by Anna Cowan
‘It seems Lady M—’
‘Marmotte.’
‘— had her money all tied up in business concerns and settlements so that Lord M – very well, Lord Marmotte – hasn’t been able to get his hands on so much as a ha’penny. He must have had a truly excellent reason to want rid of her. Seems he’s thrown himself into politics. Oh, Kit – he’s in favour of reforming the Corn Laws.’
Tom said this with no particular interest, already moving on to the next juicy tidbit, but he knew Kit would want to hear it. The Corn Laws affected what she could afford to buy week to week.
She already knew most of what Tom had narrated. She had followed, despite herself, every grisly detail of the Marmotte divorce. Ferreted out every snippet about that woman whose breasts she knew better than her face. Lady Marmotte, uncowed, had bought Sir Roskill’s debt, too, and sponsored Harrington’s younger brother his captaincy. Lady Marmotte, almost divorced, showed up to all the best social events.
She hadn’t known Lord Marmotte had come out in favour of reform.
‘That’s an . . . odd reaction to heartbreak,’ she said.
Jude made a derisive sound.
‘You don’t think it’s odd?’ she asked, risking a look in his direction.
‘I don’t think it’s heartbreak.’
They held each other’s gaze, then each flushed and looked away. Between them was the music room, and Jude pressing Lady Marmotte against the piano – and his fingers against Kit’s skin last night. She placed her cup firmly back on the table before it would give her away. The skin at the top, the inside of her thigh was not for him to touch.
It was like a puzzle to be solved. If she could just think it through, think about what it meant and what she’d felt. She thought about it again and again, his body colliding with hers, and it made no more sense than it had last night, and it wouldn’t stop.
‘Oh,’ said Tom awkwardly, then coughed as he forgot to chew his toast. ‘Er, this paper isn’t as kind to your cousin, Rose.’
‘I’ve never felt the need to be particularly kind to him, either. What do they say? I’d wager I can do better.’
‘They say he’s, er, nothing more than a hairstyle, some tall collars, and a cravat that other men envy.’
‘Well,’ said the Duke, and slumped back into the chair. His head fell back and he laughed a little, helplessly. ‘A particularly cutting mind came up with that one. I find I cannot best it.’
‘And a particularly foolish mind had it published all over London.’
Tom looked a question at Kit and drank his tea too quickly.
‘There was a pamphlet,’ she said uncomfortably. But when Jude laughed again, she was surprised by the pressing need to laugh as well. He was an impossible, ridiculous creature. ‘I suspect the Duke of having it published himself. It’s just the kind of thing he would do.’
‘It sounds as though you became acquainted,’ Tom said, setting the paper entirely aside. ‘What’s he like?’
Kit opened her mouth, and couldn’t find a single word among the thousands to say first. Arrogant, beautiful, vicious, terrifying, intelligent, scared, funny.
‘He’s a little bit simple, poor soul,’ said Jude, and curled up again around his coffee. ‘Charming, though. Everyone agrees he’s very charming.’ He looked innocently up at Kit. ‘Did you find him charming?’
He took a sip of his coffee while he was waiting for her answer, and she was saved having to say something polite and entirely untrue, because his coffee had gone cold. She knew this because he told them so in a couple of very inventive ways before calling four footmen in so that he could rage and sulk at them. It was a truly spectacular tantrum.
Kit was busy grinning at him, so it took her a while to realise that Tom was hunched tight and close in his chair, and he’d ruined the edges of the paper he was trying to hide behind. Her mother looked out the window, so fey and distant that Kit fought not to reach out and pinch her.
These attitudes of her family were intimately familiar. She hadn’t seen them for months now. She felt that impact in her flesh – the recognition of someone you love and are surprised to see, before your mind can even place them.
She hadn’t ever wanted to see these fearful people again. For a moment the weight of them was like water in her lungs. Jude was still raging, and she knew why Tom and Ma had closed themselves off as fast as they could. She remembered her own bone-deep fear when BenRuin lost his temper.
But this was Jude.
She only feared him when he looked right at her, and she could see in his eyes that he was about to say something awful. When he hurt you he meant it.
The man in the blue wig making pretty, sulky faces at the footmen was not a danger. He was . . . it was absurd, but she couldn’t help thinking he was playing. Then she thought about a small, sensitive boy growing up in large houses with only footmen for company.
One look at the footmen’s faces confirmed it.
Jude’s eyes thinned. ‘Are you smirking at me, Footman Number Three? Because I will not have coffee mocked. It is the one subject on which I demand sobriety. Academic levels of sobriety. Hushed-halls-of-Oxford sobriety.’
She realised she was grinning again, but Tom and her mother couldn’t, or wouldn’t, realise that they were in no danger. That they were being entertained in the Duke’s own twisted way.
This was probably what he thought affection looked like.
‘Dear,’ Kit said, stepping right into the path of his tantrum and placing a hand on his cheek, ‘don’t make the servants cry. It isn’t nice.’
‘I’m not very nice,’ he whispered. His sad, complicated eyes were close, watching her. She had closed the two of them in, without thinking. Want ignited, and there was no way to stop it – impossible to look away quickly enough to hide it from him.
He took a step back. One of the footmen gave a discreet cough.
‘Shall I bring you more coffee now, my lady?’
Jude swooned back onto the old armchair. ‘Why do you torment me so? Can’t you see that I am much too depressed to drink coffee now?’
‘As you wish,’ said the footman, and the whole row bowed and left.
‘Are you also too depressed to read?’ Kit asked curiously, coming round to the back of his chair.
‘Oh, yes. Far too depressed to read.’
‘Even Beaumaris?’ It was a cheap shot, but she was growing angry with her brother for being scared of Jude. She didn’t look at Tom, and neither did Jude, when he almost tore the paper in half. If Tom had come to know Lady Rose half as well as Kit had come to know the Duke, he would know there was no keeping his secret safe.
‘Even Beaumaris,’ said Jude with a heartbroken sigh. ‘Oh, Katherine, Katherine, everything’s so clear. If Hamlet were to come and soliloquise at me just now, I feel sure I should tell him, “The latter, most assuredly the latter.’”
She folded her arms across the top of the armchair and leaned in. ‘Is there any chance,’ she said sweetly, ‘that you’re too depressed to continue speaking?’
He gave it some thought, then shook his head with great melancholy. ‘I think even when I’m in the ground I won’t be dead enough to cease speaking.’
He said it almost apologetically, and though they were playing, there was something wistful in his voice that tugged at her.
‘Poor darling,’ she murmured, and reached down to stroke him from ear to collarbone with the backs of her fingers. It was alarming, really, how this touching seemed to have become necessary.
‘Would your pet make you feel better?’ She realised in some distant part of her brain that her voice had gone soft – this was no longer a show for her family. This was only for him.
‘Porkie?’ he said, his eyes shining up at her in delight. ‘Where is the little pig? I miss him so.’
Tradesmen were coming from Millcross in the afternoon to fix the bell system, but for now Kit had to go out into the corridor and yell for assistance. Apparently no one knew exactly where
Porkie had got to, which was a little worrying. She stepped into the kitchen and resented, without quarter, the way she was made to feel out of place. It was just like being back at the kitchen in BenRuin’s house.
Well, Soames’s disapproving glances hadn’t stopped her from going back again and again. And this was her kitchen. If a little unrecognisable, full of noise and people and smells that made her stomach ache in anticipation.
Liza was keeping a close, jealous eye on Oliver – the young man who was stirring white sauce. Kit passed through the kitchen slowly, to make a point. She came out into the garden.
And froze.
Holy . . . holy mother of all things pink.
Jude had mentioned to her in passing that he had personally overseen the planning of her new pigsty. He had entirely failed to mention that her new pigsty was a miniature castle, down to the turrets and arrow slits.
And it was pale, seashell pink.
She felt a little bit faint, and wondered if anyone would mind if she just sat down in the dirt for a moment.
Chapter Thirteen
‘Isn’t it magnificent?’ he said, not bothering to unsprawl from the armchair.
Kit considered calling him a git again, and decided it wasn’t nearly violent enough. She wondered if Angus and his filthy vocabulary had left the Manor yet.
‘It’s,’ she said, unable to finish the sentence. ‘It’s . . .’
‘A fantasy wonderland!’ he said. ‘Give me Porkie.’
Someone had placed the little boar in her arms when she came back into the house. It was wearing a smart jacket made of what looked like the off-cuts of one of Jude’s more outrageous dresses. The jerky, muscular movement of its legs was familiar to her, because livestock sometimes needed to be moved and slaughtered.
‘It’s a pigsty,’ she said, trying to impose order back on the world. ‘This is a . . . Good God, this is a farm! And you don’t even . . . You don’t know what that means.’
‘Give me my pig,’ he said, and pouted.
‘What’s Rose done?’ asked Tom, looking at Kit with an odd expression on his face.
‘You’ll love it, Thomas,’ Jude purred, rolling a delighted Porkie around on his lap. ‘You, unlike your sister, have a romantic soul.’
He refused to understand her, and her frustration splintered into something like fear. There was an impossible gulf between them. She wouldn’t be able to make him understand.
Tom practically ran out of the room, half smiling already. He tried, and failed, to look nonchalant and mouthed an excuse about checking on his study, which was being dismantled and moved.
‘Where’s Ma gone?’ Kit asked.
‘She said something shifty about fetching her sewing, but I believe she’s gone to give orders to the servants. The poor woman has been deprived of that particular joy for over a decade. I don’t know how she survived it.’
He shuddered delicately, and Kit thought of the numb evenings when she’d sat in the cold, dark kitchen, too exhausted to climb the stairs, too sick to let herself think. With every new task she had learned her muscles had ached, and sometimes she would hear the whimpers in the dark, and think in a detached sort of way that whatever creature was making those sounds should be put down.
She turned gratefully when there was a knock on the door.
‘A letter for you, ma’am,’ said Ronald, bowing as he held the salver out to her.
Soames. Soames had written at last.
She looked guiltily around at the new furnishings, and hoped the letter hadn’t arrived too late.
When she finished reading Soames’s letter she opened the broadsheets Tom had left sitting by his abandoned cup of tea. Because she knew what to look for, it was so obvious. It was all there.
A new theatrical production called The Misadventures and Misplaced Grace of a Simple Man – with thanks to the patronage of Vivienne, Lady Marmotte. A pamphlet denouncing the depraved sexual appetites of a society in which a woman wasn’t even safe under her husband’s roof – circulated by Vivienne, Lady Marmotte. An inquest into rotten boroughs on the Duke of Darlington’s land – with depositions collected by Vivienne, Lady Marmotte.
She dared a look at him. His head was thrown back against the chair, his eyes closed. But his fingers still moved in languid circles behind Porkie’s ears, and there was a small smile on his face.
‘Why did you seduce her?’
He didn’t even open his eyes, and his clever fingers continued to stroke the pig. ‘Because I desired her,’ he said.
‘Bullshit. Why did you seduce her?’
‘Because she’s richer than the Regent, and I thought she might buy me a pretty diamond necklace.’
‘Don’t,’ she said, the word like a badly exploded bullet. ‘You realise you have built a giant pink sign that says here I am, come and find me, and the richest woman in England apparently wants you lynched. Why draw her wrath down on yourself?’
He shrugged. ‘You cannot fathom how boring life is, when one has everything. I must do something for sport.’
He was confirming all her worst fears – and he knew it. And even though she could see it clearly, she was going to explode in rage at him. Hit him. Spit at him. Except . . .
‘Is this because you want to die?’ she said, and found herself kneeling at the armchair. ‘You know I’m not going to let you. No matter what you think you want.’
‘How did you get so fierce?’ he said, looking at her. ‘I almost believe you.’
‘Just tell me. Why did you seduce her?’
His face became cold, and she knew he was going to dismiss her. Who was she to question the business of a duke? Then with an effort she could track across his features, and through his tense fingers and the toes curled up off the floor, he changed his mind. ‘Tell me what you know about the Corn Laws,’ he said.
It was the last thing she had expected. And then it started to make sense, if she let herself think on a much, much larger scale than she had previously.
‘Grain mayn’t be imported unless the local price has reached 80 shillings per quarter. Most of the riots in the past year can be traced back to the Laws. But more than that, I know they made it impossible for me to buy flour for months at a time, and that I can’t pay tenants the cost of seed.’
He said, ‘There are some men – influential men – who believe, as I do, that the Laws need to be revised. But we are recovering from war, and that deafens people to the idea of change. Particularly if that change is coming out of their own pockets and is paying for an abstract concept. The needs of the many. Faces they don’t even see, when they look out the windows of their carriages. Hands that work until they can’t any more and then have a hundred more begging to take their place.’
She’d seen so many of his faces. She’d never seen this. His words were flat and indifferent. But there was something quiet in him – some passion that had burned for so long that it was steady, hot, capable of melting and rebuilding a government.
‘Liverpool sounded out Marmotte – knew he sympathised with our cause. He’s well-regarded. Men listen to him. But Lady Marmotte is the better politician. She was instrumental in getting the Laws through Parliament last year. We had to remove him from her money and influence. We had to make him angry enough to back an unpopular Bill.’
‘You are such a complete idiot,’ she told him, and his head snapped around as if she’d slapped him. ‘It never occurred to you, did it, that you could take your seat and back the Bill yourself. My God, you could talk an Arab into buying sand. You would be worth ten of Lord Marmotte.’
‘I choose to be flattered. I think.’
‘Why seduce a woman in cold blood, instead? Why be vicious and break up a marriage? Do you so enjoy being a martyr for letting that bitch touch you?’
His gaze on her was blue, unfathomable, and she glared back. Oh, God, what thing had she given away now? He put his fingers into her hair, scratched her scalp lightly behind her ear, and she thought she might pass out from the
pleasure of it. No wonder that pig looked comatose.
‘I won’t do it again. I . . . promise.’ That last word sounded a little more experimental than entirely encouraging, but it eased her all the same.
‘Why do it at all? Idiot.’
‘Until my claim is recognised, I’m not permitted to take my seat. But.’ He sighed, removing his fingers from her scalp; she grabbed onto the rug to stop herself from grabbing him back. ‘Next time you’re in London, I’ll take you to the Upper House. You can only really understand once you’ve witnessed the catastrophe of it. They hear hallelujahs when they speak. They chase the point of an argument like a myopic great uncle going after the glimmer of sunlight on a raindrop, thinking it’s cognac. These men are born with opinions, and they will hand those opinions down to their sons, and glaciers move more quickly than opinions do. Also, they cry a lot.’
‘You would make them change their minds,’ she said, stubborn.
‘I do.’ He gave a shrug. ‘I melt the glacier from under them, and then they learn to swim or they sink. And things change.’
‘And in the meantime you hate yourself so much you’ve ended up here.’
The small pig made pig sounds, and the noise of twenty servants in her house was still something new and couldn’t fade entirely into the background. But between them was a silence you could drown in.
She’d gone too far. She knew she’d gone too far.
‘What you’re doing now – you’re not acting like a politician or even like a bloody duke. You’re acting like a god, and you haven’t the right. Those people out there – people like Angus, and John and his brothers; hell, even me – we deserve to know that we matter. That someone is championing our cause.’
‘And that cosy knowledge will keep you company when you can’t even afford to eat, I suppose?’
‘It’s important,’ she said.
He settled back into the chair, which was when she realised they’d drawn closer to each other as they argued.
‘You are an interesting woman, Katherine Sutherland.’
