Chapter 14
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Notfelle Estate, England
Kitty lifted her chalk from the sketchbook as the front door opened and boot heels snapped over the hall floor. Her drawing of the winter landscape unfolding from the drawing room window surpassed dismal. Skeleton trees and shabby bushes with a cast-off wheel lying in a patch of overgrown grass.
The determined tread drew nearer. Kitty shut the book, and a letter flipped at her nose.
“Another express post, my Lady Justice,” Georgiana said.
If Georgiana meant the sobriquet in support, it might not sting. But her friend had softened a mere fortnight after Julian’s exile. That is, 178 days ago.
Kitty slipped the letter from Georgiana’s gloved fingers and set it on her book.
“Are you going to read it?”
“I always do.” Unlike the letters she had written Julian, fearing he’d never read any, because he was dead.
“He asked that I ensure you read it.”
Shrugging from her caped greatcoat, Georgiana tossed it to a chair.
Her friend wore the loveliest ensembles, even if they were men’s ensembles.
A sapphire wool frock coat that set off her eyes and a blush pink waistcoat, perfect for her ivory skin and the smattering of freckles across her nose. Her wigs were impeccable.
Was it easier to be a boy? Undeniably, yes. But Kitty worried for the day when Georgiana would have to venture from the shelter of Farendon, her father, and her horses. The world was hard on females who stayed within their sphere. Those who did not…
“Well, my lady, tempus fugit,” Georgiana said.
Kitty opened the letter while Georgiana slid onto the corner of the mahogany-and-ormolu writing desk—one her father had been eyeing to sell.
Hell, March 31, 1759
Day 192
Dearest Kitty,
Did you know that land has a smell, that one can smell it as the ship nears port after being in open sea for long periods?
The first time I noticed this we were beating into a headwind, with fairly uncomfortable seas, making life below difficult.
Coming on deck for watch, I caught the scent of a beach.
You see, open sea does not smell like a beach but like salt and wind, a hint of truffle.
A beach, however, mixes the scent of the ocean with seaweed and sand—imagine wet rocks and brine, a little ale and cheese.
One day, I will take you to the beach. We will sail out to open sea, you as my first mate, with our sails luffing generously and dolphins as our guide, and when we return to port, you will know.
On a less inspiring note, I have conquered Plato’s Republic.
Justice, it seems, resides in the human soul, a sort of inward grace and longing to do one’s duty according to their nature.
To think, Plato himself approves of me defying my father and doing what I do well. Huzzah, two-thousand-year-old chap.
Mr. Redgrave, with the disposition of a troll (I am offending trolls), grudgingly admitted I excel at physics. My French is rot, but Kitty, I can die a happy man for I have learned everything I yearned to know about the Peloponnesian War.
I will be waiting for you at the Fairy at three.
Yours in Justice,
Julian
Kitty lingered over Julian’s bold, upright script with the sporadic smudges from his left hand.
His father had tried to eradicate that trait from Julian, calling his left-handedness a mark of perversion and savagery.
He had ordered his tutors to whip his son’s left hand if he used it. Julian had simply refused to write.
If she ever met the earl, it would be most difficult to be civil.
“Are you going to meet him?” Georgiana asked.
“No.”
“But you didn’t even think about it.”
Kitty folded the letter, certain in her conviction and feeling like a heel all the same. “I did think about it.”
“You read the letter, I asked you, and you immediately replied no. He has written you every day. He applies himself to his studies and he walks to that silly boat every day, no matter the weather. The least you can do is see him.”
The least Julian could have done was let her know he was alive.
And he hadn’t. Grief burned her eyes, like the endless hours she had spent crying, praying, fasting, doing things just so, like chewing every bite of food twenty-one times.
Three for the trinity multiplied by the seven days of creation.
“And when he’s not studying,” Georgiana said, “or waiting for you at the Fairy, he exercises.”
“Like using his muscles?” The idea intrigued her.
“Part of his classical studies. The Greeks believed a virtuous body a civic duty.”
“Oh,” she said softly, stopping her mind from wondering on Julian’s virtuous body.
“He’s not even looked at a girl. I see how the maidservants eye him. He ignores them. Lady Stockton and her daughter, Barbara, spent three days at Farendon while their coach was mended. He yawned in her face. A very comely face, I’ll add.”
Kitty traced the sign of the cross in her mind. Lady Barbara was more than comely. Her brother Shelley was over the moon for her. And she possessed a fat dowry. Unlike Kitty’s dowry, which Sir Jeffrey’s skimming had dwindled to embarrassing.
Julian will never marry me. He only kissed me. And fondled my breast.
Kitty brushed her arm against the side of her left breast, hot and tingly all over. Why had she not felt the same fire swirling in her belly with Anthony Philips? She hadn’t been bubbling with fury when Anthony had kissed her.
Julian had plotted a seduction, just like he did with widows, and if she hadn’t slapped him, he would have ravished her on her mother’s grave. Barring his complete savagery where her feelings were concerned, she would have let him.
She again made the sign of the cross.
“Thinking on it?” Georgiana said.
“No.” I think about his kisses day and night.
And my breast and his hand. His hand callused from working sheet and sail.
She should prefer a polished hand but the memory of his touch stirred visions of Julian’s muscles straining, his black hair damp with sea water, sweat trickling down his square jaw. Not on a ship. On her.
Kitty crossed herself again.
“I know a mare in season when I see her,” Georgiana said.
Kitty shot from her chair, her heel catching a strip of lace on her hem. “I am not a mare.”
“No, a girl who has been lovesick over my cousin for years.”
To hide her embarrassment, Kitty grabbed her sewing basket and yanked her hem up between her legs. The repurposed lace had seen better days years ago.
“I’m sure he’ll offer for you,” Georgiana said. “If you see him.”
“He has no inclination to marry me.”
“Show him your pretty legs and he will.”
“There is nothing pretty about my legs.” Kitty retrieved her scissors and snipped off the lace.
“They aren’t attached to a six-foot frame like mine.”
Kitty peered at Georgiana’s superb riding boots to the fall of her tailored blue breeches. Legs as long as a mile, slender and strong. “You do not give them enough credit.”
“True. They could strangle a man, but why are we discussing legs?”
“You brought it up.”
“Right. So use your pretty legs to fetch your cloak and ride with me back to Farendon.”
“No.”
“Forgive him.”
Kitty tossed her scissors to the basket. “It is not a lack of forgiveness which keeps me away. Your cousin showed a pitiless disregard for my feelings. He hurt me. I need time.”
“How long?”
“I don’t know.”
“What if something happens? What if he leaves and you never see him again? How will you feel, then?”
I will feel anger and emptiness, the desire to sell my soul for just one minute with him. Just like with my mother.
“I will write him back,” she finally said.
She marched to the desk, tore a corner from her sketchbook, and wrote in chalk. Folding it twice, she offered it to Georgiana, who squinted at the tiny paper.
After tucking the note in her coat, Georgiana reached behind and fished at the back of her breeches. She struck out a book. “From Julian’s personal library.”
Taking the slim volume in hand, Kitty opened to the title page.
Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure. Flipping through the pages, she froze at an engraving.
A woman reposed at the edge of a bed, legs spread wide open—wide open—as in Kitty had never seen the sight even on her own body.
A man stood at the scandalous spot between her stockings, and another woman stood at the reclining woman’s right hip grasping the man’s…
Kitty peered more closely. A staff rooting from his breeches.
“Mounting,” Georgiana said. “The way of humans.”
“What is he going to do?”
“Put it in her. Fanny. Said woman of pleasure.”
She looked back at the drawing. It was the size of a maypole. “It is huge. How is it to—to fit?”
“Lots of thrusting and stretching.”
Kitty flamed from her breasts to her hairline. “What?”
“Pleasurable labor, Fanny assures us. It makes women sick with delight, furiously agitated.” Georgiana chucked Kitty’s chin. “Read on, Lady Justice. I’ll not tell a soul.”
Lengthening his stride, Julian aimed for Nate bundled in two coats and waiting with a watch. A fortnight after his splint had been removed and the surgeon had announced Julian’s leg fit to resume duty, he had started running the circuit. Twenty-four stades, per the Greeks, or about three miles.
Where Julian was presently, before the finish, he leapt onto the rope fixed to the massive copper beech.
He scaled hand over hand to reach the top without his legs, scrambled halfway down, and jumped back to the muck.
On his first attempt at the circuit, he had almost died, and then, nearly wept at his pitiful time of thirty-five minutes.
Today, despite the mud clinging to his flat leather slippers, he was going to make twenty-three minutes.
There were other challenges, many based on the Greek Olympian events, from sprints to pulling himself up on a limb or the bar he’d fastened in a closet doorway, dumbbells, jump rope, riding, swimming, and press-ups.
Training his body had become an obsession. Nothing cleared his mind of Kitty better than running. It was more peaceful than sleep or a bottle and provided a clarity not found in liquor. He hadn’t touched liquor, except for wine with dinner, since the night he had accosted Kitty.
She hurt and hurt long.
He didn’t blame her. But it didn’t make it easier.
At the finish, Georgiana sat astride her racing stallion with a smile.
Usually he cooled down with a light run around the house perimeter before checking his time.
Then, as prescribed by the Greeks, there was a therapeutic kneading of his muscles and a bath.
Following that there were two hours of gymnastics, a long run, and his visit to the Fairy. Every day, the same.
He double backed to the finish without cooling down.
“Twenty-four minutes!” Nate waved the second watch. “Thirty-six seconds!”
Julian pushed his hands from his knees, his breath blowing heavy and white. “The hell you say.”
“Er, well done, sir.”
Ripping his knit cap from his head, he looked to Georgiana. “Well?”
Swinging her right leg over the stallion’s neck, she jumped to the ground. “Come with me, Sir Olympian.”
“Shall I prepare your therapies?” Nate asked.
“Yes please.” Jogging after Georgiana, the euphoria of exertion ceded the longer she said nothing. He was not going to beg his cousin for information. He stretched his legs, taking relief from the renewed strength in his right leg.
“Kitty misses you,” Georgiana announced.
He bent up from touching his toes. “She said so?”
“In her expression, yes.”
“Words, Georgie.”
“I know when a horse misses me or when they’re cross or unwell, and they don’t use words.” Picking up a curry comb, she worked circles on the stallion’s winter coat. “I broached a few scandalous topics. Kitty obfuscated.”
“Again, words.” He avoided asking what constituted scandalous, stretching his arm behind his head.
“She avoided the topics. She quibbled. But she will marry you, if you ask her.”
His arms dropped in shock. “You asked her if she wanted to marry me? I never said a thing about marriage.”
“But you write to her every day, and if that’s not a man who wishes for a wife, what is?”
“I have no bloody idea what a man who wants a wife does. I can’t marry her. I have no plans to marry anyone.”
“But Kitty would make an ideal lifelong companion.”
“I’ll get a dog.” Before she could say it, he added, “Many dogs, throughout my life.”
“A wife would pick up after you, instead of vice versa.” She threw a wad of horse hair at him.
He pulled the clump off his knitted waistcoat and threw it back. “Even if I wanted to marry her, which I do not, her father would not consent. You know Babbington’s a secret papist.”
“And you can save her from the Lord Stavertons of the world and marry her.”
Julian’s lip curled at the lecher’s name. “I can save her from the Lord Stavertons much easier. With a pistol.”
She sniffed. “You kissed her, I can sense it.”
He rubbed his hand across his mouth to cover his dismay. Kitty hadn’t told her best friend about their kiss? Had it been so bad she hid it?
“I did not kiss her,” he said. I mauled her.
Her blue eyes narrowed to slits. “You try my optimism, you know. Close your eyes.”
Julian looked around the block. The horses hung their sleek heads over their box gates, eavesdropping. “I’m not closing my eyes.”
“Close your eyes and put out your hand.”
“Are we ten?”
“Do you want Kitty’s letter?”
Sighing, he did as commanded. He stood for at least a minute before she dropped something in his hand. He opened his eyes. The letter was the size of a pea.
“Better than nothing,” Georgiana said and breezed away with her horse.
“Optimist,” he muttered, peeling open the teeny missive. He read it, stepping into the light from a gable to be sure.
I wish to hear more about your exercises.