A finger joined his thumb on her lips. “I think you’re very brave,” he whispered. “You’re a fire that should burn itself out in five seconds of brilliant combustion. I know what it’s like to put forth that much energy, and yet you do it night after night. And nobody—not marquesses nor guardians nor physicians, not the whole weight of society’s expectations—can make you stop.”
She let out a sigh, a trembling sigh that had her lips brushing against his thumb. So much like a kiss.
“If people want you to stop talking, or to stop dressing the way you do, or to change who you are, it’s because you hurt their eyes. We’ve all been trained not to stare into the sun.”
Another finger joined his thumb against her lips. “I can’t look, and I can’t look away. But never fear, Miss Fairfield. I care what you think.”
He tilted her chin up. He did it gently, as if he were asking a question. But if his fingers on her face asked a question, his eyes answered it. They were clear and blue and stronger than she’d imagined.
“So which one is it?” he asked softly. “Do you find me attractive, or…”
“There is no or,” she told him.
He leaned close to her. So close that she could feel the heat of his breath against her lips. So close that she imagined that if she breathed in, she’d get a lungful of his essence. She felt an electric sense of expectation, as if she were putting together a jigsaw puzzle. As if she were about to set two pieces together, and she knew in her entire being that they would fit.
Instead, he straightened with a grimace and let his hand fall away.
“Is it something I said?” Jane asked. And if so, which sentence? There had been so many of them, after all.
“Impossible girl,” he said softly.
It stung that he would call her that after all they’d exchanged. “It’s only by choice,” she snapped, but she knew it was more than that. Deep down, she knew that even if she had tried to get everything right, polite society would never have loved her. “I may be impossible, but at least I’m not—I’m not—”
“That’s not what I meant.” He reached out as if to touch her again, and Jane went still. Wishing those few inches between her cheek and his fingers would disappear. Her whole face tingled, and she sucked in her breath.
“Impossible girl,” he repeated, but this time his tone was soft and low, making the words into something sensual. “I’m saying it for me as a reminder, not for you as an insult. Jane. Brave girl. Lovely girl.” He did touch her cheek then, laying his fingers against it once more. And, oh, how good it felt, that tiny little touch. That point of connection.
“Girl I should not touch,” he said. “Or kiss. Or have.”
His smile was a little sad, and she could recall him saying that she was the last woman he would ever marry.
“But bright. So bright. It’s a shame you’re so impossible, Miss Fairfield, because otherwise, I think I would try for you.”
She had preferred it when he’d called her Jane. She liked the way he said her name, not short and terse, a spare syllable to be gotten over with, but long and slow, a bite to be savored.
She reached up and laid her hand over his against her cheek. Warmth met warmth. He let out a noise, not quite a protest, but he didn’t move away.
“Remember,” he finally said, “what I am contemplating. I don’t think I should be making you more vulnerable to me. Not at all.”
“Too late for that,” she told him.
He pulled his hand away as if it would make a difference. It didn’t matter. He’d slipped past the layers of lace that she’d used to shroud her heart. She wasn’t anything so foolish as in love with him; even she was not that brave. But…
“You’re the most scaldingly honest betrayer I’ve had,” she told him.
He grimaced. “Come, Miss Fairfield,” he finally said. “It’s getting cold and we ought to go in.”
Chapter Eight
“More than two weeks in Cambridge,” the man Oliver had called father all his life said from his vantage point overlooking the stream. “And you’re just now visiting?” He didn’t look at Oliver as he spoke; he was examining the lure on the end of his line.
It was mid-afternoon—the worst time for fishing—and January to boot. But his father hadn’t quibbled when Oliver suggested a trip to the stream.
Hugo Marshall was a good bit shorter than Oliver. His hair was an untidy brown, his features square, his nose broken. He looked nothing like Oliver, and with good reason: They were not actually related. Not by anything other than time and affection.
Oliver very carefully didn’t look at his father. They had situated themselves next to their fishing pool—a wide, flat stretch of water where the stream went still. A large, gray rock on the bank made an excellent seat. “It took me far too long.”
His parents’ farm, just outside the tiny village of New Shaling, was a mere forty minutes’ ride from Cambridge. When he’d been at university, he’d visited every weekend he could.
“Free thinks you’re avoiding her,” his father said.
She would think that. His youngest sister had always had a temper—and a tendency to think the world revolved around her. That it appeared to do so on a regular basis had done nothing to dissuade her.
“Of course I wasn’t,” Oliver replied. “I was avoiding you.”
His father chuckled obligingly.
Oliver didn’t laugh. Instead, he busied himself with his own rod and line.
“I see,” his father said after a moment. “What horrible thing have I done now?”
Oliver cast his line with vicious intent into the pool, watching little ripples rise up in the otherwise still water. “Not you. Me.”
His father didn’t say anything.
“I’m struggling with a question of ethics.”
“Ah.” Hugo Marshall’s gaze abstracted. “Is it a thorny question of ethics? Or is it the sort of ethical question where the right choice is easy, but the unethical answer is too tempting?”
Trust his father to see to the heart of his problem without having heard a word of it. Oliver fiddled with his rod and didn’t look up. Normally, he’d have laid the whole thing before his father. But this time… This time, he wasn’t sure if he wanted to tell the story. Too much of it had to do with Hugo Marshall himself.
His parents had scrimped and sacrificed and saved so that Oliver could have the chance he did. He’d only barely begun to understand what his parents had given up for him.
When Oliver’s brother, the duke, had reached his majority, Oliver had visited Clermont House for the first time. Oliver had dimly known that his father had once worked for the Duke of Clermont in some capacity, but he’d never known details.
Not until he was twenty-one. Not until he’d arrived in London alongside his brother and was introduced to the staff. A good half-dozen servants remained from the time twenty-two years ago when Hugo Marshall had worked for the duke. They had been very curious about Oliver…and even more curious about what had become of Hugo Marshall.
“I knew him,” the housekeeper had said. “I was only first maid, then, and we’d all fight over who had to take him tea. None of us wanted the task, he was that fearsome.”
Fearsome. He’d seen his father angry a few times in his life, and Oliver supposed he was fearsome. But he’d understood that she had meant more than that. His father was fiercely intelligent and brooked no foolishness.
The housekeeper had sighed.
“He was the sort of man who I thought would be running all of London in twenty years. Sometimes you meet a man, and you just know about him. You know he’s going to be something more.” She’d sighed fretfully and readjusted her cap. “That’s what we all said at the time. We just knew. It was a feeling you had, looking at him. And then it all came to nothing.”
It all came to nothing.
Oliver glanced at his father. Hugo had cast his line in the deep pools at the edge of the river and sat without speaking, without expect
ing. Waiting to see if Oliver wanted to talk, assuming that anything that needed to be said would be.
It hadn’t come to precisely nothing. All that energy had been devoted to this—into fishing trips with boys who were not really his sons, to money made and then immediately invested into his children.
Every bit of excess that the business had produced had gone to his family—helping Laura and her husband start a dry-goods store in town, paying for Oliver’s university tuition, managing Patricia’s shorthand lessons and then, when she had married Reuven, giving them enough to start their own business in Manchester.
It all came to nothing.
No. It wasn’t going to be nothing. Oliver was going to make his father’s sacrifice mean something. He was going to make it mean everything.
“Does it matter,” Oliver asked, “if I want it very, very badly?”
“What is it you want?” his father asked.
I want you to be proud of me. I want to do everything you dreamed of and deliver it at your feet.
Oliver reached out and pulled a twig from the dirt, rolling it between his fingers. There were uglier wants, too, ones that made him feel almost uncomfortable.
I want them to pay.
Instead he shrugged. “Why did you do it? Give up everything to raise another man’s son?”
His father did look up at that. “I didn’t raise another man’s son,” he said sharply. “I raised my own.”
“You know what I mean,” Oliver said. “And that’s precisely what I am talking about. Why claim me? Why treat me the way you have? It must have been an enormous struggle deciding what to do about me. I know you loved Mother, but—”
“You were as much my salvation as your mother was,” his father interrupted brusquely. “You were never a burden that I had to grow accustomed to carrying. It was quite simple. If I could make you mine, in defiance of blood and biology, it would mean that I wasn’t his.”
“Whose?” Oliver asked in confusion.
“My own father. If you were mine, I wasn’t his.”
Oliver leaned back and watched the ripples on the river. He knew—vaguely—that his father’s father had not been a good man. His father had made a few curt remarks about it over the years, but he spoke little about it.
“Claiming you was like claiming myself,” his father said. “It was that easy.”
Oliver shut his eyes.
“So what is this thing you want so badly?”
“I want to be someone,” Oliver breathed. “Someone…who matters. Who can make things happen. Someone with power.” Someone who would never be shoved around again. Bradenton had it right; he had power, and Oliver had wants. That was a balance that begged for reversal.
His father didn’t say anything for a while. Finally he spoke. “Of all my children, you and Free are the most like me. It’s a gift, and like all gifts, it comes with a sting.”
“Odd,” Oliver said quietly, “that I should take after you more than the older girls.”
His father made a noise of protest in the back of his throat, but didn’t speak.
“I know,” Oliver said. “I know. I don’t mean to imply that you’ve been less than a father to me. It’s just that… The son of Hugo Marshall shouldn’t consider the offer I’m toying with. I might be the son of the Duke of Clermont. I have it in me.”
“Hmm,” his father said. “You have an odd view of me. I’ve done a great many things I’m not proud of.”
“Me, too. There are times I’ve been quiet. There are times I’ve spoken when I shouldn’t, just to keep myself from the effort of fighting.”
“That doesn’t make you into a man like your sire,” his father said. “It just makes you into a man.”
Oliver’s line had floated too far. He shook himself and reeled it in before the lure could tangle in the brown weeds on the far side of the stream.
“Hypothetically speaking,” Oliver said, “suppose that there was a man—a marquess—who promised me his vote on a very important issue. And all I would have to do in exchange…” He took a deep breath and looked away. “All I would have to do was humiliate a woman. Nothing physical, mind you. She wouldn’t be ruined. Just…”
He glanced up into his father’s eyes, and that was all he needed. There was no just. He knew Jane’s situation. He knew how she felt, what it would do to her to have Oliver hurt her.
She wouldn’t be ruined, but I could shred her spirit.
“We’re speaking hypothetically?” His father snorted.
“If the issue in question was important enough, would you…”
“You’re ten years a grown man,” his father countered. “If I still need to tell you what to think of a proposition, I’ve done a poor job raising you, in which case my opinion shouldn’t count for anything.”
“But what if it is a very important issue? What if it would mean a very real difference for everyone, and it’s just one woman who would suffer?” God. He couldn’t even bring himself to spell out the personal consequences.
“No, Oliver. Keep your moral dilemmas to yourself and your university friends. You can’t shunt that burden off to me. I refuse it.”
“You’re annoying. You always act as if everything is so easy. ‘Well, Oliver, it seems to me that your choice is either to quit or continue,’” he mimicked, remembering his father’s advice when he’d been on the verge of leaving school.
The other man only smiled. “I’m your father. It’s my job to annoy you.”
It was not the season for fishing, and unsurprisingly, they hadn’t caught anything.
“When does it stop being one woman?” Oliver finally asked. “And when does it start being…a disgusting thing to ask in the first place?”
“Here’s what I know,” his father replied. “No fish will swim up and leap at your lure three feet off the ground. Cast.”
Oliver flushed and did so. Once more, his lure and sinker hit the pool with a splash.
“What does it say about me that I’m still considering it?”
His father shrugged.
“You’re useless,” Oliver accused. “I thought you were going to tell me what to do.”
“I’m not here to be used. I’m here to fish.”
Oliver contemplated his fishing line for a moment longer. “You know,” he said contemplatively, “I think you’re a fraud. You act as if you’re so wise, and what you mostly do is make idle comments about fishing and expect me to figure it out myself.”
His father let out a guffaw. “That comes as a surprise? I taught you that trick years ago. When you keep quiet, people fill in their own most intelligent thoughts on your behalf.”
After another forty minutes of silence, in which they’d managed to catch one four-inch trout, which was tossed back without comment, Oliver finally spoke.
“When I’m not here, do you fish alone?”
“Free usually comes with me.”
“I didn’t mean to displace her. Is she angry with me? She scarcely spoke last night before disappearing behind a book.”
His father was eyeing the artificial fly tied at the end of his line, prodding it back into shape after the depredations of the fish. “You didn’t displace her,” he said evenly. “I asked her if she wanted to come along, and she declined.”
“So she is angry at me. I wonder what I did.”
“Ask her,” his father said placidly. “I’m sure she’ll tell you.”
Oliver was sure she would, too. Free wasn’t the sort to hold anything back.
“I worry about her,” his father finally said. “I never realized how easy Laura and Patricia were. They wanted normal things. Security and marriage and a family. They wanted more than that, of course. But Free… I didn’t realize your mother and I were going to pass on all our ambition concentrated in one child.”
“What is it that Free wants?” Oliver asked, slightly puzzled.
His father smiled wryly. “What does she not? Ask her. I thought you were ambitious, Oliver. You’ve not
hing on your youngest sister.”
Oliver found his sister waiting for them on the way home. She was standing on top of the hill by the stream. Her arms were folded and she hadn’t put her hair up. It blew behind her, a brilliant banner of orange the same color as his own close-cropped hair.
He paused a few feet away from her. “Free.”
She didn’t answer, but her chin squared. Yes, she was definitely angry with him.
She didn’t have a temper, or at least not the temper that people generally thought of when they imagined a woman with hair somewhere on the brighter end of the spectrum. She was patient and kind. She could also be stubborn and immovable.
“Free,” he said again. “How are you doing? Did you want to talk with me?”
She didn’t look at him. “Why would I?” She didn’t blink. “You haven’t kept your promise, so why should I talk to you?”
“Promise?” He stared at her in confusion. “Did I promise something?”
Now she finally turned to him. “Of course you did,” she said. “You promised to spend some time speaking Greek with me. Mama doesn’t know Greek, so she can’t, but you went to Eton.”
“I promised?”
“More than a year ago, at Christmas,” she said, with a firm nod of her head.
A vague recollection came back to him—of a late night sitting with his sister in front of the fire, passing pages of the newspaper back and forth.
“I can manage some of it from books,” she was saying, “but I need to practice. I need you.”
“As I recall,” Oliver said, “I promised I would help as soon as I had time, and I haven’t had any. In the intervening year, I’ve been…”
“You’ve spent months with the duke.” She folded her arms accusingly.
“That was different. I was talking to men in London about reform. That’s the whole reason I haven’t had any time. When this is all finished, then I’ll…”
Her chin rose. “When this is all finished? How long will that take, Oliver?”