Proof by Seduction (15 page)

“Lord Blakely,” Jenny said slowly, “I don’t care how spectacularly you fail at friendship. I will not be made a scapegoat for your frustration.”

“That’s not what I’m doing,” he said sulkily. “I’m acting this way because I
enjoy
it.”

Jenny sighed. “You’re an intelligent man. On occasion, you even act like one. Don’t make excuses for yourself.”

His hands clenched at his sides. “I just don’t make friends. It’s easy for you to—”

“Friendship is easy, my lord. Even commoners like me manage it. All you have to do is find what you have in common with an individual and talk about it. The rest will follow. Try conversing instead of commanding. Try seeing something good in a person, instead of seeing the worst.”

Lord Blakely pulled at his cuffs, adjusting them with minute precision. He turned his hands over and examined his palms. His jaw worked. And when he raised his head, she saw in his gaze a bleak and unrelenting wilderness, harsh and devoid of inhabitants.

She’d said it once to wound the man. But now, the sentiment escaped her before she had a chance to think it over. “My God, Lord Blakely. You really are lonely.”

The silence stretched. Finally, he turned away. “I had better leave.”

Jenny had nothing to do but shut the door behind him.

T
HE AFTERNOON AFTER
Lord Blakely’s intrusion, Jenny checked the dark cloth covering her furniture for the third time. It was symmetrically arranged, as it had been when she’d checked it two minutes before. Tiny brass bells blew in the light breeze flowing from the open window. She’d chosen them because their tinkling tones sounded Eastern and exotic. Rationally, Jenny knew she’d perfected the right atmosphere.

And yet as she ushered Ned in, the familiar scent of sandalwood cloying her senses, she sensed something was missing. It was nothing that could be fixed with incense or any quantity of black cloth. No; it was something more vital. She hadn’t the heart for this any longer.

“Madame Esmerelda,” Ned intoned, “I come seeking advice.”

That old formula. Again.

Jenny held out her palm. “Cross my palm with silver.”

The shillings he piled into her hand were as cold as ice, heavier than lead. Ten shillings. Money that would pay the quarterly rents due in the next week. But the reminder only pricked her conscience further.

Nothing had changed on the outside. On the inside, however, Jenny watched herself through Lord Blakely’s critical eyes. What she saw left her nauseated. She was weak. Greedy. She wasn’t lying to Ned for money. No, she was lying to him for friendship, and that was by far the more devastating fraud.

Jenny swallowed bitter bile and pulled a weak smile into place. “How can I help you, Ned?”

Ned leaned forward, gripping his knees. His eyes shone with a ferocious intensity.

“It’s not
working.
” He must have read the puzzlement in her eyes, because he explained. “The tasks. They’re not working. Blakely’s not falling in love with Lady Kathleen, and she’s not falling in love with him.”

Jenny met Ned’s gaze. Two weeks ago, she’d have sighed and told him to trust her. She’d have counseled patience and fortitude, and perhaps added occult platitudes.
With Jupiter nearing, good things will come to those who wait.
But two weeks ago, Lord Blakely had been nothing other than a mythological cousin mentioned by Ned in awestruck tones.

If I see the worst in everyone,
he’d told her,
it is because they refuse to see it in themselves.

Well. Jenny was seeing the worst of herself now. It was reflected in the hopeful glint in Ned’s eyes. It was mirrored in his clear, unwrinkled forehead, as he awaited her response. Waited for her to solve a problem she’d created.

She’d hoped to help Ned by softening Lord Blakely. She’d wanted the marquess to see the good in his cousin. She’d believed he’d eventually see the good in others beside himself. But even Ned could tell the tasks weren’t working.

Lord Blakely hadn’t softened one bit. And no matter how harsh or unwelcome his delivery had been, he’d had the right of Jenny’s interactions with Ned.

Through his eyes, Jenny could now see her own selfishness. She recognized a deep hunger inside her, a wistful desire to be treated as someone worthy of respect. But what sort of honor did she deserve? She’d never been esteemed when she was Jenny Keeble, so she’d created Madame Esmerelda. Madame Esmerelda hadn’t cared, and she’d found clientele who hung on her every word as the truth. That superficial honor, however, hid nothing but a swindler beneath a thin veneer of mumbo jumbo. The light in Ned’s eyes was directed at a woman who didn’t exist.

She hadn’t earned Ned’s praise. Even seeing Ned’s obvious distress, she could not bring herself to tell him the tasks were her own invention, that there were no spirits and she was a fraud. She couldn’t bear to see that light grow dim.

Now that Jenny was seeing the worst in people, she could see the worst of what she’d done to Ned. He was dependent on her to advise him in the smallest ways. And still she was too selfish to say the words that would make him turn away in disgust.

“Ned.” There was a quaver in her voice. There shouldn’t have been. Madame Esmerelda didn’t quaver. But it wasn’t Madame Esmerelda who spoke now. It was Jenny.

Ned frowned at her distressed tone.

Maybe she could make things…well, not right. Two years of lies made it too late for right. But less wrong.

“Remember what I told you, years ago? That one day you would become a man?”

He nodded.

“It’s time. Not time to
start
becoming a man. It’s time to
finish.
”

He stared blankly at her. “I don’t understand. What are you saying I should do?”

“Ned, in this matter, you want to trust me. You want me to tell you what to do.”

He nodded vigorously.

“That’s a laudable sentiment, but it’s not right. Don’t wait for my advice. Don’t—” she choked on the words “—don’t trust me.”

He shook his head, baffled. As if his world were turning upside down. “How can it be wrong to trust you?”

Oh, God. Seeing herself through Lord Blakely’s rational eyes was torture. It was maddening. The guilelessness of Ned’s query, the foolishness of his response stung her heart. How Lord Blakely would scorn the two of them if he could hear this conversation. And he would be right, damn the man.

“Ned,” Jenny said, “you have to learn to trust yourself. You have to learn to make your own decisions. You cannot rely on me for every last answer.”

He shrunk from her.

“You want to be a man, Ned?”

He nodded, his arms folding around his torso protectively.

“It’s a terrible burden, being a man. It entails responsibility, choices. It requires hard work and intelligence. And this time—right now—it requires that you stand on your own two feet without anyone to help you.”

“Alone?” His voice was soft and scared. His lips trembled.

Lord Blakely’s jaded world disappeared from Jenny’s mind in a puff of smoke, and she saw Ned with her heart again. A strong young man, hoping to be the best he could.

She reached out and took his hand. And then she opened his fingers and smiled. Slowly, she put the coins back into his hands, one by one. Each one felt like a heavy weight coming off her heart. With the last shilling, she felt almost buoyant. She didn’t let go of his hand. Instead she gripped it tight. And deep inside her, she said farewell.

“No, Ned,” she whispered. “You don’t have to be alone. Just—just be wiser in your choice of companions.”

Her eyes threatened to water. Her voice was hoarse.

Ned looked up into her face and he swallowed. Then he pulled his hand from hers and looked away into the corner of the room. “I think I understand,” he said. He, too, was hoarse.

“Do you?”

He nodded, refusing to meet her eyes. Maybe he did understand. Maybe he’d finally comprehended the words Jenny could not bring herself to say.
I am a fraud. You have been duped.

And maybe this response—this not-looking, this not-speaking—was his way of saying he’d finally seen through her, and he would not rely on her any longer.

He left silently.

For long minutes after he’d gone, Jenny stared at the room around her. She had acquired a number of occult trappings over the years. The artful cobwebs she’d allowed to build up in the corner. The depressing black, eating up the light that shone through the window. The only illumination in her room was the fitful glow of coal behind the grate of her fireplace.

All the savor had gone from her work. Playing fortune-teller had once been exciting. It had been enthralling. She’d watched, oh-so-carefully, for those tiny hints of reaction in her clients’ faces. She’d told them what they wanted to hear. They’d listened.

Secretly, she’d laughed. It had been Jenny Keeble’s revenge on her childhood.

She’d been no better than Lord Blakely, thinking herself above her clients that way. But there was no way to laugh at the way she’d betrayed Ned’s sweet loyalty.

As she looked into the dim flames, Jenny acknowledged another truth. “I cannot go on like this.”

She spoke the words aloud—to whom, she could not say. Perhaps to the fire. Perhaps to the spirits she had for so long pretended to call upon. There was no answer except a small, burning center deep in her chest. A resonance, agreeing that this portion of her life had come to an end.

And yet what was she to do with herself now? As a woman, most professions were closed to her. She could sew piecework—and ruin her eyes while eking out a living. Perhaps, after all these years, she could attempt to find work teaching. Although with no character references to speak of—she could hardly ask Lord Blakely, after all—the opportunities that presented themselves were likely to be unsavory.

The employment offered to the girl of unknown family hadn’t been savory even before she’d run away to London.

She could retire to the country, where the coins she’d saved would stretch further. She could make a pension of the money, and hope that twelve pounds per annum would keep her for the remainder of her life. It would, so long as she was hale and hearty and capable of cooking and cleaning for herself. A gamble; and a life that sounded frighteningly blank and devoid of purpose.

None of that sounded right. All those possibilities echoed emptily in the hollow of her lungs. Jenny breathed out and thought of what she wanted.

What would she do if she were to start her life over again, from the very beginning? What would she change? That old, deep aching overtook her.

She wanted a mother.

God, she wanted a
child.

She wanted to make someone of herself that even the fastidious Lord Blakely would have to respect.

Three impossibilities. She shook her head.

Jenny had no idea where she would end, but she did have some idea where to start. Slowly, ceremonially, she pulled the black fustian from her tables and chairs. She gathered the heaped cotton in her arms and hauled it to the fireplace.

It landed in the hearth in a swirl of ash and coal dust. Jenny coughed the particles from her lungs and waited. For a few seconds, the dark material cut off all light and heat. Then it glowed red, and finally caught in a crackling blaze. Jenny pulled off her multicolored skirts, one by one, and tossed them atop the fire. Her kerchief flew next, and then her shawl. Finally, she stripped down to her shift. The conflagration lasted only minutes, but it scorched the front of her thighs with its heat.

When the flames died down, the last of Madame Esmerelda had burned away.

CHAPTER NINE

A
S NOTES WENT
, the one Gareth received from his cousin two days after his disastrous encounter with Madame Esmerelda struck him as particularly opaque.

Meet me,
it said.
Musicale at Arbuthnots’. Eight o’clock. In the blue dining room. Very important. Don’t bring Madame Esmerelda. You were right about her. Ned.

Gareth couldn’t bear to think of Madame Esmerelda. Every time he thought of that evening, a hot stab of shame lanced through him, like a burning poker stabbed in his side. Sitting in his study, pretending to industriously pore over a stack of bills and reports, it should have been easy to put the woman from his mind.

It wasn’t. After all, he
was
in his study with his man of business.

There was no place for nervousness in Gareth’s relationship with his servants. Until these last few days, his interactions with White had been simple. The man dealt with the estate correspondence; Gareth paid his salary. Gareth liked simplicity. He liked not having to worry about what the man thought. He liked not wondering whether his latest ham-handed attempt at conversation would result in humiliation and unease.

He didn’t like feeling like an ass. And Madame Esmerelda’s dreadfully clear eyes—the ones that had seen Ned as something other than a childish irritant—had dismissed him. He’d told her to look at herself through his eyes, but if she had really done so, she would not have been ashamed. If she’d understood how bravado and bluster had transformed in his breast to hunger, she’d have laughed outright.

Who was he fooling? She had known it. She had spoken the truth that he’d hidden for so long behind a scowl and a cutting phrase. He had no way of conversing with others. He didn’t know how to make friends. He cringed, feeling awkward and ungainly every time he made the effort. And so long ago—more than twenty years before—he’d given up the task entirely.

But there came a time in a man’s life when he no longer wanted to cut down everyone around him. Gareth didn’t need to read tea leaves to see the future that lay ahead of him if he continued on this solitary path.

He was going to be lonely. And not just the little loneliness that he experienced now, the soft wistfulness for someone to talk with and touch, but a fierce longing, one that whispered that it could all have been different if only—if only—

If only he what?

Because of all the things she had said that night, the one that had cut the deepest—the one that had slashed through layers of muscle and subcutaneous fat, to score the artery—was that it was his choice to be who he was. For years he had told himself that he had no choice about the way he was. That coldness and calculation were natural to his personality. That he responded to threats by eviscerating them with his mind.