The Heiress Effect (9 page)

Hardly a surprise. Cambridge always made him
feel caged.

The outside door opened behind him. He didn’t
turn.

Miss Fairfield came to stand beside him.

Her beads clacked as she moved, her brocade
glittering in the dim light in a garish imitation of military
braid. It was the ugliest gown he’d ever seen, and she wore it like
the shield that it was. She set her hands on the balustrade,
gripping it tightly, not saying a word. Her breath was ragged, as
if she had climbed three flights of stairs. As if even the thought
of trusting another person had her heart racing.

It should race. She should walk away. But he
didn’t say that. He just regarded her, watched her watching him
back.

“Well, impossible girl?” he asked. “What’s it
to be?”

She took another breath. “I count,” she
finally said.

It took him a moment to remember their
previous conversation.

She twisted her hands together. “I count
every day as it passes.”

He didn’t say anything. He wanted to comfort
her, but that seemed cruel, given the possibilities of what lay
between them.

“I am afraid to even speak to you,” she said.
“If I open my mouth, I’m afraid it will all spill out. I’ll talk
and talk and talk and never be able to stop it all. There’s too
much.”

He tilted his head and looked at her. “Did I
sound like a man with a moderate number of complaints?”

“No. No.” She shook her head, and then threw
her arms in the air helplessly. “I don’t know what you want. I know
what everyone else desires, but you… I don’t know about you.”

Oliver thought of Bradenton, dangling his
vote in the Reform Act before him—dangling it like the tempting
bait that it was. He thought about what it would mean for his
chances at achieving office. He thought about the marquess,
believing that Oliver was his for the purchase.

Nobody shoved Oliver around. Nobody.

“I went to school with Bradenton,” Oliver
finally said. “He was an ass back then, until…” He paused. “He’s
better at hiding it now, that’s all.”

She didn’t say anything.

“I want him to pay,” Oliver said. “For every
filthy assumption he’s made.”

He turned to her. She was watching him, her
eyes wide.

“It’s that simple,” he said. “You’re annoying
him. Good for you. I don’t want you to feel alone.”

Her breath caught.

God, that had been a cruel thing to say. The
prospect of friendship was a hell of a thing to dangle in front of
a woman who felt she had no choice but to drive everyone away. He
had no idea what she was facing, but he’d wager that whatever it
was, it was a lonely path.

And there was the fact that he
didn’t
know his own mind. Maybe he meant every word he was saying. But if
he’d wanted to take Bradenton up on his filthy offer, he’d have
started this same damned way—by earning her trust.

For all that he rejected the idea of doing
Bradenton’s bidding, there was a vicious symmetry to using the
marquess. To fooling him into thinking that Oliver was complacent,
that Oliver would do whatever he wanted. It would mean something,
to boost himself with Bradenton’s help. To exceed his power and
then pay him back years later.

He wanted that so badly he could taste
it.

She let out a shaky breath. “Say it again,”
she said.

It wasn’t a lie. Not really. He wouldn’t do
what Bradenton wanted; there was no need to tell her about it.

And if you do decide to do it, it’s best not
to mention it. You’re just keeping your options open.

Oliver pushed that voice away.

“You’re not alone,” Oliver said.

It was ninety-five percent of the truth.

Oliver took leave of the company a few minutes
after midnight. He was rather surprised when Bradenton followed
after him, walking with him to the pavement out front. Instead of
ignoring him, though, the marquess called for his carriage and
gestured to Oliver. Oliver came—reluctantly—to stand by him.

“You should meet them,” Oliver said quietly.
“The people who will be most affected by the extension of the
franchise. You’ll see—”

Bradenton laughed. “Don’t be ridiculous,
Marshall. I meet them every day. They stitch my shoes and measure
me for my trousers. I cannot walk anywhere without tripping over a
worker. Showing me yet another one won’t help your case.”

Oliver contemplated the shapes of the
buildings across the way. In the dark, he couldn’t make out much
more than the silhouette of peaked roofs, rough dark pools of
windows with lamplight glimmering from them. The sound of
Bradenton’s carriage—hoof clops and the creak of leather—drifted to
them from the mews behind the building.

“I said
meet
them,” Oliver replied.
“Not use their services.
Meet
them. Talk with them. See what
sort of men they are. My sister-in-law and I are organizing a set
of dinners when I return to London, for—”

“You mean I should treat them as my social
equals? I do enough charity work, Marshall.” He smiled. “Here I am,
talking to you.”

If this is a sample of your charity, I’m
sure you’re well-loved on your estate.

But he didn’t say it. He held all his
complaints in the stillness of his heart, marking them down to
accounts earned but not yet repaid.

“You’ve always been amusing,” Oliver said
instead. “But there’s no need to laugh off what I’m trying to tell
you. Which is—”

Bradenton laughed. “Leave off, Marshall. I
don’t want to talk to you about your precious reform.”

The carriage turned the corner, a dark ghost
in the mist.

Bradenton turned to Oliver. “You’re thinking
about my proposition. You cannot know how gratifying I find that,
to know I judged you rightly after all.”

Oliver’s hand tightened, his knuckles
whitening.

“So what did you mean with her tonight, then?
I suppose if you want to hurt her by making her fall in love with
you and then sending her into a decline, it will serve. Still, that
seems overly sordid.”

“You can’t hurt someone you don’t know,”
Oliver said.
And I know you well.
“Sometimes the easiest way
to break a person is to make him think you’re on his side and then
withdraw your support.”

He shouldn’t have spoken words laden with
such double meaning. But Bradenton laughed.

“That is why I need you to do it. I’ll pay
you no false compliments, Marshall. I admit, I have a personal
interest in seeing Miss Fairfield too unhappy to move about in
society any longer.” His lip curled. “But you’re clever and too
ambitious by half. I won’t allow you a foothold until I’m sure of
you.”

“One choice on my part will make you
sure?”

“No.” Bradenton shrugged. “One, you’ll
dismiss as accident. Two, you’ll doubt yourself. Three times…” He
paused, as if recalling something. “Three times, and you’ll
convince yourself you were right to act as you did. Three times
doing a thing will change a man’s character.”

“So there will be other tasks, then.” He
couldn’t do it. Even contemplating this one made him feel sick to
his stomach. It brought back old memories, memories he had long
since vanquished to their rightful place.

But Bradenton shook his head. His carriage
stopped in front of him, and a footman jumped down to open the
door. Bradenton advanced forward, “There’s no need for anything
else,” he said airily. “By my count, you’re already at two.”

There were three skills that Miss Emily
Fairfield had found necessary in her current position in life:
lying, smuggling—and most important of all—scaling walls. It was
the last she’d put to use at the moment.

After a tepid ten-minute walk around the
garden at midday, she’d been put down for a nap in her room as if
she were a child of four.

She waited until the house grew quiet, the
servants departing to mop floors and go to market. Then she’d
hastily changed her clothing and scrambled down the stone wall
outside her window. She wanted to go
away
—anywhere, so long
as it was not here.

She had an unapproved novel in one cloak
pocket, a handkerchief in the other, and a determination to spend
all two hours of her ridiculous nap outside.

Titus Fairfield’s house sat at the outskirts
of Cambridge. It was a sad, two-story affair of graying stone
surrounded by drab bushes. She pulled her skirt close to avoid the
thorns of the gooseberry bush, squeezed through a narrow gap in the
back hedge, and obtained her freedom on the gravel track leading
away from town, across fields and over hills.

This was behavior that Uncle Titus would call
foolish—setting out on her own, unaccompanied by a chaperone,
walking with real strides instead of taking the delicate steps that
befitted her status as a supposed invalid. Going out for hours
instead of minutes.

And maybe he was right. A little bit
.
But the alternative—lying in bed when it was light outside, staring
at the ceiling, imagining bludgeoning her uncle with one of his law
books—was even more ill advised.
That
left her feeling
shaky, guilty, and almost feverishly restless. When she felt that
way, she’d watch him over breakfast, thinking idly of pulling his
bookshelf down around his head.

Not the sort of imagery that made her proud.
She held her head high on the main road, nodding at passing
farmers. Her gown was a little too fine to make her anything other
than a lady escaped from chaperonage, but people saw what they
thought would fit in. She marched down the road, brushing the fence
posts and stone walls with the tips of her fingers, marveling in
the feel of wind on her cheeks, the taste of freedom. It was cold;
the wind bit through her gloves, and her cloak wasn’t thick enough
to keep off the worst of the chill, but she didn’t care.

What if something happens?
Her uncle’s
mournful voice seemed to drift to her on a memory. He could have
carved it in stone and set it above the mantelpiece, he’d said it
so often.
What if something happens?
He’d been worrying
about
something happening
to her for years, with the result
that nothing happened at all.

Today, she was resolved to walk through
Grantchester. She’d seen Grantchester Road half a dozen times in
her stolen ramblings, and while a village might not be the stuff of
Mrs. Larriger’s exploits, it was something more than a handful of
goats. She would walk and smile, and nobody would know that she’d
escaped from the dreadful clutches of…of…

Not pirates. Not whalers. Not the czar of
Russia.

“I’ve escaped from the dreadful clutches of a
nap,” she announced to the road.

Emily passed a farmhouse, then another,
then—a sign that the village was nearby—a grain mill. Students were
working industriously inside a grammar school. She nodded at a
smith in his yard as he examined a horse’s hooves.

When she reached the main square, she thought
about buying an apple from a green grocer, just to prove she could.
But it seemed futile to waste her few coins on wizened fruit.

She wanted so little—just the chance to do
the things everyone else did. Was it so much to ask?

What if something happens?

A bitter thought, that—that she had to fear
everything,
simply because of what might occur. A bitter
thought, indeed.

And at that, Emily realized it wasn’t just
the thought that was bitter. It was the taste in her mouth.

It wasn’t an
actual
taste. Years of
experimentation had demonstrated that. It was a growing bitterness
that spread through her until she tasted it not just on her tongue,
but in her cheeks and stomach—in parts of her body that ought not
to have been able to taste at all. The taste fell somewhere between
rancid almond and rotting eggs.