Untamed

by Anna Cowan

  ‘Not for anything. She’s barely recovered from the last man who broke her heart. If she discovered that her new favourite is another man who’s playing her for a fool . . . No, Kit. For as long as the Duke chooses to trespass on us, let her enjoy his fiction. She won’t ever have cause to see him again, after he leaves.’ He wiped his cheek with a rough hand. ‘And neither will you. Christ, don’t you see it?’

  The room was silent, full of things broken.

  ‘I assume Mr Scott knows who he is,’ Tom said.

  ‘Yes,’ said Lydia.

  ‘Then I have to go.’ And he left, without looking at either of them.

  They sat in utter silence, and then Kit fell down onto the pillows and pulled the bedcovers over her head. ‘He’ll never forgive me. And what if I never forgive him?’

  She had already forgiven him. Her heart ached for him – for Tom trying to step into a role he’d never had to fill before. Into the shoes of a man who had hurt them all.

  ‘Nonsense,’ said Lydia, pulling the covers back off Kit, her face looming close for a moment in the candle light. ‘Tom’s just feeling foolish and scared. He’s hardly the first young man to be smitten with him. He’s right about Mother, though.’ Something seemed to occur to her. ‘If that bastard even thinks of taking advantage of Tom’s tender feelings I will make a dress from his skin and wear it to the opera.’

  ‘He’s Jude. Of course he’ll take advantage.’

  Lydia looked at her oddly. ‘You do know what I’m talking about, don’t you, Kit? When I say taking advantage?’

  ‘You mean he’ll indiscriminately use Tom’s affection to get what he wants. That if he so wants he’ll humiliate Tom, because hurt seems to sustain him in some way. He won’t spare him at all.’

  Lydia waved it all away. ‘That goes without saying,’ she said. ‘I mean sexual advantage. You know Darlington sleeps with men, I hope?’

  And of the thousand thoughts that tried to be heard at once, the one she gave voice to was, ‘Only men?’

  ‘Darling, I know you don’t mean to insult me. Our affair was consummated. Many times.’

  Kit barely heard her smug drawl.

  ‘If he sleeps with Tom I will kill him,’ she said. She was so hot she couldn’t feel her own skin, and this new piece of information tried, and failed, to coalesce into something she could take hold of. She’d heard the rumours, of course, but people would say anything to get attention. She hadn’t thought it entirely possible. If men could sleep with other men, then the world was made up differently than she’d thought, and that was —

  She remembered one night, leaving the inn with Tom – back when Tom used to go drinking with her, before Father died. They’d heard a fight out the back, two men grunting, two bodies throwing themselves against a wall. It had been dark, indistinct. She hadn’t thought much of what she’d seen, and only remembered it because Tom’s fingers had dug so hard into her arm when he pulled her away that she’d had bruises the next day.

  She thought, unbidden, of Jude’s pale beauty. She didn’t even know how it would work, but she had an image of his limbs hot and in movement, his chest pushing flat against another man’s chest. She remembered his lips so close to Tom’s that morning two weeks past, and the way he had touched Tom’s cheek and the way he had kissed him.

  And then she was thinking, If Tom sleeps with Jude I will kill him.

  ‘You do realise,’ said Lydia, ‘that when you arranged for him to leave me alone he left me . . . alone.’

  ‘W-what?’ She tried to push the hot confusion away, tried to surface from beneath it so that she could make sense of what her sister was saying.

  ‘You took my only true friend away from me,’ Lydia said.

  Lydia was enough like Jude that when she finally said something in plain English it was worse than if she’d couched it in misdirection and insult.

  ‘He . . . explained that to me,’ said Kit, fighting back the tide of feeling. ‘And I had to do it anyway.’

  ‘Why?’

  Lydia’s voice was measured, controlled, but it was a question that lay eternally between them, that Kit would never be able to answer to the satisfaction of either of them.

  ‘Because your husband loves you,’ she said, knowing to her bones that it wasn’t her place to say so. ‘And I want you to be happy.’

  Lydia gave an incredulous laugh that was raw at the edges. ‘You left me to the mercy of BenRuin so that I would be happy? Do you have any idea how insane that sounds?’

  ‘I don’t know. Maybe. And —’ She couldn’t tell her. It was so mercenary, so awful. She thought of Jude, whose power came in part from the fact that there was nothing he wouldn’t say. ‘Your marriage was the prize we won by walking through hell. I couldn’t let you throw it away.’

  She turned – and found her sister’s face choked, burning with rage. Lydia opened her mouth, but only to make an odd hissing noise through her teeth. It made Kit feel that someone had left a window open somewhere, and something essential was leeching out bit by bit.

  Lydia turned away, and they didn’t speak again.

  Kit thought she could feel him, two floors beneath her, lying awake in her mother’s old room.

  If she left Lydia now, she would never, ever get her back.

  ‘You knew.’

  Crispin looked up from the book he was reading by the fire in Tom’s room, and didn’t even uncross his legs. He’d shed his coat but was otherwise still dressed.

  ‘You should have —’

  Crispin waited, his face patient, but Tom couldn’t find the words to express what Crispin should have done, though he felt, urgently, that the man had let him down.

  ‘Should have told you, whom I don’t even know?’ Crispin asked gently. ‘My loyalty is not to you.’

  ‘No, of course, it’s to a madman who has my sister’s entire future gripped in his palm.’ He attempted to laugh. ‘Both my sisters’. And mine too, I suppose.’

  Crispin closed his book and set it aside, with none of the urgency Tom felt. ‘It is a risk one always runs, with him. Ruin, for the chance to come close.’

  ‘It wasn’t as voluntary as that. He forced himself on us.’

  ‘Did he?’ Crispin asked mildly.

  He was made to think of Kit again. Of what Kit – not the Duke, but his own sister – had done.

  Crispin stood and folded his cravat neatly on the dresser. By the time he turned back, working his shirt cuffs loose, Tom had regained some control over himself.

  ‘I never suffered what my sisters did.’ He turned his face away, and traced the crack in the wall with his finger. ‘I was sent away when I was ten, to study with Reverend Stevens. My father’s contempt for me was thirteen miles distant, and when I came home from the holidays —’

  He looked up, and was shocked at how quiet Crispin was, how all his warm concentration seemed to fill up the room. That feeling of being held, safe, in the other man’s attention didn’t calm him, it made it harder to suppress his emotions. His memories. The weight of a gun in his pocket.

  ‘My father was deluded. He made himself believe I could win a scholarship to any school – to Oxford, if he wished it. I let him believe it. And when I came home the year I was thirteen, and found Kit —’

  ‘Mr Sutherland —’

  ‘—she looked as if someone had died. As if she had died. Her hands were so scratched up that it took me three days to even notice she was working with two broken fingers. She had tried to take Lydia back from him, and he had beaten her until he’d broken bones, because she always was too much like him and he probably wanted to wipe himself from the face of the earth. He wouldn’t let her heal, and Lydia never went near her again. And all she said to me was, Tom, you have to leave.’

  He couldn’t say it.

  Crispin waited in silence, until finally Tom looked up.

  ‘And you left.’

  ‘And I left. I never came back for holidays after that, if I could help it.’

  ‘Mr
Sutherland. Tom. We are becoming, all the time. You are a good man. I don’t know your sister, and even I can see that if you had tried to assert yourself above her back then, it would have been unbearable. You would have achieved what your father never could, and broken her.’

  Tom slid down the wall, and sat on the floor.

  ‘What happened when you didn’t get into Oxford?’

  ‘By then Lydia was his great hope. All he wanted from me was to stay out of his way. He still thought he would get another boy on Mother. Such awful nights, when we would all . . .’ He looked up, fierce and gone, because this was what everything came back to. ‘I decided to kill him.’

  Crispin’s eyes were soft, and full of pity. ‘All boys at one time or anoth—’

  ‘I put a pistol in my pocket. I walked all the way to the inn, knowing this was the end. I would act. At last, I would act.’

  For the first time, Crispin’s expression was unsettled. ‘My God, did you . . .’

  ‘I was standing just inside the door, and I had my hand wrapped around the gun, and another man stood and shot him. He had cheated at cards. He always cheated at cards. So another man, who was angry and drunk, shot him in the chest. I carried him home. He cursed me, bleeding in my arms like a child, and the weight of that pistol bumped against my thigh the whole way. It was a nightmare. I never woke from it.’

  Crispin knelt before him, his knees outside Tom’s knees. He brushed Tom’s hair from his face, so gentle and warm. Something dangerous, and precious, that Tom hadn’t dared dream of.

  ‘Come to bed,’ Crispin said. ‘Come and sleep in my embrace. And I will wake you in the morning.’

  ‘Good morning,’ someone – a woman – said, and threw open the curtains.

  Jude flung an arm across his eyes, and tried to say, ‘Not any more.’ His mouth made a series of sounds that didn’t quite cohere into words.

  Oh well.

  The bed dipped as the woman sat. ‘I’ve come to shave you, on Kit’s command. We have agreed you must continue to play the woman until I can find a way to make you leave. Not that I necessarily know how to shave a man, but your neat little trick makes it impossible for Tom to come into your bedroom.’

  Lydia leaned closer to him, so that he could feel her breath against his hand.

  ‘And so much easier for me. We really should have thought of this while we were still lovers.’

  Without opening his eyes he pulled the warm bundle of her closer, until she lay against his chest, her stays rigid against him. He lazily stroked the skin of her neck – collarbone to jaw – then tilted his head up for a kiss.

  After a second’s hesitation she touched her lips to his. They were warm, and answered some of the hungry need he always felt on finding himself awake. Again. They were also just a little bit hard, and he remembered this about her: she always held something in reserve. His hand stroked to the back of her neck, and he nudged her lips open, needing more than this – so much more that panic began to settle in. Nothing would ever be able to answer this need.

  He thought of Kit’s feral golden eyes and the shy invitation in her lifted leg.

  He came fully awake. Not this woman.

  Lydia pulled away before his rough need to have her gone made him do something wretched and stupid.

  She stared fixedly out the window. ‘I wanted so much to see you, Darlington, but I find it is not at all what I imagined.’

  She looked down at him and he saw the need in her eyes that he did not want to know was need.

  ‘Why can’t things be as they were before?’ she asked. ‘You and I were getting on marvellously, terrorising London, setting all the newest trends. Together we were untouchable. But you, who should be wooing the Committee into recognising your claim, are expending your charm on my relatives, of all people, and I can’t find my way back to what we – what I . . .’ Jude could see the effort it cost her not to break down in front of him. He sat up against the headboard and pulled her into his lap. Wrapped his arms tightly around her and tucked his face against her hair.

  ‘Shush, sweetheart. Nothing is as drear as it seems,’ he murmured.

  Her body shuddered as she struggled to contain what she was feeling. To resist his comfort. Finally she sat ramrod straight and looked at him, contemptuous and cold. It reminded him that he didn’t hold a warm woman in his lap, but a small, harmful version of himself.

  ‘You know I came to warn you.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘If anyone discovered – if Lady Marmotte discovered – that you are dressed as a woman, taking advantage of a genteel family and pouring your money into impractical pigsties . . . You know it would give the Committee pause, don’t you? She’s discredited you enough.’

  ‘I discredited myself.’

  ‘For reasons known only to yourself, and you’ve left the field open for her to build on what you started.’

  He leaned back against the headboard, and wondered what Katherine was doing. ‘It’s irrelevant. The Committee would never vote in favour of the accountant. She could make me look as depraved as a drunk pope butchering babies, but unless she can give them a concrete reason to vote against me, they won’t.’

  ‘I always see her with him, you know. Are you sure she hasn’t set him up to challenge you? If she’s behind his claim, you need to take him seriously. You need to return to London.’

  He thought of the letter he’d burned two mornings ago. Did you think I went to bed with you unprepared? I didn’t take you as a stupid man. I took you as a dangerous one. Perhaps I was wrong.

  ‘Your concern is a sweet thing,’ he said.

  She sighed; her mind was still elsewhere. In London with the giant, no doubt.

  ‘Tell me what you need,’ he said, and she let him pull her a little closer. ‘You know I’ll do anything you ask.’

  ‘Can you rid him of the delusion that he loves me? Can you undo the – the heaviness of the lust in him?’

  Jude sighed dramatically. ‘I will put on a blond wig and pass myself off as you if I must, sweetheart, but really, the things you make me do. A man as large as BenRuin, I’m just not sure his cock would fit.’

  She laughed, despite herself, and hit his shoulder rather hard.

  ‘Ow.’

  ‘Don’t be such a baby. We’d best get on with shaving you, then.’

  ‘I’m not entirely certain I trust you near my throat with a razor.’

  He threw back the covers and stood. He had actually forgotten about his nightgown until Lydia drowned the morning in laughter.

  Chapter Sixteen

  The next five days were not comfortable.

  Tom couldn’t look at Jude without blushing and tripping over himself. He would barely speak to Kit, and she hadn’t been able to work out whether it was from fury or embarrassment. He and Mr Scott appeared to have overcome their opposing loyalties, and every time Kit saw one of them she also saw the other.

  Kit and Lydia spoke more often than they had in the past decade, but it was always the same as that first night: one step forward, one giant leap into an unforeseen black hole. Still, she expected over and over for Lydia to freeze her out for good, and that never quite happened. Lydia would storm out after a conversation ended badly, and then a few hours later she would invariably find Kit and criticise whatever she found her doing, even if it was merely turning the pages of a book too loudly.

  But Kit had never seen her mother so happy – not when they’d gone to Brighton for two weeks when Kit was seven, and not after Lydia was born nine months later. She had a faint memory – so faint she thought she had caught some ephemera and dreamed the rest – of an aunt visiting, and the ecstasy of happiness in her mother, still young then, as she showed her sister around.

  Here, now, her mother’s happiness was a solid thing. Something that would reach out and touch Kit, if she was very careful. A hand held as they said good night. A cheek brushed with old affection. Even, one morning when they all walked to the ruins, an arm around her waist.


  She saw that Tom had felt it, too. He took what careful caresses he could, knowing as Kit did that they might never have this again. Even Lydia drew closer despite herself. It was as though they’d watched their mother all their lives, and she’d been encased in glass. There was an aching fascination in being touched.

  And Jude.

  Kit was never allowed near him.

  Lydia went to shave him every morning, since that first morning when she’d taken the razor from Kit’s hands. Whenever Kit came into a room where he sat, Mr Scott was sitting there with him. When he came to find her in one of the abandoned upstairs rooms where she’d gone to find some quiet, Lydia was so close behind him that they hadn’t even time to speak each other’s names. And Tom, inarticulate and stubborn, stood between them, too.

  Kit had backed herself into this corner, and the knowledge wore at her. She had deceived her family. She had given Tom weapons against her, which he held as though they were all edge. Tell Ma, and wreck her perfect happiness. Tell BenRuin, and risk him hurting Jude.

  And so she kept her distance.

  It had started as a very small ache, because after all she could still see him. He was still here. He hadn’t left. She could still listen to the way language poured from the brilliant machinery of his mind. She could roll her eyes at his high-handedness, and watch his fingers stroking circles behind Porkie’s ears, knowing exactly how that felt.

  But the morning Crispin read Jude’s correspondence to him and Kit saw his breathing falter – she couldn’t stroke the back of his neck to calm him. And when she caught him watching Lydia and Crispin play a silly duet on the piano, and the film of sadness over his eyes had almost obscured him completely – she couldn’t smack him over the head and tell him to stop being an idiot. And when she sat across from him at breakfast and he laughed at something Ma had said, and while his lips were still curled from laughter he licked marmalade from them in an unconscious gesture so lascivious she felt as though he’d just licked the length of her spine – she couldn’t push him, hard, against something hard.