by Anna Cowan
He tried to talk, but she was insistent with the blade. When she had him like this, she almost imagined she could keep up with him. If she could just keep him from opening his mouth.
‘Chin,’ she said, and he caught her wrist, stilling the sharp motion of hand and blade.
‘Katherine,’ he said, and he was calm, his infinitely sad eyes trained on her. ‘Why are you so angry with me?’
She made a frustrated, incredulous noise that might have been a laugh in a different girl. ‘I feel for you,’ she made herself say – she wouldn’t play with this man who knew nothing but games, ‘but one fit of despair doesn’t wipe away the cruel things you said last night, or why you said them. We’ve no candles left, and the paraffin’s too low. I have to fix the wall you broke, and my brother’s downstairs cradling a pig that should be bacon by now. These are things that don’t disappear, and are not made right by one night of understanding.’
He let go of her wrist carefully, finger by finger, like a man easing off the trigger of a gun. ‘Katherine,’ he said, and she wished, she wished he would stop saying her name. ‘Last night.’ His hands were clasped between his knees, but if he meant to stop them shaking he wasn’t successful. He looked up at her and was more composed. ‘Thank you,’ he said, in perfect, clipped English.
‘You’re welcome.’
‘But it doesn’t change what I said or did,’ he added, watching her carefully. And then he smiled. It was slow, and it was small, and there was a beast in her so desperate to reach out for him that her mouth opened. ‘What I suspect you already know about me,’ he said, ‘and what last night showed you, is that I am a vicious bastard.’
He seemed barely to think about what he had called himself, and she thought it might be one of the faces he wore when it suited him. But when he started to speak again, she could hear, beneath the cool aristocratic tones, the deepest parts of him still shifting uneasily. ‘Where I attempt intimacy,’ he said, with an ironic grimace on the word, ‘pain and humiliation find rich soil. I am . . . I won’t . . . I’m s-sorry.’
She’d heard it a few times now, the way he stuttered when language was only the surface of some deep, difficult feeling. Her heart stuttered with it.
‘I accept your apology,’ she said in a high-handed way. ‘Lip.’ He gripped the stool with both hands and stretched his upper lip. ‘You know,’ she murmured, leaning close as she shaved around his fine nostrils, his beautiful lip. ‘I was a little savage when I was a child.’
She leaned back. ‘Don’t express your shock all at once,’ she said, and was rewarded with a quick smile. ‘I’m not done with your lip. Whenever I felt particularly mad, and knew I would lash out at someone or something, I would solve difficult sums until I calmed down.’
‘You want me to do mathmatics instead of being vicious?’ he asked when she washed the blade.
‘If mathmatics doesn’t work, find something else to stop your tongue. You can’t do it again.’ She said it simply, with absolute conviction.
He turned so quickly to look at her that she cut him, sliced through the side of his lower lip. She hissed in a breath and held the still-damp cloth tight against his mouth. Her other hand held the base of his skull. After just one night, the texture of his hair was so familiar to her that she felt the shock of it right down to her toes. The coarse pad of her thumb stroked his soft earlobe, because she could not help herself. She wanted him so badly she hadn’t been able to concentrate all morning, and her fingers were nicked and burnt with it.
He breathed in sharply through his nose, closed his eyes.
She stepped hurriedly away and almost tripped over the blanket he’d thrown on the floor. Again. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said, tucking her traitorous thumb away in a tight fist. ‘I shouldn’t have done that. I’m sorry.’
‘Please don’t think of it. Besides, I can’t go down half-shaven. What would the Sutherlands of Millcross think of me?’
He smiled at her and something eased between them.
‘This will hurt,’ she said, when she came to shave around the cut on his lip. ‘I’m sorry I cut you. I wouldn’t —’ She thought, from nowhere, of her father. ‘I wouldn’t purposely hurt you. Ever. Bottom lip.’
He stretched his lip out as best he could and so couldn’t speak, but his eyes traced her every movement. She saw how he was searching for words, and it was painfully clear to her how far they were from where they had begun. She and this man who had words for everything. When she had finished he said, ‘You understand why I came here now, don’t you Katherine? You mustn’t expect . . . more.’
She rinsed the razor one last time, and wiped it clean on a corner of the bloodied towel. Put the razor and strop into the pocket of her smock.
‘Katherine?’
She looked at him, and couldn’t help being a little bit fierce. ‘Jude.’
A reminder. He had given something away last night, and he could not take it back.
‘The drudgery of my life informs every part of who I am. Even if a prince came today, and fit a shoe to my foot, and carried me away, it couldn’t change that. I don’t think life is a fairytale. I don’t think a duke – no matter how deranged or damaged he may be – is going to see a bride in me.’
Must I keep reminding you that I’m not stupid?
She picked the blanket up off the floor and folded it across the foot of the bed. There were more chores waiting for her than could be done in a day, and there was nothing she could say to him that would change any of what was between them.
When he came down into the kitchen that afternoon he was wrapped in his fur-lined bed robe, a wig pinned to his head that Kit thought might be tipped with actual gold. He was cuddling Porkie to his chest.
Even half-dressed, his movements lazy and unselfconscious, he was so beautiful she wanted to smack something.
He sat at the table opposite her and put his head down to share a snuffling breath with the pig, leaving the back of his neck exposed to her.
She had forgotten. It was such a lifetime ago that she had forgotten the way she would pet Lydia’s dandelion hair when she sat at the table and was being good and quiet, and the way Tom would climb into her bed and she’d kick his cold feet away from her but draw circles with her thumb in his palm. She had once been a creature of easy affection. Of one person saying to another by touch, you are here, and that is sometimes an awful thing, but you are not alone.
‘Let’s get drunk,’ said the Duke, suddenly looking up at her. ‘I want to have forgotten my name by ten o’clock. That doesn’t give us much time.’
Lydia was going over the week’s menus with her housekeeper when the doors to her sitting room opened.
‘Begging your pardon, my lady,’ said Soames. ‘There’s a young man here to see you who refuses to wait.’
‘Who is it?’ Her voice was calm, hiding the sudden hope that he’d come back. That he hadn’t left her all alone in the wake of the Marmotte divorce, as the public eye turned on her, who had been his lover also. That he would sweep in and call her his dumpling and they would laugh at the world together, because she was so, so exhausted from coyly pretending she knew where her former lover had gone.
If those society women had one hint of how vulnerable she was, they would devour her. Lady Marmotte – who might keep her title now that she was divorced but would be announced wherever she went by her Christian name first – would pull Lydia’s heart out with her bare hands if she knew Lydia no longer had Darlington’s protection.
‘Mr Crispin Scott, my lady,’ said Soames.
Bastard. He hadn’t come back. Still, Crispin might at least know where he was.
‘Thank you, Marguerite,’ she said to her housekeeper, dismissing her with a wave. ‘We’ll resume our review this afternoon. Soames, show Mr Scott in.’
He bowed, and turned to leave.
Hesitated.
‘My lady,’ he said, ‘I’m sure it’s nothing, but . . . I had a letter from your sister.’
A small
shock went through her. Kit had never, not once, written to her.
‘How lovely that she’s not forgotten you,’ Lydia said, her hands like ice in her lap.
‘She asked me about the Duke of Darlington. Wanted to know where he stands in public opinion, whether it’s turning against him. How much harm it would do him to be found in, er, irregular circumstances.’
‘Thank you, Soames,’ she said, unsure what to make of it. Kit and the Duke had spoken that one time in the Park, and as far as she knew it was the only time they’d met.
And then he’d disappeared.
And Kit had left London.
Her breathing quickening, Lydia stood and pulled the bell for a footman. ‘Fetch the unopened letters from my bureau,’ she said. ‘All of them.’
‘My lady?’ said Crispin from the door, and her heart clenched a little at the sight of him, this imperfect facsimile of her best friend. He wore the same messy hair, the same theatrical clothing, but his face was young and clear. She found herself hoping he never gained the kind of experience that was evident in the Duke’s older, more beautiful face.
‘I thought your lord and master had ordered you to drop me,’ she said lightly, gesturing at the seat across from her.
‘I think he might be in trouble.’ Crispin sat, then rose again a moment later, his fingers busy on the brim of his hat. ‘I couldn’t bear it if anything happened to him. He can be so dense when he thinks he’s got the world dancing to his tune. Forgets to eat sometimes. Thinks he can live on coffee.’
‘Do you know where he is?’
He shook his head. ‘It’s Lady Marmotte. She says things to me. Small, worrying things. And the boy from Leeds, by God, he can barely speak a full sentence and his blushes are a catastrophe with those freckles, but he’s gaining confidence. As only a boy who’s never met Darlington could.’
Lydia’s response was cut off by her husband’s voice, ringing out through the house. ‘That bloody Marmotte woman. Wouldn’t tell me anything definite. Only hinted that I should look to my own.’
She and Crispin shared a worried glance. They were both desperate for news of the Duke’s whereabouts, but she would rather he stay lost forever than be found by her husband. And she did not like Lady bloody Marmotte using her husband like a hunting dog.
‘We have to find him,’ she said.
The footman returned with a pile of letters and Lydia opened them in random order. Her sister might never write to her, but every week since Lydia had become a countess, Violet Feldon had written, without fail.
Chapter Eleven
‘I don’t get drunk,’ said Katherine, not breaking the rhythm of her wrists turning, kneading, turning, kneading.
‘I bet I can get you drunk,’ he said.
‘I don’t gamble.’
He stroked the pig lazily, and pretended it wasn’t melting his heart to do it. Things warm and alive didn’t come this close without wanting something from him, normally. The pig didn’t appear to want anything other than to be scratched behind his silly ears. He said to Katherine, ‘Do you do anything other than work and sleep and work and sleep and work and —’
Because Jude was watching for it he saw that she missed a turn of the dough, and her hands became self-conscious and clumsy. They pressed the dough then pounded it together into a ball, and began their rhythm again, two old women catching up the thread of gossip after an awkward pause. ‘Go and ruin someone else’s evening,’ she said. ‘I’m busy.’
‘You put me in mind of a bee, making honey for every one of your hundred days because that’s what you were created for.’
‘Try four plus four,’ she said. ‘If it doesn’t tax you too much, we’ll move you on to more complicated sums.’
He had lashed out at her last night and this morning she had said to him, You can’t do it again. He thought he would never, his whole life long, forget her saying it. But his heart was a rabid dog in his chest, and her strength was the only thing in the world he could count on.
‘Do you think God himself made you?’ he said. ‘Or did he trust an underling to give you all those qualities you would need for . . . this?’
Her hands stopped altogether. ‘What exactly are you saying?’
He shook his head. ‘Too easy, Katherine. That was far too easy. You never used to rise to my bait at all.’
‘Go and read a book if you’re so bored. I’m not here to argue with you on demand.’ The hands started, stopped. Tried again.
‘I’m not bored,’ said Jude, and he took his fingers away from the pig in case he hurt it. ‘I’m one mortal trying to keep Mount Vesuvius from unleashing the end of days. I’m asking you to hold a burning cinder in your bare palm.’
‘You’re too much,’ she said. ‘People should not be the way you are.’
‘People should not be the way I am,’ he said.
She looked up then, right into his eyes, and he thought he might lay waste to the world to have her.
‘Liza,’ she called, without looking away. Neither of them spoke until the maid had come in from the garden. ‘Finish this dough, would you?’
She untied her apron and hung it neatly on its peg, then assumed, the way she did, that he would follow her. He watched her straight back, the unselfconscious line of her shoulders, and the sudden instinct to destroy her was so violent he stumbled.
‘Tom!’ she called up the stairs. ‘Lady Rose and I are going to the inn – will you come with us?’
Tom came down and stood diffidently at the foot of the stairs. His fingers were stained with ink, his eyes tired. ‘What are you talking about?’
‘We’re going to the inn. Rose is threatening to raze the countryside unless she gets what she wants, and right now Rose wants to get drunk. Will you come?’
He was shaking his head. ‘I know I can’t forbid you anything, but don’t go there, Kit. Please don’t go.’
‘What dreadful thing happened in that inn, Tom?’ Jude asked casually. ‘What nightmare has turned you against it?’
Katherine rounded on him. ‘Don’t even think about it,’ she hissed. And he thought, Oh, you shouldn’t have said that.
‘The buxom wench barmaid broke your heart,’ he said, watching Tom carefully. ‘You lost every last penny you don’t have at cards. You witnessed a gruesome murder.’ And there was the reaction he sought. Every sense pounded after this – this human misery, this bonfire of feeling that wasn’t his. ‘Someone close to you,’ he said. ‘Someone who needn’t have died.’
Katherine tried to pull him out of the kitchen and he put her in her place with one aristocratic look. She was . . . unlike other people. But she was still beneath him.
‘Your father was shot in an inn, wasn’t he?’ he asked idly.
Katherine stepped right up to him and shoved him hard in the chest. ‘Stop it,’ she said.
‘Or what?’
She looked carefully at him, choosing her words. ‘Or I will cast you out,’ she said.
The ground vanished from beneath him and his blood turned to ice. She could have threatened to maim him, to kill him, to send him straight to hell and he would have laughed at her. I will cast you out. He hadn’t known there was any threat left on earth that had the power to stay his hand.
She had known.
She held his eyes for a moment longer, then turned to take Tom’s hand and kiss it. ‘I’ll make sure she’s too drunk to open her mouth for the next week, if it takes me all night.’
Tom nodded. He wouldn’t look at Jude as he left the room. Katherine turned on Jude, and he knew he had undone every fragile thing the night before had made. For one dangerous second fear stole his breath; not even he knew what hell he would unleash, now that nothing held him back.
Then Katherine closed her hand around his arm, and even her wretched crooked fingers were strong. ‘Let’s start with one plus one,’ she said, ‘and work our way up from there.’
Kit was still trembling when she rummaged in her drawer and threw her old green spencer
at him. ‘Put that on over your nightgown,’ she said.
There was a fraught silence, in which she heard his voice over and over, Someone who needn’t have died.
‘I am . . . sorry,’ he said. ‘That was unforgivable.’
She turned on him, and wanted to shout at him not to bother. Except that he was not a man to apologise, and he had apologised. She couldn’t be gracious, so she just nodded at him.
Satisfied, he looked for the first time at the old, worn spencer clutched in his fingers. He gave a thin scream and dropped it on the floor, then tried to climb the bedpost. ‘I know I’ve been awful,’ he said, ‘but that garment is . . . I’ve heard being drawn and quartered is really not so bad.’
She wanted to hit him.
He screamed again and leaped up onto the bed. ‘It moved. Katherine, it moved!’
And, God damn it, she wanted to laugh.
‘You know, don’t you,’ she said, ‘that there are so many cruel things I could say to you right now? Such as that I can’t imagine how your father came upon the idea that you’re less manly than he might have liked. But I have a thing called self-control, and another called consideration. You should try them on – you might find they fit.’
‘How lucky for me you’re not going to say anything cruel,’ he muttered, climbing down off the bed, eyeing the spencer the whole time.
‘You’re going to have to put it on,’ she said. ‘There’s no way you can go to the inn looking like a duchess.’
‘I like looking like a duchess.’
‘Of course you do. And the second you walk in news of Lady Rose and her wicked ways will start to spread – faster than the post by a long shot.’ She wished the post would hurry up. Until she had a reply from Soames even this much exposure might be dangerous. ‘Not to mention that you’ll scare the locals. I don’t like to drink with an audience.’
‘I thought you said you don’t drink?’
‘I said I don’t get drunk,’ she said, and oh, she shouldn’t have enjoyed the competitive light in his eyes quite so much.
