The Proposition (11 page)

"You want that I do somethin' about it?"

She jerked, looked. "About what?"

"The rats," he said brightly. "For free. No charge."

"No." She pressed her lips between her teeth, then remembered to say, "Thank you. No, thank you." She took a breath. "You have to begin to think like a viscount, Mr. Tremore. What would a viscount see if he were sitting here? Not a hole in the floorboard."

He snorted. "I hate to tell you, loovey, but from where I be sittin', unless he be blind, he'd see a hole, a hole what, if it didn't make him think of rats, he'd be stupid." He shrugged genially, as if the next were an earnest concession. "'Course," he said, "I think a good many gents be as bloody stupid as blocks, so you could be right."

She frowned, shaking her head. It was the bath all over again. She wanted to pick him up and dunk him, headfirst, in English upper-class manners and vocabulary and sounds. While he sat there, his mind heavily entrenched in his own ways; rough, uncouth, unmovable.

She pushed back from the table. "Fine," she said. She sighed as she stood up. "Meet me in my lab, if
you will. Please hurry. I have a student at noon, and you and I have a lot to do."

She felt as if they had a mountain to level, with only a porridge spoon held correctly to do it.

Chapter 6

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M
r.
Tremore failed all morning. Then he failed all afternoon till tea. Failure, of course, was a difficult thing for anyone. Edwina tried to tell him that to get very little right at first was quite normal, yet it seemed particularly hard on him.

He balked at recording his vowels and consonants on a gramophone-recorder. Why record them until they were right? She explained the need for a record of progress. While he maintained that saying things into a machine—wrong, he emphasized—only made him feel like "a blewdy ahrss."

The best that could be said for the day was that he got to where he could
hear
himself being wrong.

"This is real progress, Mr. Tremore."

He didn't believe it. He'd expected perhaps to speak like a "gent" by the end of the afternoon. When, instead, by the end of the afternoon he spoke like a man becoming—necessarily—self-conscious about each sound he uttered.

* * *

That evening after dinner, Jeremy Lamont paid a call, no doubt to inspect how the odds on his bet were shaping up. He asked a few pointed questions, asked to see the furnishings he and his brother had provided Mr. Tremore, then wanted to observe the lessons themselves, hear Mr. Tremore speak. Edwina and Mr. Tre
more accommodated him, of course, but she could have told him that in one day no miracles would happen.

"And when might his progress be noticeable?" Mr. Lamont asked.

"It's noticeable now, but not to you," she told him. "There is little you can do. Why don't you visit, say, during the fifth week, the week before the ball. You will get a very good idea then whether Mr. Tremore is able to learn a sufficient amount for your purposes."

Mr. Lamont asked a few more questions, mostly about "tricks" to make Mr. Tremore "seem more genteel," then left.

Not so unusual really. A client paying attention. To be expected. Yet his visit left Edwina uneasy.

Then again, she told herself, she was always uneasy about something. Perhaps she just had a lot on her mind. She was still finagling her finances to pay for a new coal furnace. A carriage horse had a tendon problem that was taking money and time. Her bank's balance on her account was different from hers, and she hadn't been able to figure out why. So what was so different about today's uneasiness? She would have thought she'd be used to the state of mind by now.

At the end of the day, Edwina had a habit she used sometimes to calm herself. Perhaps once or twice a week, it was her secret that she carried a pitcher of water to her evening primroses that grew wild at the back of her garden behind her house. The plants bloomed at night, so, if anyone asked, she was outside to see them, to smell them, and of course to nurture them. But in fact she nurtured them in a way she would have been hard pressed to explain to anyone.

She liked to go out and sing to them. Oh, it wasn't really even singing. She couldn't carry a tune very well. She hummed in rhythm to words she whispered as she confided her worries to the primroses and the night.

"The Misters Lamont, la, la, even the nicer one, are so strange," she sang. "But they pay their way, and I
shouldn't complain." She sang some more, about the
bill for the coal furnace and the horse with the limp,
then moved on to Mr. Tremore's retroflexed R's. She was just working up the courage to sing on a more personal theme regarding Mr. Tremore, when from the dark another voice off to her right suddenly, quietly joined in.

She jumped, drew back. It was Mr. Tremore himself. He was on the bench under the wisteria, sitting in the shadows.

She didn't hear what he sang at first; she was too busy cringing, trying to figure out an explanation. There was none. She withdrew to the shadows,
silent, utterly silent, the only safety she
knew while she
waited for him to berate her.

He stood up more into the light, and his voice became clearer. "I hope, la, la, he's taking good care of my dogs, la,
la…
"

He was imitating her, making fun of her, she thought. Inside, Edwina died a little. Her throat tightened and her stomach grew hot, as if it were trying to digest something thick and burning.

Never had anyone caught her in this childish consolation. She couldn't even rally enough defense to demand why he was out here in the dark himself. What was he doing roaming her house—and now the grounds to her house—in the dead of night?

She wanted to hide when he stepped fully from the shadows, his handsomeness itself assailing her. So innocently, he came into the moonlight of her back garden, his white shirt brighter than the moon itself, his face shadowed and planed.

"I did drills today, la, la, that was too hard and my tongue wouldn't do right," he said.

She frowned. He wasn't smiling. He didn't seem to be taunting her. Yet … no, it couldn't be. She didn't trust her own judgment.

Yet he appeared to be trying her plant-singing out.

He sang his own song to the plant and the stars and the dark, his tune echoing hers, though his voice carried the rhythm into more of a melody. With his hand, he rustled the leaves of the hedge that shaded the primroses, as she had. Then, stranger still, he looked at her and sang the words to her.

To her.

"I hope tomorrow is easier, and I get something right," he sang, his words so soft that she had to strain to hear them.

Edwina didn't know how to react to his appropriating of her foolishness. She said nothing.

He stopped. They stared at each other. He opened his mouth as if to speak.

But all she could do was turn quickly and walk toward her back door.

She didn't want him to explain or make excuses, if he was being kind. If he was being something else, she didn't want to know.

* * *

Mick watched as the tall woman with delicate-like feelings marched away. The moon was just behind the house, so he saw her only for a few seconds before she fell into house's shadow. She was movement in the dark, then the latch of her back door clicked, and she was gone.

Begger me, he thought, but she was an easy girl to chase away. What an odd one Win was.

She sang to the moon. Or to plants or to something out here. She wouldn't sing to him, even though he'd invited her to. He didn't think he would ever see anything more tender or sad than the way she told her problems to no one: to leaves. And he couldn't think of anything more brave than carrying on anyway with a such a load. She was strong, Winnie Bollash. As strong a woman as he knew. Capable-like.

And the most vulnerable creature he'd ever met.

Chapter 7

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T
hey spent
all the next day doing tests. It was late
in
the evening when they began the last of these, with
Edwina striking a tuning fork into vibration. "Tell me when the sounds stops for you."

She went to touch it behind Mr. Tremore's ear, but he pulled back sharply. "What you be doin'?"

"It's a hearing test. Though let's fix some of your grammar while we do it. Two birds with one stone. I'd like you to stop using
be
with every pronoun—"

"Every what?"

"It doesn't matter. It's not
What you be doing.
It's
What are you doing.
You
are,
we
are,
I
am,
he or she
is."

He wasn't listening. He tilted his head, watching her, frowning as she bounced the tuning fork again in her palm.

She reached toward him. "Say when you stop hearing it—"

He drew back again the moment the fork
touched
his mastoid. "What you got there?"

She paused, looked across the table at him. "It's a way of testing your hearing. Everything I have to teach you is based on your ability to hear it, so I have to be sure you can hear what I say."

He pulled his mouth to the side, slanting his mustache. "So I could do this wrong, too? Hear things wrong?"

"No." She laughed. "You could have poor hearing, I suppose, but there would be nothing you could do about it."

He interpreted her answer as yes, he could fail here,
too. He shook his head, then caught her hand when she reached to touch him again with the tuning fork. He
said, "Let's do somethin' else. Let's talk. That's what you said we'd be doin' a lot of." From nowhere, he said, "Milton says you be gentry. Are you a"—he hesitated—"a baroness or somethin'?"

"No." What in the world? "I have no title." Then, yes, she thought. Conversation to distract him. Absently, she corrected herself as she set the fork humming again. "Oh, I'm still technically, I suppose, Lady Edwina Bollash, daughter of the sixth Marquess of Sissingley." He withdrew slightly, but let her put the fork on his bone. "Say, will you, when it stops humming."

After a few seconds, he nodded.

She quickly put the fork to her own ear. Nothing. "Good," she said, then struck it again, holding it this time to her ear first, continuing. "When my father died, someone else inherited the marquisate. I don't use the courtesy title. There's no point." At her ear, the hum of the tuning fork faded.

She quickly moved the instrument toward Mr. Tremore. "Do you hear any—" She went to take his chin as she did with her lady students, but as her fingers grazed his jaw the feeling of stubble—more than a dozen hours beyond a shave—startled her somehow. She withdrew her hand, lowering it, burying it in her skirt as she stopped the tuning fork against her bosom. For a moment, the fork hummed against her chest.

She sat there a little bit taken aback. She'd done this a thousand times. It was quite ordinary.

"What?" he asked.

"Sorry." She shook her head, laughing nervously, and struck the fork again. "Let's have another go at that. Tell me if you hear anything when I touch it behind your ear."

They were both silent as she performed the second part of the test, this time without touching his chin. It went smoothly.

"Good,"
she reported again.

"You was rich?" he asked.

She lifted her eyes to him. "Pardon?"

"When your father was alive, you was rich?"

"My father was. But I'm not poor now."

"I can see that. But I can see your house ain't what it was. Was it ever fancy and right?"

She pondered the question. Right. Was this house ever right? "I suppose. Though the
really fine one is—well, you'll see
it. It's where the Duke of Arles holds
his annual ball now: in the house where I was born, my family's old estate."

"The duke inherited your house?" The look on Mr. Tremore's face said he could hardly believe that fact.

She could hardly believe it herself some days. Still, twelve years later, she'd wake up some mornings and be surprised all over again that Xavier had everything, all she'd ever known growing up, while she had ended up here, a place she had only visited in her youth, a house in which she had only ever spent the night when her father had made trips to London, because he had papers to present.

She picked up a smaller tuning fork, struck it. "You'll tell me please again when you no longer hear the sound."

When she reached toward him, he caught her hand, taking the fork from her. "What happened to your old house?"

He was delaying after a long day of strange procedures and drills, all of which he'd trudged through but disliked. She answered anyway, mostly to be done with it, to be past the awkward questions. "Exactly as you said: When my father died the next male in line inherited his title, that person being my father's cousin. He wasn't a duke yet. That came three days later, when my grandfather, the fourth Duke of Arles, died, too. My cousin Xavier inherited it all. He became the Duke of Arles as well as Marquess of Sissingley and a host of lesser honors." She shrugged. "Quite normal. Lines pass through their firstborn sons." Indeed. Daughters of marquesses married to acquire land and money, only
she hadn't.