The Heiress Effect (Brothers Sinister #2)(21)

After a tepid ten-minute walk around the garden at midday, she’d been put down for a nap in her room as if she were a child of four.

She waited until the house grew quiet, the servants departing to mop floors and go to market. Then she’d hastily changed her clothing and scrambled down the stone wall outside her window. She wanted to go away—anywhere, so long as it was not here.

She had an unapproved novel in one cloak pocket, a handkerchief in the other, and a determination to spend all two hours of her ridiculous nap outside.

Titus Fairfield’s house sat at the outskirts of Cambridge. It was a sad, two-story affair of graying stone surrounded by drab bushes. She pulled her skirt close to avoid the thorns of the gooseberry bush, squeezed through a narrow gap in the back hedge, and obtained her freedom on the gravel track leading away from town, across fields and over hills.

This was behavior that Uncle Titus would call foolish—setting out on her own, unaccompanied by a chaperone, walking with real strides instead of taking the delicate steps that befitted her status as a supposed invalid. Going out for hours instead of minutes.

And maybe he was right. A little bit. But the alternative—lying in bed when it was light outside, staring at the ceiling, imagining bludgeoning her uncle with one of his law books—was even more ill advised. That left her feeling shaky, guilty, and almost feverishly restless. When she felt that way, she’d watch him over breakfast, thinking idly of pulling his bookshelf down around his head.

Not the sort of imagery that made her proud. She held her head high on the main road, nodding at passing farmers. Her gown was a little too fine to make her anything other than a lady escaped from chaperonage, but people saw what they thought would fit in. She marched down the road, brushing the fence posts and stone walls with the tips of her fingers, marveling in the feel of wind on her cheeks, the taste of freedom. It was cold; the wind bit through her gloves, and her cloak wasn’t thick enough to keep off the worst of the chill, but she didn’t care.

What if something happens? Her uncle’s mournful voice seemed to drift to her on a memory. He could have carved it in stone and set it above the mantelpiece, he’d said it so often. What if something happens? He’d been worrying about something happening to her for years, with the result that nothing happened at all.

Today, she was resolved to walk through Grantchester. She’d seen Grantchester Road half a dozen times in her stolen ramblings, and while a village might not be the stuff of Mrs. Larriger’s exploits, it was something more than a handful of goats. She would walk and smile, and nobody would know that she’d escaped from the dreadful clutches of…of…

Not pirates. Not whalers. Not the czar of Russia.

“I’ve escaped from the dreadful clutches of a nap,” she announced to the road.

Emily passed a farmhouse, then another, then—a sign that the village was nearby—a grain mill. Students were working industriously inside a grammar school. She nodded at a smith in his yard as he examined a horse’s hooves.

When she reached the main square, she thought about buying an apple from a green grocer, just to prove she could. But it seemed futile to waste her few coins on wizened fruit.

She wanted so little—just the chance to do the things everyone else did. Was it so much to ask?

What if something happens?

A bitter thought, that—that she had to fear everything, simply because of what might occur. A bitter thought, indeed.

And at that, Emily realized it wasn’t just the thought that was bitter. It was the taste in her mouth.

It wasn’t an actual taste. Years of experimentation had demonstrated that. It was a growing bitterness that spread through her until she tasted it not just on her tongue, but in her cheeks and stomach—in parts of her body that ought not to have been able to taste at all. The taste fell somewhere between rancid almond and rotting eggs.

Familiar. Annoying. And—as the timing went—completely awful. In a minute, Emily was going to start smelling bad things. Shortly after that…

Something was going to happen. The very thing her uncle feared, the reason she wasn’t allowed outside.

She didn’t have time to make her way out to the indifferent fields outside of town, and if she collapsed in front of the grammar school with her leg spasming, someone would see her for certain. They’d ask to help, insist on seeing her home. Her uncle would find out, and…

And she’d never go out again. There wasn’t time to think or time to choose.

Emily crossed the square and ducked into the public house.

Act as if you belong.

She swallowed the taste in her mouth, smiled as the telltale olfactory dysfunction took her senses, masking the scents of baking bread and soup in a foul miasma.

She slid into the nearest bench and tucked her skirts behind the table. Hopefully nobody would look at her. Hopefully, the few minutes of her fit would pass with nobody the wiser. Hopefully—

“Miss,” a pleasant voice said from across the table, “please don’t sit here.”

Emily looked up, and that was when she realized that she wasn’t alone at the table. A man sat across from her, wedged against the wall. A book was open before him, and he had half a loaf of bread sitting beside an empty soup bowl.

Her leg had already begun to twitch.

“I’m sorry,” she said, gritting her teeth. “I really can’t stand up right now.”