16. Unexpected Visitors #2
“If you cannot bring yourself to pick and cut and boil, you may leave. A potion works best when it is brewed by the one who will use it. What you get from me is generic. It is better if you meet personally with one of my shopgirls to help brew, but it is best if you do it yourself. Your face salve will brighten your complexion just as you like it. Your sight solution will be better than any pair of spectacles. And your—” She considered the viscount’s daughter. “What is it you want?”
Miss Prince’s lower lip trembled, and her cheeks turned red as berries. “A potion to ward against conception.”
“Ah. Yes. If you brew your own, you’ll not have a babe in your belly unless you want it.”
The young woman peeked up at her and stripped her gloves off.
The baroness and dowager did as well.
And then, with Guin’s instructions, they set off into the plants to find what they needed.
Guin yawned, placing a hand over her mouth. The earth seemed to tug at her, as if it wanted her to lie down, but she shook fatigue away and gripped tighter to the edge of the table.
A cloud moved over the sun, and the conservatory darkened, a bulky shadow drifted nearer to her and settled at her side.
“Is that a glamour or some Second Shadow magic?” she whispered.
“A little of both. You are good at this.”
“At what?”
“Leading them.”
Her heart clenched like a fist. “You cannot convince me to stay on as your duchess.”
“I know. Still… they’re defying convention for you. Transcendent women grow up thinking work of any sort is beneath them.”
“I did not have a typical upbringing.”
“How did you learn?” he asked.
“Handsford’s cook, his housekeeper. They were mother, grandmother, mentor, friend—everyone I didn’t have. When I cried, they gave me recipes to distract me. Potions to keep surfaces from getting dusty, elixirs to cure a runny nose or make a sparse meal feel more filling.”
“How often did you cry?” His voice was as tight as it was low, a shadow itself on the verge of losing its shape to total darkness.
She waved a hand, dismissing his question. “Quite often in the beginning. What child wouldn’t?”
“Because of the curse?”
“Because I was alone. The curse was like… the color of my hair or the slope of my nose—hereditary and uncontrollable. It wasn’t until I was older, falling in love with Tommy, that I thought I could break it.” She’d broken him instead.
A shadow of a hand brushed against her neck, rested heavy on her shoulder, and she thought, perhaps, she’d felt lips—made only of the intersection between light and dark—flirt with her temple. A diaphanous kiss that existed only because it almost didn’t.
The dowager reappeared first, a variety of leaves clutched in her hands. She shook them above her head, grinning wildly. “These them?”
“Come along,” Guin said, fighting another yawn, “and let’s see.”
The shadow at Guin’s side disappeared, and the dowager settled into the space, joined soon after by the other two women.
Guin was in the middle of showing Lady Folley how to peel a lemon when the butler called her from the hallway beyond the plants.
“Your Grace.”
Guin collected the seeds from a halved lemon—a cut on her finger hissing, and called out, “What is it, Bentley?”
“You have more visitors.”
“Send them this way. They may join us.”
“I do not think they will wish to do so. It is the Earl and Countess of Cairnsbury.”
There was a flicker of light in a nearby corner as the shadows there coalesced into a big body. Bran crept around the walls toward the hallway unnoticed.
And Guin tried to spin sense of confusion. Her parents were… here? But they were supposed to be in Bath. They were always in Bath. “Pardon me, ladies, but I must end our lesson for the day.”
“Can we return tomorrow?” the baroness asked.
“To finish what we started,” Miss Prince added.
“Yes.” Guin didn’t wait to make sure they’d left. She joined Bentley in the hallway where Bran was waiting for her, studying her intently. “Do you know why they’re here?”
Bentley sniffed. “They did not say, and I thought it impolite to ask.”
“You didn’t write to them?” Bran asked her.
“A letter a few times a year, but nothing since I returned to Mayfair.”
“Word must have made it to Bath. After the ball.”
“So quickly?”
“I’m surprised it took so long.”
They headed toward the drawing room, strides eating up the distance at a familiar, shared pace they’d learned together long ago. In the entry hall, Bran paused before the mirror, checked his glamour, which had begun to return once he’d left the shadows.
“Why do you always do that?” Easier to ask such questions than to consider what sort of conversation awaited her in the drawing room.
“Do what?”
“Check the mirror?”
“I’ll give you one guess.”
“Your glamour is currently unpredictable, but you could appear as yourself. Now, at the ball, in parliament. There’s no law saying you must wear the hereditary glamour in public.”
“It’s what everyone expects a duke to look like.” He pulled her away from the mirror and toward the drawing room.
“Wait.” She stopped him outside the door, inhaling deeply.
“I’m nervous.” She pressed a hand to her forehead.
She shouldn’t have admitted any weakness in front of this man, but she couldn’t quite control her mouth.
It leapt before her brain could catch up, foggy as it was inside her brain box.
At least she wasn’t asleep on her feet anymore.
Anxiety rippled her into twitchy wakefulness.
“Why?” Bran asked.
“I haven’t seen my parents since our wedding. And I assume they’re here because they’ve discovered the infamous Lady Guinevere is their daughter, Gabriella Guinevere Pottinger. They will not be best pleased.”
“Did you care what they would think when you set out on your own? Would you have let them stop you?”
“No.” She dropped her hand and rested her shoulder against the doorframe. Her entire body felt heavy.
“You’re still her. The woman with fire in her soul and wit in her eyes, the woman whose beauty is rivaled only by her daring and intelligence. That girl didn’t care for parents. Neither do you.”
She laughed. She’d cared too much. It didn’t matter. She’d faced worse, like the man behind her resting a large and gentle hand on her shoulder. Her heart tripped over itself to get to him. Words like beauty and wit in the deep Scottish brogue were deadlier than sword or potion.
She shrugged away from his touch as she pushed herself upright, opened the door, and stepped inside. “Mother, Father, what a surprise!”
Bran took up his usual place right behind her, close enough to feel his heat, and she allowed herself to lean into his strength.
Here was a man who’d lied. For years. But he’d never leave her helpless.
That a certainty, but certainly not trust, which was a deeper thing that held the soul as well as the body.
Bran might be able to keep her heart thumping, but he could not, would never, keep her heart.
Guin’s mother rushed toward her, and Guin braced herself for a hug. She received a piece of newspaper instead, held out at the end of her mother’s arm, folded and folded and folded so that only a single article was visible on the upward side.
Guin read. “Duchess of Braxton an East End Brewer.” She pushed the article away. “Rather unimaginative headline.”
Her father remained at the window, not even looking at the daughter he’d not seen in six years.
“What is this about?” Her mother shook the paper.
“Have a seat, Mother. You do not wish to become overset. It will hurt less if you faint while sitting.”
“Oh, I’ve fainted!” But her mother sat anyway, prim and proper and huffing in one of two matching armchairs. “When Lady Gibbons handed me this article, sneering. ‘You’ve always lorded your duchess daughter over us,’ she said. Did you know that’s what she said?”
“I had no idea.” Guin sat across from her mother on a low, elegant sofa—striped white and cream with wooden trim painted gold.
“It is! Then she said, ‘You won’t be able to lord it over us now, we all know she’s nothing but an elixir mixer.’”
“Elixir mixer. I’ve not heard that phrase. I rather like it.”
Bran sat beside Guin, stretching one long arm out across the back of the sofa, his hand resting right at her back, one extended thumb seeking out that strip of skin above her gown and between her shoulder blades.
An uninvited invasion of her space she shouldn’t have taken comfort from but did. “It’s catchy.”
“You approve of this, Braxton?” Guin’s father stepped away from the window. “No sensible man would let his wife, a duchess, dabble in witchery.”
Bran shrugged. “She’s happy doing it. And safe. And as her husband, those are my priorities.”
“As a duke, your priorities are to the title!” Her father’s jaw ticked.
His hair was fine and red still in large streaks.
But around his face, it was snowy white.
“The reputation of your family! Of my family! It’s clear the line had to reach so far down the family tree for an heir you have no idea what any of it means. ”
Guin’s mother shifted one way then the other with little bounces, her hair entirely covered by a large purple bonnet.
Her eyes were blue and watery, and her hands clutched tightly in her lap.
“His lack of refinement is why we chose him, Gabriella. He has everything a Pottinger looks for in a mate—title, wealth, unlovable qualities.”
Guin almost choked.
Bran tensed.
Guin laid a hand on his thigh. To comfort him? He didn’t deserve comfort. It didn’t work, no matter the why. He was still a barely-tamed beast when her father stalked their way; a sound like a low growl—territorial, animalistic—rumbled from Bran’s throat.
She squeezed his leg. “He’s not going to hurt me.”
“Of course not!” her father snapped. “Everything we’ve done has been to keep you safe! But how can that happen if you’re keeping company with criminals?”
“Hardly criminals, Father.”
“Is this about the curse?” Bran asked.
Her parents regarded him open-mouthed and silent.