The Countess Conspiracy (21 page)

Sebastian knew his brother had a heart complaint, and he’d angered him anyway. God, he knew better than that. He’d just…forgotten. He
hated
losing his temper. It made him forget everything important.

He was more than what his brother thought—not just a jester, not just a man who made people laugh. But Benedict was right. At heart, Sebastian had never wanted to be more than the man who made people smile. Every time he forgot that, the people he loved paid the price.

He
had
accomplished things—but he was also the man who’d spent three years crossing flowers, hoping to find something profound, reaping only confusion instead.

Benedict’s face twisted in agony; his hand drifted to his abdomen.

That’s what comes of being serious. You know better than that.

He stepped forward. “Stop,” he said gently. “Stop. You’re right. I’m sorry.” He reached out and brushed his brother’s shoulder. “Don’t get angry. I don’t want you to get angry.”

Benedict flexed his fingers into a fist. “Damn my heart. If I can’t yell at my brother…” He grated those words out, as if speaking through pain. “If I can’t yell at my little brother, there’s no point in living.”

Sebastian shook his head. “Here—sit down. Sit down now. I’ll go get the doctor.”

“It’s nothing,” Benedict muttered, but he sat heavily, his fist balled against his leg, pressing hard as if to ward off pain. “It’s nothing at all. Just a touch of indigestion.” He took a deeper breath. “It’ll pass,” he said. “But…” His eyes drifted shut.

“Right,” Sebastian said softly. “Now is not a good time to talk.”

But he knew what he was really saying.

There would never be a good time to talk. The gap between them could never be bridged; Benedict would never respect him.

It didn’t matter. Sebastian respected himself—so much so that he didn’t need his brother’s approval to continue. It didn’t matter how little his brother valued the skill. So long as Sebastian kept Benedict smiling, he’d account himself a success.

And if Benedict didn’t think much of him for it…well, at least he’d be smiling.

“
U
NCLE
S
EBASTIAN,” A SMALL VOICE SAID
from the stairwell as Sebastian descended. “What is happening to my father?”

Sebastian looked down. Harry sat on a chair in the entry. It was an adult’s chair, and his legs didn’t quite reach the ground. He sat, his arms folded, waiting patiently as Sebastian had never been able to do at that age. His nephew’s dark hair spilled in every direction; his expression was set in childish worry.

“Why were you and Papa yelling at one another?” Harry looked scared.

“Because we couldn’t agree,” Sebastian finally said. “Sometimes it happens. People can’t agree.”

Harry slid off the chair. He was clutching a wooden horse. He slowly came up the steps until he met Sebastian halfway. With Sebastian on the upper step, it made Harry seem even smaller than he was, barely higher than Sebastian’s knees.

“Are you going to go away and never come back?” he asked.

“No.”

Another pause. “Is Papa going to die?”

“Why…” Sebastian licked his lips. “Why would you ask that?”

“Because the doctor comes so often. He did that last year with Mama.”

It wasn’t Sebastian’s place to tell Harry about his father’s illness. But he couldn’t bring himself to lie, either. “Ask your papa,” he finally said.

Harry’s face crumpled. “That means yes.”

“Shh.” Sebastian sat down on the steps next to his nephew, removing that awful difference in their heights. “It will all work out, somehow.” He let out a breath. “I’ve been making your father angry these last few weeks, and that isn’t good for him.” He looked up. He didn’t know what to make of his brother anymore, didn’t know what was right, except that yelling wouldn’t change anything. “I’m not going to do that anymore,” he promised. “That will help. Don’t cry.”

“I’m not,” Harry said.

And he wasn’t. His shoulders shook convulsively, but he didn’t let out so much as a sob.

“I’m not crying,” Harry repeated. “Papa said men don’t cry, and so I’m not crying now.”

Don’t be ridiculous,
Sebastian thought of saying.

Or:
Crying is allowed when you’re sad.

But Benedict wouldn’t appreciate Sebastian’s interference with his parenting, and in the end, Harry was Benedict’s child. It was his decision, no matter what Sebastian thought of it.

“Right,” Sebastian said, sliding his arm around Harry. “Good. You’re not crying. I’m here, not crying with you.”

“
V
IOLET,”
L
ILY SAID,
taking her sister’s hands. “How did you know that I needed you so?”

They were in Lily’s private study, the door locked. Lily had threatened her children with tarring and feathering if they interrupted her within the next hour, which meant they had at most fifteen minutes. Lily sat at her desk, her eyes wide and beseeching.

Violet hadn’t known. She’d needed Lily—needed to be reminded that someone needed her, if only to talk sternly to Frederick about how the dignity of his tin soldiers could not be upheld if they continued to conduct excursions in his chamber pot. With Lily, she served a purpose, a real one.

Violet folded her hands.

“Help me,” Lily said. “This is more than any mother can bear.”

“What is wrong?” If one of Lily’s children had been ill enough to occasion concern, surely she would have sent for Violet already.

“Look what I found in Amanda’s things.” Lily’s hands were shaking as she took a key from the ring in her pocket and unlocked the drawer of her desk.

Suddenly, Violet had a very bad feeling about what Lily was about to produce.

“This.” Lily pulled out a volume. “
This.”
Her voice trembled.

It was only with great effort that Violet kept the emotion from her face. “Pride and Prejudice,” she said calmly. “And a first edition at that. Good heavens. Those have become quite valuable now. Did a suitor give it to her? You’re right. She never should have accepted such a thing from a man, no matter how thoughtful the gift. She’ll have to return it.”

Not lies. Not the truth, either, but none of it was outright falsehood.

“Open it.” Lily looked away. “Just…open it.”

Violet did, even though she knew what she would see. It wasn’t the frontispiece of Pride and Prejudice.

The Higher Education of Women, by Emily Davies.

Violet looked up into her sister’s eyes. “Emily Davies,” she said so calmly that she’d never have known how her own heart raced, had she not felt it beating wildly in her chest. “I have not heard of a novelist by that name.” Also true; the Emily Davies Violet knew wrote essays, not novels. “Does she write improper fiction?”

“She’s not a novelist,” Lily spat. “She’s one of those…awful women. She writes about the rights of women.”

“Oh. Dear me.”

“I knew you’d understand. My own daughter has been sneaking about with that sort of subversive literature! She won’t tell me which of her friends gave it to her. I don’t know who is attempting to lead her astray. It’s not enough that she’s harboring such vile thoughts; it has made her tell me falsehoods.”

“Falsehoods?” Violet said. “Surely she did not tell actual
lies.”

“As good as,” Lily said scornfully. “Truths designed to mislead are just as bad as lies.”

Violet licked her lips. “She loves you, you know. She’s not sly by nature. Maybe she felt you’d not be open to having such a discussion.”

“Well, of course she thought that! I’m
not
open to such conversation. Who would be? Nobody of good family. This talk of higher education may be an unfortunate necessity for women who cannot obtain a respectable offer, but Amanda is not in that situation.”

Violet didn’t say anything.

“You and I,” Lily said, “we understand. The female sphere is not lesser, merely because it is relegated to the weaker sex. We may not be as strong as men, as clever as men, but we have our purpose. To have Amanda shirk that…”

“Purpose,” Violet said ruefully. And then, after a pause, “Remind me what that is again?”

Lily looked at her sister. For a moment, she simply looked, as if only now remembering that Violet had neither children nor husband. As if wondering how she would be able to look her sister in the eye after telling her flat-out that she served no purpose.

“This is why I love you,” Lily said awkwardly. “Because no matter what our outward differences may be, you still understand me. You know what is in my heart, just as I know what’s in yours.”

Violet sat in frozen silence, scarcely able to nod in reply. She’d always known she had to mislead Lily in order for her sister to love her. Not just about her activities or her thoughts; she had to lie about everything.

It had never occurred to her that Lily—warm, sweet, open Lily—was lying to her, too. That Violet wanted her to do it, because even the illusion of love was preferable to the utter lack of it.

“When I find the fiend who gave my daughter that dreadful material,” Lily was saying, “I’ll ruin him. Or her. That sneaking, lying, selfish, false-faced coward.”

She was lying to Lily. She was lying to Sebastian. She was lying to everyone who mattered to her.

She had no idea what she said to end the interview, how she took leave of her sister. It began to drizzle on the way home; she heard the drops against the roof of her carriage. She was met with an umbrella at her home and ushered into the warm interior, but she didn’t belong there either.

She wandered from room to room, her eyes moving from the false versions of
La Mode Illustrée
that she used to hide her inclinations from prying eyes to the knitting she used to make herself look innocuous.

She’d only begun to knit because her father had banished her from his gardens. Even her knitting was a lie, an illusion of calm industriousness that she used to hide all her internal turmoil.

Everything about her was a lie. And with good reason—the truth was so very ugly.

So ugly that even Violet shrank from it in cowardice.

She changed to a simple gown and slipped out to her greenhouse. The rain had begun to pour down, but she didn’t take an umbrella. The cold, fat drops that pelted her skin seemed a just punishment.

Even her work was a lie. It wasn’t hers; nobody recognized it as such. And doing it was pointless, since nobody would present it any longer. She’d been lying to herself these last weeks.

She looked down.

Soaking seeds, trying to coax them to germinate? That illusion of fertility was the biggest lie of them all.

She was a blacksmith’s puzzle without a solution. Her faults never lay in the beginning of her acquaintances, but at the end—when she drove everyone who cared for her away. It was only a question of how long it took them to ferret out the truth.

Nothing was what she was; nothing was what she gave to those foolish enough to care for her. Nothing was what she deserved, and so nothing had been what she got. It didn’t matter how hard she tried or what she did.

At the end of the day she was a selfish, pointless, lying coward.

She put her hands over her ears, but no matter how she tried, she couldn’t make that whisper go away. It wasn’t a voice, after all. It was just her own memory, and Violet’s memory was a harsh, terrible thing.

She couldn’t make it go away. She couldn’t prove herself wrong. Maybe, it was time to demonstrate how right she was. Deep down, she had always known that if anyone knew the truth…

Well. Even Sebastian would know how impossible it was to care for her. Violet took all the feelings that she’d packed away, all the hurts and lost desires, the things she dared not let herself feel.

And she wanted. She wanted to be held so badly that it hurt. She wanted someone to say that she was wrong, that she mattered. She wanted to stop lying.

Outside, thunder rumbled. Violet knocked a row of empty pots to the ground. They broke into useless shards, stinging her skin. Rain was falling in such quantity that she could scarcely see her back-garden wall. She doubted Sebastian would be in his garden, not in this downpour.