A Delicate Deception Read online

  “It’s quite all right. You were meant to laugh.”

  He regained some control over himself, tried to summon up some dignified disapproval of her levity. But before he could quite manage it, she went on.

  “The truth is that she was devastated by my father’s death. It was very sudden and of course nobody was sending her funeral wreaths or condolence letters, given the circumstances.” Before he could ask what that could possibly mean, she continued. “I had never seen her cry before. It occurred to me that I ought to have died instead of him. Which is a very useless thought, because it’s not like one can choose, and there’s probably something sinful about questioning God’s plan, I suppose.” There it was again, that levity where it didn’t belong, and he should not be so charmed by it. “But at the time I knew I was the least valuable member of the household—my younger sisters are prettier and more biddable and in general more marriageable, and it would have been eminently convenient if I were simply out of the way.” A pause. “I was sixteen, and very dramatic.”

  Now, that was simply too much. He rose to his knees and turned so he could see her. “First of all, that is—you are wrong on all counts. Entirely wrong. Even assuming your sisters are unparalleled beauties of sterling character, you can’t measure worth in such a way. I daresay your mother would have been horrified if she knew you had harbored such thoughts.”

  She blinked at him, wide gray eyes unflustered by his harangue. “Oh, she was. It made her cry even more, which made us both feel worse.”

  “You told her?”

  “As I said, I was sixteen and a consummate idiot. And I had a very bad case of spots.” She tilted her chin, presumably to show him the resulting scars, but he could not detect any in the dappled shade. “My sisters really do have steadier characters.”

  He scrubbed his hand across his face. “I don’t find that at all hard to believe.” And then he realized what he had said, and he went still. “I beg your pardon—I didn’t mean—”

  “Yes you did, and I’m taking it as a compliment. I will write it in my diary. Today a very large stranger laughed at my jokes and praised my talents as a comedienne—”

  “That is not—”

  “—but he does not like cake, and I’m therefore inclined to disregard his opinions on all important matters.”

  He buried his face in his hands, both to muffle his laugh and to cover the blush he knew had spread across his face.

  Chapter Three

  As if the imminent prospect of a duke in the neighborhood weren’t alarming enough, the next day brought Amelia’s quarterly parcel from her mother.

  “Oooh,” Georgiana said, coming in from the garden with an armful of chrysanthemums. “Is that what I think it is?”

  Amelia already knew what was in the parcel, but she tore it open anyway. Out tumbled three gowns: russet merino, emerald-green watered silk, and pearl-gray muslin. The muslin, at least, she might wear. She recognized her youngest sister’s hand in that last gown—something practical, something Amelia might actually use. Amelia had long since given up trying to explain to her mother that she had no use for fine clothes, seeing as how she had retired to the country with the express purpose of avoiding the kind of society where such attire would be required. But Amelia’s mother had always expressed her love in yards of silk and cashmere, and Amelia tried to receive the gesture as it was meant. Still, whenever she opened the clothes press she’d see those gowns silently judging her and finding her wanting.

  Rationally, she knew she could have Janet, the housemaid, sell them and donate the proceeds to some worthy charity, or she could figure out a way to slip the funds into Georgiana’s bank account. Breathing the scent of the sachets her mother’s maid had laid between the layers of fabric made her heart race, but it also made her homesick.

  She remembered years of similar gowns, and how by the end they had felt like stage costumes; every time she slipped one over her head, she assumed a role. At first that role hadn’t been a bad thing—she was used to the idea that being in polite society required a certain degree of performance, and was well aware that anything like her authentic self was grossly insufficient for most social situations. But by the end, the role had crowded out whatever was left of Amelia’s actual identity. That was the problem with being schooled from one’s earliest age to mask one’s emotions in favor of playing a role: it left one with no doubt as to the inadequacy of one’s true self. Mother would no doubt be horrified to hear Amelia say such a thing. She had always been generous with praise whenever Amelia behaved as she ought, and had never understood that this praise only confirmed that Amelia, as she truly was, warts and all, was unfit for human society.

  With a shudder, she remembered the night of the incident, standing in the middle of a ballroom, crammed into that ghastly gown, and simply deciding that she was done, that she couldn’t endure one more minute of it. As she moved through the steps with her partner, she overheard the conversation of another couple on the dance floor. It had been a variation on a theme she had heard since she could remember being talked about, since she could remember even existing. The man had said to his partner that Amelia seemed ladylike, all things considered; the woman had responded that Amelia was harmless, and could be relied upon to make up one’s numbers at a dinner table at the last moment. And it had struck Amelia that this was the most she could hope for: all her mother’s work, all her half brother’s connections, day after day, year after year of checking every movement and weighing every word, and she had achieved harmlessness. At that moment, halfway through a gavotte that seemed like it would never end, she realized it wasn’t worth it.

  Once she knew it, there was no unknowing it. As soon as she saw that she had nothing to lose—or nothing that she didn’t heartily wish to lose—she took a glance at her dance partner, who happened to be the Russian ambassador. She was on her best behavior, because the man had titles and medals and she was supposed to be very gratified that he wished to dance with her. If she made a mess of this, there would be disastrous consequences. And so, she made a mess of it. She turned, walked off the dance floor, out of the house, and directly home.

  There had been a time when she had enjoyed things. Little things, like sneaking the kitten into church, and big things, like seeing her friends happy. But that last year in London, joy had been permanently out of reach, and the next-best thing—the absence of panic—she could only achieve with her bedroom door bolted and her eyes shut. She had tried to figure out where things went wrong, when the town she had loved began to close its walls in on her. Above all, she wanted to know when the simple act of being around people made her feel like an especially grotesque insect pinned to a board.

  As her mother and sisters and friends had pointed out many times, she was, objectively, an unremarkable woman of four-and-twenty, not an eldritch creature from one of those novels she and Georgiana read. Sometimes she thought her perception had been skewed by those first few years of her life, when it had been Amelia and her mother, trying their hardest to appear what they decidedly were not, and having scorn heaped upon them whenever they fell short. A fallen woman, her illegitimate daughter, and everyone’s judgment landing squarely on them. Perhaps that was why she now needed to be spared the gaze of anyone who might see her and find her lacking. That was the only explanation she could think of for her present condition, unless she were to admit the possibility of madness.

  Her heart pounded against her ribs, and she realized she was still clutching the gowns. She glared at the silks and satins in her arms. She was starting to think it was possible for inanimate objects to judge her. This could not be a good sign.

  “So lovely,” Georgiana said, stroking a length of braid on the russet gown.

  “You can have it,” Amelia said hastily. “Janet could take it in.”

  “A perfect ninny I’d look in russet,” Georgiana said. And she was right, of course: the faded muslins and colorless round gowns Georgiana wore suited her pale coloring and white-blond
hair.

  “As if you could be anything other than stunning,” Amelia said, rising to her feet. “I was just heading out for a walk.”

  “Now?” Georgiana asked. It was not the time for Amelia’s walk, and Georgiana was no more accustomed to Amelia doing things out of order than she was for the hands of the clock to start spinning backward.

  “I’m feeling bold and daring,” Amelia announced. She was feeling penned in and increasingly hysterical, but she could do that out of doors as well as she could in the sitting room.

  She swept up her shawl and bonnet and exchanged her slippers for a pair of sturdy boots and all but fled the house. It was a sunny day, a rare cloudless August afternoon. She drifted towards the stables, trying to look casual about the direction she was taking.

  “No,” Keating said without looking up from the horse he was currying. Dash it. There was no getting anything past Keating.

  “You don’t even know what I was going to ask,” Amelia said, trying and failing to keep the petulance from her voice.

  “If you don’t think I know by now what a young person with a bad idea looks like, you can guess again. What was it going to be? Swimming in the pond? Learning to box? Setting something on fire? Doesn’t matter, leave me out of it.”

  Amelia suppressed a smile. Thank goodness Keating had come with her to Derbyshire. Amelia and Keating had sort of inherited one another when his employer embarked on a tour of the continent with Amelia’s half brother, Alistair, Marquess of Pembroke. Keating would lie, steal, and perjure himself for Robin, but drew the line at going to France. He had remained in England, nominally to be Amelia’s general factotum, but, Amelia increasingly suspected, to keep an eye on her. He didn’t seem to think it was at all unusual for a pair of youngish ladies to live as recluses, or if he did, he didn’t talk about it. Amelia supposed that his years working for Robin had gotten him used to people who strayed from the beaten path.

  Contrast that with the vicar, who seemed to think that Amelia belonged either in Bedlam or a home for wayward girls, and that Georgiana had come to Derbyshire to tempt men into wickedness by performing such risqué acts as existing while being pretty.

  “Maybe I wanted the pleasure of your company,” Amelia suggested. She had been hoping she could sit on an overturned crate and watch him tend the horses, knowing that in his better moods he was capable of going hours without talking. Today Keating did not seem to be in one of his better moods.

  “I’m not here to amuse you,” Keating grumbled. “You’re not here to be amused at all. You’re supposed to be in that room”—he pointed to the house—“writing books no decent man ought to know about. Fact is that you’re too young to be left on your own and I don’t know what your mother was thinking in letting you out of her sight.”

  Amelia wrinkled her nose. She knew Keating was only trying to provoke her. She was hardly too young to be left alone. Her mother had already had three children at this age. But Amelia never came out well when she compared herself to her mother. It only made her feel inadequate, and then guilty because her mother would be the first to tell her she was merely different, not lacking. Her mother probably even believed it. She ought to be grateful to have this time and this space, but it seemed yet another way Amelia fell short of everyone’s expectations and needs, including her own.

  “That was only the first book,” Amelia pointed out. “The rest have been quite respectable, as well you know. I was going to ask if I could watch you curry the horses.”

  “And I was going to suggest that you bugg—run off. No, you can’t watch me. I’m not putting on a show.”

  “You are in an exceptionally foul mood,” Amelia said. This probably meant he had suffered a falling-out with the ostler at the Swan or the curate or the traveling china mender or whoever his latest bedmate had been. She made up her mind to ensure that Janet sent over a slab of the treacle tart she was making, as long as the thing could be done without alerting Keating to anything that looked like solicitude. “Robin said you were pleasant company,” Amelia said with an exaggerated pout. Although, now that Amelia thought about it, what Robin had actually said was that Keating was a good man to have around in a pinch, which could mean a lot of things.

  “You believe anything that yellow-haired slip of mischief says, you’re a fool,” he said with unmistakable fondness. “In fact,” he said, pointing the currying brush at her menacingly, “I’ve done my time putting up with shiftless young lunatics and I’m supposed to be enjoying a quiet retirement.”

  “Ha! Is that what you’re calling it? And at your age,” she murmured.

  “You know,” Keating said, shaking his head sadly, “I don’t think you’re quite a nice sort of girl.”

  “I’ve been trying to tell you all that for years.”

  “Figures, with the company you keep.” He gave her the Keating equivalent of a smile—one corner of his mouth hitched up in a grizzled cheek.

  Well, if Keating wouldn’t let her hide in the stable, she had no choice but to go for a walk. The sun was in the wrong place in the sky. Very disconcerting. She paced along the shrubbery at the side of the house for a few minutes, but walking back and forth felt pointless. She followed her usual path along the edge of the property, and when it reached the lane she headed uphill, away from the village. There was a risk that she’d run into someone, most likely the vicar’s wife, who seemed to turn up precisely where one didn’t want her.

  Usually she confined her walks to the perimeter of her property, sometimes completing two turns around it if the weather was especially fine. Other days—especially if she had Nan for company and nominal protection—she ventured further, exploring the countryside. That was what she had been doing when she ran into the land surveyor—she wished she knew his name—at the standing stones. And that was what she wanted to do today. She thought she might head in the direction of a ruined chapel she had once seen.

  The branches were heavy with summer leaves, the air thick with the scent of blooming flowers. Bird calls and the sound of woodpeckers made an almost soothing rhythm until they started to take the shape of the sounds that would drift into her bedroom window in London, a hum of voices, hoofbeats, cart wheels. She quickened her pace.

  Then the sounds changed again, resembling footsteps, loud enough that she turned her head to see a man approaching on foot, as if she had conjured the sight out of her fancy. It was, however, only the land surveyor.

  “Oh, bother,” he said, his expression comically dismayed, his eyebrows knitting together with stern disapproval.

  “A good afternoon to you too, sir,” she said, suppressing a laugh.

  “I only meant— Now you’re definitely going to think I’m following you.”

  Anyone who actually wanted to see Amelia would know she wasn’t usually abroad in the middle of the day. “I think nothing of the sort. However, if you’re heading up this path, I wonder if I might impose upon you to walk with me so as to protect me from the vicar’s wife.”

  “For a minute I thought you wanted my protection from brigands, and I was afraid I’d have to disoblige you by telling you I wouldn’t know the first thing to do.”

  “I don’t think you’d need to do anything. Just stand there looking all large and cross. Besides, who cares about brigands? They would be unlikely to try and foist off their maiden aunt as my chaperone.”

  “Ah, so that’s the fate you wish to escape. Most understandable.”

  This was, by any standard, an actual conversation. And Amelia did not know why it was not burdensome to her, whereas the prospect of mere pleasantries with a duke made her mind fray at the edges. Perhaps it was because this man in his plain coat and worn trousers, his jaw dusted with the beginnings of a beard, his hair uncombed, seemed as far from her former life as she was likely to get.

  “She means well, which only makes it worse. So will you walk with me?” she asked, hoping that she didn’t sound too eager. But she was eager, and for reasons she preferred to ignore—somethin
g to do with the breadth of his shoulders and his ready blush, the way his laugh sounded rusty and seemed to come as a shock to him. Even as she glanced up at him, she saw color spread across his cheekbones, and she bit her lip.

  “I very nearly called on you to ask your name,” Sydney admitted.

  When thinking of her—which he realized he was doing with inexplicable frequency—there was a blankness where her name belonged. But with names came explanations, personal histories, family background, and right now he enjoyed the sense that they were just two people, sharing sunshine and scenery, nothing tying them to this world except what they did and said. Still, it seemed vaguely inappropriate to have met a person three times without knowing their name.

  “Call on me?” she said. “How drastic. You could have asked anyone in the neighborhood.”

  With a start, he realized she was right—he need only have asked the Pelham land steward the name of his new tenant. He was not accustomed to overlooking obvious solutions; he would not have the career he did if he weren’t in the habit of solving problems efficiently and automatically. The fact that he hadn’t done something so obvious made him suspicious of his own mind, and he had to acknowledge that he had avoided learning her name for the simple reason that he wished to withhold his own: she would hear Goddard, and know him to be the owner of Pelham Hall. The truth was that he feared that this friendship—even though it was probably presumptuous to call it so—would be crushed by anything so solid as names and identities, anything as weighty as his complicated grief and his reasons for being here. Friendship, as far as Sydney could tell, was rare and fragile, not a naturally occurring substance, and he wasn’t quite certain what he had to do to preserve it. He steeled himself for some minor dishonesty—not actual lying, only a bit of delicate evasion.

  “My name is Sydney,” he said.

  “Mr. Sydney.” She nodded and gave him a wintry little smile that he supposed was what ladies did upon introductions. He hated it and already regretted broaching this topic.