The Heiress Effect (Brothers Sinister #2)(106)

The pages were still crisp, the leather binding not yet cracked. He felt a lump in his throat as he opened the book to the front page. These were Freddy’s words, Freddy’s thoughts. He’d purchased it, and he hadn’t known. He had scarcely known her at all. He smoothed back the pages and found Chapter One.

For the first fifty-eight years of her life, Mrs. Laura Larriger lived in Portsmouth in sight of the harbor. She never wondered where the ships went, and cared about their return only when one of them happened to bring her husband home from one of his trading voyages. There was never any reason to care.

Oliver swallowed, wondering what his aunt had seen from her window. What she had dreamed about, what she had wanted.

That day, Mrs. Larriger sat in her parlor. But the walls seemed thicker. The air felt closer. For almost sixty years, she had never felt the slightest curiosity about the world outside her door. Now, the air beyond her walls seemed to call out to her. Leave, it whispered. Leave.

That was something Freddy would have understood. No wonder that passage had seemed so true to life.

She took a deep breath. She packed a satchel. And then, with a great effort, with the effort of a woman uprooting everything she had known, Mrs. Larriger put one foot outside her door into the warm May sunshine.

Oliver shut his eyes and thought of his aunt. He thought of her putting a toe out of her door and having palpitations of the heart. He remembered her saying that she was trying, that she’d get it right one day. That she would go to the park and have a nice walk…

He hoped that she had managed to make it out before she passed away. But it was no longer so simple. What Freddy had been unable to do in one way, she’d managed in another. Somehow the most disapproving, dour, lecturing spinster of his acquaintance…

Somehow, she’d managed to make thousands of people dream of adventure. She’d done more than anyone would have guessed. The woman who had lectured Oliver about taking chills in her last will and testament had been braver than anyone had known.

He could remember the last time he’d seen her. Your mother was a regular coal-grabber, she’d said. But you, you’re like me. At the time, he’d laughed it off. His aunt never left the house; Oliver had a busy, varied career. Freddy constantly warned him about any alteration in his schedules, however minor; Oliver did new things. He wasn’t like Freddy.

You remember the pain, and you flinch.

He didn’t flinch. Did he?

Not from the outdoors, no. But…

Oliver shut his eyes and drew in a breath. He’d flinched from a great many other things.

Like Jane. When he’d first met her, he’d scarcely been able to watch her. She violated the precepts of polite society without thinking, and he’d flinched at first when he’d seen her. Jane was a coal-grabber, all right.

But Freddy was right. There had been a time when Oliver had held on to coals himself. When he’d first gone to Eton, for instance. Those first years, he’d insisted on his due. He’d proclaimed loudly that he was as good as any other boy, and he’d been willing to fight to keep it that way. What had changed, and when had it all gone awry?

The walls seemed thicker. The air felt closer. He could almost feel the walls he’d built of his life closing around him. He’d not realized they were there, so quietly had he made them. And yet when he reached out, there they were. Freddy had insisted to Free that she needed to stay inside, to wear her bonnets. And Oliver had been saying the same thing. He had looked at his sister, at her face shining as she was surrounded by a hundred women in Hyde Park, and instead of feeling proud of her accomplishment or happy for what had happened, he had felt tired. He’d tried to warn her off Cambridge.

It was an old tiredness he felt, the weariness of an aging dog lying in the summer sun, watching puppies at play. As if exuberance belonged to the young. He could remember, faintly, an echo of that feeling. Days when he’d insisted—over and over—that he was as good as anyone else, that he wasn’t going to bend to their ways, that he’d make them bend to his.

He turned the next page in Mrs. Larriger Leaves Home, but the words blurred before him.

He was asking himself the wrong question. Once, he’d been like Free, unwilling to back down or take “no” for an answer. The question wasn’t when things had changed. It was this: When had he decided to simply accept society’s rules, to play the game precisely as it had been laid out by those who already had power?

It had happened years ago at Eton.

When he’d finally learned to keep his mouth shut. When he’d discovered that he could accomplish more by holding his tongue and biding his time than by lashing out with fists and shouts.

He’d made a career of quiet, he’d told Jane. But at some point, quiet no longer carried the day. If he never learned to speak, what would be the point of achieving power? Simply to carry on carrying on?

With a great effort, with the effort of a woman uprooting everything she had known, Mrs. Larriger put one foot outside her door into the warm May sunshine.

It took Oliver a moment to remember his old self—the person he had thought was born of immaturity, the boy that he had put aside as he came into adulthood. He would never have thought himself ashamed of his background before now. And yet…

How was it that he’d taken the rules that he’d hated and adopted them for himself? He’d chafed when people told him he was a bastard. He’d raged when they’d said he would never amount to anything, that his father was nothing. How was it that he was telling the woman that he loved that she was nothing? That she was awful?