The Heiress Effect (46 page)

Mrs. Larriger Leaves Home.

The pages were still crisp, the leather
binding not yet cracked. He felt a lump in his throat as he opened
the book to the front page. These were Freddy’s words, Freddy’s
thoughts. He’d purchased it, and he hadn’t known. He had scarcely
known her at all. He smoothed back the pages and found Chapter
One.

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.

Oliver swallowed, wondering what his aunt had
seen from her window. What she had dreamed about, what she had
wanted.

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.

That was something Freddy would have
understood. No wonder that passage had seemed so true to life.

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.

Oliver shut his eyes and thought of his aunt.
He thought of her putting a toe out of her door and having
palpitations of the heart. He remembered her saying that she was
trying, that she’d get it right one day. That she would go to the
park and have a nice walk…

He hoped that she had managed to make it out
before she passed away. But it was no longer so simple. What Freddy
had been unable to do in one way, she’d managed in another. Somehow
the most disapproving, dour, lecturing spinster of his
acquaintance…

Somehow, she’d managed to make thousands of
people dream of adventure. She’d done more than anyone would have
guessed. The woman who had lectured Oliver about taking chills in
her last will and testament had been braver than anyone had
known.

He could remember the last time he’d seen
her.
Your mother was a regular coal-grabber,
she’d said.
But you, you’re like me.
At the time, he’d laughed it off.
His aunt never left the house; Oliver had a busy, varied career.
Freddy constantly warned him about any alteration in his schedules,
however minor; Oliver did new things. He wasn’t like Freddy.

You remember the pain, and you flinch.

He didn’t flinch. Did he?

Not from the outdoors, no. But…

Oliver shut his eyes and drew in a breath.
He’d flinched from a great many other things.

Like Jane. When he’d first met her, he’d
scarcely been able to watch her. She violated the precepts of
polite society without thinking, and he’d flinched at first when
he’d seen her. Jane was a coal-grabber, all right.

But Freddy was right. There
had
been a
time when Oliver had held on to coals himself. When he’d first gone
to Eton, for instance. Those first years, he’d insisted on his due.
He’d proclaimed loudly that he was as good as any other boy, and
he’d been willing to fight to keep it that way. What had changed,
and when had it all gone awry?

The walls seemed thicker. The air felt
closer.
He could almost feel the walls he’d built of his life
closing around him. He’d not realized they were there, so quietly
had he made them. And yet when he reached out, there they were.
Freddy had insisted to Free that she needed to stay inside, to wear
her bonnets. And Oliver had been saying the same thing. He had
looked at his sister, at her face shining as she was surrounded by
a hundred women in Hyde Park, and instead of feeling proud of her
accomplishment or happy for what had happened, he had felt tired.
He’d tried to warn her off Cambridge.

It was an old tiredness he felt, the
weariness of an aging dog lying in the summer sun, watching puppies
at play. As if exuberance belonged to the young. He could remember,
faintly, an echo of that feeling. Days when he’d insisted—over and
over—that he was as good as anyone else, that he wasn’t going to
bend to their ways, that he’d make them bend to his.

He turned the next page in
Mrs. Larriger
Leaves Home,
but the words blurred before him.

He was asking himself the wrong question.
Once, he’d been like Free, unwilling to back down or take “no” for
an answer. The question wasn’t when things had changed. It was
this: When had he decided to simply accept society’s rules, to play
the game precisely as it had been laid out by those who already had
power?

It had happened years ago at Eton.

When he’d finally learned to keep his mouth
shut. When he’d discovered that he could accomplish more by holding
his tongue and biding his time than by lashing out with fists and
shouts.

He’d made a career of quiet, he’d told Jane.
But at some point, quiet no longer carried the day. If he never
learned to speak, what would be the point of achieving power?
Simply to carry on carrying on?

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.

It took Oliver a moment to remember his old
self—the person he had thought was born of immaturity, the boy that
he had put aside as he came into adulthood. He would never have
thought himself
ashamed
of his background before now. And
yet…

How was it that he’d taken the rules that
he’d hated and adopted them for himself? He’d chafed when people
told him he was a bastard. He’d raged when they’d said he would
never amount to anything, that his father was nothing. How was it
that
he
was telling the woman that he loved that she was
nothing? That she was awful?

He’d started caring more about becoming the
kind of person who could make a change than he cared about the
change itself. He’d walked away from Jane, and by doing so, he’d
told her all the things about herself that everyone else had thrown
in her face: that she was wrong, broken, awful.

It was not the little lust of unmet physical
needs that he felt for her. He loved her. He loved everything about
her, from the fierceness of her devotion to her sister to the shrug
of her shoulders when she found herself on horseback with him. He
loved the way she smiled. He loved the way that she simply refused
to feel shame simply because someone else didn’t approve of her
behavior.

He loved Jane. He was always going to love
her.

He loved the person she’d made of him—a man
who could foil abductions and break into houses when circumstances
required. A man who could take on Bradenton and see a foe to
vanquish, not a powerful lord to be appeased.

And he’d wanted to make her into nothing
because that’s what he’d done to himself.

He’d thought he needed a wren—some proper,
upstanding woman who needed his money as much as he needed her
breeding.

He could suddenly see his life with that
unchosen woman. His ever-so-proper wife would never tell him
outright that his father was uncouth and improper. She would simply
intimate it with a sniff. Perhaps she might suggest that next year
they might want to consider having the elder Mr. Marshall stay at
home during the season, as he’d be so much more comfortable amongst
his own kind.

She would bear his children—and she’d raise
them to be quiet, well-behaved folk just like herself, faintly
ashamed of their father’s origins.

“Yes,” he could imagine one of them saying,
“perhaps there was that little defect of his mother, but at least
our grandfather was a duke. That has to count for something.”

They’d never speak of their Aunt Free—too
bold, too forward, altogether too
everything.
Even Patricia,
married to a Jew, or Laura, running a dry-goods store, would be
suspect. Eventually, his cipher of a wife would suggest that
perhaps they’d all be happiest if they just pretended that Oliver’s
family didn’t exist.

Jane had it right: He’d traded his bravery
for his ambition.

And if he didn’t make this right—if he didn’t
learn to suppress that memory of pain and reach in and grab hold of
the coals in front of him, he’d be locked up for life in the chains
of his own silence. He’d let too much go already: Jane, his sister,
even that time with Bradenton. He’d let Jane do most of the
talking. He hadn’t even told Bradenton to his face how disgusting
he was.

With that, at least one thing came clear.
Oliver stood. He didn’t know how to make things right with Jane
yet, but Bradenton…

Bradenton owed him a vote, and Oliver was
going to collect.

He set the book down, retrieved his coat. He
went down the staircase and out into the main entry.

And with a great effort—with the effort of a
man uprooting everything he had made of himself—Oliver put one foot
outside into the warm May sunshine.

It was half an hour later when Oliver was shown
into the Marquess of Bradenton’s study. The man looked extremely
annoyed. He shook his head as he sat at his desk, tapping Oliver’s
card against the wood.

“I had three-quarters of a mind not to see
you,” he said.

“Of course you did.” Oliver said. “But your
curiosity got the better of you.”

“But then,” Bradenton said, “I recalled that
Parliament would be voting, and I wanted to work on a speech. One
about farmers and governesses. I figured I needed to study my
source material.”

Was that supposed to be offensive?

“Save your insinuations,” Oliver said. “And
your sly jabs. You’ll need your breath to cast your vote to extend
the franchise.”

Bradenton laughed. “You can’t be serious.
With what you did to me, you think to win my vote?”

“Of course not,” Oliver said. “How could I
win your vote? You’re a marquess, and I’m just one man out of a
hundred. One man out of a thousand.” He let his smile spread as he
tapped his fingers on the table. “One man out of, say, a hundred
thousand.”

Bradenton frowned. “One hundred
thousand?”

“More than that, actually. Did you go to Hyde
Park a few weeks ago? I did. There was an infectious joy, an
exuberance in the air. The people gathered. The people won. I read
the estimates of the crowds in the paper later, and yes, that was
the lowest number I saw bruited about. One hundred thousand.”

Bradenton shifted uneasily in his chair.

“It’s precisely as you’ve pointed out
before,” Oliver said. “There’s one of you, and one hundred thousand
of me.
You
seem to find that comforting. I can’t figure out
why.” Oliver leaned forward and smiled. “They’re terrible odds,
after all.”

“I’m entirely unmoved by the protestations of
rabble.” But Bradenton spoke swiftly, refusing to look Oliver in
the eyes. “I have my seat in the House of Lords by birth. I don’t
have
to bow to what the common people desire.”

“Then you won’t mind when the headlines
proclaim that the Reform Bill was blocked once again, and this time
by a margin that included the Marquess of Bradenton.”

Bradenton’s eyes widened and he sucked in a
breath. But a moment later, he shook his head with vehemence. “I
wouldn’t be the only one.”

“No. But think how good your name would sound
in a headline. Bradenton Blocks Bill. It’s alliterative.”

Bradenton clenched his fists. “Stop it,
Marshall. This isn’t funny!”

“Of course it isn’t. You’re unmoved by the
protestations of the rabble. When they gather outside your house,
massed in numbers larger than you can count, you’ll laugh in their
faces.”

“Shut up, Marshall,” Bradenton growled. “Shut
up.”

“Yes, that’s a good one. Tell them that while
they’re chanting. ‘Shut up.’ That might work. Maybe they’ll listen.
Or maybe they’ll stop talking and start throwing rocks. Did you
know they played the Marseillaise near the end of the
demonstration?”

“
Shut up!
The constables—they’ll throw
the lot of them in prison.”

“Oh, I saw constables on the day of the
Reform League’s gathering,” Oliver said. “All two of them. They
would make a lovely barricade, those two solitary blue uniforms
arrayed in front of your house, their truncheons gleaming as they
faced a crowd of ten thousand. They might stop a charge for ones of
seconds.”

“Shut up!”

“No,” Oliver mused, “you’re right. They
wouldn’t last that long. Because more than half the constables
can’t vote, either.”

He let the silence stretch. Bradenton sat
back in his chair, his breathing heavy.

“So you see, Bradenton, you
are
going
to vote to extend the franchise. Because there are thousands of me
and one of you, and we are not quiet any longer.”