The Heiress Effect (13 page)

Jane and Emily turned to the door as one. Oh,
God. That was all this farce had needed. Uncle Titus had come into
the room. He looked around in blinking confusion—at Doctor Fallon,
waving a wicker case that smelled of acid, at the notes that
fluttered between his fingers. He looked at Emily, smiling up at
the man winsomely.

“Girls,” Titus repeated, “what is going on
here?”

“This house!” Doctor Fallon said. “This
house—it is a place of heathen infamy. I have been lied to,
seduced…” His eyes slid to the bills in his hand, and he clutched
them to his chest. “I have been
bribed,”
he said hoarsely.
“I wash my hands of the lot of you, may the devil take you
all.”

So saying, he snatched up his case and
marched out. It was a good thing, Jane mused, because if he had
stayed, he might have explained to Titus that he meant his last
statement as the literal truth.

Their uncle watched him go in stunned
silence. He waited until he heard the front door slam, before
turning to Jane and Emily.

This, Jane thought, was going to be tricky.
Very tricky.

“I was in my room,” Jane said cautiously.
“And I heard noise. It was the sound of…of ranting.”

“It’s true,” Emily said. “I was sitting here,
waiting for a fit to come on so he could test his methods, and
suddenly he was pointing his finger at me and making all kinds of
horrid accusations.”

Emily was better at lying, and so Jane let
her do it.

“I don’t know what set him off,” Emily said
earnestly. “He just kept…he kept
looking
at me. Just looking
at me and muttering to himself about how I was seducing him. But I
wasn’t
. I was just sitting down. I wasn’t doing
anything.”

It was a good story, Jane thought. Emily was
uncommonly pretty, and even Titus understood what that meant. For a
moment, Titus nodded his head, his brow wrinkling in sympathy.

“Oh,” Titus said. “I…I…” But he didn’t say
that he understood. He frowned and wrinkled his nose. “Why was he
holding those bank notes?”

“Who knows where he got that?” Emily said.
“He had already started ranting about Ba’al. No doubt he intended
to reject Mammon, too.”

It was too much. As Emily spoke, Jane caught
her eye. They exchanged a look—an unfortunate look that she never
could have described to anyone else. It was a look that only a
sister could understand, sly and happy and furious all at once. It
let Jane know that she wasn’t alone in the world.

It was too much. Involuntarily, they both
broke into betraying laughter.

“Jane,” her uncle said, shaking his head. “Jane,
Jane, Jane. Whatever am I supposed to do with you?”

In lieu of giving her opinion on the
matter—she’d made enough trouble for herself already—Jane looked
around Titus’s office.

She wasn’t sure why he called it an office.
It wasn’t as if he did real work in it. He had students, but they
rarely met here. The only time he did work was when he grew
enamored of some idea he heard at some lecture. For months when she
had first come, he’d talked of nothing but some man’s take on the
Odyssey;
another time, he’d become fascinated by a visiting
lecturer’s discussion of workers and capital. He’d read
industriously, scribbling his own ideas on paper. But eventually,
he always gave up, moving on to the next item that caught his
attention. It didn’t matter what subject he pored over. Her uncle
never altered. He always took whatever it was that he was doing too
seriously, and imagined that his involvement, puny though it was,
was vital for the intellectual health of the community.

Their discussions had much the same pattern.
She couldn’t count the number of times they’d had this particular
conversation.

“Jane,” Titus said, “I am so disappointed
with you.”

She had been nothing but a disappointment to
him ever since he’d found himself guardian to a handful of girls
two years ago.

“This was an honest effort,” he told her.
“From a good man, one who was willing to take on a patient who
offered so little reward as Emily.”

“Did you even ask for his credentials?” Jane
said. “Or speak to happy patients he had cured?”

But, no. He looked at her in bewilderment.
“He was a good man,” he repeated.

“I had not noticed that there was a paucity
of doctors offering to experiment on my sister,” Jane tried again,
and then bit her lip. That was enough. She had no reason to
antagonize him further. Best to hold her tongue. He’d shake his
head at her and be disappointed. And then he’d forget and get
wrapped up in the question of which map of the world he should
purchase to grace the south wall of his office. They’d hear of
nothing but various projections and cartographers for months, and
finally he’d settle on just the right thing.

“Up until this point,” Titus said, “I have
forgiven your many, many foibles.” He shook his head gravely. “You
are argumentative and stubborn as befits the indelicacy of your
birth. I have always hoped that my kind, patient attentions would
prevail upon you to change your ways.” He steepled his fingers and
looked upward. “I begin to despair of my object.”

Quibbling with the label
argumentative
had somehow never altered his opinion of her.

She donned an expression of contrition. “I’m
sorry, uncle,” she said, as meekly as she could manage. “I
am
trying.”

The faster she expressed an apology, the
sooner they could have this conversation over with. The one good
thing about having a gullible uncle was that Jane could usually
apologize her way out of anything.

But he didn’t start in on the usual lecture,
the one she almost had memorized. There was no temporizing over the
immoral tendencies that she had so clearly inherited from her
mother, the ones she needed to guard against. Instead he
frowned.

“What worries me this time,” he said, “is
that you appear to have wrapped your sister up in one of your
ploys.”

Jane swallowed.

“I had thought that I would serve as a
softening influence on you, but I fear that the reverse is
happening. Your ways are instead extending to your sweet younger
sister. In her innocence, I suppose she imagines that you feel
affection for her.”

“I do,” Jane protested. “Do not doubt that,
if you doubt anything.”

He simply shook his head. “If you cared for
her,” he said, “you would not draw her down your dark path.”

“What dark path?”

“The path of lies,” Titus said gravely. “You
have taught your sister how to lie.”

Emily hadn’t needed any teaching on that
front.

“If this continues,” Titus said, “I will have
to send you away to my sister. Lily is not as kind as I am. She
wouldn’t allow you to gad about to party after party without making
an attachment. She tells me on a regular basis how I have erred
with you. She’d have you married off in no time.”

Marriage—marriage to any man—would have been
bad enough. As a married woman, she simply wouldn’t have the excuse
of living in her uncle’s home. Her husband might take her away from
Emily for months at a time. But marriage to a man her aunt
favored…

Jane clutched her skirts under the table.
“No,” she said. “Please, Uncle. Don’t send me away. You haven’t
erred. I
am
trying.”

He didn’t accept her apology. Instead, he
shook his head as if Jane had run to the end of even his vast
gullibility.

“Jane, you bribed the good doctor to tell
lies,” her uncle said patiently, holding up a finger. “You
convinced your sister to tell him falsehoods about our prayer
habits, when I have done my best to raise you both as good
Christians.” Another finger went into the air. “You interrupted him
and drove him off before he had a chance to see the effect of his
treatment on Emily. The treatment he described was sound.”

“It was quackery,” Jane said. “He exposed her
to electric shock, Uncle, and he planned to do so repeatedly just
to see what it would do.”

She shouldn’t have spoken, shouldn’t have
argued. But this time, he didn’t lecture her on her recalcitrance.
He simply shook his head sadly. “And that is not all. Even I, as
insulated as I am from the madness of the social whirl, have heard
tales of your behavior.”

Only Titus would refer to the tepid
occasional dinner engagements held in Cambridge as “the madness of
the social whirl.” Most Cambridge events were unsuitable for young
women, seeing as how they involved young men who were pretending to
be adults for the first time in their lives.

Titus had a healthy competence that paid a
few thousand pounds a year. Because of that, he’d never needed any
sort of profession, and consequently, he hadn’t bothered to get
one. He’d enjoyed his years at Cambridge so much that he was now
something of a hanger-on. He styled himself a tutor. “A tutor for
the right sort of boys,” he often told others, jovially.

He had only one such boy this year, and she
suspected he preferred matters that way. He attended lectures,
halfheartedly looked for students who wanted his assistance in
studying for the Law Tripos, and generally imagined himself a
figure of greater importance than he was.

“Why is it,” Titus said, “that nobody likes
you?”

It stung, those words. Even though it was a
reputation that she herself had assiduously cultivated. Jane
flinched.

“My information does not say that your
behavior is
improper,”
her uncle said, “and for that, I am
grateful. But there is improper behavior, and there is behavior
that is unacceptable, and by all accounts yours falls into the
latter.”

The unfairness of it stung her.

“A right-thinking lady,” her uncle said,
“never insults a gentleman. She never talks when her betters speak.
She eats very little, and that with her mouth always closed. She
always knows the correct fork to use. She never uses her hands,
except when it’s appropriate.”

“Appropriate!” Jane said. “How am I supposed
to know what is
appropriate?
Every other girl has had a
governess since birth. Some of them attended finishing schools; the
others were finished by aunts and mothers and sisters—anyone
willing to spend the years necessary to make sure they knew all the
rules. How to curtsy, and to whom. How to eat. How to speak to
others.”

She drew in a ragged breath, but it didn’t
assuage her hurt. It wasn’t fair. It
wasn’t.

“My father,” Jane said, “put his wife and
daughters away for nineteen years. Mother passed away when I was
ten. For nine years after that, I lived on an isolated manor,
begging my father to do something with me. I had no governess. I
learned no rules.” Her voice was shaking. “And then you inherited
me and decided I needed to be married off. What did you
imagine
would happen when you tossed me out in polite
society with no training?”

“A true lady,” Titus said primly, “would have
known—”

“No, she wouldn’t have. Or there would be no
finishing schools. Babies aren’t born knowing how to curtsy. They
aren’t born knowing what subjects of conversation are not
allowed.”

He looked mulishly stubborn.

“I didn’t know,” Jane said. “I didn’t know
anything. You threw me out to society with no preparation or
instruction, and you have the temerity to criticize me because I
didn’t take?”

“Jane,” her uncle said, “I don’t want to hear
this disrespectful claptrap again.”

She opened her mouth to argue once again,
before remembering that it would do no good. He had already made up
his mind. And that—despite her angry words, despite how things had
started—at this point, she bore a great deal of responsibility for
her own reputation. She’d made that choice.
Mostly.

“I think,” Titus said, “that I will give you
another chance. My every rational impulse counsels against such a
thing. I will not let your sister follow in your footsteps. But…”
He sighed.

“If you’d only let her out, sir. She is—”

He cast her a look. “Enough of that. She is
too fragile to be allowed out. I’m giving you another chance, Jane.
Don’t use it up before you leave this room.”

Shut up, Jane. Learn when to shut up.
She closed her mouth and swallowed all her protests. They tasted
bitter.

“Behave
properly,
Jane,” he said
quietly. “Stop arguing. Stop influencing your sister to do wrong.
Do your best to attach a man. You may be overplump, but you have
money and I suppose that will do. And if I hear tell that you’ve
bribed another doctor…” He trailed off ominously.

“You won’t,” Jane promised. “You won’t hear a
thing. I promise.”

He wouldn’t hear a thing. Next time, she
would bribe better.

Four hundred and seventy-one days of this.
How was she to keep up this façade for a year and a half? She felt
ragged and weary, impossibly tired.