Courtney Milan (23 page)

She’d never seen him so animated. She’d never felt so closed down, as if he’d stolen all the life from her. As if he were a repository for every dark emotion that she’d felt and shoved aside.

“So if you’d like to know, Miss Charingford, why I speak of penises and cervixes, I lay the blame at your door. There is no way I can apologize for what I could have prevented with a little plain speaking. All I can hope is that I will never make the same mistake again. I would rather open my mouth and say what is true than shut it for the sake of propriety. You claim you’re not angry with me, Miss Charingford, but you should be. You should be.”

She didn’t feel anything at all. She wouldn’t. She refused to let anger take root.

“You…you didn’t agree with Parwine?”

“Not in the slightest particular. And for the record, Miss Charingford, when first I approached you last year… I had no idea who you were until you told me. I simply thought you were a reasonably attractive young lady. When I figured out who you were, I realized you were one of the bravest.”

“But you are always so rude to me. So…so…”

He shrugged. “Miss Charingford,” he said, “you may have noticed that I have a small number of defects in my character. I will tell you when I believe you are being missish—or silly—or overly cheerful, and yes, I make no attempt to cover my opinions in a coat of white sugar. But I have long believed that underneath that lovely, overly cheerful façade, you are actually a worthwhile individual.”

He was looking at her in that way he had, the one that made her fingers curl.
Worthwhile
wasn’t much of a compliment, but it was still too much. “I’m also the eleventh prettiest young lady in all of Leicester.” She threw it out to remind herself how little she meant.

His cheeks actually colored at that—she had thought him utterly impervious to embarrassment—and he looked away. “As I said,” he muttered. “You have good reason to be angry at me.”

She couldn’t think about what he’d said—none of it. He had to hate her. He
had
to think what Parwine did. He couldn’t think well of her, because if he did…

It felt as if he’d just poked a raw, weeping wound—and she refused to be hurt. It
wouldn’t
hurt. It wouldn’t.

She gritted her teeth and swung her empty basket and thought of good things—of ginger cake baking in the kitchen, filling her home with the scent of spice and sugar, of boughs cut and laid on the hearth. She filled her mind with all the best of the holiday season, pushing away those old memories that flickered at the edge of remembrance—that one Christmas where there’d been no good cheer at all.

Just cramps and lies and…and hydrogen cyanide. She flinched from the thought.

“On the first day of Christmas,” she sang, “my true love gave to me…”

He didn’t join in. But as she sang to cut off all further discussion, all need for her to think on what he’d said, she could hear him laughing at her. Not literally, of course. But he knew.

He knew that she was pushing him away, silencing every conversation they might have had. He knew that she was slamming the shutters on her own dark storm of pain. He
knew,
and she didn’t like it.

It was a long song, and she sang it slowly.

He only interrupted when she’d come near the end.

“Who wants lords a-leaping?” he asked. “If my true love brings me any number of lords shambling about in their cups on Christmas, I’ll have words for her. Someone’s going to break a bottle and cut his hand, leaping about like that, and then guess who’s going to be roused from his warm home on the holidays to stitch him up? ‘Oh, Doctor Grantham, you’d best come quickly!’” He made a rude noise.

Lydia simply looked at him. But she was grateful for that hint of levity, that retreat from the intensity that had come before. When she continued on with the song, her true love brought her lords a-leaping on the eleventh and twelfth days of Christmas, too.

When they arrived at her house, a boy stood from the step. He looked about six years of age—far too young to be out in the cold—but he seemed to vibrate with an urgency that emphasized the tear tracks on his face.

“Peter Westing,” Doctor Grantham said. “What are you doing here?”

“It’s about my brother.”

“Good God. Has something happened to Henry?”

“The boiler collapsed,” the young boy said, “and there was a slide of rubbish at the house.”

Lydia could not visualize what it meant for a boiler to collapse—how on earth could metal
collapse?
—or for there to be a slide of rubbish inside a house. Grantham however, apparently could, because he grimaced at those words.

“He can’t walk, Doctor, and he might get sacked.” The little boy burst into tears on the last phrase, as if being sacked was a more dire consequence than the loss of mobility.

Doctor Grantham stood in place, staring straight in front of him. He shut his eyes. “Ah, God. Is he bleeding?”

“No.”

“Can he move his toes? His arms?”

“Uh—yes, I think. But his leg is crooked, and he’s in terrible pain.”

“Thank God that is all that happened, then.” He turned to Lydia. “Assuming Henry consents, Miss Charingford, I’ll take you to see him tomorrow. You’re going to see a twelve-year-old child who has broken his leg because his employer cannot clean his house.” There was a note of bitterness in his voice. “And when he has been incapacitated, apparently his employer feels no compunction in letting him ago. After all, he had the temerity to trigger slides of rubbish. I dare you to find something good in that.”

He set his bag on the stoop, undid the clasp, and peered inside. “Peter, I’ll have to stop at home to get a few things if I’m going to be setting a fracture, but we’ll be there as soon as we can.”

“Yes, sir.”

But instead of setting off immediately, he paused. “Miss Charingford.” The words seemed unwillingly wrested from his chest.

“Yes?”

“You are only the eleventh prettiest woman in all of Leicester until you open your mouth.”

Her mouth dropped open. To insult her, atop all the other horrible, awful, impolite, unacceptable things that he’d said? “Thank you so much for those kind words, Grantham,” she snapped out. “I’m glad to know that my mannerisms so sink me.”

But this time, he didn’t smile at her; his eyes didn’t sparkle with that familiar mischief. “Once you speak,” he said, “you have no equal.”

He turned away while her eyes were still widening in surprise. She found herself frozen in place.

Her body seemed unfamiliar to her, filled with aches and pains on the one hand, and on the other… A spark. One that sizzled through her. Lydia swallowed and shook her head, but she couldn’t drive that feeling away.

He hefted his bag, flexed his free hand—he wasn’t wearing gloves, which made absolutely no sense, as it was bitterly cold—and walked off, young Peter Westing trotting at his side. He walked quickly, and when he got to the corner, he didn’t look back.

He didn’t need to. She was still standing in place watching him go.

Chapter Six

I
T WAS ALMOST SEVEN IN THE EVENING
by the time Jonas found himself at his father’s house. His arms ached—setting bones was tiring work, and Henry’s break had been particularly tricky. But that was nothing in comparison with the weariness he felt in his soul.

No servant answered the door, of course; Henry had been the only one his father had allowed. These upcoming nights were the longest ones of the year. The sun set early. At this point, the house was pitch black. Jonas couldn’t even see the gap in the rubbish as the door squeaked open. He found his way through the wreckage by feel. Toward the back of the room, he actually had to scramble over the piled-up detritus.

All this would have to be put in some semblance of order. But…not tonight. Not without daylight.

Jonas shook his head and found a candle on the hob and managed to light it. That scant wash of light—shifting over a wasteland of discarded metal—only made him shake his head in dismay. Nothing to do but wash his hands and prepare his father’s dinner.

He still hadn’t figured out what to say—what to do—by the time he ascended the stairs. He’d had a dozen conversations with his father in his mind already, and none had ended particularly well. But even those didn’t prepare him for what he saw coming up the staircase. His father was seated on his bed, his arms crossed, and he glared in Jonas’s direction.

“You’re late,” was what he said.

“Forgive me.” The words came out sarcastic and hard. “I was unavoidably detained, treating the injury caused by your carelessness.”

“
My
carelessness! If Henry had not been so clumsy—”

Jonas set the tray down in front of his father. “Do not talk of Henry to me at this moment. What am I to do with you? I can’t ask anyone else to come into this house to look after you. It is downright hazardous.”

“Hazardous? To those who are unable to walk in a straight line, perhaps, but—”

“I would call it a pigsty, but the greatest danger a sty presents is the possibility of mud. This place is a death trap, and I should have done something about it sooner. The only way you could make it more of a menace is if you installed spring-guns and man-traps.”

Lucas Grantham squared his shoulders as best he could. “
You
should have done something?” he echoed, his voice arctic. “It is
my
home,
my
responsibility. Did I raise you to talk to me in that tone of voice? Tell me, did I?”

Jonas set a bowl of soup and a piece of bread in front of his father. “You didn’t raise me to mince words in the face of stupidity.”

“I raised you to respect your elders,” his father spat. “To respect their wisdom and experience. To treat them with the courtesy that they deserve.”

He had. His father had taught him to respect the old. If Jonas did that, though, he’d be prescribing prussic acid and traipsing merrily from autopsy to examination of infants. The elderly were as much a repository of hoary myths as they were keepers of wisdom. They’d just learned to voice their superstitions with greater authority.

And what did respect for his father even mean under these circumstances? Did it mean doing as he was told, keeping his mouth shut and his hands behind his back, no matter what the consequences?

“You also taught me to do what I believe to be right.” He laid out a spoon. “I’m having a crew in tomorrow,” he bit out. “And they are going to clean this place out.”

His father almost choked. “I’ll—I’ll have the constable in again, I will. Thief—that’s what you are, no better than a thief!” His face turned florid and blotchy, and he raised a fist in the air, shaking it. “You just want me to be dependent on you, to have nothing of my own. What kind of son are you?”

“Calm yourself.” Jonas took hold of his father’s wrist in some alarm. The pulse was hard and irregular, racing at a worrisome rate. He’d had one heart attack once, and that had left him in his current weakened condition. Another one…

“Calm myself! How can I calm myself when my only son is threatening to remove my livelihood?”

Once, Lucas Grantham would have shouted those words. Now, he could scarcely draw breath to speak them loudly. But his face reflected his fury, red and mottled.

He reacted this way any time Jonas suggested taking anything away. It was beyond rational explanation. He’d simply become fixed upon his scrap metal. The person he had been in his life was still there, but he’d hardened and solidified around this irrational core. Even if Jonas did hire a work crew—even if the constables allowed it to happen—he suspected that his father would work himself into an injury just watching. How could he do that to him?

But the alternatives—to let it go undone, or worse, to rob his father of all his dignity and to actually etherize him, as if cleaning his house were an act of mental surgery—were equally unpalatable. There was no good way out of this situation.

“No, no,” he said soothingly. “You misunderstand me. I won’t be removing anything from the premises.” It wasn’t lying, what he said. Just a change of mind, a change of tactics. “I just…”

He sighed, and thought of Lydia. He wasn’t sure how his project was going. She’d talked to him today. He didn’t think he’d shocked her too badly.

“There is a young lady I would like to bring to see you,” he finally said. “Her name is Miss Lydia Charingford, and she is very dear to me.”

His father lowered his fist. His breathing slowed. “A young lady?” he echoed. “That’s good, Jonas. Is she pretty?”

“Very pretty.”

Pretty didn’t even begin to describe Lydia.

“I want you to meet her. All I want is to have some people in, to…rearrange things.” He winced at the thought. “To put some of the loose items up in boxes. You know ladies these days, Father, with their wide skirts. After Henry’s accident, I’d hate for anything to happen to her if she should brush up against the wrong pile.”

“Just rearranging?” his father said in a querulous voice. “Not…not getting rid of anything, are they?”

“Just rearranging. I promise. Perhaps some of the boxes might be put out back, to make a little room. And then we can find someone to come in and do for you until Henry is on his feet again.”