Seductive Starts

by Courtney Milan

  She’d hoped to help Ned by softening Lord Blakely. She’d wanted the marquess to see the good in his cousin. She’d believed he’d eventually see the good in others beside himself. But even Ned could tell the tasks weren’t working.

  Lord Blakely hadn’t softened one bit. And no matter how harsh or unwelcome his delivery had been, he’d had the right of Jenny’s interactions with Ned.

  Through his eyes, Jenny could now see her own selfishness. She recognized a deep hunger inside her, a wistful desire to be treated as someone worthy of respect. But what sort of honor did she deserve? She’d never been esteemed when she was Jenny Keeble, so she’d created Madame Esmerelda. Madame Esmerelda hadn’t cared, and she’d found clientele who hung on her every word as the truth. That superficial honor, however, hid nothing but a swindler beneath a thin veneer of mumbo jumbo. The light in Ned’s eyes was directed at a woman who didn’t exist.

  She hadn’t earned Ned’s praise. Even seeing Ned’s obvious distress, she could not bring herself to tell him the tasks were her own invention, that there were no spirits and she was a fraud. She couldn’t bear to see that light grow dim.

  Now that Jenny was seeing the worst in people, she could see the worst of what she’d done to Ned. He was dependent on her to advise him in the smallest ways. And still she was too selfish to say the words that would make him turn away in disgust.

  “Ned.” There was a quaver in her voice. There shouldn’t have been. Madame Esmerelda didn’t quaver. But it wasn’t Madame Esmerelda who spoke now. It was Jenny.

  Ned frowned at her distressed tone.

  Maybe she could make things…well, not right. Two years of lies made it too late for right. But less wrong.

  “Remember what I told you, years ago? That one day you would become a man?”

  He nodded.

  “It’s time. Not time to start becoming a man. It’s time to finish.”

  He stared blankly at her. “I don’t understand. What are you saying I should do?”

  “Ned, in this matter, you want to trust me. You want me to tell you what to do.”

  He nodded vigorously.

  “That’s a laudable sentiment, but it’s not right. Don’t wait for my advice. Don’t—” she choked on the words “—don’t trust me.”

  He shook his head, baffled. As if his world were turning upside down. “How can it be wrong to trust you?”

  Oh, God. Seeing herself through Lord Blakely’s rational eyes was torture. It was maddening. The guilelessness of Ned’s query, the foolishness of his response stung her heart. How Lord Blakely would scorn the two of them if he could hear this conversation. And he would be right, damn the man.

  “Ned,” Jenny said, “you have to learn to trust yourself. You have to learn to make your own decisions. You cannot rely on me for every last answer.”

  He shrunk from her.

  “You want to be a man, Ned?”

  He nodded, his arms folding around his torso protectively.

  “It’s a terrible burden, being a man. It entails responsibility, choices. It requires hard work and intelligence. And this time—right now—it requires that you stand on your own two feet without anyone to help you.”

  “Alone?” His voice was soft and scared. His lips trembled.

  Lord Blakely’s jaded world disappeared from Jenny’s mind in a puff of smoke, and she saw Ned with her heart again. A strong young man, hoping to be the best he could.

  She reached out and took his hand. And then she opened his fingers and smiled. Slowly, she put the coins back into his hands, one by one. Each one felt like a heavy weight coming off her heart. With the last shilling, she felt almost buoyant. She didn’t let go of his hand. Instead she gripped it tight. And deep inside her, she said farewell.

  “No, Ned,” she whispered. “You don’t have to be alone. Just—just be wiser in your choice of companions.”

  Her eyes threatened to water. Her voice was hoarse.

  Ned looked up into her face and he swallowed. Then he pulled his hand from hers and looked away into the corner of the room. “I think I understand,” he said. He, too, was hoarse.

  “Do you?”

  He nodded, refusing to meet her eyes. Maybe he did understand. Maybe he’d finally comprehended the words Jenny could not bring herself to say. I am a fraud. You have been duped.

  And maybe this response—this not-looking, this not-speaking—was his way of saying he’d finally seen through her, and he would not rely on her any longer.

  He left silently.

  For long minutes after he’d gone, Jenny stared at the room around her. She had acquired a number of occult trappings over the years. The artful cobwebs she’d allowed to build up in the corner. The depressing black, eating up the light that shone through the window. The only illumination in her room was the fitful glow of coal behind the grate of her fireplace.

  All the savor had gone from her work. Playing fortune-teller had once been exciting. It had been enthralling. She’d watched, oh-so-carefully, for those tiny hints of reaction in her clients’ faces. She’d told them what they wanted to hear. They’d listened.

  Secretly, she’d laughed. It had been Jenny Keeble’s revenge on her childhood.

  She’d been no better than Lord Blakely, thinking herself above her clients that way. But there was no way to laugh at the way she’d betrayed Ned’s sweet loyalty.

  As she looked into the dim flames, Jenny acknowledged another truth. “I cannot go on like this.”

  She spoke the words aloud—to whom, she could not say. Perhaps to the fire. Perhaps to the spirits she had for so long pretended to call upon. There was no answer except a small, burning center deep in her chest. A resonance, agreeing that this portion of her life had come to an end.

  And yet what was she to do with herself now? As a woman, most professions were closed to her. She could sew piecework—and ruin her eyes while eking out a living. Perhaps, after all these years, she could attempt to find work teaching. Although with no character references to speak of—she could hardly ask Lord Blakely, after all—the opportunities that presented themselves were likely to be unsavory.

  The employment offered to the girl of unknown family hadn’t been savory even before she’d run away to London.

  She could retire to the country, where the coins she’d saved would stretch further. She could make a pension of the money, and hope that twelve pounds per annum would keep her for the remainder of her life. It would, so long as she was hale and hearty and capable of cooking and cleaning for herself. A gamble; and a life that sounded frighteningly blank and devoid of purpose.

  None of that sounded right. All those possibilities echoed emptily in the hollow of her lungs. Jenny breathed out and thought of what she wanted.

  What would she do if she were to start her life over again, from the very beginning? What would she change? That old, deep aching overtook her.

  She wanted a mother.

  God, she wanted a child.

  She wanted to make someone of herself that even the fastidious Lord Blakely would have to respect.

  Three impossibilities. She shook her head.

  Jenny had no idea where she would end, but she did have some idea where to start. Slowly, ceremonially, she pulled the black fustian from her tables and chairs. She gathered the heaped cotton in her arms and hauled it to the fireplace.

  It landed in the hearth in a swirl of ash and coal dust. Jenny coughed the particles from her lungs and waited. For a few seconds, the dark material cut off all light and heat. Then it glowed red, and finally caught in a crackling blaze. Jenny pulled off her multicolored skirts, one by one, and tossed them atop the fire. Her kerchief flew next, and then her shawl. Finally, she stripped down to her shift. The conflagration lasted only minutes, but it scorched the front of her thighs with its heat.

  When the flames died down, the last of Madame Esmerelda had burned away.

  Chapter Nine

  AS NOTES WENT, the one Gareth received from his cousin tw
o days after his disastrous encounter with Madame Esmerelda struck him as particularly opaque.

  Meet me, it said. Musicale at Arbuthnots’. Eight o’clock. In the blue dining room. Very important. Don’t bring Madame Esmerelda. You were right about her. Ned.

  Gareth couldn’t bear to think of Madame Esmerelda. Every time he thought of that evening, a hot stab of shame lanced through him, like a burning poker stabbed in his side. Sitting in his study, pretending to industriously pore over a stack of bills and reports, it should have been easy to put the woman from his mind.

  It wasn’t. After all, he was in his study with his man of business.

  There was no place for nervousness in Gareth’s relationship with his servants. Until these last few days, his interactions with White had been simple. The man dealt with the estate correspondence; Gareth paid his salary. Gareth liked simplicity. He liked not having to worry about what the man thought. He liked not wondering whether his latest ham-handed attempt at conversation would result in humiliation and unease.

  He didn’t like feeling like an ass. And Madame Esmerelda’s dreadfully clear eyes—the ones that had seen Ned as something other than a childish irritant—had dismissed him. He’d told her to look at herself through his eyes, but if she had really done so, she would not have been ashamed. If she’d understood how bravado and bluster had transformed in his breast to hunger, she’d have laughed outright.

  Who was he fooling? She had known it. She had spoken the truth that he’d hidden for so long behind a scowl and a cutting phrase. He had no way of conversing with others. He didn’t know how to make friends. He cringed, feeling awkward and ungainly every time he made the effort. And so long ago—more than twenty years before—he’d given up the task entirely.

  But there came a time in a man’s life when he no longer wanted to cut down everyone around him. Gareth didn’t need to read tea leaves to see the future that lay ahead of him if he continued on this solitary path.

  He was going to be lonely. And not just the little loneliness that he experienced now, the soft wistfulness for someone to talk with and touch, but a fierce longing, one that whispered that it could all have been different if only—if only—

  If only he what?

  Because of all the things she had said that night, the one that had cut the deepest—the one that had slashed through layers of muscle and subcutaneous fat, to score the artery—was that it was his choice to be who he was. For years he had told himself that he had no choice about the way he was. That coldness and calculation were natural to his personality. That he responded to threats by eviscerating them with his mind.

  He’d believed he could not be the warm, loving brother his sister longed for; that he could not bring Ned under his wing as a friend instead of a subject, to be ordered about.

  She had stripped his illusions away. He’d chosen this life, and what seemed bearable when it resulted from implacable fate became untenable as a matter of option. If he did not change in the years to come, the thought that he had chosen this path would nibble away at him, like a mouse at a sack of grain, until nothing was left.

  If only he had the courage to make different choices.

  If he was going to have that courage, he could not put the matter off. He could not wait for some far-off time or place in dreams and fairy tales. It was now she demanded. This moment. In his study.

  He said the dreaded word. “White.”

  At the sound of his name, his man of business looked up obligingly. “My lord?”

  There was a cool draft in the room. It didn’t stop Gareth’s palms from moistening with a hint of cowardice. He fixed his gaze on the velvet curtains behind White. Conversation was easier if he didn’t have to look into the man’s eyes. The fabric rippled in the breeze, and Gareth found courage as best he could.

  “It occurs to me that we have—” Gareth took a deep breath, and the rest of the words spilled out all in rush “—a number of things in common.”

  “We do?”

  From the corner of his eye, Gareth saw faint puzzled lines furrow White’s forehead.

  Gareth clenched his hand and resisted the urge to punch his leg in frustration.

  “Yes,” Gareth said. “We do.” And damn it, there he was again, using that quelling tone. One couldn’t have a conversation if one quelled the person one was attempting to converse with.

  “Perhaps my lord would care to enumerate?”

  Gareth didn’t care to enumerate, damn it. But he was going to have to try if he ever expected to get anywhere. Gareth shuffled through the dismally tiny selection of facts that he knew about the man.

  “Well,” he suggested, “we are both men.”

  White put his head to one side. The motion drew Gareth’s eyes from the drapes and forced him to look his employee in the face. Gareth swallowed.

  “Yes,” said White. “We are.”

  “And,” Gareth plunged forward, “we are of a similar age.”

  “Indeed, my lord.”

  Gareth tapped his closed fist against his hip. There the known similarities ended. Gareth felt like ten kinds of an idiot—as Madame Esmerelda had no doubt intended. White waited, that curious expression on his face. He reminded Gareth of a pigeon considering a crust of bread held in the hands of a small child. Apparently, he expected something additional. But what could Gareth say?

  We are both literate.

  We both have fewer than five children.

  “And we both enjoy the company of women.”

  Stupid, stupid, stupid. He knew it was stupid as soon as the words left his mouth. There was an extremely befuddled pause from White’s side of the room. As if the child had lobbed the entire loaf of bread at the pigeon, and White didn’t know whether to fly away or tear at the bounty.

  “Shocking similarities, my lord,” said White. That straight, unblinking gaze seemed subtly mocking in Gareth’s mind.

  The tips of Gareth’s ears heated. He grabbed the edge of the desk and squeezed, as if to throttle that damned fortune-teller by proxy. There was a good reason Gareth didn’t attempt to make friends. He wasn’t any good at it. And he hated not being good at things.

  He was making a scapegoat of her again.

  If she ever found out about this, she’d mock him, and she would be right. He knew he used his social status as a shield to prevent this awkwardness. It had worked. It had worked ever since he was twelve.

  It was only now that it failed. The import of that failure hit him directly in the chest. If he couldn’t even talk to a man who depended upon him for his livelihood, who would he ever connect with? He would be isolated all his life. Gareth fumbled for a topic of conversation.

  “What’s it like, then? Marriage.”

  White leaned back. Puzzled lines crinkled the corners of his eyes. “It’s a marvelous state.”

  “But doesn’t Mrs. White ever lie to you?”

  White was no fool. Those lines relaxed and smoothed away, as if he’d finally understood the reason for the inquiry. “All the time. The benefit of marriage is that it becomes so easy to recognize when one’s spouse lies.”

  Gareth frowned. That state of hypocrisy seemed unbearable. It reinforced all his reasons for avoiding lengthy relationships. “What sort of lies does Mrs. White tell?”

  White put his hands to the side of his head and batted his eyes in a manner Gareth supposed was intended to be femininely flirtatious. On the man’s sharp, masculine features, the expression was closer to frightening. “Oh, no, William. The shawl was quite inexpensive.”

  The high falsetto proceeding from his normally baritone man of business made Gareth sit back in surprise.

  “Of course,” White added in his normal voice, “I lie to her, too.”

  “Oh?”

  “Just this morning, I told her, ‘Nonsense, my dear, you haven’t aged a day.’”

  Gareth shoved at the papers on his desk morosely. He had no experience with this sort of interaction. It sounded mundane and comforting. How could i
t seem both foolish and enviable at the same time?

  White laid a piece of blotting paper over the letter he had been working on. “This may be an impertinent question, my lord—but hypothetically speaking, is there a particular woman that you are thinking about?”

  “Hypothetically speaking?” Gareth sighed. It was not as if he could possibly lower himself any further in White’s estimation at this point. “Yes.”

  “And has this, uh, hypothetical woman perhaps told you lies?”

  “Hypothetically, everything out of her mouth has been a lie,” Gareth complained, much aggrieved. “Everything except her kisses. She meant them.”

  White nodded, as if he regularly dispensed advice on women to lovelorn lords. “Are you wondering if you can trust her? Hypothetically, of course.”

  “Oh, I know I can’t do that. What I really want to know is…” Gareth’s thoughts slowed like sap. He really wanted to know if his near-obsession with a woman whose name he didn’t even know would end if he took her to bed. He wanted to know if he’d ever eradicate that cold, lonely emptiness in his heart, the one that still longed to have people about him he could not intimidate.

  He wanted to know when his mind had split on the subject of Madame Esmerelda. One half demanded he take her in simple, sexual conquest. The other wanted to…to make her his friend. He swallowed.

  That wouldn’t happen anytime soon. Not after the way he’d behaved.

  He doubted he’d ever see her eyes cloud with lust again. Not when he’d shown her what an ass he really was. He glanced up at White, who watched him attentively. Envy at the man’s calm complacence flickered in Gareth’s breast. He’d wager White knew what to do in situations like this one.

  “White,” he said uncomfortably, “what I really want to know is—do you know how to apologize to a woman?”

  THE CLOCK SHOWED TEN MINUTES before eight. Ned’s gut clenched and beads of sweat dampened his forehead. The Arbuthnots’ annual gathering should have been no cause for consternation. But Ned had a plan and it stewed, like an indigestible lump of gristle, deep in his stomach. His every instinct told him he should stop the madness he’d set in motion before it sprouted heads like a mythical hydra. His infernal sense of honor had been twinging all day. Everything he had ever been taught counseled him that what he schemed was wrong. Really, really wrong, in a life-changing, reputation-destroying way.