Proof by Seduction (Carhart #1)(75)

“My grandfather had my guardianship after my mother remarried. He kept me on the estate with him, or here in London. To teach me, he said. But what I learned was not to show any emotion. Most particularly not tears, laughter or enjoyment. Those things, Grandfather said, were softness, inherited from my mother. She remarried as quickly as she dared after my father died. And she did so, knowing it would mean leaving me alone with my grandfather.”

Jenny looked up into Gareth’s eyes.

“Eventually, I just stopped showing what I felt. It was easier. And Grandfather was right. Because when you’re a marquess, and you don’t laugh when you should, people jump to make things right. When you’re a marquess and you send a man a cold, cutting glance, he shivers. He taught me to be a scalpel.”

“Well,” Jenny said slowly, “given your skills at carving, that was foolish of him.”

A smile fluttered on his lips. “Indeed.”

“Would you know,” Jenny remarked, “I don’t believe I would have liked your grandfather.”

“He was a complicated man.”

Another pause. This one, Jenny felt, she must fill. She walked round Gareth’s desk and glanced at the papers stacked on top. Columns of figures filled them.

“No drawings of birds this time?” she asked.

“It’s after noon. I bundle up all the things I care about after noon. Now, it’s only estate business.”

“Hmm.” Jenny poked under a stack of hot-pressed paper and found more figures. “Where did they go?”

He crossed to her side and slid out a drawer. A thick sheaf of papers, bound with green cotton tape, lay inside. Gareth removed it almost reverently and untied the ribbon.

“Here.” He ducked his head as he spoke, as if he were embarrassed. “I’m working on this monograph.” He shuffled pages—charts, drawings, and a great deal of text. When he looked up, there was a sparkle in his eye.

“You see, I’ve been thinking about Lamarck’s theory—” He cut himself off and suddenly straightened, flattening the paper under flat palms. “That is to say—I fit everything I care for in the mornings. I have another appointment this evening in any event. And you don’t care about Lamarck, anyway.”

Jenny laid her hand over his. “But you do.”

He glanced at the door, as wary as a child sneaking sweets from the pantry. “Well…”

Jenny plucked the pages from beneath his hands. “So this is everything you care for.”

She flipped through his work before finding the ink sketches at the end.

“Here,” Gareth said. “That’s a male macaw. I wish I could show you the bright red of those wing feathers. There’s no color here in England to match it. And there’s the female, less splashy—”

He turned the page and froze.

Because the sketch on the next page was no impatient ink drawing of a macaw. It was her. He’d even labeled it: Jenny.

He’d drawn her in the same rough style he employed with the birds, strong, dark lines that hinted at movement and luminosity. Jenny could not have pointed to any one feature that was drawn incorrectly. And yet—

“I don’t look like that,” she protested.

Because the woman in Gareth’s sketches seemed ethereal, light bouncing off dark eyes and coiled hair.

He compressed his lips together.

“You do to me,” he finally said. He reached for the papers and stacked them together, binding them up again.

“Gareth.”

He didn’t look at her but wound the tape savagely around his work and cinched a knot. “I told you those pages held everything I cared about.”

“Gareth.”

He hefted his drawings from hand to hand.

“Some people,” he said, looking down as if addressing the desk, “think that being a marquess means you sit in the House of Lords and collect myriad rents from dreary little tenants. They think it means you enter the dining hall before the earls and after the dukes. They think it means ceremonial robes, and plenty to eat even in times of hunger. They think you can sample a bevy of eager, beautiful women.”

“And do you not?”

His hand danced idly down his drawings. “Maybe one beautiful woman. But that is not what it means to be a marquess here in England. You see, somewhere in my distant past there was a first lord, lifted above the common folk as reward for a great service to his king.”

“What was it, with your ancestors?”

“Drubbing the Welsh, actually. But you see, the title is a reward with a sting—it is not a onetime payment for services rendered. It is a promise that condemns your firstborn son, and his, and his thereafter. It binds them, through the title, in service to the land. My grandfather was harsh, but there was a reason for it.”

He set his bound drawings in the drawer and then slowly, firmly, slid it closed.

“When a marquess takes a man’s pound in rents, he does not just make a profit. He makes a pledge. I cannot sleep at night, sometimes, thinking about those pledges. Should I establish a cotton mill, like the ones in Manchester? On the one hand, they provide employment, and if my dependents are starving, I am responsible. On the other, the accidents that inevitably result…Well, I am responsible for those, too. It did not take me long to realize why my grandfather deprecated laughter. There’s little room for it in the marquessate. There’s too much human suffering, and too little a marquess can do about it.”