He’d unwrapped the twine with practiced efficiency. Drawn out the record. “All in order,” he’d said briskly.
Yes. She was married in every way that mattered to the government. The archbishop’s skills had indeed been flawless. This paper was the proof.
She smoothed her hands over the certificate. It was freshly written, but no less official than the original. It bore the stamp, the clerk’s signature, the seals of authority.
This marriage was real in all eyes save God’s.
A tap came at the door. She startled, then hastily folded up the record and slipped it under the invitations. Cusworth stepped inside. “Mr. Gaultier, madam.”
She rose, but the solicitor waved her back to her seat as he approached, wreathed in smiles, his round cheeks and bald skull shining. “I come with very good news,” he said as he sat opposite her. No sense of drama, Mr. Gaultier. He produced the document without a flourish. “Your uncle had a change of heart, it seems. He provided his signature with no instruction from the court.” On some less dignified man, his sudden, crooked smile might have resembled a smirk. “I cannot say with any certainty that this decision relates to his dinner with a certain judge at his club yesterday. But I do wonder if he might have been informed that his suit held no merit, and would result in a humiliating defeat—the second, I believe, that your husband would have delivered him recently. At any rate, here is a record of the transfer of funds. Your father may rest easy now, madam.”
She looked at the document but did not take it in hand. The timing was too coincidental. She felt the weight of divine judgment pressing down from above. Here is everything you wanted. At what cost will you accept it?
Mr. Gaultier frowned. “Do you not wish to inspect it?”
“I trust everything is in order.”
He nodded. “Two accounts, as the will specified. The other, I will deliver to your husband. But this one is solely accessible to you.” He paused. “You might note the sum. Your father was most generous, madam. It represents a precise division of the total estate.”
She could spot the number from here. An enormous fortune, hers alone.
“And a list of the stocks and bonds also so reserved.” Mr. Gaultier added another sheet to the first.
“Thank you.” What else was there to say?
“I thought these would be cheerful tidings,” he said, his puzzlement showing.
“Oh, they are.” How leaden she sounded.
He studied her a moment longer, his eyes sharp behind the winking lenses of his spectacles. “Mrs. Burke . . .” He made a thoughtful hmm. “I don’t suppose you’ve read the newspapers this week?”
“Oh yes.” She felt on surer ground suddenly. She would be glad to speak of Crispin’s victory.
“It’s a pity and a shame,” said Mr. Gaultier, “that the journalists must look for notoriety where none is deserved. I think any Christian must feel for Mrs. Hewitt.”
She blinked. “I beg your pardon? I’m afraid I don’t follow.”
“Ah. Perhaps you haven’t followed the story. Well, I hate to speak of it, for it’s a very sad tale. Mrs. Hewitt is an heiress, not quite so great a one as yourself, but she brought substantial properties into her marriage. Only too late, she discovered that her husband was not the man whom she had believed him to be. The courts, you know, have come to recognize the injustice of marital cruelties. Why, they prove quite generous. I believe Mrs. Hewitt has been granted full restitution of her moneys along with her divorce.”
“How . . . marvelous,” she said faintly.
Mr. Gaultier held her eyes. “It’s a matter of having credible witnesses, you see. Gentlemen of good standing to testify to the indignities a wife has suffered, and the firmness of her moral character besides.” He rose abruptly. “I am, as I have said, always at your service, Mrs. Burke. In memory of your father, I hope you will never hesitate to call on me, no matter the need.” His color was rising as she stared at him. He swept her a deep bow and then showed himself out.
She sat for a long, frozen moment as his footsteps retreated. And then a strange laugh scraped out of her.
You weren’t the devil, she’d told Crispin. She’d been right. For between the two of them, who found herself presented with a devil’s bargain? Mr. Gaultier had just shown her the only options remaining.
First, to exploit the gullibility of the law and divorce Crispin, thereby keeping her money and her freedom.
Second, to tell him the truth and perhaps have her money sent straight back to her uncle. For what man, gulled into a marriage, would insist on remaining in it?
And the final option . . . to lie to him forever, and live as his wife.
Forever his wife. That phrase worked a spell on her. For a long minute, she stared unseeing at the sunlit room, lost in a fantasy that felt drugging, hypnotic. A happy-ever-after, so close within her reach.
But the fantasy would be based on a lie.
With her uncle, she had gladly been a liar. But with Crispin, forever?
She laid her palm over her belly, as though to press away the nausea that boiled there. Bravery can’t be purchased, she’d told Mrs. Shufflebottom. So where, then, should one look for it?
* * *
Crispin returned home barely in time to dress for dinner. He listened for Jane through the door connecting their rooms; he had left word with Cusworth to tell her of the evening’s engagement. But when he knocked on the door to her apartment, she did not answer. He stepped inside and found it empty.
Unease prickled through him. The dressing table lay bare, save for a comb and a mirror. The small tea table by the window gleamed emptily in the fading light. The counterpane was unwrinkled, the air somehow stale. It had the look of a room abandoned, awaiting a new occupant.
He made his way downstairs goaded by a nameless panic—then stopped on the first flight. She was standing in the entry hall below, wrapped to her throat in a thick woolen cloak that seemed too heavy for the weather.
“There you are.” His good cheer felt false, stilted. Matters between them had been strained since she stubbornly refused to remove herself to safety. She seemed offended, of all things, as though he doubted her ability to help him. It was infuriating. He would not apologize for ranking her safety more important than her assistance. “I looked for you in your room,” he said.
She lifted her face, her wide eyes catching the light, glowing amber, unreadable. “Cusworth said we were due at your parents’ house at eight. I’ve already sent for the carriage.”
He took the remainder of the steps slowly, gathering impressions. The hem of her cloak revealed skirts of a dull gray. She held herself arrow straight, her expression impassive as she watched his approach. Holding on to the discomfort between them, which she might have let pass so easily.
He groped for an apology. But it was impossible to shape one. He had said nothing unkind to her yesterday. He had merely been . . . distant. And his pride balked at apologizing for his failure to be forever charming.
Instead, he offered his arm. She took it, walking outside with him into the cool of oncoming night. He had never realized how much could be communicated through touch, how much trust and warmth could travel through a hand simply laid over one’s arm. But he felt the loss of it now. She held herself away from him. The space between their bodies felt vast.
The drive was brief. He wrestled with himself as the first street passed, and then the next. The side lamp swinging out the window brought her face into sharp clarity, then cast it back into shadow. Her jaw was squared. She resembled a victim mounting the block. He wondered if she had powdered her face, though it had never been her wont. She looked so pale.
“You’re upset,” he said. But she radiated a degree of distress too large to be explained by their recent disagreement.
“Not at all,” she said coolly.
“Then something has happened to affect you.”
“Many things have happened.”
A more infuriatingly unrevealin
g reply he could not imagine. He bit his tongue and sat back. Their first proper quarrel as a married couple! He would take it as a chance to prove his patience to her. She would divest herself of her complaint in her own time.
“Mr. Gaultier paid a call today.”
“Did he?” He sounded too eager, too grateful. He saw himself like a punished puppy, gladly bounding from the corner to lap up this token of forgiveness. His voice stiffened. “What brought him?”
“My uncle signed the papers. The funds have been transferred.” She was studying the view, sitting very tall on her bench, her long neck bare and graceful. “I left the documents in your rooms.”
He hadn’t noticed them. “That’s good news,” he said cautiously.
The look she gave him then closed his throat. It was charged, fraught—entirely at odds with the smooth, blank composure of her brow and mouth. “Yes. So it is.”
The carriage halted. He did not want to bring this mood inside with them. “Jane. I don’t know what ails you. But for . . .” This favor felt very difficult to ask. “For my sake,” he said, “please let us put on a happy face for my family.”
The door started to open. He waved off the footman and waited.
She was studying him, her gaze moving slowly over his face. “You care what they think,” she said very softly.
He felt . . . flayed, somehow, by the observation. Humiliated, as though it were an embarrassment to value his family’s opinions of him.
For a very long time, he had pretended not to care. He had worked, in fact, to spite them, giving them no room to surprise him with their disapproval. He’d invited condemnation.
But no longer. It was a fool’s game that yielded no victor. “I would like,” he said on a deep breath, “to begin again with them.”
She seemed to turn paler, which a moment ago he would not have thought possible. “I didn’t know . . .” She moistened her lips. “Did you arrange this dinner?”
“Yes. I had hoped . . .” He shrugged. “The opportunity is ripe.”
“Opportunity?”
“To make amends,” he said quietly.
“Amends.” She seemed to think this over. “With your family.”
“Yes. After the speech . . .” He caught himself before he shrugged again.
“Of course. Your speech, where you”—her mouth twisted—“proved yourself.”
“Precisely.”
She flinched. He didn’t understand the cause. He reached for her, but she was gathering herself, rising and bending for the door, which swung open.
Charlotte was waiting for them in the front hall. The porter took Jane’s cloak, uncovering a dull gray gown that no doubt made him flinch. He recognized it. He would not have thought it reparable after the abuse it had taken during her slog to the Cross Keys tavern on that night that he was not meant to remember. His glance dropped down her body, finding the stains only because he knew where to look for them.
This choice had been deliberate on her part—a private statement she did not expect him to understand. Nor did he understand it, even though he had more facts at his disposal than she could guess. When he met her eyes again, she was frowning at him.
He offered her a blinding smile.
She blinked, then returned it full force, a smile of such dazzling falsehood that even he, who knew it for a lie, felt himself dizzied. She was a beautiful woman when she chose to be. When she threw back her shoulders and lifted her chin and put her wide, rosy mouth and her enormous eyes to use, it made no difference that the gown she wore looked fit only for a maid.
“Charlotte,” she said warmly, and took his sister into an embrace. Heads close together, they walked on toward the drawing room, leaving Crispin to dog after them, his gut tight and foreboding thick in his throat.
The rest of the family was already assembled, glasses of sherry in their hands. Very unusual. As Crispin stepped inside, Atticus pressed one upon him; his mother handed a glass to Jane. And then they all raised their tumblers.
“Well done,” said his father.
“A sound routing,” said Charlotte’s husband. “No other subject at the club this week than Mason’s face.”
“Nor should there be,” Atticus said jovially. “Man was apoplectic.”
And then, amid laughter and congratulations, they all drank to him.
It was a peculiar thing, to suddenly find oneself thrust into the very scenario that one had dreamed of for years. To find his hand enfolded in his father’s, in a stiff but sincere handshake. To be embraced by his mother and told in a whisper, “We are so proud of you, dear.” To be clapped on the back by his brother-in-law, and receive Atticus’s gruff, warm nod.
He looked for his wife and discovered her watching from a short remove, one arm crossed almost protectively over her body, the other lifting her sherry to her lips for a long, contemplative sip.
The color had come back into her cheeks. She looked flushed.
She looked furious.
She lowered her glass. “What a warm welcome we receive tonight,” she said in a foreign, cutting voice.
The others turned—her mother with a frown, Charlotte still beaming.
“But of course,” Charlotte said. “Do you know, it used to be a family tradition to have supper together every Sunday.”
“So many traditions that the Burkes keep,” Jane said flatly. “And Crispin, being a gentleman, endures them. But I will not. I am afraid, Lady Sibley, that I will wear out my welcome now. I see that this family has made such a habit of judging Mr. Burke that it sees no harm in praising him on that rare occasion when he pleases you. But I was raised differently, in a family that considered love to go hand in hand with loyalty, and did not portion out either of those qualities depending on whether they felt it deserved, any given Sunday.”
His mother had made a noise of bewilderment and drew close to his father. His father, in turn, glowered at him. Take her in hand, that look said. Control your wife.
But Jane’s gaze, which had swept the room, now found his. And he felt gripped by it. He did not control her. He would not wish to do so.
“My husband appears to have forgiven you,” she said, staring at him. “Why, he thinks to forge a reconciliation.”
“Forgiven us?” Lady Sibley gasped. “For what?”
“Young woman,” his father bit out. “You are clearly unwell. If you—”
“Forgiven you,” Jane said, “for any number of things. For having made him the scapegoat for a terrible accident. For having placed on him the burden of a haunting, so the rest of you would be spared. For becoming the figure who allowed you to warp grief into accusation. For having discounted him, doubted him, and abandoned him. And now, you congratulate him? You cheer him for showing himself other than he once was? What he was, what he became, was no less your doing than his. You don’t cheer because he’s proved himself. You cheer because he grew into an honorable man despite all the injuries you did to him. You cheer for the alleviation of your guilt.”
Her glass clicked against the marble top of the sideboard. She bowed deeply.
“I bid you good night,” she said, and swept from the room.
“Crispin, what in God’s name—”
He ran after her. Caught her by the door as she waited for the startled porter to fetch back her cloak. “Jane. What—”
She turned to him. Tears glistened on her cheeks. “Go back there. Make them grovel for you.”
“What on earth?” He caught her by both wrists when she tried to pull away. “Grovel? Jane—”
“All right, perhaps that’s not what you want,” she said angrily. “It’s only a story to you, not a memory. But it’s what he deserves, Crispin. If he deserves anything, it’s an apology—from your father, and the rest of them besides. Go take it for his sake.”
For his sake.
Shock loosened his grip. She was speaking of the man she thought he’d forgotten. Fighting on that man’s behalf.
The foreboding, the shock, the c
rushing pressure of the unsaid—it had weighed on him all day, but it collapsed now, subsumed by a great dawning hope. “I am coming with you,” he said as she shrugged into her cloak.
“No.” She yanked the cloak closed at her throat. “Listen carefully: if you care for me, you will go back in there. You want a fresh start? Then settle the old accounts.” Something bleak moved over her face, flattening her mouth. “Then come home,” she said dully. “I will be waiting. There are accounts to settle there, too.”
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
In Jane’s childhood, her father had liked to lie with her on the balcony at night, showing her the constellations. She had pretended to see the animals and figures he described; she had memorized their names for his approval. But it hadn’t been until after his death, when she’d moved to the remoteness of Marylebigh, that she finally understood how ancient peoples saw pictures in the stars. At Marylebigh, even on a moonless night, it was never truly dark. Countless stars glimmered and streaked overhead. By the pale broad light of the Milky Way, one could make her way through midnight fields.
In London, the stars offered no help. They had abandoned the city, retreating behind a sky made half of clouds and half of smoke. A great city wheezing out its congestion. At Marylebigh, she had imagined this would be the place where she could finally draw a full and free breath, but she’d been wrong.
There must be a place. How she had hungered once to find it. Possibility, she’d told Crispin; that had been what drove her. But standing here on this cramped balcony, she could no longer locate her wonder or hope. The glamour of distant places, the lure of perfect freedom—she felt numb to them. If she did manage to find herself aboard a ship sailing for the sunset, she feared she would carry this numbness with her, or worse. She could no longer dream of a voyage without him at her side. Even if he was good enough to provide her a chance of escape, she would no longer be running to freedom. She would simply be leaving him behind.
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