Chapter 5
CHAPTER FIVE
Twelve Years Prior
Chedworth Estate, Huntingdonshire
Eton changed a boy, Kitty thought from where she stood at Chedworth’s library door, her heart pounding, barely able to stay in her chest with Julian finally, finally, arrived from school after a whole year.
It had felt like eons. And now she knew what an eon felt like and the joy that novelists spoke of, of love’s reunion.
At the library’s wall of mullioned windows, couched between soaring shelves with every book imaginable, Julian plied his pencil to paper at a writing desk.
A thick lock of wavy black hair draped his cheek.
He brushed it away with a frown and it fell right back, like it couldn’t bear to be away from him.
In his shirtsleeves, his arms were longer, stronger. As were his legs swathed in buckskin and riding boots, one hardened limb stretched out, another angled beneath his chair.
Would her own body craft the dramatic changes between her thirteenth and fourteenth year as Julian’s?
“Julian.” She thrilled to say his name and him be here to answer her call.
He glanced up from his sketch. “Oh you.”
Oh you?
No, she was not going to be put off. His voice was a dream of rich bass notes like steaming chocolate. Rushing across the thick red carpets, she threw herself in his arms. Not really his arms because they were still at his side.
Julian set her off, his mouth screwing in a grimace. But what she noted was the increased vigor of his hold and…
“Is that hair on your chin?” She ran her palm across his chin. Gritty. And strangely exciting. Like running in the rain with lightning chasing her. She squeezed his arm, surprised at the bulk.
“Must you?” he grumbled.
“Oh yes, I must.” She poked his chest.
“Don’t you have somewhere to be?” After a quirk of his shoulder—much broader than a year ago—he turned his attention back to his sketch.
“Aren’t you pleased to see me?”
He shrugged. “I suppose I’m pleased you’re alive.”
“How gracious your concern.”
“Isn’t it?”
She leaned over his shoulder, pressing her chest to his back.
His left hand paused. “Do you mind?”
“Not at all.” She wriggled closer, sniffing his hair. Exotic spices, oranges, and home.
She studied the drawing between his gathered sleeves. Another section of a boat, this one wider than his previous models, cut in half longways.
She recognized the keel running down the bottom like a spine. The hog on top and the keelson on top of that. The carvel planking bowed and cupped to form the hull, ending at the gunwales and cappings.
She pointed to a protruding rim below the gunwales. “What is that?”
“A washstrake,” he replied, as if she should have known.
“She’s quite wide.”
“She’s beamy,” he corrected. “Which makes her fast.”
Mrs. Higglewaite, Chedworth’s housekeeper, came to mind. “I’ve never seen anything wide move fast.”
“There’s more sailing rig to bear.” He twisted in his chair, clasping her upper arms and drawing them inward.
“Look, if I were to put a sail on you, I’d have this tiny bit of canvas to propel my craft.
But if I made you wider and kept the short length for agility…
” He widened the distance between his hands.
“More sail area. More wind. Faster. It’s called a cutter. ”
She wrapped her arms around his neck, kissing his raspy cheek. “Genius! Let’s make a boat together. I’ll sew the sails and—”
“Girls don’t make anything but children.” He extracted her arms from his person.
“Children?”
“Yes. In your womb.”
Kitty stared down where he gestured at her belly. “I have a womb? Like Holy Mary?”
“You won’t be squeezing out Jesus, that’s for sure. Now go away.”
Kitty dropped to the window ledge, awed by the news. “How, Julian? How shall I create this child?”
“You don’t want to know.”
“But I want children. Oh, to have someone to play with. You know my father rarely talks to me. Why, if I fell to a heap in a corner, if not for the servants cleaning, he’d not notice me gone for days. Maybe weeks.”
Julian ignored her, which hurt like a needle under her nail. She picked at her pink satin sash for another eon, vowing not to be cross with the horrible school that had turned her Julian into an uncaring toad.
Eton, oh, how I wish you never existed.
“Julian?”
“What?”
“Please tell me.”
He twisted in his chair. “You need a man to plant his seed inside you.”
“Like a plant?”
“Just like. Now go and play with Georgie. I’ve better things to do.”
“What is better than playing?” Julian spent many hours sketching his ships but always frowned when he did, as if his dreams pained him. He smiled much more when he played. And he teased her unmercifully, which she knew was love.
Sliding off the sill, she prepared to be rebuffed. Draping her right hand over his, she measured the startling difference. “Look how large your hand is. Stand up. I must see what else has grown.”
With an arch of his black brow, Julian swiveled his jaw. “Are you sure you want to see it?”
“Why wouldn’t I? I’m sure it’s grown as beautiful as the rest of you. Please let me see.”
He glanced down at his lap.
Kitty peeked under the desk, seeing nothing but the fall of his breeches. But she whispered for some reason, “What is it?”
Leaping from his seat, his hands strained like claws. “A snake!”
Kitty screamed.
“A big, powerful snake. Run, run away, pink fairy, before it makes children with you!”
“Julian!”
“Here it comes!” He clutched her neck, eliciting more screams.
She shoved his chest. He released her, sending her plummeting flat on her bottom. Great roars of laughter erupted from his chest, on and on. She matched his merriment with giggles.
“Silly pink fool,” he said, wiping tears from his eyes. “You’re nothing but a child. But I am pleased to see you. Who else can I laugh at in this gloomy place?”
He laughed at her. Not with her. The desire to rake his face seized her hands. Scrambling to her feet, she bunched her fists. She still didn’t reach his shoulders, and she had tried so hard to grow, eating everything on her plate and seconds. She was still skinny and short.
She couldn’t look him eye-to-eye, but he did look down his nose at her.
“I don’t know about Eton,” she said, “the awful place that makes you treat me so badly.”
He rolled his eyes.
“I waited an entire year for Julian to return to me. If you would please bring back the beautiful boy I love, I’d be forever grateful. Please tell him I’ll be at Notfelle, playing with Georgie, when he returns.”
She wiped her tears and left him to his horridness.
“My cousin’s a right bastard,” Georgiana announced.
Kitty’s champagne dropped to the medallioned Turkey carpet. Actually, it was cold weak tea in a crystal flute.
Georgiana gripped her flute at the stem, imperiling her mother’s keepsake—one of the few Kitty’s father hadn’t sold. “Black-eyed, skinny sod,” she said.
“He has grown quite strong,” Kitty chanced.
“Strong as the stench of bear shite.”
“And tall,” Kitty said. “Taller than you now.”
Georgiana growled at the reminder. “To think, all the times I lent him my best riding boots.” She had at least ten pair with names for each, like her horses.
At the window, Georgiana’s gaze threatened to set fire to the overgrown bush on the other side of the latticed panes. “I hope his tongue falls out.”
“How does a tongue fall out?”
Georgiana whipped around. “Someone cuts it out.”
“Oh.”
“He called me a child. A child. When I am nearly as tall as him and race my horses faster than Newmarket jockeys. And take taller hedges.”
“What about the Notfelle hedge?” Her friend hadn’t yet cleared the monster: six feet high and four feet wide, preceded by a precipitous drop and a brook. No one had ever conquered it before the age of thirteen. Kitty’s father, Sir Jeffrey Babbington, claimed no female ever had.
Julian had cleared it in—
“Thirteen years, twenty-two days,” Georgiana grumbled. “Well, I’ll show that Etonian rotter.”
At the force of her friend’s assertion, Kitty plopped backward on a settee, a puff of dust rising around her pink-striped cotton skirts. She bit her lip. “Why do you think he’s returned so hateful?”
“Because he’s four and ten, my father says.”
“Oh. That explains it.” It didn’t.
Though her father was out running his hounds, Kitty looked toward the drawing room’s heavy double doors and lowered her voice. “Will we turn into right bastards?”
“How should we know until we get there?”
“Well, I shall strive not to.”
“Of course you’ll never be hateful. You’ll forever be good-natured.” Georgiana’s smile reappeared, bright white and warm. “You’d befriend Satan himself and transform him into an angel.”
Wasn’t Satan an angel to begin with? “I wish I could transform Julian,” she said quietly.
“Don’t.”
“But why not?”
“He doesn’t deserve you. Or me. Or—or breathing.”
Kitty’s heart kicked in her breast. “Oh, but I shouldn’t wish for him to stop breathing. Perhaps another year and he will change again. Into a kinder person.”
Georgiana waved her off. “Per my father, this is a long phase.”
“How long?”
“Forever.”
Kitty’s face went numb.
“Stop caring,” Georgiana admonished her, planting her champagne flute to the tea table. She yanked down her sleeves. “I must prepare Turk for the hedge. Meet me there tomorrow at eight?”
“Yes.”
Kitty was never going near that monster hedge. Her brother, Shelley, had tried to herd her over it when she was nine, and she had broken her arm. Julian had hidden rose hip hairs in her brother’s bed in retaliation. To watch Shelley itch and scratch in agony had been worth the broken arm.
So why, why has my prince turned into a toad? Forever.
Tears pricked her eyes.