by Rose Lerner
“It isn’t fair of you to judge him only because he didn’t go to university.” This time the ring of truth was in her voice. “I know him. I know he isn’t going to hurt me. And I hate watching you treat him as if he doesn’t belong here.”
Jamie’s face set. “I’m sorry, Lydia. But you sound like every willfully deceived woman since Eve. Father isn’t here anymore to look after us. If I don’t stop you, no one will.”
“Yes,” Lydia said furiously, “and then I would do as I like. How terrible that would be!”
It was an awful, awful thing to say. To have Father back, she would have given anything, bartered anything—except Jamie, she added, afraid to commit herself too far even in her own mind. No freedom was worth the price she’d paid. But freedom was sweet all the same. Her face burned with anger hastily papered over shame.
She wanted to ask Jamie if he felt it too. Lord Wheatcroft had never known that Jamie liked men; the two of them had kept the secret from him carefully. Lydia had even pretended once or twice that Jamie had confided in her about girls, not knowing if she was doing the right thing but knowing that Jamie was terrified Father would find out.
Father would never find out now.
“I only want you to be happy,” Jamie said.
“I am happy! I was happy before you started a quarrel.” Her eyes welled with tears. “I miss him.”
“He was a good father.”
Lydia thought that that was almost entirely true, but also just a tiny bit a lie she and Jamie would always tell together, and then she cried all over his riding coat, not caring about the smell. Jamie sniffled a little himself and was very embarrassed about it, and then they laughed over the impossibility of sharing a handkerchief.
Lydia wished she knew whether she ought to do something about that letter.
“You did absolutely right,” Ash said, glad it was the truth. “It’s all part of my trade. The odds are low he’ll find anything. I wasn’t using this name in Cornwall, and when the answer comes back, he’ll feel justified in letting it go. Waiting is never easy, but the risk is worth it to ease his mind.”
Miss Reeve toyed with a jasmine leaf from the vine that grew along the greenhouse wall, looking unconvinced.
“If he can find something out,” Ash said gently, “better now than when we’re married.”
“I wish we were already married.” Her voice was tight. She must be really worried.
“If you want to tell him the truth, I’m game.” If she did, the marriage would be quietly called off. Ash felt that the generosity of his offer was only slightly marred by his conviction that she wouldn’t take it.
“It doesn’t concern him,” Miss Reeve said in the small, defiant voice of one who knows herself in the wrong.
She loved her brother so much. Ash picked through the tangle of screaming red let it gos in his heart to find a thread that wanted nothing but her happiness. “It’s not his choice who you marry,” he said. “But it concerns him that the person who loves him most in the world is lying to his face. If you want to be close, maybe you have to be honest.”
“Honesty isn’t necessary for closeness. Look at us. We’re close…aren’t we?” Of course she was unsure. For all she knew, this was a game he’d played with flats across England.
It wasn’t. Before her, there had been exactly one person in his life whose interests he’d consider putting above his own.
He’d offer a third time, the magic number, and if she still resisted, he’d done his duty and he could have her with a clear conscience. “Secrets are my profession. I know them inside and out. What separates me from someone I’m lying to isn’t the lie. It’s that I know I’m lying. It’s a pane of glass—they can’t see it, but I don’t forget that it’s there. My”—my brother, he started to say, and then the wound was too raw and he couldn’t.
“When I have a drink with a man in a pub, and he doesn’t know I’m Jewish…what’s the difference between a Jew and a Gentile, really? It makes no difference, but I believe it would to him, so I don’t mention it, and we can go on drinking together.” It wasn’t only practicality. But somehow, he was ashamed to explain how it would hurt, to see himself turn from a fellow soul to a dirty Jew. The pane of glass kept the distance between him and his own sadness too. “But when it’s someone you love, that fear, or shame, or mistrust, or whatever isn’t letting you tell the secret…” He couldn’t finish the sentence.
I would have stayed with you if we could have been honest, Rafe had said. There wasn’t an honest bone in Ash’s body, there were panes of glass in his heart, but maybe if he’d been braver, if he’d smashed the glass for his brother and let the blood flow, maybe…
“It makes a difference in you,” he said finally.
She chewed on her lip. “There are a lot of things I haven’t told you.”
He’d noticed. She barely talked about herself at all. He smiled. “There are a lot of things I haven’t told you too.”
“Does that mean we can’t be close?”
They might have shared a skin, that’s how close he felt to her. He leaned down, his mouth a hairsbreadth from hers, sharing her breath. Her eyelashes brushed his cheek as she kissed him. He couldn’t feel her heart beating, but even if it wasn’t keeping time with his, it might as well have been.
Let it go, he told himself. She’s ready to bet. You don’t tell a flat the game is rigged.
He didn’t want to think of her as a flat, though. “We agreed,” he said quietly, leaning back against the hot wall for comfort and breathing in the smell of rich green things. “You told me it was all right to lie, that I could say what I wanted to you. Did Jamie offer you the same deal?”
She made that Reeve half-pout. “It isn’t fair. It isn’t fair that he has control over my money.”
To Ash it looked as though no one really rich controlled his own money. It was trustees and allowances and entails and settlements and jointures and life interests as far as the eye could see, as if a pile of money or an expanse of dirt were a beloved grandmother whose life had to be stretched out at all costs. Miss Reeve wasn’t allowed to have her money because she might spend it, instead of keeping it locked up to make sure her children were rich people too. Nothing about any of it was fair.
“You’re right,” he said. “I’m not saying you should tell him, or that you owe it to him, or anything like that. I’m saying…think about all of this. The town, your brother, the money.” Me. “Decide what you want. Then go after it, whatever that is, and I’ll back you.”
Ash knew what she wanted. She wanted her brother. He traced his fingers over the embroidery at her gown’s high waist, wanting to touch her one last time if this was the end of it.
Her eyes glimmered with tears. “No one’s ever said that to me before. Not my father. Not Jamie.” She blinked; now her lashes were wet. “Jamie will never understand. I brought him up not to understand. What we wanted has never mattered. It’s always been our duty. I understand, I do. We’ve been blessed and that means we have responsibilities. I want to do my duty by Lively St. Lemeston, as my father taught me. I will do it. But I want to choose, too. I want my money, and I want…” Her glittering eyelashes swept down over her cheekbones.
“You can have me,” Ash said, gambling that was what she’d meant to say. He felt a little sick. This was what he did: he made people feel safe and accepted and then he hurt them. But there were no false pretenses this time. She knew the risks. Why should he feel guilty? He traced a line of expensive black silk thread, nearly invisible against black bombazine. “But your money…if he doesn’t sign it over before the wedding, what do you want to do?”
She pressed both her hands on top of one of his, holding it flat under her breast. “No one’s ever said they would back me even if they didn’t agree with me. Of all the good opinions in the world—and I’ve cared about all of them, Mr. Cahill, I doubt there’s a
person in England I haven’t tried to please—Jamie’s is the one I cherish the most. But I’m ready to care about my own opinion.”
She was magnificent. She was a queen, a goddess. Admiration and relief made him restless. He wanted to lift her up and swing her around, or pull her down into his lap on the floor, or go on his knees and press his cheek into the softness of her belly. He wished the shutters weren’t open behind them. With an effort he stayed still, only stroking his thumb lightly down the busk of her stays. “And what do you think?”
“I think if Jamie doesn’t sign the money over before the wedding, he’ll sign it over afterwards. He can’t hold out for six months. I think we’re getting married in eleven days, and that boys don’t need to know everything about their big sisters.”
When she squared her shoulders like that, it took superhuman willpower not to bury his face between the perfect globes of her corseted breasts. “I was hoping you’d say that.” He grinned at her, expecting her to smile back.
Instead worry clouded her face again. “It’s dangerous for you, though, isn’t it? If I don’t tell him, and he finds something out?”
She was impossibly sweet. He had been running exactly this risk for years, of his own free will, and now she was ready to make it her responsibility. “Even if you did tell him, there are plenty of other folk who live here. It’s not likely anyone will find anything out, but it isn’t impossible. Fear of discovery is part of the game.” She’d be living with it for the rest of her life, if he could talk her into it. She could do it. She liked walking the cliff-edge. She just needed to be reminded of that. “You can’t control everything,” he said. “You can’t control hardly anything. Let it go and enjoy the ride.”
Their gazes held, and he could see her do it. It was the most arousing thing he’d ever seen, the way she relaxed and straightened like an acrobat about to walk the tightrope. Eleven days was an eternity.
“Oh,” she said, “I forgot. I have something for you.” She handed him a sealed packet. “Open it later.”
Ash broke the seal as soon as he was out of sight of the house, careful not to spill the contents in the mud. The note was folded around an intricately braided circle of hair, threaded through and tied in a neat bow with the blue ribbon he’d given her.
Ash kissed it with a flourish, even though there was no one to see. Slipping it into his left inside breast pocket with her as-yet-unread letter, he read the note.
Mr. C— You were right. My hair is red. I didn’t mean to be cruel, but I think perhaps I was. I’m sorry. Please accept this as a token of my undying esteem and regard. Yours aff.ly, Lydia Reeve.
Drek. He was definitely in love with her now.
He stood in the road, strangely panicked. She’d figured out what was bothering him, and she’d apologized. He was too close to her. He realized, all at once, that he’d never put up any glass between him and her, and it was too late to fix it. Again and again, she’d asked him questions, and he’d told her the truth, because he wanted to. He’d told her things he’d hid from everyone, even Rafe.
Was he simply lonely? Was it only that she already knew part of it, so what did he have to lose from telling her everything?
No. It was her. It was the way she said, tell me things because you want to. She didn’t push, and she didn’t grab, and he felt safe for the first time in his life. As if he could let her rummage through all his secret drawers, and she’d be careful to put everything back where she found it.
His heart was wide open, and he didn’t know how to shut it. He’d have to make damn sure he didn’t lose her, now.
To Lydia’s surprise, the days until her wedding passed quickly if not painlessly. On Sunday the banns were read again, and on Monday Dot Wrenn and Abby Gower (who would be Mrs. Wrenn and Mrs. Gower henceforward despite never having married, which Wrenn clearly found a little silly and which Abby enjoyed enormously as proof of her new status) removed to the Dower House to put it in order.
On Monday, too, Lydia bought pennyroyal, and hid it where she hoped Wrenn wouldn’t look.
After that her mornings were occupied with visitors and her correspondence, her afternoons with arranging furniture in her new home, planning the menus for her first week of married life, and more than once tying on an apron and scarf and helping to beat carpets or stuff mattresses with fresh straw.
Mr. Cahill followed her about as much as possible, and when he couldn’t, he occupied himself helping in the stables and the garden. In the evening, they walked back to the manor house for supper with Jamie in tired, accomplished silence. Lydia’s bonnet swung unceremoniously from her fingers.
She glanced sideways at Mr. Cahill. Small, carefully doled-out transgressions like not wearing her bonnet had contented her once. No longer.
He grinned and plucked a bit of straw out of her cap. There was no point—she was covered in the stuff—but she smiled at him anyway. “I hear you learned to make holly wreaths today.”
“Not good ones.”
“Practice makes perfect.”
He put his hands in his pockets and gazed contentedly up at the sky. “Nothing is ever perfect. That’s part of the beauty of the world.”
Why should those words provoke such a rush of affection? The world’s beauty sprang into sharp focus, of a sudden—a gleaming black patch on a drying branch, the sky’s light, bright gray, the contrast between Mr. Cahill’s dark hair and eyes and his warm olive skin, the energetic line of his hunched shoulders in his greatcoat, its collar askew. “Jamie wants to know if you rumple your clothes on purpose, or if it just happens when you put them on.”
“That’s a trade secret.” He gave her a sidelong, laughing glance. “And the secret is that my clothes were usually made for someone else.”
She wanted to kiss him. She wanted to drag him behind a topiary sphere and have her way with him. Yet she somehow felt that neither of those things would be enough.
After a moment, she recognized the feeling: she wanted to throw her arms around him and say I love you.
He had warned her she might begin to question her own feelings. He had promised her he would know, no matter what, that it was all a lie. She tried to tell herself this was amateurish confusion, that she didn’t love him, that she would feel this way about anyone with whom she’d done the things she’d done with Mr. Cahill.
But I wouldn’t have done those things with anyone else.
He leaned towards her, breathing in deeply. “I love the smell of clean straw,” he said. “We’ll be sleeping in that bed in a few days.”
She eyed him. It was clear he hadn’t been sleeping well. In moments of quiet his eyes went glassy, and once or twice she’d seen him almost irritable, especially when supper was delayed by Jamie’s dawdling. “I have some letters to write. Why don’t you take a nap on the sofa while I do that?”
He was disarmed by her concern, as he always was. The look on his face said that basic human consideration was some sort of remarkable gift of hers.
Her heart felt as if it were actually bloating unhealthily in her chest.
It isn’t anything special in me, she wanted to say. It’s only that you’ve let me know you well enough to guess at what you aren’t telling me.
But…he’d chosen to do that. With her.
Could she really let him go in six months, only because a real marriage between them was unthinkable? She rolled the idea around her tongue, silently: the daughter of a baron, pillar of her community, marries a Jewish street thief.
Yes, it was preposterous. Sometimes men of high rank married actresses, and she could think of one dowager who had married her groom. Even that was rank folly to be mocked and condemned by all one’s friends, and all their friends and their friends’ friends besides. This was worse than anything she had ever heard. But when she set that aside and looked at Mr. Cahill, it didn’t feel preposterous. It felt like exactly what God
intended marriage to be.
She had plenty of time to decide. She would see how she felt in six months. Or was that only plenty of time to get in deeper? What were the odds that after six months of sharing his bed and his hearth, she would love him less than she did now?
But that was preposterous too. The odds were excellent. One saw it all the time. People married, they shared a home, they became hopelessly disenchanted and despised one another. She had nothing to worry about.
She repeated that to herself as she watched him sleep on the sofa, limbs sprawling, the lines on his face smoothed away and his mouth hanging faintly open. This adoration, this desire to sit and watch him, the ease with which she produced a letter filled with effusions about her upcoming marriage and her splendid husband-to-be—it was all nothing to worry about.
I thought you were supposed to be a good liar, she told herself.
Chapter Twenty
Ash couldn’t quite believe that he was standing before the vicar in a parish church at nine o’clock on a Tuesday morning, getting married. Miss Reeve was beside him on her brother’s arm, looking nervous and wearing a dress that was all the same colors as a pansy. If he glanced over his shoulder, he’d see her family and friends watching him with expectant smiles, handkerchiefs at the ready. He felt like an actor who’d wandered into the wrong play.
Growing up, Ash had hardly known anyone who was married. The people he moved among now set so much store by it, but Ash had never stopped thinking of it as one more excuse for the law to stick its nose where it didn’t belong, into what should be sacred between two people. It made it illegal to leave, a prosecutable offense to love someone else. What was solemn or beautiful about that?
He was already bound to Miss Reeve, vicar or no vicar. Her tiniest motion called up an answer in him, the way on a good day wind among the wildflowers could make his heart flutter as if it had petals. If this official blessing meant she would live with him, then it was worth it to stand here and try to look awed.
