The Suffragette Scandal

by Courtney Milan

Edward swallowed and looked away.

  “He was the first person Soames made me implicate as part of the resistance. They shot him summarily in front of me.”

  She inhaled slowly. Her eyes reminded him of storm clouds on the horizon: dark and impossible to read. “What did you do?” she asked.

  “What else could I do? I had no way to escape, and I was so turned around in my head that I wouldn’t have known what to do with one if it were offered. I stayed as Soames’s pet forger, believing what he told me to believe. People say sometimes they’ve lost hope for themselves.” He shrugged. “They rarely mean it the way I did. I lost all sense of myself for months. There was no future, no past. Only him and the prospect of pain. He kept me until the French lost Paris and sued for peace.”

  She looked at him.

  “Eventually, I got away. My friend Patrick came and took care of me until I was well enough to send him off. I spent several years wandering about Europe, honing my craft as a forger, learning how to commit crimes and not get caught at it.” Edward couldn’t look at her now. “It took me years to untangle what had really happened. When I did, I went back to Strasbourg. Soames was still there—and he was rather successful, in fact. I knew enough about him to change all that. So I forged the right letters and took control of his accounts. I left evidence that he’d played both sides during the war. And then I took his money and left him to account for what he’d done. That’s how I established myself.” He shrugged. “I always expected, every day, to be uncovered. There are times I wonder if everything is not a lie after all, if maybe I’m still in that cellar, so terrorized that I cannot bear the truth.”

  She had sat, listening, as he spoke, scarcely interrupting. “Is that why you haven’t asked me to forgive you?”

  “I don’t see how you can.” His voice dropped low.

  “No?” She looked into his eyes. “Don’t you?”

  “I try not to lie to myself.”

  “You walked into my life,” she said slowly. “You found evidence proving that other papers were copying my columns. You saved one of my writers from certain embarrassment and possible imprisonment. You saved me from fire. You rescued me from gaol. And, yes, you hurt me, too. But you think you would be lying to yourself if you believed I could forgive you?”

  Edward shook his head. It wasn’t a denial; he wasn’t even sure what it was.

  “Do you think I could hear what you just told me, and not bleed for you?” Her voice was trembling now. “Do you think I would condemn you if I heard that story, or that I would agree that you were hopeless? I have never given up hope so easily, and no matter how you hurt me, I love you too much to do it now.”

  “Free.” He could scarcely speak.

  “So.” She stood, brushing her hands off briskly. “You don’t think you can have forever with me. You don’t things can be lovely with the two of us. I will admit that we have some things we must discuss about our future.” She dismissed those things—their entire way of life—with a toss of her head. “But if you think that the two of us cannot resolve our differences, you are lying to yourself. Not all truths are bitter, and not all lies are sweet.”

  His whole heart jolted. “Free. I don’t know—”

  She came toward him. And then, to his shock, she took his hands.

  “I understand,” she said. “I understand why you did what you did. I understand why you didn’t tell me. Your entire life has taught you that you can’t have anything good unless you steal it. You wanted me; you stole me. You never expected to keep me.” She shook her head. “I can even forgive you for that.”

  His heart, cold and shriveled thing that it was, came to life, thumping in a way he didn’t understand. He couldn’t quite bring himself to look her in the eyes. She seemed so brilliant, so untouchable.

  And yet here she was, touching him in defiance of all his expectations. This couldn’t be happening; it couldn’t be real. But her fingers were truly laced through his, warming him from the outside.

  Her features softened. “You lied to me about the family that rejected you. I knew you hadn’t told me when I married you, and I married you anyway. They rejected you. I was hurt when I found out the truth. But it hurt just as much that you thought I would reject you.”

  Her other hand came up and brushed against his cheek. He let out a breath.

  “I still know who you are, Edward. And if you recall, I didn’t fall in love with a man who represented himself as the most honorable fellow in all of England. I fell in love with a scoundrel.”

  It felt like forgiveness—sweet words that he didn’t dare believe in.

  “So, yes, Edward. I think I could forgive you.” Her voice trembled. “But you can’t keep telling yourself that I am a lie, one that you must walk away from. If we’re to do this, whatever this ends up being—we’ll need to do it together.”

  He almost couldn’t hear her. She had said if. She’d said she could forgive him. He didn’t know what to do with that confused, painful jumble of his emotions.

  Her fingers trailed along his chin. She tilted his face up so that he met her eyes. “Come find me when you’re willing to do that.”

  He’d never thought of the future until now. He’d flinched from it all these years. It had seemed as impossible to unravel as his past.

  But when he shut his eyes, he didn’t think of a dark cellar. He remembered himself in the back chamber at the committee hearing just yesterday morning.

  We’re that sort of friends, Patrick had insisted.

  And they were. Stephen and Patrick had been the constants in his life, the two people he had never forgotten. They were fixed. They were not a lie. They’d not betrayed him, and he…

  How odd. He hadn’t betrayed them either. It took him minutes to understand that, and more time beyond that, turning that bewildering thought in his head, over and over, trying to imagine what it meant.

  Maybe pessimism was as much a lie as optimism.

  He got out the notebook he always carried. He drew to remember—to recall all the details that his inconsistent, unreliable memory washed away. Over the months, he’d drawn a hundred sketches of Free. He started one now—one of her standing in front of her press as she’d greeted him—was that just two nights past? It was. He drew her skirts, ruffling in a breeze, her eyes, brightening in recognition.

  Like every other sketch he’d made of her, this one was missing something—something so fundamental, so necessary, that he knew he’d never get anything right if he didn’t figure it out now.

  He wracked his memory, searching. There she was, a lone silhouette against the doors of her business. That was wrong. Empty.

  She hadn’t been alone. Slowly, he drew in the lines of his own trousers, the tilt of his head as he’d walked up to her. His outstretched hands—that brilliant smile on her face now seemed to make sense.

  It had never been her that he’d drawn incorrectly.

  The thing that he had been missing was…himself.

  He sat sketching on that rock in the sunshine long after she’d gone back to the house. He worked until the sun switched from his left to his right side. The breeze came and went, the water rippled past.

  When he was ready, he stood and went back to the house. Marshall let him in; he found Free sitting at the table.

  She didn’t rise as he approached her. She didn’t frown at him, but she didn’t smile either. He wasn’t sure how he made his way toward her, if anyone else was in the room. He couldn’t see anyone but her, couldn’t think any thought except that he no longer wanted to be towering over her, looking down.

  It was a simple matter to get on his knees before her, and an even simpler matter to bend his head.

  “Free,” he said. “I want to make you happy, but I don’t know how.”

  For a long, fraught moment, she didn’t respond. And then, ever so slowly, she reached out and took his hands in hers.

  “We’ll figure it out,” she told him.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

>   FREE DID NOT KNOW what she was doing in this house, if one could call something so vast by so unassuming a name. The ceilings reached high over her head. Her footsteps in the huge, echoing space seemed to belong to a much larger creature. A horse, perhaps, or an elephant.

  And the man at her side… She stole a glance over at him.

  Edward strode beside her. He seemed as uneasy in this place as she felt, and maybe that was the only thing that kept her from running in horror.

  Yesterday, he’d told her he wanted to make her happy. Today, she’d come with him to his estate in Kent. Because—she still didn’t quite believe this—the man she married had an estate in Kent, and that was now an inextricable part of her life. She’d married him for richer or poorer, but quite frankly, at the moment she would have preferred poorer.

  He’d made every effort to make her feel comfortable. He’d not yet announced the marriage. He’d wired ahead and sent the servants away on holiday, because he knew that she’d be overwhelmed by a procession of people all wanting to meet her needs.

  Yet somehow the absence of servants made the tour Edward was giving her even more bewildering.

  This was what he’d kept from her: this vast empty space screaming of responsibility. This was what he hadn’t told her, because he’d feared she wouldn’t want it.

  “The grand hall,” he told her. Then a few minutes later: “The blue parlor to the right; the yellow parlor to the left.”

  “The zebra-striped parlor,” Free muttered as he paused at the door of the next room.

  He glanced down at her, and the half smile on his face slowly died. “You…hate this.”

  She’d been trying her best to imagine herself in any of these rooms, in any role except gawking seer of sights. She’d failed.

  “It’s not really filling me with delight,” she admitted.

  He turned from the room. “I’m doing this all wrong. Come with me. Let me show you the good parts.” He marched down the hall to an unobtrusive door set in the wall. He wrenched this open and led her into a bare hall, one not floored underneath by marble. Here, no massive portraits looked down in snooty disapproval.

  “Oh, thank heavens,” Free said, breathing in relief. “I was going mad out there.”

  “Here.” Edward jiggled a door to a room and then opened it wide. “The seamstress’s work area. Patrick Shaughnessy—he’s that friend I told you about—his mother was a seamstress.”

  Free blinked. “Patrick Shaughnessy? Is he any relation, by chance, to…” She trailed off, and then she glanced up at him. “Of course he is. Of course. Stephen Shaughnessy—he’s why you came back in the first place.” She looked around the room. A small, dingy window let light spill onto the bare wood floor. A simply made chest of drawers stood against one wall.

  “Yes. He is. He’s like a little brother to me.”

  She frowned, recalling… “He lied to me about you. That little…” But she couldn’t muster up anger over it.

  “Clod,” Edward suggested. “It’s what Patrick and I always called him. We referred to him as ‘the clod.’ But only when he was present. You’re not angry at him for lying, are you?”

  “He hardly knew you were going to marry me,” she said dryly. “But I’ll have words with him.” It made sense of everything Edward had done in the beginning. “Then it wasn’t entirely about revenge when we first met, was it?”

  He gave her a look. “It took about five minutes before it was about you, too. You’ve been the one easy part in all of this. If I didn’t ask you to join this uneasy future with me, it’s because I love you too much to ask you to come into this.” He gestured around him.

  She turned away from him to hide the emotion that swept through her. Yes. She knew he loved her. She’d known it almost from those first five minutes. He was just learning how to do it properly.

  She blindly opened a drawer. “Let’s see what we have in here.” The drawer didn’t stick as she’d expected from her own household drawers. It slid open smoothly on a clean, oiled track. “Linens,” she said coolly. She slid that drawer closed and picked another. “More linens. Good heavens. If we sewed the sheets end to end, we could reach the ocean from here.” She shut that drawer, too, and put her hand on the topmost drawer. “Let me guess what’s in this one: yet more linens.” Free yanked it open.

  But this drawer rattled as she pulled it open.

  And when she looked inside, it wasn’t linens. It was a collection of thimbles, large and small. Some were old, weathered iron; some were new and shiny tin. There were hundreds of thimbles there. For God’s sake, why would anyone ever need so many thimbles? Even the servants here ran to excess.

  Free stared at the drawer, blinking in confusion. And somehow, that was what broke her—not the four parlors or the vast grounds. It was thimbles.

  She began to laugh. Not just a little giggle, but a helpless, unladylike belly laugh. She should have been able to stop, but after the last few days, somehow she couldn’t. It almost hurt to laugh like that. Edward watched her in confusion.

  “Well,” she said, wiping tears of mirth from her eyes, “if your brother ever comes to visit, I know just what to slip under his mattress.”

  Edward let out a crack of laughter. “The needles are in the drawer just over.”

  Somehow, after that, the tour got better. Not that it became any less overwhelming; it was still utterly ridiculous that any human beings would spend their lives surrounded by this kind of wealth. But the visit started to be something that they were doing together.

  There were a handful of servants in the gardens and stables that he hadn’t sent away—those whose duties could not bear a few days’ neglect—but they slipped away when Free and Edward approached. Edward showed Free around the farrier’s station. He explained how to shoe a horse, demonstrated how to work the bellows. That, she could accept. After that, he took her up to the ruins on the hill.

  He pointed out the boundaries of the estate—hazy and indistinct, thousands of acres, hundreds of tenants. She could scarcely believe it.

  “One of the early skirmishes in the battle for Maidstone took place just down there,” he told her. “Back when my forefather was a mere Baron Delacey. People come constantly to see this place for historical reasons. My father hated it.”

  “Let’s put up a monument,” Free suggested. “Open it to the public.”

  He sat on one of the broken battlements and smiled. “Better. We could charge admission. That would be so crass that my father would turn in his grave.” His smile widened, and he turned his finger in a lazy circle. “Which would also be useful. We could attach his coffin to some kind of an engine and use the power of his outrage to…I don’t know, grind corn.”

  Free found herself smiling. She came to sit beside him. “Is that how we’ll sully the family name then?”

  “Oh, we’ve already made an excellent start on that. But why limit ourselves to just the one option? I might expand the farrier’s station so I can do some metalwork here. If we decide to stay here.” He glanced over at her. “That would employ some of the men, too. And the way I see it, the more people we employ in an actual productive scheme, instead of supporting our degenerate ways…” He swept his hand, indicating the house below. “Well, the better it will be.”

  She took his hand. “The massive palace and the ridiculous estates are a significant problem. But I want to run my newspaper.” She hugged her knees. “That’s the one thing I insist upon. Everything else, I suppose we can work with, but my newspaper is not negotiable.”

  “Very well, then. We will make that happen. I promise.”

  They stared off into the distance. It was really an excellent hillside for a ruined castle. She had a vantage point on the slow, lazy river making its way through the trees. On the far horizon, she could see the sea—sparkling blue waters fading into indistinct sky.

  “Someone,” Free said, “is going to have to do the things the lady of the manor is supposed to do.”

  She di
dn’t go on. She was really considering this. She was considering him, considering what she would have to be, have to do, to become his viscountess.

  She wasn’t sure who took whose hand, whose fingers twined with whose.

  “On the benefit side,” Free said, “that house leaves a lot of room for me to hide the bodies of my enemies.”

  His thumb caressed her palm. “We’ll put them in the zebra-striped parlor,” he told her.

  “Can’t we just do this instead for the rest of our lives?” Free asked. “Just the two of us. Together. The rest of the world can disappear. I like it like this.”

  “No,” he said. “We can’t. You’d be bored in half a day. And how will we fill the zebra-striped parlor with the bodies of your enemies if we never sally forth and slay them?”

  She was laughing at that, when she saw a wisp of dust rising from the road. It was still more than a mile distant. “Someone’s coming.”

  Edward glanced upward—and then slowly stiffened. His hand pressed into hers. “Yes,” he said slowly. “And…I rather think I recognize the carriage. It would be lovely if it were just the two of us, Free. But it isn’t. That’s my brother.”

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  EDWARD WAS WAITING WITH FREE in the blue parlor when James Delacey arrived. Free didn’t move as the carriage pulled up on the gravel ring outside the house. But still, it felt as if she drew farther and farther away—as if she were drifting from him on every breath.

  Through the gauzy curtains of the parlor, they could see the horses coming up to the house. A footman jumped off the back of his conveyance, setting out a step. Another appeared and opened the door. The first one held out a hand, steadying his brother as he stepped out.

  Beside him, Free shook her head. “Are we supposed to have all those footmen?” she whispered in shocked tones.

  “Yes,” he whispered back. “But we can flout propriety as much as we like, remember. Supposed to is not a necessity, just a consideration.”

  She frowned and folded her arms.