The Privilege of the Sword (45 page)

“Back here?” I looked at her blankly. “I—well, I’ve got things to do here.”

“What things, Katherine?”

“Well—friends and things. And my lessons, of course. And, well—things.”

“Katherine Samantha,” she sighed. “You have not been listening to what I’ve been telling you. You’re coming home with me, so we can put this all behind you.”

“What? No. I mean, that’s not possible.”

“My poor heroic darling. Of course it looks that way to you, locked up here with this madman for so long, and no one to turn to for good counsel. But listen to me.” My mother leaned forward. “You can still have a normal life. Nobody blames you. They know my brother is a lunatic; Gregory says no one decent will even visit him anymore, or have him in their homes. It’s not your fault if he’s sent you out in public like this—” she indicated my jacket and breeches “—And now this awful fight at Lord Godwin’s…” At least Greg hadn’t told her about the Rogues’ Ball—maybe he didn’t know himself. “Well, they’ll forget in time, if we let them. The best thing to do,” she explained with elaborate patience, “is to get you settled back home, do you see? Just long enough that people can forget all about it. A year or so should be enough.”

“And then?”

“And then…well,” she said archly, “if you decide someday that you can do without me—for I surely will never be able to do without you—well then, perhaps we can find a nice man for you to marry, and you can have—”

I couldn’t say it. Not to her face, not with my heart pounding and my breath catching in my chest. I stood up, crossed the room so I stood under the portrait of the lady in grey, and clutched the marble behind me.

“I can’t,” I said. “I can’t do any of that. I’m sorry, Mother. It’s too late.”

“But that’s just what I’m saying! It isn’t too late. We can still save you—”

“I don’t need to be saved.”

My mother twisted the ends of her hair. I’d seen her do it a hundred times. It used to look sweet, but now it just looked silly to me. “Katherine. Stop it. You’re not being very adult. There’s a whole world out there you know nothing about. Gregory has been out in Society, and he understands these things far better than you. He agrees with me that the best thing to do is to get you out of this madhouse as quickly as possible. I’ve got it all worked out. You’ll have a quiet summer at home, and then you can start over, as if it had never been.”

“But it has b—” I began, but stopped myself. You didn’t tell my mother things like that.

“You can’t stay in your uncle’s house playing at swordfights forever, all dressed up like some booth at a fair.” You couldn’t argue with her when she got like this. If only she would be quiet and let me think. But her voice rattled on, more and more shrill. “You may be having fun now, but my brother is utterly mad. When he gets tired of you, you’ll be out on the street, and then you’ll come running home but the damage will have been done. And then what will you do? Answer me that.” What kind of damage did she think there was that hadn’t been done already? I remembered Marcus saying, “He bought you, too.” If my uncle had bought me, my mother had sold me to him. “We must think of your future, Katherine. You know I only want what’s best for you.”

“You should have thought of that before you sent me here.” The words were out of my mouth before I could stop them.

I opened my mouth to apologize, to take them back before I could do any more harm. But my mother was quite still. She stood looking at me as if she were looking at a stranger, at someone she did not love or even like at all.

“You’ll do as I say,” she told me. “Go get your things. We’re leaving.”

“No, Mother, please. If you could just—”

“Katherine,” she said, her voice musical with suppressed rage. “Don’t make a scene.” She picked up a silk pillow, thick with embroidery of exotic birds with long tail feathers, and began picking at the threads with her nails. “This nonsense has to stop. We must think of your future.”

“I can’t,” I said miserably, watching the bright threads of silk flying out of her hands, clinging to her skirt, falling to the floor. “I would if I could, honestly, Mother, but I just can’t do it now.”

Her fingers dug into the cloth of the cushion. “It isn’t like you to be so selfish. Do you want to bring disgrace on our entire family? What am I going to do without you? I can’t manage alone!”

There was a noise as the door opened. The Duke Tremontaine stood in the doorway, dressed to go out, and only slightly more sober than when I’d seen him last. He looked at me, and looked at his sister, and blinked.

“Hello, Janine,” he said. “Welcome to Tremontaine House.”

My mother looked her brother in the eyes. He was taller than she was, but her gaze was fierce. “My daughter,” she said to him. “You have ruined my daughter.”

My uncle looked startled. “Ruined her? I never touched her.”

“You didn’t have to. Look what you’ve done to her!”

“She seems all right to me. Are you all right, Katherine?” I pressed my back against the wall, as if I could melt right into it, and didn’t answer. I knew what was coming, even if he didn’t. He took a step toward my mother. “There’s nothing wrong with your daughter. My cushion, on the other hand, you are certainly ruining.”

“What do you care?” she said, tearing it further. “You’ve got plenty more. You’ve got everything in the world here, haven’t you? Look at this house! Look at your suit, for that matter—I can’t imagine what that costs.”

“Neither can I; that’s why they send me the bill.”

“Are you trying to make me laugh? You have everything, everything, everything—money, jewels, land, heaven knows what, and it isn’t enough for you—you have everything you want and more—and now you try to take my child from me.”

I wondered if it was worth darting in and trying to clear things from her path. But that would only make it worse. And she was right; he could buy plenty more.

“That’s ridiculous,” the duke said weakly.

“Is it?” my mother hissed. “Is that what it is?”

“Janine, stop carrying on like some sort of mad stage witch.” She picked up an etched glass bud vase, clutching it in her hand like a dagger. “Janine, listen to me and be reasonable and put that down.”

“Why should I be reasonable? Were you reasonable? You didn’t think much about being reasonable when you ran away and ruined our chances with Grandmama and left us thinking you were dead, did you? You left me all alone to deal with Mother and you know what she was like—”

“I left you?
I
left you?” Something changed in him, like a fighter who thinks he’s playing in a practice bout and suddenly realizes the swords are not tipped. His face was very white, and his hands were no longer elegant. He opened them and closed them on nothing. “You’re the one who left, Janine. I was there waiting for you. Don’t you remember? You said you would run away before you’d marry that old fool. And I said, Right, then, we’ll do it. I said, No one is going to take my sister away like that. I said, Meet me in the orchard—in the
orchard,
Janine,
not in the goddamned chapel!
”

I had never heard him roar like that before. She was staring at him, mesmerized, as white as he was and whiter, down to her lips, as though his story were draining all the blood from her. He stepped toward her, and she didn’t move. “What on earth was I doing freezing in the orchard all night with a bag of food and a pair of cloaks, while you were being laced into your wedding dress?”

My mother shook her head, mute. I had my hands pressed to my mouth, listening, listening. The trouble was, I could see it. I could see it all perfectly clearly.

“I missed the main event,” he said dryly, a bit more like himself. “I got in trouble for that, for missing my sister’s wedding. Mother locked me in the—” for a moment he lost the word, lost his smooth and cruel habit of speech—then he gasped and regained it—“She had them lock me in the storage cell, you remember? Well, of course you do, you’d been there, too, not long before. I wasn’t whipped; I was just locked in, to teach me manners. It was very cramped in there, I was getting big for it. But it didn’t matter. Nothing did, because you weren’t coming back.”

She held out a hand to him. “I didn’t know. I thought you were angry with me, that’s why you weren’t there. I wanted to come. But I was so afraid of them.”

“I would have helped you!”

“You couldn’t.” When she said that, he actually flinched as if he had been struck. “You couldn’t help me. You couldn’t do anything. You couldn’t stop them marrying me off any more than you could stop them locking you up, Davey. I knew that then.”

She tried to touch him, but he turned away. “It was a long time ago,” she said. “But I did the right thing.”

“You did what they told you to do. And what did it gain you?”

“I had a husband,” she said. “I have my children. I did my duty.”

“You should have fought,” he growled. “You should have stood and fought.”

Oh, stop,
I wanted to tell him.
Mother never fights, not the way you mean. Stop before something happens.
But I was afraid to come between them.

“You’re being unfair. Our parents meant well. They wanted the best for us.”

He looked at her in real surprise. “No, they didn’t. We were raised by servants. Don’t you remember? All Father cared about was his maps. Mother cared about chapel and about getting back at her own mother, the dread Duchess Tremontaine, who was, let me tell you, a real piece of work.”

“I wouldn’t know. I never met her. She had no interest in me, Mother said.”

“Mother didn’t wait to find out, did she? She was in too much of a hurry to marry you off to the highest-bidding country bumpkin. I would have brought you to the city with me—”

“No, Davey. She did try. When Charles first offered for me, Mother wrote to the duchess, to ask if she would bring me out properly and make a better match. But the duchess wrote back to say, no, she wasn’t interested. So Mother accepted Charles’s suit.”

My uncle stared at her. “To
spite
her? She married you off to that idiot just to spite her mother?”

“Charles wasn’t an idiot. He was a prosperous landowner, from a fine old family. I was very lucky, really. So were Father and Mother, because I lived nearby so I could look after them—”

“Stop it!” he raged. “Stop
lying
! How can you be saying all these things? You, you who were—oh, god. You, Janine. You were so pure of heart. You saved my life, you held me in your arms and told me stories when things were really bad—you made up whole countries for us to hide in, horses for us to ride there…don’t you remember Storm Cloud and Flame of the Sea?”

My mother clutched the folds of her skirt, saying nothing. He turned his back to her, poured himself a brandy. “You were strong and true. I wanted to be like you.” He knocked back the drink. “I know you fought them. You’ve forgotten, that’s all. I wasn’t there. I was in the orchard. But you tried, I know. I remember, if you don’t. And afterwards—everything I did, I did to avenge what they did to you. Everything.”

“Including trying to ruin me and my family?”

He turned slowly to look at her, his head low. “You could have come to me. You could have written, or you could have come.”

She turned to him with that same strange gesture he had made before, hands outstretched, opening and closing on nothing. “You know why I couldn’t come.”

“I know now,” he said harshly. “It’s because you’ve forgotten everything. You’ve turned it all into comfortable lies. You’re just like the rest of them now. Go away. I don’t want you in my house.”

“No!” I heard my own voice shatter the awful stillness of the room. But I wasn’t fast enough this time. I should have been. Had I forgotten? I should have seen her looking back at the glass bud vase. I should have been by her side, I should have taken it out of her hand before she smashed it against the table and held a shard so tightly the blood started seeping between her fingers.

“Oh!” I heard the duke draw in his breath, not shocked, but as if he’d suddenly remembered something.

She dropped the glass to the carpet, showed him her open hand, bleeding. “This is truth,” she said. “I know that this is truth, don’t you?”

“Oh, yes,” he said. “I used to do that, too.” He took her palm and examined it. “It’s all right.” She let him wrap his large white handkerchief lightly around her hand to catch the blood. “But I’ve got something better, now. Here, I’ll show you. Want to see?” She stared at him, spellbound. He crossed the room to a locked cabinet and took out the key.

I knew what he kept in there. “You can’t give my mother that!”

“Watch me,” he said calmly, taking out the little vials of precious stuff. “Or better yet, don’t.”

I shouted, “You put that down!”

“Don’t speak to your uncle like that,” my mother said. “He’ll think you weren’t brought up properly.”

“Run along, Katherine,” my uncle said. “Your mother and I have a lot to talk about.”

I took the stairs to my room two at a time, and slammed the door and locked it behind me. Maybe Marcus could stop him, but he’d never stopped the duke before, and I didn’t want him to see my mother like this. I didn’t want to ask Marcus for anything, either, not after what had nearly happened in the garden between us. I got into bed and snapped the curtains on their rings closed around me, and pulled the covers over my head.

I had wanted to know family secrets. Well, now I knew them. My uncle didn’t hate my mother after all. And he had always been angry at everyone, not just us. He didn’t know that she still told wonderful stories, and snuck off to the orchard to eat apples when she should be counting spoons. He didn’t know that my father and mother had planned a garden together, and stayed up all night when I was sick. Maybe she was telling him now. If she was even there. If they could even talk.

The night was coming on. I unwrapped myself, and lay stiffly staring up at the dusky canopy above me.

Today I had wounded a man, and hit my best friend and almost kissed him. I had seen my mother for the first time in half a year and defied her. Three fights in one day, and only one I knew that I had won for certain, the one with rules.