At last, she drew away. “I’ll help you,” she said unsteadily. “With the speech. If you wish it.”
“Yes.” His face was unreadable, his smile perfunctory. “You should sleep,” he said.
He did not invite her to stay.
As she returned to her room, she passed the little table by the window on which lay the volume of Debrett’s.
Almost against her will, she picked up the book and opened to the entry for the Burkes.
Jonathan Michael Alexander Burke,
b. 1836, d. 1841.
She swallowed the knot in her throat. That ruby ring, made from the rattle of a boy who’d died too soon . . . The other Crispin had not worn it out of vanity.
He’d worn it as a dare to his family. Go ahead, judge me.
Or . . . he’d worn it as penance. A constant punishment to himself, doled out every second of his waking hours.
Perhaps both were true. She could not decide which was the more terrible.
She closed the book, but not before another tear had slipped free to stain the page.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Read me that last line again.”
Jane rubbed her eyes. They had been at this for seven hours now—and twelve the day before it, and ten the day before that. If Crispin truly had lacked discipline as a child, then he had found it somewhere along the way. “ ‘Fear,’ ” she read aloud, “ ‘may serve countless useful aims. It may sharpen our wits when danger is upon us—’ ”
“No, after that.” He made a quick circle of his hand. “Skip the virtues.”
Ah yes. She moved her finger down the page. This was from last night, very late; her handwriting had begun to slip. “ ‘But when fear is causeless, it becomes an enemy. Fear cripples our minds and breeds delusions; it blinds us to the true nature of the world. It hamstrings reason, for the foundation of reason is fact, and fact alone. So I ask you, without fear, in full view of the facts—’ ”
“That’s enough.” He clawed a hand through his hair, then dropped onto the settee beside her. He was doing a fine job of disguising his nerves, but through the door that connected their apartments, she’d heard him pacing these last few nights. He was barely sleeping. “Bit dry, I fear.”
It would certainly mark a change from his usual approach. “Your speeches, from what I’ve read, tend to fix at first on a single MP. You mock his logic, then enlarge on his faults until they extend to indict his allies.”
He snorted. “Yes, I noticed that in the transcripts. What a charmer I am! But that approach won’t work here. How can I call a man out if I can’t remember what he looks like?”
“You won’t need to,” she said gently. “And you won’t give anyone time to question you. Once you’ve finished speaking, you’ll slip out straightaway—”
“Slip out.” He shook his head. “That’s another thing.” He turned to her. “Imagine this: I try to leave, and find myself lost again. I wander the wrong way, make an idiot of myself.”
Her pulse hitched. “I thought that problem had passed.”
“It’s improving by the day,” he said. “But I was glad to have your escort into the dining room the other night. And if it happens on the floor of the Commons . . . the talk won’t be of the bill.”
This did pose a problem. “We’ll find someone to guide you from your seat.”
He offered her a faint smile. “Are there men in the Commons whom I can trust?”
She bit her lip. Many men claimed Crispin Burke as a friend. But she knew what “friendship” had meant to him. Trust was not a part of it.
Inspiration struck. “We’ll procure you a cane,” she said. “We’ll say that the attack left you unsteady—that you’ll need an escort to and from St. Stephen’s Portico.”
His brows lowered. “And make a show of infirmity?”
Her breath caught. She sat forward. “In fact, perhaps that is what the speech requires. You’re right; it is very dry. And without the knowledge at your fingertips to identify those who will heckle you, to call them out by name—why, you have no choice: you must make yourself heckle-proof.”
“I remember enough of politics to guess that pity will not protect me,” he said wryly.
“No, not pity. Heroism!”
He sat back, lifting his brows. “Go on.”
“This speech does not account for why you’ve changed your mind on the bill. Obviously, the truth will not serve; it might be used to call you unfit for your post.”
“Ah.” He tilted his head. “But if I made a point of emphasizing my physical injuries . . .”
“Precisely.”
He rose and began to pace. “Yes. Of course. Of all people, I am the true authority in that room on the problem of crime. After all, I was savagely attacked—felled by a band of hooligans. But the experience, so near to death, has caused me to . . .”
“Awaken,” she said.
He pivoted toward her. “Awaken. Exactly.”
“And you saw, by the grievous state of poverty so evident on the bodies of the men who attacked you—”
“Ah yes, I remember it well,” he said dryly. “Poor, desperate, hopeless men, whose eyes will forever haunt me. Who deserve punishment, certainly, but not without mercy. For was it not in part the misery of their circumstances, their desperate poverty, that drove them to attack me for what lay in my pockets?”
Jane clapped. “Hear, hear!”
“And what good can come of a bill that would guarantee the deepening of that misery? How could such a bill claim to solve the epidemic that poverty has helped to create?” He lunged for her fountain pen, then carried a page to his desk and began to scribble notes. “There’s promise here,” he said absently. “This is . . . good.”
“Indeed. And every time someone jeers, you must return to this one fact: you nearly died. You survived.”
“Right. As a good Christian, I cannot believe in destroying those who sinned against me.” He looked up with a grin. “But as a politician, as a man who has survived the worst, I also want, more than any other man in that chamber, justice: the best kind of justice, which diminishes, rather than exacerbates, the dangers that Londoners face on the street.”
“Oh, well put!”
He sent her another quick, flashing smile, and then, for a long minute, the only sound was the scratching of his fountain pen.
“Clever as hell,” he said at last. He laid down his pen and came toward her. “I would say I had married you for your brain, but your other charms are too obvious.”
She laughed. “To be married for one’s brain would be a great compliment, I think.”
“Then do accept it as one.” His gaze dropped to her mouth. “One among many,” he murmured as he leaned down.
* * *
Crispin felt her shy away. It was not so much a physical rejection as a shuttering of herself, which registered on an ineffable, intuitive level. A moment before, he had sensed her as a warm, willing, open, affectionate presence. Now, in his mind’s eye, her presence had dissipated, leaving him alone. She had gone . . . blank.
It was not fair to feel frustrated.
Jane had risen; was watching him warily. “I’m sorry, Crispin, I—we have become friends, I feel, over these past days, and I don’t think . . .”
It was a peculiarly demoralizing thing, to watch one’s wife grope for reasons she did not wish him to touch her. Maddening, too, to try to fit those reasons to the facts: they had kissed several times, once by her own choosing. She had not seemed to dislike it. Quite the contrary.
She still looked poised to spring away. Like a deer gauging the intentions of a gunman. It became increasingly difficult to avoid the conclusion his brain had been pushing forward for days. On that extraordinary occasion when she had kissed him in the park, she had forgotten that other Crispin, the one she had intended to live apart from. But in the time since, she had disciplined herself not to forget again.
She still intended to leave him. She was not persuaded by his ch
ange.
He sat down on the sofa, deliberately filling his hands with the scribbled, scratched-out pages of composition. She was safe. His attention, most conspicuously, was focused elsewhere.
The floorboards creaked as she stepped toward him. He kept his eyes on the page. She wrote a fine copperplate script, very elegant. He turned the page. It was clear from the places in which her penmanship occasionally lurched, the loops loosening, where she had lost patience. Or felt fatigued. But she’d admitted to neither, although last night, as he’d caught her yawning, he asked three times if she wished to stop, to put the work aside and sleep. Defeating the bill was deeply important to her.
That, he saw suddenly, was the passion that animated her, that kept her close to him. He had mistaken it as something intimate and personal between them, the slow growth of a true attraction. But, no.
Ah, vanity.
“Crispin,” she said, very low. “I wish . . . you would look at me. Talk to me. I didn’t mean to . . .”
His pride winced at the potential completions of that sentence. Hurt him? God above, what a sorry figure he cut, sulking over a woman’s rejection like some hapless suitor kept out on the porch.
“It’s no matter,” he said briskly. He stacked the pages and smiled at her. “I understand. It’s an awkward situation.”
“No, it isn’t.” She lifted her thumb to her mouth, caught herself chewing the nail, and snatched it away again, blushing. “It isn’t awkward at all,” she said raggedly. “I . . . that’s the problem, you know.”
No, he didn’t know. He took a large breath. “Did I mistreat you?” And then, although surely it wasn’t required, he specified: “Before.”
“No!” Her denial was instant. But then she frowned and reconsidered it. “That is—well—you were . . . different.”
No revelation in that. But if she wanted to discuss it, then they would discuss it, frankly, without euphemisms. “When I bedded you,” he said evenly. “Did you enjoy it?”
Her blushes were marvelous. The original template, surely, on which all other women’s blushes had been modeled. She was not so fair as to turn red; the olive cast of her skin translated the sudden rush of blood in her face as a blooming pinkish rose.
The blush kept spreading. He watched it, fascinated. Down her throat. Across the delicate skin over her collarbones. How far did it continue? He would never know. The high neckline of her brown silk gown concealed it.
She sat down suddenly, heavily, as though some great weight had become, all at once, too onerous to be carried. “We never . . .” she said.
It took him a long, stupid moment to believe that fragment of truth. He could not believe, once granted the full force of godly and state approval, he had not immediately carried this woman to a bed. “Never,” he repeated carefully, not wanting his disbelief to show. He had never, in his memory, been a lecher, but since he’d woken to this new world, half his waking thoughts had been of her—the sounds she would make, the way her skin would feel, what it must be like to cause her immense self-possession to tremble and splinter apart. All the little wonders he had forgotten. All the wonders he felt damned sure he would have laid claim to, the very moment the wedding was over.
“Never,” she whispered. Her profile was to him. She sat beside him but faced straight ahead, like a fellow passenger on a train—perhaps a stranger, a lady intent, through her fixed attention elsewhere, on communicating to him that he must not take liberties or attempt to forge an acquaintance with the journey bound to end so soon.
Was it some peculiar sense of loyalty that guided her? Did she keep herself away from him now, from allegiance to the man he had been? But she’d not been in love with that man. She’d all but said so herself. A marriage of convenience, she’d called it.
He’d been so certain that deeper feelings had driven him. But if he’d married her and neglected to bed her . . . he must be wrong.
That man was a damned fool. She owed nothing to that man.
And he, the man he was now, certainly would not be guided by the actions of a fool.
He touched her upper arm. Felt, in response, the slightest flinch that traveled through her flesh, translated through the warm silk of her sleeve. Still she did not look at him. He smoothed his thumb up her arm, to the top of her shoulder. That point where her skin emerged, naked to the world. How tense she was. Her muscles were locked, straining.
“This is fine news for you,” she said breathlessly. “A marriage that hasn’t been consummated . . . you could pursue an annulment, if you like.”
He massaged the rigid muscle, feeling how it yielded, the smooth pliancy of her skin. “Is that what you wish?”
She did not reply.
He slipped his hand beneath the heavy mass of her low chignon, cupping the back of her neck, kneading it. After a moment, her head drooped; she made some faint noise in her throat, and then swallowed. Trying to swallow that noise away, but too late.
He had caused that noise. With his fingertips, he searched for the spot that had caused it, and massaged a little harder. She remained silent, her face hidden now from his study, but her shoulders loosened.
A body, he thought, was like a complex and complicated clock. Each one unique in its parts. Through study, one might discover the tricks of its mechanisms. Through trial and error, one might calibrate one’s touches on the gears and learn to make the clock tick.
He drew his knuckles down her nape, along her spine. She shuddered.
“I don’t think,” he said very gently, “that an annulment would suit you, Mrs. Burke. After all, you married for a reason, did you not?”
Still stubbornly silent. He spread his hand across her back, feeling the thick discipline of her corset, sliding higher, searching for the point where the corset ended, finding it. He pressed his fingers hard into her and massaged the muscles that flanked her spine.
This groan, she could not swallow. But as soon as she’d made the sound, she leapt to her feet, turning in a flaring sweep of skirts. “I—we—”
He had never seen her panicked before. But her eyes looked wild. “You’ll regret it,” she blurted. “If we—if we make it unbreakable. If it can’t be undone.”
He rose, a predatory hunting instinct still guiding him. But she took a step backward, and he forced himself to halt.
“So many opinions to do with me,” he said. “What of yourself, Jane?”
“When you remember,” she said stubbornly, “you will want to be free of me. All of this”—she cast a hand out to indicate the speech, which, forgotten, had spilled from his lap and scattered across the carpet—“will not please you. You’ll be livid, Crispin. And you will blame me for it. And you—” She squared her shoulders. “I,” she said with sharp precision, “will not want to be bound to you then.”
He shook his head. “What do you imagine, Jane? That the memories will flood back and replace everything that has come afterward? Even once I do remember, I will also remember this. Every thought and feeling I have experienced since I woke. And I will tell you now”—he stepped toward her, to hell with her retreat—“that regret is the very last thing I will feel when I think of touching you.”
Her lips visibly trembled. For a moment, she seemed to sway toward him; for a moment, he felt a leap of triumph: he had convinced her.
But then she shook her head and said, with a broken laugh, “You don’t know Crispin Burke. But I do. And for my own sake, I won’t trap him. Not even for you.”
It was the most aggravating, infuriating statement. She conjured an imaginary man, a version of himself that did not currently exist, in order to rebuff him.
To hell with the bargain his former self had struck with her. He wanted none of her money. He only wanted her. “And what if I never remember?” he said, speaking very quietly lest he shout. “What then, Jane? How long will you let this phantom control us?”
She stared at him for a stricken moment, then turned and fled the room.
* * *
&nb
sp; A newlywed bride was allowed to cling to her husband, to whisper into his ear. And so, amid the swarms of well-wishers in the Sibleys’ ballroom, Jane kept close to Crispin, watching those who approached, murmuring their names to him when she knew them. When she did not, Crispin stepped forward, presenting her with a show of enthusiasm and then leaving them to introduce themselves, some of them—the most self-important, the elderly and titled—appearing quite flustered by this breach of etiquette.
The plan was sound. Nobody would leave the ballroom tonight wondering how Crispin had forgotten old friends. This was the plan they had agreed on two days ago, between sessions of drafting Crispin’s speech, when their manner had still been easy and companionable, even conspiratorial, bound together by hard work and mutual admiration for a few fine turns of phrase.
Jane tried to recover that mood. As they strolled the floor—he could not dance tonight, not if he meant to show up to the Commons with a cane—she made pleasant remarks about the fineness of the orchestra and the beauty of his mother’s decorations, drapes of black silk and garlands of white roses hanging from the sconces and chandeliers.
But his replies were perfunctory, polite but disinterested. She tried humor instead. The current fashions made the ballroom more crushed than necessary, the great belling of ladies’ skirts turning the room into a maze. “Doorways will have to be widened,” she said, “if this fashion continues.”
He smiled. He patted her hand with the polite approval of a disinterested but dutiful uncle. He kept his eyes on the dance floor. Something was broken between them.
She followed his look. He was watching a young couple, a burnished golden pair who looked utterly delighted by their cleverness in finding each other. Jane did not recognize them; if they weren’t married, then they were behaving very recklessly. It wasn’t so much their animated laughter, the clear pleasure they took in holding each other, as it was the sinuous grace with which they waltzed. The gentleman swung the woman daringly wide; she tossed her head in glee, encouraging his recklessness. As he gathered her back to him, she stepped closer than necessary. Their bodies were communicating. A fine sight, very romantic. Jane felt ill-tempered, suddenly. They did not mean to flaunt themselves, of course.
A Lady’s Code of Misconduct Page 18
