Untamed

by Anna Cowan

  ‘Who was once a boy.’

  ‘Who grew up. You despise to be touched, and you touched her. It wasn’t love, or even lust. I don’t know what it was, but it disgusted me.’

  He sat in frigid silence.

  ‘This isn’t what you want to hear.’

  ‘No.’

  She didn’t know whether to continue. It would be possible to humour him until he was ready to return to London. Perhaps. She looked at the huddled, badly sutured form of him. ‘If I tell you things you don’t want to hear, will you hurt me for it?’

  ‘Lydia is safe.’

  ‘And my reputation? My family?’ she pressed.

  ‘Also safe. Do you even have a reputation? I believe people – important people – must first know who you are.’

  She pushed her hands into the bed on either side of her, and hung her head down. And then she laughed. ‘I wonder what exactly you imagine I can do.’

  ‘Then you’ll help me?’

  ‘Probably,’ she said. ‘But if we’re going to talk, it’ll be on equal footing. What is your name?’

  His given name was available for anyone to find – it wouldn’t even have taken much looking. But no one actually called him by it, and he knew that she would. That was the only reason she asked.

  And he couldn’t bear it.

  ‘Use any of the names you already have for me. Lady Rose, if you must.’

  ‘The woman who is worn by the Duke of Darlington, who is worn by . . . you?’

  He looked over at her – the rough girl with a wolf’s eyes. Her long, coarse ponytail had fallen over the shoulder nearest him. She was probably unaware of how she leaned towards him.

  ‘Your Grace will suffice if Lady Rose bothers you,’ he said.

  Her clear gaze made the question of his name seem simple, as though shedding the layers of himself wasn’t a sickening, impossible thing to ask. Already the meaty pump of his heart was too much. He half stood, before his mind came to bear on his body and he forced himself to sit. If he ran now, he ran out into the dark, and he would be lost.

  He laughed, and even to himself it was an unwholesome sound – some gestating thing seen in the half-light.

  ‘I seem to be bent on ending my life,’ he said. ‘I find myself unable to stop.’

  ‘Stop,’ she said, and he didn’t know if she was echoing him or commanding him. Her hands, in her lap, turned to fists – not to fight with, he thought, but to hold on. Another man might have stopped then, but he couldn’t. She would have to be strong enough to hear it. She looked up. Her voice was weaker, but she was still there with him. ‘So you left London for —’

  ‘London was killing me.’

  ‘And is the silence, and the dark, any better?’

  She watched him with no self-consciousness, leaning more heavily towards him, pressing her teeth into the chapped flesh of her lip. ‘You are,’ and her voice was urgent in some complex way he felt in his spine and throat, ‘the man who is always five steps ahead. What is your plan? What do you imagine will happen?’

  His heart – that bloody muscle – would break his chest if it beat any harder.

  ‘Do you mean for BenRuin to come?’

  ‘BenRuin,’ he said. ‘What has BenRuin to do with anything?’

  ‘Then what is your plan?’

  ‘You,’ he said, his voice unfamiliar. ‘You are my plan.’

  ‘What is your name?’ she said.

  ‘No, this is —’ He stood. ‘I know I’m cracked – I feel it all the way through me – but there is this . . . thing inside. If I let him out he will —’ He felt so close to the end, to doing or saying something reckless or cruel. He couldn’t look at her. ‘I need you to take . . . him . . . out.’

  ‘Is that your plan? Kill the man inside?’

  Yes. Kill what was sick and dangerous. Be the man outside who didn’t frighten people. Be only that man.

  ‘And now we know why you seem to wish for death.’ Something else occurred to her – she pulled away and drew her leg up onto the bed. He watched the furious industry of her thoughts, and crushed silk between his fingers to stop himself from interrupting her. This was the vital equation. She would give him the answer he needed.

  ‘Your Grace,’ she said, looking up at him, her eyes golden in the candlelight, ‘let’s say there are two men inside of you. One is charming and moderately clever and he wants to kill the other, who frightens him. So which of those men, do you suppose, has brought you all the way to the arse-end of nowhere in his bid to survive?’

  She had to stop speaking. She had glimpsed it – that part of himself that terrified him – and the last thing she should be doing was encouraging him to release it. How many people, though, had seen so clearly what he felt because he couldn’t, or didn’t, close them out? How many people had he chosen to tell his insides to?

  He was a temptation like none she’d ever felt, and she didn’t fool herself into thinking she could resist the chance to go deeper, get closer. What he had asked was, in the end, so much more intimate than the seduction she had imagined.

  He started to shake when her meaning became clear to him.

  She spoke as softly as she could. ‘You think you want to be rid of this part of yourself – but it’s the very thing that’s fighting to survive. It’s what brought you here, to me. You cannot kill him, and live.’

  He was still shaking, and he’d thrown his head up – to help him breathe, she thought, even though his breaths were already lifting his whole chest.

  ‘What is your name?’

  He turned on her, and she had no more warning than that.

  ‘I’m sick and broken, and you want me. What perverse thing happened to twist you like that?’

  She could only think, stupidly, that they’d been like lovers entwined and his words were a small knife pulled against her stomach. She stood.

  ‘Do you lie awake at night and watch me? Do you think I don’t see how your gaze devours me and how you reach for me?’

  ‘Don’t,’ she said. ‘You don’t have to —’

  ‘I’ve had the pretty sister already. Why do you think I spoke to you that night at the ball? You were so painfully out of place that I couldn’t resist you. What draws you to me when I am so wrong? No woman could see the thing inside and still want me – what cruel, stunted life have you had?’

  ‘Don’t do this.’

  ‘Isn’t this who you wanted me to be?’ he said, his face vicious and cold. ‘The man inside – the one who wants to live?’

  She brought herself to stand tall and look him in the eye. The day she had no more strength to stand upright, no matter the circumstances, would be the day she died. ‘This,’ she said, ‘is why neither I, nor any other being on earth, can help you.’

  She could not stay here with him. Let him make what he would of the dark.

  He caught up with her on the stairs. ‘Jude,’ he said. ‘My name is Jude.’

  Chapter Ten

  He hadn’t brought the candle with him. The only window in the stairwell was on the first floor, and it cast almost no light. Kit could hear only their footfalls as she continued down, and behind her the stutter-race of his breathing.

  ‘You have . . . to . . . stop,’ he said, his voice sucking into his throat. He came down after her, his hands landing clumsy and wet on the back of her neck, fingers tangling in her hair. He pulled, trying to get free, and his breathing got worse.

  He was frightening. This was beyond anything he had said or done. He was with her, in the dark, losing control.

  ‘Jude,’ she said very quietly, turning. ‘You need to be calm.’

  Keeping her touch firm and impersonal she untangled his hands from her hair. His skin was drenched in sweat, and she could hear the whalebone corset creaking as his body tried to suck in more and more air.

  ‘Here, put your hand on the wall,’ she said, placing his hand flat against it.

  ‘Don’t go. Please don’t go. Don’t leave me.’

  She
could hardly understand him, the words forcing themselves out from some long-unopened place in him. She knew something about a father’s harsh treatment – and she would bet her life that as a child Darlington had taught himself not to cry out or beg when he was shut up in the dark.

  The fact that he begged now, when life had taught him not to, made her hair stand on end.

  ‘Be quiet,’ she said. ‘Go back up the stairs – I’m right here, right behind you.’

  She kept her hand firmly on the small of his back as they climbed. Her eyes had adjusted, and she could see the outline of him ahead of her, and the walls on either side. He shuffled and stumbled like he was blind, and his breathing shook him so hard he could barely stay upright.

  She gritted her teeth against the sound of it, and knew that no matter what he said, this was why he’d come to her. So that he could fall apart in some anonymous part of the world that he need never visit again.

  He’d left the hallway door and her bedroom door open, and she ushered him straight in, sitting him at the dresser. She let his weight fall against her, to keep him upright.

  ‘Hush now,’ she said, the way she used to say it to Lydia when her sister wouldn’t stop talking at night. ‘I’ll get this bodice off you and you’ll start to feel better.’ She reached over his shoulders and unbuttoned the jacket. His body, when she pulled the jacket down off his arms, sheered helplessly back. She untied the tapes of his petticoats and hoops, every bow like a knot to her fingers.

  She eyed the one stubby candle by the bed, and judged that they had only forty minutes of light remaining. There were only two more candles in the kitchen – both of them part-used. She’d have to go down for them both, when he was calmer.

  ‘There now,’ she said, pulling the pins quickly from his wig and lifting it free of his head. She took an old shawl from the top drawer and rubbed his hair with it, to dry some of the sweat pouring from him. ‘Hush now.’

  ‘Get . . . it . . . off,’ he said in that graceless voice, pulling at the front of the bodice.

  She was rougher than she would have liked, but she judged that getting the laces undone was more important than being careful. She pulled the sides of the bodice apart and his spine curled over, his back heaving up and down like some newly born creature’s.

  ‘Sit up,’ she said, helping him upright with one arm across his chest. She pulled the bodice clear of him. ‘You’ll have to stand now, Jude.’

  His legs couldn’t take his weight, and he leaned heavily on her. It took him three attempts to step out of the skirt and hoops, and the curve of his ribs, his armpit and chest pressed into her, racked and wet.

  If she sat him back down he wouldn’t stand again.

  She peeled the soaked chemise from his skin, bullying him into raising his arms while she held him upright with her own body. His back was heavy against her as she unbuttoned and stripped his drawers from him.

  She let him fall onto the bed and tugged the covers out from underneath him, then used the shawl to dry him – his forehead, neck, collarbones, chest, wrists, between his fingers, hips, thighs, the back of his knees, his feet. She’d wanted to see him naked – he had, of course, been right about that. She’d dreamed about him being naked to her, till she couldn’t breathe with the heat.

  It hadn’t occurred to her that when this man gave up control he would shatter, spectacularly, into pieces.

  When she was done she tried to leave his side and he grabbed her. She rubbed the cloth slowly over his chest, down his arms, praying for the stark blue eyes to fall closed. They were fixed, burning, on her face.

  She realised that she was saying his name, over and over.

  ‘I need to go downstairs for another candle,’ she said. ‘You have to let me go now.’

  ‘No.’

  She flinched at the sound of him. Unhidden. For the first time, he was really a person to her, here in the room with her. It was unsettling the way ghosts were unsettling, because she was entirely separate to him – and he mattered.

  ‘I promise I’ll come back,’ she said. ‘I don’t want you to be in the dark.’

  He wouldn’t let go of her hand, and without thinking she lowered her head and kissed his wrist, warm and close. His other hand came to the back of her neck and buried itself in her hair. His grip on her stung, but she kept her lips against his damp skin until she had satisfied herself that his pulse was strong, and would not falter while she was gone.

  ‘Let go now,’ she said, and he let her go.

  When she woke, she didn’t open her eyes. She was drowning in heat. She held him from behind, one arm wrapped around him, the other lying beneath his head and across the pillow, her fingers twined with his. She could feel, because so much of her was in contact with him, how his whole body vibrated with tension, with the effort of submitting himself to her touch. She wished for an evil fairy godmother with a handy spindle, so that they could lie like this forever while thorn bushes grew up all around them.

  She didn’t know what told him she was awake, but he was out of her grasp like prey startled from the undergrowth. Before she could take one last breath of him.

  It was a shock, how quickly he was gone.

  ‘Good morning,’ she said, still not opening her eyes.

  ‘Good morning,’ he replied. She kept her eyes shut one moment longer to savour it, because it might be the last vulnerable part of him she ever had.

  When she opened her eyes the first things she saw were the burnt-out stubs of the household’s last candles. She landed, hard, back on earth.

  He had pulled on his dressing gown – every part of him covered – and was sitting in the window seat, not looking at her. He would let the morning waste, sitting there. And she, lying in the dying heat of their sleep, had to bring herself to get up, and then she had to work until it was dark again.

  He said nothing as she rose and straightened herself and pulled on her cracked boots and tied her hair back so tightly it brought tears to her eyes. ‘I’ll be back to shave you in an hour,’ she said, and left.

  The first crack of splitting wood made him jump, and his wrung-out muscles took to quietly shaking again. After the second crack he eased the window open and watched Katherine split log after log. He couldn’t look away. Her movements were heroic, articulate, economic. She was so, so strong.

  She planted the axe head on the ground, leaned down and picked up the next log with one bare hand. She placed it on the stump, turned it a fraction of a degree counter-clockwise. Her body traced a powerful arc and the log split in two.

  That woman, that body, had held him all night. He had broken against her, and she was unharmed. He was in awe of her. He was repulsed by her. The thought of her coming back up the stairs, and being near, and shaving him, made him break out into a sweat.

  Now that she had seen what he couldn’t kill.

  He watched her until all the logs were split. He watched her pile them – systematically, quickly – then carry an armload inside. He thought she was gone, and a shock went through him when she reappeared. She carried a second load inside, and though he waited, still, for ten minutes, she didn’t reappear.

  He remembered her fingers holding his tightly in the night, and imagined the force she would bring, if he once let her near – the strength of her fingers deep in his hair, and her muscled legs around him, and her coarse hair let loose over him.

  Sparks scattered down his spine. He thought of her twisted fingers, her rough palms. The way she had said fuck, in the pigsty.

  He turned away and shut the window. He was exhausted, but couldn’t bring himself to climb back under those covers, which might hold some remnant of her body. His eyes fell on the packet that had arrived for him yesterday, which he hadn’t yet opened. Careless. Inside was yesterday’s Times and six of the weekly broadsheets – including Cumberpot’s, which the better fishmongers refused to wrap their wares in.

  It must be bad.

  His fingers came away stained with ink, and he looked out
the window again. Maybe she would come back – maybe she would need something from the garden – and he could watch her from this safe distance.

  Kit knocked before she entered – on her own bedroom door.

  ‘Come in,’ he said. It was the voice of a duke, perfectly composed.

  She pushed the door open with her foot and found him sitting exactly where she’d left him, with a pile of newspapers by his feet. He followed her to the dresser, sat on the stool where his knees almost brushed her skirts. He didn’t look at her.

  She poured the water into the basin, wrung out the cloth and . . . hesitated. Then she cupped his face, through hot, wet cloth. Still he wouldn’t look at her. His skin turned red – fierce, flushed, spreading from where her palms held his cheeks, his jaw. He jerked away, so that her hands hung useless and awkward for a moment between them.

  She gave a short laugh. ‘Well, if that doesn’t sting just the tiniest bit.’

  ‘Don’t take offence,’ he said, folding and unfolding his fine white fingers over and over in his lap. He looked up at her. ‘Last night.’

  ‘One night does not change a man,’ she said, stropping the razor. ‘I know.’

  Better than anyone, she knew that. And yet. She felt changed. Fundamentally, irrevocably changed. She had simply acted as she thought was right. But she had slept pressed against this man, so that she had breathed him for hours, and her fingers had been a cage around his, and the tender parts of her face had become animal and sought parts of him according to their own unquestionable instinct.

  ‘Head up,’ she snapped, and made less than a second of contact, her finger under his chin. His eyes flared and fixed on her. Looked away.

  She skimmed the sharp edge over his cheek and washed the dark hair off the blade. ‘Turn.’