Chapter 8
“Jasper! You are not paying attention to me in the least!”
Jasper started at his younger sister’s voice and lowered the book he had not been reading. “My dear Pen,” he said, with a tone that might have persuaded a less perceptive audience, “I assure you, I am all attention.”
“You are not,” Penelope returned at once, narrowing her bright eyes at him.
She was only ten, but fiercer and more intelligent than any other child he knew.
Precocious, their mother called her. “You have not turned one page in five minutes, and when I spoke just now, you agreed with me without knowing what I had said.”
“That is not, I think, a failing,” he replied mildly. “You are very often correct.”
She huffed at that, unimpressed. “I said that Parliament is composed almost entirely of men who would faint dead away if asked to consider a woman as their intellectual equal.”
“A bold claim, my dear.”
”A true one.”
“Undoubtedly.”
She stared at him. “You see? You are not listening.”
“On the contrary. I am listening with the greatest care, Penelope. I merely find myself in no position to dispute you.”
Penelope set aside her papers. “You are thinking of something else,” she declared. “Something interesting.”
Jasper leant back in his chair, stretching his long legs before the hearth.
It was raining outside, and it was slightly less boring at Deverell House with his sister and parents than it was alone at his bachelor’s lodgings.
He could go to a gentleman’s club, he supposed, but he did not much feel like it.
“My thoughts, I assure you, are exceedingly dull.”
“They are not,” she said flatly. “You look as though… as though you have swallowed a secret and cannot decide whether it pleases or disgusts you.”
He laughed. “A most poetic description, Pen. You have a gift with words.”
Her eyes narrowed. “What is it?”
“Nothing,” he replied, far too easily.
Penelope folded her arms. “Then why do you keep frowning at nothing in particular, and then smiling as though you have done something very wicked indeed?”
Jasper’s smile faltered, before returning twice as wide. It was just like Pen to see right through him.
“If you will not confess, I shall deduce. It is a lady.”
Jasper put down his book and took a slow sip of brandy. “Is it?”
“Of course it is,” she said, settling back with satisfaction, “I hope she is disagreeable.”
“Do you?” he asked, amused.
“Certainly. It would serve you perfectly right.”
“For what crime?”
“For thinking yourself so very difficult to affect,” she said. “Sometimes I think I will be the only young lady you will ever love. It is tiresome. I do so want a sister.”
Jasper laughed again, though the sound held less ease than before.
He did think of himself as difficult to affect.
His romantic attachments had always been of the lightest, most agreeable kind: easily formed, easily relinquished, and never of sufficient consequence to trouble his peace.
He moved through the world with a ready charm and an open curiosity, inclined towards pleasure where he found it, and seldom inclined to deny himself when it presented.
There was no shortage of company. Women, certainly—bright, clever, rich, poor, ardent, indifferent—it made little difference, so long as they amused him.
Men, too, when the inclination struck, and occasionally those who did not sit comfortably within either distinction, whose appeal lay precisely in that ambiguity.
He enjoyed the variety of humanity, the endless novelty of character and desire.
It pleased him to admire and to indulge, and to love, but never to be in love.
He had never, in all his varied acquaintance, mistaken desire or affection for anything so perilous.
Indeed, he would have said himself quite immune to it.
Until—
He shifted slightly in his chair.
He desired Miss Tolliver. That, at least, was straightforward. Anyone in possession of sight and the smallest inclination towards feeling would have done the same; there was nothing singular in that.
She was handsome, certainly; lively in a manner that animated every room she entered.
But desire did not intrude upon a man’s thoughts while sitting reading beside one’s sister, nor render one absurdly conscious of a lady’s absence, nor compel one to recall—against one’s will—the precise inflection of her voice when she implored him to kiss her. No, it could not be desire alone.
Was it, then, her indifference to marriage?
He turned the notion over with great seriousness.
For in that, she differed from every other young gentlewoman of his acquaintance.
However artfully disguised or prettily denied, the desire for the security of a husband’s name and fortune was always present, whether openly or otherwise.
It coloured every interaction and lent a certain predictability to even the most spirited among them.
Miss Charlotte Tolliver… did not. Or, if she did, she concealed it so perfectly as to render the question irrelevant.
Yes—that must be it. A lady who did not seek to entrap him was, by all rational accounts, the very height of desirability.
Jasper set his glass aside with rather more care than was necessary.
“Well,” said Penelope, who he realised had been watching him attentively. “I should very much like to meet her.”
“I should not like you to meet her,” he returned at once. “She would be a terrible influence.”
“Oh, she must be very interesting indeed! Do tell me more, brother.”
Jasper huffed a quiet laugh and dragged a hand through his hair, his composure slipping just enough to betray him. “She is… troublesome.”
“Ah.” Penelope nodded. “Like the women in my pamphlets?”
“No.” He laughed. “Not at all. Not like one of your radicals. Like a… a… Well, I confess, I do not know.”
Penelope sighed, as though she were an elderly lady, and came to sit beside him. “Does she wish to marry you?”
Jasper blinked. “Good God, no.”
Penelope tilted her head. “You sound almost offended.”
“I am not offended,” he said. “I am—“
He stopped.
“What?” she pressed.
He frowned faintly. “Surprised, perhaps.”
“Because she does not wish to secure your fortune and your name?” Penelope asked, with a certain dry emphasis.
“Because she does not appear to wish to secure anything,“ he said. “At least, not in the usual way.”
“I believe I understand now.”
“Do you? Pray enlighten me, sister, for I find myself entirely at a loss.”
Penelope folded her hands in her lap, looking for all the world like a child about to deliver a most serious lecture. “It is perfectly simple. She does not behave as though she requires anything from you, and so you cannot decide what or who you are meant to be in her presence.”
Jasper stilled. “That is nonsense,” he said, though without much force.
“Is it? You always know precisely what everyone wishes you to be, and so you become just enough of it.”
He frowned. “I do no such thing.”
“You do,” she said. “Only you do it so well that no one notices. Not even you.”
Before Jasper could examine this most unwelcome piece of wisdom from the mouth of a babe, the door opened, and their mother, Lady Bellston, entered. She paused upon the threshold, her gaze moving at once between her son and daughter.
“Penelope,” she said with reproach, “you are overtiring yourself.”
“I am doing nothing of the sort, Mama,” Penelope returned. “I am sitting and conversing quietly.”
“Your colour is too high, and you have been up far longer than you were permitted,” Lady Bellston said, advancing into the room.
“I was quite explicit.”
Jasper rose, though whether from habit or an instinct to escape notice, he could not have said. “Mama, I assure you—“
“You may assure me of nothing,” she interrupted, not unkindly, but with a composure that admitted no debate. “You ought to have sent her up to rest half an hour ago.”
Penelope gave an indignant sound. “I am not a parcel to be sent, Mama.”
“At present,” Lady Bellston replied, taking her daughter lightly by the arm, “you are very much a charge to be managed, and I shall do so whether you approve or not. Now—upstairs to lie down. I shall have some tea sent up.”
Penelope trotted obediently from the room, but not without a loud sigh that reminded Jasper of another young lady.
When the door closed behind her, Lady Bellston turned to her son. “You must take more care. Penelope does not feel her limits until she has already exceeded them.”
“I had not thought—“
“No, you had not. Her spirits will carry her farther than her constitution allows. If we do not manage her with some consistency, you may find that the next time you are called to this house, it is not for conversation, but to lay flowers upon her dead body.”
“I apologise, Mama. You may depend upon my being more careful in future.”
His mother nodded, and then drew a breath, as though setting one matter aside only to take up another no less pressing.
“Your father spoke of you this morning at breakfast, and I find I am not surprised by the nature of his concern, for he observes—as do I—that you have reached an age at which a gentleman ought to possess some notion of his direction, and yet you appear content to defer the question indefinitely.”
Jasper resisted the urge to sigh as his sister had done, for it was not a new reproach.
Indeed, it had been delivered in so many forms, over so many years, that it no longer possessed the power to startle—only to weary.
He had, at various times, attempted to meet it: to take an interest where expected and apply himself to becoming, if not precisely what his father wished, then at least something approaching it.
Yet the effort had never quite sufficed.
There was always some deficiency—too little seriousness, too much levity, a judgment that did not align.
It was as though he were perpetually almost, and never entirely, what was required.
It was a curious thing to consider, particularly after Penelope’s pronouncement not moments before that he shaped himself, however subtly, to meet the expectations set before him.
He did so easily in every other sphere, but the one person he could not succeed in satisfying or understanding was his father…
and now, quite possibly, Miss Tolliver. She, too, refused to be met on any terms he understood.
“You will be the next earl,” his mother continued, “and with that inheritance comes not merely title, but responsibility. It will not wait upon your inclination, nor accommodate itself to a life arranged entirely for ease and diversion.”
He inclined his head slightly. “I do not mean to disregard it,” he said at last, though the words sounded, even to himself, insufficient.
His mother regarded him, measuring his assurance and finding it, likewise, wanting. “No, you rarely mean to do anything of the sort. That, I think, is precisely the difficulty.”
There was nothing to be said to that. She seemed to accept it as the conclusion of the matter, and with a decisive nod, turned and quitted the room.
Almost, and never enough. Jasper exhaled and scrubbed a hand across his jaw.
And here, dear reader, we arrive at a truth not often spoken plainly: that a gentleman, when confronted with the uncomfortable suspicion that he is not, in fact, equal to the role laid out for him, is afforded a most convenient refuge in diversion.
Where a lady must sit with her thoughts, refine them, master them, and be judged by them besides, a gentleman may simply ignore them.
I should like to see Miss Tolliver tonight, Jasper thought to himself.
She, at least, required nothing of him that he understood well enough to fail at—and, perhaps more importantly, nothing he had yet been asked to become.
Yes. That would do exceedingly well. For if he could not, at present, be what he ought—he might, at least, enjoy some laughter with a beautiful young lady.