Unveiled

“No.” Margaret wished she could snatch that wavering syllable back. But what he said was too true to be borne, and nobody knew it better than she. Her own wants and desires had been insignificant. She’d been engaged to her brother’s friend before her second season had been halfway over. She’d been a pale, insipid nothing, a collection of rites of etiquette and rules of precedent squashed into womanly form and given a dowry.

His voice was low. “Damn their bonnets. Damn their rules.”

“What do you want?” Her hands were shaking. “Why are you doing this to me?”

“Miss Lowell, you magnificent creature, I want you to paint your own canvas. I want you to unveil yourself.” He raised his hand to her cheek and traced the line of warm sunshine down her jaw. That faint caress was hotter and more dizzying than the relentless sun overhead. She stood straight, not letting herself respond, hoping that her cheeks wouldn’t flush.

You matter. You are important. He was doing it again, but this time, he was doing it to her. He was subverting some deep part of her as easily as he’d won over Mrs. Benedict. What he’d whispered seemed more intimate than the touch of his glove against her cheek. It wasn’t fair that this man, this one man who had utterly destroyed her, would be the one to pick her deepest desire out of the maelstrom of her wants.

“Am I asking so much, then? I only want you to think of yourself.”

“That’s sophistry. You know you have your sights set on a great deal more.”

He smiled in wry acquiescence. “For now, Miss Lowell, I’d be happy with nothing more from you than a little defiance.”

She looked up into his dark eyes. A little defiance, he called it. Just a little defiance, to believe that she mattered.

But she needed more than a little defiance to call upon now. She couldn’t let this continue. A few more days of this, and he might begin to convince her of his sincerity. When he looked at her with that fierce light in his eyes, she could almost feel the world bending about him. She could feel herself drifting to land at his feet, ready to do his bidding. If he continued to pay her those extravagant compliments, she might actually start to believe him.

She took his hand where it touched her cheek and moved it firmly to rest against the buff fabric of his breeches.

“Mr. Turner, you fail to understand.”

He lifted one eyebrow, and Margaret stood up straight and glared at him. “I’m not a cat. I’m not a canvas. And I’m certainly not about to become an enterprise for you to cosset and charm into docility. You want a little defiance?”

His head cocked at an angle, as if he couldn’t believe the words she was saying.

“Good,” she said. “Then you may try this: leave me alone. For good. Don’t talk to me. Don’t browbeat me. And for God’s sake, don’t try to seduce me.”

He looked at her quizzically. For a second, she thought she’d pushed him too far. She was sure that his pleasant manner would evaporate into scorn. That he would force that kiss on her, no matter what he’d said before.

Instead, he sat back on his horse, touched his hat and disappeared down the track.

IT HAD BEEN MORE than a week since Ash had been sent on his way, but Miss Lowell was never far from his thoughts—or indeed, from his person. Right now, in fact, she was a mere two rooms away. He could sense her presence, tantalizingly close.

“No. Keep your elbow tucked close to your side.” His brother’s instruction wafted down from the hall, both enticing and damnably irritating.

Ash stared at the pages in front of him, more determined than ever to concentrate on the letters before him and to block out the vision that came to mind with those words. He couldn’t see Mark, but his voice carried. Ash could just imagine what was happening at that moment.

“Like this?” Miss Lowell’s response.

“Yes, better. Now bring it up. Quickly, now.”

Ash envisioned his brother standing in the parlor. He could stand behind Miss Lowell, his fingers wrapping about her hand. Sometimes, he thought that Miss Lowell had accepted Mark’s offer to teach her to defend against a man just to drive Ash mad. He was certain Mark had offered with that exact end in mind.

Brothers. Ash shook his head.

Ash wished he’d had the bright idea to teach Miss Lowell how to hit a man. There were so many opportunities for touching. But then, that was why she would never have accepted. Not from him. Not yet, at least. Everything worth having, he reminded himself, was worth waiting for. Every day that passed in which he did not importune her worked in his favor. She would learn that he could be trusted, that he wasn’t going to harm her. That wariness would eventually leave her eyes. Patience won all battles, revealed all secrets. If he could figure out how to reach her once…

Instead, Mark was the one reaching her. Or, rather, being Mark—he was not reaching her at all.

Because Mark wouldn’t take advantage of any of those delightful opportunities to fold his hands around hers. Ash had purposefully walked by the parlor during Mark’s lessons several times this past week. He’d walked as if he hadn’t cared one whit about what his brother was doing with Miss Lowell. Still, he’d managed to ascertain a great deal from the corner of his eye.

They’d thrown open the broad double doors, for propriety’s sake. So far as Ash could tell, Mark had never laid so much as a fingernail on Miss Lowell. Instead, he stood a proper three yards distant. Two of the upstairs maids had joined them—at first, to serve as reluctant chaperones. But as the days had passed, they’d joined in earnest as giggling participants. If Ash judged the matter right, the maids were giggling, willing participants, who wished Mark would do more than instruct.

It was just like Mark, to be surrounded by women, and yet to take no advantage.

Ash wasn’t sure if he was more annoyed at Mark, for stealing time with the woman who had riveted his attention, or jealous of Miss Lowell herself. After all, he’d planned these weeks as a way to spend time with his younger brother. A way to build common experience, to finally forge a connection that would bridge the many differences between them. But when Mark wasn’t teaching Miss Lowell effective ways to bring a man down, he buried himself to his neck in books. The summer contained no horseback ambles across wide fields, no lazy trips to the river armed with fish hooks and bait. There were no evenings spent drinking port and discussing politics.

No; the only place Ash ever met his brother was here in the library. And to put it mildly, libraries had never been Ash’s specialty. In point of fact, he would rather dig a well for Parford Manor using a spoon made of cheese than read about—he turned the volume over in his hands—Practical Agriculture. Looking at the table of contents alone made him feel exhausted. An incipient headache formed at his temples. But he stayed here with the damned book, because when Mark was finished with Miss Lowell, he would come into the library. And before his brother threw himself headlong into his work, Ash would have a narrow opportunity to speak with him.

So he sat here, pretending to make sense of subtitles on soil.

It was another fifteen minutes before he heard Mark bidding Miss Lowell farewell. She left first, walking past. She didn’t even glance into the library as she went by. It had been like that for nine days, now. Ever since he’d talked to her on the path, she had flatly ignored him. For nine days, he’d been forced to listen to the two most interesting people on the estate make friends with each other. Ash let out a small growl of frustration.

At that moment, Mark sauntered into the room. He took one look at Ash and shook his head.

“Don’t be ridiculous, older brother.” His voice was annoyingly cheerful. Ash was convinced he put on that bright expression on purpose, just to annoy him. He became even more sure when Mark leaned over the arm of his chair and favored him with a brilliant smile. “I’ve never even touched her, you know.”

“It hardly matters. Neither have I.”

“That was rather the point.” Mark pushed away from Ash’s seat and turned around. “Come now. Chastity builds character.”

Ash held back a rude noise. He’d wanted to spend time with his brother, not antagonize him further.

“If you must know,” Mark continued, “she reminds me of Hope.”

A brief band of pain constricted about Ash’s chest. “She’s nothing like Hope.” But his brother’s words brought to mind a picture of their sister, her hair long and dark, her smile fragile. It was an image he couldn’t forget, even had he wanted to. She should have been a grown woman now. She would have been, if Parford had acted when Ash begged him to do so.

“What do you remember of her, anyway?”

“Not enough. Her hands. Her laugh. I remember that after she died, everything seemed to change so quickly. It was as if she had been the gatekeeper to all that was good in the world, and with her gone…” Mark shrugged again. “But all that’s over. Still, I remember enough of the nightmare that followed to know that it’s a hellish thing to be alone in the world, unprotected.”

“Miss Lowell doesn’t need protection from me.”

“She’s employed by the Dalrymples, Ash. What do you suppose will happen to her when we leave and Richard and Edmund return? Do you fancy leaving her to their tender mercies, then?”

He hadn’t fancied leaving her behind at all. But if he said that, Mark would tease him all the more. “I hadn’t thought what would happen when we left,” Ash said stiffly.

“No. You wouldn’t.” Mark spoke this piece of brazen treachery with an utterly matter-of-fact manner.

Ash flinched. He could not make himself look away from his brother’s gaze. He spent half the days wishing Mark would talk to him. It was in moments like this that he wished to take it all back. He wished he could push his brother away. That he could forget what he had done to his brothers—or rather, what he hadn’t.

“Christ, Mark.”

“You don’t always think about others the way you should,” Mark said simply.

That criticism cut more deeply than the reference to Hope. Mark stated it so mildly, making the wound sting all the more. Mark’s gaze was as piercing as only someone who had survived the precise contours of one’s faults could be.

“I think about others every damned second of the day. It’s because of you that I’m here, after all, because of what I wanted to give you—”

“And still you stomp about, leaving little eddies of destruction in your wake.”

Hell. Guilt was bad enough, without having his brother point out his every flaw. Ash had been the one to solemnly swear that he would protect and defend the younger children. He had been the one who had nodded as his father told him that their mother was given to excess. He’d solemnly promised to temper her zeal.

He’d failed. A few years later, despite his best efforts, his sister had died. A few months after that, Ash had left for India, determined to make his fortune and thus undo everything their mother had done.

But he’d left his brothers behind. He would never be able to forget the sick sensation he’d felt when he found Mark and Smite on his return, pale and thin, alone on the streets of Bristol. It had made so much sense to leave them. But nothing he did could repair what had happened to them in his absence. They wouldn’t even talk of those years, not to him.

And that hadn’t been the only time he’d abandoned Mark. Just the first.

“Very well,” he said stiffly. “You are quite in the right. I should never have left. I failed Hope. I failed you.”

A puzzled look flitted across Mark’s face. “How is it that we are talking about me, then?”

“Every time I look at you, I recall how I’ve failed you. There. I’ve admitted it. Are you happy now?”

“Happy that you look at me and see failure?” Mark’s voice was tending towards scorn now, and his lip curled. “Hardly.”

Christ. He was cocking it up again. “I know you’re not a failure. You took a first at Oxford.”

“In case you hadn’t noticed,” Mark said hotly, “I’m a good deal more than that. Granville himself said I was the brightest student he’d seen in the thirty-five years he’d been in philosophy. And this—” Mark gestured at the pages that lay on the table in front of him “—this will show everyone what I can do. Even you, Ash. Even you. So don’t look at me and see failure. I haven’t failed anything.”

This had all gone horribly wrong. “Don’t get so upset, Mark. I’m not questioning your intelligence. Or your capabilities.”

“What are you questioning, then? It can’t be my principles, seeing as how you have none of your own to speak of.”

“Oh, it’s my principles you object to, then?” Ash felt the whole bitter weight of his responsibilities shift restlessly. He’d done everything for his brothers—everything. Mark was his principle. And if Ash’s hands were a little dirty, it was because he’d wanted to keep his brothers’ clean. “They’re a hell of a lot more honest than your own,” he snapped.

He wished he could take the words back as soon as he’d said them, because Mark actually gasped in surprise.

“What do you mean by that?”

Ash didn’t want to answer. He didn’t want to let Mark know that there was yet another barrier between them, another one of Ash’s many failures. But Mark gestured, and the words tripped out anyway.

“Maybe you’re too young to remember what it was like before father died, or what happened in those years afterwards. You might not remember the day Mother decided to take to heart the Biblical command that one should sell everything one had and give it all to the poor. Nice, in principle; in practice, it leaves your own children starving, housed in rat-infested penury. We lost everything we should have had—modest comfort, education. She traded a secure competence for some stupid words she didn’t even understand.”

“You’re the one who never understood Mother,” Mark said.

“As if I could. She was mad, Mark. Plain and simple.”

Mark’s lip curled. “There was nothing plain or simple about her insanity.”

“Maybe it doesn’t seem that way to you. But I was supposed to protect you—all of you. Her principles killed Hope. They almost killed you and Smite. And throughout it all, Mother clung to dead words in a dead book, paying no attention to the living around her. Maybe you can understand why I mislike the notion of my youngest brother clinging to more dead words. Maybe you can understand why I wince, knowing that my little brother, who spent his childhood with a woman who quite literally went mad with her principles, is spending the summers of his youth practicing the same sort of abstemious insanity that he grew up with. Do you want to know why I’ve failed you? Because I haven’t been able to save you from a woman who has been dead these past ten years. I haven’t saved you from anything.”

Mark stared at him, his hands curled into fists. “You don’t know anything,” he spat. “Not about me. Not about Mother. You can be such a great oaf sometimes.”

“Oaf? Is that the best insult the brightest student in thirty-five years of philosophy can muster? Call me a damned bastard. Curse me. Consider a little blasphemy, Mark. It would make me feel a great deal better, knowing you were capable of even a little sin.”

“Far be it from me to leave you unsatisfied. Ash, you can go to bloody hell. It is the height of hypocrisy for you to criticize what I choose to do with my time, when I know for a fact that you haven’t even bothered to read my work. Not one word.”

Despite the finality ringing in his voice, he looked at Ash with an expectant hope in his eyes. And Ash knew what his brother wanted. He wanted to be contradicted. Wanted Ash to spit out that he’d read the carefully bound essays his brother had so proudly sent to him over the years.

But Ash’s best effort—“I stumbled through the introductory paragraph, before I threw up my hands in despair”—would hardly mollify his brother. The truth choked him, and if it were to come out, it would destroy Ash’s last chance of forging any sort of connection with Mark.

When he remained silent, Mark shook his head. “I don’t know why I bother. Some days, I think Smite has the right of it.”

The final sally, and Ash had nothing to say in response. Mark swept his gaze around the room at his books, stacked in neat arrays along the table near the window. Finally, he picked the top two from the pile and walked out.

He didn’t even stamp his feet as he left.

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