3 - Clem Shoots Her Shot
3
Clem Shoots Her Shot
Two days later
Clementine could not wait to get out of these blasted trousers.
That part was a disappointment. In novels, when girls disguised themselves as boys, they always remarked on the freedom they found in the wearing of breeches. They could ride faster and scale fences more efficiently and undertake all manner of pursuit with greater ease.
They never talked about how terribly uncomfortable it was to wear breeches. Breeches cut into the flesh of one’s midsection in a most unpleasant way. Perhaps if one was accustomed to wearing stays, this sort of pain was familiar. But when one was a country lass at heart and on the verge of spinsterhood—and may she soon return to that verge, where she belonged—one managed to avoid stays quite a lot of the time.
Thinking of all the instances recently when she had worn stays—when she’d worn them for him—made her blood boil. That blunderbuss. That knave. That—“Oh!”
The coach lurched to a stop, throwing her up against the passenger next to her, a Bible-clutching man who hadn’t spoken a word since Chorley and smelled of cabbage and mildewing parchment. He turned to her, no doubt startled by some combination of her regrettably girlish exclamation and the regrettably girlish mound of bosom she had inadvertently brushed against his shoulder.
Clementine had learned a great deal about bosoms of late, during her conscription in London, her forced march through the Marriage Mart. She had learned that some women powdered theirs. Sometimes they even traced the veins there with blue paint, for reasons that entirely escaped her. Some inserted busks in their stays, stays apparently not being torturous enough on their own. Others even turned to wax and cotton in service of a mission of augmentation.
Everything Clementine had learned in this regard was about enhancement. The drawing of attention. She had not, alas, learned anything about the deflecting of attention from the often inconvenient mounds of flesh with which ladies were burdened. Today, to her dismay and despite her most ardent efforts in the art of concealment, her own rather ample bosom was not staying where she put it. Namely, beneath a long piece of muslin she’d wound around her torso before sneaking out of the house two days ago.
Two days or a lifetime, one or the other.
The cabbagey man narrowed his eyes at her. She lowered her voice, muttered a vague apology, and the moment the coachman opened the door and called, “Oi! Five minutes!” she was out, blinking into the bright sun.
The yard of the coaching inn was, as coaching inn yards were wont to be, unpleasantly populated with people chattering, ostlers changing horses, and trunks being heaved in and out of conveyances. But there was also the dirt beneath her feet and the sky above her head. She couldn’t remove her boots and wiggle her toes in the mud like she wanted to, but she could imagine all the creepy-crawly friends below the surface, going about their days profoundly undisturbed by the machinations of the men above them. And she could tip her head back and narrow her eyes, not in suspicion like her erstwhile seatmate, but strategically, so as to block out the roof thatch of the inn and the chimneys rising from it, until all she could see was sky. The bolstering, beautiful blue of an English sky. The same one sheltering her home in the country.
She would soon be back at Hill House. She just had to rescue Olive first.
Olive.
Her heart squeezed. Clementine and Olive had never been particularly close. The same could be said for Clementine and all of her family. She loved them, but sometimes Clementine wondered if she belonged with them. Indeed, when she was young, she’d harbored a fancy that she was a changeling, that the fairies had come and taken her parents’ true firstborn and left Clementine in her place. But as Clementine grew tall and strong and failed to sprout elven ears, she had to accept that she was, in fact, a true, if atypical, Morgan.
Clementine had different interests and priorities from the rest of her family—especially Olive. Olive was at home in a crowded ballroom, wearing the latest fashions and giggling with her friends over which gentlemen they hoped would ask them to dance. Clementine felt most herself in the forest. The stream. Under the starry heavens. She preferred thickets to tea, would sooner visit a meadow than a modiste. There was a devastating sort of beauty all around if one only paid attention to it, discernable in the tiniest details: the veins of a leaf just as it starts to turn color in the autumn; a ladybird perched on a rose, red against red except for its signature black spots; even the cold iridescence of a fish washed ashore and left to perish on the sand by a receding wave.
Most people didn’t pay attention, though. Olive didn’t pay attention.
Still, they were sisters. Motherless sisters. And soon the gout, or something else, would take Father, and they would be alone together.
All this to say that Olive had hurt Clementine so very much more than Theo had.
And a week ago, Clementine would have said that Theo had hurt her very much indeed, in both body and spirit.
But it did no good to dwell on any of it. The fact remained that Olive did not know what she’d gotten herself into, and she was in need of rescuing. So Clementine was going to rescue her. Because in her world, that was what people did for their sisters.
But as soon as that was done, Clementine was putting her foot down with Father. No more parties, no more balls, no more gentlemen. No more London. She would leave that to Olive and retreat to Hill House. She had been telling Father for years that she was not going to marry, and he had been ignoring her for just as long. If there was one upside to this dreadful business, it was that he might finally accept defeat.
It made her shudder to think how near she had come to making such a terrible mistake. All the heartsickness she felt now was worth that fate averted.
A hawk soared into view, and she gasped in delight and awe—and gratitude. Tears prickled her eyes, as they sometimes did when the world was being too much itself—too beautiful and terrible and capable of expressing a kind of steadfast rightness through its creatures and its colors.
An all-too-human muttering had her reluctantly transferring her attention from the tableau above to a pair of men standing at the foot of the coach. It was the driver and the cabbage man. The latter was no longer silent but looking at her and speaking a great deal indeed.
Clementine’s three Seasons in London had not taught her much of use, but her childhood in the country had. She had spent enough time watching—deer bounding through the forest, a spider spinning a web in a hollow tree, the bowing of a willow in the wind as it bent to skim the surface of a pond—that she had learned to be sensitive to small shifts in the air. She had honed her instincts and learned to trust them.
She hitched her satchel up on one shoulder, picked up her skirts—and because she’d forgotten she wasn’t wearing any, that amounted to picking up two handfuls of air—and ran.
Twenty minutes later, she crept back into the yard, hoping Mr. Cabbage had departed with the coach. She hadn’t been planning on stopping here. Indeed, in her mind, she’d been going to take the London-to-Glasgow Mail coach all the way straight through to the end of the line. Forty-eight hours hadn’t seemed an impossible stretch. Her favorite ramble through the woods at home took two hours, and forty-eight was only that twenty-four times over.
She had not accounted for the corporeal realities of cross-country travel by Mail coach. There was the hunger, of course. She had anticipated the fact of that, filling her pockets and her bag with apples and walnuts and bread, but not the degree. She should have brought more food. Worse, though, was the discomfort. Before this, the longest trip she had made was between her family’s London home and Hill House in Kent—western Kent, not so terribly far from Town geographically, though in another sense, it was as far from London as the moon in the sky. And those journeys had always been undertaken in the family coach, which went more slowly than the Mail and therefore made for a much less rough-and-tumble experience. Here, by contrast, the hours and hours spent curled in on herself, the jostling, the lack of fresh air and light—well, it was grim.
So, part of her didn’t mind the fact that, twice now, the need to maintain her subterfuge had forced her to take refuge inside a posting inn and to wait for the next Mail coach, which, here at the Blue Lion in Thorpesden at four o’clock in the afternoon, was going to mean staying the night. The delay was regrettable, but the image of a soft, clean bed made her near delirious with want.
If this were a novel, she would not have attempted to make the trip without pause. She would have stopped along the way, asking at posting inns if anyone had seen a pretty young auburn-haired woman accompanied by an uncommonly tall gentleman wearing boots made of cotton.
But in novels, she would not have been acquainted with the man in question. He would have been a mere villain who had absconded with her sister, not a man Clementine knew—in all the senses of the word, to her great regret. Novels also disregarded how very many Mail routes there were to Scotland, but that was not the primary point. Clementine, unlike so many hapless literary heroines, knew that Theo was bound not for the nearest border town with an anvil and an unscrupulous innkeeper, but for Glasgow. He had friends there. He had acolytes there. There he would be sheltered and cosseted and flattered, and no one would give Olive any thought beyond her supporting role in the life of Mr. Theodore Bull. Theo wanted Olive, therefore his friends would move mountains that he should have her.
If there was any good to come from Clementine’s knowing of Mr. Theodore Bull, it was that she could use her knowledge—of his mind, his vanity, his habits, of him—to save her sister.
But since she was here, at the Blue Lion in Thorpesden, she might as well make like in novels and ask if anyone had seen Theo and Olive even if, unlike in novels, the answer would almost certainly be no.
She scanned the room. There was an innkeeper manning the bar she could interview, and she could get something to eat.
“Ye want just potatoes?” the innkeeper asked after she’d ordered.
“Yes, but only if they are not cooked in beef tallow. I’d prefer them boiled.” The poor man was wearing such a look of befuddlement that she added, “Beef and its by-products do not agree with me.” She patted her stomach and made a mournful face.
“Ah, well, if that’s the case, this will see you in good stead.” He set a pie on the battered oaken bar. “’Tis only lamb in this one.”
She sighed and took a sip of her ale. Ale, it turned out, could be rather pleasant. Better anyway than the sickly sweet ratafia Theo had always pressed on her at parties. When the bartender turned away, she extracted a newspaper from her satchel, wrapped the pie in it, and deposited the whole package back in the bag. She would find a yard dog to give it to later.
“You made quick work of that, lad.” The friendly innkeeper was back. “My missus’s lamb pies are famous in these parts and for good reason, if I may say so.” He positively beamed with pride. “I tell her the last thing I want to pass my lips in the final minute of my life is a bite of her lamb pie.”
Clementine could not help but be touched by the man’s praise of his wife. What must it be like to be married to a man who valued one’s accomplishments enough to boast of them to strangers? Not that she was going to be married to any man ever—she had briefly entertained the notion, and look where it had gotten her. Still, if a lady had to be married, which she realized most ladies did—Clementine was unaccountably lucky not to number among them—it must be gratifying to be appreciated.
“Well, no, scratch that. The last thing I’d want to taste is a mouthful of her apple dumplins, if you get my meaning.” The innkeeper winked in a way that suggested to Clementine that it wasn’t a mixture of fruit and pastry he was talking about.
That was another thing about being a man: other men said the most shocking things to one as easily as if they were remarking upon the weather.
“Yes, quite.” She picked up her ale and took a long drink in order to avoid having to say more. She was nearly done with the pint and feeling much less distressed about life in general when the innkeeper returned. “I say, sir, I’m looking for someone who may have been here ahead of me. An unusually tall man, and he’d’ve had a very pretty auburn-haired woman with him.”
“Man wearing very strange boots?”
“Yes!”
“He’s taken a private parlor.”
“Oh!” Clementine was so shocked, she nearly fell off her stool. She righted herself and made a point to lower her voice. “He’s here now?”
In novels, this sort of sleuthing would have yielded intelligence about which direction the fugitive lovers had gone and how long ago they had left, not that they were under the same roof at that very moment. But Clementine knew where Theo and Olive were going—Glasgow. And she had to admit that if she’d been any kind of detective, she would have been prepared for the possibility that the Mail coach would overtake Theo’s landau.
“Yes, indeed.” The innkeeper paused. “Bit of an odd one, he is.”
“Yes. He’s—” She considered telling him the truth. They were both “men,” after all, and the easy confidences between men she had just been observing might allow her to say, “He is a beast who has run off with my sister.” The innkeeper might bluster and express moral outrage and help her confront Theo. But what then? Backed into a corner, Theo would expose Clementine as a woman, and probably a woman passing herself off as a man was a greater scandal than a man running off with a girl to marry in Scotland against law, reason, good taste, morals, manners, and . . . She refocused her thoughts, which were going a little fuzzy, and concentrated on answering the innkeeper in a manner that would reveal neither her femaleness nor the true degree of her interest in the man with the unusual boots. “He’s an old friend I’d heard might be passing this way.” The floor lurched beneath Clementine’s feet as she slid off the stool, and she set a hand on the bar to steady herself.
“Fortune smiles on you.” The innkeeper pointed. “They’re in the last parlor down that corridor.”
“Have you a room for the night?” She hated to spend the money—the funds she’d stolen from Father’s desk were dwindling—but she could hardly march into Theo’s parlor without so much as a plan. She needed a moment to get her bearings.
There was a room to let, and when the innkeeper came back with a key, he was also carrying a plate of roast beef. “If you’re going to see them, do me a good turn and take this with you.”
“Oh, you must be mistaken. This must be for another party.” Theo hadn’t allowed the flesh of a dead animal to pass his lips for nigh on fourteen years.
“Nay, ’tis bound for your friends. They already finished a plate of beef and liked it so much they called for more. To my mind, my wife’s roast beef isn’t as good as . . .”
Anger drowned out the man’s next ode to his wife’s culinary skills and/or corporeal endowments. How could Theo? It was almost as bad as his having run off with her sister. But on the other hand, was she truly that surprised? Something Olive herself had said to Clementine during Clementine’s first London Season came to mind: Most people will show you who they are if you only watch closely enough.
That observation had been creeping into Clementine’s thoughts a great deal lately, but it had been making her uncomfortable enough that she’d shoved it down every time.
And look where they all were now.
Clementine made her way upstairs gingerly, holding her breath so as not to smell the meat she was carrying. Once inside her room, she crossed to the window, hurled both the beef and the lamb pie out of it, and smiled in grim satisfaction when a pack of skinny cats came running.
She had to steady herself on the windowsill as she straightened. The trip up the stairs had suggested to her that perhaps it had not been shock, or not only shock, that had made her unsteady at the bar. She feared the ale had a hand in her discombobulation. She ought to wait until the effects of the drink faded before going back downstairs, but she could not afford to. She had no idea if Theo was staying the night or if he planned to be off again after his second helping of dead cow.
Resolved, she upended her satchel on the bed. She pulled out a novel, some dried fruit, and a dress—though she had made her flight from London in men’s clothing stolen from Father’s wardrobe, she had packed a dress in the hopes that once she rescued Olive, she could give up her subterfuge. Beneath the dress, she found what she was looking for—yet another item nicked from Father.
The rage that flowed through her carried her over to a mirror mounted on the wall. She rewrapped her bosoms and buttoned her too-large coat over them, tucked some errant strands of hair into her hat, and slid the flintlock pistol into the back of her breeches.
So perhaps breeches were good for one thing.
She allowed the rage to continue to direct her actions. It carried her down the stairs, through the tap room, and along the corridor lined with private parlors. The door to the last stood partially open.
In novels, this would be the climax. The moment of dramatic tension. The standoff. In novels, this was where somebody would get shot.
It was much easier than that, almost laughably easy. Clementine was able to sidle up to the door and peek in. Olive, and Olive alone, was in her line of sight. Theo was talking. Well, Theo was always talking. But here, now, he was orating.
What had possessed her sister? Clementine had resigned herself to some of Theo’s more distasteful traits, but Olive never resigned herself to anything unless she absolutely had to.
“So you see,” Theo was saying, “on the Continent, there are other innovative thinkers, men on the vanguard of numerous movements. Having pondered it, I’ve decided a permanent move is in order.”
“You never said anything about that!” Olive cried. “I never agreed to leave England permanently!”
That made Clementine wonder exactly what Olive had agreed to—and, once again and more to the point, why. Olive had entertained some flirtations last Season, her first, and, by her own account, enjoyed herself immensely—so much so that she’d declared herself disinclined to accept any suits until she’d had one more Season. Even had that not been the case, she could have had her pick of gentlemen who were much less . . . an acquired taste than Theo.
“I’ve decided we will find a warmer welcome for our ideas on the Continent,” Theo said.
“You mean your ideas.”
“All that I have is yours,” Theo said smarmily, and didn’t that sound familiar? “Just as all you have is mine.” That part was less familiar, Theo not having been so bold as to state his philosophy so overtly to Clementine—at least until that last day.
Olive huffed an exasperated sigh that would seem more in keeping with not having received a coveted party invitation than the potential collapse of her elopement. Clementine supposed she should be relieved that Olive did not seem to bring out Theo’s dark side.
“Don’t sigh at me, Olive!” Theo shouted in concert with the sound of glass shattering. Clementine heard something unsettled beneath the surprise in her sister’s answering shriek.
Therewas Theo’s dark side. Clementine’s pulse kicked up, and her senses sharpened, allowing her to shuck off the lingering effects of the ale. She was that hawk she had seen circling outside, homing in on her prey. She would be damned before Theodore Bull laid a hand on her sister. She laid her hand on the butt of her pistol and crept closer to the crack in the door.
Olive looked over, and Clementine saw real fear in her eyes. She hadn’t seen Olive look like that since the day Mother died. The fear turned to shock as she registered Clementine’s presence. Her eyebrows flew up. Only momentarily, though, before she composed herself and looked away. Then, while Clementine was trying to think what to do, Olive looked back at Clementine and ever so slightly shook her head before turning back to Theo and pasting on a smile. “Theo, darling.” Olive spoke soothingly. “I’m sure you’re right about all of this.” She got up and disappeared from view, presumably going to Theo’s side.
“I should think you would know by now, Olive, that I am possessed of higher-than-average intellect.”
“Of course, my love. That is why I am here, is it not? You’ll have to be patient with me. You know I’ve never been exposed to a man so positively brimming with ground-breaking ideas.”
Clementine could almost see her sister’s long eyelashes batting innocently, her mouth turned into a perfect pink pout of entreaty.
“Which is exactly why I am in need of a helpmeet,” Theo said.
Clementine resisted snorting but only just.
“A true meeting of the minds,” Theo went on, using exactly the phrase that had hooked Clementine.
“You’re right, of course. You’re right about everything,” Olive purred in that voice everyone else heard as innocent but Clementine recognized as guileful. It was the same voice she used to shake loose extra pin money from Father. “Theo, darling, I need to use the necessary. I’ll be back in a moment and we can talk some more about our initial Continental itinerary. I have a feeling the Romans might be open to some of your more interesting ideas, but of course you’ll know best.”
“Inquire after that plate of roast beef, won’t you? It’s been ages since I asked for it.”
Clementine smiled, thinking of those skinny cats.
Olive appeared at the door. Clementine hadn’t needed her weapon. She hadn’t even needed to say anything. She merely had to stand there, take her sister’s hand, and gesture for her to shut the parlor door behind her.
This novel was going to have a very anticlimactic ending indeed.
They didn’t speak—or they didn’t speak with words. Something passed between them, though, a kind of anguish and relief and, Clementine dared say, love. Whatever had happened here was Theo’s fault. Or mostly Theo’s fault.
Of course, he hadn’t run away by himself.
Half Theo’s fault?
They climbed the stairs to Clementine’s room silently, and Olive burst into tears as soon as the door shut behind them.
“Come now,” Clementine soothed, leading her sister to the bed. Olive had had the foresight to leave the parlor with her portmanteau, and she was holding it against her chest as if it were a shield. Clementine tugged it gently from her and encouraged her sister to sit on the bed. “It’s over.”
“It’s not over!” Olive’s voice was high and frightened, which unnerved Clementine. Olive’s fear was in such contrast to her previous self-possession. “He’s going to find me! He’s going to find both of us!”
“I’m not going to let him do that.” Clementine pulled out of the embrace and regarded her sister. Olive’s eyes had turned into tiny blue waterfalls.
“I’m sorry,” Olive said in a pitiful, small voice that was more alarming than the tears. That Theo had cowed her unflappable sister was, in this moment, the greatest of his many offenses.
“You are not the one at fault here,” Clementine said, though the declaration sounded less than certain. She wasn’t sure what her feelings about Olive were, truth be told. The sense of betrayal she’d been carrying around had faded somewhat now that she had her anguished sister in hand, but Clementine was still hurt. And bewildered. But Clementine of all people understood how flattering Theo could be. How he could see inside one’s very soul, it felt like, find the holes one had thought were invisible to others, and start patching them, working so fast and so intently that it was only much later, when the patches dried and started crumbling that one realized he’d used only the thinnest and cheapest of plaster.
“It doesn’t matter who’s at fault,” Olive said, her voice taking on a hard edge as she dried her tears. “There’s no way out. If I don’t go with him, he’s going to ruin us. You don’t know what you’re up against.”
Clementine laughed bitterly, pulled her pistol from her waistband, and said, “I assure you, I know exactly what I’m up against.”
The next few seconds passed as if in a dream, one of those dreams where time gets muddled and things seem to happen both more quickly and more slowly than they ought. First, time moved too fast. Clementine heard Olive’s name being shouted, then her own. She spared a moment to wonder how Theo knew she was here but concluded it didn’t matter. What mattered was that Theo was not marrying her sister.
The door burst open. The gun was in her hands. A shot rang out. Her sister screamed.
Next, time slowed, nay, lurched to a stop, as abruptly as the coach in the yard had earlier. A man cursed. It was a familiar voice, but not that of Theodore Bull. It was a voice from her past, a voice that used to laughingly sing “Here we go round the mulberry bush” with her when they came upon such a shrub in their wanderings.
Her own voice was the next to ring out across the room. “Arch!”
“Clem.”
“I shot you.”
“You did indeed.”