Of all the things that Judith had expected to hear when she came, this had not been on the list.
“I had night terrors as a child,” Christian said simply. “I’ve always had odd dreams; I’d scream out in the middle of the night, and kick at anyone who tried to calm me down. On top of my other oddities, it made my father believe that I belonged in an institution. My mother saved me from that fate by giving me a small dose of laudanum every night when I was young. The dreams didn’t stop; the screaming did.” He shrugged and gave her a smile that was not quite a smile. “By the time I started at Eton, the dose was no longer small.”
She found her fingers trailing down Fillet’s spine, searching out the rumble of her purr. Judith’s heart was squeezing inside her.
“Anthony found out because one night, I took too much. I stopped breathing.” Christian’s voice became more ragged. “Anthony made me stand. Anthony slapped my face. Anthony walked me around the room until I coughed and took a breath again. He saved my life. And he told me I had to stop taking laudanum.”
She could scarcely breathe.
“It took months. Every time I went home, my mother… Did you never wonder why I spent every holiday with your family? Every summer? Every spare moment?”
She shook her head. “It…just always was. I didn’t even question it.”
“I couldn’t go home,” Christian said. “My mother would set out my medicine, and…I couldn’t say no, not those first years. It’s as I said. Anthony saw what opium did. He sat with me when I was a gibbering mess. He kept my laudanum in his trunk and measured out smaller and smaller doses. He heard me beg and cry. He saw me at my absolute worst, and he would sit with me and help me make lists and sort things until the worst subsided.”
Judith couldn’t breathe.
“I hate opium the way one might hate an old lover—one has to hate it, because one doesn’t dare return. Anthony hated it the way you hate me—as the thing that nearly destroyed a friend.”
“Oh.” Judith’s chest felt heavy. She wanted to take his hand, to comfort him.
She wanted to comfort herself.
“So, yes,” Christian said. “I believe that Anthony hated the opium trade enough to turn traitor to stop it. How could he not?”
“Oh,” Judith repeated. Something inside her was breaking. Her anger. Her certainty. Her righteous fury.
“What I told you is true: I owe your family everything. Just not, perhaps, the way you imagine it.”
She inhaled. She’d known. Deep down, maybe, she’d always known. She’d been angry at Christian, so angry in part because she had known. Anthony hadn’t defended himself because he’d done it.
Everything was too much. “Of course.” She picked Fillet off her lap and stood. “Of course.” Her world had just altered in the blink of an eye and she wasn’t certain what would take its place. She should say something to him. Offer him an apology. Something. Anything.
“Thank you for explaining. I’m sorry for…everything.” She didn’t know what else to give him, so she handed him the cat.
“Judith?” He stood. “Judith, are you well?”
“Perfectly so.”
“No.” His hand touched her elbow. “No, you’re not. I should have known. It’s a great deal for anyone to take in. And you weren’t well when you came in.”
The words came out in a rush. “I have no idea where Camilla is,” Judith heard herself saying. “Nobody has any idea. The cats broke everything. Benedict…”
He set the cat on his desk and put his arms around her. She should tell him to let go. She absolutely should not twine her hands in his lapels, nor breathe in his scent. She shouldn’t let him hold her.
But, oh, how she wanted to be held. Even if it was by him.
Maybe especially if it was by him.
You don’t want to admit I could be right. If you did, you would understand that I was the one person on Earth who shared your pain.
“How could he?” She choked on the words. “How could he? How could he simply do what he believed to be right without thinking of the consequences? Without asking what it would mean for Camilla and Theresa and Benedict?”
“And you.” Christian whispered the words in her ear. “And you, Judith. How dare he leave you to fend for everyone? How dare he place that weight on your shoulders?” His hand crept around her waist.
“And you,” she heard herself say. “He let you discover…everything. He made you feel responsiblefor what happened to him.” Her voice shook. “He let me blame you, and I still don’t know how I can ever forgive you.”
“Sweetheart, I don’t know how I can forgive myself.”
She looked up at him.
Her life was a shambles. Everything had fallen to pieces. She had no idea where to turn next. But looking up into his eyes…
He was looking back at her, his dark eyes solemn. God, he’d asked her to marry him once. She’d said no; of course she had said no.
“Maybe we can figure that out,” she said. “Maybe we can figure it out together.”
He exhaled. He smelled of chamomile, of warm sugar.
He’d kissed her once long ago. That flutter in her belly said that whatever wounds her heart had sustained since then, she could let him do it again. Maybe if he did, maybe it would be as if all those years hadn’t happened. As if there were no pain, no anger, no fury between them. As if this were only that perfect summer evening in the apple orchard.
But there were no trees here. There was no moon. And kisses couldn’t wash away the pain she felt.
She looked down and the moment passed.
“Let me take you home,” he said.
“I can make my own way.”
“I know. Let me take you anyway.”
Chapter Eighteen
Christian’s carriage was well sprung and, despite the sound of wheels rattling against the uneven street, the ride was smooth. After so many years of having her teeth rattled from her jaw by indifferently sprung hacks, Judith had forgotten that a carriage might be like this, that she might pull the curtains, shut her eyes, and forget that the world was composed of rough streets and rowdy crowds.
Of course, one could not ignore one’s companion. Christian sat across from her. He didn’t speak. He didn’t let his legs brush against her skirt, although he could have claimed the space was small enough to require it. He gave her all the room she needed.
She would never have enough.
Judith had known that matters didn’t appear ideal for her brother’s case. But she’d always made excuses. Too many excuses. Someone had planted the evidence; someone had misunderstood. Letters had been misattributed. She’d imagined any number of shadowy unnamed actors, because she’d not wanted to admit the truth. Something must have happened, because it was easier to believe that the universe and Christian had conspired to orchestrate her family’s downfall than to comprehend that her brother might betray his family, his country, his every principle.
She might as well have convinced herself of the truth of those bedtime stories she had manufactured of Anthony, off fighting pirates and swimming to some unknown shore. Once-upon-a-time thinking, yet again.
The world in which he had betrayed her because of his principles was, for the first time, a colder, believable alternative. It was a lonelier place than the world she’d inhabited this morning.
She would adjust. She had to adjust. She always had so far.
She pulled her arms around herself and tried to imagine the truth.
Her brother was a traitor. He was not going to be vindicated posthumously. She was not going to have help. She glanced over at Christian and tried not to think.
Her thoughts were a muddle now. She hated Christian as much as she hated her brother—which was to say, she ached just to look at him. Her hand clenched over her skirt, reaching for the letter about her sister.
That was when she remembered that she’d left it in Christian’s office, on his seat. She’d taken it out because Fillet had st
epped all over it, drawing attention to her.
She’d almost forgotten her sister. That letter from the solicitor, blithely consigning Camilla to oblivion somewhere in this godforsaken country, was still at his house.
Maybe Christian’s servants would throw it out.
She hardly had time to untangle her own feelings. She didn’t have time for Camilla.
She could rush off to the last place her sister had been. She could ask a thousand questions, see what she could find. But if she did, she’d leave Benedict and Theresa alone, unprotected. Who knew what might happen to them?
The closer the carriage drew to her home, the more everything hurt.
She couldn’t concentrate on Camilla yet. Judith felt like a cat in a flood, trying to decide which of her kittens to save, knowing that whichever she chose, one of them would drown.
The carriage shifted right ever so slightly as it went around a turn.
Judith looked up to see Christian watching her.
You don’t want to admit I’m right, he had told her. If you did, you would know that I am the only person who can understand your pain.
He had been right. She wasn’t ready to admit that.
“Why have you never married?” she asked instead.
She could not see his face in the dark, and it was just as well. She didn’t want to know whether he was looking at her with interest or with pity. Night lay between them like a velvet curtain. The darkness muted the emotions that she might otherwise have detected, hiding them in shadows.
“I thought about it,” he finally said. “But here’s the thing about having been in love that first time: I always knew, every time after, that what I was faced with was a pale imitation. I never found someone else I could trust with my soul. After the first time, nothing else was acceptable.”
The pain was impossibly sharp. Trust him with her soul? Yes, that’s what she’d done.
Like her brother, when Christian had to choose between her and his principles, he’d chosen his principles.
He didn’t say anything else, and she didn’t trust herself to speak. The carriage came to her street. The conveyance was too wide to bring down the narrow cobblestone road, and so the footman dismounted and held the horses.
“I’ll see you to your door,” Christian said.
“There’s no need. I’m known hereabouts. I’ll be perfectly safe.”
“Nonetheless,” he said, by which she understood that he intended to be stuffy.
“What of you?” he asked as they walked down the road in the dark. “You could have made a match. Not a brilliant one, I suppose. Not after that scandal. But you’re an earl’s daughter. You might have chosen someone who would have provided everything you wished.”
He had asked her. After her father’s funeral. He had found her and made her look at him. He’d told her he wanted to marry her, and damn what had happened with her family.
She’d been outraged.
She didn’t answer. Not as they passed the dark-windowed house where her friend Daisy likely no longer lived on the second floor. Not as they skirted a group of men in the middle of the street, huddled under the single street lamp.
“Aw, Miss Worth,” one of them called. “Come join us.”
Christian took a step forward, but Judith set a hand on his arm. Once, she’d been scared of these men. Now she knew them. It was Fred Lotting, Mr. Padge, and the fellow that everyone just called Crash.
“Padge, you know I never gamble,” Judith said. “Especially not on…what are you betting on tonight?”
Mr. Padge indicated the street, where rough circles were demarcated in chalk.
“We’re betting on which of these, ah, crickets, will be the first to escape the third circle,” answered Crash.
She looked over at him. “It’s not that dark. Those are roaches, and I don’t even want to know what you’ve attached to them to slow them so.”
“It’s—”
Judith set her hands over her ears, and the men laughed.
Crash took a step closer. “And who’s your sweetheart?”
“Mr. Trent,” Judith said repressively, “is a family friend.”
“Aw, well, give her a nice, long friendly kiss good night for us, then,” Fred put in.
Judith felt her cheeks flame. “Kiss your cockroaches,” she snapped back.
They laughed once more, and she wished them good night and continued down the street.
Once, Judith had slipped on Theresa’s discarded petticoat—who leaves petticoats on the stairs?—and had fallen, thump thump thump, down the steep steps of their house.
She’d had a wicked black and blue bruise on her hip for three weeks. She’d complained that everything hurt.
“Not everything,” Theresa had told her. “What about your left middle finger?”
Her left middle finger had not hurt. And somehow, that one discovery had been a gateway to all the things that hadn’t hurt. Not everything hurt.
“If I had married,” Judith said, “I’d have thought men like that were rough and coarse and boorish all my life.”
Christian tilted his head to look at her. “And aren’t they?”
She shrugged. “I suppose. But Fred Lotting fixed my roof when it nearly collapsed after the snowstorm four years ago.”
He frowned.
“Before you ask what he wanted in return, he did it because his wife said he should, and he adores the ground she walks upon. He doesn’t even try to hide it. I’ve had men address me in an unwanted, unmannerly fashion before. It happens in Mayfair as much as it happens here. More, even.”
“I see.” He stopped in front of her house.
Not everything hurt. To discover that now, when so much had broken, seemed almost freeing.
“If I’d married,” she said softly, “I would never know what I was capable of doing. It turns out that when you take away my kid gloves and my morning dresses, I can do quite a bit. This may sound ridiculous, but I’m proud of myself.”
She climbed the steps.
She had intended to send him on his way, but when she opened the door, the entry had a view on her parlor. The events of that afternoon had seemed so distant that she’d almost put them out of her mind. But splintered wood and broken crockery were still spilled across the floor. She’d forgotten.
“Well,” she said with as much faked brightness as she could manage. “Thank you very much. Good night.”
“Really, Judith?” He shook his head in disgust and walked in. “It’s almost as if I’m a complete stranger to you. You can’t even move this much wood all on your own.”
“Of course I can,” she shot after his back. “No kid gloves. No morning dresses, if you recall?”
“Of course you can,” he mimicked. “Just not easily. You do the crockery. I’ll manage the wood.”
Half the good plates were salvageable—just cracked and not actually shattered. There were two bowls, too, and almost all the wooden eatingware had survived. Her good tea service, though, had been on the top shelf. It had the farthest to fall.
And…
Christian set the last piece of her splintered hutch outdoors as she contemplated the one item that had been truly irreplaceable.
Her clockwork shepherdess with its dancing sheep. The china shepherdess was smashed beyond all possibility of repair. The base was in shards, and the inner clockwork was mangled, gears bent, springs broken.
He came to stand by her.
She remembered the day he’d given it to her. When she’d realized that he’d noticed her, really noticed her, and her imagination had built castles around the two of them. She hadn’t been wrong; it was just that those castles existed in some other world, and she was living here.
Two of the sheep were unscathed. She gently pulled one off its little post.
“I can replace it,” he said in a low voice, and she knew he was talking about more than the shepherdess.
“You can’t.”
“No, I can. I remember preci
sely where I got it. A visit, a little money, and…”
Judith felt suddenly tired. “You got it from Arthur Levitt,” she said. “Four streets over, on Carlson Street. You can’t replace it.” She slid the sheep into her skirt pocket. “That first year, I sold everything I could. Gowns. Jewelry. Any property that hadn’t been forfeited, I sold. I tried to sell the shepherdess back to Mr. Levitt six months after you asked me to marry you.”
He inhaled.
“He wouldn’t buy it,” Judith said. “But he was very interested in the fact that I’d managed to make the sheep go backward. And when I showed him what I’d done, and how I’d managed it, he said he’d never seen the like. He offered to introduce me to a man he knew in Edinburgh, who arranged for the purchase of clockwork designs. It turns out that between my experience taking your shepherdess apart and that book you got me...” She shrugged. “Over the course of seven years, I made just over a thousand pounds.”
He looked at her.
Not everything hurt.
“Mr. Levitt died six months ago. There really would have been nothing without his help,” Judith said. “Instead, I made enough to send Benedict to school. Enough to set aside some money for my sisters. Some four hundred pounds apiece, sent anonymously because the only thing that would hurt their chances of some kind of decent marriage more than a lack of money would be having a sister who made that money in trade.”
He hadn’t looked away from her.
“There was a great deal of luck involved,” Judith said. “But it’s as I said. If I had married, there is much I would not have learned of myself. This has been hard and painful and horrible.” She swallowed. “But I’ve learned that I’m stronger than hard, better than pain, and that with enough luck, horrible can go away.”
“Judith.”
She held out the second sheep to him. “Here,” she said. “There’s a reason I didn’t tell you the full truth about the source of my sisters’ money from the start.”
“You thought I’d tell people the money was made in trade?”