The back room was, thank God, not quite so dire. That only meant that the rubbish that ringed the walls had only reached head-height, and that the area around the fireplace was mostly clear. There were a few boxes filled with grimy bits of metal strewn about. But at least there was a basin and soap and a table where a boy like Henry might prepare a simple meal.
Jonas washed his hands before heading up the stairs.
When he’d been young, there had always been rubbish around. Inevitable, really, when your father was a scrap-metal dealer. But it had been carefully sorted then, and had been kept in the sheds out back and the scrap-yards. Most importantly, the piles of scrap had left as swiftly as they had come in. But his father’s health had begun to fail, and he’d gradually stopped selling. He’d stopped selling, but he hadn’t stopped taking things in. By the time Jonas had finished his final year at King’s College, matters had come to this point.
He made his way up the stairs into the top bedroom. The steeped roof was low enough over the staircase that he had to stoop until he came into the center of the room. There was a second fireplace here, and a nice fire of coals burning. Mr. Lucas Grantham sat up in bed and was squinting at the stairwell.
“Well?” he demanded. “What have you got?”
Jonas spread his hands out. “It’s me, Father.”
“Hmmph.” The man folded his arms, tucking his hands into his armpits. “Well, don’t be long,” he groused. “I’m doing business today, I am.”
Jonas looked around the room doubtfully. “I…see.”
A wooden box was set up on one side of the bed, filled with chunks of rusting metal. At the foot, bits of splintered wood and paper were scattered about.
“Got some old barrels just yesterday,” his father said. “Good fastenings in those, if you know what to look for. Made my first fortune in fastenings, looking for those little bits of metal that other men couldn’t be bothered to find.”
Jonas looked around for a chair, but either the one that had been here yesterday had been dismantled for its nails, or it had been swallowed by the rubbish that crowded the north side of the room, spilling onto the floor.
“That’s how I won your mother, it was. Fastenings.” He made a happy noise.
Jonas settled himself gingerly on the edge of the bed. “Father,” he said. “You don’t have to do this any longer.”
Once, Mr. Grantham had owned a regular scrap-metal empire. He’d traded not only in fastenings, but in larger pieces—obsolete machinery from the factories, iron rails from train tracks that had fallen out of use, purchased at cut rates from bankrupted railways. He’d always been scrupulously frugal—one of Jonas’s earliest memories was his father plucking a horseshoe nail from the middle of the street, ignoring the filth it stood in, while Jonas stood three feet away and prayed desperately that none of the other boys would see him. But this…this was different.
“’Course I do,” his father replied. “Always have. Always will. Never too late to save a penny. I’ve got to do it.” He glared at Jonas. “I know what you’re about, boy—want nothing more than to have me dependent on you, dancing to your tune. But this is my livelihood, boy. Nobody’s taking it away.”
“I’d have no objection, if you sold what you took in. But—”
“As soon as I’m feeling well again, I’ll start up once more,” Mr. Grantham replied.
“It’s been over a year. And you’ve enough money in the bank, there’s no need to worry.”
“A year? Faugh,” Mr. Grantham grumbled. “It’s been a few weeks at most, and I’m feeling better already.”
That was one of the things that had begun to go wrong. In the first few days after his father’s heart attack, he’d seemed confused and stricken. But he’d survived, and even if Lucas found himself short of breath most of the time, Jonas had harbored hope. That hope died more everyday. It wasn’t just his father’s body that was failing, but his mind. His sense of time had melted away. He no longer remembered that it had been months since he was able to leave the bed. And he’d focused on bringing in scrap iron, more and more of it. Perhaps some part of him believed that if he could only bring in enough, if he could fill is home with the rubbish that had made up his past, that the future wouldn’t come.
Jonas had tried everything. One time, he’d even hired a pair of men to go in and forcibly clear the house. But his father had shrieked and carried on. He’d called for the police, in fact, and when they had come, they had regretfully informed Jonas that as it was Mr. Grantham’s house, and as he did in fact own the rubbish, it would be theft if Jonas removed it.
That had been a lovely day, his father threatening to have him prosecuted if he continued. Now, he simply tried not to upset the man.
At this point, Jonas could have recited the relevant section in Conolly’s Indications of Insanity from memory. “Where the individual has always been eccentric, the eccentricity will probably be increased by age. For one unacquainted with the previous habits of the patient, he may seem to be mad, although, perhaps, merely a humorist, who has in declining life become a little more childish in his humors.” Mr. Grantham was still the same man he’d always been—a little dour, a little suspicious, and extremely frugal. It was just that those qualities had been refined over and over until he could think only of scrap and scrap metal, until his home had become a veritable midden, with himself appointed as King of Rubbish.
All Jonas had to do to stop this was to have his own father declared incompetent.
“You’d be married by now, I wager,” his father said, “and giving me grandchildren already—if only you still saved fastenings.” This was said with a sad air. “Now you’re all alone.”
Jonas might once have pointed out that he was twenty-six years old—that his father had married far later than he, that he might still have his choice of a dozen women. But there was some truth in what his father said.
Oh, not the folderol about fastenings. As for the rest…
He could have been married last year, but for his fascination with Lydia Charingford.
The mornings when he tipped his hat to her on the street were always the brightest. He smiled when he saw her. He saw so little hope in the world, and she saw far too much. There were days he wanted to sit and watch her, to figure out where all that good cheer came from.
He knew he tended toward gloom. It made him consider blood poisoning and heart attacks when someone else might see a touch of indigestion. Those carefully considered worst-case scenarios made him a good doctor, but they also made him feel like a dark little raincloud.
When Lydia Charingford was around, though, he felt like a smiling dark little raincloud. He liked the way she saw things, even as she baffled him. He liked the way she saw all the world…except the portion of it that contained him.
He was the one person she didn’t like. He should have given up.
But every once in a while, he’d catch her eye by accident, and the blush on her face when she turned away… That alone had kept him from moving on.
He knew he should have said something—something other than stray, blunt remarks that never turned out well—but it was difficult to talk to a woman who always thought the worst of him. Besides, she’d become engaged to Captain Stevens six months ago, and Jonas wasn’t the sort of man who would encroach where he had no right.
Months had gone by. He’d called himself a fool. In love with another man’s fiancée? Now that had been truly insupportable. But then she’d ended the engagement.
“You’re right about that,” he said to his father. “It’s time I made up my mind on that front. I don’t suppose you’d agree to clean this place out if I married within the year?”
“Clean this out?” his father echoed, looking about him. “I suppose I will, at that.”
Jonas looked up sharply. “You will?”
It was time—past time—to attempt to win her over, notwithstanding all the many defects in his personality. His father’s agreement on this score was a
ll that he had been waiting for. If he succeeded, she’d make him happy. And if he failed…it was long past time for him to choose someone else.
“’Course I will,” his father said. “I told you, the only reason it’s piling up a little now is that I’m not on my feet. Once I’m well again, I’ll take care of it all.”
Jonas sighed, and judged that promise to be as worthless as the junk that spilled out of boxes around him. “Of course you will,” he said, looking upward. He’d been hearing that from his father every day for the last year, and every day, he could mark another sign of his increasing fragility. “Of course you will.”
“WELL, MISS CHARINGFORD,” JONAS SAID, “I suppose you’re wondering why I’m here.”
Miss Charingford traced the edge of her scarf with her finger. It could no longer be called a morning sun, that brilliant light that spilled through the plate glass window in the front parlor of her parents’ home, but it was only just past noon. The light kissed the face of the eleventh prettiest woman in all of Leicester, and Jonas felt jealous.
But she didn’t look at him. She simply shrugged. “Not at all, Doctor Grantham,” she said. “I’m not wondering. Wonder requires thought; thought requires concern.” She looked over at him and raised one eyebrow. “And concern, Doctor Grantham, requires me to care about your motives in the first place.”
Which I do not. She left that implied, but unspoken.
“I am constantly amazed by you,” he said. “To say that you view the world through rose-colored glasses would be the greatest of understatements. You don’t just see things tinted in pink; you see a world that is pink all the way through.”
She gave him a tight, forced smile.
“When I push you on it, you don’t simper or fluster or make excuses. You defend what you see with a surprising capacity for logic.”
“A surprising capacity,” she said flatly. “My, the compliments you give a woman. Do say on.”
Jonas felt himself flush. He had, in fact, intended it as a compliment. “That came out poorly. I only meant that you see the entire world in glowing terms. The entire world, that is, except for me.”
Miss Charingford didn’t look at him. In fact, Jonas rather thought she was avoiding his eyes altogether. Her fingers flexed. “I don’t see the world in glowing terms, Doctor Grantham. I theorize, and not all my theories are positive.”
“I don’t believe that for one second.”
“Of course you don’t,” she said. “But I allow myself to consider both the good possibilities and the bad. I merely choose to focus on the good, when it’s there to be found.”
“Do you?”
“You, on the other hand, are only aware of the bad.” She looked away.
“I hardly think you know me well enough to judge that,” he replied mildly.
“Well enough. Take me, for instance.”
He would like to, actually. He would have liked to take her very much. But he turned to her and gestured attentively.
“You think that because I am optimistic, I am frivolous and foolish—a veritable lily of the field, unable to toil, spin, or read the London Quarterly when the opportunity arises.” She leaned in and whispered. “Let me tell you a secret. I’m not stupid.”
“Actually, Miss Charingford,” he said, inclining his head toward her, dropping his voice as low as he could. “I already knew that about you. I have never thought you stupid. Or foolish. Or ignorant.” He set his hand atop hers. “Just different.”
Her breath caught and her eyes widened. She glanced down at his fingers—he could feel her knuckles against the palm of his hand.
“You surprise me because you know precisely the same things that I know, and you come to the exact opposite conclusions,” he said. “Every time you open your mouth, I’m convinced that you must be the most naïve girl on the face of the planet. And yet…” He shook his head. “And yet every time you open your mouth, you demonstrate that you are not.”
He hadn’t moved his hand the entire time. She sat, looking up into his eyes, and he felt positively mesmerized. Her eyes were so dark, her skin so fair. Her hair was put up, with little ringlets escaping from the knot to fall at her cheek.
Miss Charingford always dressed well. There was a sleek attention to detail in her toilette that even his fashion-ignorant brain could identify. But today, dressed in a russet gown that highlighted the pink of her cheeks, she looked particularly adorable. Those light freckles dusting across her nose practically begged to be touched.
She pulled her hand from underneath his, balling it into a fist at her side. “That is because, as I said, I see both the good and the bad in everything that comes my way. That way, I am never unprepared.” She shot him a look, one that had him swallowing. “Around you, I need a great deal of preparation.”
“Ah. So you might not wonder about why I have come. But perhaps you’ve theorized about it.”
She pressed her lips together and looked away. “It wouldn’t be polite to say.”
“The one thing we have never been to one another is polite. But never mind, Miss Charingford, I shall fill in the bad and the good. Either I am an unspeakably rude fellow, the kind who vents his ire and spleen on perfectly innocent young ladies, or…” His gaze slid to her profile. She was still looking across the room, refusing to meet his eyes. “Or,” he said softly, “I am madly in love with you. And I have been for this last year.”
His heart seemed to stop in his chest as he spoke. The seconds that should have ticked by froze into an agony of waiting, watching to see if her eyes would widen. If she would turn to him and see the truth writ large on his features. If she would even care.
But she didn’t look at him. He couldn’t read what he saw in her expression—a tightening of her jaw, a tensing of her hand before she pressed it flat against the table.
“Well,” she finally said, “you’re doing it wrong. You are supposed to pick two possibilities—one dreadful and one lovely.” She turned then, deliberately meeting his eyes. There was a spark of merriment in them. “Confess, Doctor Grantham. That’s two dreadful ones.”
It was such a curious sensation, that constricting feeling that settled about him. He felt as his heart were made of green bottle-glass—cold and wavy, distorting the light that passed through it until even the brightest emotion was stripped of all illumination. He pushed the corners of his lips up into a smile.
“Ah, Miss Charingford. You slay me.”
Maybe some hint of the truth leaked out, because the light faded from her eyes, and she peered up at him. “I didn’t hurt your feelings, did I? I meant it—”
“In all good fun,” he said brusquely. “Yes.”
Fastenings, he could imagine his father saying. I wooed your mother with fastenings. Jonas tried to imagine Miss Charingford’s face if he presented her with a horse-shoe nail retrieved from some mucky boulevard. She would probably look at him…approximately as she looked now, as if he’d offered her a bouquet ripe with horse-droppings.
He’d done it to himself. He had a dreadful sense of humor, a too-blunt tongue, and he’d never seen the point in holding either back. But she’d never take him seriously now. He had told her outright that he loved her, and she hadn’t seen it as anything but another volley, another ill-considered jest. The entirety of his feelings had become a joke. She didn’t even see him as a friend, let alone a suitor.
If he were another person entirely, he might burst into flowery speech. If he did, she’d probably laugh at him. Besides, he didn’t believe in pretending to be anyone other than who he was. Even if she swooned at whatever poetic nonsense he managed to spout, she would only be disappointed once they grew comfortable with each other and he went back to making jokes about death and gonorrhea.
“Don’t worry, my dear,” he said, a little more brusquely than he’d intended. “I’m a doctor. We’re not allowed to have feelings; they interfere with our professional judgment. I’m here to make you a proposition.”
“Oh?” He
r jaw squared. “On a scale of boring to improper, where does it fall?”
“Mildly scandalous.” He tapped the table. “I have a wager for you, if you’ve the stomach for it.”
Up went her chin again. “There’s no point to a wager,” she said. “There is nothing you have that I could want.”
He ignored this. “I wager,” he said, “that I could show you a situation before Christmas that would be beyond even your capacity for good cheer.”
She frowned. “What do you mean?”
“I see the worst of Leicester. In five minutes, I’ll leave for my next appointment. You smile and you wish and you see an entire world set forth in the most optimistic terms. I wager that I can find you a situation that lacks a bright side.”
He didn’t have fastenings, but he did have his version of it—house calls.
She mulled this over for a few moments. “What do you get if you win?”
“We’ll get to that in a moment, if you please. The more salient question is, what would you wish if you win? You could ask me for any favor. You could make me stand on my head in the market square for twenty minutes, if you wanted. Think, Miss Charingford, of all the ways you might humiliate me. Surely that would be worth something to you.”
She frowned and tapped her fingers against her lips. She didn’t look at him as she thought; she just tilted her head and narrowed her eyes. Finally, she gave a nod. “What if I said I wanted you never to talk to me again?”
His lungs stopped working. “That’s…that’s what you’d want?”
“No sarcastic comments. No biting wit. No reminders of my past mistakes.” Her voice dropped. “Yes, Doctor Grantham. That would tempt me. That would tempt me greatly.”
He swallowed. Every word she spoke hurt. She didn’t just dislike him. She hated him. But if that was the way of things… Best that he discover it now.
“What if you changed your mind later? Would I be barred from speaking?”
She considered this a moment. “I suppose that if I should lose my head so far as to want to hear the grating tones of your voice once more, I should be allowed the opportunity to reverse the wager. It needn’t be a permanent condition.” She tilted her head at him. “It will be, of course.”
A Kiss for Midwinter (The Brothers Sinister) Page 3
