The Suffragette Scandal (The Brothers Sinister) (35 page)

He clearly knew enough of her that he didn’t find this surprising or even unusual. He clucked instead and kept rubbing her hands.

“Have you had supper? Tea?” He was shaking his head at her, but he abruptly stopped. “Have you been crying? What has happened to you? How can I help?”

She shook her head. She’d come here to talk to him, and now she didn’t know how to do it. She had hoped to ask a few impersonal questions, but he wasn’t treating her impersonally. If she started her story now, under the weight of all his kindness, she would burst into tears. And she’d already left water everywhere. “I’m so sorry,” she heard herself say, “so sorry, Your Grace. I won’t be a bother. I’ll leave first thing in the morning. I never intended to presume on so slight an acquaintance. I just didn’t know where else to go.”

His hands froze on hers. He was on his knees before her—which seemed impossibly strange given that it was
his
cream carpet that she was befouling. He looked up at her, and let out a long, slow breath before he sat back on his heels.

“You’re not a bother,” he said.

“You’re busy. You’re important. You have a wife and children, and—”

“And I have a brother,” he said.

Her throat closed up. “Yes, but—”

“No buts.” He gave her a short smile. “
You
may have a slight acquaintance with me. I suppose I should be calling you Miss Marshall. I suppose we should even keep Louisa here in the room to safeguard your reputation. But as strange as it might seem to you, Oliver is my brother, and I am deeply grateful to you for sharing him with me.”

Free let in a breath. “Yes, but—”

“As I said,
you
have a slight acquaintance with me.” He looked away. “I know you somewhat better. He used to read me all his letters from home when we were at school together. I didn’t have any of my own, you see.”

She felt a faint flush rise in her cheeks.

“It’s how I knew what I wanted.” He wrapped her feet in the towel, tying it off. “It’s how I knew what it looked like to have a loving family and a little sister who sent her brother her first scribbles before she could write. I remember the first letter you sent him.”

“Oh, God.” She put her head in her hands. “This is going to be embarrassing.”

“You dictated it to your father,” the duke continued. “And you said: ‘Dear Oliver, please come home. What are you going to bring me? Love, your Free.’ And I remember thinking…”

Frederica felt herself blush. “How mercenary.”

“I remember thinking,” he said, as if she hadn’t spoken, “that I would give everything that I had for a little sister.”

The heat died away from her cheeks. She found herself staring at the top of his head in surprise and puzzlement.

“For anyone,” he continued, “who rejoiced when I came home for any reason at all. I would have sent you a million presents if you would have agreed to be my little sister, too.” He sighed. “Alas, after the way my father treated your mother, I didn’t think the offer would go over well. So I never made it.”

She searched his face for signs that he was joking. Perhaps poking fun at her a little. He looked serious.

“But you have a family now. Everyone respects you.”

He raised a dubious eyebrow.

“Well, they may call you names,” she amended, “but they’re mostly respectful names. You have a wife, and unless Oliver is completely wrong, it’s a love match. You have children who must adore you. And…” She trailed off and looked at him.

He looked away. “I spent
years
imagining you were my little sister. Love is not a finite quantity.” He smiled at her. “And yes, I know you’re not my sister—you’re Oliver’s. Still, I’m glad you came to me. Whatever it is you need…” He spread his hands. “It’s yours. Even if it’s just a towel and a room for the evening.”

She hadn’t known quite what she’d been hoping for. She’d imagined posing him a few abstract questions, receiving a few desultory answers. She certainly hadn’t expected…this.

She swallowed hard and looked away.

“I was hoping you’d have dinner with me,” he said. “Minnie is out for the evening with some friends; she’ll be back in a few hours. London is dreadful in the summer, and the children are with Minnie’s aunts for the next two weeks. I’m at loose ends and was just feeling a mite lonely.”

“Your Grace—”

“I wish you’d call me Robert. If you keep Your-Graceing me, I’ll have to stop thinking of you as Free, and as much as Oliver has talked of you, I don’t think that’s possible.”

“But—”

“Or call me Your Grace, if you must, and I’ll invent you a title of your own to match. Something that fits you. If you call me Your Grace, I shall have to call you…” His finger tapped his lip in contemplation.

She felt an unaccountable urge to laugh. She had a title now. She was Lady Claridge, a stuffy, stupid peeress. She’d never wanted anything to do with the nobility. And yet here she was, accepting a duke as her brother and a viscount as her husband. The entire day was completely impossible.

“I shall have to call you Your Fierceness,” he was saying. “Like this: Would you like anything to eat, Your Fierceness? You must be starving, Your Fierceness.”

“Stop, Your Grace.”

“As Your Fierceness wishes.” His eyes twinkled at her.

“Have it your way. But I’ll have to go in stages.” She took a deep breath. “Can I just call you…
you
for the next little bit?”

“Yes, Your Fierceness,” he said. He stood. “Louisa, is Miss Marshall’s bath ready?”

“Yes, Your Grace,” the maid, who’d been standing in the corner, said. “Mary signaled to me not a minute past.”

“Very well, then,” the duke—Robert—said. “If you could conduct Miss Marshall there?”

She wasn’t Miss Marshall any longer. She didn’t know
who
she was.

The maid bowed her head and then turned to Free. “If you would care to come with me, Your Fierceness?” There was a glint of a smile in the woman’s eyes, just that tiny hint of a sense of humor. And somehow, it was that—that tiny indication that the Duke of Clermont’s servants felt free to express humor in their employer’s presence, rather than turning into empty shells of themselves—that decided her.

Free pushed herself to her feet and wobbled across the room.

“Come along, miss,” Louisa said to her indulgently. “Come along.”

A
WARM BATH AND DRY CLOTHING
did a great deal to restore Free’s good humor. When she came down the stairs, back into the parlor, the Duke of Clermont—Robert, she reminded herself with a strange feeling—was sitting in front of the fire, slicing bread. It was such an odd thing to see: a man of his stature wielding a knife. He cut a thick, clumsy slice of bread as she watched from the doorway, the crumbs spilling haphazardly onto the carpet.

She paused, not sure what to say.

“Come,” he said, motioning to her. “Sit down.”

She drifted toward him.

“I don’t know anything about cheering up sisters,” he said, sliding the bread onto the waiting tines of the toasting fork. “I don’t know anything about cheering up anyone except children between the ages of six and fourteen. But maybe this will work on you.”

She glanced over at him curiously. “What are you doing?”

“
We,”
he corrected her. “We’re making dinner. We’ll toast bread and cheese over the fireplace and have some tea.” He gestured with the toasting fork, and the bread dipped perilously close to the flames. He shrugged guiltily. “Oh, dear. I’ll take this one.”

“No, it’s better singed,” Free heard herself say. “I always like that extra smoky flavor.”

His smile grew. “Come on, then.” He patted the cushion on the other side of the fireplace. “Have some toast.”

She’d known she was hungry, but her stomach growled in anticipation at the aroma of toasting bread. After he’d singed one side—only a bit black—he added cheese to the top and leaned in again. The cheese on top began to bubble and drip off the edges. He seemed to have infinite patience for waiting, turning the toast this way and that to try and get an even melt.

He handed her the slice of bread when he was satisfied.

“Don’t wait for me,” he told her and speared another piece of bread.

She wished she could be polite enough to demur, but she was too ravenous to think. Instead, she broke off a piece and put it in her mouth. The cheese was the perfect temperature—hot enough to be glorious, barely managing to escape burning the top of her mouth. The bread crunched between her teeth, soft in the middle, toasted to a crisp on the edges. She almost let out a moan.

“I know,” Robert said beside her. “I’ve had toast for breakfast made ingloriously on the racks of the kitchen oven. That’s just browned bread. It’s not really toast if it hasn’t been cooked over an open flame.”

“Mmm.”

A cup of tea was put into her hand. She took a sip—liquid that was sweet and milky and bitter all at once filled her mouth.

“How often does the Duke of Clermont make himself dinner?” she asked.

“Not very often,” he replied. “Maybe once every month or so, the family gets out the toasting forks and I do my best to wrangle up toast and cheese.”

“Mmm.” She wished she could say more, but her mouth was full again.

He poured himself a cup of tea one-handed, juggling the fork skillfully. “The trick,” he said, “to getting good toast is to try not to be too perfect. You won’t want to brown it too evenly, or to avoid singeing it. You don’t want to cut the bread too perfectly, either. It’s better if it has lots of jagged edges to blacken nicely.”

“That’s the problem I always have, too,” Free said. “I have to try so hard not to be perfect.”

He grinned at her.

His cheese was beginning to bubble, and he was eyeing the piece with a hungry look. And that was when they heard a noise in the hall.

They turned. A door was opening; voices murmured in the distance. For a moment, Free had the wildest idea that Edward—no, she couldn’t think of him that way—
Viscount Claridge
was here. He’d hunted her down. He was going to apologize, tell her how badly he’d treated her, and she was going to…

She had no idea what she was going to do. Her tea sloshed onto her skirt, and she realized her hand had begun to tremble.

But the figure who came into the room was a woman—the Duchess of Clermont, no less. She didn’t blink at the sight of her husband sitting before the fire. She didn’t ask what Free was doing here. She simply came into the room and took off her gloves.

“Oh, good,” she said. “A toast and cheese night. I need one of those.”

Her husband looked longingly at the slice on his toasting fork, but he didn’t even hesitate. He handed the bread to his wife.

She slid down to sit on the floor beside him. “Want half?”

“God, yes.”

Maybe it was the toast, managed in so perfectly imperfect a fashion. Maybe it was the companionable silence. Maybe it was the fact that she’d expected to be treated like some distant, grasping relation, and now she was sitting on the floor with the duke and duchess, eating burned bread and dripping cheese. Maybe that was what prompted her to finally speak.

“I got married,” she confessed.

Robert’s hands stilled. He looked up at her, his eyes widening.

“It was…it was a whim,” she said, speaking faster. “Or more than a whim. I don’t know what it was. We’ve corresponded for months. Maybe I was feeling reckless.” Maybe she’d thought herself in love. She didn’t say that, though. She shut her eyes. “I got married yesterday night.”

Across from her, the duchess took a genteel bite of toast and looked down. “You married by special license, then?”

“I should have asked how he’d obtained one so quickly.” Her hands were trembling again, so she set down her teacup. “I knew he was a scoundrel, you see. I knew that. But he had always been there for me. I thought I could trust him.”

She felt sick to her stomach.

“And then I went to the demonstration, and was arrested, and he…he…”

Neither the duke nor the duchess spoke. They just watched her intently.

“I was arrested,” she repeated. “As I’d known I would be. We were all crammed into the station. He came to get me out.”

It didn’t sound awful when she told the story. It sounded sweet. Almost romantic.

“But he didn’t forge papers falsifying my release.” And oh,
there
was a complaint for the ages. There wasn’t a wife in England today complaining about her husband’s failure to commit crimes. “He
told
me he was Edward Clark.”

The duchess twitched at that name, her eyebrows lifting. She turned to her husband, but he set a quelling hand on her knee.

“He told me he was a scoundrel and a metalworker,” Free said. “He’s a forger. I’ve seen him do it myself. But he didn’t tell me everything. He was…” She gulped.

“Edward Delacey,” Robert said, his voice low.

Beside him, the duchess let out a long, slow breath. “Huh. I was right.”

“No.” Free’s hands balled into fists. “He doesn’t want to be called Delacey.” That much, at least, they agreed upon. “But he’s Viscount Claridge.”

The duchess tilted her head to the side, to contemplate the ceiling, not quite looking at her husband. “There should be a rule somewhere that lords ought to act like lords. When they engage in forgery or, ah, general skulduggery, it can be very confusing to the rest of us.”