Prologue #2
She laughed, and realised that for all his gorgeousness, she felt so at ease with him.
She normally didn’t with people; the changes in her life had made her so uncertain of how to behave, how to think.
But talking to him felt like something she had always done, as easy as a breath of springtime air.
‘No, I’m afraid not. But my life has lately turned in…
well, in another direction. I have different things to hide from now. ’
His head tilted again in interest. ‘What sort of things?’
‘Well, when I was a child, we lived with many other people. It was just noise, noise, noise all the time, shrieking and arguing, and…’ And love-making.
Everything could be heard through those paper-thin walls.
She blushed to remember that. ‘When I was lucky enough to get my hands on a book, if I read hard enough, focused close enough, I could just make myself vanish.’
‘Vanish?’
‘Go somewhere else. I wouldn’t even hear the baby twins next door howling.
Now we have our own house, just my mother, brother, me, a couple of maids.
I even have a sitting room I made into my own little library!
But my mother thinks I shut myself up alone there too much.
She’s always coming in saying I should be out there making friends, shopping for hats, doing something useful.
I can’t really ignore my mother, imagine her away in a poem, so I come here to read sometimes. ’
She suddenly realised that maybe her mother was right and she should buy some new clothes, because she wore her old, plain shirtwaist and dark-blue skirt, her hair untidily tied back. She wished she had something a bit prettier to catch Benedict’s eye!
He didn’t seem to notice, though. He nodded as if he knew just what she meant. ‘I’ve often had the opposite problem,’ he said quietly, and slid a book back onto the shelf.
She couldn’t imagine a man like this, a man so filled with quiet confidence, had any problems he couldn’t shoo away. ‘What sort of problems?’
‘I’ve lived in a place that’s too empty—no noise at all. No one to talk to or overhear, nothing new to see. Until I went away to school.’ He flashed a crooked smile. ‘And that was its own set of problems. But it all came right in the end.’
‘There was no one at all where you lived?’ Jane asked, her heart aching to think of him lonely, to imagine him wandering empty, chilly corridors.
He shrugged. ‘My father was there sometimes, but we rarely saw each other. There were maids and footmen. They seemed appalled when I want to talk to them.’
Jane tried to imagine maids and footmen, gliding silently through those halls, and she couldn’t quite fathom it.
‘You never saw your own father?’ she whispered, appalled.
‘My mother can be quite nosy, but she’s always there.
She wants to tell me what she thinks is best for me, even though we don’t always agree on what best is. ’
‘My father would just tell me what I was to do. Then he’d go off shooting or riding again.’
‘And your mother?’
His expression shifted, closed. It was like watching a shutter clang down. ‘She has been gone for a long while now.’
‘Oh. I am sorry.’ Jane bit her lip, chilly sadness washing over her.
She longed to touch his hand, to bring him back to her and ease the sadness that clung around him.
‘My father died when I was very little; I don’t even remember him.
My brother Connor has tried to be like a father sometimes, and I know he cares very much, but he is many years older than me.
And, like your father, he can be very busy. ’
‘Shooting and fishing? I wouldn’t think there would be much of that in these narrow streets!’
Jane laughed. ‘Slaying the great beast of commerce. It’s why we have our own house now.’
‘So he builds things rather than destroys them,’ Benedict murmured thoughtfully. ‘I envy him that. So much seems to be crumbling away where I’m from.’
Jane wondered if he meant Derbyshire, and what was crumbling beneath him there: castles, stone rings, ancient monasteries?
She had never yet visited Europe, but she thought she could see it in her mind after all her books: beautiful places filled with old stories, not like New York.
‘My parents came from County Mayo, before I was born. My mother says there were only sheep and churches and cottage walls there! I can’t really imagine it as she describes it, though I like to think there’s a castle or two somewhere, some place suitable for ancient kings and fair damsels.
’ She tapped one of the books on the shelf.
He studied the gilded writing on the spine. ‘Morte de Arthur?’
‘It’s an old favourite. Mostly these days I read things like this.’ She held up the book with her bookmark tucked within it.
‘Elements of Useful Knowledge, Volume One? Are you a teacher?’
‘I’m not really allowed to be anything now. I’m meant to be a lady.’ Which hadn’t been going very well. She mangled her embroidery until the threads were one great knot, and hadn’t progressed beyond scales on the piano. ‘I am allowed to help with charity work.’
‘Would you have liked to be a teacher, then, if ladyhood didn’t stand in the way?’
‘I’m not really sure what I would have been.
I didn’t dare think of it when I was young, and I was afraid I would have to go to the factory.
To have useful work in clean, respectable places, that seemed amazing.
Mostly I saw girls a little older than me get married and have too many babies, along with lots of laundry and lots of cabbage to boil. ’
Also ladies of the night who’d lurked on the corners, looking tired and bored, and bent and grey women older than their years stumbling home from the factories.
‘But, yes, maybe I would have been a teacher. I like being able to help other people build their lives, see them find refuge in books and learning as I have. What about you, Benedict?’
‘Me? Oh, I’ve never dared imagine that, either. My path seems laid out for me already.’
Jane couldn’t quite believe that. Men usually did have choices, of course, whereas girls such as her from crowded tenements had very few choices at all. But Benedict looked astounded even to begin to think of it, as if choice was an unfathomable fantasy.
‘I—I think maybe I’d like to do as you do, Jane: help people,’ he said after a long moment. ‘Make some choices.’
‘And you don’t do that now?’
He laughed wryly. ‘I won’t be able to for a while, I’m afraid. I can’t build things as your brother does; I must wait for the tools to fall into my hands. But I can prepare; you are right about that.’
Jane was confused and curious. She studied the books he held under his arm: Stephens’ The Book of the Farm and the National Livestock Journal. ‘Are you a farmer, then?’
He held up the books, a delighted smile spreading across his face. ‘In a way, yes. That would be the best way to describe my life’s plan. I should certainly like to be a farmer. It’s fascinating work.’
‘If you say so,’ Jane said dubiously, though she had to admit he looked enthralled by the idea, his handsome face glowing at the thought of soil conditions and expanding livestock herds. And that enthusiasm was infectious.
‘Oh, yes! I was just reading Stephens’ excellent advice on crop rotations.
’ He held up one of the books, as if it was an emerald.
‘I’m learning how to regenerate fields that have been overplanted or neglected.
A few fields could be turned to turnips and clover now, in the Four Course Rotation, which could replace the fallow year and allow for more intense cultivation, made quite profitable with more oats and barley.
’ He looked at her and laughed, as if he could see her confusion.
‘But you probably think I sound crazed, thinking about soil and fertilizer and greenhouse yields of strawberries.’
Jane laughed too. He just had that kind of smile, that kind of laugh—warm, rich and inviting, if slightly rusty, as if he didn’t use it very often.
It invited her closer. ‘Not at all. You sound as if you have a passion, just like my brother can talk of stock operations for hours. I admit I’ve rarely seen a farm, or anything more than the little kitchen vegetable plot my mother keeps at our new house. ’
He studied her again, his eyes widening. Strangely, it felt as if time slowed and drew close around them, as if they were caught in each other, interested only in each other. She’d never sensed anything quite like it before. A man interested in her, in what she had to say—what she thought!
‘I do wonder, Jane, what you would think of my home. There’s rolling green hills in the distance, wildflower meadows, moorlands that seem to go on for ever; ancient oak and beech trees that have seen things centuries ago. It feels like it’s been there for ever, watching, knowing.’
Jane closed her eyes to picture it: endless skies with silvery clouds drifting toward those hills, and pale stone manor houses amid rose gardens. ‘It sounds like a place that could certainly be full of poetry.’
His smile turned wistful. ‘I wish that was so. Just now, it’s all falling apart. But some day I can change that.’ He glanced at his watch and frowned. ‘My aunt will be expecting me soon.’
Jane was startled it was growing so late. ‘So will my mother! She hates how I lose track of time in the bookshops.’ And now she’d been distracted by him. It was so dangerous; romantic distraction blurred logic, pushed people off their paths. Made them long for things they couldn’t have.
‘Can I walk you home?’ he asked eagerly. Jane was suddenly struck by how lonely he seemed. Why should this man, so handsome, so charming, be lonely at all? What lurked in his life that made him so? She longed to know, to make it better.
See, Jane, she told herself. Dangerous.
‘I’d like that, Benedict,’ she found herself saying against her better judgement. She couldn’t resist it.