A Delicate Deception

by Cat Sebastian

  And then he came across a too-familiar shape. Even covered in dust and cobwebs he would have known Andrew’s trunk anywhere—it had accompanied them from Liverpool to Flanders to Durham to London and back again. And when Andrew had decided to stay in Derbyshire to marry Penny, his trunk had stayed with him. Sydney thought it had been destroyed in the fire along with everything else Andrew had owned. He was on his knees before he could think twice, throwing the lid open, staring down into its depths.

  There was Andrew’s hairbrush, his shaving kit, a few pairs of moth-eaten waistcoats that Sydney could still imagine his brother wearing. No, he couldn’t quite cope with any of that, couldn’t quite accept that this hairbrush existed when its owner did not. He shoved them aside, feeling for what he couldn’t see in the faint light that made its way through the single small, dirty window. His fingers brushed against a smooth leather surface, and he knew he had it. He lifted the book out and looked at the cover. It was too dim to read but he knew the volume by heart, even after all those years: Moral Tales for Young People by Hannah Goddard. It was Andrew’s copy of their mother’s book. Andrew hadn’t thought it even slightly embarrassing to carry around a book of children’s stories written by his own mother, and hadn’t cared who knew about it. He hadn’t cared what anyone thought about anything, come to that. He had effortlessly managed to make everyone love him, and Sydney might have resented it if he hadn’t loved Andrew as well.

  When he opened the book, the pages fell open to the story of little Sally Cartwright who decides to learn the science behind exploding puddings and winds up boycotting sugar. That had been Andrew’s favorite—the story of a child who isn’t punished for her curiosity, but rewarded with both puddings and righteousness.

  For a moment he was overwhelmed by how much he missed his brother, how much he wished Andrew had lived to know that he had a daughter. They could have dismantled every clock in the house together. Andrew had been rash and sometimes irresponsible, but he had never been stingy with his affections. He had been the sort of man who seemed to have a bottomless well of kindness and love, while Sydney only had duty. His caring for people did sometimes feel about as joyful as emptying a chamber pot, and he resented Lex for having got that right. Lex, a man who had certainly never emptied such a thing in his life.

  He ran his fingers over the worn cover of his mother’s book. He wished she were here, to ask for advice, to help raise Leontine, but also as living proof that Sydney was capable of affection, of loving and being loved. All he ever had from her were increasingly rare letters from America. All his connections seemed to deteriorate into unanswered letters—first Lex, now his mother, and he had always suspected that if he hadn’t spent every day working alongside Andrew, his brother would have forgotten he existed. That would happen with Amelia as well. Perhaps he wasn’t the sort of person one developed deeper feelings for. That was, he supposed, fine. He could still do what was right.

  Chapter Six

  5 August, 1824

  Dear Amelia,

  I meant to ask you about your father. I suppose that’s just the sort of opening guaranteed to have you toss the entire letter into the fire, which is no more than what I deserve, but the fact is that I did mean to ask you about your father, and now it’s too late to come up with a more graceful way to ask. You probably think I ought to start the letter afresh on a new sheet of paper, but this single sheet was all I could persuade the innkeeper at the King’s Arms in Peak Dale to part with. Why, you may well ask, am I at Peak Dale instead of Manchester? A sink hole opened in the middle of the road, caused the stagecoach to tip, and its passengers to undergo an adventure. If for some reason you’ve read this far (why, Amelia?) please note never to ask me about the condition of the roads from Bakewell to Manchester (for now I will confine myself to noting that a certain turnpike trust ought to have hired me when presented with a chance).

  So, your father. When you mentioned that you would have died in his place, do you mean that you felt like it was your fault for having lived when he died? That your family would have been better off if he had survived? That, I’m afraid, is the sort of deranged notion that passes for thought in my mind these days. (But truly, my brother was a better man than I, and the world would have been a better place had he lived. He had a family—)

  Please note that over the course of writing the last paragraph, I’ve muttered so many imprecations under my breath at my own presumptuousness that the respectable matron at the next table has pointedly found a new seat. You may well sympathize.

  But you spoke of the matter with such perfect frankness and even humor that I think I’m not grossly overstepping, but I trust you’ll put me in my place if I’m wrong.

  Glancing out the window, I can see that it’s pouring rain, which means you’re going to be done out of your walk. Are you trapped inside as you read this? Do you get restless when you can’t get out?

  Sincerely yours,

  Sydney [illegible]

  P.S. If you take leave of your senses and wish to write me back, my address is 12 Booth Street, Manchester.

  7 August, 1824

  Dear Sydney,

  I thoroughly sympathize with the respectable matron at the King’s Arms in Peak Dale, if only because your apologies are excessive and wear upon my patience. I will proceed to cheerfully talk your ear off about the earnest longing for the grave that ensued upon my father’s death, but first let me point out that most human beings would have begun such a letter as yours not with a gentle request about the nature of grief, but with the news that they had recently had a narrow escape from their own death. May I assume that you were uninjured, as that single sheet of paper is not blotted with your own blood?

  I suspect that for those of us who are accustomed to find ourselves lacking in some capacity, especially by comparison with those around us, our minds find self-recrimination a very comfortable and familiar place. So when confronted with a new and terrible sensation, such as grief, our idiot brains retreat to the homely comfort of self-loathing. That, at least, is how I think my own poor mind manages. It is, of course, balderdash, and I know that now, but try telling that to my brain.

  It has been raining for two days straight. I’ve been pacing the length of my sitting room for about an hour, earning pitying glances from long-suffering Georgiana and glares from the cat.

  I cannot read your signature, so will take my chances and address this letter to Sydney Gibberish and hope for the best.

  Sincerely yours,

  Amelia Allenby

  9 August, 1824

  Dear Amelia,

  It occurred to me in the middle of the night (in my own bed in Manchester now, thank heavens) that women do not tend to write to men. Or perhaps the rule is that unmarried women do not write to men. There is quite literally nobody I could ask about this except my landlady, who is already very cross with me for planning to move out on short notice. In any event, our previous interactions have given me reason to suppose that you may not take such strictures very much to heart.

  The second paragraph of your letter rings uncomfortably true. A pox on you for being so correct. The truth is that my brother was everything I am not—generous, open-hearted, humorous. He was also impulsive, reckless, and absentminded, and I would feel disloyal for committing those thoughts to paper, but for how I am the inverse of those as well, but still manage to make it come out a flaw: I’m afraid I’m a bit of a bore.

  Yours,

  Sydney

  11 August, 1824

  Dear Sydney,

  Are you calling me a lightskirt? I neither confirm nor deny these allegations.

  As for your second paragraph, I do wonder if my letters have been intercepted by some boring, humorless, churlish man because the Sydney Gibberish of my acquaintance is none of those things. If you were angling for a compliment, consider it delivered.

  Returning to your first paragraph, I will have you know you’re hardly the first man I’ve corresponded with. Interpret that as you see fi
t.

  13 August, 1824

  Dear Amelia,

  I am unfit for society in every capacity. I didn’t mean to suggest that—oh bother. I’m making you pay the postage on this single sheet and I am awash in regret.

  S

  15 August, 1824

  Dearest Sydney,

  Honestly, you’re always awash in regret, so don’t try to make me feel special about it. If you wish, you can make it all up to me with another kiss upon your return. I expect your entire face is crimson now and I only wish I could see it.

  Now I’m making you pay the postage on this brief missive, but I turned it into two paragraphs so I don’t feel bad about it.

  A

  Chapter Seven

  On the stagecoach from Manchester, Sydney found his hand repeatedly drifting towards the coat pocket where he kept Amelia’s letters. It shouldn’t have come as a surprise that she was a good correspondent: she earned a living by writing, but so had Sydney’s mother, who was one of humanity’s worst letter writers. Case in point: the letter waiting at Sydney’s lodgings, which read, in its entirety: “Out of prison for now, your father’s gout is acting up.” Amelia’s letters, though, made him feel like she was beside him. In her words he could hear her voice and imagine her laugh. It wasn’t the same as being near her, but it was close.

  But without her presence, he found himself questioning more often what exactly they were doing together. When she was near, it was easy to go along with whatever hedonistic whim was impelling them both. They had never talked about the future, had never even alluded to the possibility that anything serious lay between them. But it also wasn’t a carefree tumble. Not that Sydney had ever managed a carefree tumble—or a carefree anything—in his entire life. He suspected that this was more serious for him than it was for her, because in his experience everything was always more serious for him than it was for everyone else around him. He wanted to pin it down, know exactly what it was and precisely where in his mind to slot this experience, and decided that maybe he would have to be content with calling it friendship.

  Sydney was half asleep on his feet when he arrived at Pelham Hall. The coach had left Manchester just past midnight and arrived in Bakewell a little before dawn, and he had only managed the briefest and least satisfying of naps during the journey. Surely his fatigue added to the dreamlike state of confusion with which he approached Pelham Hall. It hardly seemed real that after days and days of talking with the merchants who sponsored the railway and the other engineers who offered opinions of how to make the thing actually work, he was back here, looking at a house that stood almost precisely as it had a few hundred years ago.

  He walked slowly up the drive to Pelham Hall, taking in its motley assortment of gables and window bays. He was surprised to find that the past weeks had softened the edges of his hatred for this place. It now housed his niece and his—well, he supposed Lex was still a friend—and it was close to Amelia. And he regretted that in a few weeks it would once again be empty, abandoned.

  Except, as he got closer, he saw it was not precisely the same as it had stood two weeks ago, let alone a few hundred years before that. Before leaving, he entrusted Lex’s manservant with a draft on his bank and instructions to hire whatever servants were required to make the house safe and comfortable for Leontine and Lex. He arrived to find no fewer than two dozen workers on the premises. He counted three glaziers, a couple of masons, and more carpenters than he cared to think about.

  Carter met him on the gravel drive. “His Grace and I had a difference of opinion on what work needed to be carried out,” Lex’s manservant said. “I’m afraid he insisted on paying for it himself.”

  Sydney passed a hand over his jaw and tried to remind himself that Lex was doing this for Leontine. And also that spending money was something Lex did the way other people breathed. “How long does he plan to stay?” Sydney asked. “I was under the impression that we were only staying until he and the child were well enough to travel.”

  Carter tactfully cleared his throat. “His Grace has paid the servants’ wages for the next month.”

  A month! Good God. Lex was welcome to stay for twenty months but Sydney could not and would not.

  “How many servants has he engaged?” Sydney asked. “And where, pray tell, are they sleeping?”

  “Five, in addition to the nursery maids and several gardeners and laborers outdoors. As for their lodgings, there are quite a few rooms in the attics that only needed sweeping and airing. They were in a most unexceptionable condition considering the state of the rest of the house. His Grace paid for the furnishings and linens.”

  “Anything else I ought to know about?”

  Carter cleared his throat again. “I’m afraid I poached a cook from one of the great houses near Bakewell. And I may have given her the impression that she would be working in a duke’s establishment. So she was understandably dismayed to discover . . .”

  “That she was cooking over an open flame in a pit of a kitchen. Yes, quite.” He thanked Carter and headed into the house, where he discovered Lex and Leontine in the great hall, which, thanks to the light streaming through the now-spotless windows and an accumulation of mismatched furniture, somehow seemed even more dilapidated than it had two weeks earlier.

  “Uncle!” Leontine cried. She sat on the floor at Lex’s feet, a book open on her lap.

  “We’ve been working on vocabulary,” Lex said. “It seems we read English, but we do not speak it, so she’s been reading aloud to me from this book of improving tales you left behind.”

  Sydney took a closer look at the book Leontine held and saw that it was his mother’s book of fables. “I’m certain you found it an edifying experience,” he said, trying and failing to keep a straight face. “Do you feel that your morals have been improved?”

  “I’m mired in wickedness in ways I never contemplated. I’ve already been lectured in two languages about sugar, cotton, worldliness, and—in a true turn of events—bargaining.”

  Now Sydney was smiling openly. “My mother believes haggling is immoral because everyone should be charged the same price for the same good or service.”

  “Écoeurant!” Leontine supplied. “Infâme.”

  “Indeed, my pet,” said Lex. “I cannot wait for you to lecture your uncle on these topics as resoundingly as you have lectured me.”

  Sydney realized that the Lex he saw before him appeared years younger than the man he had parted with two weeks earlier. Not only were some of the signs of weariness gone from his face, but also he was smiling. Sydney had forgotten how dazzlingly handsome Lex could be. It was good to see him looking healthy and well.

  Carter arrived with a tray of tea and biscuits. “Don’t eat the biscuits,” Lex warned. “They’re paperweights.”

  Sydney picked one up anyway and tested it in between his teeth. Indeed, it was effectively made of bedrock, solid enough to support an impressively vast suspension bridge. He ought to introduce the substance to the men who still argued for building a bridge across the bottomless bog.

  “Do I want to know why we have a tray of inedible biscuits?” he asked.

  “The cook and I are working out our differences. Leontine,” he said, raising his voice to get the child’s attention. “Go to Mr. Carter and tell him you need a proper tea. Sweets. Bonbons.”

  At the last word, Leontine shot to her feet and left the room, stopping halfway to the door to drop into a hasty curtsey. When they were alone again, Lex said, “I’m glad your—our—niece exists and I’m glad to be able to spend time with her. Never thought six days of vomit would endear me to a brat, but there you have it. I confess that I had my doubts about whether you’d come back, but I’m glad you did. I half feared you’d send some formidable matron to whisk Leontine away.”

  “Of course I came back,” Sydney said, now feeling churlish for wanting to take Leontine and leave at the earliest opportunity. “Why wouldn’t I have come, Lex?”

  “I rather thought you were
—well, to say I thought you were cross with me doesn’t quite cover it. These details do get lost to memory, but you may recall that your brother died because I let him keep gunpowder in the hayloft.”

  Sydney was stunned. It had never once occurred to him that Lex would blame himself for the fire. “I was too busy blaming myself,” he admitted.

  “You were in Durham, I believe, and can wash your hands of all responsibility. You couldn’t have done a damned thing about it. Penny wanted a pyrotechnics display for her birthday, and Andrew was going to give it to her. You know how they were.”

  Of course he knew how they were—rash, careless, happy people. Andrew had always needed someone on hand to keep him out of trouble. That was why Sydney blamed himself. “If I had been here, you’d better believe that powder would have been kept someplace safe.” Sydney stopped himself, remembering what Amelia had written him. Grief made the mind revert to comfortable—if demonstrably useless—patterns. “Look,” he said, “you’re not responsible for everything that happens around you.”

  “I damned well ought to be. What’s the use of me if not that?” He gestured at himself and his surroundings as if encompassing all of it—the title, the wealth, the generations that had come before him.

  “I can think of a number of other uses.”

  “Oh, I bet you could,” Lex said, one eyebrow hitched up.

  “You know that’s not what I meant.” Sydney sighed. “In any event, it’s the height of arrogance and pride for you to blame yourself for an explosion, when there was a trained engineer on the premises.”