The Heiress Effect (40 page)

It was as if he’d sent an automaton in his
place.

Oliver made his way to his friend, almost
afraid to remind him of what they had planned. He wasn’t sure what
he would do if he spoke to his friend and got that same warm,
generic reply.

And maybe it was just as well. Because for
every man that complimented him on his work, there were three who
muttered imprecations in his direction. Threats. Complaints. A
woman laid a hand on him and gave him a shove.

Sebastian treated them all alike. He gave
them a smile, one that looked increasingly out of place on his
waxen face, a nod, and warm, effusive thanks that seemed
ridiculously genuine.

Oliver almost gasped with relief when Violet
caught up with them. She knew Sebastian. They’d been friends for
ages. And if she cared for him…

Violet had to reach out and physically take
hold of Sebastian’s sleeve before he turned to her. She smiled up
at him, her face alight with a mere echo of the brilliance she’d
directed at him during his talk.

“Sebastian,” Violet said.

Sebastian had been smiling at all those
people, smiling with such fervor that Oliver had wondered if he was
ill. He looked down at Violet, and that humor disappeared from his
face, the friendliness wiping away like chalk markings on
slate.

“What?” he demanded curtly.

“You were brilliant, Sebastian,” she said.
“Utterly bril—”

He took a staggering step backward. “Fuck
you, Violet,” he said savagely. “Fuck. You.”

He’d spoken into a momentary lull in
conversation, so that everyone near could hear his words.

Violet winced.

Oliver came up beside his friend.
“Sebastian,” he said quietly. He steeled himself for a similar
outburst.

But when Sebastian turned to him, he merely
looked tired, not savage.

“Ah, Oliver. Perhaps you can explain—”

“Excuse me,” Oliver said to the crowd around
them, “he’s drunk.”

“I’m not—”

“You might as well be,” Oliver whispered, and
jerked on his arm. “What the hell are you doing? You
know
what’s at stake here. What we have to do.”

Sebastian opened his mouth to answer, and
that’s when Oliver heard it—that strangely diffident voice, the one
he remembered from the walk he’d taken with Sebastian so long
ago.

“Mr. Malheur? Mr. Malheur?” The voice spoke
from behind them. “You wished to speak with me? That is, I had a
message from you regarding a little tidbit you had to share?”

Sebastian and Oliver turned as one. Titus
Fairfield stood before them, rubbing his hands together. He shifted
uneasily from foot to foot.

“Is this not a good time?” he asked.

God, the man was inept. Anyone with a brain
would know this was a terrible time—the worst time.

But Sebastian’s face didn’t change at all
from his impassive mask.

“Mr. Fairfield,” he said in a forbidding
tone, completely at odds with his words. “You are just the person I
want to see.”

“I am?” Even Fairfield sounded dubious.

“You are. Unfortunately, at the moment, I am
a little tipsy.”

Oliver inhaled. That had not been the plan
that he’d worked out with Sebastian. He took a step forward,
reached out—but his cousin was already forging on.

“Luckily, my friend Violet here will explain
everything. I trust her implicitly, so…”

“What are you doing?” Oliver whispered. “That
was not the plan.”

“Yes,” Sebastian said, “I imagine that Violet
could say anything I could. And turnabout is always fair play.”

Oliver glanced over at Violet. He would have
expected her to look hurt by Sebastian’s savage outburst. At the
very least, he had thought she would be confused. Instead she
simply shrugged her shoulders
.

“Come on, Oliver,” Sebastian said, hooking
his arm through Oliver’s. “Let’s leave Violet to it.”

“That wasn’t the plan,” Oliver said to
Sebastian, as Sebastian headed out onto the street. “That’s not
what we were going to do. We were going to—”

“Come on, Oliver,” Sebastian said. “If we
look back now, Fairfield will think he can talk to me. And right
now, I can’t bear him.”

“This isn’t about you,” Oliver fumed. It’s
about—”

His cousin stopped on the street and looked
about them. It was dark by now, and a little foggy; the lamps on
the street had been lit, and they did their best to drive away the
darkness with warmth. It wasn’t quite enough.

“It’s been a good long while since it’s been
about me,” Sebastian finally said. “I think it’s my turn.”

And in that moment, Oliver looked at his
friend. Sebastian looked…
wrecked
was the closest word that
Oliver might have chosen.

“Violet will handle it,” Sebastian said. “She
likes Miss Fairfield, and she’s the most frighteningly competent
woman I have met. If you would pay attention, my dear cousin, you
might have noticed that more than half the population of England
wants me dead. I think I am allowed to crack under the strain.
Once. I’m allowed.”

It seemed impossible. Sebastian always seemed
so indifferent to what others thought of him. He treated his infamy
like a lark. He was…

Oliver had accused Sebastian of hiding
unhappiness when last he was in Cambridge. But he’d suspected a
mild melancholy, not…this. Sebastian had always joked, had always
laughed. How much of that had ever been real?

They walked in silence for a few blocks. “You
know, Sebastian,” Oliver said quietly, “I don’t pretend to
understand what is going on—but you owe Violet an apology.”

Sebastian snorted.

“I mean it. In front of an entire crowd,
you—”

“You don’t know what she did.” Sebastian’s
voice was shaking. “What she’s doing to me.”

“I don’t care what she’s doing. How could it
justify what you just said? In front of everyone?”

Sebastian shrugged and looked away. He didn’t
add anything else, which seemed uncharacteristically like him.

“Very well,” Oliver said. “What is she
doing?”

“Nothing,” Sebastian said with a maddening
shake of his head. “She’s not doing anything.” But his voice was a
few notes higher than normal.

“Sebastian, you can’t put me off—”

“Everyone hates me.” Sebastian turned to him.
“Everyone. At first it was just a few people. Now, everywhere I go,
there are death threats, people wishing me ill. The papers are
filled with vitriol.
Everyone
hates me, Oliver.
Everyone.”

“Surely not everyone.”

“Enough as to make no difference,” Sebastian
retorted. “Does it matter if the entirety of England wants me
dismembered, or merely a half of it? Either way, it’s a bloody
great lot of people howling for my blood.”

Oliver swallowed. “I thought you liked that
sort of thing—tweaking people, getting under their skin.”

Sebastian threw his hands up in the air. “In
all the time you have known me, Oliver,” he said, his voice
shaking, “in all that time—when have I ever made a joke at anyone
else’s expense?”

“Uh…”

“When have I ever done anything except make a
fool of myself, expose myself to ridicule to get others to
laugh?”

“Well…”

“Yes, I love tweaking noses.” His friend
paced away and then turned back. “But I like to be
liked,
Oliver.”

How had Oliver never seen that before?
Prankster Sebastian. Smiling Sebastian. But he was right; all of
Sebastian’s clever tricks and pranks had been aimed at making
everyone else laugh. He mocked himself with greater alacrity than
anyone else, and when they’d been in school together, everyone had
loved him for it.

Oliver swallowed hard. “I’m sorry,” he
finally said. “I…I know that the response you’re receiving must
have taken you by surprise. Still… What you said to Violet just
now? That was unconscionable.”

Sebastian stiffened. “I am not talking about
Violet with you.”

“Well, then, I’ll be the only one talking,
because I won’t let this go unsaid. Sebastian, I think Violet is in
love with you.”

He’d expected Sebastian to protest, to frown.
To
think,
perhaps, and reconsider.

Instead, Sebastian burst into laughter. “No,”
he said, when he’d recovered himself. “No, she is not.”

“Give it some thought. The way she looked at
you when you were talking… It was like—I don’t know, I can’t
describe it—”

“I know how she looked at me,” Sebastian
said, with a funny little smile on his face. “Trust me; I am quite
sure Violet is not in love with me.”

“You can’t be sure. You didn’t see—”

“I can,” Sebastian said. He looked upward.
“Just leave it, Oliver.” He smiled. “I’ll have to find my own way
out of this morass. But never fear.” His voice gained strength. Or
maybe, he was just finding his ability to lie again. “Our intrepid
hero, beleaguered on all sides, may have had a moment of weakness.”
His voice was deep and booming. “But so it always is. The darkest
hour, indeed, is the one that comes before—”

Oliver shoved him. “Come on, Sebastian. Stop
pretending. You don’t have to make
me
laugh.”

But Sebastian just raised an eyebrow. “I
don’t have to,” he said. “But watch me do it.”

Jane waited in the little room to the side of
the lecture hall for over an hour, each minute seeming longer than
the last. The sounds of the crowd—never more than a dull
murmur—were her only company. The rising volume of that murmur was
the only indication that the event had ended and—she hoped—that her
uncle would be coming soon. She waited long minutes after that,
until she heard footsteps in the outside hall.

“…Not sure,” she heard her uncle say, in his
sad, rumbling voice. “It seems a little improper, in fact. Are you
sure that Mr. Malheur—”

“I am positive,” said a female voice.
“There’s an important point to be made, namely—”

The door opened. Behind it stood a woman
dressed in dark brown—the woman who had given Jane her cactus at
the Botanic Gardens. For a moment, Jane blinked. She couldn’t
recall the woman’s name. And then she remembered. She was a
countess—the Countess of Cambury.

She was the sort of woman who would have been
called “commanding” rather than pretty—and she was almost old
enough to fit that look on her face. She seemed perfectly coiffed,
not a hair out of place, not a wrinkle on her gown, even though she
must have been sitting on the uncomfortable chairs above. It was as
if even gravity didn’t dare to defy her.

She looked formidable, and Jane wanted to
know how she did it.

“Well, Fairfield,” the woman said in a tone
that made it clear that she had not dropped the
Mr.
from his
name for reasons of familiarity. “What have you to say for
yourself?”

“Your pardon?” Titus gave her a toad-eating
little bow. “I—well—I rather thought that Mr. Malheur had something
to say to me.” He bowed again; he hadn’t even looked around the
room to see Jane. “Of course I understand that he is busy.
Naturally so. But—”

With a sigh, the Countess of Cambury shut the
door.

“This is becoming most improper.” Titus shook
his head and rubbed his hands together in consternation. “In a
room, alone—I could hardly think—that is to say—” A thought seemed
to penetrate his head—a horrific one, by the pallor that crept over
him, and the way he put his hand to his throat. “Oh, dear,” he
whispered. “Mr. Malheur surely has been thinking about a breeding
program, the one we had talked of earlier… He does not think to
start it with
me?”

Jane felt like laughing aloud. Nobody—not
even somebody so depraved as to start a human breeding
program—would look at her fussy, stuffy uncle and think, “There,
there’s a fellow who ought to be included.”

The Countess of Cambury simply blinked at
this nonsense and then shook her head. “Fairfield,” she said in
cutting tones, ‘if you had been a hunter on the plains of old, the
lions would have killed you while you were wandering around the
savannah saying, ‘Where is everyone, and what have they done with
my spears?’”