Untamed (15 page)

They needed Kit. Tom was never so alone as when she was gone.

Then she’d written to say she was coming home early. And he’d wanted her to enjoy London. He’d wanted success for her, wanted her to be courted even, to have a chance at life. In theory, he’d wanted all those things. But when he’d received her letter he’d felt loose with joy, with relief. His other half was coming home.

He glanced up from his book to where she sat, leaning against the old armchair that Rose hadn’t let the footmen throw away. She smiled at something Rose said, too low for Tom to hear, then tipped her head back to answer. Rose reached out a lazy hand and stroked Kit’s hair while she listened. Kit picked up her book again and Rose closed her eyes, her fingers playing idly with a strand of Kit’s hair she’d pulled loose.

Even after two weeks in her company, Tom wasn’t used to Lady Rose. The light from their small parlour fire was made rich in the pale mint silk of her dress. Her face was so striking, so complex. She changed from one thing to another so quickly it sometimes smacked the breath from him. He understood why Kit found it hard to look away.

Rose made Kit laugh and Kit hit her leg with the book. Tom wondered if they knew the impact they had. He wondered if Rose understood how very rare, how very unfamiliar Kit was to her brother when she was undone by contentment. He wondered if they realised how completely they shut the world out when they were like this.

And they had been like this for days.

Jude lay in bed and waited for her. Five candles burned brightly around the room. Neither he nor Katherine had said a word about the fact that he could have ordered himself a new room lit just as brightly, and hadn’t.

He thought his skin might split with impatience. What could she be doing that would take such a long time? He’d made a production of going to bed – kissed Tom’s quiescent palm, murmured flattery and adoration to Mrs Sutherland, and said a short, indifferent good night to Katherine that was as good as shouting,
You are to come to me as soon as possible, I cannot do without you
.

He watched the shadows flicker over the ceiling. Something in his chest moved in answer – that same shifting, uneasy light.

He’d received a letter that morning, from Lady Marmotte. It wasn’t a surprise – the papers told him clearly what she was up to, who she was buying off. But it had made him uneasy enough that he’d burned it.

He breathed. Katherine would be here. She would come.

She continued to sleep under the covers with him, and she continued to wear layers of clothing to bed. Neither of them had reached for the other since his single botched attempt. He’d been like a drunken fool who was absolutely certain he could catch a tiger by the tail.

When he next opened his eyes, she was lying on the pillow beside his, watching him, hand in a fist by her mouth. There was something unguarded about her that closed up when she saw he was awake.

‘You’re here,’ he said, and covered her hand with his palm. The sensation touched him – his hand like a lover taking hers from behind. He pushed his fingers between hers, and they lay like that without speaking for a couple of minutes.

Then he said, ‘I miscalculated in so many ways, when I asked to come with you to the country. I didn’t understand how dark it would be, or how quiet. But the worst of my errors was not allowing for these hands.’ His hand flexed around hers, the only movement in the room. ‘I didn’t know you’d go without gloves in the country. And you don’t have easy hands, Katherine. At first they repulsed me.’ He was ready, and didn’t let her pull away.

‘When you handed me that first plate of food, and I knew these hands had made it, I could barely swallow it down. But the more I watched you, the clearer it became that your hands cannot be separated out from who you are. The parts of the world that fascinate you pass through your hands first. I thought at first it was childlike, before I suspected what wisdom was in touch. And then I thought about touching. And then I could not stop myself from imagining the rasp of your hands on my skin – those rough, truthful things rubbing me until I was uncomfortable and tender with it. Testing and tasting me in order to understand me. I began to long for you to understand me.’

There was a long silence, and their harsh breathing, then she said, ‘You shouldn’t talk to people like that.’

‘Why not?’

‘It’s too much, Jude.’

‘But you,’ he said, letting go of her hand to take the side of her face in his palm, ‘are so strong.’

His body moved closer to hers, desperate for contact. ‘Touch me.’

‘Oh, God,’ she said, ‘oh fuck, don’t do this.’

He couldn’t speak.

She made a helpless noise and grasped his wrist. Turned his hand and crushed it to her mouth. Bit the fleshy part of his thumb until his lips opened with pain.

‘Wait,’ he said, breathless.

She pushed him, hard. ‘If we do this, you don’t get to control me,’ she said, her lungs straining as they had this afternoon at the top of the bluff. ‘Why don’t I go to the country?’ she said. ‘That bumpkin with the blunt mouth can fix me and it will all be nice and clean. Why don’t I seduce her? She’ll touch me and it’ll all be nice and clean and I won’t have to feel a thing!’

‘That’s not what I —’

‘You’d never be able to take it, Jude, how out of control you’d have to be with me. Don’t ask me again.’

She threw the covers back, and when she reached the door he saw that she wasn’t wearing any stockings.

‘Where are you going?’ he heard himself say, like an idiot, a fool.

‘I’ll sleep in Ma’s old room,’ she said, and pulled on his quilted dressing robe.

He looked at the angry mark of her teeth on his hand, and he did not call her back.

Kit beheaded another foxglove with a precise flick of her wrist. One half of the sky threatened to storm, the other half was blue. The bluff, rising huge behind the Manor, was lit golden green and looked unreal against the dark sky.

She beheaded another flower and wished, with vivid bloodiness, that she could remove Sir Winston’s whiskered head from the rest of him. She’d forced herself to drink his tea, which Mrs Parsons always beefed up with smouch. She was raging. Unsettled. She hadn’t listened as closely as she needed to, to the figures.

He’d seen their altered circumstances at the Manor. He wanted more than she could give right now, that much was clear. She would have to sell the sofa with the tiny flowers, and the new china. The piano and the rugs from the hall. She would think about whether they were hers to sell later, when the Squire was no longer breathing down her neck.

And this morning she’d received a reply from her uncle. Three short lines of condolence in the neat hand of a secretary, with his scrawled signature at the bottom. No sign that her wish to reconcile was reciprocated.

She thought about Jude, who was playing a game so big its ramifications were being felt through the country. She thought about Lady Marmotte, who dared to force her way into the world of men, and to dominate it, devil take you if you didn’t like it.

She saw so, so clearly that she was like a beast of burden, with a yoke around her shoulders. This stupid debt to the Squire, from which she couldn’t free herself. The needs of her family, her inheritance from her father, her years of servitude that had formed her nature while she was too busy working to notice. Her life was a small, mean thing, and on this familiar, muddy road, she knew that it no longer fitted her.

She could simply step off the path into the wet grass and leave. She didn’t have to go back to the Manor – it ran well enough without her these days.

Except all those servants were in the employ of the Duke, and they would leave when he did.

She froze, and the countryside was plunged into gloom. It started to rain. He had been on her mind all morning, and she had forgotten that he would be leaving. Not today. Not tomorrow. But soon. One of these days he would be ready to return to his life, and leave the backwater where he’d come undone.

He would hate her, she knew, when he had enough distance.

And she and Tom and Ma would keep going, but it would be so much harder than before, and she’d let it happen. It felt suddenly urgent that she get more money out of him, before he left. An amount that would be meaningless to him, yet would keep her family going for another couple of years, if they were lucky.

She ignored the part of her that baulked at the idea of living out here in stifling, exhausting anonymity for even one more year.

When she finally returned to the Manor there was a large, expensive carriage in her driveway and she thought numbly,
Today. He’s going today
. Of course he was going. She’d bitten him, sworn at him. That wasn’t what he’d wanted, when he’d come here to be repaired.

He was going.

She made herself walk the last few steps. She could survive anything, she’d always known that.

‘Kit? Is that you?’ Tom said, stepping out from the shelter of the roof and bounding down the steps towards her. ‘It’s Lydia,’ he said, his face cracked wide into a grin. ‘Lydia’s come home.’

‘— thought I should expire,’ Jude was saying in Rose’s husky voice, ‘but your daughter insisted that I dance one more set, because the Marquis de Pontoit had compared me to a tulip. We were amazed at his originality. All other men compare me to my namesake, and I’m sure I have only thorns in common with that flower.’

Ma laughed in delight. Tom was so close behind Kit, so eager, that he actually came up against her when she paused in the doorway. She realised now, with a fear that cut, that she had become used to Jude looking at her when she entered a room.

He did not look at her now.

A young man knelt at his feet, where Kit usually sat, and looked adoringly up at him.

‘Ah. Kit,’ said Lydia, setting her teacup onto her saucer with a click. There was a moment’s sober silence, and Kit took in the whole scene: her sister, exquisite in a pale rose travelling dress, perched on one of their new chairs. Her mother sitting on the sofa, nervous but flushed, smiling, happy. Jude curled in his armchair, Porkie on his lap. He was wearing the white wig this morning, the one that made his eyes so difficult to dismiss. He must have sent a servant for his dressing gown. The fur of it framed his face, and he was wrapped as usual in a bright, rich shawl.

He still had not looked at her.

Tom pressed by her, into the room. ‘Kit, this is Mr Crispin Scott,’ he said, and the young man stood up immediately and came to make a bow.

He had a friendly, open face, and before she could think Kit said, ‘We’ve met before, at —’ At Lady Marmotte’s ball, when he had been passing himself off as a duke.

He blushed, bit his lip. Smiled down bashfully at his feet.

She gave up. It was impossible to hold him in contempt.

‘Being a mister suits you better,’ she said quietly, offering her hand.

‘Where did you meet Mr Scott, Katherine?’ her mother asked. This was her favourite kind of talk – loud, enthusiastic, full of sordid gossip and naughty details.

‘He is one of my cousin’s cronies,’ said Jude, smiling at the little pig in his lap, before Kit could answer. ‘She met him the night she met the Duke.’

Kit didn’t miss Lydia’s reaction. She would have called any other man stupid to have let that detail slip. Because it was Jude, she assumed he was scoring a point against her sister that would be added to a tally only the two of them could see.

Mr Scott winked at Kit and went back to sit at the Jude’s feet. She could practically see the band that tied him to Jude – the impatience when he was more than a few feet away from him.

‘Come sit by me, Kit,’ said her mother, patting the sofa. Her good mood had made her generous, languorous. ‘Lady Rose and Lydia were telling me all about the Prince’s Christmas feast the year before last.’

Kit knew, for a fact, that they hadn’t even known one another the Christmas before last.

‘I remember you insisted on going dressed as Cleopatra,’ Lydia said to Jude, taking up her tea again. ‘You were sent so many bouquets the next day that we talked about opening a quaint little flower shop. Do you remember?’

‘Ah, my sweet, nobody could forget a headache like that.’

‘You sent me to the apothecary,’ Mr Scott said, laughing. ‘Lord, the way you screamed when I opened the curtains of your sitting room. You told me you were dying.’

‘I’m sure I was dying,’ Jude said with a pout. ‘Ungrateful brat.’

They were so quick together, the three of them. So practised at taking lies from each other’s mouths.

‘Ugh,’ said Jude, holding his coffee as far from him as he could. ‘This coffee is cold. Get me another cup, Crispin, quickly.’

Jude hadn’t bestowed a single kind word or look on Mr Scott that Kit could see, but the boy’s face lit up as if the sun had just come out. It hit her then, what made her so uneasy about his adoration.

She looked at Jude in the same way. She sat at his feet and listened to his nonsense and smiled when he was autocratic and rude, because she had fancied she knew him in a way no one else knew him. Looking at Mr Scott’s face – at the eager way he leapt up to do the Duke’s bidding – she felt her mistake. She wasn’t the first person, she would wager, who had thought she held a particular place in his affections. She doubted she was even the hundredth.

She looked up and caught Lydia watching her, something inscrutable in her grey eyes. She looked quickly away.

‘We should go to the continent, Rose,’ Lydia said. ‘You and I. Can’t you just imagine the mischief we could cause? Not to mention the sheer amounts of wine and cheese we could consume.’

‘The continent bores me,’ said Jude with a sniff.

‘Come, my love, you can hardly waste away here. Now that I have found you out.’

Kit’s shoulders tensed and she saw Mr Scott’s do the same. Her mother and Tom remained blissfully ignorant of the dangerous undercurrents.

‘I have decided to stay here forever,’ Jude said brightly, and lifted the pig to his face, nose-to-nose. ‘Porkie would pine for me so badly he’d forget to eat, and that would break your brother’s heart. No, I’m afraid there’s simply no way I can leave.’

And the worst part of this wretched morning was the way Kit’s heart thudded in her chest, and the way she thought,
He’s going to stay forever
, even though she knew what a liar he was.

Ma turned the conversation back to gossip, and Lydia smiled her polished society smile and didn’t stop her. Kit let it wash over her – the hundred inanities, the sparkling performance given by Jude, Lydia and Mr Scott. They were outrageous, witty, sophisticated, sarcastic. The Duke was high-handed and spoilt, and it only made the others lean in towards him more. When Tom made a tentative foray into the conversation, the Duke smiled at him like Tom was the only person in the world, and Kit watched her brother blush under the attention. And grow more confident in the conversation.

It was a kind of magic in Jude, the way he drew people out and made them feel
necessary
. He sat there in a tatty old armchair, half-dressed, with a pig in his lap, and Kit had never felt so clearly just how powerful he was.

She had a sudden memory, more visceral than conscious, of the vulnerable curve of his spine when she’d pulled the bodice off him. The man sitting in her parlour laughing at her mother’s old-fashioned French was bright and complete. He would never fall apart.

He was not entirely real, she thought.

And then she thought – he came to
me
.

Lydia said, ‘You’re looking almost heathen, darling. We must get you back to civilisation as soon as we possibly can.’

‘Oh, I never dress before two if I can help it,’ Jude said, and looked directly at Kit for the first time. His hand stilled on Porkie’s belly. ‘Katherine usually laces me up, and she was nowhere to be found this morning.’

‘Of course,’ her sister said. ‘She’s had a lot of practice at being a lady’s maid.’

‘Darling,’ said Jude, reaching lazily for Lydia’s hand, ‘it is far too early in the day to be catty.’

Kit expected a sharp, sarcastic response from her sister, and wasn’t prepared for the childish face Lydia pulled at Jude, or the small smile between them. They had been lovers, Kit thought numbly. And perhaps would be again, now that she had failed to keep them apart.

‘I would kill for some sandwiches,’ Lydia said to Kit. ‘Would you come to the kitchen with me? I’ll never find my way around on my own.’

‘Ring for a footman,’ Jude said, before Kit could respond. ‘They become so despondent when one doesn’t order them about. Here, Katherine, sit beside me in your usual spot. Crispin, dear, you’ll have to move.’

‘I’m comfortable here with Ma,’ Kit said.

‘Thomas,’ said Jude in a light, ruthless voice that made Kit realise, too late, that she had miscalculated. ‘Didn’t we all express our desire not to crowd your mother when Katherine and I agreed to share a bed?’

Tom grinned. ‘I’m sure if you ask Kit again she’ll come and sit by you, Rose. You know you always get your own way.’

Lydia finally spoke, and she sounded winded. ‘You and Kit share a
what
?’

‘Bed,’ said Jude, looking at her with concern. ‘Are you quite well, my dumpling?’

‘You bastard.’

‘Lydia Jane!’ said their mother. ‘Apologise at once!’

‘I will not.’ Lydia’s face was blotched a fierce red. ‘It is quite accurate, after all,’ she continued, smiling horribly Jude. ‘If one listens to the rumours.’

He smiled back at her in the same way, and Kit thought,
Lydia learned that smile from him
.

‘Ah, the old persistent rumours,’ he said. ‘They made my father so angry by refusing to die.’

She wondered how Lydia could know him so well, and still not understand that you couldn’t wound him like that. Anything you could level at him he’d already told himself a hundred times, and worse.

‘Now, my sweetmeat,’ he said, ‘I believe you and I have been sufficiently entertaining and should cease speaking. Usually Thomas reads to us from the paper, and we all pretend an interest in the latest political nonsense. After twenty minutes or so, when we’ve proved our gravitas, I read the gossip pages aloud and Sophie and Thomas pretend to disapprove. Katherine demonstrates her insufferable superiority by paying us no mind and reading something boring and scientific.’

‘Rose reads the gossip as if it’s a play,’ Tom said, his eyes shy and avid on his sister’s face. It hit Kit for the first time that Tom hadn’t seen Lydia since she left for London more than two years ago.

‘Except yesterday, when I tried to perform the part of my cousin, the Duke, your mother told me I sounded as if I had a potato in my mouth. I suspect she meant some other orifice, but was too polite to say so.’

Her mother giggled and swatted in the direction of Jude. ‘Oh, you do go on, you naughty thing. I would never think such a thing.’

‘I do. Every time I see him.’ He launched into an impression of himself that was far too . . . accurate for comfort. Tom and Mr Scott shared a look, which seemed to tip them both into a fit of giggles. Ma laughed behind her hand, and at any other time Kit would have thanked God for the man who could make her mother seem like a girl again.

But she had caught sight of Lydia’s face, and her sister had gone so pale Kit was scared for a moment she might be sick.

Kit had forgotten he could be like this. She watched him, his eyes glittering as he berated his audience for laughing at a peer of the realm. Lydia had challenged him and he had given her a warning slap, with as little thought as you would slap an overly enthusiastic puppy.
I belong here with your family
, he was saying to her.
And you do not
.

‘Ma,’ Kit said, ‘didn’t you tell me this morning you wanted Rose to look over your menus but you weren’t sure you should ask?’

‘Tut, Sophie,’ said Jude, unable to resist the lure. ‘You know I am your slave for life. I also have an exceptional palate and very expensive taste. I would love nothing more than to review your choices, though I intend to be very scathing and pithy. I hope you are ready.’

Kit patted her mother’s shoulder and stood. She retrieved the draft menus from the bureau and placed them in Jude’s hands.

‘Tom will help you decipher her writing,’ she said. ‘Ma has a terrible hand.’

She turned her back on her family, drawn cosily around Jude, and bent close to Lydia, placing her palm warm on her shoulder. ‘Let’s go and see about those sandwiches.’

Lydia nodded and rose, her cold expression less perfect than usual, but at least it was in place again.

Jude caught Kit’s eye as she crossed the room. He opened his mouth to speak. Closed it again. Something very like fear crossed his face, fleeting and sharp. Then he bowed his head over the menus and turned to her mother with a bright smile, as though he wouldn’t be anywhere else.

‘Eggs – for – dinner,’ Kit heard him gasp as she left the room. ‘Bring me a taper, quickly. We have to burn this document before it offends me to death!’

‘You didn’t need to do that,’ Lydia bit out, when they entered the room with the piano. Her voice echoed a little; the only other piece of furniture was a whimsical divan.

Kit sat on the piano stool – remembered his tongue on Lady Marmotte’s large, pale breast, and stood again.

‘He was being an arse,’ she said.

Lydia looked at her in shock and sat abruptly on the divan. She laughed – an unpractised, involuntary sound. ‘My God, no wonder he’s in love with you.’

Heat cracked open at the top of Kit’s skull and licked, long and slow, down every inch of her skin. She very distinctly felt the muscle in her heart expand, then painfully contract. She thought for a moment she might pass out.

‘Kit,’ Lydia said clearly. ‘You realise this is what he does – he changes the world to suit himself. He has made this happen. He has made you think that you would do anything for him, because he demands everything of people. You saw clearly, in London, who and what he is. Ask yourself whether that has changed. Ask yourself whether this isn’t exactly what he wanted.’

Kit sifted desperately through everything she knew of Lydia, of herself, of him.

‘Whatever he’s done,’ Lydia said, ‘whatever thing he found that made you trust him – the thing that is particular to only you in all the world – he did it for a price.’

Kit remembered the texture of his skin slicked with sweat, thought of the voice he hadn’t been able to control, how pliant exhaustion had made him. Not even he would shatter himself just to get what he wanted from her.

Would he?

Lydia stood, agitated. ‘You saw him just now. I know him better than you do, so he’s terrified to let us talk. He can’t afford to have you come to your senses. He has you under his influence, and everything he says next will be just the right thing to say to gain your trust back. He knows you will think the worst of me, with only a little help.’

Kit opened her mouth to speak, and forced herself to stop and think. He had hurt Lydia by showing how much more comfortable with her family he was than she. And he unerringly found the thing that hurt the most.

‘Is your brain diseased?’ Lydia burst out, sounding much more like herself. ‘I threw every eligible man I could think of at you, and he was the one man – the only one, in all of England – whom I didn’t want you to meet. There is only one way this ends – unless you are strong enough to end it first.’