The Duchess War (The Brothers Sinister) (13 page)

Always know the path ahead.
That had been one of her father’s rules. Why she would cling to those now, after everything he’d done to her, she didn’t know. Maybe because forgetting them would make her childhood not just a result of lies, but false through and through. Still, Minnie shook her head.

“We want you to be happy,” Caro said. “And I would never tell you to have no ambition. But the trick is to want only an
appropriate
amount. If I yearned to be Queen of England, you see, I’d never be satisfied.”

“I don’t want to be Queen of England.” Minnie folded her arms around herself.

“No, no.” Caro smiled sadly at her. “All I’m saying is, you should want just enough to make you stretch your arms a little bit. More than that, and you’ll do yourself an injury.”

Minnie stood. “I didn’t refuse Gardley because I wanted too much. It wasn’t that I thought I could do better. It was simply that I couldn’t do worse.”

Caro tried to suppress a sigh, but she didn’t quite manage it.

“Think of this logically,” Minnie said. “Because I should have before. If I marry someone who wants a quiet, dutiful wife, he will put me away if he discovers my past.”

Eliza’s needles came to a standstill.

It was dangerous talk, that, and they all knew it.

Look up.
But she wouldn’t. If she were looking up, she’d think of a man standing next to her, the sun glinting off his blond hair while he told her how clever she was.

“You
are
quiet, Minnie,” Eliza finally said. “I wouldn’t want you to go against your nature.”

Quiet, yes. Her voice wasn’t made to carry. She didn’t like to draw attention to herself. She could never be happy anywhere but at the edges of a gathering. Dutiful, however…

She could almost see Clermont from the corners of her vision, as if he were still standing next to her. He had brilliant blue eyes and a smile that curled up at the corners when he saw her. She thought of his hand, wrapping around her wrist before she could punch the davenport again. Of the rich timbre of his voice as he stood next to her and said…

I want you.

She shook her head. Reach that high, and she’d be burned for certain. All she wanted was a little security.

“Men look for many kinds of wives,” Eliza finally said. “Pretty, vivacious wives. Wealthy, indulgent ones. Highborn, prideful ladies.” She bit her lip. “I don’t want you hurt, Minnie. But it is my duty to make you face the truth. Nobody is looking for a shy, clever girl whose father died halfway through his sentence of hard labor.”

Minnie put her fingers against the bridge of her nose, pressing to try and drive the pain away. It didn’t help. The boundaries of her life pressed in on her like prison walls. Look up? With rough rocks under her feet, to look up was to stumble.

“List the things you are,” Eliza said, “and ask yourself what man would want them.”

I want you.
But Clermont didn’t know her, either.

“Your choices are yours,” Eliza intoned. “We won’t steal them from you.”

No. They never
stole
her choices. They only pointed out—kindly, sweetly, implacably—that she had few to begin with. Minnie’s hands shook. The only thing they had done wrong was to allow her to believe that she had
one
choice, instead of zero.

Minnie didn’t see any way forward. She couldn’t see a future at all. She felt chokingly blind.

There was really only one thing she could do, and that was to keep on going in the direction she’d started. To avoid ruin for another week, to pray for shelter where there had been none thus far. And that meant she needed to find proof of what Clermont had done. She had to take care of the next step, and hope for the future.

And that meant… “I’m going to London tomorrow,” she announced.

Their eyes widened, blinking. Eliza sat up straight. “But—”

“Have you—”

“Is this about a position?” Her great-aunts spoke atop one another. Their hands had met on the sofa between them.

“Be careful,” Caro said. “I’ve read of those schemes in the newspaper—faithless madams who advertise good jobs at excellent wages, only to—”

“I am not taking a position,” Minnie said. “You’re right. I can’t look up. I can’t dream. I don’t dare to. All I can do is take the next step forward.”

Caro frowned. “And the next step forward is…London?”

“The next step forward,” she said, “is to win the game I’m playing. And that means I must talk to some paper sellers. I’ll be back in three days.”

Her great-aunts exchanged glances—wary glances, ones that tugged at her chest. But she couldn’t explain and she couldn’t back down. And while it was not quite the done thing for a young woman of her age to travel alone on the train, she wasn’t a debutante who would have to account for every waking hour of her day.

“Well,” Caro said finally. “If that’s what you believe you must do. You…you have the means?”

“I do.”

She had her egg money. Even that was a misnomer. When she’d reached her majority, her great-aunts had given her responsibility for the chickens—and allotted her all the income from them. A gift, that, since they could have kept it all. But it hadn’t just been a gift of money they’d given her, but a present of independence. It was one they could ill afford.

They let Minnie go back to her room to get her things ready. But instead of packing, she found herself drawn to the chess set that had been left to molder in the trunk in her room. Twelve years since she’d last looked at it, and still she approached it with a grim wariness. She knelt before the wooden trunk, folded back the cloth that covered it, and undid the buckles. The metal resisted moving; she had to jam her palm against it and shove.

The chess set was at the bottom, hidden under old clothing and a smattering of brittle newspaper clippings.
There.
The pieces were ebony and ivory, both oddly familiar and curiously strange. Her first memories were of this board—lifting pieces that had seemed large and heavy. Now, she could curl her hands around the pawns and hide them entirely.

She took out the board and removed the pieces from their velvet bag. She set them atop her writing desk. Even after all these years, she didn’t have to think about what went where. Queen, king, and a host of pawns all fell into place. If she were a piece in a chess game, she’d be… No, she wouldn’t even be a pawn. She had become too small even for that.

Setting up the pieces had once given her spirits a lift. The beginning of every game was awash in possibility. Anything could happen. Every choice was open. Today, she felt nothing at all. She stared at the pieces and realized that she wasn’t at the beginning of this game, but near the end. Now there were entire swathes of the board that were unreachable, pieces that had been stolen away, moves she could never make.

There was almost nothing left on her board. Still, she drew out her spectacles, donned them, and studied it.

“There is a point in almost every game,” her father had once said, “when a win is inevitable. When your every move forces your opponent to react, and by reacting, to dig his own grave.”

How strange. She could no longer recall what he looked like, but she could see the board precisely as it had been laid out at that moment. She brushed pieces off her board, leaving only the ones that had been there at the time. Her bishop and knight, holding down his rook; her queen arrayed against two pawns that served as his only fragile protection against her offense.

“Have we reached that point yet?” he asked her. “Plan it out. Always know the path ahead.”

She’d stared at the board, squinting—and then she’d seen it for the first time. She could force those protecting pawns away. They’d be picked off by knight and queen until her rook swept in and hammered the king against the anvil of her bishop.

“Yes,” she’d said in wonder. “We’re there.”

“Then on the next move, when you pick up your piece—give it a kiss. Like that, love.”

She reached for her bishop. In her memory, the piece was large, her hands chubby. She couldn’t have been much older than six at the time.

“Why?” she’d asked.

“Lane family tradition.” Her father smiled. “When you’ve backed the other fellow into a corner, you give him a kiss to show there’s no hard feelings.”

After that, whenever they’d played—when one of them came close to a checkmate—he’d laughed and said there was a kiss just around the corner. She wanted to remember her father like that—warm and smiling, instructing her in everything he knew. Laughing, saying that she was the center of his existence. She had to remember her father like that, because the alternative was to think of him as he’d been at the end.

Look up? Her father hadn’t just told her to look up. He’d taught her to fly. And then, when she’d reached the top of the world, he’d ripped her from the sky.

Chapter Eight

I
N THE END, IT TOOK DAYS
for Robert to bring Sebastian in—in large part because Violet, the newly widowed Countess of Cambury, insisted on coming along.

“First,” Violet had said, spearing Robert with her gaze, “I am tired of sitting on an estate in Cambridgeshire with nothing to do. Second, you’ll need someone to keep Sebastian on a leash.” She’d nodded at Sebastian, who had attempted to look innocent.

There had been some truth to that. Violet
could
get Sebastian to behave—nominally—when she wished. Violet was two years older than Robert and Sebastian. She’d grown up on the estate next door to Sebastian’s, and until Violet had been deemed too old to play with boys, she’d accompanied them during the summers.

But Robert had far more memories of Violet tweaking Sebastian and sending him climbing trees for hawks’ eggs in a fit of rage, than he did of Violet getting Sebastian to behave.

“Finally,” Violet said, “your mother actually likes me, and if we wish to distract her, a two-pronged approach will work best. Sebastian can drive her off, and I’ll lure her away from you.”

But it had been Sebastian who provided the final impetus, after Violet had disappeared that first evening. “Look,” he’d told Robert, “she’s in mourning for a man she hated. Give her a chance to get out.”

So Robert had relented—and thus brought upon himself an entourage of servants and maids and dressers, of messages sent to reserve rooms in a hotel, as Violet could not stay in Robert’s bachelor establishment. It was more than forty-eight hours before Robert found himself, his cousin, the Countess of Cambury, nine separate servants, two cats, and one owl on the platform at Euston Square in London.

The servants were engaged in wrestling the luggage into the proper compartment, and Robert took the time to walk with his cousin. There was a bit of a breeze, enough to keep the air along the platform crisp and pleasant. The tang of burning tobacco—that was Robert’s excuse for not sitting in the station proper alongside Violet—made an acrid counterpoint to the smell of autumn leaves.

He walked beside his cousin, and all his myriad worries seemed to grow smaller.

“So,” he said to Sebastian, “they’re actually taking steps to make some sort of position for you at Cambridge. Given what they said of you when you were a student there, I would imagine that was the last thing you’d expect. Are you dying of shock yet?”

Sebastian gave him a long look. “I’m not a student any longer, you know.”

“Don’t pretend you’ve grown up.”

That got him an impish smile. “Wait until I turn it down,” his cousin said. “That will shock everyone.”

Robert blinked and looked at the man more closely. Sebastian was a known prankster, but he took the work he did now very seriously. “You’re going to turn it down?”

“I’m afraid I have to.” Sebastian put his hands in his pockets. “Even Newton had to get a dispensation from Charles II because he didn’t believe in the Trinity. Oxford has become more liberal, but Cambridge…” He shrugged. “Still the Dark Ages there. They insist on adherence to Church of England doctrine. Half the natural scientists want me because they think I’m doing interesting work. The other half believe that appointing me a Fellow will force me to shut up.”

“Would it?” Robert glanced at him. “I’ve never known you to shut up, not about anything. And
are
you an unbeliever? I’ve read all your papers, even the ones that are well over my head, and I don’t recall you taking a position.”

Sebastian shrugged. “Haven’t you heard? I’m a godless scientist, an apostate follower of Darwin.”

“Even Mr. Darwin isn’t an unbeliever.”

Sebastian didn’t answer the question. Instead he gave a resigned shrug. “I not only think that the species evolved, I can prove that characteristics are transmitted from parent to offspring in a dependable, scientific manner. Not by the grace of any divine being. By the operation of simple, natural principles.” He gave Robert a look. “That makes me an unbeliever in half of society’s eyes. Who am I to argue with them?”

“I take it that’s a rhetorical question, as you argue with them at every opportunity.”

Sebastian smiled in pleasure and shook his head.

“I think you just like being an outcast.”