by Anna Cowan
She wanted to say, If you stopped underestimating my intelligence you wouldn’t have to sound quite so surprised, but she didn’t trust herself. He would know, from her voice, what it meant to her that he’d said it.
She heard him smile, and glanced up. Realised that she’d been playing with Porkie’s tail to distract herself – pulling it straight and letting it snap back into a curl. Before she could scowl at him, before she could snatch her hand away, he captured her fingertips, then slid his palm slowly across hers.
Oh. God.
She couldn’t look away. The smile had fallen off his face as his eyes bruised dark. He stroked her wrist, his never-calloused fingertips unbearably soft.
She stood, abruptly. Brushed down her dress and smock. ‘It’s too dangerous, drawing this attention to yourself,’ she said. ‘What’s the point of the dresses – of me shaving you, and lacing you up – if you’re not even trying to stay hidden?’
He looked surprised, and not at all as if they’d just burned each other. ‘The dress isn’t to hide me. It’s so that I could get close to you. Because I needed to be close to you.’
She felt the flush. She shook her head slowly. ‘The footmen, the maids – they’ll all have to go. The pigsty will absolutely have to go.’
‘Too proud to accept my charity?’ he said lightly.
‘I said the servants and the pigsty had to go. You couldn’t pry the rest of it from my cold, dead fingers. It’s mine now, and you can’t take it back.’
She held her head high as she said it, aware that of course he could – he could take it all back. It just made her weak to think of letting it all go again – the rugs out in the hall, the room that had been cleared and cleaned and now had a piano and curtains in it, Tom’s new study with bookshelves, wall to ceiling. She hadn’t been prepared for it, and this morning she’d locked herself in the old laundry and breathed in ugly, painful sobs, the stone basin biting into her rough hands.
‘Are you worried about me?’ He said it almost hesitantly, as if he expected to be laughed at.
She battled with the urge to cut the tenderness of it somehow, and made herself nod instead.
‘I . . . thank you,’ he said, which was just an odd response. ‘Do you trust me?’
‘Not a farthing.’
‘Do you trust that I am intelligent enough to know what I am doing?’
A more difficult question. ‘If this were about politics, I would say yes. If this were about anything but yourself, I would say yes.’
He stroked Porkie. ‘And if this is about you?’
She watched his bowed head, helpless.
‘I know what I’m doing,’ he said quietly. ‘Let the servants stay. Let yourself rest, Katherine. Leave the former Lady Marmotte to me.’
It made her uneasy – this first encroachment of the outside world into theirs. But he was a grown man – a duke – and she knew he had more games afoot than she could begin to guess at. It wasn’t for her to take up his burdens as well.
‘Very well,’ she said, turning to leave. ‘They can stay.’
She was almost out the door when she turned back. ‘And it’s not charity. I deserve a bloody kingdom for putting up with you.’
She could still hear his laughter when she was halfway up the stairs.
Jude lay at the top of the bluff watching Katherine, who was watching a man make his way along a dirt track well below them. The afternoon light was setting her brandy hair and yellow eyes on fire; she looked fierce, free, otherworldly. He wondered if she even remembered he was there beside her.
Her hair had come unbound as she set a furious pace up the hill, and she had opened the collar of her dress now, so that he could see her heartbeat locked in the flesh between her collarbones.
Out here he was the alien presence. Because he knew this, he didn’t try to approach her. Her eyes flickered over to him, and she smiled shyly, tucking a strand of hair behind her ear. He had known since their first conversation that she wasn’t to be had – and that was still true, wasn’t it, even though he wanted to slip into her world, into fox skin so that they could run through the dark underbrush together and never be seen again.
But his father had died on the tenth of April with no one but a physician by his side, and now Jude was the Duke of Darlington. Even sitting here on the edge of a rock face, that was true.
‘It has not been easy, having me here,’ he said finally.
‘No.’
They said nothing else as the afternoon wasted away below them. At one point Katherine lay on her back and watched the sky and Jude lay beside her. He closed his eyes, felt the wet from the grass seep into his silks, felt the earth solid beneath him, and imagined the distance between himself and the other side of the world.
His fingers lay an inch from hers and the sun was warm on his closed lids.
Tom Sutherland missed his sister. It irritated him. It made him feel as if he had been sliced open, only he’d forgotten that he’d been sliced open, and then ten times a day at least he would remember.
He’d missed her badly when she was in London. He didn’t understand Mother like she did – couldn’t tease her into boasting about her debutante days, didn’t have the knack for laughing at her and petting her and making everything work. The evenings had been so long and quiet, with Tom reading at his desk and Mother sitting and gazing into the fire for hours at a time.
They needed Kit. Tom was never so alone as when she was gone.
Then she’d written to say she was coming home early. And he’d wanted her to enjoy London. He’d wanted success for her, wanted her to be courted even, to have a chance at life. In theory, he’d wanted all those things. But when he’d received her letter he’d felt loose with joy, with relief. His other half was coming home.
He glanced up from his book to where she sat, leaning against the old armchair that Rose hadn’t let the footmen throw away. She smiled at something Rose said, too low for Tom to hear, then tipped her head back to answer. Rose reached out a lazy hand and stroked Kit’s hair while she listened. Kit picked up her book again and Rose closed her eyes, her fingers playing idly with a strand of Kit’s hair she’d pulled loose.
Even after two weeks in her company, Tom wasn’t used to Lady Rose. The light from their small parlour fire was made rich in the pale mint silk of her dress. Her face was so striking, so complex. She changed from one thing to another so quickly it sometimes smacked the breath from him. He understood why Kit found it hard to look away.
Rose made Kit laugh and Kit hit her leg with the book. Tom wondered if they knew the impact they had. He wondered if Rose understood how very rare, how very unfamiliar Kit was to her brother when she was undone by contentment. He wondered if they realised how completely they shut the world out when they were like this.
And they had been like this for days.
Jude lay in bed and waited for her. Five candles burned brightly around the room. Neither he nor Katherine had said a word about the fact that he could have ordered himself a new room lit just as brightly, and hadn’t.
He thought his skin might split with impatience. What could she be doing that would take such a long time? He’d made a production of going to bed – kissed Tom’s quiescent palm, murmured flattery and adoration to Mrs Sutherland, and said a short, indifferent good night to Katherine that was as good as shouting, You are to come to me as soon as possible, I cannot do without you.
He watched the shadows flicker over the ceiling. Something in his chest moved in answer – that same shifting, uneasy light.
He’d received a letter that morning, from Lady Marmotte. It wasn’t a surprise – the papers told him clearly what she was up to, who she was buying off. But it had made him uneasy enough that he’d burned it.
He breathed. Katherine would be here. She would come.
She continued to sleep under the covers with him, and she continued to wear layers of clothing to bed. Neither of them had reached for the other since his single botched attempt. H
e’d been like a drunken fool who was absolutely certain he could catch a tiger by the tail.
When he next opened his eyes, she was lying on the pillow beside his, watching him, hand in a fist by her mouth. There was something unguarded about her that closed up when she saw he was awake.
‘You’re here,’ he said, and covered her hand with his palm. The sensation touched him – his hand like a lover taking hers from behind. He pushed his fingers between hers, and they lay like that without speaking for a couple of minutes.
Then he said, ‘I miscalculated in so many ways, when I asked to come with you to the country. I didn’t understand how dark it would be, or how quiet. But the worst of my errors was not allowing for these hands.’ His hand flexed around hers, the only movement in the room. ‘I didn’t know you’d go without gloves in the country. And you don’t have easy hands, Katherine. At first they repulsed me.’ He was ready, and didn’t let her pull away.
‘When you handed me that first plate of food, and I knew these hands had made it, I could barely swallow it down. But the more I watched you, the clearer it became that your hands cannot be separated out from who you are. The parts of the world that fascinate you pass through your hands first. I thought at first it was childlike, before I suspected what wisdom was in touch. And then I thought about touching. And then I could not stop myself from imagining the rasp of your hands on my skin – those rough, truthful things rubbing me until I was uncomfortable and tender with it. Testing and tasting me in order to understand me. I began to long for you to understand me.’
There was a long silence, and their harsh breathing, then she said, ‘You shouldn’t talk to people like that.’
‘Why not?’
‘It’s too much, Jude.’
‘But you,’ he said, letting go of her hand to take the side of her face in his palm, ‘are so strong.’
His body moved closer to hers, desperate for contact. ‘Touch me.’
‘Oh, God,’ she said, ‘oh fuck, don’t do this.’
He couldn’t speak.
She made a helpless noise and grasped his wrist. Turned his hand and crushed it to her mouth. Bit the fleshy part of his thumb until his lips opened with pain.
‘Wait,’ he said, breathless.
She pushed him, hard. ‘If we do this, you don’t get to control me,’ she said, her lungs straining as they had this afternoon at the top of the bluff. ‘Why don’t I go to the country?’ she said. ‘That bumpkin with the blunt mouth can fix me and it will all be nice and clean. Why don’t I seduce her? She’ll touch me and it’ll all be nice and clean and I won’t have to feel a thing!’
‘That’s not what I —’
‘You’d never be able to take it, Jude, how out of control you’d have to be with me. Don’t ask me again.’
She threw the covers back, and when she reached the door he saw that she wasn’t wearing any stockings.
‘Where are you going?’ he heard himself say, like an idiot, a fool.
‘I’ll sleep in Ma’s old room,’ she said, and pulled on his quilted dressing robe.
He looked at the angry mark of her teeth on his hand, and he did not call her back.
Kit beheaded another foxglove with a precise flick of her wrist. One half of the sky threatened to storm, the other half was blue. The bluff, rising huge behind the Manor, was lit golden green and looked unreal against the dark sky.
She beheaded another flower and wished, with vivid bloodiness, that she could remove Sir Winston’s whiskered head from the rest of him. She’d forced herself to drink his tea, which Mrs Parsons always beefed up with smouch. She was raging. Unsettled. She hadn’t listened as closely as she needed to, to the figures.
He’d seen their altered circumstances at the Manor. He wanted more than she could give right now, that much was clear. She would have to sell the sofa with the tiny flowers, and the new china. The piano and the rugs from the hall. She would think about whether they were hers to sell later, when the Squire was no longer breathing down her neck.
And this morning she’d received a reply from her uncle. Three short lines of condolence in the neat hand of a secretary, with his scrawled signature at the bottom. No sign that her wish to reconcile was reciprocated.
She thought about Jude, who was playing a game so big its ramifications were being felt through the country. She thought about Lady Marmotte, who dared to force her way into the world of men, and to dominate it, devil take you if you didn’t like it.
She saw so, so clearly that she was like a beast of burden, with a yoke around her shoulders. This stupid debt to the Squire, from which she couldn’t free herself. The needs of her family, her inheritance from her father, her years of servitude that had formed her nature while she was too busy working to notice. Her life was a small, mean thing, and on this familiar, muddy road, she knew that it no longer fitted her.
She could simply step off the path into the wet grass and leave. She didn’t have to go back to the Manor – it ran well enough without her these days.
Except all those servants were in the employ of the Duke, and they would leave when he did.
She froze, and the countryside was plunged into gloom. It started to rain. He had been on her mind all morning, and she had forgotten that he would be leaving. Not today. Not tomorrow. But soon. One of these days he would be ready to return to his life, and leave the backwater where he’d come undone.
He would hate her, she knew, when he had enough distance.
And she and Tom and Ma would keep going, but it would be so much harder than before, and she’d let it happen. It felt suddenly urgent that she get more money out of him, before he left. An amount that would be meaningless to him, yet would keep her family going for another couple of years, if they were lucky.
She ignored the part of her that baulked at the idea of living out here in stifling, exhausting anonymity for even one more year.
When she finally returned to the Manor there was a large, expensive carriage in her driveway and she thought numbly, Today. He’s going today. Of course he was going. She’d bitten him, sworn at him. That wasn’t what he’d wanted, when he’d come here to be repaired.
He was going.
She made herself walk the last few steps. She could survive anything, she’d always known that.
‘Kit? Is that you?’ Tom said, stepping out from the shelter of the roof and bounding down the steps towards her. ‘It’s Lydia,’ he said, his face cracked wide into a grin. ‘Lydia’s come home.’
Chapter Fourteen
‘— thought I should expire,’ Jude was saying in Rose’s husky voice, ‘but your daughter insisted that I dance one more set, because the Marquis de Pontoit had compared me to a tulip. We were amazed at his originality. All other men compare me to my namesake, and I’m sure I have only thorns in common with that flower.’
Ma laughed in delight. Tom was so close behind Kit, so eager, that he actually came up against her when she paused in the doorway. She realised now, with a fear that cut, that she had become used to Jude looking at her when she entered a room.
He did not look at her now.
A young man knelt at his feet, where Kit usually sat, and looked adoringly up at him.
‘Ah. Kit,’ said Lydia, setting her teacup onto her saucer with a click. There was a moment’s sober silence, and Kit took in the whole scene: her sister, exquisite in a pale rose travelling dress, perched on one of their new chairs. Her mother sitting on the sofa, nervous but flushed, smiling, happy. Jude curled in his armchair, Porkie on his lap. He was wearing the white wig this morning, the one that made his eyes so difficult to dismiss. He must have sent a servant for his dressing gown. The fur of it framed his face, and he was wrapped as usual in a bright, rich shawl.
He still had not looked at her.
Tom pressed by her, into the room. ‘Kit, this is Mr Crispin Scott,’ he said, and the young man stood up immediately and came to make a bow.
He had a friendly, open face, and before she could
think Kit said, ‘We’ve met before, at —’ At Lady Marmotte’s ball, when he had been passing himself off as a duke.
He blushed, bit his lip. Smiled down bashfully at his feet.
She gave up. It was impossible to hold him in contempt.
‘Being a mister suits you better,’ she said quietly, offering her hand.
‘Where did you meet Mr Scott, Katherine?’ her mother asked. This was her favourite kind of talk – loud, enthusiastic, full of sordid gossip and naughty details.
‘He is one of my cousin’s cronies,’ said Jude, smiling at the little pig in his lap, before Kit could answer. ‘She met him the night she met the Duke.’
Kit didn’t miss Lydia’s reaction. She would have called any other man stupid to have let that detail slip. Because it was Jude, she assumed he was scoring a point against her sister that would be added to a tally only the two of them could see.
Mr Scott winked at Kit and went back to sit at the Jude’s feet. She could practically see the band that tied him to Jude – the impatience when he was more than a few feet away from him.
‘Come sit by me, Kit,’ said her mother, patting the sofa. Her good mood had made her generous, languorous. ‘Lady Rose and Lydia were telling me all about the Prince’s Christmas feast the year before last.’
Kit knew, for a fact, that they hadn’t even known one another the Christmas before last.
‘I remember you insisted on going dressed as Cleopatra,’ Lydia said to Jude, taking up her tea again. ‘You were sent so many bouquets the next day that we talked about opening a quaint little flower shop. Do you remember?’
‘Ah, my sweet, nobody could forget a headache like that.’
‘You sent me to the apothecary,’ Mr Scott said, laughing. ‘Lord, the way you screamed when I opened the curtains of your sitting room. You told me you were dying.’
‘I’m sure I was dying,’ Jude said with a pout. ‘Ungrateful brat.’
They were so quick together, the three of them. So practised at taking lies from each other’s mouths.
