“I don’t know where we would be without her ladyship,” Mr. Pike told the room at large. “No idea, none indeed. I hope you’ll have a moment to see that plough’s results before you go.”
“Of course,” she said. “In fact, I’ve been meaning to chase down rumors of a new technology come out of the Midlands, which employs a double tackle and a self-propelled engine.”
“Oh! You’re a saint, my lady.”
“So we’ve heard,” Lockwood said dryly. “Countess, you have been nominated for sainthood several times in my hearing—it begins with oats, and now ends with engines.”
“Goodness, may it never end!” exclaimed Mr. Pike, to laughter from everyone.
The housekeeper, Mrs. Bradley, offered a tour of the hall while Lockwood went off to see to his artists. As Anna followed the woman from room to room, a strange feeling crept over her, surreal and disorienting. Here was the welcome she had envisioned four years ago. She walked in the footsteps of another Anna, who would have passed through these rooms as a new bride, blushing and contented by her honeymoon.
That other Anna would have found no cause for discomfort at Lawdon. In contrast to the townhouse, Lawdon’s furnishings were quiet, tasteful, and worn by long use. They suited her far better than the gaudy and outrageously expensive gilt in which Lockwood had smothered his London home.
In an airy salon that overlooked the parkland, Anna paused to admire the view: rolling fields stretched away to a lake, on the far shore of which stood a small Roman folly. Nearer by, an ancient oak tree sheltered a fanciful little castle, two stories high, topped by a miniature turret and ramparts.
“That was the children’s playhouse,” Mrs. Bradley said in answer to her question. “His lordship’s father then turned it into a schoolroom, in the hopes it might encourage a love of study.”
“And did it?”
Mrs. Bradley laughed. “Well, young Mr. Devaliant never had to be dragged to his desk. But his lordship . . .” She mimed buttoning her mouth shut.
Anna smiled. One hand resting on the worn damask of a stuffed armchair, she gazed out again at the lake, the sunlight glimmering on the waters, as a sense of serenity came over her.
Why, she might have felt at home here. Here, in England.
“It’s a lovely view, no?” Mrs. Bradley seemed cheerfully oblivious by nature, but perhaps that was only a mask for kindness—for Anna felt tears pricking her eyes, and would not have known how to explain them.
She cleared her throat and firmly pushed away all thoughts of the other Anna. “Yes, it’s wonderful.”
“This was the favorite room of our late countess. She often took her breakfast here, to watch the sun come up over the lake.”
She would have adored you, Lockwood had once told her of his mother. She also had strong opinions, and the knowledge to support them—and the temper, too.
What had gone wrong, between that conversation and the night he’d left?
“It is very good,” the housekeeper suddenly blurted, “to see you here, m’lady. We have been waiting ever so long for your visit.”
“Indeed,” Anna murmured. “It is very fine to be here, Mrs. Bradley.”
Minutes later, as they mounted the stairs, Anna caught conversation overhead, from one of the artists no doubt: “Ain’t fit for fine company,” grumbled a man in a thick northern accent. “They’ll laugh me out of the house.”
“Every artist is nervous on the eve of discovery.” This was Lockwood’s voice, pitched in a gentle and soothing register. “But I will not allow you to discount your artwork as trifling. You have a genius, Mr. Jobson.”
That strange melancholy twisted through her again. When had he last spoken to her with such patience and approval and warmth?
“Genius, ha!”
The housekeeper had already crested the stairs. Anna hurried after her, and they emerged into the upstairs hall, where she spotted the object of Lockwood’s persuasion: a plain-faced, sandy-haired man with a bulbous, speckled nose. He was tugging at his collar as though it strangled him. “I paint farmers and their flocks, my lord. When your city friends laugh me out of your house—”
“London society trusts my taste. If I say your work is fine, then it is—and the city will agree.”
“This was a mistake,” Jobson moaned. “I swore never to show again.”
Lockwood clapped the man on the shoulder. “You will thank me before month’s end; that, I promise you.”
He spoke with easy confidence, like a man who had never been judged. But Jobson was not impressed. “I was drunk, or you’d never have persuaded me to it. Please, my lord, it’s still not too late—”
“Come.” Lockwood discarded charm for a more athletic approach. Seizing Jobson’s arm, he hauled him off down the hall. “You’ll look square at your work right now, and we’ll see if you still dare insult it.”
“I don’t need—”
“Chin up, man. If the applause won’t please you, then the offers will. You’ll have three hundred pounds in your pocket by August.”
“Three hundred?” Jobson’s voice cracked. “Surely you’re joking . . .”
As their voices faded, Anna spied the housekeeper smiling to herself.
“That’s the fifth time I’ve heard that speech,” she told Anna. “I never met an artist before his lordship began to lodge them here. But they’re a nervous lot, aren’t they? He always gets their feathers smoothed, though.”
What an image! Lockwood fussing over clackish artists like a mother hen.
“This here is your office,” said Mrs. Bradley, nodding toward an open door. “Been waiting for you for some time.”
“My office?” Frowning, Anna stepped inside.
The room did not resemble any typical study. No carpet had been laid over the gleaming floorboards, and in place of a desk stood a sturdy oak table that nearly ran the length of the room, its shape mirrored exactly by the skylight overhead. Cloudy light gleamed over cushioned benches and bookshelves that lined the walls, full of . . .
Journals. Agrarian, geological, biological, chemical . . .
Scientific journals. As she stepped forward to examine them, she noticed their dates. “All from 1857,” she murmured. This lot of journals was four years old.
He must have built and stocked this space directly before their wedding.
“We ran out of space for the newer ones,” Mrs. Bradley said. “They are downstairs, in the library proper.”
Wordless, she nodded. One volume was thicker and more handsomely bound than the rest. She picked up the book, brushing her fingers over the tooled leather cover. When she opened it, her heart turned over.
This was her manuscript. He’d had it bound, like a real book.
She sank onto the nearby bench and shut the book, gripping it so hard that the leather bore the marks of her fingernails when she finally let go.
Why had he done this?
Why had he built this place for her, if he had never intended to stay?
“Shall I leave you for a bit?”
The housekeeper’s words seemed to come from a great distance. Anna nodded, barely hearing her retreat.
She opened the book again with trembling hands. Here was her inscription to him:
Promise me never to burn a book again!
AWW 1857
A noise drew her gaze up to the doorway, where Lockwood stood. She caught a strange look on his face before he offered an abrupt half smile. “You never published it,” he said.
So he knew which book she held. Her bewilderment felt dizzying. “I sent it to publishers. But nothing came of it.”
He stepped inside. “I can’t believe there was no interest.”
“Markham and Macallister wanted it. But they would not consent to anonymity. They wanted to send me around to give lectures.”
His head tipped. “Why didn’t you? It’s a fine piece of work, Anna. You should have been proud of it.”
Hating to ruin this fragile truce between them, she s
poke in an apologetic voice. “It would have drawn notice to me. Markham had a campaign planned, advertisements for the ‘Lady of Science,’ the ‘Scientific Countess,’ all manner of nonsense. People naturally would have begun to wonder about my husband—where you were, why you’d gone. And I . . .” Feeling awkward, she gave a little shrug. “Well. I had no desire to be known as the bluestocking whose mannish interests drove her husband away.”
She braced for his defense. But he offered none, his gaze opaque as he considered her. “Mannish?”
She flushed. “You know how people are.”
“Idiots, for the most part.”
Relieved that he hadn’t bridled, she pushed out a short laugh. “So they would have been wrong, then? It wasn’t my mannish interests that drove you away?”
The joke was poor, and her voice did not manage to carry it. Nor did he bother to muster a smile.
“No,” he said. “Your intellect was—is—one of your beauties.”
Surprise fluttered through her. She had no notion of how to respond to his compliment, much less whether it would make her a fool to seem to believe it. After all, for all her ‘beauties,’ he had left her.
In lieu of a reply, she looked around the room—and felt a startled laugh catch in her throat when she spotted the painting on the wall high above. She had never seen it, but she recognized it all the same. “Is that the ‘Wretched Folly’?”
He followed her glance, then winced. “Is that what I called it?”
“Yes.” He had begun the painting at her joking insistence, to ‘prove’ his lack of talent, and kept her apprised of its ‘monstrous progress’ in each letter he sent. But somewhere along the line, it had become something more than a silly lark. Her teasing encouragements had led him to discuss more honestly his old ambitions, and the pain and growth inherent to realizing his own inaptitude. The first time I’d truly failed at something, he’d said of his time in Rome. My father had predicted it, but he never spoke a word in smugness. He told me to look elsewhere for my gifts. And so I did.
He stepped back now, squinting at it. “Wretched might have been too kind.”
She walked over to join him. “What was it titled?”
She knew the answer, of course. But she wanted to hear proof that he remembered as clearly as she did.
“ ‘The Lady at the Window,’ ” he said softly. “I should have painted a blonde. There was never any hope of capturing your hair.”
The woman’s hair was indeed a rather unlikely scarlet, interspersed with clumsy dashes of orange and yellow. But he was not entirely talentless, even when trying to be so: the view was recognizable as the parkland seen from the window of the morning room.
She remembered his vow to make the lake look as it had to his eyes as a child, when he’d been tossed in by a footman in order to learn to swim: endless, impossibly deep, large as the ocean.
Her lips twitched as she considered the results. “Is that a tidal wave coming toward us?” The wave rose so high that the trees beyond it looked dwarfed, three feet tall at most.
He slanted her a laughing look. “Precisely—a sweet promise that the viewer will be put out of her misery in a few moments.”
She bit the inside of her cheek to keep a straight face. “Come now. It’s . . . remarkable.” Remarkably awful, in fact. The clouds looked as though they were melting out of the sky.
“Remarkable,” he mused. “How . . . politic of you.”
“The point was not to become Michelangelo, if you’ll recall—or even to produce something averagely accomplished. I challenged you to paint terribly. In fact, I made you promise that you would only paint rubbish.”
He arched a brow. “And evidently I obeyed. But what a waste of Prussian blue!”
“You enjoyed every moment of it. I still have the letters somewhere to prove it.” She knew exactly where they were: in the chest at her Edinburgh townhouse. “You said that angels were rejoicing as you laid the final brushstroke, and that your next work would dazzle the Royal Academy into a collective fit of apoplexy.”
His laughter was so robust and full throated that she wondered if he had ever laughed genuinely until now. “You’ll notice I did not sign my name to this atrocity.”
Her laughter slipped free, joining his. Some part of her looked down from a distance, marveling at this wondrous bizarre sight: the two of them joking together as of old.
The moment was over too soon, but it left her feeling lighter than air, as though her next step might launch her floating into the sky. Perhaps it was not too late for them, after all. Perhaps . . .
His gaze dropped to the book she held—she realized she had clutched it to her chest, a posture that suddenly seemed too revealing. Quickly she turned away, carrying the book back to the shelf, then sat again. What she wanted was some remark that might keep them in a casual, merry mood—but as she groped for it, he spoke first.
“You could publish it now,” he said. “It’s worthy of an audience.”
“Yes, I suppose.” She stared at him. None of this made sense. “You built this for me. This room.”
“It was to be a wedding present.”
“I wish . . . you had stayed to give it to me.”
His head tipped, some complicated thought working across his face. She could not hope to decipher it, but he seemed to resolve it for himself: with one sharp nod, he stepped toward her and caught her hand.
“I am giving it to you now,” he said as he tugged her to her feet. “With apologies for the delay,” he added against her mouth, then kissed her.
Her eyes closed. A pulse of pleasure beat through her at how softly he kissed her—a light molding of lips, tentative, almost innocent. This was an unfamiliar species of kiss. It bore no relation to the strange hot passion of last night. She relaxed, sighed into his mouth. How safe she had once felt in his arms—not simply protected and admired, but also, more crucially, ever free to pull away.
The memory caused her to sway into him. The hard warmth of his chest, the press of his hips . . . His grip on her chin, quick and clever and firm, tilted her face upward, giving him deeper access to her mouth. She opened to him, and swallowed the growl from his throat—
The kiss changed all at once. He crowded against her, pushed her back against the wall, an animal ferocity, almost a desperation, in how deeply he kissed her. She gripped his shoulders for balance, thrilling at the crush of his body—the flexing breadth of his shoulders beneath the soft nap of his jacket. His stubble rasped her skin. His hand found her buttocks through her skirts, palmed her, pulled her against him so she felt his readiness for her.
Her body clenched. Desire was a hard, insistent pulse, thrumming through all the spots he’d addressed so expertly last night. Her body knew its due now: it ached to be bared, to be handled and filled. She bit his lip, dug her fingers into his back.
Some rough noise came from him—he pulled her without warning away from the wall and lifted her onto the table. His palm cradled her skull as he laid her across it and pressed down over her. His fingers speared through her hair—a dozen stabbing pains along her scalp, pins popping free, the discomfort somehow magnifying the pleasure of his weight against her, his pelvis rocking into hers. She thrust upward against him. Yes. Pleasure beat through her now like a drum.
His palm found her calf, gripped it and squeezed. Possessiveness: it should have frightened her. But it didn’t. Take me, she thought.
His hand smoothed up her leg, to the back of her knee, her thin stocking translating the rough, warm feel of his palm. She rolled against him, wanting these clothes gone, wanting his skin against hers. He thrust against her, but her skirts interfered. She reached down blindly, trying to claw them up. Her crinolines, her petticoats, trapped her. On an impatient noise, she tried to wrestle free.
Bright light spilled over them, falling through the skylight: the sun had broken free of the clouds.
He went still, his breath rasping into her mouth. And then, abruptly, he pulled away
.
His withdrawal felt as shocking as ice water. She reached out to pull him back and caught a peculiar look on his face: pale and almost shocked.
He sidestepped her grip and turned away.
She sat up, bewildered. Her body felt abandoned—raw, throbbing, exposed. He was buttoning his coat, smoothing out his trousers. “What is wrong?”
He faced her, and the blank look on his face made her feel chilled. Gone, all evidence of tenderness and laughter. Of lust, or of any human feeling at all. “Nothing,” he said.
“Then why . . . ?”
“We’re in public.”
Public? The door stood closed. The sight of it, of their undisputed privacy, caused some chemical shift inside her, tipping passion into embarrassed temper. “Nobody can see.”
“I’m flattered by your eagerness.” He inspected his shirt cuffs, smoothing them between thumb and forefinger. “But you will have to wait until tonight.”
Her mouth opened. She would have to wait? He made her sound like some blowsy tart!
He glanced up. Heaven knew what she looked like. It caused him to take a deep breath.
“You started this,” she said.
His jaw squared as he stared at her. “Very well,” he said at length. “Lie back and I’ll finish it for you, if that will improve your mood.”
Did he mean . . . ?
She scrambled to her feet. Moments ago, she had felt brazen and bold. Now he made her feel judged for it—a pathetic, desperate strumpet. “Spare me your kindness.”
“Good. Tonight, then.” He turned for the door.
“But I won’t be blindfolded.”
He paused but did not turn back.
“Or”—even saying it made her flush—“tied. It’s not decent.” If this ‘public’ setting was not decent in his view, then neither were restraints in hers. “I won’t tolerate that again.”
He turned back, lifting one shoulder in an elegant shrug. “As you wish. Perhaps once will have done the trick anyway.”
The way he said it! As though bedding his wife were some onerous duty to be endured with teeth gritted! But he had not seemed repelled just now. Not until he’d pulled away and stared at her as though she were the deviant between them.