Talk Sweetly to Me (Brothers Sinister #4.5)(26)

“Oh, Rose. You mustn’t worry about me.”

So like Patricia, to insist she needed nothing for herself.

“How can I not? I promised Doctor Wells I’d be here for you, and I wasn’t.”

“Shh. You’re here now. And I do understand. Hypothetically speaking, I might have been willing to sneak out at night to see Isaac, when I was your age.”

Rose smiled wanly. “Why, Patricia. We are speaking hypothetically, are we?”

“Oh, shh. Then say it’s realistically speaking, too. Just…don’t meet a man alone at night unless you’re sure he’ll marry you.”

Rose sighed.

“And, ah, even then… Don’t let things go too far.”

“Whatever do you mean by that?” Rose asked innocently.

Too innocently, apparently, because Patricia gave her shoulder a slap. “Hussy. You’re not that naïve. If you feel like falling asleep afterward, you’ve done too much.”

“Oh, dear. I feel like falling asleep now,” Rose told her, shutting her eyes.

“Cuddling with your sister doesn’t count,” Patricia said severely. “I don’t have designs on your virtue. All I ever want to do at this point is sleep. Use the chamber pot and sleep.”

“How indelicate.”

“Anyone who thinks that ladies are delicate has either never been pregnant or has put the experience from her mind out of sheer horror.”

Rose snorted. For a long while, they did not say anything. Rose held her sister’s hands, her head resting against her shoulder. She could almost pretend that they were still young, that she was a child and Patricia not much older, that she was once again falling asleep to the sound of her sister’s heartbeat.

But they weren’t. Rose was twenty. Her sister was pregnant, and she had to take care of her. She had not thought anything would ever make her forget that…but then she’d underestimated Stephen Shaughnessy for too long.

He made her think this would all be easy—that all she had to do was love him and then all her problems would disappear. They wouldn’t, though. They would multiply: his problems with hers. All he could do was what he’d managed tonight: He could make Rose forget herself long enough for real danger to threaten.

Rose buried her head in her sister’s shoulder. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I’ll never leave you to worry like that again. I promise.”

“I know.”

After a long while, Patricia’s hands squeezed her shoulders—not hard, but long—five seconds, then ten. Rose turned and looked at her. Her sister’s breath came ragged; her jaw squared. Eventually, though, Patricia relaxed and glanced at the clock. “Forty-seven minutes,” she said calmly. “They were forty-seven minutes apart.”

“You had another contraction?” Rose sat up even straighter. “We should go get—”

Patricia shook her head. “False contractions, remember? Doctor Chillingsworth was just here.”

“But—”

“Even if they are real,” Patricia said, “which I doubt—they’re still forty-seven minutes apart. They’ll have to come much faster before it’s time. We can fetch him then.”

Chapter Seven

ROSE HAD EXPECTED TO SEE Mr. Shaughnessy on her walk into the observatory the next morning, but she did not encounter him. She wondered all day if he might come by, asking for another lesson—an excuse, of course, but she’d not have expected him to balk at inventing an excuse to see her—but every time the door opened, it was not him.

She was beginning to think that her worst fears had been right—that all he’d ever intended was a seduction, that he’d never wanted anything more—when she encountered him on her way home. She saw him, his scarf flapping in the wind, his hands in his pockets. He paced along the pavement, his face solemn. She did not know what to say to him.

He caught sight of her and gave a little shake of his head—not denial; by the tension that seemed to leave him, it rather looked like relief.

He came up to her. “Rose.” His voice was low. “Before you send me on my way, let me be as clear as I can be. I love you. I have loved you for months, and I don’t wish to do without you. I want to marry you. I want to buy you telescopes. I want you to have my babies. I want you, Rose. You and only you.”

Oh, how it hurt to hear those words. She had suspected they must be true, even if part of her hadn’t been able to make herself believe it.

“I love you,” he said. “I didn’t say it directly last night, and I ought to have. I love you. Marry me.”

“Listen to you.” She gave him a sad smile. “Have you given any thought at all to what this would mean? Given your reputation, it will be a terrible scandal if—when—you marry. Everyone will assume the worst of me.”

“At first. It will blow over, though,” he said confidently.

“Stephen. Think. Have you considered what it would mean for us to have children together?”

His eyes softened. “At length.”

“No, you beast. I don’t mean the begetting of them. Have you thought about what it would mean to have black, Irish, Catholic children?”

He blinked, slowly, and frowned. He really hadn’t thought about it.