The Heiress Effect (11 page)

That delusion lasted up until the moment she
saw him again. Jane had just disembarked from the carriage and
turned to wait for Mrs. Blickstall, who was right behind her. As
she did, she caught sight of him on the other side of her
horses.

He was walking on the pavement headed in the
direction of the market a few streets over. His stride was
determined and swift, his expression abstracted as if his mind were
on anything other than her. He didn’t see her; he simply kept
walking. Five strides, and he was already several yards
distant.

She started to wave at him, but he bore a
distant expression, one that arrested her hand.

He was a duke’s son. A man who, by his own
admission, wanted one day to be prime minister. No doubt he had far
more pressing problems on his mind than the piddling questions that
plagued Jane: accounts of her sister’s guardianship and medical
treatment. In the time it would take to hash through the sordid,
petty details of her life, Mr. Marshall could review the entire
text of every act passed by Parliament in their last sitting.

She curled her fingers in an abortive
movement and brought her hand back to her side.

He’d been kind. He’d been clever enough to
see a great deal about her. But it would be foolish to think that
those two things meant that he actually cared about her. He had
more important things to deal with than a young lady and her
sister.

Jane squared her jaw and crossed the pavement
to the bookstore. She wouldn’t watch him retreat down the street.
She wouldn’t relive her stupid fantasies of friendship.

The store was musty and empty; Mrs.
Blickstall, bored, took a seat at the front and folded her hands
primly while Jane looked through the volumes at the back of the
shop. She could hear the bell ring, idly, the murmur of a
customer’s voice as he spoke with the shopkeeper. Jane picked one
book from the shelves and then wandered down the aisle, perusing
titles. She heard footsteps behind her.

Instantly her mind went to the man she’d
commanded herself to forget. Mr. Marshall. It was him.

No, ridiculous. It wouldn’t be. He was
already off to a very important meeting. He had no time for stupid
girls in small shops buying—

“What is it that you have there?”

She jumped.

God, his voice. She’d never properly imagined
his voice when she thought of talking with him. She wouldn’t have
known how to describe his voice to anyone else. Warm, of course.
Such breadth in it. The other night it had hissed with controlled
fury. Now it sounded as if he was on the edge of laughter.

She turned, ever so slowly. Oh, God, the
frisson was back—a crackling electricity that rushed down her
spine. Jane sucked in her breath and dug her nails into her palm,
but it didn’t help. Before she could help herself, she was
smiling—an over-large goofy grin, far too revealing.

He had the kind of looks that improved with
familiarity. That brush of freckles across the bridge of his nose
invited her touch. As if he were whispering to her.
Come, make
yourself comfortable.

Jane swallowed and pressed her palm against
her stomach, lest she do precisely that.

He looked…well, he
looked.
He was
looking at her, not at some faraway point. With his attention
focused on her, her whole being felt insubstantial. As if she might
simply float away.

He was already carrying a book.
A
Practical Guide to P—

She couldn’t read the end of the title, as
his hand was obscuring it.

“Mr. Marshall,” she said with a laugh.
Don’t blurt out everything all at once, Jane. Whatever you do,
don’t blurt out everything all at once.
“How lovely to see you.
How do you do?”

She was congratulating herself on her
restrained manners when, to her faint horror, she realized that her
mouth was still moving.

“I saw you on the street, but you looked busy
and I didn’t want to interrupt. You were doing something important,
no doubt. You probably still are. I should let—ah…”

Shut up, Jane,
she commanded her
fluttering nerves, and luckily, they obeyed.

He didn’t wince at the excessive flow of
speech. Instead, he reached out and took the volume she was
carrying from her.

“You should let me look at your book,” he
said, turning the spine so he could read it. His eyebrow rose.
“Mrs. Larriger and the Criminals of New South Wales?”

Jane felt her cheeks flush even hotter. He
probably read important books, books with sober-sounding names,
like
A Practical Guide to Proper Behavior.
That had to be
what he was carrying. He no doubt thought her flighty.

“It’s not mine,” she blurted out. “That is,
it’s for my younger sister. My sister, Emily.”

He looked faintly amused.

She wrinkled her nose at him. “I’m allowed to
abuse her taste because she’s my sister, but don’t you dare.”

“I have three sisters,” he said mildly.
“Four, now, counting my sister-in-law. I would never be so foolish
as to speak ill of anyone’s sister.” He turned the book in his
hand. “So, is it any good?”

The question surprised her.

“I haven’t read it.” She shrugged. “But I did
read the first eight of the series. They’re awful, but they’re also
curiously compelling.”

“I like curiously compelling. And I love
awful. Should I get it?”

She choked, imagining Mrs. Larriger on his
bookshelf next to
A Practical Guide to Political
Careers.

But he was flipping through the book as if he
were considering the purchase.

“Mrs. Larriger is old, bossy, annoying, and I
do believe she isn’t in her right mind. You wouldn’t…”

“She sounds a great deal like my aunt
Freddy.” He smiled at her. “Old, bossy, annoying… She never leaves
her home any longer, and some people speak ill of her for that. But
don’t tell me my aunt isn’t in her right mind. It’s like with your
sister. I love her too well to hear your criticism.”

She swallowed. “If you’re going to do this,
you have to start with the first one.” She wandered back down the
aisle and scanned the titles on the spines. “Here.”

She held out
Mrs. Larriger Leaves Home
and waited to see what he would do with it.

He took it without hesitation and opened it
up. “Nice frontispiece,” he commented. “Do you think the author is
really named Mrs. Larriger?”

“No,” Jane said baldly. “I do not. The first
book was printed two and a half years ago, and since that time,
there have been twenty-two more published, practically a book every
month. I think Mrs. Larriger is composed by committee. No one
person could write so swiftly—not unless she had nothing else to
do.”

“Mmm, that does seem unlikely.” Mr. Marshall
turned to the first page. “‘For the first fifty-eight years of her
life, Mrs. Laura Larriger lived in Portsmouth in sight of the
harbor. She never wondered where the ships went, and cared about
their return only when one of them happened to bring her husband
home from one of his trading voyages. There was never any reason to
care. Her house was comfortable, her husband brought in an
excellent income, and to her great satisfaction, he was almost
never present.’” He looked up. “There are worse starting
paragraphs, I suppose.”

“Do continue on.”

“‘But one day, on one of those rare occasions
when her husband was home, he was struck on the head by a falling
anvil. He died instantly.’” Mr. Marshall blinked. He blinked again
and set his finger on the text he’d just read. “Wait. I don’t
understand. How did an anvil fall on her husband while he was at
home? Where did it come from? Was he in the habit of suspending
anvils from the ceiling?”

“You will have to read and find out,” Jane
said. “I am not in the habit of telling people what happens in a
book. Only brutes disclose what comes next.”

He shook his head. “Very well, then. ‘That
day, Mrs. Larriger sat in her parlor. But the walls seemed thicker.
The air felt closer. For almost sixty years, she had never felt the
slightest curiosity about the world outside her door. Now, the air
beyond her walls seemed to call out to her.
Leave,
it
whispered.
Leave. Leave before they conduct the inquest.’”
Mr. Marshall laughed. “Ah, I think I am beginning to understand the
anvil—and Mrs. Larriger.

“‘She took a deep breath. She packed a
satchel. And then, with a great effort, with the effort of a woman
uprooting everything she had known, Mrs. Larriger put one foot
outside her door into the warm May sunshine. And as she didn’t
burst into flame, she marched down to the harbor and purchased
passage on a vessel that was departing within the next five
minutes.’” He closed the book. “Well. I’m getting it.”

“It will go well with
A Practical Guide to
Plato’s Most Important Writings.”

He frowned. “What’s that?”

She gestured. “I can’t see the entire title
of your book.”

“Ah.” His grin flashed brilliantly, and he
turned the book to face her.

A Practical Guide to Pranks,
it
read.

“All nostalgia, I’m afraid. I miss the days
when I could respond to ridiculousness with a little mischief,
that’s all.” He sighed. “There was one night when we were students
at Trinity… There was a man who had a new phaeton that he was
crowing about. So my brother, Sebastian, and I disassembled it and
then reconstructed it entirely inside his rooms. We couldn’t put
the wheels on, you understand, but everything else… He was so
violently drunk when he returned that he thought nothing of it, but
you should have heard him shout come the morning.”

He wasn’t anything like she’d imagined, this
man who claimed he would be prime minister. He had a sparkle in his
eye and an air of mischief about him. Was he pretending at
politics, or was he pretending at this?

“And here I had the impression that you were
respectable.”

He sighed, and the light in his eyes dimmed.
“Alas. I
am.”
He spoke the words grudgingly. “High spirits
are always excused in the young, but I’m well past the age where a
good prank can be overlooked. Still, one can imagine.”

This felt like a dream—standing next to him,
talking about books and pranks.

“Sebastian,” she said. “That would be Mr.
Malheur, would it not?”

“He’s the only one of us who skipped over the
respectable phase. He’s never stopped being a troublemaker.” His
eyes abstracted. “In some ways, I envy him. In others, not so
much.”

“Of us?”

“I forget; you don’t know us. My brother,
Ro—the Duke of Clermont. Sebastian Malheur. Me. They called us the
Brothers Sinister because we were always together, and we are all
left-handed.”

“Are you sinister?” she asked.

Something flashed in his eyes, a hint of
discomfort. “I’ll leave you to decide. I can hardly judge for
myself.”

Her nervousness had faded to a pleasant hum.
She was smiling a great deal at him.

“Tell me, Miss Fairfield,” he murmured in a
low voice. “What do you think? Because I rather get the impression
that you’re a good judge of sinister behavior.”

She could feel the tug of him. She’d dreamed
of this—of having a friend, someone she could laugh with. Someone
who looked at her and looked again, who looked for the pleasure of
looking and not to criticize her deportment or her clothing. If she
had dared, she might have dreamed of more.

But the bell rang behind him, and Jane
glanced over to see who had entered the shop.

Her breath caught. It was Susan, the upstairs
maid, dressed in brown and white. She caught sight of Mrs.
Blickstall, still sitting bored at the front of the room; Mrs.
Blickstall sat up straighter and pointed at Jane in the back.

Jane took a step forward just as Susan came
up to her.

“Miss Fairfield, if you please.” The maid’s
voice was breathy, as if she’d dashed all the way here from the
house.

She probably had.

Susan glanced once at Mr. Marshall. “Perhaps
we might have a word outside.”

“You can speak freely,” Jane said. “Mr.
Marshall is a friend.”

He didn’t dispute the label, and her heart
thumped once.

“There’s another physician come,” Susan said.
“I got away as soon as I could, but he was just going in with Miss
Emily as I left, and that was twenty minutes past.”

“Oh, hell. What kind of quackery does this
one practice?”

“Galvanics, Miss. That’s what he said.”

“What the devil are galvanics?”

“Electric current,” Mr. Marshall supplied.
“Usually stored in some sort of electrical battery, used to deliver
shocks as—” He stopped talking.

Jane felt her face go white. She couldn’t
look at him. She couldn’t think of this dream world she was
leaving, this place where one might talk of books and laugh about
pranks and consider what it meant to be respectable. This was not
the world she inhabited.

She fumbled a heavy coin from her pocket and
pressed it into Susan’s hand. “Thank you,” she said.

The household staff no doubt very much
appreciated the fact that Jane and her uncle were at odds. It gave
them all sorts of ways to supplement their income.

“Miss Fairfield,” Mr. Marshall said
carefully, “might I accompany you home?”

In her mind, she’d imagined telling him
everything. She’d imagined him telling her not to fret, that it
would be all right. But he couldn’t say that now. After all, he’d
told her he wouldn’t lie to her.

It wouldn’t be all right. The best she could
hope for was an uneasy truce—one bought with as many banknotes as
she could carry.

Her mind had gone numb. There was no room in
her life for a simple friendship.

“No.” Her voice was tight. “Don’t. You’re
respectable, see, and you should try to remain that way. I have to
go bribe a doctor.”