by Anna Cowan
‘Mr Sutherland, then. Tom, you can start unloading the lady’s things. John, you’ll help us?’
John? thought Darlington, peering into the dark at the side of the house. Who’s John?
‘Of course, Miss,’ said Darlington’s footman.
Ah. John.
Darlington stood in grand state to one side of the carriage as they carried his luggage, piece by piece. His footman – John – was too well-trained to swear when he tripped or was scratched or thwacked in the face by a branch, but Darlington could hear his progression through the overgrown darkness that Miss Sutherland navigated almost silently.
He was conscious of feeling . . . foolish. A new and uncomfortable thing. She should have shown him into the house first, of course, rather than leave him waiting. He would have thought she’d done it on purpose except that she seemed entirely uninterested in him.
Another new thing.
People had longed to be out of his company before. His father, for instance. But they had always wanted it passionately. There had always been disgust, or fear, or heartache to propel them from his side.
Never this sufferance of his company.
She came back around the house with only John for company. She conferred briefly with his coachmen, who were sharing a smoke. They snuffed their pipes and stowed them under their greatcoats, then pulled themselves back up on to their seats. They nodded respectfully in his direction, and drove away, taking the lantern light with them.
‘Now you, my lady,’ she said, coming to him.
‘Are you going to hoist me over your shoulder, as well?’ He wondered if she was as suddenly conscious as he that they were alone together in the dark. Marooned on this desert island.
‘Hold your skirts in tight,’ was all she said, before turning. Assuming he would follow her. He watched her disappear into the dark.
He followed her.
She went slowly, and held branches away from him as he passed. The silence pushed against him and his sense of her became muted. By the time he came through the gate she held open to him, into the kitchen garden, his skin was damp and breathing was a sickening exercise.
He had begun to think the house abandoned, wild, but light spilled from two spotless leaded windows into the garden.
Miss Sutherland opened the heavy kitchen door, giving it a practised shove with her shoulder. He caught the shake of her head as he swept past her. Not a communication to him. A simple, bodily denial that this was in any way a good idea. She had not, after all, exaggerated when she told him her house was not fit for a duke.
The kitchen was as clean as its windows, though most of its surfaces were worn and there was little evidence of crockery or pans.
‘This is Liza,’ said Miss Sutherland, gesturing to a red-faced woman whose hands gripped tightly into her apron as she hovered in a curtsey. Miss Sutherland placed a hand on the maid’s shoulders, and it was a soft touch, Darlington thought, confused. ‘Liza is a right angel, come to save my poor hands from cracking any worse than need be.’
The maid swatted Miss Sutherland’s hand from her, bobbed one last curtsey in Darlington’s direction and turned back to kneading dough on the large wooden table that dominated half the room. Miss Sutherland jerked her head towards the door on the far side of the kitchen and made to walk through it.
‘Now there I must protest,’ he said. ‘I know we have left London far behind us, but am I really to follow your gestures like a trained dog?’
She became unnaturally rigid.
‘Do please forgive me, my lady. Would Your Ladyship prefer that I bow and scrape and ask Your Ladyship’s permission for every little thing, in my own home, because Your Ladyship has graced it with her presence?’
I would prefer that you be kind, he thought, then pulled away from the thought, embarrassed.
‘The common courtesies should suffice,’ he simpered. He gestured for her to lead on and put as much condescension as he could into it.
Her golden eyes narrowed, but she bobbed her head. ‘If you would follow me, my lady.’ The door opened into a hall and he thought he heard her whisper a curse on the other side of it.
‘Please wait here, Your Grace,’ she said. ‘I’ll announce you.’
‘You needn’t —’
‘No, please, let me announce you.’
‘Miss Sutherland, I didn’t mean for you to —’
‘I want to greet my mother without you watching me do it! I haven’t seen her for seven weeks.’
He sank into a deep, graceful curtsey. ‘Of course.’
She opened the next door down the hall and entered that room. He followed quietly in her wake and pressed his ear to the door after she shut it.
‘Ma,’ she said quietly, and then again, a little louder. She laughed, the sound evidence of a warmth in her he hadn’t been allowed to see.
‘. . . sleep you silly old woman.’
‘Katherine Grace.’ This voice was softer, indistinct. ‘. . . never manage . . . manners . . . woman. Let me look at you. Oh . . . graceful, very . . .’
‘Don’t fuss over me, Ma, it’s just Lydia playing dress-ups with me, trying to make me as uncomfortable as possible.’
‘That girl,’ – this louder –’she’s the devil’s own child . . . has made you look . . . reminds me of . . .’
‘Never mind that now, I’ll be selling them to Miss Faith, anyway.’
‘You needn’t —’
‘I’ve no use of these fine rags but what they’ll get me. But, Ma, do you remember I wrote to you that I’d be bringing a guest with me?’
‘. . . all very mysterious.’
‘She’s the cousin of a duke.’
Darlington’s mouth pulled into a smile against the door at the distressed gasp this news elicited.
‘Oh, Kit, how could you – how can we – oh dear, oh dear.’
There was a great deal of busy noise and Miss Sutherland laughed again.
‘Make yourself as respectable as you can. I’ll bring her in to introduce her to you.’ A few steps towards the door. A pause. ‘She’s very grand. But don’t mind what she says. Speaks a lot of nonsense, Lady Rose. Better not to try making sense of it.’
He didn’t bother to step away; she pulled the door open and started back at the sight of him. Her face flushed and her back was as straight as an exclamation point when she turned and ushered him into the room.
‘Your Ladyship, may I introduce my mother, Mrs Sutherland? Ma, this is Lady Rose Everdale, cousin to His Grace the Duke of Darlington.’
Miss Sutherland’s mother was shorter than she, and somehow faded. Or maybe that was the room, too full of furniture and all of it old. The woman gave a very creditable curtsey, and in the soft lamplight Darlington could see neither of her daughters in her watercolour features.
He curtseyed in return. ‘I cannot thank you enough for giving shelter to a poor ruined woman. Oh, please don’t be uneasy, you and I both know society is a capricious lover and will take me back next month, or the next month after that. You are the daughter of an earl, are you not? May I call you Sophie?’
He didn’t look at Miss Sutherland, but he felt her go very, very still. What had she thought – that he wouldn’t make it his business to find out what he could about her family?
‘Of course, Your Ladyship,’ said Mrs Sutherland, thrown into a delighted kind of confusion. ‘Please, have a seat. Kit will bring us some tea.’ A significant look, from mother to daughter. ‘And find that brother of yours. His books are poor company when we are hosting a duke’s cousin, and you can tell him so.’
He caught Miss Sutherland’s eye and let his lips curl, by the smallest fraction. There was dismay on her dark face, but she did as her mother bid.
‘Tom!’ she yelled from the hallway. ‘Ma says you must come down!’
Mrs Sutherland froze, and her eyes flitted to Darlington. ‘I have tried to instil manners in her, Your Ladyship. I am, as you say, the daughter of an earl. She’s a wild girl, though. Ver
y spirited.’ Her fingers picked nervously at some sewing. ‘Not like her sister, who’s a countess now. Have you met Lady BenRuin?’
He made light conversation and watched her. He could find nothing in the woman to merit how Miss Sutherland – that fierce, animal girl – loved her. She was like an old, well-washed shirt that would have blown away in the breeze were it not pegged fast to a line.
Tom came into the room and bowed to Darlington. ‘Your Ladyship,’ he said in a quiet voice.
‘There you are, my darling,’ Mrs Sutherland murmured. When he made to take her hand she shooed him to the seat opposite Darlington.
In the soft light he could see Miss Sutherland’s brother more clearly. He was very like his sister – dark hair, golden eyes, a strong face – but his nose was not broken, and he did not unsettle Darlington by seeming to see right into him. He didn’t meet Darlington’s gaze but looked down at his hands that were soft and still in his lap, as though reading some meaning from the ink stains on them.
Darlington and Mrs Sutherland kept up a gentle, mutually flattering conversation. He had time to take in more of the room and a kind of muted horror was working its way, insect-like, up his neck. The signs of daily habitation were unmistakeable – miniatures hung on the wall in a cluster, brown petals collected around the base of a vase, books lay open on the one small desk, and a faint stain described where a teacup must have rested earlier in the day.
This was not a small evening parlour, or even the private parlour of the mistress of the house. This was their whole living area, next to the kitchen, in the very back of a dead house.
He looked at Mrs Sutherland, still working at her sewing, and at Tom, who did not look back at him. This was their private world, and they were to be his only company for a week at least. Miss Sutherland came into the room back first, carrying a tea tray.
And Katherine. She was here, too.
He made a travesty of her home, sitting there as splendid as an empress on their poor sofa that sagged where too many bottoms had sat before him. She served him, then Ma and Tom tea, then sat on the arm of the chair where Ma was doing needlework. The Duke asked Tom whether he’d yet come across the boy-poet Keats, which started a passionate discussion. Kit blinked, stifled a laugh and bent her head to watch her mother’s rhythmic stitching.
‘I suppose you’re hoping to convince her that you’re a respectable widow,’ she murmured, bending over to rest her chin on her mother’s shoulder. ‘Even though you haven’t the knack for fine needlework.’
‘I am a respectable widow. And as far as our guest will ever know, I embroider beautifully.’ She held up the hooped fabric and Kit hid her smile in the folds of her mother’s shawl. The patch was one of Miss Faith’s embroidered masterpieces. Ma was simply adding some ugly green shapes to the border.
‘Are those supposed to be lizards?’
‘They’re leaves, obviously.’
Kit caught Tom’s eye and he made a very slight expression that she could read as if she’d been the one to make it. He was nervous, but hiding it behind amusement. He turned back to a question the Duke asked him in Lady Rose’s unsettling voice. He made Tom uneasy, and Kit was the one who’d brought him here.
If he meant to turn her family into a weapon against BenRuin, he must have realised by now what poor ammunition they would make.
She let her head settle back onto her mother’s shoulder. Today had been a long day. She would think about what to do with the viper tomorrow.
‘I find I am tired by the day’s journey,’ the Duke said, placing his saucer delicately on the small table. ‘May I enquire what sleeping arrangements have been made for me?’
‘You’re to sleep in the room opposite this one,’ said Kit. ‘The bed’s ready made, and your things have been, er, put away as best we could manage.’ Stacked in a menacing pile in the corner of the room, because Ma’s wardrobe had filled after the first box was opened. ‘Let me show you the way.’ She was impatient to have him gone, so that she could have her family to herself – her brother, her dear mother.
The Duke stood and made one of those careless curtsies that women would study their whole lives to emulate. ‘Your hospitality undoes me,’ he said. ‘But I am afraid I must trespass further. It is difficult for me to admit it . . .’ He broke off in exactly the manner calculated to pique her mother’s curiosity.
He allowed a tense, expectant silence. Then, as though it were difficult to say: ‘I am afraid of the dark.’ His face was flushed, but his eyes flickered to hers and within the affected embarrassment she read triumph, like jewelled sap in bark. ‘It is shameful, a woman grown, and still I find I need company in order to sleep. I had thought perhaps a maid . . . But you have only the one, and I would hate to monopolise her.’
‘We had thought to give you my room,’ her mother said, a little less certain, ‘and I to share with Kit.’
Understanding rushed at Kit, as though from a great distance.
Her mother said, ‘I suppose you could share with her instead, though I’m not certain it’s right for the cousin of a duke to – that is, Kit’s bedroom is not exactly —’ She broke off into mortified silence.
‘It’s not a bad idea,’ said Tom, looking up at Kit. ‘I didn’t like Mother to climb all that way; her breathing has been worse since the flowers came out.’
This was how he meant to trespass on BenRuin.
‘Then I absolutely insist,’ said the Duke, who had somehow come into possession of her mother’s hand, and was kissing it affectionately. ‘I shall share Miss Sutherland’s bed for the duration of my stay.’
He knew. God, she could see in his face that he knew how the words were ripping up her insides in their need to be spoken. To deny that a man, a duke, could share her bed. This man, more than any other.
He meant to seduce her.
‘Liza could—’ She stopped. Liza couldn’t.
He opened his eyes at her, wide, innocent, and said, ‘I am sure on this at least you and I agree, Miss Sutherland. Your mother must have every comfort we can allow her. Now be a good girl and say you’ll let me share your bed. You will hurt my feelings if you don’t.’
He was like a clockmaker, and he had laid all her inner workings bare. I would rather sleep out with the pigs, she almost said, but Tom was looking at her; he knew something was not right. She had thought she could pay the Duke’s price when she agreed to it in Hyde Park. Now that she understood the full extent of what he asked, she couldn’t even begin to think of how to extricate herself. If she gave him away now, he would be back in Lydia’s bed tomorrow.
And he could tell all of London at his leisure where he had been. The Sutherlands of Millcross would be beyond ruined. All Tom’s ambition and hard work, undone. The last utterances of her mother’s good name. The reputation for forthrightness that she herself relied on for local credit.
She’d had her own bed for one measly year. She had taken to sleeping sprawled across it like a giant starfish, simply because she could. She hadn’t ever thought it might become a battlefield.
‘You may share with me,’ Kit said, and her limbs that had been forced again and again to bend as circumstance demanded formed themselves into something very like a curtsey. ‘I’ll show you up.’
As soon as they were out in the hall, she turned and raised her hand to him. They both looked at it, and she let it fall again in some confusion.
‘Something to say, Miss Sutherland?’
‘Those are people in there.’
‘Did I say I thought they were elephants?’
‘I have seen what you do when you forget that people are . . .’ She broke off, feeling an echo of the pain she’d felt watching him seduce Lady Marmotte, of losing something bright. If he tried to touch her like that she would stick him with a knife. And yet . . . she couldn’t afford to send him away.
He had seemed so clear that night – not simple, but defined in his black clothing with his hair off his face.
Now here he stood, in
her house, the silk of his skirts brushing the walls, his travelling cases spilling out into the corridor. Every part of him was elaborate, down to his brilliant, speculative gaze. Every detail of his costume, every word he spoke, was a misdirection.
She hadn’t the faintest clue, she realised, and it washed cold through her, what he was capable of.
Chapter Six
He said nothing as he followed her up the stairs, which Kit thought quite an accomplishment for him. For her part, she would push him down the stairs before she would resuscitate their conversation. They were the back stairs, used once upon a time by servants, when the Manor had such things as bells and servants and upper rooms. The wood was rubbed smooth in the middle of each step. It was more practical to use these stairs than the grand marble staircase out in the front hall – and far less lonely. The candle she carried shed a swaying, warm light in the narrow space.
At the top of two flights of stairs was a hallway that gave on to what were once the maidservants’ quarters. The first of these doors led into Kit’s room – tiny, cluttered, hers. More than once in this long day she had reminded herself that at the end of it she could retreat to her own limited domain and close her door on the rest of the world.
She opened the door and passed through it, and her room was already diminished – reduced to a stack of books, her old dresser and the badly crocheted blanket on her bed. She turned to tell him not to use the lock, but he was much closer behind her than she had thought, and she found herself face-to-face with him.
‘Excuse me,’ he said in that awful voice. She stepped quickly away. It was probably rude, but it was necessary. The backs of her knees hit the bed.
How easily he had brought them to this moment. He had done away with every obstacle before they’d even left London.
‘You needn’t think you’re coming anywhere near me,’ she said. ‘That wasn’t part of our bargain.’
He didn’t come any closer, but he smiled. It began very small. It made her think about what was bound so tight in that corset, what was hidden beneath the heavy, expensive fall of those skirts. ‘I had the impression you liked me well enough the first time we met,’ he said.
