The Suffragette Scandal (The Brothers Sinister) (39 page)

When he was ready, he stood and went back to the house. Marshall let him in; he found Free sitting at the table.

She didn’t rise as he approached her. She didn’t frown at him, but she didn’t smile either. He wasn’t sure how he made his way toward her, if anyone else was in the room. He couldn’t see anyone but her, couldn’t think any thought except that he no longer wanted to be towering over her, looking down.

It was a simple matter to get on his knees before her, and an even simpler matter to bend his head.

“Free,” he said. “I want to make you happy, but I don’t know how.”

For a long, fraught moment, she didn’t respond. And then, ever so slowly, she reached out and took his hands in hers.

“We’ll figure it out,” she told him.

F
REE DID NOT KNOW
what she was doing in this house, if one could call something so vast by so unassuming a name. The ceilings reached high over her head. Her footsteps in the huge, echoing space seemed to belong to a much larger creature. A horse, perhaps, or an elephant.

And the man at her side… She stole a glance over at him.

Edward strode beside her. He seemed as uneasy in this place as she felt, and maybe that was the only thing that kept her from running in horror.

Yesterday, he’d told her he wanted to make her happy. Today, she’d come with him to his estate in Kent. Because—she still didn’t quite believe this—the man she married had an estate in Kent, and that was now an inextricable part of her life. She’d married him for richer or poorer, but quite frankly, at the moment she would have preferred poorer.

He’d made every effort to make her feel comfortable. He’d not yet announced the marriage. He’d wired ahead and sent the servants away on holiday, because he knew that she’d be overwhelmed by a procession of people all wanting to meet her needs.

Yet somehow the absence of servants made the tour Edward was giving her even more bewildering.

This was what he’d kept from her: this vast empty space screaming of responsibility. This was what he hadn’t told her, because he’d feared she wouldn’t want it.

“The grand hall,” he told her. Then a few minutes later: “The blue parlor to the right; the yellow parlor to the left.”

“The zebra-striped parlor,” Free muttered as he paused at the door of the next room.

He glanced down at her, and the half smile on his face slowly died. “You…hate this.”

She’d been trying her best to imagine herself in any of these rooms, in any role except gawking seer of sights. She’d failed.

“It’s not really filling me with delight,” she admitted.

He turned from the room. “I’m doing this all wrong. Come with me. Let me show you the good parts.” He marched down the hall to an unobtrusive door set in the wall. He wrenched this open and led her into a bare hall, one not floored underneath by marble. Here, no massive portraits looked down in snooty disapproval.

“Oh, thank heavens,” Free said, breathing in relief. “I was going mad out there.”

“Here.” Edward jiggled a door to a room and then opened it wide. “The seamstress’s work area. Patrick Shaughnessy—he’s that friend I told you about—his mother was a seamstress.”

Free blinked. “Patrick
Shaughnessy?
Is he any relation, by chance, to…” She trailed off, and then she glanced up at him. “Of course he is. Of course. Stephen Shaughnessy—he’s why you came back in the first place.” She looked around the room. A small, dingy window let light spill onto the bare wood floor. A simply made chest of drawers stood against one wall.

“Yes. He is. He’s like a little brother to me.”

She frowned, recalling… “He lied to me about you. That little…” But she couldn’t muster up anger over it.

“Clod,” Edward suggested. “It’s what Patrick and I always called him. We referred to him as ‘the clod.’ But only when he was present. You’re not angry at him for lying, are you?”

“He hardly knew you were going to marry me,” she said dryly. “But I’ll have words with him.” It made sense of everything Edward had done in the beginning. “Then it wasn’t entirely about revenge when we first met, was it?”

He gave her a look. “It took about five minutes before it was about you, too. You’ve been the one easy part in all of this. If I didn’t ask you to join this uneasy future with me, it’s because I love you too much to ask you to come into this.” He gestured around him.

She turned away from him to hide the emotion that swept through her. Yes. She knew he loved her. She’d known it almost from those first five minutes. He was just learning how to do it properly.

She blindly opened a drawer. “Let’s see what we have in here.” The drawer didn’t stick as she’d expected from her own household drawers. It slid open smoothly on a clean, oiled track. “Linens,” she said coolly. She slid that drawer closed and picked another. “More linens. Good heavens. If we sewed the sheets end to end, we could reach the ocean from here.” She shut that drawer, too, and put her hand on the topmost drawer. “Let me guess what’s in this one: yet more linens.” Free yanked it open.

But this drawer rattled as she pulled it open.

And when she looked inside, it wasn’t linens. It was a collection of thimbles, large and small. Some were old, weathered iron; some were new and shiny tin. There were
hundreds
of thimbles there. For God’s sake, why would anyone ever need so many thimbles? Even the servants here ran to excess.

Free stared at the drawer, blinking in confusion. And somehow, that was what broke her—not the four parlors or the vast grounds. It was thimbles.

She began to laugh. Not just a little giggle, but a helpless, unladylike belly laugh. She should have been able to stop, but after the last few days, somehow she couldn’t. It almost hurt to laugh like that. Edward watched her in confusion.

“Well,” she said, wiping tears of mirth from her eyes, “if your brother ever comes to visit, I know
just
what to slip under his mattress.”

Edward let out a crack of laughter. “The needles are in the drawer just over.”

Somehow, after that, the tour got better. Not that it became any less overwhelming; it was still utterly ridiculous that any human beings would spend their lives surrounded by this kind of wealth. But the visit started to be something that they were doing together.

There
were
a handful of servants in the gardens and stables that he hadn’t sent away—those whose duties could not bear a few days’ neglect—but they slipped away when Free and Edward approached. Edward showed Free around the farrier’s station. He explained how to shoe a horse, demonstrated how to work the bellows. That, she could accept. After that, he took her up to the ruins on the hill.

He pointed out the boundaries of the estate—hazy and indistinct, thousands of acres, hundreds of tenants. She could scarcely believe it.

“One of the early skirmishes in the battle for Maidstone took place just down there,” he told her. “Back when my forefather was a mere Baron Delacey. People come constantly to see this place for historical reasons. My father hated it.”

“Let’s put up a monument,” Free suggested. “Open it to the public.”

He sat on one of the broken battlements and smiled. “Better. We could charge admission. That would be so crass that my father would turn in his grave.” His smile widened, and he turned his finger in a lazy circle. “Which would also be useful. We could attach his coffin to some kind of an engine and use the power of his outrage to…I don’t know, grind corn.”

Free found herself smiling. She came to sit beside him. “Is that how we’ll sully the family name then?”

“Oh, we’ve already made an excellent start on that. But why limit ourselves to just the one option? I might expand the farrier’s station so I can do some metalwork here. If we decide to stay here.” He glanced over at her. “That would employ some of the men, too. And the way I see it, the more people we employ in an actual productive scheme, instead of supporting our degenerate ways…” He swept his hand, indicating the house below. “Well, the better it will be.”

She took his hand. “The massive palace and the ridiculous estates are a significant problem. But I want to run my newspaper.” She hugged her knees. “That’s the one thing I insist upon. Everything else, I suppose we can work with, but my newspaper is not negotiable.”

“Very well, then. We will make that happen. I promise.”

They stared off into the distance. It was really an excellent hillside for a ruined castle. She had a vantage point on the slow, lazy river making its way through the trees. On the far horizon, she could see the sea—sparkling blue waters fading into indistinct sky.

“Someone,” Free said, “is going to have to do the things the lady of the manor is supposed to do.”

She didn’t go on. She was really considering this. She was considering
him,
considering what she would have to be, have to do, to become his viscountess.

She wasn’t sure who took whose hand, whose fingers twined with whose.

“On the benefit side,” Free said, “that house leaves a
lot
of room for me to hide the bodies of my enemies.”

His thumb caressed her palm. “We’ll put them in the zebra-striped parlor,” he told her.

“Can’t we just do this instead for the rest of our lives?” Free asked. “Just the two of us. Together. The rest of the world can disappear. I like it like this.”

“No,” he said. “We can’t. You’d be bored in half a day. And how will we fill the zebra-striped parlor with the bodies of your enemies if we never sally forth and slay them?”

She was laughing at that, when she saw a wisp of dust rising from the road. It was still more than a mile distant. “Someone’s coming.”

Edward glanced upward—and then slowly stiffened. His hand pressed into hers. “Yes,” he said slowly. “And…I rather think I recognize the carriage. It would be lovely if it were just the two of us, Free. But it isn’t. That’s my brother.”

E
DWARD WAS WAITING WITH
F
REE
in the blue parlor when James Delacey arrived. Free didn’t move as the carriage pulled up on the gravel ring outside the house. But still, it felt as if she drew farther and farther away—as if she were drifting from him on every breath.

Through the gauzy curtains of the parlor, they could see the horses coming up to the house. A footman jumped off the back of his conveyance, setting out a step. Another appeared and opened the door. The first one held out a hand, steadying his brother as he stepped out.

Beside him, Free shook her head. “Are
we
supposed to have all those footmen?” she whispered in shocked tones.

“Yes,” he whispered back. “But we can flout propriety as much as we like, remember.
Supposed to
is not a necessity, just a consideration.”

She frowned and folded her arms.

James strode forward confidently, marching up to the house at an even pace.

The front doors remained obstinately shut. James came up short, inches from the wood panels, and frowned at the doors in confusion. Slowly, he retreated a few steps. Then he walked to the doors more tentatively. They still didn’t open.

There were no servants to open them after all. James no doubt had no experience with the concept of
no servants.

His brother reached out and, with a quizzical expression on his face, touched the door handle.

“Do you think he’ll be able to figure it out?” Free said beside Edward.

Edward wasn’t sure. Some evil part of him wanted to pull out his pocket watch and see how many seconds would elapse before his brother decided to take on the arduous task of exerting pressure on the handle himself. Instead, he sighed. “It’s your home, Free, whether you accept me or not. With all that my brother has done to you, can we even let him in?”

Her eyes narrowed and her nostrils flared. “With all that he has done to you, can
you
let him in?”

For a moment, they exchanged glances. She sighed and looked away first; he blew out his breath.

“I suppose we’ll have to have this out with him sooner or later,” Edward said.

Her hands went to her hips. “Sooner,” she said with a growl. “Let’s finish this sooner.”