Chapter 22 #3
“I do understand,” she said quietly. “I respect your devotion to your family, Jem. I do. I admire your dedication to your business. It is one of the many things I adore about you. So practical. So determined. You are a kind, deeply moral man, and your mind is as good as your eye for fashion.”
She laid a hand against his cheek. She’d stripped off her gloves, and her palm was cold, the pulse in her wrist fluttering against the corner of his lips.
He turned his head slightly and kissed the delicate skin, trying at the last to coax the words he wanted from her.
She drew a deep breath and dropped her hand.
“I have had a week to think deeply about what I want from my life, Jem. About what marriage would mean to me. What you mean to me.”
He reached for her hand, drawing it stubbornly to his chest so she could feel the wild beat of his heart. “You love me.”
She nodded. “I do. I never expected to feel this way about anyone. I didn’t know that I could.
I adore you with everything in me. I suspect that I always will.
” She spoke in a low tone, steady and firm, but her eyes glistened with tears.
“But I have also, in these past weeks, come to understand myself more clearly. And I need to use my voice.”
“You may,” he said, the words spilling out of him.
“Of course. However you wish. Benefit concerts, and performances for our friends, and even now and then a private engagement. Your voice is a miracle. Your voice is what truly made me see you.” He clasped her hand to his chest with both hands. “I want to use your voice. Always.”
“But not as a career,” she said quietly. “Not in public.”
“It doesn’t have to be that, does it? There are other ways.”
She tugged gently at her hand. He refused to release her.
“It is my one great dream, Jem. It is the one thing that has always been mine, when everything else was taken from me. My music. It is not just my greatest pleasure—it is my purpose.” She tugged more firmly, and the tears spilled from her eyes.
“If you cannot share my great dream, Jem, then I cannot give my life to you.”
“I can give you music,” he insisted. “Lessons with friends, like you did for Judith and Bertie.”
“A music conservatory of my own?” she asked gently.
“You won’t need it. I will provide for you. A marchioness has no reason to have a music conservatory.”
“But I want to teach. I want to help others pursue their passions and use their gifts. I want to share music with them. And I want to perform.” She wiped the tears from her cheeks with her free hands.
“I didn’t understand how badly I want to sing in this concert with the girls until Gale kept me prisoner and I thought I wouldn’t get back in time. ”
“I’ll build you a stage of your own at Arendale House,” Jem said wildly. “You can have a private concert every night.”
“And sing only by your permission. I don’t want to have to choose, Jem,” she said, her voice catching.
The tears fell freely. “But if I cannot have a husband and also sing, then I do not want a husband. Not even you.” She held her hands over her face a moment, then faced him, wiping the tears from her chin.
“I love you, Jeremiah Falstead, upon my soul I do. But I will not dally with you, and I cannot marry you.” She passed a hand over her eyes.
“I have one request of you, however.” She took a deep, bracing breath. “Please do bring your family, all of them, to the concert tomorrow. I promised they might hear it, and I want to say a proper goodbye. I shall send over the tickets.”
She went into the music room and closed the door. Though he stood for several moments, not a sound emerged.
His guts had been torn out of him and flung to the ground, like a traitor disemboweled before his execution, but his skeleton still worked.
Jem walked down the stairs, each jarring step telling him that he did not dream, that Lucasta Lithwick had declined his hand and wounded his heart to a depth he could not even begin to fathom.
Her friends waited for him on the small landing, watching.
“Turned me down.” His voice rasped like dried flax. “After all I can offer her…”
“Can you give her her great dream?” Selina asked quietly.
Jem stared at her with bewildered eyes. “To sing,” Minnie explained.
Jem shifted his gaze to stare out the small window, where the sky had finally delivered on its miserable promise and released rain. “I cannot,” he said helplessly. “In my position— I have more than my own wishes to consider.”
Annis nodded, her gaze full of compassion. “Lucasta understands that.”
Jem looked back and forth between their faces.
These women understood something about Lucasta that he didn’t, and might never.
Perhaps it was a fundamental difference in the way men and women were built.
He could give her a lifetime of ease and protection, his utmost fidelity and devotion, and she wanted something he couldn’t comprehend.
He looked at the women once more. The Luneberg, the daughter of a German duke, was a foreigner and an outsider on British shores. The same with Voronska, daughter of a Russian count. Miss Humby, a mix of races like his younger siblings, at least had the benefit of married parents.
But all three of them were considered, by those of the highest ton, exotic oddities. They were watched, speculated about, insulted. All the things he wanted to avoid for his own siblings, these women endured.
And rose above.
“I never meant that comment about the zebra to be a slur,” Jem said to Selina. “Those stripes were vile, and I never considered your parentage. I ought to have. I am sorry.”
She gave him a sweet smile. “I accept your apology.”
He didn’t deserve her easy forgiveness. “But I would never have chosen to subject you to shame or ridicule.”
She shrugged. “You didn’t. Not from anyone who mattered, at any rate.”
Jem blinked at this, taken aback by her indifference. To not care if she were not admired, to not be watching every moment to see if she were being accepted by people around them, conforming to those invisible but very firm lines about what was ton and what was not—
“I named you the Gorgons,” he said slowly.
“We suspected it was you.” Annis nodded.
Again he felt the need to explain himself. “Ashley was outraged by something you’d said, and you were calling yourselves Miss Gregoire’s Girls—”
“Ashley,” Minnie hissed.
“But none of you cared,” Jem realized. “You went to the parties anyway and made your own group and enjoyed yourselves hugely, and you never cared what others thought.”
He simply couldn’t wrap his head around the idea that it was possible to step away from that dance of courting attention and acceptance. Perhaps it was the draper in him, a shopkeeper after all; he had to win customers, he had to be liked.
So many times he’d heard his mother weeping over a slight one of his father’s acquaintances had dealt her.
Eventually she stopped going to the parties and the balls and the theater and the pleasure gardens.
She focused on the business and her children, and her husband went his own way, letting her hard work fill the family coffers while he enjoyed his status and her income.
Jem had courted society’s approval telling himself it was for the sake of his business. He had said as much to Lucasta. But all along, he’d wanted to show that world that his mother really had been good enough for them. That he, as her son, was good enough for them.
He’d hidden his sister’s blindness and his illegitimate younger siblings because he was worried he’d no longer be approved of, and if society rejected him, they were rejecting his mother all over again.
He had been exerting himself to the utmost trying to please people who were never going to find him worthy.
He’d just let the most miraculous woman he was ever going to meet refuse him—the woman made for him in every respect, the woman he wanted to spend his entire life with—because he was worried what other people might think of her wanting to sing.
When Miss Gregoire’s girls, the Gorgons, didn’t care whom they pleased.
They followed some inner guide, and Lucasta, especially, followed some lode star that shone from within.
What was his great dream? Jem wondered. What was the one thing he would give up anything else for, approval and acceptance be damned?
The girls still stood on the landing with its inset alcove and the absurd little trinket on display there. Traffic moved along Caroline Street, tousled by the wind. The girls watched him curiously.
“You are attending the concert tomorrow, I presume?” Jem rasped.
Annis gave him a broad grin. “We are performing. We always perform in the concerts Lucasta organizes. We have since our first year at Miss Gregoire’s.”
Minnie preened, and Selina, gulping, nodded.
“I have no right to ask a boon of you, and you have no reason to indulge me.” It took all his courage to say these words.
“But my sister will be there. She does not move in society much, and—because she is blind and very shy, I fear she will not make friends. You seem to have taken in Bertie, and I hope—I may—introduce you?”
“We shall be very happy to make the acquaintance of your sister, Lord Payne,” Minnie said politely.
She shared a look with her friends that said, whatever question they had for him, it had not yet been answered.
“And now, if we might ask you to remove yourself from the stairs, we need to see Lucasta.”
“Oh. Of course.”
They’d not been waiting on the landing to offer support as he groped his way to understanding.
They waited because, given how narrow the stairs were, they couldn’t get past him.
His heart turned to pulp, Jem located his hat and cloak and a boy to bring round his carriage.
He needed to go to Arendale House and tend to his family.
He wanted to be upstairs in the music room with Lucasta. But her friends had the right to comfort and console her and hear every detail of her captivity, the details he was certain she’d kept from him.
Jem didn’t have that right to her comfort and confidence. Her friends had earned her trust and loyalty.
He hadn’t. The knowledge brought him lower than anything had since his mother died, taking away the last person in the world he had to depend on.