The wall broke with a sound that drowned out the rain.
Darlington had heard women compared to bedraggled kittens before, when they’d been caught in a downpour. Miss Sutherland, when she entered the shed pushing a barrow full of decomposing food scraps, her hair hanging long and plastered to her head, looked nothing like a kitten. Her dress and smock clung to her, and the hair was slick beside her face. She was pared back – all that might have been floss or sugar about her had melted away and left the hard, uncompromising core. Only her lashes became poetic when wet, conceding some relationship to stars.
‘What the hell is going on here?’ She let the barrow fall with that casual, wiry strength of hers. The neck of her jacket and shirt were open, so that he could see the water running down thick strands of hair, plastered to her skin.
‘You need a better shed,’ he said, gesturing to the gaping corner, where water was already spilling through.
She stared at the hole as if it had been made in her own person.
‘It’s unfortunate, but you can have someone fix it.’
‘Who?’ she said. ‘The pigs?
You?
’ She closed her eyes and he heard one decisive breath in, one out. Her shoulders straightened, her face cleared. It was an exhausted kind of strength. He wondered if one day she would reach for it and it would be all gone. ‘You go back inside. Get out of my way.’ She didn’t even look at him. She pressed her already muddied knees into the filth of the sty floor and inspected the hole.
‘Fuck,’ she said, and he felt it from his scalp to his toes. He was not a prude, but he’d never heard a woman say it.
He would not be sent away from her.
She shooed the curious pigs out of her way, then picked up the small axe back from where she’d left it by the door. He caught her wrist before she could leave.
She rounded on him, and there was none of the something-unsaid that was normally there between them, even when she was short with him. There was just impatience, and a mind preoccupied with a matter in which he had no part.
‘Use me,’ he said, letting her go. ‘Surely I can help.’
She hesitated. ‘Bring me five logs from the pile against the back wall of the house. Can you manage that?’ No time for more than a nod in reply. No time for something witty, ironic, self-deprecating. ‘Good. Make sure you wear the blanket. I don’t have time to nurse you, too.’
He wrapped himself in the still-sodden blanket and made his way through the garden. Paths through the muddy mess were hard to find, and he could hardly see through the rain. When the kitchen window appeared in the gloom he longed, coward that he was, to be inside where it was warm and dry. He didn’t need Miss Sutherland to think well of him, he just needed her.
‘Bugger,’ he said, resting his forehead against the kitchen door.
He found the woodpile with its sagging straw roof. From nowhere, he thought of BenRuin. In his place, the Scottish earl would have ripped trees apart with his bare hands and nailed a sound structure together with nothing more than a few pieces of iron and his thick skull. He’d probably do it stripped down to the waist, too, and intermittently beat his chest and roar at the skies, in defiance of the weather.
Darlington gave a gleeful cackle that was entirely lost on the rain-drenched garden. Wrapping the blanket around his hands, he carefully selected five fine logs, piled them into his arms, then made his way back to the pigsty.
Miss Sutherland had staked out a temporary pen to keep the pigs in one corner of the already cramped shed. ‘Quickly,’ she said.
He spilt the logs at her feet, and received neither praise nor thanks. Where he saw form and symmetry she apparently saw only a log.
She stood the first of them on its end, and split it down the middle with the axe. There was a frightening strength in her. And she had not been born to this. It came to him suddenly that other men, in his place, might offer to split the logs for her. Perhaps it would be the gallant thing to do.
He wrapped the blanket more tightly about himself. Other men were not the Duke of Darlington.
She lined each half log up against the cracked wall and nailed the top, then the bottom, each to a wooden beam. The nails were long, wicked-looking things and each one went in with one or two practised whacks with the back of the axe. Only once did she fumble a nail, and he saw that it was the crooked fingers of her left hand that made it awkward. They were angry and red with cold.
He opened his mouth half a dozen times, and each time he closed it again. This was not a task that could be made easier by words. It simply had to be done.
‘That will have to do for now,’ she said, pulling up the stakes of the temporary pen. ‘I’ll spread the compost out, and you can put dry hay over the top.’ She pointed with the blade of a knife she’d taken from her smock. ‘Cut the sheafs with this as you need. Break it with your hands and sprinkle it over what I lay down.’
She tipped up the wheelbarrow and started spreading the dark, smelly matter around.
‘Right,’ Darlington murmured to himself, approaching the lopsided pile. ‘Hay.’
‘You’ll have to put your fingers in.’
The straw was rough against his hands. When he cut a sheaf and broke it open, he wasn’t prepared for the heat stored inside it.
Walking over the soft, uneven ground in her wake, he felt that he might never find his way back to London. Indeed, that the bright rooms full of laughing, sardonic company had ceased to exist.
She nodded at him, when the floor was all covered. ‘We’re done,’ she said. ‘We can go back inside, now.’
But after they’d drunk a hot cup of tea at the kitchen table, with Liza fussing about them, Miss Sutherland pulled on her bonnet and shawl again and went back out into the rain.
She didn’t invite him to go with her, and he couldn’t find it within himself to offer.
Darlington sat in the window seat wrapped up in his dressing gown and the bedcover. Liza had helped him unlace his wet dress, which now lay in a heap in the corner of the room. He’d asked if it might be possible to have a bath, and Liza had told him she’d need to fetch the water from the trough in the back paddock – bucket by bucket. He almost asked her to do it, no matter that she would be soaked in the process, but then he imagined Miss Sutherland’s face when she discovered why they wouldn’t eat their supper until ten o’clock.
Miss Sutherland had been talked about in London for her lack of manners and polish, but Darlington was starting to think it amazing she’d ever managed to pass for a gentlewoman at all. When she had said to him that hers was no house for a duke, he had thought she meant the rooms were small, and maids served the dinner in place of footmen. It hadn’t occurred to him for a moment that anyone could live like this.
There was a knock on the door – a couple of soft raps, descending in confidence. A hesitation. Two more raps.
‘Come in, Mr Sutherland,’ he said. He hadn’t reapplied his make-up, but most of his face was huddled into the covers. And Tom didn’t tend to look at him directly.
Tom’s dark head appeared around the door and he came into the room. ‘I’m sorry to disturb you. Some correspondence has arrived for you, from London.’ He lifted the packet and made to place it on the small table by the door.
‘If you would be so good, Mr Sutherland, as to bring it to me. I fear that I will never move from this spot again.’
Mr Sutherland smiled a little at that, and relaxed the smallest bit. He came closer and lay the packet by Darlington, then retreated – a man leaving meat for a hungry animal. Darlington watched him, openly.
Mr Sutherland didn’t speak, but neither did he leave.
‘I am sorry I left so abruptly this morning,’ said Darlington, ‘after I had asked for your company.’
‘Please don’t think of it,’ said Mr Sutherland, walking over to peruse the teetering book pile. He plucked at a couple of titles with his ink-stained fingers, but did not pull any free. ‘You mustn’t be offended by my sister.’ He said it quickly, without ease. ‘She has shouldered the whole burden of our livelihood for such a long time. You see what she is – how strong she is, when she has a brother who should be strong for her. I would have made such a hash of it . . .’ He turned, caught the full force of Darlington’s attention. His eyes flickered to the side. ‘Oh,’ he said, and flushed bright red. ‘You’re reading
The Atavist
. I . . . good day.’
He bowed and left.
Darlington watched the closed door for some time. ‘Well, well,’ he murmured, and picked up the packet of his correspondence. There was a letter – five pages – from Crispin, which he would read at his leisure. It was a precious piece of his world – the world that he understood, in which he directed events and players according to his desire. A world where he would never be made to feel that he was out of his depth because he hadn’t a clue how to be
useful
.
But first, there was a packet addressed in Liverpool’s powerful hand. Inside was an ironed copy of that day’s
Times
.
Lord Marmotte had backed Villers’s motion to reform the Corn Laws.
Kit sat on the footstool with her head to the side, drying her hair in front of the parlour fire. The flames brought out brandy-gold highlights, and the strands were drying in lazy waves. She had time, now, for a moment’s vanity, she thought with a smile.
‘Here you are,’ Ma said, handing Kit her special hand cream. Kit took it with the appropriate amount of ceremony, though in truth it did nothing more than leave an oily film on her hands. Her mother bought one jar every year from the Denniston apothecary; that and myrrh for her asthma were the only signs of languishing she could afford. Sickness truly was a rich woman’s prerogative.
‘Thank you, Ma,’ she murmured, kissing her mother’s hand before it was gently removed from her grasp. ‘You know how this cream eases my fingers at the end of a hard day.’
‘Be sure to dry your hair properly,’ her mother said, sitting back on the sofa. ‘And have Liza give you some myrrh and honey in hot water. We can’t risk a chest infection.’
‘Yes, Ma.’ Liza had already fallen asleep on her pallet in the pantry. It had been a weary day. ‘I missed your nagging.’
‘You are more temptation than a mother can resist,’ her mother said with a small smile. ‘Have you been to call on the Squire yet? He asked after you often while you were away.’
Kit cut in before her mother could mention marriage – a painful misapprehension she held about the Squire’s interest in her eldest daughter – and told a barefaced lie. ‘I’ll be sure and call on him as soon as may be. Now, would you read to me?’
‘Let me read to you both,’ said Tom. He stood on the other side of the fire from Kit. ‘We have today’s paper from London, which is an unearthly delight.’
Kit smiled behind the curtain of her hair. She loved it when her quiet brother let slip the melodrama in his soul. Then she frowned. ‘How on earth do we have today’s paper?’
‘My cousin sent it to me,’ said the Duke.
Of course. ‘Just when I had almost managed to forget you were there.’
‘Katherine Grace!’ her mother hissed.
He had curled himself up in their oldest armchair, bright silk spilling across the worn upholstery. He smiled, and on another man it might almost have been a sweet smile. ‘I didn’t like to disturb you. The three of you make a family idyll that is a novelty to me. I have been enjoying it quietly.’
She peered at him. Now that he put it like that, she trusted him even less when he
wasn’t
talking.
‘My dear Tom,’ he said, still soft, ‘do you know that your sister is planning to butcher your piglet on Monday?’
‘Porkie?’ said Tom, involuntarily.
Kit closed her eyes.
‘Porkie?’ said the Duke, and there was something released in his voice – something surprised, or charmed – that made her open her eyes again in a hurry.
‘Before I address the delicious naivety of calling a pig Porkie, might I point out that you, Miss Sutherland, told me that little porcine thing had no name?’
‘You’re having Porkie butchered?’ said Tom.
‘I told you before I went to London not to name them.’
‘I went out the morning after they were born,’ said Tom, ‘and three of the piglets were lying in the far corner of the pen. I knew as soon as I entered, because their mother wouldn’t even look at them. Cold little slabs of meat, their eyes shut so tight.’
She dared a glance at the Duke, and his face frightened her. He was focused on her brother, bright and inquisitive. He seemed to know, magician that he was, that he was looking through a fracture into a man.
‘I stayed that night in the pen with them,’ said Tom, oblivious to the Duke’s attention. ‘The three who survived slept between their mother and me. In the morning two more were dead, and she’d lost interest in the one little piglet who was still pink and breathing. She was going to let him freeze. So I brought him inside with me, and held him in front of the fire, and he ate pap from my fingers.’
‘Oh, Tom.’
‘His small, liquid eyes opened in that kitchen.’ His finger shook, just a little, as he pointed. ‘And I was the first thing he saw.’
‘You are a fool, brother.’ She tried to say it gently, but his eyes flinched away from hers, and his fingers played restlessly with a dead petal on the mantelpiece. ‘You should have had Angus slaughter him as soon as the sow lost interest. You could have had three times what I’ll get for him on Monday.’
His fingers stopped fussing. He wouldn’t look at her, but after a long, hung moment he nodded and sat down with the paper.
‘You know I detest such talk in my drawing room,’ Ma said, her voice in the particular register she used to hide distress.
‘I’m sorry, Ma. Tom, won’t you please read to us from the paper?’
There was a short, difficult silence. Kit tried not to feel angry with her sensitive brother. He was only a year younger than she, but some days it felt like decades.
‘Please allow me,’ said the Duke. ‘Reading the
Times
is like having a conversation with an old, slightly senile acquaintance. I am always charmed to begin, which admirable sentiment is followed by a strong desire to hurry the conversation along, and before the end I find myself fighting the temptation to do something mad and wicked.’
He stood with a swish and leant gracefully down over Tom’s shoulder. ‘I always lose,’ he said, low and full of laughter. ‘I make a point of it.’
Kit watched her brother’s mouth – the mirror of her own – flash into a smile he could not help. The Duke pulled the paper from his hands and sailed back to the old armchair.
‘Oh, goody,’ he said, tucking his feet up under him, ‘foreclosures on property. I do love those. It seems Haverstock’s had to give up his second townhouse and his mistress’s Brighton house – oh, hush, Sophie, you wish I would talk about men and their mistresses all day long, I know you. He’s managed to sell off his debt though, the wily old fox. Ah.’ He glanced up at Kit, just a whiplash of blue. ‘Lady Marmotte has bought it from him, it seems. Dear me, and I had thought her an astute businesswoman.’
She couldn’t help herself. ‘I suppose the Duke of Darlington will try to sell off his unentailed properties if that boy from Leeds is successful.’
‘He won’t be,’ the Duke said, without looking at her again. ‘Oh, look, an advertisement from a mature gentleman who wishes to make the acquaintance of a pretty woman with good references. What do you say, Sophie old girl?’
‘You are angry with me,’ he said, as he unpinned his wig.
He sat before Kit’s dresser, his back effortlessly straight. The man had been bred like a prize animal. The quick white fingers plucked pins from his hair. ‘I didn’t come here to make you angry.’
‘But you can’t help yourself.’
He hesitated, then pulled the wig from his head. ‘No, I suppose I can’t.’
She found herself close behind him, her hand outstretched. Her fingers already imagined themselves buried deep in the silky fur of his hair, learning the contours of his skull.
‘Miss Sutherland, I feel I have no choice but to be plain with you about – what are you doing?’
He was standing, looking at the hand she hadn’t lowered in time. At the twisted red fingers she had been about to put against a duke’s scalp.
‘Barely resisting strangling you. You had to go and put my brother into a sulk.’
‘I don’t think he was sulking.’
‘I think I know my brother better than you. Sit. I’ll unlace you.’
‘As long as you promise not to strangle me with the laces when you’re done.’ He sat before her, and her fingers moved in quick, practised pulls; she did not look at the skin beneath his hair – his naked, bowed neck.
‘I think,’ he said, his voice uneven as she unlaced him, ‘your brother could not speak because he was ashamed. He was moved, Miss Sutherland, beyond the ability to speak like a man.’
‘Tom knows I couldn’t give a rat’s arse for manliness.’
‘Or womanliness, one would hope. So,’ he said, turning on the stool, his keen blue eyes looking up at her, ‘you are the killer of small animals.’
It shouldn’t matter what he thought, but it stung. He didn’t use language as other people did.
She turned to the bed, pulled her hair free of its bun and plaited it with hard, efficient strokes. ‘The butcher, Angus – would you think him heartless for killing a pig?’ she asked.
‘I do not envy him his work, but I suppose the man is making a living, and cannot be thought heartless for that. I should warn you that I am about to disrobe. You may look if you wish, but you have expressed a certain . . . distaste for me.’
She turned hurriedly away again. ‘Then you are intelligent enough to realise I am making a living, just as Angus is.’
Her body hummed with awareness, trying to see with every sense but sight the expanse of skin behind her, and the shape of him when he was stripped of his layers and layers of disguise.
Even then, he would be impossible to take hold of. There would be his eyes that saw too much, and there would be his treacherous mind, and there would be that dangerous thing she had glimpsed only once, which was so tightly leashed inside of him.
Her fingers were clumsy on the buttons of her spencer.
‘Even to make a living,’ he said, his voice muffled, ‘I don’t understand how you can kill the pig your brother nursed to life. That,’ and then his voice was clear, ‘is cold.’
‘And seducing a married woman, even though you can’t bear for her to touch you, and even though there is nothing but calculation in your heart – that’s a mug of warm milk by the fire on a winter’s night, I suppose?’
Every line of his face was composed – but his hands had frozen about the bedcovers, which were half lifted. She had seen him lose mastery of himself last night, and she had paid for it. He had thrown his wretched childhood at her, though it must have hurt him worse to do it. She forced herself to take an even breath and smile blandly at him, as though nothing were amiss. He began to move again.
She could not bring herself to be under the covers with him. She folded her spencer and shoved it into the drawer, let her slippers fall under the bed, and refused to shed a single item of clothing more.
She lay down on top of the covers, and her heart beat uncomfortably.
‘Did you see me?’ he said after a long, long silence – after she had hoped he was asleep. ‘Is that why you were so angry with me that day in the park?’
She didn’t reply. She couldn’t.
She left the candle burning, though they would be out of candles by the end of the week.
Darlington spent two days confined to Katherine’s room. It was his third night in the country, and he still hadn’t slept. He glanced at the pocket watch clutched in his fingers. Twenty-five minutes past three. Just over an hour before Katherine would rise.
He would have laughed if he could.
There
was something to look forward to! That long stretch when he would be alone in the almost-dark; her return, and the pain of having her close as she shaved him.
For three nights he had lain awake with nothing to distract him and tried, by focusing minutely on Katherine, to ignore the other person lying there awake and demanding attention.
Five years old and hugging his bedcover to his small limbs, longing with all the power of his needy heart for it to be a living person holding his body to theirs. Anyone would have done.
Fifteen and walking into the disused study at Brookfeld Park, his heart alight with hopeful anticipation, about to be taught the lesson that made the man.
Thirty-one and sitting alone on the front pew at St George’s, as a bishop he did not know eulogised the father he did not know, an iron key branded cold across his palm.
It terrified him, being awake at night with only himself for company.
When his father became ill – became so thin and light on the mattress it was difficult to make out his body under the sheets that covered him – Darlington had needed reconciliation. It had awoken in him like a disease, this need to end the narrative of his father’s life with love. It was a kind of madness, he’d known that even as he was caught in it. His father did not love him, and would never be made to love him. Not now, when his body was visited with such pain, and all he could think of was pain.
He had ordered his son from his side, the day before his death. He had threatened to disown him. Darlington, who had been such a grave disappointment to his father in life, had not disobeyed this last request.
The last words he had heard from the man were
Get out
, and that would never be altered now.
He glanced again at the watch. Only two minutes had passed since he had last looked. He would be well in the morning. As soon as it grew light, time would start up again, propelling itself forward.
The pain started.
He thought of the waves he had watched as a boy at Stonehaven. The stones had ground and shifted beneath his feet on the beach, an off-kilter reflection of the sky. He remembered the sea, huge and steely, muscling its way up, against the pull of gravity; the foam knitted across its surface after it broke. The duchess had been wearing a pale pink coat and bonnet over a darker pink dress with small hoops. He remembered how her round, placid face had pinched, her lips unsure as she told Nanny not to let him so close to the water.
He saw his hand reach out for Katherine. He saw his fingers pinch the very end of a curl of hair between them. His whole world narrowed to the coarse-wild texture of her hair. He rolled the strands gently between finger and thumb until his fingers belonged again at the end of his hand, and his heart slowed and the pain receded. His lungs relaxed and pulled long, even breaths into his body.
When at last he looked at his watch it was four o’clock. He forced himself to let go of her hair, and rose from the bed. He had hoped that simple proximity to Katherine would be enough to cure him of his ailment. It wasn’t.
He was going to have to act.
The brush of skin against her lips woke her. Warm and close, exhalations of breath against her neck, soft hair kissing her, skimming over her neckline.
‘Good morning,’ he murmured, and his voice was the beginning of the day. ‘Open your eyes,’ he said, when she wouldn’t.