Untamed (13 page)

‘The game only works if we’re honest,’ he said, ‘so I won’t cheat.’ And then, before she could make a sceptical remark, he added, ‘Cheating’s only fun when it means you win.’

He held up his glass. ‘Make my heart bleed, Katherine.’

She was aware of her twisted fingers, wrapped around her glass, but she would pass out from drink before she would give him her personal pain to entertain him, or distract him, or whatever this was.

‘One summer we were swimming at the lake, and I decided I really didn’t want to come home when Nanny said. So I ran all the way into Millcross, yelling like the armies of hell were after me.’

He looked at her with a crooked half-smile, as if she had charmed him a bit. ‘Not exactly the stuff of nightmares.’

‘I was naked,’ she said.

There was a second’s pause, and then he gave a completely involuntary shout of laughter. Another pause, and then he threw his head back, abandoned, his neck exposed, and laughed until he almost fell off his chair.

Everyone was staring at them, and she didn’t care. She would have every person in the room discover he was a man before she would have him stop.

He leaned weakly forward on his forearms, and his body shivered with the remnants of laughter. ‘Drink up,’ he said, flashing his teeth at her.

She made a face at him, because it would be no fun if he knew how delighted she was, and drank down a mouthful of whisky. ‘That’s bloody good,’ she said, and leaned back in her chair.

‘I think you might be more manly than I am.’

‘Jude,’ she said, ‘Porkie is more manly than you are.’

He smiled at her again – more warmly than before, nothing he would ever have seen in the mirror – and topped up her glass. ‘Try again.’

‘When I was fourteen I became my sister’s lady’s maid, because all our servants had abandoned ship.’

Something crossed his face that she thought was less a pang than simple surprise. ‘How old was Lydia?’ he asked, and the familiar, unselfconscious way he said her sister’s name leeched the warm buzz from her veins.

‘Seven.’

‘Why do you say lady’s maid? Why not simply say you took care of her when no one else was able?’

‘Because —’ Because she’d never thought of it. Because Abe Sutherland had said to her, She’s the only one of you who took after me. I won’t have you infecting her with your nonsense and your common manners.

‘It wasn’t like that,’ she said. ‘Father said her complexion was worth more than the Squire’s fortune and he was right. He said she would be debuted instead of me because she would make a great match. And he was right.’

‘And you still have your family home because she lived up to his expectations,’ he said. ‘Am I right?’

‘Yes. No!’ She took a nervous sip of whisky. It hurt her, peculiarly, to have him take Lydia’s part. They still had the Manor because Kit had never shrunk from doing what was necessary. ‘I was fourteen years old, and I didn’t mind so much that we’d lost everything. I was so . . . sure Father would win it back. It meant long days outside, just me, Tom and Lydia. We went half wild, and I didn’t care. And then one day Tom had found a cave and we were going to build a fort, but I said wait for Lydia and went to find her, and she was sitting in the parlour and she’d been crying, but the only thing I could see was the white dress. It had a thick, glossy ribbon around the middle, the blue of robin’s eggs, and these – lace ruffles around the sleeves that made Lydia’s arms look like a doll’s arms. I used to have a doll with arms just like hers. Lydia hardly even remembered a time when we’d owned such things, but I did, and I couldn’t bear to see her in the dress.’

Lydia used to screech at Abe like a little fishwife. Kit couldn’t fathom it. She was torn between them. Her world strained at the seams, torn between two loves: her tiny, sickly sister and her hero.

Then Lydia turned seven, and Abe realised she was going to be a beauty. It was the most terrifying day of Kit’s life.

She screwed her eyes shut because she hadn’t thought of it in years – the way Lydia had run towards her, the dress a delicate puff of white in movement. The sick thwack of Abe’s hand across Lydia’s small head.

‘You fell out over a dress?’ the Duke said very, very quietly. ‘Well, I’ll drink to that.’

‘I was fourteen years old.’

He looked up, because he was intelligent enough to know she was trying to say something else. Abe had made her in his image, and realised too late he had made her into the wrong thing. He had seen his second chance in Lydia – his golden ticket. That day Kit saw Lydia in the dress she had felt her world tip on its axis. She had
wanted
Abe to hit Lydia.

And the next day, when it was too late, she had been so sorry. She had searched all morning in the mint patch for a perfect, dead beetle. Lydia loved the metallic blue of their shells, and would hold them up to the sunlight, watching green ripple over the surface.

Lydia had told Kit to take her dirty insect back to the garden where it belonged, and Abe . . .

Kit’s fingers and the bones in her nose ached with the memory, and she couldn’t tell Jude about that, or about the days following when she hadn’t been given time enough to heal properly.

‘Are you drunk yet?’ he asked suddenly.

‘Not even close.’

‘Let’s play cards.’

‘I told you I don’t gamble. We should —’

‘Don’t say it,’ he said, and she looked down in surprise at his hand, wrapped around hers. ‘Don’t move. Don’t think. Promise me?’

His fingers tightened on hers, and she nodded. Then he left the table – his fingers gone. Christ, she was in trouble.

He came back and slapped a deck of cards down in front of her.

‘No money,’ he said. ‘So it’s not really gambling.’

‘Then what’s the point?’

He said, almost experimentally, ‘Can’t winning be its own reward?’

She didn’t dignify that with an answer. He started laying out the cards, his fingers long and practised. She’d only ever seen one other man handle cards with the same ease.

‘The apple that fell on Isaac Newton.’

She took another sip of whisky. She was vaguely aware that they’d drunk more than half the bottle, and everything was easy, golden, lovely. ‘I’ll counter with the apple Eve gave Adam.’

He shot her a glare. ‘The noble fruit that gave us gravity, which in turn allows us to understand our world, against a marital disagreement involving a snake.’ She snickered at the dirty way he said the word. ‘I think not.’

‘Without the fall we would have no need of understanding our world.’

‘Without Newton we wouldn’t understand falling. Is that what you really think?’

Her glass was empty. How had that happened?

‘Katherine. Is that what you think? That the fall gave us a world.’

‘Well, of course it did.’

‘But the previous world was better. The heaven. The paradise one.’

She shrugged and said, ‘I like understanding gravity.’

He played the first card and called ninety-three points. She won the trick and called ninety-two. He won five tricks, she won six; she was only one point behind, but he was on ninety-nine. If he won the last trick, he won the game.

His face lit up with unholy glee. ‘I have you now, Sutherland.’

‘Bet if you dare,’ she returned. ‘Bet your soul, if you dare.’

A soul, they had agreed, was the costliest thing you could put on the table. That gave him pause, and he thought for a minute.

John interrupted them on his way out of the inn. Kit blinked up in some confusion. She’d forgotten there was a world beyond the small circle she and Jude made with their lovely whisky and their dazzling wit.

He was gone again.

‘Every letter R Shakespeare ever wrote,’ Jude said, carefully eyeing her.

‘Ah, Omeo,’ she murmured, ‘thou art diminished.’

Jude started cackling in his chair, which she thought was very undignified but terribly flattering. She frowned. Or unflattering. Did he still expect her to be an idiot?

He hadn’t played his card yet. There was a chance it was the queen of spades, which she couldn’t beat. Her heart thumped harder in her chest. The possibility that she might lose was like stepping blindfolded onto a busy street.

‘My soul,’ she said, and he played his card.

When they had mostly finished the bottle – or had they already finished it? Kit couldn’t remember – they were playing a childish slapping game. They stared into each other’s eyes, competitive, intent, and her hands were red and stinging.

His were worse.

They stumbled home in the dark, and Jude insisted on carrying her over the muddy part of the track. Kit had enough presence of mind left to think this would more likely land them both in the mud than be of any use whatsoever, but before she could form the words his arms were around her and the world tilted, and she was held close and warm against his chest. Her head came to rest against his collarbone, and his fingers were tight across her thigh, and there was a confusing sensation of skin and the rough slide of velvet against wool, and his breathing above her and through his ribcage, thudding with every step. She closed her eyes and imagined she was on a ship crossing an ocean so deep whole mountain ranges had been lost in it.

He set her down, and they didn’t talk any more. They were being pulled, she could feel it, by a point in time. By the room they were walking towards, and the moment they would climb into bed together.

Too much had happened. It would be different. She didn’t know if she could refuse to get under the covers this time.

She lit the cheap candles she’d nicked from the inn at the banked kitchen fire. They climbed the stairs and she said, ‘We’re well, Tom, go back to sleep,’ when they passed his open door.

There was a tricky moment when Jude had shed all his layers but his nightgown, and looked down in dismay at the mud caking the hem. Kit threw him an old flannel shirt, and forced herself to turn away. This nakedness was not like last night’s. This was something that needed permission.

She turned when she heard him nestle under the covers, and now there was no profusion of frills to cover his lack of breasts – there was just the hard plane of his body beneath the flannel, and his hair on the pillow, and his eyes watching.

She pulled off her outer dress, fingers shaking. She felt odd and sick, but she didn’t want him to look away. She came to the edge of the bed in her stockings and shift, lifted the covers, then lay very straight and still on her back, right at the edge of the mattress.

Jude curled in towards her and sighed with contentment.

His eyes were closed and she thought after a couple of minutes that he’d fallen asleep, but he began to talk, low, without opening his eyes.

‘When I was a boy – maybe five years old – my uncle took us to Vauxhall Gardens. We watched a puppet show. How strange that he would think to take us to see a puppet show. The villain was a forest sprite, done up in a hard casing of seeds and twigs.’ His face scrunched up, and he nestled further into the covers. ‘I think there must have been some sort of fanfare – lights and whistles, that sort of thing – when the sprite appeared, because when I try to remember it now I still feel,’ a sleepy roll of his shoulder, ‘awe. Fear. Rose and Evie grabbed each other, but I couldn’t because I would be a duke some day.’

Kit didn’t dare move for fear that he would stop.

‘Then,’ he said and paused. An expression lit his face that was like hurt, but good in a way she couldn’t articulate. ‘The sprite cracked open – as seeds do, but we’d forgotten that seeds do or were too young to know it – and revealed its most vulnerable, tender centre: a swathe of red silk that seemed so frail against its crusty exterior, but so bright, so beautiful that I knew nothing would ever destroy it.’

His eyes opened, and they were not sleepy, and she had no time to guard against what came next.

‘Last night eclipsed that childhood wonder. You are wild, and hard, and impossible to breach – and I have felt only the faintest lick of the warmth in you.’

He didn’t make a single move towards her, but she was breathing like she’d been running, like she’d been drowning, and her heartbeat rushed past her ears like a thousand needles dropped on marble.

‘I want to crack you open,’ he said.

He was out of control. He had been for some time. He shouldn’t allow himself near her when he was like this – when his need for closeness was so indistinguishable from violence.

‘Touch me,’ he said, and the words were like sex coming out of his mouth.

Her breaths were short and hard. ‘One plus one,’ she said.

‘Two.’

‘Three plus five.’

‘Eight.’

‘Twenty-one times ninety-six.’

‘Two thousand and sixteen. You couldn’t come up with a sum difficult enough to distract me. I want you to touch me.’

She shook her head, which fixed his attention on the rumpus of her hair across the pillow. Her lean cheeks, her scrapper’s nose.

‘You touched me last night.’

‘This is different,’ she said, and curled around to face him. ‘I can’t afford this.’ She sounded almost indignant. Offended. As though her end of the conversation was a heated argument.

‘Katherine,’ he said, only he was really saying,
Come. Here
.

‘Do you know why all the servants left?’ she asked, fierce in the candle-lit dark.

‘I imagine your father gambled everything away.’

‘I —’ Her eyes widened in quick shock. ‘You notice far too much.’

‘There’s a long scar on the inside of your left thumb,’ he said. ‘You hate brushing your hair. You would have lost no sleep over having Porkie killed, but when you find a spider indoors you’re careful not to crush it when you take it outside. I could put an autumn leaf between your hands when you’re like that, and it would stay intact.’

I could put a human heart between your hands, when you’re like that.

She closed her eyes, breathed out long and hard. ‘My father risked everything. And he lost. And my whole life was changed. I was changed. I won’t gamble everything we have.’ She opened her eyes, gold and feral. ‘Not even for you.’

Jude could make people do what he wanted, and the temptation was like tiny hooks in his skin. He watched her, and she watched him back, and he knew it was no good. He wanted what was inside, and she would never come to him except because she chose to. And with everything he was, he knew a moment of doubt.

‘All right,’ he said carefully, and watched her let go of a breath she’d been holding for some time. ‘But we know each other better now, Katherine. You needn’t wear armour to bed. I have said you’re safe.’

He slid his hand across the sheets, cool cotton rough against his palm. His fingertips found the knuckles of her hands, and he realised they were clutched so tightly together they were shaking, and her body was curled around them.

Her breath caught. He traced the topography of her knuckles, down across the top of her thigh. He watched the tight control of her nostrils and lips as she forced her breathing to remain even and he wound up her shift into his palm.

He couldn’t touch her beneath it, yet. The pain of arousal was familiar; the other thing, reverent and loose, was not.

‘Jude,’ she said, and he was aware that only this woman called him that.

He gripped her knee, the cap of bone snug against his palm, and his thumb traced a line on to her thigh. The firm give of her became all that his hand wanted; he found the upper edge of her stocking. And then he was touching her skin that shied and shivered against the pads of his fingers.

The gold of her irises went into eclipse.

He pressed her flesh, and the thought that his fingers would leave red marks on her was unbearable. It was like one of those hot stones the Scandinavians used to evaporate water, sitting on his tongue.

The covers shifted over them, displacing cold and warmth. She had to lift her leg – just a fraction – so that he could get the stocking past her knee. It was such a small, erotic concession. He pulled the stocking over her foot and imagined the permission Katherine would be giving him if she opened her legs all the way.

Hunger opened in him – and he recognised it. He had almost killed himself to avoid it.

He shoved her leg from him.

‘You can keep the other one,’ he said, his voice unpolished, mortifying. ‘Good night.’

She opened her mouth; he turned his back.

There was a hesitant silence behind him, and then she moved, cold air rushing in under the covers. She’d gone up on her elbow, he thought, and watched him. He was painfully aware of her, ready for anything. When she finally lay back down, she was curved behind him – close enough for him to feel her heat but not touching. Close enough that he could feel the ripples running through her, and subsiding, like the after-effects of shock.

She woke from a dream in which she was suffocating to find her head wedged under his shoulder. She’d burrowed under him while she slept. She eased slowly away and he didn’t wake.

His hair was messy on her pillow and he trusted her to see him like this. Rumpled. Warm. She was close enough to trace the system of veins beneath the delicate skin of his eyelids. One hand was curled by his ear, the elbow flung out against the pillow. She had never seen him so lost to sleep.

Just one more minute
, she promised herself, and counted down the seconds.

She walked downstairs into . . . chaos. From halfway down the stairs she counted four liveried men and a maid. Two of the men were carrying a chest between them, another clutched a sheaf of papers to his chest, the fourth ducked into the parlour calling out, ‘Fionn, the piano won’t fit through the window, and the lads haven’t cleared the —’, and the maid was carrying folded linen.

She would go down in just a moment. She would call out to them just as soon as her breath stopped stabbing her throat on its way out. Wait. She had to breathe in as well. That was important.

‘Kit?’ It was Tom, behind her. She shut her eyes tight. Oh, God.

‘Kit, are you all right?’

She realised she was sitting down, and tried to make herself stand and face him. He sat beside her before she could, and she took his hand firmly. To show him they would be fine. Everything would be fine. She would make everything fine.

‘It’s happened again, Tom,’ she said. ‘Just like last time.’

She thought she’d spoken evenly, but Tom’s expression said she hadn’t.

It was just – she remembered it. Suddenly, vividly. The sick kick in her stomach, the queasy knowing of something-not-right when the men and maids had come and taken everything away. She’d sat on a step then, too – the grand steps, out in the entrance hall – and watched her father’s back, because people always listened to her father. He would make things right.

His neck was red, and he was arguing with a man in a cheap coat. She watched his neck go so red it looked bruised, and that made her think of the man in the paper who was hanged but hadn’t died right away.

Abe Sutherland’s collar loosened, became crooked, as his hand ran across the back of his neck, under his shirt. Then Mother appeared, and Kit was glad, because a maid was crossing the marble floor with Mother’s lilac satin folded over her arms, and now she would undo the mistake. But there were no calm words or smiles. Her mother ran at Abe and screamed,
My mother’s Ming vase. Bastard. She died without— And these filthy women. You break my heart!

Kit would never forget it. How ugly her mother was when her calm was shattered. Her voice ringing out in the emptying space.
You break my heart
. Worse, somehow, than the sway of her favourite doll’s arm over the edge of the box, as a man carried it off.

‘It’s happening again,’ Kit whispered, and just as soon as her brain unfroze she would figure out why. Where she’d gone wrong. She’d been so, so careful, and still it hadn’t been enough.

‘Darling,’ Tom said, and kissed her tense knuckles. There was an off note in his voice. ‘These people were sent by Lady Rose. They’re not taking things away.’

Laughter. That’s what was wrong. He sounded like a gleeful boy. Nothing like the white, pinched little thing who had looked to her to fix everything.

‘They’re not?’ she said, dizzy and stupid with relief.

‘They’re
bringing
things,’ he said. ‘Food and furniture and a piano and paintings and rugs and one hundred boxes of pure wax candles – don’t ask me why, I haven’t a clue how we could possibly use them all.’

Jude came down just before eleven, walking as though he’d been pulled apart and put back together slightly wrong. He had a pale blue wig pinned with vicious precision on his head, and instead of making him look more haggard, which would only have been fair, it made him look fragile. Sensitive.

Ha.

She’d purposely not gone up to shave him – left him stranded up there until she felt she could adequately deal with him. She’d had an army of servants to manage all morning, and hadn’t felt the need to add a whimsical duke to the pile.

His arms were clasped across his chest, dressing robe wrapped tightly around him, a rich silk shawl thrown carelessly over his shoulders.

He was shaved and made up, and she didn’t know whether he’d managed the task himself, or whether his servants were in league with him. His arrival downstairs hadn’t caused any smothered smiles, and the maids bobbed curtsies at him as if by rote. Kit couldn’t decide whether it was worse that the servants knew what her own family didn’t, or that they didn’t know, thereby tying her and Jude tighter into the deceit.

Jude glared at the men carrying furniture and goods and taking measurements and making notes as though he hadn’t had the slightest thing to do with them being here – and they’d been sent from hell specifically to torture him.

He didn’t even seem to see her as he made his way past her, into the kitchen.

‘Rose,’ she said, taking hold of his arm. ‘We have to talk about —’

‘Coffee,’ he said, his voice coming out rough and scratchy. ‘In the name of all that is good, give me coffee before you say another word.’

‘We don’t have any —’

‘You there.’ He rounded on one of the footmen coming through the doorway holding a list. Kit had, apparently, stopped existing the moment she denied him coffee. ‘Bring me a cup of coffee. Don’t be longer than ten minutes.’

Everything about him – voice, posture, expression, the very unconscious fact of his entitlement – spoke of centuries of master and servant.

‘Yes, my lady,’ said the footman. He actually ran out into the hallway – he
ran
. Kit stared after him.

‘Weren’t you about to pester me about something?’ said Jude from the kitchen, his head buried on his arms at the table. ‘Oh, God, Katherine, never let me drink again. Ever.’

She came to stand by him, meaning to bring up the matter of the upheaval he’d caused – and Jude leaned his head against her hip.

‘You are an evil woman,’ he said in a pitiful voice. ‘Do you know how difficult it is to shave in a mirror? Every time I told my hand to go left it went right. I was poking myself in the eye like a madman half the time.’

Without thinking she wanted to stroke him to give comfort. Then she thought, and did it anyway. Fingers down the back of his collar, fur a soft shush against her hand. She kept the touch firm, rubbed his neck slowly.

Every part of him froze. He didn’t pull away. After what seemed a very long time, he gave a sigh, and his shoulders relaxed by the tiniest fraction.

‘Where is Miss Sutherland?’

The voice boomed in the hallway and Kit and Jude sprang apart. She cursed the Squire to an early and unpleasant grave.

‘Ah, Miss Sutherland,’ he said from the kitchen doorway, and she wished he would talk instead of shouting.

‘Sir Winston.’
It’s beneath you to be under the thumb of a bit-part villain like the Squire
. ‘As always, it’s a pleasure to see you. I’ll bring tea into the parlour.’

‘Oh, no,’ he said, eyes hungry on Lady Rose, ‘I find it a charming novelty to socialise in the kitchen.’

It came forcefully to Kit that if Sir Winston of Millcross thought it a novelty it was beyond farcical for the Duke of Darlington to be comfortable sitting at their battered wooden table. She glanced at his blue head. Not comfortable exactly, more like excruciatingly hungover. But he didn’t seem to mind the kitchen any more, or even notice where he was.

‘I have heard rumours this morning,’ said the Squire in his jovial shout, and advanced a couple of steps towards the table. ‘Apparently I have hired on a new maid named Daisy – and half the county’s in love with her. Looks suspiciously like our Lady Rose.’

His laugh slid greasily down Kit’s insides – the worse because he apparently thought he and Lady Rose were sharing a joke. The lady in question showed no sign of hearing him.

‘What d’you make of that, eh, Lady Rose?’ The Squire moved even closer.

Jude looked up at the Squire, and Kit stopped breathing. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘Did you say something?’

She thought she’d seen him being ducal before now. He’d turned an icy glance on her more than once – put her effortlessly in her place. That, she realised, had been the reflection of a dream of what he could be. Even rumpled, even seated, even in a state of undress, he looked down his nose at the Squire.

His eyes didn’t go icy, they turned to blue fire. His indignation – his disbelief that this rotund man from the country would dare to
talk
to him – did not need to be spoken. The Squire took a sharp step back and it still was not far enough.

He took another.

‘Cease bothering me, little man,’ Jude said, his voice husky and sweet.

The Squire opened his mouth but could not speak. He gave a quick bow, and his eyes lighted on Kit as he turned to leave.

‘Sir Winston, wait!’ She forced herself to say it, even though Jude would think less of her for it. ‘I’ll bring tea to the parlour. Please don’t leave.’

‘I wouldn’t want to stay and risk being a bother,’ he said. ‘But you’ll come and see me tomorrow. For tea.’

He wouldn’t mention the loan outright in front of Lady Rose, but Kit knew they were going to talk about interest tomorrow. He would raise it. Again. The ten guineas would be worse than useless.

The Squire nodded and left, almost colliding with a whole calf.

‘Morning, sir,’ said Angus, his face flushed, above the carcass.