by Anna Cowan
‘Do I really have to wear it over my nightgown, though?’
‘Even your nightgown’s finer than anything I own, you git.’ Her skin prickled a bit, because she’d just called a duke a git.
‘I could go dressed as a man,’ he said quietly, and looked at her through his lashes, and her whole body caught on fire.
‘They know me too well,’ she said. ‘I can’t just turn up with a nameless man. You’re too . . . pretty for them to overlook it.’
He moved his head slightly to the side, like turning a key in a lock. But all he said was, ‘If this garment bites me, I’m taking Porkie and running away to London.’
‘I’m Daisy,’ he was saying, ‘the Squire’s new upstairs maid. I clean candlesticks with a cloth, and make bread with my hands. I’m very good at it. I think I’m his favourite. He even let me polish his medals with, er, polish. I expect I’ll be his housekeeper before long, and then I’ll write in ledgers and be busy and important and carry many keys.’
Kit buried her face in her hands and tried very hard not to laugh. He was so aristocratic he was practically brain-damaged.
She peeked up in time to see him bestow a smile on John, and easily capture the poor man’s heart for life. She should have known the shabby disguise wouldn’t make a bit of difference. His wasn’t a beauty that came from fine clothes.
‘Mark and Simon are waiting for their beer, John,’ she said. ‘But think about what I said, won’t you?’
John nodded, without looking at her.
‘Shoo,’ she said, as no level of subtlety was going to penetrate the drunken-besotted fog.
John reddened a little. ‘Aye, I’ll think on it, Kit,’ he said, with that sympathy in his voice that meant, You and I both know it’s a useless thing to ask, and ambled over to his brothers, a huge grin on his face.
Darlington was wrapped up in the spencer, with an old coat of Kit’s buttoned over the top. An ancient woollen hat was pulled low over his face, with his expensive black curls peeking out underneath. It had been more trouble than it was worth, getting him into it, but he seemed utterly enchanted with the disguise now. He looked less like a woman than when he was in full dress, but you wouldn’t assume he was a man unless you had any reason on earth to think of it.
His face was flushed a little from drink, and he was taking delicate sips from the crude glass in front of him. He looked around the room with a kind of benevolence, as though he actually thought he was blending in. She had expected him to be collected – to drink and drink and never lose that self-contained air. She had not expected this . . . soft, undignified happiness.
He finished the beer in his glass and looked, all disapproving entitlement, at the empty bottom.
‘Katherine,’ he said. ‘Please explain these coins to me again. The smallest one, what’s that called?’
‘You should write a travel guide when you return to London,’ she said, picking out the right number of coins from the pile in his hand.
‘What a marvellous, delightful idea! I will be able to explain about farthings and pence and – what’s this one?’
‘That’s a button.’
He looked blank for a moment. Then, ‘I have never heard of this button,’ he said, outraged. ‘Is it a currency the working poor are keeping to themselves? How much is a button worth?’
‘Buh-ton,’ she said. ‘You know – that pesky little device you deal with twice a day, at least . . .’ She trailed off, realising that of course he didn’t deal with buttons. His valet likely did that for him. Fingers against the Duke’s skin for a moment every morning and night.
‘Er,’ she said, ‘never mind.’
‘They know you here.’ He let the rest of the coins fall from his palm onto the old, scarred tabletop.
Kit started sorting them into neat piles. ‘They should. I’ve been coming here since I could talk.’
‘Is that . . . a country thing?’
She grinned over at him. ‘Do we raise our children on beer and sops? No. My father would bring me when he came to play cards. He found it useful that I could also count.’
It had been more than that. She’d been his little guard dog, his champion, his heir, girl or no. She had never been prouder than when he’d brought her with him where other men were, and swung her up on his shoulders and taught her to laugh at the world.
He had been her hero.
She’d done everything she could to help him win enough money to buy the title he so desperately wanted to pass on to Tom. She’d scolded her mother for saying the wrong things to Abe, didn’t she know that made him angry? She’d called her mother silly and weak.
Then Lydia was born.
‘You never speak about your father.’
‘And you never speak about yours.’
Darlington collected up the coins she’d picked out for him and nodded over at John, Mark and Simon. ‘If you won’t talk about your father, then tell me why they don’t want to farm on your land.’
She cursed herself for assuming his wits would be dulled by anything less than a blow to the head.
‘You’re offering them far better rates than the Squire.’
‘Better rates but no assistance if they need it, no capacity for new agricultural techniques, no insurance against a bad harvest. The Squire knows I want them and he treats them better because of it.’
‘They could build something with you though,’ he said, almost crossly. ‘They should know that. They should know you’re the most competent person in England.’
The compliment was unexpected, and every part of her skin stung like it had been lightly slapped. ‘I can’t look after them properly until I’ve more capital, and I’ve no capital until I have tenants. Let’s not talk about this.’
‘No,’ he said, ‘you’re right. It’s far too depressing and plebeian. And also you don’t seem to be drunk yet.’
She had drunk as much as he.
‘Whisky?’ he said.
‘It has to be a game, or it’s not fun.’
Kit rolled her eyes, which proved that she was perhaps just a little bit drunk, and said, ‘Of course you’d think that.’
‘You’ve heard more than is seemly about my wretched childhood. I want some woeful tales in return.’
She made a face. ‘In what way is that either fun or like a game?’
‘If your tale is sufficiently full of woe – if you make me feel a pang – then I have to drink. If there’s no pang, then you drink.’
‘Unfair! You wouldn’t feel a pang if you stepped on your granny’s glasses and she couldn’t see for a week.’
‘Well, no, obviously. I would be far too busy laughing.’
‘Wretched man. I don’t trust you at all.’
He blinked innocently at her. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘You seem to be confused. I’m a woman.’
She was perfectly caught for a moment between the desire to thump him and to fall over laughing. He took advantage of her silence and poured them each a glass of whisky from the bottle he’d brought over. She didn’t want to think about how much it had cost. It smelt expensive.
‘The game only works if we’re honest,’ he said, ‘so I won’t cheat.’ And then, before she could make a sceptical remark, he added, ‘Cheating’s only fun when it means you win.’
He held up his glass. ‘Make my heart bleed, Katherine.’
She was aware of her twisted fingers, wrapped around her glass, but she would pass out from drink before she would give him her personal pain to entertain him, or distract him, or whatever this was.
‘One summer we were swimming at the lake, and I decided I really didn’t want to come home when Nanny said. So I ran all the way into Millcross, yelling like the armies of hell were after me.’
He looked at her with a crooked half-smile, as if she had charmed him a bit. ‘Not exactly the stuff of nightmares.’
‘I was naked,’ she said.
There was a second’s pause, and then he gave a completely involuntary shout
of laughter. Another pause, and then he threw his head back, abandoned, his neck exposed, and laughed until he almost fell off his chair.
Everyone was staring at them, and she didn’t care. She would have every person in the room discover he was a man before she would have him stop.
He leaned weakly forward on his forearms, and his body shivered with the remnants of laughter. ‘Drink up,’ he said, flashing his teeth at her.
She made a face at him, because it would be no fun if he knew how delighted she was, and drank down a mouthful of whisky. ‘That’s bloody good,’ she said, and leaned back in her chair.
‘I think you might be more manly than I am.’
‘Jude,’ she said, ‘Porkie is more manly than you are.’
He smiled at her again – more warmly than before, nothing he would ever have seen in the mirror – and topped up her glass. ‘Try again.’
‘When I was fourteen I became my sister’s lady’s maid, because all our servants had abandoned ship.’
Something crossed his face that she thought was less a pang than simple surprise. ‘How old was Lydia?’ he asked, and the familiar, unselfconscious way he said her sister’s name leeched the warm buzz from her veins.
‘Seven.’
‘Why do you say lady’s maid? Why not simply say you took care of her when no one else was able?’
‘Because —’ Because she’d never thought of it. Because Abe Sutherland had said to her, She’s the only one of you who took after me. I won’t have you infecting her with your nonsense and your common manners.
‘It wasn’t like that,’ she said. ‘Father said her complexion was worth more than the Squire’s fortune and he was right. He said she would be debuted instead of me because she would make a great match. And he was right.’
‘And you still have your family home because she lived up to his expectations,’ he said. ‘Am I right?’
‘Yes. No!’ She took a nervous sip of whisky. It hurt her, peculiarly, to have him take Lydia’s part. They still had the Manor because Kit had never shrunk from doing what was necessary. ‘I was fourteen years old, and I didn’t mind so much that we’d lost everything. I was so . . . sure Father would win it back. It meant long days outside, just me, Tom and Lydia. We went half wild, and I didn’t care. And then one day Tom had found a cave and we were going to build a fort, but I said wait for Lydia and went to find her, and she was sitting in the parlour and she’d been crying, but the only thing I could see was the white dress. It had a thick, glossy ribbon around the middle, the blue of robin’s eggs, and these – lace ruffles around the sleeves that made Lydia’s arms look like a doll’s arms. I used to have a doll with arms just like hers. Lydia hardly even remembered a time when we’d owned such things, but I did, and I couldn’t bear to see her in the dress.’
Lydia used to screech at Abe like a little fishwife. Kit couldn’t fathom it. She was torn between them. Her world strained at the seams, torn between two loves: her tiny, sickly sister and her hero.
Then Lydia turned seven, and Abe realised she was going to be a beauty. It was the most terrifying day of Kit’s life.
She screwed her eyes shut because she hadn’t thought of it in years – the way Lydia had run towards her, the dress a delicate puff of white in movement. The sick thwack of Abe’s hand across Lydia’s small head.
‘You fell out over a dress?’ the Duke said very, very quietly. ‘Well, I’ll drink to that.’
‘I was fourteen years old.’
He looked up, because he was intelligent enough to know she was trying to say something else. Abe had made her in his image, and realised too late he had made her into the wrong thing. He had seen his second chance in Lydia – his golden ticket. That day Kit saw Lydia in the dress she had felt her world tip on its axis. She had wanted Abe to hit Lydia.
And the next day, when it was too late, she had been so sorry. She had searched all morning in the mint patch for a perfect, dead beetle. Lydia loved the metallic blue of their shells, and would hold them up to the sunlight, watching green ripple over the surface.
Lydia had told Kit to take her dirty insect back to the garden where it belonged, and Abe . . .
Kit’s fingers and the bones in her nose ached with the memory, and she couldn’t tell Jude about that, or about the days following when she hadn’t been given time enough to heal properly.
‘Are you drunk yet?’ he asked suddenly.
‘Not even close.’
‘Let’s play cards.’
‘I told you I don’t gamble. We should —’
‘Don’t say it,’ he said, and she looked down in surprise at his hand, wrapped around hers. ‘Don’t move. Don’t think. Promise me?’
His fingers tightened on hers, and she nodded. Then he left the table – his fingers gone. Christ, she was in trouble.
He came back and slapped a deck of cards down in front of her.
‘No money,’ he said. ‘So it’s not really gambling.’
‘Then what’s the point?’
He said, almost experimentally, ‘Can’t winning be its own reward?’
She didn’t dignify that with an answer. He started laying out the cards, his fingers long and practised. She’d only ever seen one other man handle cards with the same ease.
‘The apple that fell on Isaac Newton.’
She took another sip of whisky. She was vaguely aware that they’d drunk more than half the bottle, and everything was easy, golden, lovely. ‘I’ll counter with the apple Eve gave Adam.’
He shot her a glare. ‘The noble fruit that gave us gravity, which in turn allows us to understand our world, against a marital disagreement involving a snake.’ She snickered at the dirty way he said the word. ‘I think not.’
‘Without the fall we would have no need of understanding our world.’
‘Without Newton we wouldn’t understand falling. Is that what you really think?’
Her glass was empty. How had that happened?
‘Katherine. Is that what you think? That the fall gave us a world.’
‘Well, of course it did.’
‘But the previous world was better. The heaven. The paradise one.’
She shrugged and said, ‘I like understanding gravity.’
He played the first card and called ninety-three points. She won the trick and called ninety-two. He won five tricks, she won six; she was only one point behind, but he was on ninety-nine. If he won the last trick, he won the game.
His face lit up with unholy glee. ‘I have you now, Sutherland.’
‘Bet if you dare,’ she returned. ‘Bet your soul, if you dare.’
A soul, they had agreed, was the costliest thing you could put on the table. That gave him pause, and he thought for a minute.
John interrupted them on his way out of the inn. Kit blinked up in some confusion. She’d forgotten there was a world beyond the small circle she and Jude made with their lovely whisky and their dazzling wit.
He was gone again.
‘Every letter R Shakespeare ever wrote,’ Jude said, carefully eyeing her.
‘Ah, Omeo,’ she murmured, ‘thou art diminished.’
Jude started cackling in his chair, which she thought was very undignified but terribly flattering. She frowned. Or unflattering. Did he still expect her to be an idiot?
He hadn’t played his card yet. There was a chance it was the queen of spades, which she couldn’t beat. Her heart thumped harder in her chest. The possibility that she might lose was like stepping blindfolded onto a busy street.
‘My soul,’ she said, and he played his card.
When they had mostly finished the bottle – or had they already finished it? Kit couldn’t remember – they were playing a childish slapping game. They stared into each other’s eyes, competitive, intent, and her hands were red and stinging.
His were worse.
They stumbled home in the dark, and Jude insisted on carrying her over the muddy part of the track. Kit had enough presence of mind left to
think this would more likely land them both in the mud than be of any use whatsoever, but before she could form the words his arms were around her and the world tilted, and she was held close and warm against his chest. Her head came to rest against his collarbone, and his fingers were tight across her thigh, and there was a confusing sensation of skin and the rough slide of velvet against wool, and his breathing above her and through his ribcage, thudding with every step. She closed her eyes and imagined she was on a ship crossing an ocean so deep whole mountain ranges had been lost in it.
He set her down, and they didn’t talk any more. They were being pulled, she could feel it, by a point in time. By the room they were walking towards, and the moment they would climb into bed together.
Too much had happened. It would be different. She didn’t know if she could refuse to get under the covers this time.
She lit the cheap candles she’d nicked from the inn at the banked kitchen fire. They climbed the stairs and she said, ‘We’re well, Tom, go back to sleep,’ when they passed his open door.
There was a tricky moment when Jude had shed all his layers but his nightgown, and looked down in dismay at the mud caking the hem. Kit threw him an old flannel shirt, and forced herself to turn away. This nakedness was not like last night’s. This was something that needed permission.
She turned when she heard him nestle under the covers, and now there was no profusion of frills to cover his lack of breasts – there was just the hard plane of his body beneath the flannel, and his hair on the pillow, and his eyes watching.
She pulled off her outer dress, fingers shaking. She felt odd and sick, but she didn’t want him to look away. She came to the edge of the bed in her stockings and shift, lifted the covers, then lay very straight and still on her back, right at the edge of the mattress.
Jude curled in towards her and sighed with contentment.
His eyes were closed and she thought after a couple of minutes that he’d fallen asleep, but he began to talk, low, without opening his eyes.
‘When I was a boy – maybe five years old – my uncle took us to Vauxhall Gardens. We watched a puppet show. How strange that he would think to take us to see a puppet show. The villain was a forest sprite, done up in a hard casing of seeds and twigs.’ His face scrunched up, and he nestled further into the covers. ‘I think there must have been some sort of fanfare – lights and whistles, that sort of thing – when the sprite appeared, because when I try to remember it now I still feel,’ a sleepy roll of his shoulder, ‘awe. Fear. Rose and Evie grabbed each other, but I couldn’t because I would be a duke some day.’
