Chapter 18 #3
“Come, come,” said Caroline as Jack tossed back his drink in lieu of the laugh he couldn’t quite find.
“If there’s one thing friends never do, it’s remember each other as children.
All children are wretched. They cannot help it.
” With her usual skill, she turned the conversation to a story of an old friend and the trials of the numerous progeny she was afflicted with, and from there, somehow, to some interesting gossip about mutual friends.
And thus they passed the wait for dinner, Jack still probing his odd mood as though it were a loose tooth.
Numbing it with another swill of cognac, he watched Lucy and George, and George and Lucy, and felt indeed as though some part of him had come loose.
It was just damnably strange. It was just…damnably damn.
He set down his glass, loud enough to make everyone look, but fixed a smile to his face and pretended to study the light fixture. Cobwebs in the chandelier, tiny, wispy ones, moving in an unfelt current.
They didn’t look much like lovers to him sitting next to each other at dinner, even though etiquette ought to have put him by her side.
Several significant glances were exchanged, and even more blushes.
But there was nothing burning. George seemed to feel no need to manufacture a hundred ways to touch her: the glance of fingers when passing a dish, the helpful rearrangement of the napkin on her lap, the request to examine the bracelet on her wrist and hold her hand as he did so, fingertip exploring every bead.
He didn’t seem to find his eyes lingering on the colours the candlelight made in her hair, finding amber and red honey among the dark curls.
Or to be a base, pathetic man, Goddammit, unable to stop his eyes dropping again and again to the plump, pale mounds of her breasts, set there like forbidden fruit on the devil’s own plate.
He unclenched his fingers from his cutlery and ate studiously, tasting nothing. They were both shy. And George was a better man than he. So perhaps the lover-like behaviour was reserved for private moments.
This observation gave him little satisfaction, as did the inevitable conclusion that he reached as the final course was being cleared away, that with such similar temperaments, they were clearly made for each other.
George stood, decorously assisting Min to her feet, saying something gallant and tactful about how Jack would excuse him from pipe and port, because how could he want to be separated from his love for even one minute?
How devoted George would be, Jack had to admit as he followed the pair—now sweetly arm in arm—to Caroline’s parlour.
How tender and gentle. And how Min would blossom under that kind, respectful care.
It was what she needed. She was smiling her thanks at George now as he led her to the seat of her choosing.
It was exactly what she needed. To be seen and valued and set apart.
The Lord knew that society, in all its loud, rambunctious narcissism, seldom noticed or cared for such quiet qualities as Min’s.
Especially when set in a skin not fashionably beautiful, and especially when the creature in question was happiest in quiet corners—had, indeed, been taught from birth to take second place.
First to her father’s books and clinging, self-indulgent grief, and then to her grand neighbours and their spoilt children, her only choice of companions.
Which was why, later, as Caroline was hunting the house for a child’s game she was sure was in a cupboard somewhere and George had stood to tend the fire, he found himself asking, “Would you have known us?”
It was the warm, companionable quiet of late evening, and for once, with no ball or party or show to dash off to, Jack let himself succumb to it, the comfort of food in his stomach, wine in his veins, the soft crackle of the fire.
And Min with her legs drawn up under the rich satin of her skirts, curled in the corner of the sofa nearest his chair.
“If the rector had been a family man,” he continued, “with a brood of respectable and well-mannered children, or if there’d been some quiet country gent with a couple of very proper daughters your age—a Claire and a Dorothea, both diligent with their needles and their catechisms—would you have come every day to our garden and subjected yourself to the tyranny of the Ortons? The tyranny of me?”
Min gave him an odd look, one too complicated to be a smile. “Would you have known me, Jack, if that country gent had a strapping, sporting son or two? Some fellows to hunt with, and fish with, and give black eyes to whenever you got it into your heads to try your hands at boxing?”
His own smile was easy. He always smiled remembering their past. “You should be glad there were none, or you can be sure we’d have teamed up to torment you together. Three horrible boys. Poor Lucy. We would’ve driven you to despair.”
“You did that all by yourself.”
“I’m sorry.” Though he was still smiling.
She didn’t answer straightaway, and in the pause, he felt doubt creep in. She seemed far less amused than him. Not amused at all, in fact.
“Was I truly so awful?”
“No. I…” She sighed. “I wondered for a moment whether it would have been better if it had all been different. But then you wouldn’t have been you, and I wouldn’t have been me, and I think…I think it’s best for both of us that we are the way we are.”
He didn’t understand any of that. But one thing he did know.
“I never wanted you to be any different.”
Her lips pressed up, sceptical, her nose wrinkling. “Not braver or bolder or…or more fun?”
“No.”
“I suppose I might have stolen some of your shine if I were.”
“Min… I mean, Lucy… Ever since you told me not to call you by that nickname… Ever since we met again at Almack’s and you held out your hand like you scarcely knew me, I’ve been worrying that you didn’t remember those years with the same fondness I’ve always done.
” He resisted the urge to take her hand. “Do you?”
She paused. “I do remember them.”
“But fondly?”
Another pause. “Something deeper than that, Jack.”
Relief washed through him, warm and sweet as cocoa. “Well, of course. It was everything.”
She gave him a strange look, surprised and doubting.
The glow from the fire was a perfect gold—he realised now that George had finished tending it and had gone, left the room, perhaps to assist Caroline in her hunt for the game.
He could understand Lucy’s doubt. The last seven years had left plenty of room for doubts to grow.
But the last seven years had also been a waste.
He could see that now—now that he had something to compare them too.
They were hollow as a courtesan’s laugh.
But here was reality. Here was the very core of him, the thread that ran through him from boy to man.
It was in the warmth and the depth of this companionable quiet, with the light playing over Lucy’s chestnut curls like exploring kitten paws.
The freckled skin of her cheek was smooth.
Cream and cinnamon. She sat close to him, tucked up in the sofa’s corner, and he found himself leaning closer, his elbow on the arm of his chair.
If she’d turned to face him, their mouths would be scandalously close. But she stayed looking at the fire.
“Lucy…”
She turned a fraction, looked at his lapel. Somewhere beneath it his heart was beating a strange rhythm.
“Lucy… Do you love him?”
She pulled back. Sat up straight. The question had startled them both. But really, once it was out, he realised it was the only question worth asking.
Nothing else seemed to matter as she took a torturously long moment to answer, the whole world narrowed to his heartbeat—and her.
“I… He… He is a very good man.”
She was looking at the fire again, so he couldn’t read her eyes. He studied the side of her face instead, the sweep of her lashes, the tension at the corner of her mouth, grasping at straws.
“But do you—” He cut himself off. He didn’t want to know. Suddenly he didn’t want to know.
The question was impertinent. He couldn’t believe he’d asked it. He rubbed a palm over his knee as though chasing away a wrinkle, but it was more to relieve the sticky heat. What business was it of his?
Of course she loved him. A cold sweat spiked his chest. Of course she did. It was nothing but an insult to suggest she would marry where her heart wasn’t engaged. He might as well call her a fortune hunter and be done with it.
“I’m sorry. Never mind.” He had to swallow. The words were a mass in his throat, painful as a lodged brick. “I only want you to be happy.”
When she spoke, her voice sounded strange because it was her own normal voice, level and quiet and stout. Completely at odds with the clamour in his own mind.
“And will you ever trust that I know how to make myself so?”
“I…” He let out a breath, forcing his mind to quiet. “I want you to be loved as you deserve.”
“Do you think I don’t? But a woman…a woman needs more than just love.”
“More?” He could think of something else a successful marriage might need, but that was a censored topic. “Money, I suppose? Well, of course. We all need that.”
“I mean…I mean freedom, Jack. And respect. A woman needs love that includes that. And the ability to be herself, even once married.”
“Yes…” He said slowly, trying to understand. He respected women, of course he did. It was essential in a gentleman. But so was protecting them and guiding them. Wasn’t it? Everybody said so. “A good husband would obviously respect his wife.”
“And let them work? I want to…to create things and do things.” If he could see her eyes, he suspected they’d be burning like the flames she stared into. “I want to be Miss Lucy Fanshaw, artist. I want to stand up and be seen.”
“But you hate attention.”
She gave him a fleeting glance, then fidgeted with her skirt, pinching the green satin into a crease and then smoothing it out. “I think I could survive the right kind of attention.”
“A famed artist? Like Thornton? Going to exhibition openings and painting portraits of the queen…? Min, Lucy…if you think George… Devil take it, I wouldn’t speak ill of him for the world, but you have to know he’s a stickler for propriety, the whole family is.
He’s not the man to let you have a career. ”
Her cheeks went very red, and he hoped to hell it wasn’t anger, but he had to warn her. A good friend would, wouldn’t they?
She continued pinching the satin, gathering it into a tiny fan before letting it all go and starting again.
“He will listen to me,” she said. “And that is all I ask.”
Miss Sedgewick and George appeared in the doorway. Jack straightened in his chair, guiltily conscious of their cosy tête-à-tête. And its subject. He couldn’t quite meet George’s eye. He ought to be hung.
But neither Caroline nor George looked in the least perturbed, and Caroline advanced into the room with a wide smile. “The game is lost for good. But never fear, I have a better plan for our entertainment. We shall have a dance!”