THIRTEEN
Evie didn’t slow down but started talking immediately, knowing Aubrey was right behind her without needing to turn around. She fired off the names of the rooms as she walked briskly through the house, no plan in mind except never to look at the man. Escape as soon as possible.
“Sitting room, morning room, green saloon. All added in the early eighteen-hundreds.” She crossed into a wide, dark-panelled parquet-floored hallway, steps slapping on the almost-black age-hardened wood. “The oldest part of the house is the entrance, built in medieval—”
“God damn it, Evie!”
His fingers were hard on her shoulder, stopping her furious pace and spinning her around to face him. She shrugged angrily out of his grip, hot everywhere, more than ready for a fight.
“ That’s your apology, is it?” she said.
“My apology! What exactly am I meant to be apologising for? Doing exactly what your father—my boss —brought me here to do? It’s a shooting weekend, Evie. Did you seriously think there wouldn’t be any?”
“And you enjoyed it, did you?” Her voice was embarrassingly emotional, sharp and quivering. “Had a lovely time killing those animals?”
“Do you think there’s any part of this weekend I’m enjoying? If you weren’t so bloody self-centred, it would be obvious I’m not here by choice!”
“Neither am I!”
He scoffed. “Right, your extremely important spy mission. Then where were you last night after dinner? If you truly wanted the dirt on Domnall, that’s where you should have been. If you actually had any commitment to this cause, then you should have been there today, you should have been there at lunch, but you just swan in and out whenever you feel like it, and now you’re hiding here, sulking, all because I actually did the job I’m here to do.”
She bristled, but her skin was prickling—fear that he was beginning to suspect her, and shame that he was right. But last night… How could she explain that she couldn’t face it…? Domnall sitting there smoking a stinking cigar, his eyes snaking over her body any chance he got, her father watching her with loathing, ready to snap at any flicker of dissent? And Liv watching Aubrey, Aubrey watching Liv…
And none of it would have helped, not when it was Aubrey who was her goal.
“I draw the line at hunting,” she said, trying to draw herself up and modulate her tone. “There are some lines I won’t cross.”
He looked at her, unimpressed. “But you’re ready to hate those who do? And you think you’re tolerant and liberal-minded? You’re the most narrow-minded person I’ve ever met.”
“Because I don’t kill things?”
“Because you’re so ready to judge! And to hate everyone who isn’t exactly like you! Am I really so awful for putting my career above a few birds, given I have no qualms about eating meat in the first place? I’ve been at BlacktonGold for ten years. I’ve built a career for myself after crashing out of my degree, and I’ve clung on to it while my life fell to pieces around me for the second time, but, God…!” He broke off, shaking his head. “I was twenty-four when I started working there, the same age you are now. Of course you don’t understand. Why the hell am I trying to defend myself to you?”
He was about to leave, disgusted by her, defeated. And to Evie, that seemed just as unfair as everything he’d just said about her age.
“You’d do anything to keep it, I suppose?” she said acidly, her own sense of defeat burning in her throat. “No lines you wouldn’t cross? Just what did I miss last night—this dirt on Domnall? Is that another thing you did because my father said so? We’ve established you’ll pull a trigger. What else are you prepared to do?”
He gave a dark laugh, running a hand through his hair and messing up the usually neat, short dark strands. “The mistake you’re making, Evie, is thinking that I care. I don’t care what the job is. I get it done, and I get paid, and I go home and live my very nice life, and Do. Not. Care.”
Each word fell cold against her. She suppressed a shudder. “Then congratulations. My father picked the perfect man.”
He gave her one last look, hard and contemptuous, then turned and left her in the echoing parquet hall.
Amy found her alone in the music room, scowling at the demonic horse. It was a grey stallion, half-rearing, eyes and nose and mouth flared and red, teeth showing. She’d failed to get Aubrey even this far. Failed her task entirely. There was a message from Zig on her phone, a voicemail, too, asking how she was getting on.
Terribly. How was she meant to get into his laptop if they couldn’t even stand being in the same room?
“I saw Aubrey just now,” said Amy, voice studiously casual. “Leaving.”
Evie grunted.
“Is he really friends with Roscoe?” Amy continued in the same light manner. “They seem quite different types. But maybe he’s not always so…”
“Stubborn? Rude? Pig-headed and amoral?”
“ Brusque is perhaps what I was going for.”
Evie grunted again and looked away from the horse, sympathising with it as she always did. Of course the poor thing didn’t want a bit in its mouth and some hard-heeled, heavy-handed man on its back. She crossed to the window, ivy framing its edges, and looked out at the gardens, the yellows of the changing leaves bright under the mild blue sky. A flight of geese formed a distant V, coming into land on the marshy fields beyond, where shots had sounded that morning.
“How did it even start, this rumour that the two of you were dating?”
“I don’t want to talk about it.”
Amy came over, sat on the window seat near where Evie was leaning and smiled up at her—one of her rare, mischievous smiles. “I admit, I’m somewhat more interested in how it’s going to end .”
Evie shot her a look. “It’s already ended. ” She fiddled with the tassel of the curtain tie-back, running the thick, silky strands between her fingers. “Women aren’t allowed to have opinions, are they?” she began in a different tone, as though starting a completely different topic. “If we get angry, if we make a stand, everyone thinks we’re just shrewish and whining. Or childish. Little girls throwing a tantrum. Still, even now, after everything we’ve fought for, a woman showing any kind of strong, negative emotion is criticised or laughed at. It’s what they did to the suffragettes. And it’s still happening.”
Amy sighed, but sympathetically. “Probably. Sometimes. Is that what Aubrey’s like? Because you objected to the shooting?”
“I don’t care about Aubrey.” I. Do. Not. Care. “He thinks I’m immature.”
If Amy thought that the second of those statements perhaps contradicted the first, she only showed it by frowning slightly as she, too, glanced out at the gardens.
“I’m beginning to not like the sound of him,” she said, which, irritatingly, gave Evie the sudden urge to defend him. She dropped the tassel in disgust. You don’t understand, part of her brain protested. He’s not always so…
“Maybe I am immature,” Evie said, suddenly wondering if it was true. “I keep doing the same sort of things I’ve done since I was a teenager. Going on the same types of voluntary schemes, joining in the same types of protests, making the same arguments over and over, and I’m not getting anywhere. It’s all so ineffectual, and it keeps breaking my heart. But maybe I’m the problem. Acting like a thirteen-year-old with a hand-written petition and expecting it’s going to change the world. I need to do something different. Think bigger. But I don’t know what.”
“I thought that’s what this FTP thing was? That’s how you explained it last night. Serious activism, high-profile stuff. You said they were proactively trying to change things, not just care for the broken pieces after the fact.”
That’s how it had felt, when she was describing it all to Amy and Hugo last night. Because what good was feeding a few starved donkeys when you could change the system that let them starve in the first place? There had been refugee camps in Spain. She had passed them sitting in the back of a pick-up, bales of hay stacked around her, dust in the air. Rows of tents like something out of the apocalypse. She’d felt very small then. Completely insignificant. Still that child trying to rescue ants from puddles while shots rang out in the fields and her father shouted at Hugo for another of his indiscretions and her mother came back from London in new fur and her best friend cried with loneliness at her father being away. But how could you fix it all? So many problems, and all of them so big and complicated. Grown up.
“I just need to try harder,” she said—as much to herself as to Amy. “Maybe I won’t achieve much. But I won’t achieve anything at all if I give up.”
“True enough,” Amy agreed, a trace of doubt in her smile. But she stood up, giving Evie a sudden, unexpected hug. “Just remember to put yourself first occasionally, when you’re out there saving the world.”
Evie smiled that away, awkward, embarrassed. Then she caught the change in Amy’s expression. “What? What is it?”
Amy’s grimace deepened. “I came to find you because we’ve been summoned to Conyers. Hugo and I. Your father wants to discuss some estate stuff. And we’ll be there for dinner—we can get changed there. It’s where all our clothes are anyway. Are you coming? I don’t blame you if you’d rather stay here with the demon horse.”
Evie laughed faintly, looking back at the vicious creature that was ready to fight to the death for its freedom. She had one night before Aubrey left. He doubted her commitment to the cause, did he? She’d prove him wrong.
She left the room with her lip curling much like that of the horse on the wall behind her.