When uncertain about a conversation, ask a question requiring a long answer. That was what her grandmother would say.
Amanda struggled to think of something appropriate. “So… How much do you two still have to do for your spring benefit? The last Free told me, you were up to your ears.”
Miss Johnson’s perfectly shaped eyebrows rose. Not so high as to be rude; it seemed an involuntary response on her part, and Amanda realized she had misstepped somehow.
“We only have to send the thank-yous for attendance,” Mrs. Marshall said. “But there was a great deal that had to be done.”
Oh, God. It had already happened. Amanda felt herself blush fiercely. Of course it had. Miss Johnson would never have made so horrible a blunder. If Miss Johnson was a china doll, Amanda felt like the proverbial bull entering the shop where she was kept. She was outsized and clumsy, capable of smashing everything around her with one misplaced flick of her ungainly tail. She felt both awkward and stupid.
“But tell us why you’re in town,” Miss Johnson said. “Are you visiting your sisters?”
“My sisters don’t see me.” Her response was too curt, too bitter.
Miss Johnson drew back, and Amanda could practically hear china plates crashing around her, breaking to smithereens.
“I’m here to talk to Rickard about his suffrage bill,” she continued. “He’s been circulating it, trying to get anyone else to sign on.”
“And how is he doing?’
About as badly as Amanda was managing now. “The radicals hate it,” she said. “It limits voting to a small minority of married women. Everyone else hates it because, well…” Amanda shrugged once again. “It’s a terrible bill. But it’s a bill at least.”
“I’ll have to ask Oliver what he thinks of it,” Mrs. Marshall said. Oliver was her husband and Free’s half-brother. He was a Member of Parliament—and through a set of circumstances that Amanda had found it polite not to understand, also the half-brother of a duke. He was usually conversant in these affairs.
“Oh, he’s opposed, I’m sure,” Amanda said. “He’s part of the set that says the next suffrage bill must be the universal one. It’s the most dreadful mess.”
“Why is that?” Miss Johnson asked.
Amanda recognized this tactic from her youth. She was being drawn out—by an expert no less. She flushed.
“Well. There’s an argument about who ought to be allowed to vote. All women? Just women who own property? Or maybe only married women. Of course, almost every group favors a bill that allows only their ilk to vote. They all promise they’ll circle back eventually and include the rest—but there’s very little trust that those representations are true.” She considered that. “The mistrust is not unwarranted, given, um, the things that some have said.” No need to go into those. In the beginning, Amanda herself had been one of those women who shied away from universal suffrage. Women, yes, but poor women?
It had taken some interesting conversations with Alice Halifax before Amanda had come around, and she was still embarrassed with herself for her earlier stance.
“Universal suffrage,” she continued, “is a harder task to achieve, but if we’d insisted on it back in 1832…”
She trailed off, realizing that she was the only one talking. Once again, she felt herself flush. When she was seventeen, she’d thought that she could leave the drawing rooms she inhabited. She’d imagined learning more, becoming a larger person. She hadn’t understood that the process of leaving meant that she would never fit in her old life again.
She understood the rules just well enough to remember them a minute too late.
“But,” she said, feeling her cheeks heat, “we needn’t talk politics.” God. It was the most dreadful of drawing-room missteps. How gauche of her. She was so used to being able to say anything that she’d forgotten how to hold her tongue.
She made a great show of checking the clock on the wall. “Dear me. I must be off, or I’ll be late for my appointment with Rickard.” It was in two hours, but no point in mentioning that. She could look over her notes again.
“But we like hearing you talk of politics,” Miss Johnson said gently. “Haven’t you a few more moments?”
Too bad that Amanda knew that tactic, too. You were always supposed to set the other person at ease, no matter how badly she was doing. That left you free to gossip about her in good conscience afterward.
Amanda frowned repressively. “I’m afraid I don’t.”
She’d accepted reality for what it was years ago. She’d no interest in being a proper lady. She was a bull; her place was in a field, flicking flies off with her tail, or—if need be—charging her enemies with horns lowered.
But Miss Johnson sighed almost regretfully. “Do come back,” she said, a pattern card of politeness.
That’s all it was: politeness. If Amanda had been an artist, she’d have painted a swirl of butterflies around Miss Johnson, dancing gently around her. But she wasn’t, and instead, every one of those butterflies seemed to be lodged in her stomach, fluttering in protest.
It didn’t matter. If you were a bull and you happened to find yourself in a china shop, there was nothing to do but head for the exit and try not to knock over any of the displays on your way out. Amanda had understood that years ago, and nothing had changed since then.
“I will,” Amanda said.
It wasn’t precisely a lie. She was sure that Free would send another package one day, that Amanda would be forced to return.
And Miss Johnson and Mrs. Marshall would likely get a good day’s worth of gossip abusing her manners afterward, so it was a fair trade for all the broken china. She might have been able to shrug it off.
But there was one small thing that made this all more than humiliating. Miss Johnson smiled as if she had meant her invitation. Her flaxen hair shone in the morning sun, and her lips were perfectly pink as she said her good-byes.
Things would be bad enough as they were. But it was just Amanda’s bad luck that she had a taste for porcelain dolls.
SEVERAL WEEKS AGO, EDWARD had visited his brother. Tonight, he returned to James’s office once more. The room was almost precisely as it had been when last he’d come. Papers were strewn across the desk; volumes on land care and finance sat on the bookshelves lining the walls. The day’s newspapers had been stuffed in the rubbish bin.
This time though, he found James already in their father’s place at the desk. His brother opened the glassed door to the outside with a suspicious frown and gestured for Edward to sit across from him. “Why are you here, Ned?” he asked skeptically.
“I still prefer Edward,” Edward managed mildly. “But never mind that. I haven’t come back to bicker. I realized that I owe you an apology.”
If anything, that made James more suspicious. His nose wrinkled in obvious distrust. But what he said instead was, “Nonsense. Water under the bridge and all that, surely.”
“No.” Edward put on his best false earnestness. “It’s not nonsense. I assumed that you’d not want to see or hear from me based on your actions seven years ago. But I feel I have misjudged you. I never gave you a chance to tell me why you did what you did. That was unfair. Unbrotherly, even. I assumed the worst of you, but I can see now that I was mistaken.”
His brother was still suspicious; Edward could tell from the set of his jaw, the flare of his nostrils. But James was too rooted in the rules of polite conversation to accuse Edward of lying, and that meant he responded to his words at face value. Good. Making a man speak a lie was the first step toward making him believe a lie.
“Right.” James blinked. “Yes.” His words came reluctantly. “Of course I never wanted you…harmed. Ahem.” He steepled his fingers. “It was for your good, you understand? It was only for your good. You sent that urgent letter stating that there was an army marching on the scene, that you needed our assistance to get away. And Father had sent you there for punishment, right? You hadn’t come around yet. That was all that was on
my mind. I promise, I never, absolutely never, intended you to perish.”
The hell of it was, Edward suspected James was telling something that looked suspiciously like the truth. He had no doubt studiously told himself that he didn’t intend for his brother to die. He’d justified it all to himself—saying that Edward, by refusing to bow to their father, had essentially made himself an outcast. He was just like an impostor.
No doubt he’d justified his lie to the consul a hundred times over the years. The fact that Edward could have died, and James stood to inherit the viscountcy as a result… No doubt, he’d told himself that those things did not matter to him.
It was a lie, of course. But men lied to themselves all the time, telling themselves they were far better than they were.
Edward tried not to fall into that same trap.
“I understand that,” Edward said with what he hoped was an approximation of brotherly warmth.
“I wept when you could not be recovered,” James told him.
Edward was sure that was true, too. James would no doubt have felt very sorry. If he hadn’t, he would have been forced to admit he was a vile betrayer who’d secretly hoped his brother would die. No man saw himself as a villain. James had done what he’d needed to do, and then he’d lied to himself about his actions.
“I haven’t been fair to you.” Edward reached across the table and clasped his brother’s hand in his. James’s hands were bare; Edward hadn’t removed his glove, and the contrast of pale skin against black leather, of bumbling incompetence against smooth, slick falsehoods, seemed to set the mood for what was to come.
“I realized my mistake,” Edward said, “when I read about Stephen Shaughnessy in the paper.”
His brother’s mouth twitched slightly.
“You really did have a plan for him. But you went to all that trouble to undo it, just for me. Because I asked.”
Edward knew that James had done nothing to undo his plans. James knew that James had done nothing. But James didn’t know that Edward knew. It took James all of three seconds, spent blinking wide-eyed at that canard, to swallow up the bait.
“Why, yes,” James said. “Yes, I did.”
Lies worked best when you could invest the target in the lie itself. James wanted to believe he was a good person. He wanted to believe he could be forgiven for abandoning Edward on the eve of war. He wanted to believe himself an honorable fellow who would never welsh on an agreement—and so when Edward handed him the chance to believe it, he grasped hold of the possibility.
But telling oneself lies was a dangerous business. One started to believe them. In James’s case, believing that Edward was his brother in anything but blood would be the most foolish lie of all.
“It was difficult,” James said. “You and the Shaughnessys… I always felt that they stole my older brother from me.” That was said so bitterly that Edward suspected it was true. “Giving up on my plans for Stephen was difficult. But if it would bring my brother back, well, there’s a pleasant symmetry to it, eh?”
There was no symmetry, pleasant or otherwise. Even if James had been telling the truth, he’d have acted because he wished to keep Edward away and take what should have been his birthright.
But Edward smiled and pretended to be touched. “That means a great deal to me, James. A great deal. I’ve not been fair to you. Listen to me now—all these years spent apart, and I never even asked after your situation. I hope my absence hasn’t posed too many problems for you.”
“Oh, not too many.” James leaned back.
“You’re being too kind to me,” Edward said. “Come. Tell me how things have really been.”
Getting a man to lie to himself was a peculiar sort of black magic. One had only to whisper the faintest praise in his ear, and he’d invent the rest. He’d make himself out to be a hero, beset by villains and calamity.
“Well,” James said slowly. “I didn’t want to make too much of it, but there have been some difficulties.”
“Ah, I thought so.” Edward smiled.
“I don’t have full control over the finances yet, and I can’t sit in Parliament. That’s delayed many a plan of mine.” James frowned. “And when I was looking for a wife, I’d have been able to do better had there not been that cloud over the title.”
Edward tsked in sympathy. “How dreadful for you. I hope you’re not too unhappy on that score?”
“It all turned out for the best,” James said heartily. “Annie had a decent portion, and she’s pretty enough. She eases me when we’re alone in the country together and doesn’t mind what I do in town. I couldn’t ask for a better wife.”
“Indeed. What more could a man want?” Edward asked. He even managed to sound sincere saying it.
But the answer to his rhetorical question rose unbidden in his mind. It was ridiculous to want Frederica Marshall. It didn’t matter how he dreamed of her at night; it didn’t even matter that he, apparently, did not disgust her, either. She was too intelligent to entangle herself with a man like him—and he was just foolish enough to want her anyway.
He was already in over his head. He didn’t mind that.
The danger was in telling himself lies. And the notion that he might have Frederica Marshall was the sweetest, most seductive lie he might have told himself. He wouldn’t give into that.
His brother burbled on—about his sons, his friends, about nothing in particular, helped on by a few judicious comments on Edward’s part. After a full quarter hour, James seemed to realize that he’d been monopolizing the conversation.
James took a long swallow of brandy and finally looked at Edward, squinting. “So,” he said. “What have you been doing with yourself all these years?”
“Running a metalworks in Toulouse,” Edward said smoothly. That much was true if James ever cared to look into the matter. His brother didn’t need to know any of the other things Edward had done.
But apparently, that was enough. James looked thunderstruck. “A metalworks! When you say running it—you mean you own it, but…”
“A fancy metalworks,” Edward smiled faintly. “If it makes you feel better. We do ornamental gates, fences, gratings for chapels. That sort of thing. And yes, I run it. I’m involved in all aspects of it.”
“You don’t actually mean that you do some of the…” James gestured futilely. “You know. The working. With metal.”
“Of course I do. I’ve always been artistically minded, and metal is just another medium.”
James did not ask any of the questions that Edward might have found uncomfortable, questions like How did you come to own a metalworks?
Instead, he took a long swallow of his brandy. “No wonder you disappeared. You told me you’d done things that reflected poorly on your honor, but I’d never imagined that you would take up a trade. Why, metalworking is practically…manual labor.” This was followed by another swallow of liquor, as if spirits were the only thing that could make metalworking tolerable.
“It is manual labor.” Edward tried not to let his amusement show. “However fancy the product might be.”
“Good God.” James drained his glass, frowned at the bottom of it.
“Here,” Edward said, reaching forward and picking up the glass. “Allow me to do the honors.” For one thing, standing and turning his back on his brother meant that James couldn’t see him try to hide his smile.
“I understand what you were getting at now,” James said. “I didn’t understand at all, when you came the other night. Couldn’t figure out why you’d agree to give up a viscountcy. But this makes sense of everything. We couldn’t have a laborer as viscount. What if people found out?”
Edward wouldn’t laugh. God, to be such a fool, imagining that manual labor was the worst a man could do. Running the metalworks was the most respectable thing Edward had managed in his years away. He had a sudden, wicked desire to show his brother his skills at forgery, just to see him choke. Instead, he filled his brother’s glass with brandy and turned b
ack.
“Here.” But as he returned, he knocked his foot against the rubbish bin, tipping it over. “My pardon.” He reached over and righted it, shifting the contents as he did. “How clumsy of me.”
He caught a glimpse of Miss Marshall’s masthead as he rearranged the papers. Just as he’d thought.
James waved this away. “I’m glad we had this chance to talk. I’ve been worried, to tell the truth. We were a bit at odds as children.”
An understatement.
“But I see that won’t persist. We’ve each found our place. You’re happy, are you not?”
Happier than ever, now that he’d found his way into James’s confidences. “I am,” Edward said. “And I, too, am glad we spoke. But I must be getting on. I won’t be in England much longer, and you’ve still work to do.”
“Of course.” A frown passed over James’s face. “Do you mean to stay here for the night?”
“Don’t be ridiculous. Of course not. The family can’t risk my recognition, can we?”
Relief flickered over his brother’s face.
Edward shrugged. “I’ve a room for the night in a place by the station. I’ll be taking the train back to London first thing tomorrow. Speaking of which, is that today’s Gazette?” He gestured to the rubbish bin.
“Yes.”
“They still print the rail schedules, don’t they? Mind if I take that copy from you and bring it along with me? It’ll save me from having to look up the timetables tomorrow morning.” Edward gestured toward the rubbish bin.
“Of course.” James reached for it himself, but Edward beat him in bending down. He picked up the entire jumbled sheaf of newspapers, rummaging through them with a little more clumsiness than necessary until he found the proper one. “Ah. Here we are.” He gave the newspaper a tug, rolled it up, and smiled at his brother. “Thank you. I’ll be out of England soon enough—business will take me back to France, I’m afraid.”
James made a face, as if business was a dirty word.
“But I’m glad we had a chance to speak.”
“Of course,” James said. “No matter what you’ve done, you’re still my brother.”