Once Upon a Marquess

  One. That was the smallest, there, a hard nub scarcely the size of a pinhead. He captured it under his smallest finger. Two. Slightly larger. His heart began to slow. Three, a more imposing bulge, almost button-sized.

  “No,” Christian said. “I’m sorry, Mother. No possets. I’ve work to do tomorrow, and you know they always make me muzzy-headed.”

  His mother loved him; it was her only sin. He didn’t want to hurt her. She didn’t need to know everything.

  Four. Five. Six. His breathing evened, his chest no longer ached.

  His mother exhaled. “I heard you shouting,” she said. “The servants must have as well. Servants talk. What do you think people will say?”

  Seven was a gooseberry-sized bead under his left index finger.

  “They’ll say I don’t sleep well.”

  She didn’t say anything.

  Eight. Nine.

  “They could say nothing,” she said. “And you could have a good night’s rest for once.”

  Just this once. He could feel the tug of it. He could smell the laudanum, now that he’d calmed, that faint herbaceous sweetness in the dark. It whispered to him that now would pose no problem. Just a little. Just this once.

  Laudanum lied.

  Ten. The tenth bead was as big as an acorn. He held them all in place, ten beads, smallest to largest, one under each finger. If he could sort these, he could sort out his life.

  “You can’t go on like this,” his mother was murmuring. “I worry for you. You need to sleep more.”

  It wasn’t a posset he needed, and it wasn’t a lack of laudanum that woke him up shouting. It was doubt. For a moment, he remembered Judith looking at him just this past afternoon, across a table laden with over-dry, over-spiced biscuits, and telling him that he should have known. He should have known Anthony wasn’t guilty.

  Christian pressed until those hard beads hurt his fingers. He’d never doubted Anthony’s guilt. There was no question in his mind that Anthony had committed treason. Transportation had been too light a sentence.

  He knew, after all, why Anthony had done it.

  “Just this once,” his mother said again.

  It was never just once, but his mother didn’t need to know. She loved him, that was all, and he loved her. She didn’t need to know. “Not tonight, Mother,” he said instead.

  He had no doubt that Anthony was a traitor. No, the reason Christian woke at night was that he wasn’t sure Anthony’s treachery was wrong.

  “I’ll fix it,” he said aloud. “I’m fixing it now.” He wasn’t sure whether he was talking to his mother or the long-dead friend who haunted his dreams. Christian lifted his hands and the beads rolled back to the center of the basin. “There’s another way.”

  Something other than treason, something other than laudanum. He’d thought and thought. He’d made lists of lists. He was going to get Anthony’s journals. He would identify the men who had so enraged his friend with their sins that Anthony had felt he had no choice but to commit treason.

  Christian was going to find them, and he was going to bring them to justice.

  Then he’d finally be able to sleep without dreaming.

  His mother let out a disappointed sigh. “If you insist.”

  He patted her hand. “You’ve worried over me enough. Go get some sleep yourself, Mother.”

  He waited until she left, taking the laudanum-infused milk with her. When she had gone, he pulled the bowl onto his lap again. One bead. Two. Three. Ordering little pieces of the universe didn’t bring him much peace, but it was some. He was going to solve this problem. He was going to solve it his way. But until he did…things were going to get worse, not better, because he was going to have to deal with Judith. He’d had little enough peace since the day that women had divided into Judith and everyone else.

  Four. Five. Six.

  He could still remember that day.

  It had been a cold, gray, rainy day at the Worth household. He’d started it with no notion that his entire life would change over the course of an hour.

  Seven. Eight. Beads didn’t dispel the memory. Judith had been fifteen, and he’d been a year from starting at university. He’d felt his importance greatly. As befitted his new status as scholar, he had taken a book of Greek poetry to the blue parlor, ensconced himself behind the curtains, and started reading. A few hours into his studies, she had come into the room. He’d looked up with narrowed eyes, but she didn’t see him in his comfortable window seat. She had looked down the hall furtively, and then, very carefully, she had shut the door.

  On the one hand, being closed up in a room with a gently bred lady was not a good idea. On the other hand, this gently bred lady was Judith. He’d known her since the very first time he’d come for a visit with Anthony. He knew her from summers of play and picnics. He knew her mostly from trying to sneak away from her so he could go fishing with her brother.

  Judith was technically a gently bred lady in the same way that Welsh corgis were technically herding dogs. Yes, the breed was supposedly used to handle sheep by other people—but one look at those ridiculous short legs and he could never take the dogs seriously.

  He felt the same way about Judith. He’d dropped her in a lake once. After that, she simply didn’t register as someone who needed to be handled with the kidgloves of propriety.

  She seemed unaware of him. Instead, she’d gone to the clock on the mantel and had taken it down. It was a shelf clock, maybe two hands’ height. She held it, turning it about, and then set it on the worktable.

  He’d seen her there before, doing embroidery. She looked at the clock as if it were a French knot in need of unraveling. Then she had removed from her pocket a set of jeweler’s tools.

  That had riveted his attention. He’d watched as she removed the backing from the clock, and then—very methodically, very precisely—had begun to take the instrument apart. She had laid out the gears and springs, one by one. At first, he’d itched to arrange the pieces she removed by size or by function. By tensile strength. By any damned thing, instead of the bizarre ordering she made on the table.

  She dismantled the entire thing, down to the minute hand.

  He had wondered what she would do at that point. Would she walk out of the room, leaving behind this table covered with springs and gears? Would she attempt to put it all back, and then feign confusion when the clock no longer worked?

  She did neither of those things. Instead, she took her father’s heavy gold watch out of her pocket and set it on the table in front of her. Then, working just as methodically as she had done when she’d taken the thing apart, she’d put it back together again—piece by piece, no hesitation, reaching for each piece precisely as she had laid it down. The order he’d failed to comprehend before suddenly made sense. She’d set the parts out by order of assembly, the order in which you’d arrange these pieces if one cared not about their size or their color or their function, but about what they would become as a whole. Put together like this, they were not hunks of metal. They were a map to time itself.

  Christian had spent his whole life sorting things. Watching Judith, he’d realized that the best order for things could mean something that made them more than the sum of their parts instead of reducing them to individual elements.

  She snapped the back of the clock in place, consulted the pocket watch on the table, and smiled. “Fourteen minutes,” she’d announced, seemingly to the room at large. Then she’d looked at him—directly at him, as if she had known he was there the entire time.

  “That’s a new record for me,” she had told him.

  While he was staring at her in disbelief, she had stood calmly, gathered her tools, and walked out of the room.

  The Worth family had always been odd. It was why Anthony had adopted Christian without blinking at his more peculiar habits. But until that afternoon, he hadn’t realized that Judith was that odd, and in that particular way.

  After that he had tried—valiantly—to put this new, distur
bing Judith out of his mind. She was his best friend’s sister. She was supposed to be a Welsh corgi of a lady. And then he’d started noticing all the other things about her. Her smile. The fact that she’d developed breasts. He had tried not to notice her for two days before giving it up as a hopeless cause.

  Wouldn’t you know? It turned out that Welsh corgis were excellent sheepdogs.

  Judith was still a hopeless cause. What did he want? He wanted to disassemble time itself. To go back to the point when the most difficult problem between the two of them was a thing of clockwork and gears, a machine to be disassembled and then put back together without any indication that anything had ever gone amiss.

  Of all the people in the world, she was the one who had never made him feel odd or out of place. She’d never made his head itch by disturbing his orderings. She had been perfect, up until the point when he’d taught her to hate him.

  Ever since then, his world had ceased to sort properly. Ever since then, he’d felt an itch in the back of his mind—the itch of a book out of place, a letter slid into the wrong file.

  Eight years ago, he’d made a decision, and ever since then, it had eaten at him subtly, whispering that he’d put Anthony in the wrong place, and that there was no way to correct his mistake.

  He was never getting Judith back; he’d become inured to that fact by now. He’d settle for keeping hold of himself.

  Ten.

  He let the beads fall away and set the bowl back on his bedside table.

  He lay back, adjusting his position on the pillow. Sleep came, eventually, and with it, dreams of clockwork ships sailing in storms.

  Chapter Five

  The good thing about sleep was that it wiped away the emotions of the prior day. One could wake refreshed, ready to take on the tasks of a new morning.

  When Judith awoke in bed next to Theresa the morning after she saw Christian again, sun spilled through the curtains. She thought first of the tight clockwork turn she’d worked on last night—that quick reversal of figures, not so swift as to seem mechanical. If she could get that right, it might mean a little extra. Another thirty pounds, maybe.

  She had hope again. There had been setbacks yesterday, but she was so close to her goal. The hard part had been earning the money to be held in trust for her sisters, to send Benedict off to school. From here on out, it was simply a matter of execution and making an appointment to accompany Christian to the family solicitor.

  Not that she was worrying over that last task. Not at all. She wasn’t thinking of him as she made a mental list of the things she needed to purchase. She had put him entirely—well, mostly—out of her mind as she got her shopping basket. She’d forgotten him—sort of, maybe—by the time she greeted her friend.

  Daisy Whitlaw lived across the way, in one of the myriad flats that had been carved out of a larger house as the neighborhood fell into slow decay. They had made each other’s acquaintance over the course of years of shopping. Daisy’s father had once been a grocer—past tense both in the sense that he had lost his business years before, and that he’d passed away a year ago. Her mother had been a vicar’s daughter. Daisy had never been a lady, not like Judith had, but she knew what it was like to fall slowly from grace. She’d understood Judith the moment they’d run into each other at the market.

  Judith looked much the same as she always looked. She was wearing her favorite green dress, comfortable and clean, if faded; her shawl was looped over her shoulder, and her basket hung at her elbow, ready to receive that day’s shopping.

  Daisy was waiting in place, under the black painted pole of the street lamp. Her friend’s day gown was faded blue, instead of faded green; her shawl was a dull gray instead of a dull blue. And she carried her basket—slightly misshapen and definitely aging—in her hands instead of hooked over her elbow.

  They looked completely different. Daisy was tall and blond, where Judith was short and dark-haired. Still, everyone in this handful of streets knew them as an entity.

  “Good morning, Daisy dearest,” Judith called.

  “Good morning, my lovely Judith.” Daisy gestured her closer, and Judith crossed the street to her friend.

  Daisy worked in a flower shop. She could put on her mother’s accent when she wished, but most of the time, she spoke like the other residents nearby. She’d never asked where Judith had fallen from, a refreshing change of pace. Judith had been glad to have a friend who didn’t ask her endless questions or who saw her as the traitor’s daughter.

  She and Daisy could be friends. A friend, one she could laugh and talk with, one who never reminded her of her past, had been as valuable as learning to make proper sandwiches. More, even.

  Daisy hooked her arm through Judith’s and they proceeded on their way. The market was four streets away, far enough to make the walk unpleasant on wet, drizzly days. Today, though, was glorious for once. The sky was clear, all the grime and muck washed away by last night’s rains. The streets had been cleared by the same. The sun shone and the clouds—small, wispy, insubstantial things—hardly blocked its light.

  “What shall you get at the market today?” Daisy asked after they’d gone about twenty yards.

  This was the usual start of their game.

  “Would you know,” Judith said, “that we are fresh out of gold leaf in our household?”

  She and Daisy had started the game years ago, when one of the local boys had accused them of thinking too highly of themselves.

  “No!” Daisy turned to her in mock horror. “Not out of gold leaf! Why, however will you gild your beef?”

  “I don’t know,” Judith said. “Why, just last night, with Benedict home for the first time in weeks, we had to have our filets seasoned with nothing but salt and pepper and a little rosemary.”

  “Oi.” Daisy shook her head. “You ought to watch your stores with greater care. I find that a bit of gold leaf, laid on top of a fruit tart, aids the digestion. Without it, cream can upset the stomach.”

  “So true, Daisy dearest.” Judith smiled and patted the other woman’s hand where it laid on her elbow. “What is it that you are tasked with purchasing today?”

  “Well.” Daisy paused. She tilted her head up to the sky, so that sun spilled onto her face, as if thinking of something she needed. “I did need to stop by the glove-maker. Yesterday, when I was scrubbing the pots…” She stopped at this—manual labor didn’t fit the game, after all—and finally shrugged. “Well, you know—I wore through my last pair of kidskin gloves with seed pearls.”

  In the game, one never pointed out that one didn’t scrub pots wearing kidskin gloves. That would ruin the fun.

  “Tsk, tsk,” Judith said instead. “They simply don’t make kidskin gloves with seed pearls the way they used to. Why, back when we were children, kidskin gloves—the normal sort, even before you added the seed pearls—could go through a year’s worth of work in the grimiest scullery without falling to pieces.”

  “It’s true,” Daisy said mournfully. “Standards have fallen. We live in decrepit times.”

  “So,” Judith said. “Gloves and gold leaf, then?”

  This conversation had brought them from the relative quiet of their street to the market square. The stalls were bustling already. The greengrocer, in particular, would prove a bit of a fight. They’d have to go there first to lay claim to whatever decent vegetables remained.

  Without discussing this, both women passed the glove-maker on the corner without a second glance and took their place in line. The summer harvest was delayed after a cold spring. The vegetables were still rather sparse: suspicious-looking turnips and last year’s potatoes with little white sprouts growing out of the eyes made up the bulk of the bins. But there were some heads of lettuce and peas. And—wonder of wonders—a cache of oranges.

  Oranges. They were dear, especially at this time of year, and who knew how far these particular ones had traveled. But an orange, peeled and split among three over breakfast… It would be a lovely treat.

/>   Not a good choice, Judith warned herself. Not after she’d already splurged for Benedict’s homecoming.

  But the day was beautiful and Benedict was home, at least for now. An orange would make everything better. Judith mentally counted the coins in her pocket and those remaining in her dresser drawer.

  One orange.

  “I’ll have twelve of the turnips,” Daisy said as she came to the front of the line, “and sweet ones, too—none of the tough ones.”

  The grocer laid his grime-stained hands on the counter. “It’s July,” he said gruffly. “All the turnips are tough.”

  “Twelve of your best,” Daisy said, with her head thrown a little higher. “And a good three pounds of potatoes. Smaller, please.”

  The man weighed these items out, and money changed hands.

  It was a curious friendship, the one Judith had with Daisy, but that didn’t make it any less dear. Theirs was not the sort of friendship where they told each other the truth. The truth was hard and nearly impossible to bear; talking about it would not make it any easier. When they did talk, it was as they had today—a conversation that centered on gold leaf and kidskin gloves, silk and strawberries, honey-wine and carriages. They talked as if they had no worries in the world.

  And so, for the space of four streets, they could lay them down.

  Doing your household shopping with another woman was an act of intimacy. Judith tried not to do the math. She tried not to divide those turnips by the two people in Daisy’s household. Once, twelve would have seemed a great many turnips to her. Now, she knew that no matter how you mashed them, no matter how finely you chopped them or how large the quantity of water in the pot where the soup was made, twelve turnips divided by seven days and two mouths was not quite enough to fill the stomach.

  These were the things they didn’t talk about.

  Judith got her own turnips, twice as many potatoes, a bunch of new peas, some lettuce that looked sweet, and her orange.