Proof by Seduction (Carhart #1)(63)

“A dung beetle?” Gareth suggested.

She smiled at him and, thank God, snuggled closer.

“What did you do?”

She shrugged. “I had no desire to continue along the path he’d set me. Being a mistress is quite boring—there’s no challenge, nothing new to discover. And at that point, any position I could obtain as a governess given my preceding conduct would have been unsavory indeed. I figured—everyone lies. Why shouldn’t I?”

“You could have—” Gareth paused. What could she really have done? As a man with a solid education, she could have become a clerk. As a woman, though…“You could have made hats?”

“I’d have ruined my eyesight in short order, while starving myself on too little coin. Lodgings and food are dear in London. I had nobody to vouch for my character. And besides, I wanted more than that. I wanted independence. I wanted people to look at me with honor, as they’d never done—” Her voice trembled. “Do not lecture me for trying to have a tiny portion of what you’ve always known.”

Gareth shut his eyes. He’d thought more knowledge would reduce her power over him. But it wasn’t working that way. What he felt…

He didn’t have a word for the images she’d conjured up in his head. Some unnameable emotion accompanied them. The thought of Jenny, betrayed at eighteen and deciding to show them all up, made him ache down to his bones. Whatever this nameless feeling was, it seeped into his soul like dirty black water, biting as the Thames in winter.

She hadn’t curled up like a pill-bug, or hidden herself away like some fragile creature. She’d rejected the usual options and found a choice that afforded her everything she wanted.

“The best part of being Madame Esmerelda,” she said, “was that I had to learn everything—gossip, of course, but finance, industry, even science. It’s much easier to foretell the future if you’re aware of the present. Before then, nobody had ever expected me to know anything.”

He’d expected familiarity to breed, if not contempt, at least indifference. It didn’t. It bred respect.

“Tell me,” he whispered against her shoulder. “You told me you learned everyone lied when you were nine. How did that come to pass?”

Twilight had passed. He could feel her breath in the expansion of her chest against the palms of his hands, hear it soft and sighing in his ears. But the visible line of her shoulders had faded to an indistinct silhouette, rising and falling with each exhalation.

“When I was very young,” she said, her voice quiet as the sound of still water running, “I was brought to school. I was distraught and confused as only a four-year-old child can be. The instructor tasked with my care told me if I stopped sniveling and was good, my mother would come for me soon.”

Maybe it was because his hands over her shoulders gave the illusion of closeness. Maybe it was because he hadn’t expected a revelation of that magnitude from her. But he shook with the cruelty of telling a small child a lie of that nature. His hands tightened.

“So I was good.” Her matter-of-fact delivery only drove the ice deeper into his bones.

“It may be hard to believe, but I was quiet and polite and…and honest. At that age, at least. I never wept, not even—well, you can imagine how cruel young girls can be.”

Gareth had seen how the boys at Harrow tormented those not from the oldest of families. How they’d singled out the awkward and the quiet. He could extrapolate.

“I was uncommonly good until I turned nine. Then one of the other girls pushed me down and I skinned my knee and got mud on my dress. Nothing unusual, you understand. And while I was telling myself it would all come right when my mother came for me, I realized it had been years. She wasn’t coming for me. Nobody ever would, no matter how good I was. Mrs. Davenport had lied to me, and I was all alone.”

Gareth swallowed the lump in his throat. “So what did you do?”

Her shoulder blades leapt under his hand in what Gareth supposed was a fatalistic shrug. “I stopped being good. And here I am.”

Here they weren’t. She shifted and smiled at him. Pretending it didn’t matter.

“But all this talk of me is boring. What of you? Twenty-one, was it, when you discovered everyone lied?”

Gareth paused, reluctant. In part, he held his tongue because he wanted to learn more of her than she did of him. But he also didn’t want to air his petty complaints to her. Not now, in the barren aftermath of her revelation.

“The usual,” he eventually said. “Delusions of love.”

“A woman?” He must have made some sign of acknowledgment, because she covered his cold hand with hers. “And another man, I would imagine.”

“And more than one man,” he corrected. “One of whom was my grandfather.”

Her breath hissed in. “Good Lord. How did that—I mean—why?”

“It was a wager. I’d planned to ask her to marry me. My grandfather—he had the training of me after my father died—thought she wasn’t good enough to be the future Marchioness of Blakely. I said she was. He wagered he could prove otherwise.”

“What do you mean, wagered she wasn’t good enough? That sounds horrific.”

No more horrific than sending Gareth’s mother away from her son just because she remarried. Gareth waved his hand. “It was part of his lessons. Learn about the estates. Accept responsibility. Noblesse oblige. He said I had plebeian instincts, and he needed to drive them from me.”