A Lady’s Lesson in Scandal (43 page)

“Aye.” She swallowed and spoke faster. “Katherine has offered to take me in. Of course, I’ll be giving you half the inheritance. That was our agreement. I mean to honor it.”

He ran his hand through his black hair, tousling it. The weariness on his face suddenly struck her.

Why, he’d killed a man today. For her sake, he’d murdered someone.

She took a step toward him. “Are you all right?”
God above, she hadn’t even made sure of that. “You’re not hurt?”

He stared at her. “What do you mean?”

“I mean, did you get hurt?” She looked him up and down, panic thrumming through her. Bullets had flown. But surely she’d know—”You spoke to the doctor?”

He frowned. “Nell, I wasn’t hurt. I came—” His laughter cracked, short and humorless. “I came barely in time,” he said. “At the end. Another second—”

“But you’re fine.” Suddenly she had to sit again, so great was her relief. She was shaking. “You’re fine,” she repeated softly. Thank God.

“No.” He crossed to her in two long strides. “No,” he said emphatically, crouching down before her. “I am
not
fine.” His hand gripped her chin, lifted her face so their eyes met. “Nell. You look into my eyes and hear me out.
Listen
to me when I say this. Are you listening?”

Having him so close only made this shaking worse. With inches between them he was still too far away. So hard the world tried to keep people apart. Otherwise it might have been easy to span the bridge between separate universes; human flesh, pressed together, recognized no impossibilities.

“Yes,” she whispered. “I’m listening.”

He nodded once, tightly. “When I woke up to find you gone, I thought you had decided to accept Grimston’s offer after all.”

Her fingers cramped, closing like vises on the edge of the seat cushion. She’d known when she’d walked away that she would never be able to come back. She’d abandoned him just as that other woman had. He wouldn’t forgive her for it. “I didn’t take his offer,” she said.

“I gathered that.” His eyes searched hers. “But it would have made no difference if you had.”

Her throat tightened. “What?” How could that be true? “After what that other woman did to you—” Anger prickled through her. “You would have been a fool to forgive me.” Or a condescending ass. Did he think he could expect no better of her than betrayal?

“Perhaps.” He smiled slightly. “But this is love, I gather: I find it has no separate existence from trust, not in any way that signifies. You could not destroy the one without destroying the other. And so, when the first held strong, the second only bent slightly, for a small moment. For a moment, it mattered to me, this idea that you had taken Grimston’s money. And then it simply … didn’t.”

He let go of her and took a deep breath. “I do love you,” he said slowly. “I have said it before but now I say it with a better understanding of what it means. Had you died today, I would have lain down in an early grave.”

Tears blurred her vision. She blinked them away, dashing her hand across her eyes. The anger slipped away, now, leaving only her view of his dark, resolute face as he said: “And for that reason alone, I tell you this—you should go.”

She shook her head, uncomprehending. “What?”

“You have all the choices in the world. I was not truthful when I told you that before; I deceived you, as you realized. But now, with Katherine’s acknowledgment, it
is
true—beyond dispute. Beyond my power to alter. And I mean to make sure you realize that.”

He retreated a pace and linked his hands behind his back. In measured, formal tones, he said, “Daughtry can end this marriage for us. Not on the grounds
that you are a fraud, of course—but that I coerced you into marriage. It would be easy for him to do so. I am willing to give him those instructions. The choice is yours.”

He was putting this choice on
her
? Wasn’t that the easy way! “You want to be free of me, do you?”

“
Free
of you?” His lips rolled together into a flat line. He turned away, then wheeled back with a savageness that made her flinch. “Tell me,” he said, low and sharp, “why
I
am the one who must answer that question? You have left me once already.
I
came after you.
I
have said that I love you. Tell me, what maggot in your brain still insists that
I
am the one who wishes to be free?”

“I …”
Because I’m the factory girl, and you’re the lord
.

These words, even in her mind, sounded small, pathetic. They sounded afraid. She could not speak them.

“You want to stay married?” she whispered instead. He did not blame her for abandoning him?

“Enough of what I want,” he said flatly. “What do
you
want? Do you wish to spend the rest of your life with me?”

Yes
.

She took a breath to say it but fear stopped her dead. A cold revelation washed through her.

She’d always known that Simon could not be for her. She’d been waiting for the unhappy ending. Only a fool, a woman weak enough to deserve the bad end coming for her, would have dared instead to believe that miracles could come true.

Sitting in jail, she had despaired, but she had not for a moment felt surprise.

She looked down to her hands, her square-tipped fingers knotted so tightly together. She squeezed them harder yet, focusing only on the ache. So Katherine would acknowledge her as Cornelia. But this wouldn’t change the past. She still would be a woman who’d been raised in Bethnal Green, who could not take fine dresses for granted, who knew nothing of music—who might, like a beast trained to do tricks, grow less amusing to the audience over time.

“I love you, Simon.” The hoarse words seemed to be jerked from her by some outside power. She froze, panic and dread leaping up inside her.

“Yes,” he said quietly. “But do you want to stay here with me?”

She forced herself to look up. His steady gaze seemed to drill straight into her skull.

He saw her so much more clearly than she’d seen herself.

She wanted to stay with him. But to stay
here
? That bridge she’d walked across to reach this world—it supported no middle ground. But in jail, faced with that sneering inspector who had learned all about her from his daily newspapers, she had come face to face with the truth: a girl could never leave the past behind. It would follow her across the bridge.

“I’ll never belong here,” she said. “You know that.”

“But
here
is where I live.” The roughness of his voice startled her. “If you think there is a better place for you, then go look for it. I will not stop you; I have no interest any longer in playing the tyrant. But if you want me, you will have to take my world along with me.”

“It’s so easy for you,” she choked.
He
would never have to walk that bridge. Whatever rebellions and infamies he’d committed, they were born of the world
in which he already lived. In the future, he would not be tested at every turn, every day, by those who knew how little prepared he’d been for their judgments.

His jaw muscles flexed. “Yes,” he said. “Very easy. Because it is
my
world—not
their
world, Nell, or
that
lot’s world, or the do-gooders’ world, but
my
world. And it requires you.
I
require you.” He took a long breath. “However, if you doubt that we could carve a space in which we,
together
, might belong … then you underestimate my love, or I have overestimated yours. In either case, your decision seems clear: you must leave and be glad of your freedom.”

She gaped at him. “
Glad
of it?” The idiot, the arrogant bastard; of course she would not, could never, be
glad
to leave him! “You can’t be such a fool.”

“Can’t I?” He made an impatient noise and took her arm, pulling her to her feet. “Come, let me remind you how such decisions are made. One simply—walks out.”

She tried to yank free but he propelled her toward the door in an iron grip. In the hallway, he released her, looking down into her face and snarling, “You see? One
goes
. You did it once: was it so difficult then?”

As he started to turn away, she lunged toward him and caught
his
elbow, yanking him back around. “It’s
my
decision! Not yours! I’ll go when I’m ready to go!”

They stared at each other. Down the hallway, from some remote reach of the house, came the faint sound of laughter, as puzzling and foreign to Nell’s ears as the language of a distant land. There was nothing to laugh about.

The look that fleeted over his face—frustration, grief, resignation—made her go cold. “My God, Nell. You would stay for days … years, no doubt … if
you thought that to leave me is to admit your own weakness.” He shook his head. “I could goad you into staying forever—and God help me, I am tempted to do it. But I won’t,” he added with a shrug. “I won’t do it, Nell.”

That shrug paralyzed her breath. It seemed so completely … indifferent.

He turned on his heel and began to walk away.

She stepped back against the wall, her shoulder knocking a vase, setting it to wobbling. Her hands balled into fists as she watched his back. Damn him for a coward! He was giving up. He was already leaving but she hadn’t even gone yet.

The next second, all her rage turned on herself. He said he loved her. She knew she loved him. What was
his
fault in this? It was all hers.

Why did she find despair so much easier to depend on than happiness? For love of Simon, she had turned down five thousand pounds; she had returned to the Green; she had given up all her hopes. Love had been a sound and sustaining reason to endure despair. Love had given her the strength for it.

Why was it so much harder to make love the reason for hope? Why could it not give her the strength to believe in their future joy?

“I’m a factory girl,” she whispered.

He was ten paces away now.

Somehow he heard.

He turned on his heel and fixed her in a calm, grave look. “Yes,” he said. “A factory girl. My wife. The Countess of Rushden.”

She put her hand to her throat, because panic was swelling there. “I wouldn’t be a lady like the rest of them. I … won’t care for drives in the park.” Each
word grew harder to say, peeling away another strip of her skin, exposing her messy innards and ugly yellow guts. “Small talk at parties won’t interest me. I’ll never know how to do it. How to charm people as you do. How to care so much about music. I won’t want to attend other people’s concerts so often, because it …” The words burst from her: “It seems a waste of time and I’ve got other things to do.”

“Such as?” He was watching her very closely, but his tone revealed nothing.

“I mean to buy that factory, but—” She wet her lips. “Only as a start. I’m going to buy as many as I can, I think; I’m going to improve all of them.”

He nodded and took a step back toward her.

“And I’m going to do something about doctors for poor women, too.” She hesitated, startled by how fluently these intentions spilled from her. They felt familiar, intimate, as though they had been born and molded in the sleeping parts of her mind, and now sprang free fully grown. “That doctor today … I mean to build a hospital where such men will tend to women like my mum.”

“I see,” he said slowly.

“Do you?” The world didn’t want to hear that she had loved Jane Whitby. Very well. She would
show
it she had.

“I think so,” he said.

They stared at each other. Dimly it surprised her that she didn’t feel foolish for speaking such ideas aloud. Then, with a little shock, she wondered if it was
because
he was listening that these ideas seemed so good and true.

“You think I can do it,” she said. “You do.”

“Of course I do,” he said.

She nodded once, carefully, because something was swelling inside her, and it felt huge and powerful and able to knock her off her feet if she moved too suddenly. Until she had met him, her dreams had been small by necessity.

“You made me think I could do it,” she said. If he hadn’t pushed her to dream bigger, to think about power, to ponder what wealth could do, these larger ambitions might never have occurred to her. She might have been content to give Hannah a violet dress every spring. “But the point,” she went on quickly, “is that I won’t hold myself away from it like the do-gooders tend to do. I’ll be in the thick of it, making sure my money won’t go to waste. It won’t be proper at all.”

“The best things rarely are,” he said gently.

A choking little laugh slipped from her. “You certainly aren’t,” she said. “You’re …” The kind of man that life in Bethnal Green hadn’t prepared her to imagine.

Maybe, to dream these things and feel these things, she already
was
living in his world.

She saw him swallow. “So,” he said. “Shall I show you to your sister, now?”

“No,” she said.

He opened his mouth. Hesitated. Put his hands into his pockets and looked at her.

Loving him would not be easy. It would mean never again completely belonging anywhere—save with him.

But she
would
belong with him. He would be her home, she thought. And with him at her side, she would do—
anything
. Anything in the world would be possible.

He shifted his weight and she realized suddenly that he was not waiting calmly. He stood rigidly, biting
his tongue with visible effort, his hands in his pockets clenched now.

He was not at ease in the slightest.

The astonishing prospect of Simon St. Maur at ill-ease unearthed a very odd impulse: she giggled. And then slapped her hand to her mouth, hearing the slightly hysterical note in it. “Simon,” she said through her fingers. “I can’t leave. I love you. I can’t go.”

He nodded, his lips white. “But do you
trust
me, Nell?”

She was too full of feeling to even fathom the meaning of doubt. “Down any road, as far and as long as we travel. You’re mine and I’m keeping you, Simon.”

She heard the long, slow breath he blew out. “You,” he said as he came toward her, “are the most incredible, extraordinary,
stubborn
woman—”