by Darcy Burke
But the Dowager hadn’t taken anything he cared to fight over. He’d turn a blind eye to her greed, if that would hasten her exit.
“Julian! How lovely of you to check in on me. I’d invite you in for a chat, but as you can see…” The Dowager Duchess, wearing her lavender wrapper open at the throat, her hair pinned into a loose chignon at her nape, waved at the chaos surrounding her. “There’s no room.”
“We know one another well enough that we shouldn’t have to stand on ceremony.” Julian picked his way to the nearest closed and locked trunk, which he sat on. “I can make do. It wasn’t so long ago that I stood where you are today, remember.”
“I’d forgotten. You weathered the transition so well.” The Dowager flicked her fingers at the middle of the room. The servants stopped what they were doing and filed out of the room, closing the door behind them.
“I’m glad to see you.” She perched on another trunk; the chairs and tables were all in use as staging grounds. “I want to thank you, Julian. I hate Derbyshire. I don’t like High Bend. And yet I kept finding excuses to stay. I don’t know how long I would have lingered here, malcontent and pushing my departure further and further into the future, if you hadn’t given me a shove. You did me a favor.”
“You’ve a generous spirit, madam,” replied Julian.
“You know that I haven’t.” Her fine, almond-shaped eyes gleamed knowingly. “So tell me. What do you want?”
He wanted her full attention. He wanted her curious but unprepared. And, because he also wanted to be sure, he waited until he had her expression, down to the most subtle nuance, committed to memory before he said, “Did you kill your husband?”
His question didn’t register immediately. He remembered the same delay when he’d warned Sophie about visiting the constable, asked her about the note. The blankness of innocence. Like Sophie, the Dowager was not receptive to the question.
A murderess would know that a crime had been committed. A murderess might scramble for a response, or supply a ready-prepared one. She would not, as the Dowager Duchess did, stare back at him in earnest, mild confusion.
Nor would her upper lip curl with contempt as she jumped to the wrong conclusion, as the Dowager proceeded to. “Did I drive him to it, you mean?” She vibrated with righteous anger. “Did my wicked ways and my infidelities force him to take his own life?”
“Did you drive him to it?”
The Dowager Duchess clenched her hands, draped over her knee, tight enough to make the tendons in her wrist rise up like plucked violin strings. “Wouldn’t it be nice, if you could wash away his sins and coat me in their dirt? That idea must appeal to… not you, Julian, but your wife. Has she put you up to this?”
“She thinks you’re guilty of something,” Julian acknowledged.
“But she doesn’t know what?” The Dowager laughed, rich and low. “Then she is a liar, Julian, and you’re too good to be serving as her lackey. Now, if you don’t mind”—she stood—“I have nothing more to say on the topic.”
“How many people will I have to ask, to find out what I want to know?” Julian asked. “What about your mother, your sisters and brothers? How will they react, if I share my concerns about your behavior?”
“If you think I am frightened of disapproval, you do not know me at all.” She strode to the door, opened it. “And you might be surprised what you find, if you approach my family. Not the club of sanctimonious bullies you obviously expect.”
“Then how do you explain your premonition?” Julian stood, but only so he could look her in the eye. “You bought your townhouse in London while he was still alive.”
“That was Clive’s suggestion. He was tired of listening through the wall while I made love to other men.” The Dowager’s gaze raked his body and her lips stretched into a thin, hard smile. “I had the best husband a woman could ask for. Why would I wish him dead?”
He’d eliminated a suspect and made an enemy. “Thank you for your honesty, madam.”
As he walked past her on his way out, she murmured in his ear, “Do you know, Julian, my husband had one thing to be grateful for: he didn’t marry me for love.”
“I am in awe of his good sense,” returned Julian, with an ironic twist he did not quite feel.
For the butler, he had one question: “Who spent the most time in the library over the past year?”
“The whole family made use of the library,” came the staggeringly unhelpful reply. “The last Duke read his papers there in the mornings. Lady Honoria took her embroidery there in the afternoons. And the Dowager Duchess retired to the library in the evenings, to read.”
Marvelous. He knew the room saw frequent use, but hadn’t expected such a frustrating answer.
“Each of them alone?”
“Not always.” The butler’s gaze unfocused. “In years past, the family mingled more, and more merrily. But you asked about recent times.”
Julian thanked the butler, utterly confounded. If the Dowager Duchess hadn’t killed her husband, that left… Lady Honoria?
§
The bell chimed as Sophie opened the door to her cottage on Halftail Road. She’d spent the morning at the new factory on Littlemoor Lane in conference with Max Dawe. She’d had the idea to send him on a tour of all the shops that sold her ink to evaluate their displays and demonstrate Charlotte’s new nibs, and they’d begun making arrangements.
Max thought the copperas would arrive in a few days, and she wanted to make progress on the project she’d started the previous afternoon, a liver stone ink. She’d worked from her iron gall recipe and hoped to achieve a result that stood up to some weathering. She’d already pasted a few written samples to the window, exposed to sun and rain, and her first order of business would be to check them for deterioration.
In her workshop, her uncle Malcolm bent over the worn central table. He stared at a scrap of paper creased and bent from having been folded. Her ledgers lay open, strewn in a haphazard pile across the long table that ran the length of the far wall.
Her heart leapt into her throat, but the chest where she kept her diaries and handwriting catalogue still stood where she’d left it, closed and locked. Thank heaven.
“Uncle Malcolm? Are you here all alone?” Sophie took a step into the room, finally spotting the key that rested on the table, a few inches away from her uncle’s splayed fingers. Dregs. She’d kept a spare key hidden beneath her mattress at Broadstone Cottage, and she’d forgotten to collect it on her way out. “Have you been waiting long?”
“Who delivered this?” He pushed the paper toward her, his liver-spotted hands shaking. His ears were red as plums. “Who have you told?”
“Who delivered what?” She took a closer look at the paper and identified it by the color of ink: bright indigo on sized paper. One of her ghost letters, and the last one she’d written… had been in Clive’s hand.
Oh, no.
She’d written about the theft of her dowry. She’d guessed at her uncle’s greater culpability and deeper shame. All of it in Clive’s voice, a confession from beyond the grave.
“I haven’t told anyone,” Sophie answered truthfully, gauging the distance between herself and her uncle, herself and the door.
Her uncle slumped over, pent breath whistling out in a harsh exhale. “For once, Sophie. For once you put the family first. Thank God.”
“I haven’t decided not to,” she snapped. “You stole from me.”
“I took care of my family the best way I knew how.” Bent as he was, he had to look up to meet her eyes. She read irritation in the flare of his nostrils, impatience in his thinned lips. “You included, Sophie.”
“By stealing from me?” She felt heat in her throat, an acid burn. She wished she could spit bullets at him. “You took everything.”
“And you think it’s fair that you inherited so much?” Malcolm slammed his hand on the table hard enough to make the bottles and jars on her shelves rattle. “That was my parents’ wealth, before it went
to your father. Mine as much as yours. Should I stand by with nothing, when I have a wife and children to care for, while you take it all? Should I have let you give a husband what ought to have stayed in the family?”
“How dare you.” She shook with anger. Soon she wouldn’t be able to contain it. She would lose the power of speech. “You shamed me for eating at your table. You made me pay for every lump of coal.”
“No, Sophie. How dare you.” Malcolm rose up to his full height, the great bulb of his forehead sternly furrowed. “I did right by you. If you’d accepted my guidance, you’d have married. You had a fine future laid out, and you’d never have felt the pinch of your lost fortune. You chose to make yourself a burden—unwanted, a shame to us all.”
“A burden?” Sophie turned around, paced to the wall, spun again. “A shame?”
“And a liar.” He gestured back at her ledgers. “I’ve had a look at your books. You lied about how much money you were making.”
“Because you’re greedy! That’s why.” Her voice broke; she feared she’d cry, too, and then he’d laugh and sneer at her. “You take and take and take. Even before I found out that you stole from me, I knew what kind of man you were.”
“You lived your life for money, Sophie. Scrounging in the dirt for pennies. I devoted myself to the well-being of my family and peers. There is no comparison between us—because you have sunk so low.”
“You—” Sophie seethed. Bastard, she wanted to say. Cur. “You—”
“You haven’t the manners God gave a pig,” her uncle finished. He clucked his tongue at her. “Calling the man who raised you names.”
“I am a duchess!” Sophie shouted. How could he make her feel so powerless? “I am the Duchess of Clive. You should be begging at my feet for forgiveness.”
“But here you are, the same drab, dull shopgirl you always were.” Malcolm tore her letter in half. “And do you know what? I don’t think you’ll tell anyone.” He tore the halves. “If you stir up a scandal, it’s Jenny and Bettina who will suffer.” He tore the scraps a third time, into eight pieces now. “You don’t want that, Sophie.”
“Just you wait,” Sophie swore, and she meant it. “You will pay for what you did to me.”
“Go on, Sophie,” her uncle mocked. “Tell me what you’ll do.”
And Sophie, to her shame, sobbed.
“That’s what I thought.” He crumpled the ripped pieces of the forged letter into his fist. “It wasn’t my idea to hide what we’d done. I would have liked to tell you earlier, so you might learn something from the experience. Clive refused. He craved your good opinion. But I have no need for your esteem—and I know you too well to fear your anger.”
He strode toward the door.
The bell chimed as Malcolm let himself out and Sophie collapsed into the nearest chair, shaking uncontrollably. The thought of vengeance possessed her, like a fire in her blood. She wanted to hurt him. She wanted to make him bleed. She wanted to see him broken, reduced to a mindless wreck of a human being—
And Malcolm had been right, because these fantasies horrified her even as she relished them. She felt a pleasure akin to lust when she conjured a particularly gruesome scenario—she imagined burning down Broadstone Cottage while he was locked inside it; she saw her uncle’s skin melting from his bones—while her nerves trembled and quailed.
She had learned to endure. To thrive, in her way. Not to fight back.
Chapter 22
After she’d written the whole episode down in her journal, Sophie returned to High Bend. She couldn’t be alone. She needed comfort, and though she had no right to ask for it, she would anyhow. The carriage ride took long enough that she stepped out of the vehicle steadier than she had been when she climbed in, calm enough to doubt the wisdom of her return.
Perhaps she would retire to her rooms. Perhaps she should forget all about her uncle and his crime.
The grooms and carriage melted away. The door-within-a-door cracked open. Sophie collected herself and advanced into the silent, high-ceilinged entry hall, the walls hung with faded tapestries, just as Julian entered from the opposite side.
They both froze.
The sight of him, a little pale, a little feral, loosed something inside of her. She ran to him. At him, really, like a cannonball fired at an enemy army, a mindless object propelled through space.
He absorbed the momentum of their collision and held her tight. “Sophie.” He nosed her ear, her hair. “Sophie.”
She clutched at him. She buried her face in his neckcloth. She wanted exactly what he gave her: not gentleness but strength, his arms like steel bands around her ribcage. She could fall apart. He would hold her up.
“I don’t know what to do,” she said, her words muffled and wooly to her own ears.
“Then you’ve done just as you ought.” He guided her deeper into the house, arm around her waist, to the library where they’d made love, and drew her onto the green sofa.
She stared blankly into the room, unnerved by a subtle wrongness. Everything looked as it ought—the decorative bric-a-brac on the built-in shelving, curtains drawn over the windows leaving only three parallel slants of light to fall in thin lines across the carpet, one of them bisecting the polished wood of a bare table.
Julian gently lowered her back to the cushion, resting her head in his lap, his hard thigh a bolster supporting her neck. She let her slippers fall to the floor and propped her feet up, too, knees curled cozily. She stared dreamily up at the bony vee of his jawline and the holes of his nostrils, guarded by fine hairs.
Even the handsomest men in the world grew hair in their noses.
Julian combed his fingers through her hair and she shut her eyes. She let him soothe her into a kind of stupor, a state of suspended animation, violated when an image rose up before her mind’s eye: her uncle standing on the doorstep of the nearest workhouse, emaciated, unwashed, dressed in rags. All the townspeople of Padley arrayed before him, pointing and laughing, as he wept tears of blood.
“Sophie, what’s wrong?” The pad of Julian’s thumb traced the circles beneath her eyes. “What happened?”
“My uncle…” She hadn’t told Julian what Vasari Jones had revealed before her trip to Derby. “Uncle Malcolm stole from me.”
“I know.”
“No, you don’t.” Sophie opened her eyes. Julian’s face filled her whole field of vision, patient, concerned. He cupped her neck with one smooth palm, and that single point of contact made her feel cocooned, swaddled like a baby.
“I mean ten years ago,” she explained. “When I lost my dowry. My uncle and Clive lied about what happened. They weren’t bystanders at all. They weren’t trying to save what my father squandered from beyond the grave. They stole from me. Both of them, working together. And then they split my dowry.”
“I know,” Julian said again.
Sophie slid her head up toward Julian’s knees, the gully between his thighs guiding her like a rail, and grabbed the nearest arm of the sofa to brace herself as she rose up a few inches. “And you didn’t tell me?”
He didn’t flinch or glance away. “I found out at the same time you did. Vasari Jones told me before he went to see you.”
Sophie let the moment stretch, though her neck ached from holding the awkward pose.
“Of course I hoped it would flush you out,” he said, speaking evenly. “Of course I planned to take advantage of it.”
Sophie let her head drop. “That’s why I need you,” she said. “I can’t… I’m not…”
“If you need me to be brutal for you, I will be brutal.” Julian trailed a light touch along the valley between her breasts and then up, to kiss her cheeks with the tips of his fingers. “All you have to do is ask.”
His words echoed in her mind, strangely powerful. “I have misjudged you.”
He laughed dryly. “I think you understand me very well, Sophie.”
Sophie swung her feet back down to the floor and twisted around so that she faced Julian
, her calves tucked beneath her thighs. She put her hand over his heart. “Then I have misvalued you.”
His pupils dilated. His lips parted, but no words came out.
“Yes.” Sophie licked her lips. “I wish you to be brutal for me. My uncle knows now that I am aware of his crime—”
Julian twitched, focusing again. “How did he find out?”
“He ransacked my workshop.” Sophie fisted her hand in Julian’s shirt, squeezing the fabric. “And then he mocked me. He said that I would not take revenge but I will.” She thumped his chest. “I want revenge.”
“If you want revenge, you shall have it,” Julian said.
Sophie almost wept with relief.
“If you want to see your uncle bleed, I will guide your hand while you hold the blade,” he continued, unfurling her hand and lacing his fingers with hers. “If you set me on him like a dog, I will rip out his throat.”
“Yes,” Sophie hissed. A hot tear leaked from her eye. “I didn’t know I was so angry.”
“You didn’t know the savagery of your own secret heart.” He squeezed her hand and dropped his voice to a chocolatey whisper. “But I did.”
“And you can’t make me go to London.” She pushed Julian away and stood so fast she almost toppled. “Go ahead and try. I’ll murder you in your sleep.”
Julian pulled the open neck of his shirt down to reveal the shallow bulge of one smooth pectoral. “Right through the heart.”
Sophie stalked across the room, whirled around. “I mean it.”
“I hope you do.” His eyebrows lifted. “I need you to.”
Was he mocking her? She would not allow him to mock her. She snatched up a little Greek urn from the shelves, black figures prancing across a terra-cotta background, and threw it at the floor. It hit with a sound like the ringing of a bell, round and pure, before breaking into pieces.
Julian burst out laughing. A laugh such as she would have sworn she’d never heard from him before, except that it sparked a memory. An old one that came back to her vivid and complete, as though it had been preserved in a drop of amber. “Do you remember the time we played hide and seek in the snow?”
