by Anna Cowan
For three nights he had lain awake with nothing to distract him and tried, by focusing minutely on Katherine, to ignore the other person lying there awake and demanding attention.
Five years old and hugging his bedcover to his small limbs, longing with all the power of his needy heart for it to be a living person holding his body to theirs. Anyone would have done.
Fifteen and walking into the disused study at Brookfeld Park, his heart alight with hopeful anticipation, about to be taught the lesson that made the man.
Thirty-one and sitting alone on the front pew at St George’s, as a bishop he did not know eulogised the father he did not know, an iron key branded cold across his palm.
It terrified him, being awake at night with only himself for company.
When his father became ill – became so thin and light on the mattress it was difficult to make out his body under the sheets that covered him – Darlington had needed reconciliation. It had awoken in him like a disease, this need to end the narrative of his father’s life with love. It was a kind of madness, he’d known that even as he was caught in it. His father did not love him, and would never be made to love him. Not now, when his body was visited with such pain, and all he could think of was pain.
He had ordered his son from his side, the day before his death. He had threatened to disown him. Darlington, who had been such a grave disappointment to his father in life, had not disobeyed this last request.
The last words he had heard from the man were Get out, and that would never be altered now.
He glanced again at the watch. Only two minutes had passed since he had last looked. He would be well in the morning. As soon as it grew light, time would start up again, propelling itself forward.
The pain started.
He thought of the waves he had watched as a boy at Stonehaven. The stones had ground and shifted beneath his feet on the beach, an off-kilter reflection of the sky. He remembered the sea, huge and steely, muscling its way up, against the pull of gravity; the foam knitted across its surface after it broke. The duchess had been wearing a pale pink coat and bonnet over a darker pink dress with small hoops. He remembered how her round, placid face had pinched, her lips unsure as she told Nanny not to let him so close to the water.
He saw his hand reach out for Katherine. He saw his fingers pinch the very end of a curl of hair between them. His whole world narrowed to the coarse-wild texture of her hair. He rolled the strands gently between finger and thumb until his fingers belonged again at the end of his hand, and his heart slowed and the pain receded. His lungs relaxed and pulled long, even breaths into his body.
When at last he looked at his watch it was four o’clock. He forced himself to let go of her hair, and rose from the bed. He had hoped that simple proximity to Katherine would be enough to cure him of his ailment. It wasn’t.
He was going to have to act.
The brush of skin against her lips woke her. Warm and close, exhalations of breath against her neck, soft hair kissing her, skimming over her neckline.
‘Good morning,’ he murmured, and his voice was the beginning of the day. ‘Open your eyes,’ he said, when she wouldn’t.
She opened them.
The wet, long-lashed eye of the piglet looked back at her. She came up onto her elbow too quickly, and the piglet reared back with a rough snort. His small trotters tangled in the blanket and he fell onto his side.
The Duke laughed. It was the first genuine expression Kit had seen from him, and it ruined the perfection of his face. His austere nose scrunched up at the corners, his cheeks pulled back in unsophisticated concession to the lips opening and curving to show his sharp incisors.
The effect was devastating.
It was too early in the day for him to laugh like that. She had not properly woken up. He scratched the piglet with his long fine fingers and she couldn’t blame the little beast for grinning back at him, because she was fairly sure he could make her do anything by smiling at her just like that.
He lounged on his side atop the covers in his nightgown, ankles crossed. She’d never really understood why men were so concerned with women’s ankles. There was barely a less pretty, more functional part of the human body.
And yet . . . he had been put together by a master. A Michelangelo, standing by God’s side.
She covered her eyes with the crook of her elbow and groaned. This was worse than bad.
‘What is that pig doing in my bed?’
‘This little pig and I are more alike than you might think. I couldn’t let him go to the butcher. I bought him from Tom for ten guineas.’
‘Ten guin . . . Ten . . .’
‘Which I think you’ll agree gives me the right to bring him into my bed. Doesn’t it, Porkie?’ The piglet snuffled in delight.
Kit subsided again. Groaned again. Covered her eyes again.
It was going to be another long day.
Kit waited outside the garden gate for Angus before breakfast. He would cut across the fields from Millcross. She pulled the knife from her smock and started trimming the raspberry bush that grew up against the fence.
She had to get rid of him. Somehow.
It was hard to remember, now that she was standing on her own wet grass under a familiar sky, what urgency had made her leave London with him. It had felt so vitally important. Making sure he left Lydia alone – giving Lydia and her husband a chance at least to see one another clearly.
Now she felt as she usually did: that Lydia was better left at a distance.
And already – after only three days – she could practically hear her small family creaking as it bent and changed and made room for him. If she let him stay, he would leave them in splinters when he went.
And then there was the matter of heat.
She looked out over the field and saw Angus in the distance, climbing over a turnstile. She raised her hand, then dropped it a moment later. There was no mistaking the figure walking behind him.
The Squire. It had been foolish to think she could put him off so long.
When the butcher called out a greeting, she couldn’t help spilling her news out, anyway. ‘Prices have been driven up, Angus. You’ll never guess what I got for a piglet this morning.’
He planted his feet, hands strong and clean on his hips. ‘It was Rogers, wasn’t it,’ he said. ‘Gave you half a guinea, damn fool. You know he can’t tell a trotter from an ear.’
‘Not half a guinea,’ she said. With the Squire there watching, her delight was awkward and slippery, but she could not keep it in.
Angus pulled the felt hat from his head and dashed it against his leather trousers. ‘More’n half a guinea?’
‘Ten guineas, Angus. Ten whole guineas for a piglet. A boar, too, and well past suckling.’
‘But that’s not . . . I mean, only a madman would . . . Ten guineas.’
Kit shrugged, as though to say, Oh, what’s ten guineas? As though she hadn’t sounded just like Angus less than an hour ago. Ten whole guineas. She held herself by the elbows, to keep this feeling. Like the earth’s tightly held muscles had eased.
‘Ten whole guineas, Miss Sutherland?’ said the Squire, and she had at last to acknowledge him with a curtsey. ‘Perhaps my visit here today was not necessary after all.’
He jabbed a tussock with his walking stick, and the earth seized up again. He was not the kind of man who could leave a sleeping beast alone, even for a second.
‘You’ll get your share, don’t you worry,’ Kit said. Though she’d planned, long ago, how to repay him, and knew exactly how many years it would take, her family had depended on him for so long that she sometimes thought she would never be free of him.
She imagined holding him to the ground by his thick, white moustache while Angus split him from breast to groin.
‘Angus, I’m sorry you came out for nothing. I told Tom he should have fetched you when the sow rejected her piglets. The boar was the only one of the lot to survive. He named it, the silly boy.’
>
‘It’s a damn shame, Kit, but don’t you worry. Er, who’s the madman who bought him, then?’
She hesitated for a moment. The Squire had a habit of coveting what belonged to her. And with a young daughter about to be launched on the town, he wouldn’t stop until ‘Lady Rose’ was well within his clutches.
Then she thought of the Duke’s treacherous blue eyes and shrugged. The Squire could try to grasp ‘Lady Rose’ all he pleased, but it’d be like a spider trying to catch a dragon in its web.
‘You know the Duke of Darlington, Angus – the new one, I mean?’
‘The boy who turned up to his dad’s political supper with Fanny Grenville on his arm? Everyone knows that dumb bastard. Turned out she was the mistress of the minister his dad was trying to woo, but the idiot boy thought his dad was hosting a theatrical.’
Just last week Kit would probably have thought him an idiot boy as well. Now she wondered what political agenda he had scuttled by showing up with just the wrong person at just the wrong moment. There was no question in her mind that he had done none of it by accident.
The Squire’s hand clenched on the golden hart that topped his walking stick. It would have to be damn uncomfortable on his hand, but the Squire would stick a nail in his eye if he thought it made him look distinguished. ‘Shut your mouth. You are speaking of a man who stands one step below our king. You may leave us.’
Angus’s expression didn’t change one bit, and he looked to Kit. Being alone with the Squire made her feel sometimes as though Abe Sutherland was still alive. She wasn’t child enough to ask the butcher to stay and shelter her, though. He shrugged, donned his hat, and walked away back down the paddock.
‘The Duke of Darlington can have nothing to do with your pig,’ the Squire said. ‘Why did you mention him? Is it to do with your sister?’
She made herself stay quiet, even though she wanted to tell him to keep his fat slug of a tongue away from her sister.
‘Your father, God rest his soul, asked me to act as Lydia’s guardian after he died. He feared the Scottish savage would misuse her, and as I have been denied access to her, I fear he was right to worry. I have resorted to reading rubbish, in order to fulfil my duty. I have . . . heard things that connect her name to the Duke’s.’
Firstly, Kit wanted to say, so that it scored the flesh inside her mouth, God would not touch my father’s soul with a red-hot poker. Secondly, the next time I see BenRuin, I will kiss him for keeping you away.
‘I took care of it,’ she made herself say, each word a traitor detaching itself from her. ‘The Duke’s cousin is here, staying with us for a time. It was the favour he asked in return for leaving Lydia be. It was Lady Rose who bought the pig.’
The Squire moved in closer, and Kit reacted in the old way. He didn’t grab her – he plucked the collar of her spencer between two meaty, fastidious fingers and came closer still, until she could smell his moustache and thought she would gag on it. ‘I am not amused by your vulgar attempt at wit, girl. One month in London does not erase a decade of servitude. Now tell me the truth.’
If she had to swallow any more words, she was going to choke on them. Somehow she kept her mouth shut and pulled herself carefully out of his grasp. When she knew she could speak without screaming, she said, ‘Lady Rose Everdale. Look her up, if you like. Her father holds a diplomatic post in Moscow – he’s the Duke’s uncle on his mother’s side. I told you, I fixed his thing for Lydia, and this was what he asked in exchange.’
The Squire was beginning to believe her. She could see, against the backdrop of dark English sky, that he was looking into a future new with possibility.
His entire manner changed. ‘Violet has been asking for you incessantly ever since your return from London. She is desperate for details. Come at eleven for tea. She may even take you for a ride.’
He smiled, and she saw at last what she should have seen right away. She held a face card in her hand – a duke’s cousin – and it would buy her untold concessions from the Squire, if she only had the stomach to play it.
‘Thank you,’ Kit said. ‘A ride would be lovely.’
Kit let the pony choose his pace as she and Violet came up the driveway to the Manor. Violet had been relentless since they left Millcross, describing every dress in Miss Faith’s shop, ribbon by ribbon, though they had been there a mere half-hour before.
Kit had stopped listening long before now.
The gold-stone façade of her home came into view behind the trees on the drive, and she felt the habitual warmth of that place punctured by the man now housed within it. As they pushed through the overgrowth Violet broke with the subject of dresses and became silent.
‘Wait here.’ Kit dismounted at the garden gate and handed her reins up to the other girl. ‘I’ll fetch Tom to hold the horses, then you and I can go in and find Lady Rose.’
In the dim hallway she called for her brother.
‘Katherine Grace,’ murmured her mother from her place by the parlour fire, ‘must I forever tell you not to yell like a hoyden, with no hope of success?’
‘Sorry, Ma.’ Kit went in. ‘Have you seen Tom?’
Her mother put the novel she was reading down over her lap, the leaves open. It drove Tom crazy, but he could no more break her of the habit than she could break Kit of her bad manners.
‘Oh, you’re reading Beaumaris again?’ Kit lounged against her mother’s side, unconcerned about leaving Violet a couple of moments longer to dream of her own beauty in peace.
‘This remains my favourite. Ferdinand is so very dreadful in it.’
‘You get the impression Beaumaris tried to moralise him a little later on, I agree. Is Tom about?’
‘He’s gone to debate the philosophy of machinery, or something equally incomprehensible, with the vicar.’
‘Would you like me to bring Violet in to see you?’
‘Lord no. Dreadfully chatty, that girl.’
Kit smiled, but her mother had resumed reading and didn’t see it. She left her to her solitary pleasure and called to Violet from the kitchen door, ‘Tom’s not in. I’ll go and see if our guest’s up and bring her to you.’
She closed the door against Violet’s protest that she couldn’t meet a duke’s cousin for the first time from the back of a horse.
‘Voice, Kit,’ her mother said as Kit sped by, up the stairs.
She slowed when she reached the top. She often let herself imagine, just before opening her bedroom door, that he was nothing but a bad dream and she would find no sign of him within. Today she was determined to wring some good from him. Today she was glad for his sharp mind and his bright, overwhelming confidence.
He was mad. He would do what she asked and make a game of it.
When she opened the door her eyes were drawn straight to the window. He sat there, knees drawn up, wine-red silk draped about him. The way the light fell on the silk and cast shadows against the rough plastered wall – he looked like a Vermeer masterpiece.
Until Kit understood the true quality of his pose.
His arms were wrapped across himself like giant sutures holding his chest closed. He was pale. He looked out the window, but Kit knew he didn’t see the peppercorn tree and the corner of the garden where the compost heap leaned drunkenly over the fence. He looked at some internal landscape. His mouth made her think of Cuvier’s giant fish, groping blindly through the silt at the river’s bottom.
His lips parted to breathe, but no air seemed to pass them. He tried again, with the same poor result.
Kit felt cold. She didn’t want to see this.
She turned away, planning to make her entrance a second, noisy time over.
‘Don’t go,’ he said.
She turned, but he didn’t look at her; he said nothing as long minutes ticked by. Violet was waiting downstairs, impatient to meet him. Kit had to go over the accounts to see how much of the ten guineas she could keep out of the Squire’s hands. She had to find a way to take the money from Tom. She was s
upposed to be making preserves with Liza today, which would already have to be put off until tomorrow; the kitchen hearth needed to be swept out; the floors mopped; the windows washed. But she supposed you couldn’t bring yourself to speak when you could not breathe.
‘Oh, for God’s sake,’ she said, and snatched the water pitcher from its basin.
She walked over to where he sat and made herself impervious to the wreck of him. Joan of Arc, she told herself, dealt every day with men wounded in the chest, and she did not flinch. Of course, those wounds had been of the bloody, visible variety.
‘Drink,’ she said to him. Then, ‘Don’t make me slap you. I already told you I don’t want to go to prison.’
A smile ghosted across his lips, and did nothing whatsoever for his eyes. She didn’t know if there was a power on earth that could make inroads into those eyes. He took the pitcher and drank, then set it restlessly aside.
‘This is why I came here,’ he said.
The admission caught her unawares. It was so far from what she’d imagined, in London or since.
‘Katherine,’ he said quietly, and it was the first time he’d said her name.
‘Pull yourself together,’ she said, turning away. ‘The Squire’s daughter’s here to meet you. We’ve left her waiting long enough.’
‘What is a squire’s daughter to me? I need to speak with you. I need . . . I need you to do something for me.’
‘Firstly,’ she said, ‘I have already done at least ten things for you this morning, you’re just too bloody privileged to have realised it. Secondly, you may mope all you like on your own time, but you insisted on coming to my house, so you’ll do as I tell you and come down to meet my neighbour. You’ll be impressive and grand and condescending and make her flighty little heart sing like a bird. And thirdly,’ she said, before his mind caught up and he found some new and interesting way to make words unpleasant, ‘do not use my name.’
‘Katherine,’ he said, ‘this is the very definition of difficult. Please do not make it harder.’
‘Why not?’
