The Suffragette Scandal (Brothers Sinister #4)(62)

“Only because you ask impertinent questions. I’d have no need to deflect anything, if you stopped snooping.”

She pushed to her feet, walked to her door. But she didn’t leave. Instead, she made sure it was firmly shut. “Mr. Clark,” she said softly. “Edward. I don’t think you gave me a lump of metal that you’d been carting around for six years for no particular reason. Talking about this particular lump of metal is difficult for you. You don’t have to tell me anything.”

He took a breath. “I lied when I said I commissioned it.” He didn’t look at her. “Or, rather, it was a mangling of the truth. I commissioned it, but the artist was myself.”

She blinked and looked at it again. “Oh. My.”

“Don’t look so surprised. You’ve seen my sketches. You know I have some capabilities as an artist.”

“Some, of course. But sketches are one thing. Any number of people can manage a creditable sketch. This is something else entirely.”

“I spent two years with a blacksmith.” He shrugged. “I learned a few tricks. And I had to decide who I was. I couldn’t be the useless little rich boy I had been all that time. I felt as if I were trapped in a labyrinth with no way out, traveling tangled paths that could not lead me to the surface. I made that”—he nodded at the paperweight—“trying to find myself in the man I became.”

Free looked at the piece again.

“No,” he told her. “You won’t find me in there. That’s the whole point. I only ever found a collection of twisted passages leading nowhere. I never found a place to go, a person to be. I learned to believe in nothing, because that way I would never be disappointed.”

“So.” She picked up his paperweight and turned it over. “This was your search for a heart?”

“No.” His voice was ever so quiet. “I made that when I gave up on having one altogether. I didn’t think there was any point in looking for such a ridiculous object until I met you. At some point in the weeks of our acquaintance, I realized I did have one buried somewhere.” He looked over at her. “There’s no point in searching it out now. By the time I realized it existed, it was already yours.”

Oh. Her chest felt too tight. She could almost feel her eyes stinging in response. “And still you’re leaving.”

“I am.”

Free knew that she was the sort to push others. She knew because she’d been told it, time and time again, and because…well, frankly, it was true. Other people were often wrong, and she had no qualms about letting them know.

But if she had one regret in her life, it was pushing too much at the wrong time. When she was younger, she had pushed her Aunt Freddy. Freddy had been beset by a complex mix of fears, ones that Free still didn’t understand. Still she’d pushed, as if she somehow knew better than her own aunt what Freddy needed.

And what had she accomplished by that? They’d both been miserable, and in her aunt’s final days, she’d made Freddy feel as if she were not good enough.

Sometimes, she’d learned, the only way to move forward was to stop pushing.

“Very well,” she heard herself say calmly.

It was rather like his gloves; there were some things a man needed to speak about when he was ready. A man like Edward didn’t give her a piece crafted by his own hands because he wanted to walk away and forget her. He did it because he wanted her to remember. Maybe he needed to leave for now. But deep down, he expected to come back when he’d sorted himself out.

All she had to do was leave the door open.

“I suppose I should send you a memento in return,” she said casually. “If you’ll give me your address, I’ll send you issues of the paper.”

It was as obvious a falsehood as the one he’d delivered about the paperweight itself.

He snorted. “Are you lying to me, Miss Marshall?”

“Of course I am.” She smiled at him. “I thought it would put you at ease.”

He laughed, that dark, appreciative laugh she’d come to adore. “Touché, my dear.”

For a second, they stared at one another, her will matching his.

“Just the paper, now,” he warned. “No letters.”

It was a victory of a sort, that she’d made him tell that lie. He clearly knew it was a lie; he gave his head an annoyed shake.

And then he rubbed a hand through his hair and looked away. “I own a metalworks in Toulouse,” he mumbled.

“Why, Mr. Clark, that sounds surprisingly respectable.”

He raised an eyebrow at her. “Don’t make too much of it. I’ve only had it a few years. And you’d best not ask how I got the money to start it.” He smiled tightly. “For that matter, don’t ask how I got the first references I needed so that business would start coming in.”

“Does this metalworks have an address?”

He wrinkled his nose at her. She smiled calmly in return while her heart raced. Then slowly, ever so slowly, he took a sheet of her paper and scrawled a few lines.

“I won’t write back,” he told her.

He was such a dreadful liar. Let him lie, if that’s what he needed for the moment.

He didn’t take hold of her, didn’t even touch her. He simply stood and strode to the door. “You have my best wishes, Free. Now and always.”