trying to avoid reminding men that one is like other women. Men don’t always treat women very well.”
His mouth twisted. “No.” He sat up. “I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have done that in your parlor, even if we are out of line of sight of the keyhole. I forgot how much you have to lose.”
She felt bereft, and sad. Sad about the world’s unfairness, and sad for him too, because he didn’t have anything to lose. She wanted to pull him back down and feel that giddy warmth again.
She sat up. “You’re probably right.”
“I had an idea last night. Something that would make it make sense, how fast we’re getting married and then me disappearing a while later.”
“Yes?”
“We could say I’m ill. Nothing contagious, but definitely fatal.” He grinned at her. “We don’t know how long I have left, so every day is precious.”
It was a brilliant idea. Lydia’s entire body went rigid in protest. “No.”
“Surely you aren’t superstitious,” he teased. “So common.”
“Have you done this before? Pretended to be dying?”
“Once.” His mouth did something lopsided and complicated. “Rafe didn’t object. He could work himself up to tears about it. It was heartbreaking. I had a couple of handkerchiefs spotted with blood. We could have made a fortune raising money to send me to Italy. But Rafe was never as good as me at stopping a feeling when he didn’t need it anymore. A few days in he sta
rted crying at night too. So we stopped.”
“You could have done it the other way round,” she suggested, to see what he said. “Had Rafe pretend to be dying.”
“Bite your tongue!” he said, half sharp and half laughing at himself. “I never said I wasn’t superstitious. Poor folk learn to respect the evil eye, keeping body and soul together day to day.”
As always, a wave of fellow feeling hit her at how much he loved his brother. She searched for a reason to object to his plan that wasn’t The idea of your dying upsets me. She didn’t want him to think she was too soft for this. “I don’t want to be back in mourning, just when I’m out of it,” she said at last. “I don’t want to have to pretend to grieve. It sounds difficult and painful.”
There was a pause, and then he shrugged and smiled. “Then you’ll have to act extra infatuated.” He went on with her lesson: tell as few lies as possible, keep them vague and simple, be prepared to change them if necessary. Lydia listened in fascinated horror to rule after rule for dishonesty and betrayal, clearly distilled from long and varied experience—aware all the while that there was more fascination than horror.
“…Let the other person create the story in their own mind. They’ll do it better than you could, because they know what kind of story they like best.”
She remembered Mr. Ralph saying, We barely had to lie; you did the work for us. There was a lovely alchemy to it, really. She had done it herself, in a smaller way, when paying charitable visits or talking to a guest.
She had never thought of it as cheating anyone of anything.
“What is it?” he asked.
She could smile and say Nothing. Lydia hesitated. “I was reflecting that I do something similar in my own work. I learned it hostessing. I used to let my father’s guests do all the talking, when I first started at seventeen. I thought that was what they wanted. But I discovered they all thought me very dull, even a little proud. So I began giving them a few charming speeches, carefully doled out.”
He smiled. “Oh, they did want to do all the talking. They just also wanted to believe that a brilliant, beautiful woman liked the sound of their voices as much as they did.”
It was a cynical thought. “I suppose so,” she said, feeling protective of those well-meaning, self-important men and their fragile pride, “but there’s no harm in wanting to be liked. I didn’t mind listening.”
His smile broadened. “A girl after my own heart.”
She froze.
He saw it, and his smile faltered. “Don’t let it trouble you. A blacksmith and a burglar both pick locks, but that’s no shame to the blacksmith.”
Then, perversely, she wanted to avow the connection that had so unsettled her. Instead she said, “I don’t know what to write to Jamie. I’ve tried and tried, and…I’m going to hate lying to him.”
“You could tell him the truth.”
She tried to imagine telling Jamie the truth, that she was marrying a Jew swindler to get her money. He would be horrified. He would think she was pathetic and obsessed, that she was throwing everything away for nothing. “He would believe it was his duty to stop me. For my own good. He said—he called Lively St. Lemeston Father’s hobby. He said we spent a fortune to puff ourselves up in the town.” She felt so embarrassed, saying the words—afraid that Mr. Cahill would agree, that it was true, that she was a frustrated spinster drunk on her own consequence.
Mr. Cahill frowned a little. “All right, we won’t tell him.”
“It’s not a hobby,” she insisted. “We didn’t do it for our own pleasure. I don’t—”
He looked surprised. “What’s wrong with liking your work? Isn’t that the point of being gentlefolk, that you can choose a profession that pleases you?”
That made her feel guiltier than all the novels of Hannah More. She had never had to work whether she liked it or not, only to eat.
She’d been told all her life that women were inclined to base their conduct on the gratification of shifting impulses at the expense of principle, that if she enjoyed her work she was self-indulgent, that it was unchristian to be proud of what she had accomplished. She hated hearing it, and hated even more how it got into her bones so she believed it herself.
There was something freeing in realizing that the question, which had been so large to her, did not even make sense to Mr. Cahill. It mattered to a great many people whether her pursuit of philanthropy was proper, Godly and self-effacing. That didn’t mean it had to matter to her, so long as she made the right show.
“I’m going to give that letter another try,” she said. “Do you mind waiting and coming to town with me? I have to visit a friend. She—well, thereby hangs a tale, but she recently married the man who publishes the newspaper.”
“The Intelligencer? It’s a good paper.” He laughed at her grimace. “Even if it is Whig. I don’t mind at all. A newspaperman is a gossip with a speaking trumpet. If we can convince him, we’re halfway there.”
She hadn’t considered that aspect of things. It made her even more anxious about the proposed visit. Could she really fool Caro?
If she could fool Jamie, she could fool anyone. She went to her writing desk, and instead of trying to imagine what she would write if she were in love, she tried to feel it. She tried to be in love and writing to Jamie. My dear James, she wrote, and suddenly she had a hundred things to say. Her pen swept across the page with an authoritative scritching sound.
She looked up halfway down the page to see Mr. Cahill watching her, pleased as a tutor with a clever pupil. “You were right,” she said, pleased enough herself to wish to gratify him. “Once I stopped feeling as if I deserved to get caught, it was easy.”
He beamed.
“You…” She hesitated. “Can I ring for anything for you? I know from experience that it takes me at least an hour to write a good-sized letter.”
“It’s only been five minutes.”
“Yes, but I’ll agonize over every word when it’s done, and copy it over at least once. I do that with all my letters. I know it’s probably not necessary, but—” She checked herself. “I write good letters, and this is how,” she said firmly. “It’s easy to be misunderstood when one isn’t there to explain.”
He nodded. “I don’t much care for the written word, myself. It’s like touching marble when you expect flesh.”
She was taken aback until she thought. “You haven’t had occasion to receive many letters, have you?”
He shook his head.
“I love letters,” she said. “They are different from conversation. But they aren’t like books or magazines, or something that isn’t addressed to you. I find myself quickly losing interest in those too, unless I plan to make use of the information in them. Letters are more like—more like a clothed embrace.”
His eyes gleamed. “With a charm of its own. I see.”
“Yes, and there are practical obstacles to incessant nudity.” She bent her head demurely over her letter. “One doesn’t always live in the same place as one’s friends.”
Chapter Twelve
“Mmm,” Ash agreed. “And it would be cold.” Her hair shone a dull bronze in the gray winter light, and her skin looked like ice cream; inside that still head were a million whirring thoughts, and he wanted to know all of them. At the moment, her thoughts about nudity interested him in particular.
Being with her was like a Frost Fair on the Thames, life and noise and a welcoming, solid sheen over the filthy, freezing water. He really had thought he would shake to pieces on the walk here. He’d known he wasn’t dying, but it had felt that way, like how people described seasickness. Now the earth revolved steadily under his feet.
He walked around behind her chair. She turned her head sharply to look at him and put a hand over her papers.
“Don’t worry, I won’t read your letter.” He ran a finger along her shoulder, through he
r clothes. If a letter was like that, it was a fine thing indeed. She shivered and didn’t pull away, so he traced her shoulder blades and the collar of her dress. He ran his finger lower, aiming at her nipple.
“Not when I’m writing to my brother!” She set down her pen, though, and let him nuzzle the nape of her neck. Turning her face towards him, she kissed him for slow minutes, just long enough that it didn’t sting when she pushed him away. “Now let me finish my letter.” She was swindling him, letting him think it was a struggle to resist him when he was pretty sure she could resist anything.
He smiled at her sneaky, upright back, and her hair piled up and covered with lace like icing over a fancy dessert. “Can I have a look around the room?” He was a little surprised when she nodded, but he didn’t ask twice. Permission to snoop in a house like this was too good to be true, a little slice of paradise on earth. She even let him look through her desk drawers, smell her sealing wax and test the edge of her penknife and feel the weight of her writing paper.
She smiled at him while he did it, even, and when he could pull himself away from her to look around the room at the pictures and knickknacks and doilies and carved cabinets, she patiently paused in her writing to answer his questions about who had bought them, and who had made them, and how old they were. She gave him a few narrow-eyed looks, but she was too polite to ask if he was planning to steal anything. As it happened, he wasn’t, but he was incurably nosy and liked touching other people’s things and seeing how they lived.
This was different than anything he’d ever done. He was burrowing right into someone else’s life and pulling it shut behind him, and she seemed to want him to. It was too much luck, but Ash didn’t mean to look a gift horse in the mouth, even if everything he touched, he wanted to tell Rafe about. Sometimes they burn cherry-wood for the smell, and Her grandfather’s snuffbox isn’t gilt, it’s gold, and They buy new curtains every ten years, can you believe it? He could picture the appalled wonder on Rafe’s face, and the pain of it was so sharp that he almost wanted to stop and sit by the sweet-smelling fire. But then he’d have nothing to do but think about Rafe.
