Season for Scandal (28 page)

Audrina blinked. “But polite society is so critical of you now, yet you’re not caving. That takes bravery.”

Jane waved a hand, setting her cooling tea to quivering in its cup. “I didn’t think of society’s reaction when I decided to leave, so it doesn’t count. Honestly, I just cut and run. It would have taken far more bravery for me to make a go of my marriage. To try to earn my husband’s trust instead of just assuming I should have everything I wanted, all at once.” Her hand shook, and she set the teacup down on a small table at her side. “I didn’t mean to say that. I—I hadn’t thought of it that way before.”

Their marriage had foundered in its first storm, but they hadn’t built it very solidly to begin with. Why should they have expected it to sail along smoothly for the long term? Had either of them thought that far ahead? No, marriage had been an escape for them both.

“But you shouldn’t stay where you’re unhappy. Should you?” Audrina sounded as uncertain as Jane felt.

“Not if you’re in danger.” Jane squinted into the cool light filtering through the room’s tall windows. “I wasn’t in danger, though.”

No, she had simply been on a hunt for happiness. Only the real article would do: bright and pure. Something Edmund hadn’t a prayer of buying for her. “But if I had no idea how to find it myself, why should I expect that he would hand it to me?”

“How to find what?” Audrina asked.

Jane only realized she’d spoken part of her thoughts aloud when her friend replied. “Happiness,” she explained. “The best escape.”

“It would be, wouldn’t it?” Audrina sank against the sofa’s back again, a dreamy expression on her face.

For a few moments, the two friends let their thoughts unroll with the ticking of the mantel clock; then the earl’s daughter stood. “I’d better return home before the rest of my family gets back from church. Thank you for letting me talk to you, Jane.”

“Likewise.” Jane stood, shaking her hand in farewell. “Everyone else I’ve seen lately is a relative or a servant paid by a relative.”

“To be fair, your cousin
did
give me five pounds to call on you.”

“Ha.”

Audrina grinned. “I’ll try to call again soon.” And then she was gone, leaving Jane behind in the morning room.

The sudden silence seemed heavy and cold, and Jane busied herself with unnecessary tasks as her mind raced. She poured out dregs, stacked up teacups, poked up the fire, and wondered.

Wondered whether Audrina craved escape, with her questions about courage and money and Scotland. What did she want to escape from—or to?

She wondered the same for herself.

She couldn’t have dreamed so long of escape if she hadn’t had love to lean on. Her mother. Xavier. More recently, Louisa. They were so much a part of her life that she took them for granted, never doubting that if she left, they would welcome her back. And so there was no danger in thinking of running away. She had never done anything on her own: leaving Edmund for Xavier House, gambling with Sheringbrook wearing Xavier’s jewels—always, her plots and schemes depended on others to help her.

But Edmund didn’t have that foundation. He had left Cornwall as a boy and never returned. He had no one to rely on; nothing but himself. So he’d built that self up bright and strong, and he’d won Jane’s heart without even meaning to.

And for that, she had left him.

Never before had it occurred to her that she blamed Edmund for failing to make her happy. Yet she had told him, more than once, that he wasn’t responsible for how she felt. She shouldn’t put that burden on him. It didn’t belong anywhere except herself.

It was heavy, though; so heavy to admit that she had been wrong. Not wrong in loving, or wanting to be loved, but in giving up. Jane Tindall had never given up on anything; there was no reason for Jane Kirkpatrick to be a poorer creature.

She sank onto the trellis-patterned carpet before the hearth, hands extended to catch the fire’s warmth.

Two days ago, she and Edmund had talked frankly at last. They’d lanced wounds. Gotten angry with one another. She couldn’t love him anymore for being her white knight, pure of heart. He was selfish and jealous and high-handed; no better inside than other men.

But. She could love him for something different. Better. Real. Because no matter what he felt inside, he chose to give the world his best. Even when it was a matter of determination more than desire, he pieced together goodness after goodness, leaving people the better for being around him.

And because of this, she—selfish and jealous and high-handed herself—had a new world of reasons to love him.

With a world of reasons, though, there was no place to hide from what she wanted. No way to escape her desperate longing for him to return that love.

She pushed herself to her feet. Enough. Enough, now. She must think of what she had that was good. Of the love she possessed. Though she had once thought he took her with nothing, that she was irretrievably in his debt, she brought more to their marriage than she had realized.

To one side of the morning room stood a fine-grained walnut writing table. The black chess queen stood at the corner, watching her fruitless fidgets.

Jane strode to the table, drew a sheet of paper toward her, dipped a quill, and began a letter. “We’re playing a different sort of game now,” she told the chess queen.

My dear mother
, she scrawled.
As Christmas draws near, I am wishing you very happy. I know you prefer not to travel to London, so I shall send Christmas to you. Kirkpatrick and I chose this lace for you . . .

Writing his name was a tiny, harsh pleasure. And writing to her mother, who would enjoy the rare letter very much, was a pleasure, too. A sweet one, as Jane imagined Mrs. Tindall’s ruddy face lighting up, knowing her only child was thinking of her.

Jane continued her letter for a cheerful page, omitting the news of her recent scandal. Ringing for a servant, she asked that the finished letter be bundled with the lace she’d chosen weeks earlier. If sent now, it would reach Mytchett before Christmas.

She wouldn’t spend Christmas with her mother, but she loved her homely, contented mother no less for the distance between them, or for their differences. They had each found a world to live in that they liked.

And even though, in the whole of the
beau monde
, only a few people would speak with her, Jane didn’t feel as though her life was small anymore after all.

“Your sandwiches, my lord.”

“Thank you, Pye.” The week’s long sessions in the House of Lords had put Edmund behind on his correspondence, and he intended to spend this drizzly Sunday afternoon catching up on the papers that cluttered his desk.

Instead of leaving the study after depositing the tray, Pye remained standing by Edmund’s desk. The butler was far too well-mannered to fidget, but the tension of his posture fairly shouted of strain.

Edmund set down the penknife with which he’d been sharpening his blunt quills. “Something you wish to tell me, Pye?”

“I don’t wish to speak out of turn, my lord.”

Edmund laid down his quill as well and fixed the butler with his full attention. “Please. Speak freely. Is something amiss?”

The butler took a step forward. “Not as such, my lord. I simply wondered whether we—that is, the household staff and myself—might be expecting Lady Kirkpatrick to return often. If so, we can make appropriate arrangements for her comfort.”

“I have no idea.” Edmund pinched the bridge of his nose, expecting to ward off a headache at the thought of Jane.

But it didn’t come. And the plate of sandwiches looked good. He took one and studied it: thick, indelicate slabs of bread, ham, and cheese. When he bit into it, the salty-smoked flavors seemed like the first food he’d ever eaten. Instead of rebelling with a twist of pain, his stomach growled for more.

“Very good, Pye,” he said, once he’d swallowed his massive bite. “My compliments to the cook.”

As the butler turned to leave, Edmund added, “Pye, as to your earlier question.”

“My lord?”

“I don’t know what Lady Kirkpatrick plans, or how often she might return. But I think she’ll call again.”

The butler’s mouth twitched. What a red-letter day this was turning out to be. “Very good, my lord. I shall see to her ladyship’s comfort when next she calls. Might we also put up a bit more greenery to mark the holiday?”

“Make it mistletoe,” Edmund agreed. “In every doorway, if you please.”

No one could refuse a kiss under mistletoe. Why, last year, at Xavier’s house party, Jane had almost smothered him with kisses under a berry-covered branch.

He’d thought she was young and eager and wild. He hadn’t known she loved him then. If he had, he could have been wiser.

When Pye bowed himself out, Edmund stuffed the rest of the sandwich into his mouth. So. His butler had almost smiled at the idea of Jane’s return. The servants liked her, didn’t they?

Hell.
He
liked her, and the house seemed empty now that she was gone. But less so than it had earlier, before she had called.

He didn’t know what she was doing with her time now that she was living apart from him. But that not-knowing didn’t lead, as Turner had vowed, to not-trusting. He trusted Jane not to betray him in the physical sense.

Turner had failed, as always, to account for human decency. Within her family, Jane had the reputation of being a terror, yet she was good through and through. Loving. Thoughtful. Honest. The opposite of Edmund himself, whom everyone thought of as good and who came from stock as dirty as a pig farmer’s trousers.

Which reminded him: his steward in Cornwall, Browning, had sent the requested parcel. It squatted in the chair across Edmund’s desk, where he had been ignoring its presence for days. No more.

Dusting his hands off, he rose from his seat and looked down at the paper-wrapped package. Time to learn whether Turner had been telling the truth.

He sliced the string with a penknife, then unfolded the paper to reveal a stack of small leather-bound volumes. His father’s date books. He had hoped they were still located in the ancestral home somewhere, and the capable Browning had located them. It looked like he’d sent the former baron’s notes from all of the 1790s.

It was distasteful to think of one’s own conception, or the conception of one’s sisters. How much Edmund would rather pretend that his generation alone was sexual; that the human race had, until his birth, sprung from flowers or been dropped from the sky.

Unfortunately, he could not. Someone had fathered his sisters. And Edmund turned the pages of the date books to see whether that person could have been the late Lord Kirkpatrick. The baron had kept careful account of his travel; he was often in London for the Season, or with friends in the Home Counties, where the hunting was easy and the land was soft and gentle.

The records showed that the baron had been gone a great deal of time. Oh, it wasn’t impossible that he had fathered Catherine and Mary. Babies came in their own time, and he had been at home some time between ten and eight months before the birth of each of Edmund’s sisters.

But did they resemble the late lord? Edmund’s eyes were like his father’s, blue as the sky never was in London. His mother’s, too, were light. Turner had dark eyes.

What about Mary and Catherine? He couldn’t remember.

He shut the book and looked at its black-leather cover, tooled in a pattern of scrollwork. A great
K
was chased in gilt in the center of the cover. Here was the year 1794 as his father had lived it, so distant in time and memory as to bear no relation to anyone Edmund had known. He had been only four years old. Tutored by the ever-present Turner, already sopping up history and language. Ignorant of, oblivious to, the man’s true nature, or his mother’s feelings.

Maybe Edmund hadn’t wanted to return to Cornwall because he hadn’t wanted to see how much his mother missed Turner. Maybe he hadn’t wanted to see the sorrow on her face—not for the husband who had died, but for the lover who had left.

Since Jane had left him, Edmund felt he had gotten a taste of that sorrow. She had wanted escape more than she wanted him, despite her profession of love. In the end, he knew, she hadn’t loved him enough to stay. Just as he knew his parents had not loved each other, or their children, enough to do right by one another. Their family ties were coarse and brittle, nothing but habit.

Such knowledge destroyed a family—but what did it do to an individual? It had eaten away Edmund’s insides; it had robbed him of sleep.

But it had not destroyed him.

He hadn’t always been happy. He hadn’t always been sensible. But overall, he’d been . . . decent. As a boy, he’d done his best, just as he strove to now. He wanted to do right by everyone, especially those who relied on him. He just didn’t always know how.

Jane was certainly proof of that.

He made a stack of the date books and slid the pile to the corner of his desk. For a moment he simply stood, lost in thought.

Then he took a candlestick in hand and made his way up to the attic, where the family portraits were stored.

Chapter 21

Concerning a Portrait

Jane had spent the first weeks of her marriage learning the Berkeley Square house. For all her exploration, though, she’d never ventured to the attic of the building that had so briefly been her home. There had always been enough to occupy her on the floors below.

But Pye had said Edmund was up here. And so, on this chilly Sunday afternoon, she would be, too.

Her heeled slippers clattered on the wooden treads of the stairs. The flight was narrower here than on the ground floor, or the first or second. An upper landing took a rectangular bite from the rear corner of the attic. Along the front of the house, door after door indicated where servants’ chambers had been portioned out. At this hour, they were busy about their work or enjoying a half day out, and the space was utterly quiet.

Turning, she faced the back of the house. Two more small chambers had been divided off here. Beyond them, stretching back to the corner of the house, was a chaotic tangle of cast-off furniture, piled draperies, and leaning stacks of paintings.