This Wicked Gift (9 page)

Lavinia shut the account book in front of
her. “If it weren’t for your mistakes,” she said, her voice shaking, “we’d be
having a real celebration on Christmas, just like Mother gave us. It would be
as if she were not gone. Now we’re having nothing. Why do you suppose I’m
staring at the accounts, if not to conjure up the coins you lost?”

His face flushed with embarrassment and
anger. “I
 
said I was sorry
already. What more do you want from me? You’re not my mother. Stop acting as if
you are.”

“That’s not fair. I’m just trying to make
you happy.” She wasn’t sure when her voice had started to rise, when she had
begun to clench her hands.

Her brother shook his head. “You’re doing
a bang-up job of that, then. So far, all you’ve managed to do is make me
miserable.” He stomped away. He couldn’t get far; the flat was simply too
small. He paused on the edge of his chamber, and then turned. “I despise you,”
he said. A second later the door to his chamber slammed. The walls rattled.

Lavinia curled her arms around herself. He
didn’t hate her. He wasn’t miserable. He was just…momentarily upset?

“One day,” she said softly, “you will
understand how idyllic your childhood has been. You have nothing to worry
about. That’s what I’ve saved you from.”

She clenched her hands around the account
book, the leather binding biting into her palms. Then she opened the book
carefully and found the spot where she’d left off adding columns.

Fifty-three and
fifteen made sixty-six….

E
VERY TIME
 
L
AVINIA
AWOKE
 
that
night, tossing and turning in her narrow bed, she remembered her words to
William.
 
You
thought you had forced me, and thus you dishonored yourself
. She
could call to mind the precise curl of his mouth as he’d realized what he’d
 
done, the exact shape of his hands as
he grasped the dimensions of his dishonor.

She had wanted to lessen his hurt, but
she’d made it worse.

All you have
managed to do is make me miserable.
 
Not William’s
words, but they seemed to apply all the same.

No, no, no. Lavinia stood and walked to
her window. Thick, choking fog filled her vision. It was past midnight, and
thus it was now Christmas Eve. But it was not yet near morning. The night fog
was so thick it would swallow an entire troupe of players juggling torches. It
could easily hide one nineteen-year-old woman who didn’t want to be seen. She
 
would
 
make William feel better. She had to.

Silently she opened her bedroom door. She
crept out into the main room and removed her cloak from its peg. She found her
boots with her toe, and then bent to pick them up. Slowly she crept down the
not-quite-creaking stairs, and across the lending library. And then she was
outside, the fog enshrouding her in its cold embrace.

Lavinia lifted her chin, put on her boots
and walked. In the few nights before Christmas, a musicians’ company sent men
on the streets to play through the darkness of night. There were no players
anywhere near her house, of course, but in these quiet hours before dawn, the
haunting sound of twin recorders came to her in tiny snatches. The sound wafted
through the fog like fairy music. She’d catch a bar, but before
 
the melody resolved itself into a
recognizable tune, it slipped away, melting into the fog like the shadow of a
Christmas that had not yet come.

As she walked through the engulfing mist,
those enchanted notes grew fainter and fainter. By the time she reached Norwich
Court, they had disappeared altogether.

When she arrived at his home, she realized
she had no key to unlock his door. Surely, his chamber was too distant for him
to hear her knock.

A little thing like impossibility had
never stopped Lavinia.

She was systematically testing the windows
when the creak of a door opening sounded behind her.

“Lavinia?”
His voice.

She turned, her stomach churning in
anticipation at the sound of her name on his lips. He stood, four feet away
from her, his form barely visible through the fog. She jumped down from her
uncomfortable perch on the windowsill, and would have run into his arms—but
he’d crossed them in a most forbidding manner. Instead, she walked slowly
toward him, her heart pounding.

“You must be freezing.” His words reeked
of disapproval. “Thank God I couldn’t sleep again. Thank God you didn’t meet
anyone on your way over. If you were my—”

She had come close enough that she saw the
scowl flit over his face at that. He shut his mouth and turned away, walking
into the house.

She followed. “If I were your
 
wife,
”
she threw at his retreating back, “I wouldn’t need to risk all this fog just to
see you on a morning.”

He didn’t respond. But he left the door
open, and she went after him. This time, he had not climbed the stairs to his
bedchamber. He was headed down a narrow cramped hall into the back of the
house. Lavinia sighed and closed the door behind her.

She was not his wife. She was not even
anything to him
so
clean and uncomplicated as his
sweetheart. She was the woman who’d made his life miserable. Still, she
followed him down the hall. The narrow passage gave way to a tiny kitchen in
the back of the house. Without looking at her, he pulled a chair out from under
a narrow, wooden table and placed it directly by the hearth. She sat; he stoked
the fire and then placed a kettle on the grate.

For a long while he only stared into the
orange ribbons that arched away from the flames. The dancing light painted his
profile in glimmering yellow. His lips pressed together. His eyes were hooded.
Then he shook his head and stabbed the coals with a poker. Bright sparks flew.

“If you were my wife,” he finally said,
“this moment would be a luxury—enough coal of a morning to heat the room.”

He shook his head, set the poker down and
turned away. William moved about the tiny room with the efficiency of a man
used to dealing for himself. He set
 
out
a pot and cups, and then turned back to her. “If you were my wife, you’d take
your bread without butter. You would mend your gloves three, four, five times
over, until the material became more darn than fabric. And when the babes came,
we’d have to remove from even these tiny and insupportable quarters into a part
of London that is even less safe than this address. We’d have no other way to
support a family.”

“When the babes came?” Those words sent a
happy thrill through her.

He turned to contemplate the fire again.
“I am not such a fool as to imagine they wouldn’t.
Lavinia,
if you were my wife, the babes would come.
And come. And come. I
couldn’t keep my hands off you. I pray one is not already on the way.”

It was not her fog-dampened cloak that
left her chilled. He spoke of putting his hands on her as if she were one
more bitter
sip from a cup that was already starkly devoid
of happiness.

“It would be worth it,” she said quietly.
“The gloves.
The bread.
It would be
worth it to me for the touch of your hands alone.”

“Is that why you came here this morning?”
He spoke in tones equally low to hers. “Did you come here so that I would touch
you?”

Yes.
 
Or she’d come to
touch him—to see if she could salvage the moment when he’d thought himself
dishonored. He’d said once he had no notion of love. She’d wanted to show him.

“Did you come thinking I would kiss your
lips? That I would undo the ties of your cloak and let my hands slide down your
skin?”

Her body heard, and it answered. The heat
of the fire flickered against her neck; she imagined its warm touch was his
hands. She imagined his hands tracing down her cheek; his hands cupping the
curve of her bodice and warming her breasts; his hands coaxing her nipples into
hard points. She ached in tune with his every word. Her breath grew fast.

He knelt on the floor in front of her, one
knee on the ground. With that frozen, almost supercilious expression on his
face, his posture seemed a gross parody of a proposal of marriage.

“In the year since I first saw you,” he
said, “I have imagined
your
giving yourself to me a
thousand times. If these were my wildest dreams, I’d have you now.
On that chair.
I would spread your legs and nibble my way
from your thigh to your sex. I’d slip inside you. And when I’d had my way with
you, I would thank the Lord for the bruises on my knees.”

As he spoke, her legs parted. Her sex
tingled. His breath quickened to match hers.
 
Do it. Yes, do it.

He reached out one hand and laid it on her
knee. It was the first time he’d touched her all morning, and her whole body
thrilled in wicked recognition of his. She leaned forward. For one eternal
second, she could taste his breath, hot and masculine, on the tip of her
tongue. She stretched to meet him. But before her lips found his, he stood.

“Lavinia.”
His
words sounded like a reproach. “I can’t have you in dishonor. I can’t have you
in poverty. And so I will not be marrying you.”

She stared up into his eyes. Those dark
mahogany orbs seemed so far away, so implacable. She
 
had
 
to fix this. But before she could
speak, a hissing, sputtering noise intruded from her left, and he turned away
from her.

It was the kettle, boiling with
inappropriate merriment over the fire. He found a cloth. For a few minutes, he
busied himself with the kettle and teapot, his back to her.

When he finally turned back, he held a cup
in his hands.

“Here,” he said.
“The
very nectar of poverty.
Five washings of the leaves.
I believe the liquid still has some flavor.” He handed it to her.
“There’s no sugar. There’s never any
sugar.”

She took the cup. He pulled his hand away
quickly, before she could clasp it against the clay. In her hands, the warm mug
radiated heat. Tiny black dots, the dust of broken tea leaves, swirled in the
beverage.

“You don’t speak like a poor man.” She
darted a gaze up at him. “You don’t
 
read
 
like
a poor man, either. Malthus.
Smith.
Craig.
 
The
Annals of Agriculture.
”

He turned away from her to pour his own
cup of tea. He did not drink it. “When I was fourteen, my father, a tradesman
who aspired to be more, engaged in some rather risky speculation. A friend of
his had lured him in. He promised to see me through my schooling, and
 
to settle some significant amount on
me should the investment fail.”

William lifted the mug to his mouth. But
he barely wet his lips with the liquid. “The investment did fail—quite
spectacularly. My father shot himself. And his
 
friend
—”
he drew that last word out, a curl to his lip “—thought that a promise made to
a man who killed himself was no promise at all. What little property remained
was forfeit when he was adjudged a suicide. And so down I went to London, to
try and make shift for myself.”

“Where did all this take place?”

“Leicester. I still have the edge of their
speech on my tongue. I’ve tried to eradicate it, but…”

He looked down, moving his cup in gentle
circles. Perhaps he was trying to read his own tea leaves. More likely, Lavinia
thought, he was avoiding her gaze.

“So you see
,
I am
in fact the lowest of the low. I am the son of a suicide. I make a bare
eighteen pounds a year. I was once a member of that unfortunate class that your
lovely books label the deserving poor. After I had you—after I took to my bed a
woman I could not afford to marry—I don’t qualify as deserving any longer. Even
if I had the coin to take you as my wife, I don’t think I’d have the temerity.”

Lavinia
stood,
the better to knock sense into his head.

But already he was setting down his tea,
stepping away from her.

“It’s getting on toward morning,” he said.
“I’d best get you home.” And then he turned toward the hall and left her.

W
ILLIAM WALKED DOWN
 
the hall. He had
made the matter as plain as he dared to her. She’d wanted to argue—he’d seen it
in her eyes. Her words could have tied him in knots.
And
having to watch her deliver those arguments—having to hold his distance from
her when every fiber in his being yearned toward her—had been almost
impossible.
But she had no way to debate straightforward gestures. He
hid behind those unarguable motions now. He got his coat. He walked to the
door. He opened it, and stood there in silence until she came from the kitchen.