by Anna Cowan
Her better judgement urged her not to speak.
‘You should allow a person one false start,’ she said, ‘where you’re concerned. My family downstairs think themselves charmed, as I once did. Why are you here?’
‘Oh, excuse me, I thought that was obvious. I’m here for you, Miss Sutherland.’
He watched closely for the impact of his words; there was nowhere left to retreat from him.
‘Why?’ It was ripped from her. ‘What possible reason could you have?’
His brow creased into delicate confusion. ‘Did your brother-in-law not warn you of exactly the kind of man I am?’
‘You didn’t answer the question.’
‘No,’ he said. ‘I suppose I didn’t.’
She waited. She realised she could never out-wait him. ‘There are limits to what I’ll endure for my sister’s sake. You’ll not touch me.’
‘Hush. I ruined you the moment you let me through your bedroom door. There is no reason for me to seduce you in truth. You are . . . safe.’ His smile acknowledged that ‘safe’ was an inadequate word for whatever Kit was with the Duke of Darlington in her bedroom.
If he was telling the truth – if he need ruin her in name only to satisfy his purpose – then perhaps her thudding, fearful heart had the wrong of it.
She had not forgotten his uneasy relationship with truth.
He turned away from her, his skirts swaying lazily after him, and she put the candle down on the small table by the door. He raised his arms and started to pluck hairpins from his wig as he bent to look at the books and magazines overflowing in piles along the wall.
‘You’ve a good sight too much luggage,’ she said. ‘We’ll have to see if we can clean out another room for your clothes.’ Though where they were to get a wardrobe from, she had no idea. They’d broken up the last of their spare furniture for firewood two winters ago when things had been so very bad.
He made no sign he’d heard her. Another pin came free, and another, and her room became strange around her. She couldn’t look away from his pale, industrious fingers. Another pin plucked free. She knew the black hair that would be exposed when he took off the wig. She imagined it would be messy – pressed in tufts against his skull.
She fled, taking the stairs in the dark by memory and touch. Her mother called out as she passed her bedroom, but Kit ignored her. She spoke briefly to Liza then left by the kitchen garden into the thick, wet underbrush of the forest path. The sky tumbled endlessly out, and then the forest claimed her, soaking into her boots and hem and closing her away from the world. These trees had been bare and exposed not four months ago. They were strong enough to survive a winter.
She pulled her hair out of its hasty bun and opened the neck of her gown to the cold air.
Darlington fetched the candle – one stubby candle! – and put it on Miss Sutherland’s antique dresser. He sat himself before it and his fingers tightened erratically into fists, without the consent of his brain.
Breathe.
He amused himself by looking through Miss Sutherland’s things. The marble surface wasn’t covered with face paints and jewellery, as such dressers usually were. He opened one wooden box expecting the usual gewgaws.
‘Huh.’ His hand stilled. The box was full of what looked like small pieces of machinery. In another were various bits of paper – old shopping bills and dress patterns. In yet another was a collection of buttons, a piece of dried honeycomb and some white heather. In the very centre of the dresser, before the mirror, sat the perfect shell of a beetle, metallic blue and no larger than a button. And in that blue glass pot —
The maid entered the room with an embarrassed ‘Milady’.
Could she not have waited ten seconds more? He forced his fingers away from the unopened pot.
The maid placed a basin of hot water on the dresser before him and laid a nightgown – from his own luggage, he presumed – on the bed. She spent an age unbinding him, the ripe smell and heat of her body an unbearable intrusion. When all the laces were loose he excused her.
He took his time washing his face free of make-up – the movement of cloth to face a familiar thing from his childhood, when he had performed all his own ablutions.
He wrestled himself out of his dress, threw it over the back of the room’s one stuffed chair, and pulled the nightgown over his head. It was exquisitely made from the finest lawn, and a multitude of lace fell from his breast – whether for Mme Soulier’s private amusement, or as a further disguise, he couldn’t say.
He had never been comfortable sleeping naked and the garment was something clean and fine to wrap about himself in this strange place.
He approached the tatty bed, cautiously peeled back three or four layers and slipped in between the sheets. They smelt faintly of lye soap. The mattress wasn’t down, but neither was it straw. Wool, he thought, as he sank slowly into it. In fact . . . he moved about a bit until he found just the perfect spot between blankets and mattress, his face buried in the pillows. It was, in fact, bliss. Like being wrapped up in a dense English cloud. His heart slowed. He was so very tired. He sighed, and breathed right in.
And a scent, so faint it barely existed, of Kit surrounded him.
His eyes opened again. He rolled over and stared at the ceiling.
He’d snuffed the candle – between two spit-wet fingers, no snuffer in sight – because his desire to keep it alight had seemed childish.
He could do nothing but listen for Miss Sutherland’s tread on the stairs.
The first thing she saw, when she entered the room hours later, was the Duke slumped against the wall beneath the window. He looked small in the candlelight, his shadow looming. The curtains were open.
He looked up at her – no, not at her, at the candle. She looked quickly away from him, unsettled.
‘It’s kind of you to leave me the bed,’ she said, placing the candle on her dressing table beside the other cold stub. She frowned. Nothing was precisely out of place, but she knew to her bones that he’d fingered her things. ‘Have you —’
He pushed himself up the wall and the movement made her flinch. He shook so badly the layers and layers of lace at his chest rippled like water down rocks.
‘You’re here,’ he said.
She turned back to the dresser and tried to shrug, but her muscles were ungainly and slow. It was bad enough coming back and finding him awake, without this. He was so awfully undone, though she didn’t understand the cause, or how deep his shaking went. She took her time plaiting her hair, and he was more composed when she turned back. Which didn’t make the enormity of him in her room any less overwhelming.
‘Are you coming to bed?’ he asked, getting under the covers.
Her fingers gripped the edge of the dresser. She’d tried not to think too hard about how exactly she would climb into bed beside him, knowing the whole night long he might reach out for her. Behind her she could hear him . . . moving about. Making himself comfortable. His messy black hair on her pillow.
‘I will write a book of bad ideas,’ she said, pulling viciously at the buttons on her sleeve, ‘and the final chapter will be dedicated to this epic, gravity-defying feat of stupidity. And in hundreds of years a celebrated English wordsmith will come across it and write a poetic tribute to the very bad idea that malformed in the brain of one demented duke. His work will run to eleven volumes before his vocabulary has even begun to do justice to how extremely bad this idea is.’
She could hear him smiling in the dark, and she knew she was showing off. Just a bit.
Idiot.
She bent to blow the candle out before she took off her dress; she’d have to sleep in her shift and stockings.
‘Don’t,’ he said. ‘Don’t blow it out.’
‘I’m not leaving it lit so you can gawk at me.’
‘But I’m so terribly curious, Miss Sutherland.’
His eyes were on the candle, not on her.
‘Oh, my God,’ she said, ‘You’re scared of the d
ark.’
He said nothing, and she took a step closer. ‘The Duke of Darlington. Quaking like a small boy. Well, well. If there isn’t a silver lining to every cloud.’ She sat on the edge of the bed, and tutted like a concerned aunt. ‘You can tell Kit everything, lovey. Let it all out.’
If her bed was to be a battlefield, let this be the first sally. Let him attempt seduction in the same bed where she had pitied and judged him.
‘Tell me,’ she said. ‘For myself I’m not particularly interested, only I’m sure there are some London papermen who will be. It would be some neat insurance should you try anything against me and mine. Did the little duke wet his bed, too?’
‘Stop,’ he said quietly. ‘You’re not nearly unkind enough to want to do this. You imagine you will enjoy my humiliation. You won’t.’
‘Do you have any idea what it took to keep this house? Do you suppose for a second that I’d have managed it if I’d been nice?’
He said nothing.
‘Tell me, you condescending prick.’
They were silent for a long time, but she wouldn’t look away. His neck was rigid, and he didn’t move under the covers. The candle guttered; his eyes flicked involuntarily towards it.
She laughed, a mean sound, and turned away from him. ‘Forget it.’
‘You may not have noticed this,’ he said, ‘but I’m not exactly the manly variety of man. My father was a keen observer of the fact, and his response was to lock me into a particular room under the house with no windows. Would that be the Grosvenor Square house? you are about to ask me, or the Hartsfield estate? To save you the arduous task of naming all twenty-one of my houses, I can tell you now, Miss Sutherland, that my father had a room just like it built in every one. And I needn’t point out that they all seemed very much the same to me, given that I couldn’t see what a single one of them looked like. What? No witty rejoinders? I would have thought at the very least a gleeful chuckle would be in order.’
‘I don’t.’
He waited patiently, but when nothing else would emerge from her mouth he said, ‘Tut, Miss Sutherland, I won’t let you give up nearly so easily. What I have told you is idle chit-chat that would barely cover one cup of tea. What you’re after is something truly horrific. Something that would bring the newspapermen to your very door.’
‘I don’t want to hear any more.’
‘Are you sure? Because there are worse things a boy can be deprived of than light. I always thought my father an affectionate man when he made his feelings that tangible.’
‘You were right,’ she said, ‘I’m not unkind enough to enjoy this.’ She concentrated on the solid, right-here thunk of her shoes as she kicked them off into the corner. This was a man who had seduced a woman under her husband’s roof, and remained as untouched as the dead. She could not compete with him. It made her cold to think what it would take to beat him.
And now was the moment to join him in her bed. She wrapped herself in her shawl and hopped on to the very edge of the bed, on top of the covers.
He sighed. ‘I told you, you have nothing to fear from me. Come, you needn’t martyr yourself.’
‘I’ll sleep on the floor if you don’t shut up.’
She lay on her side in silk and wool, as though turning her back on him would make sleep any more likely.
‘Good night,’ he said.
She gritted her teeth and did not reply.
Darlington had his eyes so almost closed that the grey glass of the window shivered and shuttered between his lids. She had left the bed, never having really entered it, about ten minutes earlier. He had been relieved that she kept her distance and he did not have to risk her toes getting caught up with his in the night. It was worse without her here.
His hand was still closed about empty space, where he’d reached out on waking.
The door opened.
‘Get up,’ she said, and placed a basin of water on the dresser. She pulled a razor from the pocket of her smock and stropped it against her thigh. For an irrational moment he thought she was going to kill him.
‘You look less like a woman this morning,’ she told him, not quite looking at him, and he wondered if she’d done all her looking earlier when he’d been drifting uneasily in and out of sleep.
‘I used to shave Father all the time – you needn’t worry I’ll cut you. But it has to be now. Here, sit on the stool and put this napkin under your chin. I’m already late helping Liza with breakfast, and she uses too much wood when I’m not there to watch her make the fire.’
She took a second cloth from her shoulder and wet it in the basin. His feet cringed away from the cold floor, but she showed no sign of pain as her fingers worked in the scalding water. It was the first time he’d seen her bare hands in daylight. Even he, seeing her in her ill-fitting gown in Marmotte’s ballroom, could not have guessed at these base hands. And he had put himself wholly within them, though she refused to understand it yet.
Her sleeves were pushed up, and he could see the whole system of her muscles working under her skin as she wrung out the rag.
She wrapped it around his face.
‘I’m not going to slit your throat,’ she said, and the touch of the cloth was succinct, impersonal. ‘You can breathe again at your leisure, Your Grace.’
‘Your accent is more pronounced here,’ he said, forcing himself to look up at least. Not at her face. At the startling brown skin that moved over her collarbones – one more visible than the other, as the neck of her shirt sheered off to one side.
She grunted in answer, more answer than his inanity was worth.
She looked different, too. The shirt she wore under her dress was sizes too large and a nothing kind of a colour that might once have been white. The dress itself was worn and faded, and she wore a plain smock over it. He would have mistaken her for a maid, had he met her like this. Except that she curtseyed with such bad grace.
‘Don’t speak,’ she murmured, touching the blade to his cheek.
He had been about to smile, not speak, but he couldn’t say so because she pressed closer to him as she focused on the rasp of the blade. Like the maid she put her whole body into his space, without thought.
She had less finesse than Grey, but she was confident with the razor, pressing the back of it to his jaw to move his head this way, then that. She didn’t hesitate in the short flicks of the wrist that shaved around his nostril.
The metal skim-kissed the corner of his lips and he fought not to flinch. He closed his eyes.
‘Stretch your bottom lip,’ she said, her voice soft with concentration.
He did, and gripped the seat of the stool. Breathe. She took the hair from beneath his mouth with sharp scrapes.
‘Up,’ she said. He heard her wipe the blade against cloth, then it was against his neck in long, fluid strokes under his chin.
‘You haven’t any chest hair,’ she said, ‘or it would need to be removed, too, I suppose.’
‘I think we’ve already established,’ – he felt that sensitive, gristly part of his neck move against the blade –’that I’m not the manly variety of man.’
Another one of her grunting replies. Another sweep of the blade against his neck and . . .
. . . a hesitation. The ghost brush of a rough finger against his shorn skin.
‘Thank you, Miss Sutherland,’ he said, rising recklessly from the stool. She lifted the blade away from him, shrugged, cleaned and put it away.
‘Wait,’ he said. ‘What time is it?’
‘Six o’clock, Your Grace.’
‘And what . . . what is our itinerary today?’ How on earth did you fill the gulf between six o’clock and the beginning of the day?
She turned and looked at him. ‘I’ll be working. As I said, I’m already late for breakfast. Ah, it disgusts you, doesn’t it, to find that I live a mean little life, and that I work.’
It did. A little.
‘You should find your itinerary fairly easy, then. All you need do is sta
y out of my way. Good day, Your Grace.’ She picked up the basin of water and left.
He distracted himself for a couple of hours by going through Miss Sutherland’s erratic collection of books, magazines, pamphlets . . . It seemed anything that was written down fascinated her. There was a first edition Grimm’s nestled beside a pamphlet on the gestation of tadpoles published by the Royal Society last September. Someone had scribbled notes in the margins in pencil, and crossed out entire sections of Hartman’s findings. Her notes – he assumed the notes were hers, they smacked of her abrupt bad manners – were to the point. Rubbish, beside one paragraph, H needs to examine his own brain, beside another.
He pulled out a Complete Works of Shakespeare and caused a small landslide. The pages were so thin and worn the type was illegible in places. He was about to replace it when a sheaf of pages fell out. The paper was yellow, the ink gone brown, and the edges were stained dark where they’d stuck unevenly out from the book.
It was a child’s writing, but it was neat. All the Lords and Ladies: A Play, he could make out, by Tom S.
Players: Sir Horace Hislop, knight of disrepute, played by – here a name had been replaced in an urgent, messy script with Katherine S.
Mab, the neat hand resumed, Queene of Faeries, played by Lydia S.
Lady Larissa Norrisham, faire and cursed, played by – this was left blank, but Darlington fancied he could hear the small Sutherlands: Katherine refusing to play ‘Faire Larissa’, Lydia offering to play both Larissa and Mab, as she had the most dramatic talent between them, Tom despairing of ever seeing his play performed.
Sir Horace Hislop was an unsavoury, strangely sympathetic sort of character, if a little too inclined to soliloquy. The play itself was idealistic, juvenile and tragic, but still it left Darlington smiling. His eyes went again and again to the parts of Mab, which were marked L. S. – proof in decades-old ink that Lydia had not always felt herself so superior to her siblings.
