The Rose Bargain

Chapter Sixteen

I open my mouth and inhale a lungful of the Thames. My legs kick on instinct, but I don’t know which way is up, so I might be swimming deeper. The thought makes me panic. I whip my head around, but the darkness is so complete, I only disorient myself further.

My body coughs reflexively, and I suck in more sludge.

Then a beam of light breaks through the darkness. A strong pair of arms grabs me around the middle and hauls me to the surface.

Bram kicks at the boat with his strong legs, and I realize now that I was trapped under it.

I blink against the sudden light. My lungs are screaming. I roll to my side and vomit river water all over the dock. My eyes sting with the force of it. I suck in grateful breaths and try to slow the frantic beating of my heart.

Bram stands over me, looking concerned. He’s soaked to the bone. His hair is plastered to his forehead and his sweater clings to every curve of his torso. “Lady Ivy, are you all right?”

I try to respond, but only manage to wheeze in a shaky breath. Another wave of brown water comes pouring out of my mouth. I cough and cough, unable to catch my breath. Bram pounds me hard on the back a few times until my lungs expand enough to manage a gasp.

From the lawn, the music has stopped, and dozens of London’s high society players are staring at me, frozen with shock. The other girls and Viscountess Bolingbroke run down the dock to us.

“Give her space,”

Bram commands, and their footsteps stop immediately.

He leans down closer, so near I can feel the heat of his breath against the shell of my ear. “Let’s get you out of here.”

I wipe my eyes, acutely aware of how pathetic I must look, and nod in silent agreement.

Bram hauls me to my feet, and Greer rushes toward me to hold me steady on the other side.

My dress is sticking to every part of me, made unbearably heavy by the water. My hair, so artfully styled this morning, half hangs sodden down my neck. My straw hat is gone completely, bobbing sadly down the river.

I want nothing more than to rip off my soaked gloves, but I can’t risk revealing my bandages.

“I’ll help,”

Greer says over me to Bram. “Ivy and I are the best of friends, you know.”

I sputter again, and Bram claps me on the back. “Easy now, get it all out.”

I look up through a curtain of my wet hair at Greer, who has a smug look on her face. She knows as well as I do that ratting her out will only make me look bad. Throwing myself back in the river and floating to the nearest home county is tempting.

Together, Bram and Greer assist me into a carriage, Viscountess Bolingbroke nipping at their heels.

“I think it’d be best if I accompany her,”

Bram says. The viscountess purses her lips but knows she cannot deny a prince.

“Lady Greer will go too, for propriety,”

the viscountess replies.

Bram bows his head. “I insist upon it.”

He sighs and leans back against the walls of the carriage. “Thank you for giving me an excuse to get out of there. If I had to listen to one more person give their thoughts on which of you I should wed, I may have jumped into the Thames myself.”

Greer’s eyes meet mine. We’re both shocked at his sudden casualness. It’s as if a curtain has fallen and the real Bram is in front of us. He looks younger, his shoulders more relaxed.

“Thank you for coming to my rescue,” I say.

Bram flashes a half smile, showing off his single dimple. “Trust me when I say, anytime. Any body of water too—the sea, a lake, a particularly deep bathtub.”

The carriage rattles down a few more blocks. I’m shivering in my waterlogged dress but desperate not to show it. Bram’s clothes are wet too, but he doesn’t seem to mind.

“So, who are they saying?”

I ask after a moment.

Bram looks from the window to me. “Excuse me?”

“Who are they saying you should choose?”

I ask it with the lilt of a joke, but my curiosity really is killing me.

“I feel fairly sure that everyone is advocating for who they’ve put money on at the clubs. Lady Marion Thorne has the highest odds, but you, Ivy Benton, will bring the biggest payout.”

“That’s a kind way of saying everyone thinks I’m going to lose.”

I laugh, and Bram laughs along with me. I’m surprised to find that I love the sound of it, love this version of him, so unencumbered by the constant surveillance of the ton.

“Tell me, how did you two meet?”

Bram asks us.

Greer and I look to each other. “Ivy smashed my fifth birthday cake, and then her sister tried to smush it back together with her bare hands,”

Greer says. “She was . . . unsuccessful.”

And even with all the things I feel about Greer, I can’t help but smile at the memory: Lydia, Greer, and I all covered in pink icing on the floor. Greer smiles too, and it looks odd on this new face of hers, but I can still feel the echo of the girls we used to be, and for a heartbeat, I miss them.

“You have a sister?”

Bram asks.

“I do,”

I reply. “Lydia is a remarkably sparkly sort of person. Even at seven, she commanded the spotlight.”

Greer nods in enthusiastic agreement that I’m surprised to find genuine. “She was the star of every party she ever walked into. Ivy wasn’t quite as elegant and polkaed right into the French buttercream our cook had spent all week on. I sat down on the floor and wailed until Ivy scooped me up and placated me with a water ice. In Ivy’s defense, she felt terrible—still does. It’s been over a decade, and she still shows up on my step with a cake every year.”

Every year except for this year. She doesn’t say that part.

There’s a lot she doesn’t say, like how she and Lydia grew tired of my obsession with faeries when we were twelve. Lydia gave me a dressing-down about needing to stop acting like a baby, but Greer didn’t say a word, she just stopped showing up to play with me. All I knew was that one day I was making faerie court dresses out of flower petals with my sister and best friend and the next I was alone. They left me alone in the garden.

It felt so unlike her, I thought for the better part of a year that maybe she was a changeling. That would explain why we’d grown apart. I wrote my theories in a notebook I stole from Mama’s stash, like I was a detective.

Eventually I moved on. It was either play alone or play with Lydia and Greer: I chose the latter.

“You said was.”

Bram’s brows knit together in a question.

“What do you mean?”

Greer asks.

“You said Lydia was the star of every party.”

Greer glances at me nervously.

“She’s taken ill these past few months,”

I say quickly. “Her nerves have been poorly, and she’s been convalescing. I’m hopeful the season will prove an excuse for her to reenter society.”

Bram smiles warmly. “Lydia.”

He says her name slowly, like he’s committing it to memory. “I’d love to meet her, though I appreciate the warning to keep the Benton sisters away from any cakes.”

When we reach Caledonia Cottage, Bram shoos away the footman and helps me down from the carriage himself. I linger awkwardly as he looks down at me. I wish I could ask him to heal my hands again, the way he did the first day we met, but that would require an explanation of how the injuries came about, and I can’t do that.

He delivers me to the door, and I horrify poor Lottie for the second time today. She blushes deeply as she curtsies to him and rushes me upstairs. “What on earth happened?”

“I fell into the river.”

“Was it so he’d jump in and catch you?”

She cranes her neck to get a look at Bram through the window as his carriage pulls away. “That might be the handsomest boy I’ve ever seen.”

“It wasn’t like that,”

I grumble.

Once in dry clothes, I meet Greer downstairs for a late luncheon, both of us having missed the rest of the regatta party.

I know she didn’t hop into that carriage for my sake, but I still thank her, only to break the silence.

She plucks a sugar cube out of a porcelain bowl with delicate silver tongs, and an expression that might be shame comes over her. But I can’t be sure. I don’t know this new face of hers. I’m struck with the feeling that I haven’t known Greer in a very long time.

“Remember when we used to hide in the wardrobe during cotillion class?”

she asks softly.

We’d tuck ourselves behind piles of fabric and whisper about a made-up land where girls didn’t have to learn to sew and we could explore glaciers and volcanoes and forests on horseback. Her horse was snow-white, and she told me that mine was smaller, with brown spots, but in my head it was always golden. They had names, but I can’t remember them now.

If it was her governess who found us, we’d be scolded. If it was her mother, we’d be slapped.

“I do remember,”

I whisper back.

I remember everything. I remember everything so much I am being crushed under the weight of it all. If I weren’t so horribly defined by everything I’ve ever loved and lost, maybe I could be the kind of person who moved through life easily. I’m only eighteen, but I’m beginning to understand what my mother meant when she said, Remembering is heavy. It lasts so long.

I think, now, of Greer’s mother dragging her up to the dais and taking the knife to her hand the day of the Pact Parade.

I look at Greer and feel all that ugly resentment and love tangling together into a mess I can’t unknot.

I hate myself for how much I hate her. Why is it always like that with me? Why is it I can only hate people if I love them first?

“Do you want to win?”

I ask her.

“He seems kind.”

“He does,”

I agree. “But do you want to win?”

Her teeth worry her full bottom lip. She winces when she bites too hard and draws blood. “I have to win.”

It’s such a Greer answer. “You could say that’s true for any of us.”

She shakes her head sadly. “If you lose, at least your mother will look you in the eye again. Mine has promised I will be disowned.”

Knowing Greer’s mother, I doubt it’s a figure of speech.

We eat the rest of the meal in the silence of two people who no longer know how to talk to each other.

I’m dipping a dessert spoon into a carafe of cold pudding when she clears her throat.

“Do you remember Joseph?” she asks.

I dig through my memories. “The cook’s son? The one we used to chase around the walled garden?”

She’s got a far-off look in her eyes, one I can’t read. “He was kind.”

“I suppose so. Do you still see him?”

“He works in the stables now.”

“Greer,”

I say more forcefully, and she blinks a few times, coming back to herself. “Greer, do you still see him?”

We both know I’m asking more than that.

She takes another sip of tea, and her eyes go remote. “Of course I don’t.”

Sneaking out is easier than I thought it would be. Faith snores the moment her head hits the pillow, and Viscountess Bolingbroke takes to bed promptly at ten p.m.

Starlight is reflected in the long, rectangular pond running down the length of the garden, and I’m shivering as I wait. It’s been an unseasonably cool spring, and even my thickest cloak isn’t helping much.

I jump at every long shadow, every rustle of leaves in the dark, terrified I’ll find a snake, or a swan with razor teeth, or Queen Mor herself.

My hair is unbound around my shoulders, and beneath my cloak I’m wearing nothing but a nightdress. Faith is a heavy sleeper, but I didn’t want to press my luck.

A twig snaps as someone approaches. “Emmett?”

I whisper.

He steps out from the cover of rosebushes. “It’s Lottie’s night off. I’m sorry to make you meet me like this—I didn’t want you lost in the tunnels alone.”

I follow the dark silhouette of his shoulders through the orangery tunnels and up to his room.

He crosses the room to pull a quilt off his bed and wraps it around himself. A disgruntled Pig, who had been napping in said quilt, scrambles to get onto Emmett’s lap.

“Why is it so bloody cold in here?” I ask.

“Couldn’t risk having the servants discover us. I told them to stay out this evening, so no one has made the fire.”

“Why not make your own fire?”

I kneel at the hearth and pull away the grate.

Emmett hesitates.

“Oh my god.”

I laugh. “You don’t know how.”

“It’s not my fault!”

“Of course it is. Come here.”

I wave him over.

He relents with a groan and kneels next to me.

There’s a neat stack of firewood and a box of matches on the hearth. I point to them. “Give me three logs and those matches there.”

“No. See, I tried that already. The logs don’t light.”

I turn to him so he can see the full force of my eye roll. “You need kindling. Did your fancy tutors teach you nothing?”

“If you need an Old English text dissected, I am the boy for you.”

I pull a tangle of grease-soaked rags from the silver tinderbox on the mantel and arrange the logs over them. “Like this. You have to light something smaller first.”

He leans closer, the heat of him suddenly overwhelming despite the cold room.

Snick.

The rags go up in flames quickly, bathing his face in the glow of orange firelight.

He turns to me. “Do all the other daughters of marquesses know how to build fires?”

His voice has gone softer. I know what he’s really asking.

I look back toward the hearth. “Only the ones whose household staff had to be let go.”

At first it wasn’t that noticeable. The butler served us at dinner instead of the footmen. Then my mother’s lady’s maid got married and wasn’t replaced. Then the carriage was sold. Then the housemaids went, and things really started to fall apart.

Lydia and I learned to build our own fires, iron our own clothes, and darn our own socks while other girls were sewing lace with their governesses. My mother was very clear that we must keep the state of our household a secret. I hated lying. I never developed a stomach for it, so I let Lydia do it for me.

I straighten my back. “Back to the matter at hand. You and Faith. All your cards. I’d like to see them on the table now.”

He leans back on his hands and stares at the fire. “From the moment I heard this was the season the queen planned to marry Bram off, I knew I couldn’t leave it up to chance. I spent the better part of a year trying to find the perfect candidate. It’s actually what I was doing, that night we met. I was going to meet Christine Cambere, but she was all wrong.”

Everything that happened that night comes rushing back to me, the way he leaned his face in close to mine. You know, you’re really quite pretty.

No one had ever called me pretty. When they wanted to pay me a compliment, they’d say, You look like Lydia.

I don’t understand why I suddenly feel like crying. I smack him in the shoulder instead. “Is that why you asked to call on me?”

Is his rakish reputation just a clever misdirection, hiding his much riskier true motives?

“Yes.”

“You were never actually interested in me.”

“I’ll remind you, you rebuffed me. My ego never recovered.”

“Your ego seems just fine.”

I look away from him back to the fire, which is properly roaring now. The heat seeps into my bones.

“I knew Faith,”

he says. “I liked Faith. Faith’s father said she must marry this season, though the whole of that story is hers to tell. She asked me to be the one to do it, and I refused. Once I dodged the crystal goblet she threw at my head, I agreed to help her marry Bram instead.”

“Why didn’t you want to marry her?”

Emmett considers his words carefully. “Because I did not love her. Not like that.”

“So you agreed to help her marry your brother instead.”

“You make it sound so ugly.”

“Isn’t it? Manipulating your ex-lover and your brother like that?”

Emmett’s mouth is turned down in a frown as he feeds another log to the fire, which goes up in a shower of sparks.

“I never claimed to be good. It’s why Bram should be king. He’s so much better than me.”

“So you promised you’d help Faith win.”

“I did.”

“And now it has to be me.”

“It does.”

You could be queen. “All right, then. Help me.”

Emmett nods, all business now. “Bram loves strawberries, all fruit really, says it’s different from what grows in the Otherworld. His favorite color is green. He loves his horse, Mab, adores any type of competition. I think his ideal match will be someone who challenges him.”

“Did you tell Faith what bargain to make?”

Emmett shakes his head. “Even I have my moral limits. I couldn’t ask her to do that, not when I don’t believe in the system myself. And besides, what could she have asked for? She’s already the most beautiful girl in London.”

He’s right, but it stings to hear him say it.

“Did she make a bargain?” he asks.

“I’m not sure. She refused to tell us.”

Emmett laughs. “That sounds like Faith.”

“One more question.”

Emmett looks at me expectantly.

“Why are you and Bram so close? I imagine you’d have every reason to hate him. You hate his mother.”

Emmett’s eyes narrow, still looking at the fire. “I did hate him, at first. I was an absolute terror when he first arrived. We were both fourteen. I refused to acknowledge his existence, even as he tried to speak with me or join me for horseback rides or lessons. I know now how lonely he was back then, how scared, but at the time I could see him only as an extension of his mother. She doted on him, which only made my hatred stronger. Then one day, about a month after he arrived, a few of the other sons of noblemen and I were taking shooting lessons on the grounds. Some of the bigger boys liked to push me around, call me a bastard, nothing terribly creative. I’d never been much of a fighter, but I’d grown three inches that year and thought maybe it was time I stood up for myself. I ended up with three broken ribs and a black eye. They pummeled me. A footman had to carry me kicking and screaming back to my rooms before I let them knock me unconscious. Bram walked in a few minutes later, with torn clothes, a bloody knee, and a matching shiner. ‘I got the ones you missed’—that’s what he said to me. We were the same age, but he was so much bigger than me back then. I looked like a scrawny kid still, but Bram was nearly a man. I asked him why, and he said, ‘I won’t let them call my brother a bastard.’ I just laughed, even with the broken ribs. I couldn’t help it. And from that day on, we were inseparable.”

I can imagine it so clearly. “He’s a good person, then? As good as you say?”

“He’s better than good. He’s the best.”

“I need time with him,”

I say. “I’m never going to win if we don’t spend time together.”

“Then you have to learn how to flirt. I’m not leaving the future of the country in the hands of someone who thinks shrimp heads are romantic.”

“That’s not fair! You sprang that on me out of nowhere!”

Emmett levels me with a glance. “All right then, give it another go.”

“What?”

“Flirt with me.”

“Yuck.”

“For practice.”

He gives me a big grin. “Pretend I’m Bram.”

I look down at my feet, hesitating. I picture Bram, his kind eyes, perfect jawline, that single dimple. It makes me nervous just to think of him. “Um . . . how was your day?”

Emmett tips my chin up with a flick of his thumb. “Eye contact helps. You sound like you’re talking to your grandmother. Try again.”

“Have you read any good books lately?”

“Are you quizzing him?”

I throw my hands up in frustration. “You show me how to do it, then!”

He bends so we’re eye level, cocks his head slightly. His eyes flit down to my lips, then back to my eyes. “I never noticed your eyes before. They’re so beautiful.”

My stomach gives a sickening swoop. “Thank you. I grew them myself.”

He rolls his eyes and huffs in frustration. “We’re doomed.”

“I know you’re lying,”

I say. “No one ever compliments brown eyes.”

“People have no taste. Try again.”

“I want to get to know you better.”

Emmett puts his hands out in a so-so motion. “Touch my arm while you say it.”

I reach out and brush the inside of his wrist. “I want to get to know you better.”

He clutches his heart. “Oh, Ivy, I’m flattered.”

“Shut up.”

“People like honesty,”

he says. “It helps them feel closer to someone. There’s no quicker way to bond than with a secret. Tell me something.”

“You want a secret?”

It’s just like the maze all over again.

Emmett nods.

“I’m terrified. You said it yourself. The future of the whole country depends on me making him fall in love with me. What if I can’t do it? How will I live with myself if I doom everyone to her cruelty forever because I wasn’t charming or pretty enough?”

There’s a part I don’t say, that Emmett scares me too.

Emmett looks at me for a minute, really listens. “I’m not worried.”

“That makes one of us.”

He glances at the ticking clock on the mantel. “We should get you back. You need your rest.”

The door to the cottage is unlocked, and I climb the stairs on my tippy-toes so I don’t make any noise.

There’s a shadow moving in the darkness. Faith is sitting upright in bed.

“You little snake,”

she snarls. “I wonder how Bram will react when I tell him you were out all night.”

“Faith, please,”

I beg. “It’s not what you think.”

“Emmett can’t save you.”

“What do you want from me?” I croak.

“I want Emmett back.”

“He’s all yours. That’s not what this is.”

I don’t have the energy to fight her. I feel suddenly weak at the knees. The room tilts.

“Then what is it?”

It would be easier to be angry with her if she didn’t sound so broken. “I wish I could say,” I reply.

“Then we have nothing else to talk about,”

she snaps.

Her tone chills me. I crawl into bed, unable to stop shivering, and let an uneasy sleep pull me under.