Lydia leaned closer to him, so that he could feel her breath against his hand.
‘And so much easier for me. We really should have thought of this while we were still lovers.’
Without opening his eyes he pulled the warm bundle of her closer, until she lay against his chest, her stays rigid against him. He lazily stroked the skin of her neck – collarbone to jaw – then tilted his head up for a kiss.
After a second’s hesitation she touched her lips to his. They were warm, and answered some of the hungry need he always felt on finding himself awake. Again. They were also just a little bit hard, and he remembered this about her: she always held something in reserve. His hand stroked to the back of her neck, and he nudged her lips open, needing more than this – so much more that panic began to settle in. Nothing would ever be able to answer this need.
He thought of Kit’s feral golden eyes and the shy invitation in her lifted leg.
He came fully awake.
Not this woman
.
Lydia pulled away before his rough need to have her gone made him do something wretched and stupid.
She stared fixedly out the window. ‘I wanted so much to see you, Darlington, but I find it is not at all what I imagined.’
She looked down at him and he saw the need in her eyes that he did not want to know was need.
‘Why can’t things be as they were before?’ she asked. ‘You and I were getting on marvellously, terrorising London, setting all the newest trends. Together we were untouchable. But you, who should be wooing the Committee into recognising your claim, are expending your charm on my relatives, of all people, and I can’t find my way back to what we – what I . . .’ Jude could see the effort it cost her not to break down in front of him. He sat up against the headboard and pulled her into his lap. Wrapped his arms tightly around her and tucked his face against her hair.
‘Shush, sweetheart. Nothing is as drear as it seems,’ he murmured.
Her body shuddered as she struggled to contain what she was feeling. To resist his comfort. Finally she sat ramrod straight and looked at him, contemptuous and cold. It reminded him that he didn’t hold a warm woman in his lap, but a small, harmful version of himself.
‘You know I came to warn you.’
‘I know.’
‘If anyone discovered – if Lady Marmotte discovered – that you are dressed as a woman, taking advantage of a genteel family and pouring your money into impractical pigsties . . . You know it would give the Committee pause, don’t you? She’s discredited you enough.’
‘I discredited myself.’
‘For reasons known only to yourself, and you’ve left the field open for her to build on what you started.’
He leaned back against the headboard, and wondered what Katherine was doing. ‘It’s irrelevant. The Committee would never vote in favour of the accountant. She could make me look as depraved as a drunk pope butchering babies, but unless she can give them a concrete reason to vote against me, they won’t.’
‘I always see her with him, you know. Are you sure she hasn’t set him up to challenge you? If she’s behind his claim, you need to take him seriously. You need to return to London.’
He thought of the letter he’d burned two mornings ago. Did you think I went to bed with you unprepared? I didn’t take you as a stupid man. I took you as a dangerous one. Perhaps I was wrong.
‘Your concern is a sweet thing,’ he said.
She sighed; her mind was still elsewhere. In London with the giant, no doubt.
‘Tell me what you need,’ he said, and she let him pull her a little closer. ‘You know I’ll do anything you ask.’
‘Can you rid him of the delusion that he loves me? Can you undo the – the heaviness of the lust in him?’
Jude sighed dramatically. ‘I will put on a blond wig and pass myself off as you if I
must
, sweetheart, but really, the things you make me do. A man as large as BenRuin, I’m just not sure his cock would fit.’
She laughed, despite herself, and hit his shoulder rather hard.
‘Ow.’
‘Don’t be such a baby. We’d best get on with shaving you, then.’
‘I’m not entirely certain I trust you near my throat with a razor.’
He threw back the covers and stood. He had actually forgotten about his nightgown until Lydia drowned the morning in laughter.
The next five days were not comfortable.
Tom couldn’t look at Jude without blushing and tripping over himself. He would barely speak to Kit, and she hadn’t been able to work out whether it was from fury or embarrassment. He and Mr Scott appeared to have overcome their opposing loyalties, and every time Kit saw one of them she also saw the other.
Kit and Lydia spoke more often than they had in the past decade, but it was always the same as that first night: one step forward, one giant leap into an unforeseen black hole. Still, she expected over and over for Lydia to freeze her out for good, and that never quite happened. Lydia would storm out after a conversation ended badly, and then a few hours later she would invariably find Kit and criticise whatever she found her doing, even if it was merely turning the pages of a book too loudly.
But Kit had never seen her mother so happy – not when they’d gone to Brighton for two weeks when Kit was seven, and not after Lydia was born nine months later. She had a faint memory – so faint she thought she had caught some ephemera and dreamed the rest – of an aunt visiting, and the ecstasy of happiness in her mother, still young then, as she showed her sister around.
Here, now, her mother’s happiness was a solid thing. Something that would reach out and touch Kit, if she was very careful. A hand held as they said good night. A cheek brushed with old affection. Even, one morning when they all walked to the ruins, an arm around her waist.
She saw that Tom had felt it, too. He took what careful caresses he could, knowing as Kit did that they might never have this again. Even Lydia drew closer despite herself. It was as though they’d watched their mother all their lives, and she’d been encased in glass. There was an aching fascination in being touched.
And Jude.
Kit was never allowed near him.
Lydia went to shave him every morning, since that first morning when she’d taken the razor from Kit’s hands. Whenever Kit came into a room where he sat, Mr Scott was sitting there with him. When he came to find her in one of the abandoned upstairs rooms where she’d gone to find some quiet, Lydia was so close behind him that they hadn’t even time to speak each other’s names. And Tom, inarticulate and stubborn, stood between them, too.
Kit had backed herself into this corner, and the knowledge wore at her. She had deceived her family. She had given Tom weapons against her, which he held as though they were all edge. Tell Ma, and wreck her perfect happiness. Tell BenRuin, and risk him hurting Jude.
And so she kept her distance.
It had started as a very small ache, because after all she could still see him. He was still here. He hadn’t left. She could still listen to the way language poured from the brilliant machinery of his mind. She could roll her eyes at his high-handedness, and watch his fingers stroking circles behind Porkie’s ears, knowing exactly how that felt.
But the morning Crispin read Jude’s correspondence to him and Kit saw his breathing falter – she couldn’t stroke the back of his neck to calm him. And when she caught him watching Lydia and Crispin play a silly duet on the piano, and the film of sadness over his eyes had almost obscured him completely – she couldn’t smack him over the head and tell him to stop being an idiot. And when she sat across from him at breakfast and he laughed at something Ma had said, and while his lips were still curled from laughter he licked marmalade from them in an unconscious gesture so lascivious she felt as though he’d just licked the length of her spine – she couldn’t push him, hard, against something hard.
The sixth morning she woke without him, it was not a small ache. She felt as though her body had been hollowed out, and was sucking at the world.
Kit, her mother, Tom and Crispin were sitting down to breakfast when the Squire’s summons was brought in on a salver. The day before, a Louis XIV table had been delivered to the Manor, and instated in the room that had been cleared out for it days before. Kit had no memory of what this room used to be, but now it was their breakfast parlour, completely ostentatious with the grand table and brocaded curtains and a gold-framed Turner that had been hung on the wall practically before the paint had dried on it. It was too much. It was just like him. She loved it, and although she would have to sell everything off to repay the Squire, this room would remain. Just as he had made it – for her.
‘What’s wrong, Katherine?’ he asked, arriving at that moment in the doorway, in full dress.
She looked up from the Squire’s summons, into the dark blue of his eyes. Her body clenched, clutched at the world.
‘Is it bad news, Kit?’ asked Tom from beside her, and pulled at the paper in her hands; she was forced to look away from Jude to snatch it back.
Lydia came in behind Jude and steered him to the sideboard. Crispin leapt up and engaged him in talking about a mare they had thought to ride out and see next week.
‘The Squire has invited me for tea, Tom, that’s all. He . . . hints . . . that he wouldn’t be averse to Lady Rose accompanying me.’
‘We mustn’t keep the Squire waiting,’ said Jude, bringing his plate of toast to the table. ‘Katherine and I shall submit ourselves to it. And afterwards we shall expect you all to spoil us rotten in recompense.’
‘I haven’t seen dear Violet in an age,’ Lydia said breezily, sitting by Jude with her own heaped plate. ‘I believe I shall accompany you.’
Jude glared at her, then speared a sausage off her plate. Which would explain why Lydia had put so much food on it. Kit kept forgetting how very well they knew each other.
‘Winston was always such a good neighbour,’ Ma said, accepting a fresh cup of tea from the footman. ‘He and your father were almost like brothers. It meant a lot to your father – he never quite believed that I didn’t mind his lack of a title, you see. I can only think Winston took his death very hard, as we have seen him so rarely these past years.’
‘Ah but then,’ said Jude idly, ‘a man like Sir Winston will not choose to be friendly when he can choose to condescend. The temptation is too much.’
‘I don’t take your meaning, my dear,’ said Ma, frowning a little.
Kit shot a look at Lydia, a desperate,
Shut him up!
Jude moved deftly out of the range of Lydia’s elbow and said, ‘I didn’t mean to be obscure. I am talking about the fact that the Squire —’
‘Ma, I don’t think you —’
‘Be quiet, Katherine. The Squire what?’
Kit saw the deep fear in her mother. She knew, also, that this was all a dream and would end.
‘He holds the mortgage on the Manor,’ said Jude, and something in his voice made Kit think that he wasn’t being an arse; he had simply thought they all
knew
.
Three pairs of Sutherland eyes came to rest on Kit.
‘Kit,’ said Tom, very quietly. ‘What have you done?’
She made herself look up at him. It was his inheritance, not hers. She took his hand under the table, and squeezed it as though she could crush him into forgiving her. She thought for a horrible moment that he was going to pull away, but he relented, and squeezed back.
‘Oh, Kit,’ said her mother, and Kit watched her change – like a folded paper flower crumpling beyond repair in her inartistic fingers.
Jude threw his fork down on to the table. ‘Would you listen to yourselves? How did you think you kept the Manor, when the late Mr Abraham Sutherland had lost his fortune many times over?’
Her mother flinched, became even smaller.
‘Lydia’s marriage settlement,’ Tom mumbled, his hand convulsive against Kit’s. She held it tight and firm in hers.
‘How much did your father receive when you married BenRuin?’ Jude asked.
Something horrible and mutinous passed over Lydia’s face. Then she said, ‘Enough to buy him a title, if he’d wanted it.’
Tom opened his mouth to speak, but Jude held up a hand to him, without ever looking away from Lydia. ‘And what
did
he buy with it?’
Lydia’s eyes flicked to their mother, and Kit would not have expected that sign of consideration. ‘He lost every penny. And then he gambled on his expectation of more.’
In Kit’s beautiful breakfast room, on a bright spring morning, the surface of their life here was split, the truth spilled out amongst the fresh-cut flowers and warm morning rolls, across the shiny surface of the table.
‘I am sick to death of this,’ Jude said, his voice harsh but still subtly feminine. ‘I will not have a mere squire holding you ransom, Katherine. I think I would like to take care of Sir Winston once and for all. Or rather, my cousin the Duke of Darlington is going to take care of him. My cousin would do anything I asked of him.’
‘You can’t,’ said Crispin. ‘That is, my lady, the Duke isn’t even in England.’
Jude frowned at Crispin, and it reminded Kit that they were in the habit of contradicting him only because he allowed it. Then his mood changed, quicksilver.
‘You’re quite right, my dear,’ he said. ‘It would be beneath my cousin to deal with him personally.’
Violet thought she might actually die before she made it to London for her debut. Two more weeks, and time crawling so slowly along that sometimes she felt as if she was going backwards.
‘One more time,’ said Mrs Parsons, without looking up from her embroidery.
Violet minced across the room towards her, and swept down into her court curtsey. She didn’t need to practise it again. She knew it was perfect. Her hair was an extraordinary colour, her dress expensive, if not in the first stare of fashion. But court dresses were supposed to be a little old-fashioned, anyway, so that didn’t matter. She was seventeen, and beautiful, and none of that meant anything out here in the countryside, where no one could see her.
‘Come, sit by me,’ Mrs Parsons said in her flawless French. ‘Your tense conjugations are still sloppy.’
‘I would have attended your garden party,’ Violet said, paying no mind to her own awful accent, ‘but I hadn’t been well. If you were to ask me again in the future —’
‘Duke!’ someone shouted, down below. It was abrupt as a filthy word in the quiet morning. Nothing
ever
happened here. Their butler
never
raised his voice.
‘The Duke of Darlington is approaching!’ he shouted up the stairs, followed by a volley of orders too fast for Violet to follow.
She leapt up, ignoring Mrs Parsons, and ran to the window.
Oh, it was too – too wonderful to be real.
A rather large party approached the Abbey on foot. Her eyes found the Duke immediately. He would have been impossible to miss. His blue coat seemed soaked with colour, more real than any other part of the morning. His hat was tall, but sat at a jaunty angle on his head, and his boots reflected sunlight with every step. Even the way he walked was the most wonderful thing Violet had ever seen. He tilted his head up to the window, and she fancied she saw him smile and she almost toppled over.
She remembered to breathe, and the window misted up. She scrubbed viciously at it. She didn’t want to miss an instant of this.
On the Duke’s arm was his terrifyingly sophisticated cousin. She was wearing a pale lavender dress today, and it was hard to see beneath the lace parasol from this distance, but it rather looked as though she had a whole bird twined into her yellow wig. Violet really had to see Miss Faith about getting hoops.
She let her eyes roam briefly away from the Duke, and noted Kit – no change to her disastrously plain wardrobe – and Tom. Violet flushed a little when she recognised his contained stride. She hadn’t seen Tom in an age, and she had fancied she loved him for a long time.
Still, a duke.
Her eyes were pulled back to His Grace, as he turned to his cousin and laughed at something she said. Oh, God, there was no way Violet would be able to compete. Lady Rose was a little . . . intimidating. She seemed to know everything, and only a third of what she said made any sense. Violet huffed, and quickly wiped the window clean again. She would simply have to make the Duke see how charming a quiet, lovely girl could be in comparison.
Her eyes widened a little when she saw that Mrs Sutherland made one of the party, because Mrs Sutherland had hardly left her house since her husband’s death – not even to attend church, which was the only thing there was to do here, anyway.
Her eyes widened even further when she realised that the elegant figure beside Mrs Sutherland must be Lydia – the Countess of BenRuin. She’d not seen Lydia for years, and the sudden tightening of her lips, the burn through her chest, reminded her unpleasantly of what it was like when Lydia was around. The other golden-haired girl. She was wearing a very fashionable bonnet, a pale pelisse and a golden shawl. She glinted a little in the sunlight as she walked.
A countess.
Still.
Violet looked back at the Duke. She had to believe it might be possible. She had to. What was the point of being seventeen and beautiful, otherwise?
‘— away from the window, this instant.’
Mrs Parsons’ admonitions finally penetrated, and she realised she was pressed fully against the glass and had crushed the front of her dress.
‘Quickly,’ she said. ‘I must change. Quickly, the —’ She couldn’t wear lavender – too like Lady Rose. Could she risk her pale yellow, and stand up in comparison to Lydia? She made a face. Better not risk it. ‘The white,’ she said. Her best chance was her unspoiled youth.
When she was dressed she tripped out of the room and down the stairs, humming a country dance. She thought she did rather well in her act of nonchalance, as none of the party looked up when she came down the stairs. Father was greeting them just inside the front door, and all the downstairs activity had subsided from view – except for that red-headed maid, the one they’d hired on last year, who scurried past the bottom of the stairs with a tall vase.
‘Hello, Kit,’ she said quietly, coming up beside the easiest of the party. Kit didn’t count, and Violet could get rid of some of her nerves – acclimatise herself to being so close to the Duke of Darlington. Dear God, the
Duke
of
Darlington
.