Chapter 18 #2
The scene played again and again in my head—Mrs. Rawlings’s haughtiness, her superiority, her downright hatred of me. It all made sense now, why she’d treated me so. She’d assumed I was a woman of loose morals intent on entrapping her son.
But to bring back the rumors to torment me yet again .
. . Had Clarissa’s falsehoods not ruined my life enough?
Now they had to poison Mrs. Rawlings against me as well.
Because no matter what I or Alexander said, I would not be surprised in the least if she still doubted we were telling the truth.
I was a seductress, after all. Perhaps I’d tricked her son into lying for me.
I could certainly see her convincing herself to believe that.
I wrestled with the darkness that grasped and clawed at my mind.
I’d hoped for so long that one day I might escape my past, that I could create a future free from that bitterness.
Now though . . . Now it seemed impossible, when women like Mrs. Rawlings wielded my ruined reputation like a broadsword.
It was cold, my feet wet, and my shoulders soaked through, but I refused to go inside. I would not go where I was not wanted.
Eventually, I heard Alexander’s footsteps. He came down the stairs alongside the canal and found me there on my bench, as if he’d known all along that I’d be here. He did not come sit beside me. Instead, he stood there, hands at his sides, looking at me with the strangest restlessness in his eyes.
“I shouted at my mother,” he said.
I said nothing, only gripped the marble under my fingers harder.
“I’ve never raised my voice to her in all my life.” He shook his head. “Though she’s certainly deserved rebukes in the past. But she went too far today.”
“She is very protective of you,” I said stiffly. “Such a trait in a mother is to be commended.”
“Not when she attacks someone entirely innocent.”
A few raindrops fell on me from the tree above, and I shivered, a chill climbing my spine. Alexander moved to me, shrugging out of his jacket and settling it around my shoulders. It was warm, far too big, and smelled of him.
He sat beside me and eased my left hand free of the bench, my fingers bent into rigid claws. “We should go inside. You’re near to frozen.”
I shook my head. “I cannot.”
His hand curved around mine. “Then give me your other hand.”
I allowed him to take it, having no argument left in me. He took my hands between his larger ones and rubbed them until heat built under my skin, warming me.
I watched him as he coaxed life back to my fingers. “Thank you,” I said simply, my mouth suddenly dry. “For defending me.”
His lips flattened into a slash, his eyes shadowed pools. “I should not have needed to.”
“Still,” I said.
We sat there in the quiet, dripping stillness, the water running under the balustraded bridge just a few steps away. After a minute, his hands stopped moving over mine.
“I do not wish to try to excuse her actions,” he said, his brogue soft, “but I do feel that you are owed some truths about my family and me. If you’ll allow me.”
I gazed at him, feeling the gentle tenderness of his hands around mine. I nodded.
He swallowed. “You know that I lived here as a child but that I also spent many years in Scotland. But I’ve never told you why.”
“No,” I said. “You never have.”
His thumb ran over the line of my knuckles, his touch raising bumps along my skin.
“My grandfather,” he began, “made his money in trade. He built this house, determined to propel our family to new heights and join the ranks of England’s most elite.
He depended on my father to make a good match, to force our family to be accepted.
“But my father had other plans. He fell in love with my mother, though she was but the daughter of an apothecary, and married her against my grandfather’s will.” Alexander paused. “I have only the barest memories of my father. He died when I was four years old.”
My fingers tightened around his. “I am sorry.”
Alexander went on as if he hadn’t heard me. “My grandfather hated my mother. He made his opinion quite clear. After my father died, Grandfather took over the entirety of my upbringing, employing stern and harsh governesses, refusing to let me see my mother but rarely.”
Sympathy tore at my heart—how hard that must have been, for the both of them—but I resisted it. I was still too angry at Mrs. Rawlings to feel sorry for her.
“My mother endured this for years,” he said.
“Suffered the cruelty and mistreatment of my grandfather so as not to abandon me. It hardened her, I think. Formed her. When she began to see how he was changing me, teaching me to be like him instead of like my father, she knew she had to take me away from here before it was too late. But escaping my grandfather was no easy task.”
“Why?” I asked softly.
He exhaled. “Grandfather knew very well that Mother hated him, that she wanted me away from his influence. But he gave her no money, refused to allow her guests, even her own family. When still she defied him, he threatened to have her committed to an asylum if she did not obey.”
I stared, mouth parted. I could not imagine such cruelty. My father was indifferent but never needlessly mean.
He glanced at me. “I learned this later, of course. I was only seven years old at the time. But I knew very well what sort of man my grandfather was. When my mother told me we were running away, I listened. We left in the middle of the night, with only one bag each. She’d hidden away a small amount of money, enough to take us across the border to Scotland, where she’d visited once as a young woman.
Grandfather would search everywhere for us, and she wanted to be as far away from him as possible. We eventually settled in Inverness.”
“Where you lived until you were grown,” I said.
“Yes,” he said. “We kept in contact with my aunt, Helen’s mother, but beyond that, we were cut off from all we had known.”
Alexander looked at me then. “In those long years between, Mother and I lived a life far from luxury. She worked endless hours to support us, in a multitude of positions—seamstress, laundress, maid—but never complained. She educated me, made me who I am.”
My jaw tensed, again fighting any small surge of sympathy inside me. I could not deny that I was surprised, however. I could never have imagined the aloof and proper Mrs. Rawlings bent over a washboard for endless hours, all to keep her only son from the clutches of her horrible father-in-law.
“She always talked of returning here, to my and my father’s inheritance, and taking back what belonged to us,” he went on. “It was what drove her and gave her strength. But my desires were different.” He paused, his leg bouncing slightly as if agitated—or nervous.
“What did you want?” I asked quietly.
His throat bobbed. “My life in Scotland was not an unhappy one,” he said, “but I needed more than our small world there.”
His words took me aback. They described so perfectly my own feelings of home, of my parents.
“Against my mother’s wishes,” he went on, “I left Inverness at seventeen. I went to London, found a few odd jobs. I was aimless, really. Wandering. Eventually, I did some work for Bow Street, helped an officer with a case. He took me under his wing and mentored me.” He shook his head slightly, as if in amusement.
“It was luck, really. The most fortunate twist of fate. Because it was at Bow Street that I found my calling. I found friends. I could help right wrongs and catch criminals and be useful.”
“But your mother wishes you to give that up.”
“Yes,” he replied. “A few years after I arrived in London, my grandfather died. Briarstone was left to me.”
He said it with such distaste that I knew immediately. I remembered the conversation I’d overhead between him and his mother when we’d first arrived here. My life will be my own, he’d said. “But you did not want it,” I suggested.
“No,” he said. “My happy memories of my early childhood had been tainted by my grandfather’s cruelty. I wanted nothing more than to sell the place and move on.”
That was why he seemed so ill-at-ease here. It was his house, but it was not his home.
“But Mother refused to let me sell,” he said with an exhale.
“‘Briarstone is ours,’ she insists. ‘We earned it.’ And so I let her take over the running of it while I returned to Bow Street. She still does not understand why I remain in London, though I’ve told her a dozen or more times.
I’ve built a life there, one I’m loath to give up. ”
“Nor should you.” I shifted to face him. “She might enjoy isolation, but not everyone does.”
“It is more than that.” He exhaled. “My mother does not trust easily. Though she had many friends here in Camberwell, during those few years after my father died, all those so-called friends abandoned her, intimidated by my grandfather’s power.
When she decided to run with me, she had no one to help her, save my aunt.
Mother has never forgotten their abandonment.
And then, in Scotland, she was always so afraid that my grandfather would find us that she never allowed us to grow close to anyone, to have anything more than passing acquaintances.
That is why she holds herself apart from Society here, why we both do.
And that is also why she was immediately suspicious of the woman I brought home with me. ”
I swallowed. I could see it—understand it, even. But my emotions from when she’d confronted me still refused to abate. It would take time. “Thank you for telling me,” I said.
“No one knows this about me.” He sounded almost baffled, leaning forward to brace his elbows on his knees. “I never thought I would tell anyone. I always intended to keep my two lives completely separate. But because of you . . .”
“Because of me, your two worlds came crashing together,” I said lightly. “I ruined everything.”
“No,” he said. “That is not what I meant.”
My lungs were tight. “What did you mean?”
He said nothing, only stared at his hands clasped in front of him. Then he stood and offered me his hand. “We should go inside.”
I wanted to ask him again. What was he not saying?
But I took his hand, so warm even in this chill, and he helped me to my feet. He did not offer me his arm as we started back up the stairs of the water garden.
I pulled his jacket tighter, wishing—pointlessly—that it was his arms wrapped around me instead.
“We still need to take care,” he said, walking beside me.
“Take care?”
“Stroud’s questions in London may have stirred something up,” he replied. “And we know now that my mother was the one in your room, but that does not mean you are not still in very real danger.”
I gazed down at the damp grass, drops of rain hovering on their tips. He was right. Mrs. Rawlings’s meddling was a stark reminder of our reality, of how quickly one small slip could ruin our cover. I swallowed back a sudden bitterness on my tongue, the familiar bite of fear.
“You are in danger as well, you know,” I managed.
“My safety is secondary,” he said. “You are my priority.”
He said it so briskly, businesslike, as if to pass over the true significance of his words.
But I heard them. I felt them. For a moment, my stomach warmed with the knowledge that Alexander would do anything to keep me safe.
Then that warmth withered and seeped away.
If our attacker should find us, I knew Alexander would put himself, willingly, between me and death.
The idea of him in any sort of danger made my blood turn to ice.
When we reached the house, I was shivering terribly, even under the jacket. Alexander noticed, of course, and immediately sent for Agatha.
“A hot bath,” he instructed her when she arrived, “and then some rest. I’ll see that a tray is sent up immediately. She hasn’t eaten breakfast.”
“I’m not an invalid,” I protested even as my teeth chattered.
“And bring her some books from the library,” he went on, ignoring me. “Whichever she wants.”
It was all too much. I didn’t need such a fuss. And yet with every command he gave—each one for my well-being—my heart beat a little faster.
Agatha began to lead me away, Alexander’s jacket still draped around my shoulders. I looked back at him standing there in the corridor, his shirt and waistcoat nearly wet through, his hair damp and curling. All because he’d sat in the rain with me.
My eyes rose to his. He watched me go, and though he wore, as always, an expression of careful neutrality, I could read him better now. I saw the worry in the set of his mouth and the slight furrow in his brow.
Verity had been right. He is kinder than he lets on, she’d said. You can trust him.
It was a very good thing, because I was fairly certain I’d just given him my heart.