‘Oh, Christ,’ Kit said weakly. ‘All that time in London – all those balls and introductions to eligible men. You thought you were helping me.’
‘Have you never considered what London would have been like for you, without my silly little efforts?’
‘Do you have any idea how much I hate going out to
ton
parties?’
Lydia smirked. ‘I was doing right by you. That didn’t mean I was also going to be nice.’
Kit almost smiled back, and she thought Lydia knew it, because Lydia added, ‘Not to you, Katherine. Of all people I wouldn’t be nice to you.’
Lydia hadn’t cared about the white dress. She had stood, her face shiny with tears and snot, and screamed at their father. She had said,
Kit won’t let you take me
. She had been so sure, so full of unshaken faith in her big sister.
And Kit had let Abe hit her, and take her away. It was the moment that would forever stand between them.
Yet here Lydia was, trying to warn Kit away from the Duke. Not because she showed any sign of wanting him for herself, but because she feared he was dangerous.
‘Then I . . . thank you,’ she said, feeling absurd, and absurdly moved.
Lydia took a step closer to her. ‘It makes sense that you and I would both be drawn to him.’
‘You warn me away,’ Kit said, desperate to forestall what she knew was coming, ‘and yet I can see that you like him. The two of you have history, affection —’
‘Sometimes, he is so like Father,’ Lydia said, and reached out a shaking hand to Kit.
‘If you are comparing me to the man who broke Katherine’s fingers and nose,’ said a lazy voice from the doorway, ‘then Lydia, I will have to do violent things to you.’
‘Like break my fingers and nose?’ Lydia said, stepping away from Kit. She’d gone white again, but she looked defiant.
Jude faltered, then came into the room and closed the door behind him.
‘Lydia, my sweet, melodrama was never your style. Of course I wouldn’t hurt you. I was being expressive.’
‘And sometimes fists and feet express more than words. And sometimes they hurt less.’ Lydia shrugged, pulling Kit’s eye to the thin, sharp line of her collarbone.
‘You don’t understand everything that’s going on here,’ he said. ‘You and I have been very good friends, but there are some things you don’t know about me.’
‘And my sister – who is under my husband’s protection; my very large, very angry husband – seemed like the perfect person to confide in?’
He frowned – a genuine expression. ‘You turn against me so quickly.’
‘I told you to stay away from her. God damn you, you useless bloody prick. I thought you and I would be friends at least, when I no longer appealed to your cock.’
Kit’s face heated, prickling into her hairline. She wished she were anywhere but here, in the middle of a lovers’ quarrel between her sister and her . . . and Jude.
He glanced at Kit, some residue of fear still in his eyes. His lips were so ready, she knew, so fluent in obscenity, but he said, ‘I was so unhappy I couldn’t breathe. Er, I actually couldn’t. Breathe. Your sister has a way with words, and she has a way of seeing right through to what matters. And a charming ability to put me in my place. I need, selfishly, to be near her.’
‘Oh, God, you . . .’ Lydia gave up on words and pushed him.
‘Just until I can breathe again,’ he said, and Kit thought stupidly,
But you said you were staying forever
.
He caught Lydia’s hand in his, touched his other hand to her cheek. Lydia cast her eyes down.
‘How lucky for us all that I’m such a useful sort of person,’ Kit heard herself say. She sounded like them, and she hated it. ‘What will I be asked to mend next, I wonder?’
‘Katherine, you know that’s not —’ he turned to say, but she cut him off.
‘Yes. It is. And because you’re the most complicated bloody man in the universe, the fact that you’re using me doesn’t exclude other things from also being true.’ She couldn’t doubt, now, that he cared for her.
Lydia pulled her hand from his and said, ‘Where are we all to sleep tonight? The Duke’s munificence didn’t extend to extra beds, I can’t help but notice.’
They watched her – two of the most sought-after personalities of the
beau monde
– as though the next words out of her mouth would determine the future of humankind.
There was no right answer.
‘Mr Scott with have to share with Tom,’ she said finally. ‘There’s a spare bed in Ma’s old room. You’ll sleep there, Your Grace, and Lydia will share with me.’
She didn’t know if she was trying to keep Lydia out of his bed, or him out of her own. She just knew she wasn’t ready to make that decision yet.
Lydia tried to look smug – but her nervous dismay was so obvious she’d have had better luck covering horseshit with lemon icing. ‘Will we never get those sandwiches?’ she said, and swept out of the room.
Neither Kit nor Jude spoke, and they didn’t move.
‘Are you going to resume your affair?’ she asked, because she could not keep the words inside.
He was in front of her then, his hands tight around her skull, as he pressed his forehead against hers. ‘I promised you,’ he said. ‘Did you think I didn’t mean it?’
She made herself stay very still and tried to ignore her lungs filling with the warm, close scent of him, and the restless, almost painful pressure of his fingers around her bone, and the very faint tremor that ran through him.
He let her go.
‘You chose her above me.’
‘She’s my family.’
‘And I —’ He closed his mouth in a thin line, looked away. Nodded. ‘I am not your family.’
She grinned suddenly, and he stared at her mouth.
‘Well?’ he said, wary.
‘It’s not as easy, is it, when you really want something?’
Her smile faltered a little under his intense scrutiny and the frightening look on his face. ‘I wonder if you feel what I feel,’ he said. ‘This slow desperation to kiss, to fuck.’
He pressed his thumb hard into her bottom lip, so that her teeth bit into the soft flesh of her mouth.
There was a polite cough from the door, and he didn’t have the decency to let go of her.
‘Refreshments are being served in the parlour,’ said the footman.
Kit pulled herself out of his grasp and left the room. She wanted to wash linen until her skin was cracked and raw and bleeding into the dirty water, so that she needn’t think of him.
She knew the woman who married Jude would never wish for such a thing. It was the wish of a servant.
Kit was sure that supper would have been hilarious for anyone on the outside of their little drama – say a playwright or a particularly malicious wit or anyone who didn’t have to suffer through it themselves.
The exchange in the parlour that morning looked benevolent in comparison. Because Kit had chosen her, Lydia was insufferably smug, and condescended to Jude every chance she got. Not that she was any nicer to Kit for it. In fact, as it grew later, and came closer to the time Kit and Lydia would be sharing a bed for the first time since they were girls, the snide pinching fingers of Lydia’s commentary began to twist, so that she left bruises in Kit’s insides.
Jude was strangely demure – polite even – when supper began, and he looked Kit’s way when he was addressed and before he spoke, as though looking for clues to a no doubt convoluted puzzle. It was bearable at first, but by the time he asked her for the fourth time whether she was enjoying her meal – in language so pedestrian you could build roads by it – she thought she would scream.
Luckily he bore the strain of it no better than she, and when Lydia made a condescending remark about the way he ate his green beans, he snapped. He turned to their mother and began to engage her in reminiscences. It seemed that his mother had taken him to parties even when he was a small child, and he could recount the details and gossip of people long dead, who had been gods in Ma’s girlhood.
Then he drew Lydia into the conversation and took every opportunity to showcase her inability to converse with her own family. Every awkwardly worded phrase became an insult. Every defensive, stilted remark became an attack.
And still Kit preferred him like this.
She was so deep in trouble she couldn’t even begin to chart it.
Tom, still lost in an adoring dream of his little sister, had begun to frown at Lady Rose. Kit didn’t think he entirely understood the mood at the table, but he was sensitive, perceptive – he knew enough to trace the discord back to Lady Rose’s sharp mind.
Mr Scott, knowing none of the history in this house – the wider, difficult context – had begun to frown at Lydia. She was obviously a favourite with him, but you hardly had to look to see that he would die for Jude if it ever came to that.
Kit had watched him with Tom earlier – before dinner was served. They’d stood by the bookshelves. Mr Scott had been speaking quickly, his face and hands engrossed in whatever point he was making, and had straightened Tom’s lapel without a thought. Kit had seen Tom’s face, as he looked down at the hand resting flat on his jacket, against his chest. He had been shocked, shy. For a moment unreadable.
Now there was cold silence between her brother and Mr Scott, though they sat beside each other at the table. They were champions on opposite sides of a war. Kit almost spat out her custard when she realised that she was the spoils of this particular war, and dropped the metaphor as if it burned.
She would have been relieved when supper ended, but the next part was so much more difficult.
Tom had bid them all good night, and rather stiffly held his hand out for Mr Scott to precede him up the stairs. Ma had drunk too much wine and fallen into a happy doze in her chair. Jude hurried to help Kit cajole her to her feet and into her bedroom. He fussed over her while Kit pulled her slippers off and undid her lace cap and Lydia watched them from the doorway.
Then the three of them stood in the hallway outside the parlour and Lydia refused to leave, to let them say anything she couldn’t also hear.
Kit had chosen this.
She hadn’t enjoyed sleeping on her own last night – despite the years she had longed for her own bed, she had not enjoyed it. She had needed to put space between herself and Jude, after he had touched her and she thought she might die if she didn’t claim him. And when she first arrived in the cold, dark bedroom she had been so, so thankful for the silence, and for being on her own in the silence. But she had woken in the night and the lack of him had
ached
. It had kept her awake, twisting herself into the sheets like a child with fever.
As she’d walked through the fields to the Abbey that morning, she had thought the whole way of how he would be there tonight. How she would take it all back, if he asked her to. Anything to be close, while she could still be close.
‘Good night, then,’ she said, looking into his eyes. Like looking through a telescope into infinite space. Except infinite space had nothing on his eyes.
‘Katherine,’ he said, and then he said nothing else.
She nodded, and let Lydia pull her into motion, up the stairs. She tried to look back, to make sure he’d started breathing again, but she only saw the door of her mother’s old bedroom closing quietly behind him.
She had threatened to cast him out, and even though he had seen proof after proof of her strength he hadn’t believed she would be able to actually do it. Oh, fuck. Oh, Jesus, this was bad.
He walked straight over to the window and tried to raise the sash. He felt for one squeezing, awful moment that he was closed in and he had already breathed all the air in this room. A small, tired part of his brain said,
Undo the latch, you utter idiot
. He fumbled it open, shoved the window up with his shoulder, wrenched in dry, heaving sobs of air.
‘Fuck, it’s freezing,’ he muttered, and closed the window almost all the way again.
For the first time he realised that the room was lit. Ten candles – he counted them – on the now bare surfaces. He sat on the bed, and pulled his arms close around himself. If she had cast him out entirely, she wouldn’t have lit the night for him, would she?
He was still here, still at the Manor. She had cast him from her side, but not from her house. Not yet. He wondered what Lydia might be saying to her.
A long time passed in silence.
He rang for a maid, and excused her when she’d undone the more difficult parts of his costume. He didn’t know whether they’d worked it out or not. They weren’t his usual household staff. Not having the credit to furnish Katherine’s house new, he’d simply plundered the Redbrook estate for furniture and servants. Probably not the sort of thing responsible land-owners did. But it might not be his land for much longer, and he needed to give Katherine
something
. He hadn’t been to the Redbrook estate since he was nineteen years old, when he’d hosted a week’s revelries that he preferred never to think of again.
He didn’t much care whether they had worked it out or not. This had never been about hiding. In so many ways, it had been about the opposite.
He curled up on his side between the cold sheets. He had barely slept at all the night before, could feel how heavy and exhausted his body was. He sternly told himself that he was a grown man, and that he could survive another night on his own. Eyes shut tight, he tried not to wonder whether every night of his life had been just this bleak – he simply hadn’t had anything to properly judge it against before.
Lydia sat where Jude usually sat, before the mirror on the dresser. She was just as vain as he, apparently.
‘Even knowing him,’ she said, ‘I can’t quite believe you have been sharing a bed this whole time.’
She hesitated, and Kit winced inwardly away from what she knew was coming.
‘We haven’t,’ she said, to forestall her. ‘We never kissed, or – or touched,’
liar
, ‘or anything else you’re thinking. My reputation is intact.’
‘Until he chooses to share your intimacy with anyone else. I can’t believe you let him —’
‘Let’s not,’ said Kit, pulling on her nightgown. ‘Let’s not talk about him. You and I will never agree about him.’
Lydia turned sharply at that. ‘But I thought —’
‘You see what you want to see. I don’t want to talk about it.’
‘But —’
‘Lydia!’
It was so different, being here in her room with her sister – in the room they’d shared when they were so much smaller, and so different from who they were now. It wasn’t like being the rough girl from the country in Lydia’s grand house, subject to her sister’s every whim.
‘Stop talking and come to bed.’
And that was another piece of the past, come like a ghost into the room, to breathe cold and frightening over them.
She could see how nervous Lydia was – even though her hair spilled shining down her back, and her nightgown must have cost a fortune and her face was that of a woman. Kit kept her own face carefully pragmatic, and tucked her hands between her knees, wincing a little at the cold.
Lydia stood, took one step towards the bed, then spun to face the door.
‘Come in,’ Kit said; she would recognise that diffident knock anywhere.
Tom peeked his head around the corner, and looked first at Kit, seeking permission. When he stepped into the room in his long nightshirt, he couldn’t help a ragged grin from breaking across his face, and Kit thought,
If I don’t protect you, the world will swallow you whole
.
She felt an urgent need to protect. There was something so unstable, so dangerous, about the three of them alone in a room together for the first time in over ten years.
Tom hopped from foot to foot. Kit rolled her eyes and said, ‘You can get under the end of the covers, but if you put your feet anywhere near my legs you’ll regret it.’
Lydia came closer, and Kit resisted the sudden urge to laugh. Not even Jude had looked so disdainful. Lydia hopped gingerly under the covers, and then yelped.
‘Sorry,’ said Tom.
‘You’ve the circulation of a lizard. How we came from the same womb, I’ve no idea.’
‘Ugh, Kit, must you talk of wombs and such?’
‘It’s perfectly natural, sister.’
‘I prefer to think I came fully formed from an egg. A lovely painted egg with golden detailing.’
‘I don’t think you remember yourself clearly,’ said Kit. ‘If you came fully formed from anything it was a dandelion seed. I wrote to our uncle.’
‘Kit,’ Tom said, amazed, but Lydia just threw herself back on the pillows and said, ‘I assume it was a waste of ink.’
‘I received his reply this morning. I don’t think he even wrote it himself. It was all so long ago, I don’t understand why he couldn’t show even the smallest interest in our welfare.’
Lydia came up on an elbow. ‘What do you suppose Lord Barton’s mother told him, when he asked for his favourite sister and wasn’t allowed to see her? He was only a boy when she married Father.’
‘I suppose they told him she was as good as dead,’ Tom said.
‘Good Lord, of course they didn’t! They told him a bad man had taken her away. That she was a no-good Sutherland now, and the no-good Sutherlands would use any connection to leech money from the Barton title.’
Kit’s heart sank. ‘So when he had a letter from me,’ she said quietly, ‘he thought,
Here’s a no-good Sutherland who wants to use my money and connections
. And I don’t suppose he was wrong, either. Damn.’
For a couple of seconds no one spoke, then Lydia said softly, ‘Huh. That stain on the ceiling still looks like an old man,’ and Kit bit her lips and closed her eyes against the sudden urge to cry. Or maybe she needed to be sick. It was a bit hard to tell.
Tom said, ‘Do you remember that summer I came back from the Reverend’s and you two waylaid the coach, covered in feathers, and Father —’
‘You really should tell him,’ said Lydia.
Kit’s eyes flew open. Lydia’s voice had cut through the memory like a blade, and now it would begin to unravel – this unstable, unique moment between the three of them.
‘Tell me what?’ said Tom.
‘Is it so impossible to just be here with us?’ Kit said to Lydia without looking at her.
She made herself sit up against the headboard and face Tom instead, the boy who wore her face, the boy she’d held, who had held her, from the day he was born and Nanny lay him beside her in the cot. He looked back at her with perfect trust, because she had never given him a single reason to doubt her. ‘I have to tell you something about Lady Rose.’
On the first night she’d brought the Duke here she could have said to Tom,
Our guest is truly a man, a duke, in disguise
; she could not fathom, now, how to begin. She had let Tom live with him for almost three weeks and said nothing. Watched Tom become unguarded and smile more often and drink up the Duke’s conversation. So now, when she told him, she would also be saying,
Brother, I have made a fool of you
.
‘God damn you, Lydia,’ she said, low and vehement.
‘Excuse me?’ Lydia sat up as well, and glared at her. ‘I’m not the one who’s been deceiving my mother and my brother and forcing them to live in proximity to the human equivalent of volatile explosives!’
Lydia stopped, a little stunned. ‘Ha,’ she said. ‘No wonder you enjoy the moral high ground so much. It really is rather invigorating.’
‘Explosives,’ Tom said, still looking at Kit with perfect faith. No matter how excited he was to see Lydia, he would assume the worst of her and side with Kit in a heartbeat.
‘I am going to sound crazed, when I —’ Kit said. ‘I don’t even know where to – I met the Duke of Darlington in London, as you know.’
Tom nodded encouragement, and said with a small smile, ‘I had assumed you and he came to some agreement about Rose – I’m not a complete imbecile.’
Kit closed her eyes. She was about to make him feel worse than an imbecile. ‘It might be better if you just let me speak.’
There was a silence and then Lydia said, ‘He is nodding. Tom, really, she has her eyes closed.’
Kit opened them. ‘I was concerned, because there was gossip about the Duke and —’ She broke off. How easy it would be to pay Lydia back. To break Tom’s regard for her in half. ‘I met the Duke and I insulted him. To his face. Only I didn’t know it was him, because Mr Scott had dressed as the Duke, and the Duke had dressed plainly, all in black, and so I didn’t know who he was. But I told him what I thought of . . . the Duke – gah, this is impossible to tell. That ridiculous, convoluted man!’
And of all things, Lydia giggled. ‘He does resist retelling.’
‘Uh,’ said Tom, ‘I am completely lost.’