Jane Steele(102)

“I never loved you so,” she said.

Clarke freed her hand from my tightening grasp as two tears fell soundlessly from beneath the pince-nez. Had she trussed me up like a slaughtered buck, I might have thought it my just deserts for the web of lies in which I had entangled her—this, though, seemed to exceed the boundaries even of cruelty. When my breath hitched, she rose to depart.

“Do you recall the book you had—the one my father published? The Garden of Forbidden Delights?”

My mouth must have worked; but sepulchres cannot produce sound, and I was a monument to wishes ungranted and tenderness left to rot unused.

The whisper of fingertips touched my cheek, and then Clarke was kissing me.

It was only a brief press, but it was neither dry, nor chaste, nor seeking. It was the kiss of a person who has thought about variants of the same kiss for a very long time, as if it were a hundred kisses, all of them passionate and all of them hopeless. I was startled and—in the moment—grateful enough even to reciprocate, did so before even thinking why I should not, and I tasted years in that kiss. I tasted years of dying hope, and the sweet bellyache of longing, and coffee, and Clarke herself, before she pulled away, running her thumb over my open lips.

“That was how I loved you,” she told me.

Women often embrace, sisters often kiss, and no one regarded us as she bowed her head, closing her eyes for a fleeting instant, and then turned and walked out of the tea shop.

I floated to the window, following her as she strode into the street. She did not look back, gauging the traffic at the corner with a practised tilt of her head; therefore I was the one turned to salt, and not Rebecca Clarke, when I watched her hand leave the front of her bodice and drop my address to the cobbles, the paper fluttering prettily before it landed in the filth and the straw.

For minutes which stretched before me like miles, I stood at that window, still seeing the ghostly afterimage of her slim back and gleaming hair the instant before I lost her for the second time. Carriages and buses clattered over the bill, no longer visible in the road, but that was for the best—I had never wished Clarke harm in all my days, and if seeing me grieved her, I renewed my vow never to seek her out.

An unexpected peace flooded the air around me.

Some tragedies bind us, as lies do; they are ropes braided of hurt and bitterness, and you cannot ever fully understand how pinioned you are until the ties are loosened.

Other tragedies free us, as Clarke’s confession freed me.

You cannot know what it means, reader, to have thought yourself despised for your unworthiness for a period of years—to have supposed your very nature poison, and your friend right to have thus abandoned you—and to learn thereafter that you were loved not too little but too well.

? ? ?

East India House was a fortress; the building loomed over me like a conqueror, the lower two floors absurdly high-ceilinged, and the entrance guarded by six positively enormous Ionic columns. A frail wind whined in my ears, tugging the tailcoats of the men dancing about with their arms full of papers in a chaotically choreographed tribute to wealth. Never had I set eyes on a place which so pungently reeked of power and money, and I hesitated, fearing the consequences should I provoke the lion in its den.

Better you than the residents of Highgate House, I thought. You have been Jane Stone, Jane Smith, and today you will be Jane Steele—the only woman suited to this task.

I adopted an aloof air and entered the front hall.

If the shareholders were already assured of the Company’s ruthless dominance by the exterior of East India House, the interior hammered the point home; everywhere I looked was marble and crystal and carvings and paintings of faraway lands. Finding Augustus P. Sack’s office would have been daunting, but a clerk with waxed grey moustaches escorted me, somehow exuding hauteur and deference simultaneously. A knock produced an instant reply of “Come in!” and the stranger presented me to Sack, making a prompt exit.

“Well, well, Miss Stone,” Augustus Sack purred, quitting his desk to drop a kiss above my outstretched hand. “I was very intrigued indeed by your letter.”

“Yes, I suppose you must have been.”

“Do sit down. Tea or a little wine, perhaps?”

“The latter, if you will join me.”

“Miss Stone, a beautiful woman need hardly ask that question—and may I state in addition that your present costume quite takes my breath away?”

It had not escaped my attention that Mr. Sack’s shrewd eyes had examined my attire, landing with a spark of lust upon the Punjabi diamonds.

“Governesses are expected to be such drab creatures. It is a life of terrible drudgery even when one is not living in fear of one’s employer, Mr. Sack.”

“Frightened you, did they, the scoundrels?” Mr. Sack commiserated. “Happily, you are safely under the care of John Company now, Miss Stone.”

Mr. Sack poured claret from a decanter on a carved mahogany sideboard; he was just as I remembered him, doughy and pink faced, with gleaming cheeks and fat fingers. Now I saw that his rich attire—a maroon coat on this occasion, with a yellow silk necktie—matched his office, for everywhere I looked were signs of needless expense. From ivory cigar box to silver-chased gasogene, Company executives seemed to display wealth like peacocks spreading their plumage.

He ushered me into a chair, equipped us with wine, and perched on the front of his desk. “First, Miss Stone, let me offer my solemn oath that you may tell me anything in complete confidence—I gather that you departed Highgate House in great anxiety, which I confess does not surprise me, considering the dark history of Thornfield and his shadow, Singh. If we are to be friends, we must trust each other.”