Untamed (17 page)

Lydia sighed. ‘I was having an affair with him. That’s why Kit wanted to speak with him, and that’s why she made a deal with him. I assume it was something galling and altruistic like that?’

For the first time, Kit considered that Lydia simply . . . wanted Tom to know, because it was only fair that he should know.

An uncomfortable thought.

She made herself continue. ‘The Duke wanted to come to the country – to have some time away from London, and away from being the Duke of Darlington.’

‘He seems to spend a lot of time not being the Duke of Darlington,’ Tom said, a small tremor in his voice. Because he was not stupid, and some part of his mind had raced ahead and was already beginning to understand.

‘He agreed to leave Lydia alone if I brought him to the countryside with me. And he . . .’ Oh, God, she couldn’t say it.

Lydia’s sharp elbow dug into her ribs, and she blurted out, ‘He turned up dressed as a woman. I thought it was a disguise, but now I don’t know. I think he’s trying to be as far from himself as it’s possible to be, and he’s Lady Rose.’

Tom made some very strange noises and almost fell off the bed. Lydia started giggling again, and Kit sat frozen, her fingers clawing into the bedcovers.

‘Good – God – Kit – you —’

‘I’m so sorry, Tom. I wanted to tell you right away, but I thought he would just go straight back to London if I did – back to Lydia. I couldn’t. I was in so deep, I didn’t know what to do. I mean,’ she laughed a little hysterically, ‘a duke, Tom, an actual duke.’

‘Oh, my God, Rose is a duke. I have played Snap with a duke.’

Lydia kicked him. ‘You’d think the two of you didn’t have a countess in the family. Honestly. You sound like country bumpkins.’

‘Er,’ said Kit. ‘We are country bumpkins.’

‘Hang on,’ said Tom, still sounding stunned, and Kit waited breathlessly for the accusations to begin. ‘The broadsheets call him simple – an idiot. Rose is not . . .’

Kit and Lydia shared a look.

‘Oh, my God,’ said Tom again, but this time his voice barely made it through his throat, and his whole body flushed dark. ‘Rose is a man. And I was so – so charmed.’

‘It’s all right, Tom,’ said Kit, as gently as she could. ‘He’s an impossibly charismatic person. In any guise.’

Tom gave a short, uncontrolled laugh. ‘No, that’s not – Kit, he was the first woman to charm me. It gave me such hope.’

Then, ‘Rose is a man,’ he said, and looked directly up at her. It was the first time in their lives that Tom had looked at her and Kit had seen their father. Their father’s heir. ‘And he has been sleeping in your bed.’

She held her hands out before her. ‘He never seduced me. He wanted . . . something else from me. Not that.’

‘I don’t care what he wanted! You knew I wouldn’t let him into your bed. You knew, and so you didn’t tell me who he was.’

Anger coiled thick into the back of her throat, wrapping around some other feeling. ‘That is not up to you!’

Tom threw the bedcovers violently back, and stood. There was nothing silly, now, about his nightshirt. Kit and Tom had never spoken like this. Not once. Her skin was red and hot with shock.

‘I don’t want you to see him again. Can’t you see that – Kit, you’ll be utterly ruined. You can’t see him any more, you can’t —’

‘He can’t go back to London,’ she said, sure of that one thing.

Tom looked to Lydia – Lydia – for confirmation. He scrubbed a hand through his hair and his eyes came back to Kit, wild and unsure and belligerent. ‘Then you’ll not see him without Mr Scott, Lydia or myself present. He will not step foot in your room.’

‘Tom —’

‘I’m the head of this family, not you! You might be able to stand against me, but not me and Lydia together.’

‘Tom,’ she said, a soft plea to her brother to remember who they were. To remember that he spoke to his sister, not to a stranger.

He closed his eyes, and his face trembled, then was still. ‘Don’t plead with me, Kit. I owe you so much. I owe you what meagre protection I can offer. I know I’m no threat, but if you see him unchaperoned again I will write directly to Lord BenRuin.’

‘Tom, you can’t!’

Tom’s eyes opened, and tears spilled down his cheeks. ‘I will,’ he said. ‘Does Mother know?’

Kit shook her head dumbly, and realised Lydia was gripping her hand so hard it might break. She’d barely felt it. ‘You won’t tell her, will you?’

‘Not for anything. She’s barely recovered from the last man who broke her heart. If she discovered that her new favourite is another man who’s playing her for a fool . . . No, Kit. For as long as the Duke chooses to trespass on us, let her enjoy his fiction. She won’t ever have cause to see him again, after he leaves.’ He wiped his cheek with a rough hand. ‘And neither will you. Christ, don’t you see it?’

The room was silent, full of things broken.

‘I assume Mr Scott knows who he is,’ Tom said.

‘Yes,’ said Lydia.

‘Then I have to go.’ And he left, without looking at either of them.

They sat in utter silence, and then Kit fell down onto the pillows and pulled the bedcovers over her head. ‘He’ll never forgive me. And what if I never forgive him?’

She had already forgiven him. Her heart ached for him – for Tom trying to step into a role he’d never had to fill before. Into the shoes of a man who had hurt them all.

‘Nonsense,’ said Lydia, pulling the covers back off Kit, her face looming close for a moment in the candle light. ‘Tom’s just feeling foolish and scared. He’s hardly the first young man to be smitten with him. He’s right about Mother, though.’ Something seemed to occur to her. ‘If that bastard even thinks of taking advantage of Tom’s tender feelings I will make a dress from his skin and wear it to the opera.’

‘He’s Jude. Of course he’ll take advantage.’

Lydia looked at her oddly. ‘You do know what I’m talking about, don’t you, Kit? When I say taking advantage?’

‘You mean he’ll indiscriminately use Tom’s affection to get what he wants. That if he so wants he’ll humiliate Tom, because hurt seems to sustain him in some way. He won’t spare him at all.’

Lydia waved it all away. ‘That goes without saying,’ she said. ‘I mean
sexual
advantage. You know Darlington sleeps with men, I hope?’

And of the thousand thoughts that tried to be heard at once, the one she gave voice to was, ‘Only men?’

‘Darling, I know you don’t mean to insult me. Our affair was consummated. Many times.’

Kit barely heard her smug drawl.

‘If he sleeps with Tom I will kill him,’ she said. She was so hot she couldn’t feel her own skin, and this new piece of information tried, and failed, to coalesce into something she could take hold of. She’d heard the rumours, of course, but people would say anything to get attention. She hadn’t thought it entirely possible. If men could sleep with other men, then the world was made up differently than she’d thought, and that was —

She remembered one night, leaving the inn with Tom – back when Tom used to go drinking with her, before Father died. They’d heard a fight out the back, two men grunting, two bodies throwing themselves against a wall. It had been dark, indistinct. She hadn’t thought much of what she’d seen, and only remembered it because Tom’s fingers had dug so hard into her arm when he pulled her away that she’d had bruises the next day.

She thought, unbidden, of Jude’s pale beauty. She didn’t even know how it would work, but she had an image of his limbs hot and in movement, his chest pushing flat against another man’s chest. She remembered his lips so close to Tom’s that morning two weeks past, and the way he had touched Tom’s cheek and the way he had kissed him.

And then she was thinking, If Tom sleeps with Jude I will kill him.

‘You do realise,’ said Lydia, ‘that when you arranged for him to leave me alone he left me . . . alone.’

‘W-what?’ She tried to push the hot confusion away, tried to surface from beneath it so that she could make sense of what her sister was saying.

‘You took my only true friend away from me,’ Lydia said.

Lydia was enough like Jude that when she finally said something in plain English it was worse than if she’d couched it in misdirection and insult.

‘He . . . explained that to me,’ said Kit, fighting back the tide of feeling. ‘And I had to do it anyway.’

‘Why?’

Lydia’s voice was measured, controlled, but it was a question that lay eternally between them, that Kit would never be able to answer to the satisfaction of either of them.

‘Because your husband loves you,’ she said, knowing to her bones that it wasn’t her place to say so. ‘And I want you to be happy.’

Lydia gave an incredulous laugh that was raw at the edges. ‘You left me to the mercy of BenRuin so that I would be
happy
? Do you have any idea how insane that sounds?’

‘I don’t know. Maybe. And —’ She couldn’t tell her. It was so mercenary, so awful. She thought of Jude, whose power came in part from the fact that there was nothing he wouldn’t say. ‘Your marriage was the prize we won by walking through hell. I couldn’t let you throw it away.’

She turned – and found her sister’s face choked, burning with rage. Lydia opened her mouth, but only to make an odd hissing noise through her teeth. It made Kit feel that someone had left a window open somewhere, and something essential was leeching out bit by bit.

Lydia turned away, and they didn’t speak again.

Kit thought she could feel him, two floors beneath her, lying awake in her mother’s old room.

If she left Lydia now, she would never, ever get her back.

‘You knew.’

Crispin looked up from the book he was reading by the fire in Tom’s room, and didn’t even uncross his legs. He’d shed his coat but was otherwise still dressed.

‘You should have —’

Crispin waited, his face patient, but Tom couldn’t find the words to express what Crispin should have done, though he felt, urgently, that the man had let him down.

‘Should have told you, whom I don’t even know?’ Crispin asked gently. ‘My loyalty is not to you.’

‘No, of course, it’s to a madman who has my sister’s entire future gripped in his palm.’ He attempted to laugh. ‘Both my sisters’. And mine too, I suppose.’

Crispin closed his book and set it aside, with none of the urgency Tom felt. ‘It is a risk one always runs, with him. Ruin, for the chance to come close.’

‘It wasn’t as voluntary as that. He forced himself on us.’

‘Did he?’ Crispin asked mildly.

He was made to think of Kit again. Of what Kit – not the Duke, but his own sister – had done.

Crispin stood and folded his cravat neatly on the dresser. By the time he turned back, working his shirt cuffs loose, Tom had regained some control over himself.

‘I never suffered what my sisters did.’ He turned his face away, and traced the crack in the wall with his finger. ‘I was sent away when I was ten, to study with Reverend Stevens. My father’s contempt for me was thirteen miles distant, and when I came home from the holidays —’

He looked up, and was shocked at how quiet Crispin was, how all his warm concentration seemed to fill up the room. That feeling of being held, safe, in the other man’s attention didn’t calm him, it made it harder to suppress his emotions. His memories. The weight of a gun in his pocket.

‘My father was deluded. He made himself believe I could win a scholarship to any school – to Oxford, if he wished it. I let him believe it. And when I came home the year I was thirteen, and found Kit —’

‘Mr Sutherland —’

‘—she looked as if someone had died. As if she had died. Her hands were so scratched up that it took me three days to even notice she was working with two broken fingers. She had tried to take Lydia back from him, and he had beaten her until he’d broken bones, because she always was too much like him and he probably wanted to wipe himself from the face of the earth. He wouldn’t let her heal, and Lydia never went near her again. And all she said to me was,
Tom, you have to leave
.’

He couldn’t say it.

Crispin waited in silence, until finally Tom looked up.

‘And you left.’

‘And I left. I never came back for holidays after that, if I could help it.’

‘Mr Sutherland. Tom. We are becoming, all the time. You are a good man. I don’t know your sister, and even I can see that if you had tried to assert yourself above her back then, it would have been unbearable. You would have achieved what your father never could, and broken her.’

Tom slid down the wall, and sat on the floor.

‘What happened when you didn’t get into Oxford?’

‘By then Lydia was his great hope. All he wanted from me was to stay out of his way. He still thought he would get another boy on Mother. Such awful nights, when we would all . . .’ He looked up, fierce and gone, because this was what everything came back to. ‘I decided to kill him.’

Crispin’s eyes were soft, and full of pity. ‘All boys at one time or anoth—’

‘I put a pistol in my pocket. I walked all the way to the inn, knowing this was the end. I would act. At last, I would act.’

For the first time, Crispin’s expression was unsettled. ‘My God, did you . . .’

‘I was standing just inside the door, and I had my hand wrapped around the gun, and another man stood and shot him. He had cheated at cards. He always cheated at cards. So another man, who was angry and drunk, shot him in the chest. I carried him home. He cursed me, bleeding in my arms like a child, and the weight of that pistol bumped against my thigh the whole way. It was a nightmare. I never woke from it.’

Crispin knelt before him, his knees outside Tom’s knees. He brushed Tom’s hair from his face, so gentle and warm. Something dangerous, and precious, that Tom hadn’t dared dream of.

‘Come to bed,’ Crispin said. ‘Come and sleep in my embrace. And I will wake you in the morning.’

‘Good morning,’ someone – a woman – said, and threw open the curtains.

Jude flung an arm across his eyes, and tried to say, ‘Not any more.’ His mouth made a series of sounds that didn’t quite cohere into words.

Oh well.

The bed dipped as the woman sat. ‘I’ve come to shave you, on Kit’s command. We have agreed you must continue to play the woman until I can find a way to make you leave. Not that I necessarily know how to shave a man, but your neat little trick makes it impossible for Tom to come into your bedroom.’