Portrait of a Scotsman by Evie Dunmore

Chapter 20

Judging by his wife’s blank expression, she hadn’t had a clue. Ah well. He supposed if she had married him knowing he was illegitimate, she would in time come to terms with this, too.

“You said you worked for an antiques dealer near Leicester Square,” she said, sounding shaken. “And that your mother was employed as a maid in a manor.”

“I said I was thirteen when I took up apprenticeship in the shop. I lived on the street for nearly a year before that. I had come down to London from Inveraray when I was twelve.”

“The street,” Harriet whispered. “You were alone in London—what of your parents?”

“Both dead at the time,” Lucian said, and she flinched at his harsh tone.

She took her napkin from her lap, folded it into a sharp triangle, and put it aside on the table.

“Please, do tell,” she said.

“My mother was from the mining community,” he said. “She had a rare flight of fancy and thought to better herself by taking a position at the manor. Well, she soon returned to the pits, but in the family way.” He realized his hands were in fists, and he could relax them only slowly. “After she was gone, I stayed with her husband until the man who had sired me died. A cousin of his took over his estate; he was of the zealously religious sort and made the rounds through the county to collect all his cousin’s bastards, to shorten his time in purgatory, I reckon. He meant to send us all to a religious boarding school in Kensington.”

Harriet’s eyes were huge. He wondered what possessed him to speak of these things. The coal-infused air, the boy Ruri spilling the turnips, her soft mouth beneath his, salty with tears his rudeness had caused. A potent mix, enough to make a man talk about himself.

“I thought your stepfather had given you his name,” she said. “Why would they care to take you from him?”

“They knew who I really was. Everyone did. My mother had worked at the manor until her condition became impossible to hide; she had stayed for the richer food and lighter work, you see, for as long as she could. They knew, and they came for me.”

He remembered the day clearly. The weather had been cold and windy, properly dreich, and still the mountain slopes had glowed with the fiery red colors of mid-autumn. He had just been brawling with a lad who had tried to settle some disagreement by calling him a bastard; hence the most vicious punches had been thrown until someone had separated them—a regular occurrence in that community, where they had had to settle after the mine accident. The men had arrived on mud-splattered horses and had sneered down at him from their saddles while his stepfather had held him before them by the scruff of his neck. His clothes had been dirty and his nose had still been clotted with blood. “You’re certain that’s him?” one of them had asked, and the other one had laughed.

“Of course. Same face as his old man and same temper, too, by the looks of it.”

He had been outraged to learn that he took after a man he had never met but loathed all the same. Meanwhile, his stepfather wasn’t objecting to him being taken but to him not getting adequate compensation. “Look at him,” he had said to the men in his nasal voice, “look how strong he is for his age. Can’t do without his wages.”

When the haggling had been done, Lucian had resisted. He had indeed been strong for his age, and he had fought like a cornered animal, inflicting bruises and kicking at soft parts with good aim until his grandmother had emerged from the cottage and trudged through the mud to reach him. She had taken him back to the kitchen and broken his defenses in ways violence never could. There was nothing for him here, she had said. Everyone in the new place knew he was a bastard and would never let him forget it. Besides, the miners died young, and in life they had nothing but the mine and their pride. His mother had tried, but being a woman had betrayed her—but he, he had a chance; if he went to London and studied, he could have better things. He had fallen to the floor and put his head on her knee and sobbed, not wanting to leave her. Then you come back for me, she had told him and stroked his hair, you come back a fine man. She had given him his grandfather’s sgian dubh and the love spoon he was to gift Harriet many years later, and sent him on his way.

He became aware of Harriet’s probing gaze and of the long pause he had allowed to stretch between them. “They came for me,” he repeated. “And I went with them.”

“I see,” she said. “But if you had a home in Kensington, why would you live … on the streets?” She whispered this, as though it were literally an unspeakable horror.

“Ah well,” he said. “The school’s headmaster wasn’t a good man.”

After barely a week of classes, the rotter had tried to put his hand between Lucian’s legs after a caning, and Lucian—prepared by the hints of the other boys—had grabbed the heavy paperweight off the desk and put it to the man’s head. He had never seen so much blood pouring out of a human, and after tiptoeing to the dorm to snatch his belongings, he had run all the way to the docklands in East London, uncertain whether he had committed homicide. Aoife had found him a few days later, starved and hiding in a corner. It was the day he had named himself Luke Blackstone and Lucian Stewart had joined the mass of missing children.

“The street didn’t suit me, either,” he said.

“Unsurprisingly, I would think,” Harriet said faintly.

“There’s hierarchies, and if you want shelter, people force you to join this group or that,” he explained. “Life is cheap there, and someone always has trouble with someone else and makes you stand with them even if you’re not interested in the trouble. Half the time, it’s stupid trouble.” The same held for more elevated underworld activities, which was why he had withdrawn from those, too, many years later, one by one while he still could without too great a cost. “I used to be good at working with wood,” he told Harriet, “doing carvings and such, so when I saw the sign in the antiques shop window, I tidied myself up and applied.”

He had risked the jail by stealing a pristine shirt and cravat off a washing line to present himself to Mr. Graham, the antiques dealer and owner of the shop. Sometimes Lucian wondered what his old mentor would say were he alive to learn that his bit of trust in the scruffy boy had been a cornerstone of said boy’s ascent to the top of London ….

“Since this seems to be the hour of truth,” Harriet said, “who was the woman in the drawing room?”

Her lips were pale, but there was unexpected steel in her gaze.

“Aoife Byrne,” he said easily, thinking, Of all the things she could have asked. “We met on the street. She set my nose when it was cracked. And she saved my hide several times while we were both homeless urchins.” After which she had soon become a ringleader in the smuggling operations at London Port, but that wasn’t for Harriet to know.

“You are not urchins now,” his wife remarked. “Yet still acquainted.”

So she had done away with the polite stance of not acknowledging her husband’s liaisons. Only here her efforts were wasted; Aoife would never bed a man, and since she had found her Susan, not even other women, but that, too, was not for Harriet to know, at least not from his mouth.

“I gave you my word that I wouldn’t take a lover,” he said instead.

Harriet promptly made a bored face, as if she couldn’t care less. Fickle creature. “Miss Byrne shares your interests,” he said. “She’s often up at the Royal Academy or with the Decadents, sitting for paintings. She enjoys the opera.”

“How thrilling,” Hattie murmured. Her shoulders were drooping and shadows had appeared beneath her eyes from nowhere, and his fingers flexed on instinct, to take her somewhere where she could rest. But he’d be damned before he lost his composure and fell on her again. The memory of their kiss promptly seared through him. He tried to block the phantom feel of her warm, wet mouth and eager tongue.

“Would you like a bath?” he said, and when her gaze flickered to him uncertainly, “I have to deal with some business affairs—I’ll do it here.”

She hesitated. “You would work here—in the dining area?”

“Has anything been done by protocol lately?”

A tired smile tugged at her mouth. “No,” she said. “I do love a bath.” He rose when she did, but she shook her head. “Please, stay. I should like to go alone.”

He was aware his gaze was following her swaying skirts like a hungry dog going after a bone, and he didn’t like it. It felt as though she had a part of him on a leash. I don’t know how to do this right. The tops of his ears felt warm when he recalled his heated words earlier. He couldn’t remember the last time he had admitted cluelessness to another person. First, there had never been a need for it—as Aoife had pointed out, there was no one around for him; second, he was hardly ever clueless. And his men of business didn’t cry, no matter what he said; all they wanted from him at the end of the day was profit. What did Harriet want from him?

He ordered another ale to his booth and assessed his financial due diligence reports. It demanded near inhumane discipline. The moment he put the pen aside, she invaded his mind again. How at ease she had looked among the children. Her keen interest in … everything. Her tears. Her soft, soft kisses. He neatly stacked his documents as restlessness took hold of him. She was sweet. Genuinely sweet and unassuming. Spoiled and ignorant, too, but her cheerful disposition was rooted in something deeper; there’d be some whimsy in her even had she been raised in a beggar’s hovel. It was reckless to be this way, in a world such as this; she could be hurt in all sorts of ways. He felt a knot in his stomach as a cold sensation seeped beneath his skin. He hadn’t felt moved to keep a particular woman safe from … everything … in over ten years. Now the long-buried instinct rattled its cage at the bottom of his soul. Unless he kept it buried, it might swell with the force of a tidal wave and take the ground from under his feet.

Harriet was left to soak undisturbed in the metal tub next to the fire for a long while, but she was barely conscious of the soothing heat of the heather-scented water. Her mind was too deeply preoccupied with Lucian’s revelations.

When he finally returned to their room, her hair was nearly dry again and she was huddled in the armchair, hugging her knees against her chest beneath a double layer of tartan blankets. He washed behind the curtain in the side room, cursing softly as he maneuvered in the small space, and finally he emerged wearing a soft black cashmere robe that outlined his strong shoulders to great effect. She studied him as he sorted his papers on the table, trying to superimpose all she now knew over the man she had thought he was.

“Is that what you do?” she said. “Acquiring ailing mines to improve the communities?”

He glanced up. “When I can, yes.”

“I thought the mining commission takes care of such matters.”

“It should. It does. But laws are only ever as good as the will to enforce them.”

“What about the miners’ unions?”

A sardonic glimmer lit his eyes. “Tell me—who still owns the mines in Britain, the slate mines, the coal mines? Or who steers the consortia that own them? The unions?”

“No,” she said reluctantly. “Dukes and earls and wealthy men of business.”

“That’s right.”

“They are not above the law.”

He gave her an incredulous look. “When have you last heard of an earl brought to justice for his crimes against the working classes?”

She touched her aching temples. “I haven’t.”

“Drummuir here’s been owned by Rutland,” he said. “It’s why the conditions are so dire.”

This shocked her a little. “I did not know,” she said.

“He cooked the books, too,” Lucians said. “Consequently, the consortium buying Drummuir formed the wrong conclusions from their due diligence. When they noticed this mine will yield only low profits even after the necessary investments, they sold it to me at a loss. Will there be consequences for Rutland? Doubtful.”

“The lords you have ruined,” she said slowly. “You did not choose them at random, did you?”

“No.”

Gooseflesh spread down her legs. She hugged her knees more tightly. “You are taking the law into your own hands, one reprehensible nobleman at a time?”

He cocked his head. “You disapprove.”

“Tell me,” she said, “have I married an anarchist?”

“Hell, no.”

“Well, that’s a relief,” she said, and then, suspiciously, “Why aren’t you?”

His mouth twisted derisively. “You know what anarchists do?”

“Contemplate the demise of the monarchy?”

“They sit around all day and talk a whole lot,” he said. “And under this pretense of avoiding authority by talking a lot about everyone’s ideas—when in the end, there’s always a leader and group coercion, anyway—they achieve bloody little.”

“Oh.”

“I don’t care much for authority,” he said. “So I won’t suffer inefficient authority exerted by hypocritical chatterboxes.”

“Understood,” she soothed. “Are you a communist, then?”

He shook his head. “Though I support a few financially—William Morris, for example.”

“The William Morris?” she asked, amazed. “The wallpaper designer?”

“Yes.”

“I had no idea.”

“Now you know.”

“Yes,” she said, “you’re a socialist.”

He gave a shrug. “I want to turn people in power; I care little about how.”

“Turning people in power,” she murmured. “I suppose that is my role, then. Or rather, my father’s.”

He gave a nod.

She felt numb. “I’ll have you know that my father hardly has a magic wand to wave,” she said. “And he is bound by the law, too.”

He leaned back against the table and crossed his arms over his chest. “Do you deny that he has influence? Could open doors?”

She put up her chin. “Why not begin bettering the world by giving away your vast wealth to those in need?”

Lucian made a contemptuous sound. “Charity? No. I want lasting change. Remember the trouble of raising wages to a living wage as a single entrepreneur? I want a restructuring of government expenditure. A systemic redistribution of wealth—that is what I want.”

“Right.”

He was right fired up. “Take a guess how much of public spending is allocated to the British military every year.”

She gave a tired shrug. “Twenty percent?”

“Thirty,” he said, “thirty percent of central public spending for infernal imperial wars. On the other hand, nothing for health or education, not a shilling. Which very nicely maintains the oversupply of poor, uneducated lads to the front lines and mining pits. There’s more dignity in bullets and rocks than in begging for alms in a rotten London ally.”

He sounds like Lucie, she thought as she watched the room’s shadows play over his hard face; the strength of conviction, the focus, were the same.

“What do you propose?” she asked softly.

He uncrossed his arms. “We’ll never see money diverted from the imperialists,” he said. “They’d rather devour the world than feed the people of Britain. I’m looking at the revenue side and currently the most effective lever is to increase the income tax.”

“I had to study Gladstone’s voting records for my suffrage work,” she said. “I’m fairly certain that for the last twenty years he continually advocated for abolishing the income tax altogether.”

“Och, but he never did, because it’s baseless pandering,” said Lucian. He was pacing in front of the table now in a rare agitation. “The budget relies excessively on customs and excise duty when trade conditions are continually worsening, and American imports are able to undercut British products at every turn.”

“Sounds logical,” she allowed. “Still implausible.”

“Gladstone knows there’s no alternative,” he said. “Income tax is applied at a rate of less than one percent, and most citizens are exempt—it must be increased and expanded, also to include corporate profits.”

She snorted at the absurdity. “A corporate tax?”

“One day,” he said. “You’ll see.”

It struck her then that she had been tricked into a marriage for the purpose of British fiscal reform. She narrowed her eyes at him. “Why can’t you buy members of Parliament to do your bidding, like a regular industrialist?” she demanded. “Or form an opposition party? Why must you become one of them?”

He smirked. “Trust me, these strategies aren’t mutually exclusive. But the strongest fortresses don’t fall under siege. They need to be hollowed out from the inside.”

“And once the walls fall, you will give away your excess wealth?” Her tone was sweet.

“No,” he said, grimly.

“Still not?”

“A wealthy man has the ear of powerful men; a poorer one doesn’t. We only hear of a lowly worker if he dies some violent death and is put on his company’s record, or if a journalist cares to make him a headline for a day—either way a poor man is usually heard louder in death than in life.”

“How convenient for you.”

He came to an abrupt stop and glared. “I’ll never go back to the pits,” he said, and pointed at her. “I’ll never again degrade myself for food; I’ll never again be held in the same regard as a sewer rat.”

“All right,” she said soothingly. “All right.”

He glanced away, a little shaken, presumably at having lost his composure, at having revealed some of the shame in his past. Her heart, tired and bruised as it was, went out to him then, because that was what it did: it flung itself toward the hurt of other people, not caring whether it was deserved.

“I was provoking you,” she said. “I know the difference between change and charity well from the suffrage movement. Our leader, Millicent Fawcett, is a socialist.”

He pondered it for a moment. “I suppose there’s much in common,” he then said.

“Injustice is injustice,” she replied. “It occurs to me that it might be inconsistent to acknowledge merely the injustices that suit.”

Their gazes held across the room, and an understanding passed between them that made her defenses rise once more, to shut him out.

“My father sacrificed me for his business interests before,” Harriet said. “What makes you think he’ll support your politics when it begins to hurt his pockets?”

He came to her with heavy steps. He looked at her upturned face with eyes as deep as the dark night outside the window, then he slowly went down on one knee. “Will you ever stop being angry with me, you think?”

She contemplated him, on his knee on the floor. “I cannot say,” she finally said. “It is certainly a bit less ghastly to have been used for good, a greater cause than just for your individual gain.”

Lucian winced.

“But it’s also more tragic,” she continued, trying to match her words exactly to her thoughts for once. “I would have greatly enjoyed joining forces with my husband for a just cause. But the manner in which our betrothal came to pass … your callousness and deceit …” She shook her head. “For all your talk of justice, you have used me badly.”

The corner of his mouth curled in a humorless smile. “Would you have accepted me,” he asked, “had I wooed you the normal way?”

She knew the truth to that. “No,” she muttered. “Nor would my father.”

His expression remained unchanged; he had expected this. “I never planned on forcing your hand in the manner our kiss in the gallery forced it,” he said.

Perhaps unwisely, she believed him. “Your actions still describe a devious man,” she said. “How can I possibly trust you now?” Her pulse sped up again. He had ruined something that could have been a dream come true. “Yes, I am angry,” she said thickly. “And I’m not certain how to make it stop.”

He shifted slightly as though he had noticed the worn floorboards pressing into his knee, but his gaze never left her face. “For what it’s worth, I respect that,” he said. “I respect your anger.”

“Well, I think an annulment would put a swift end to all the angriness.”

He was quiet for a long moment.

“Could we discuss that after we return to London?” he then said, his voice surprisingly tired. She felt the same fatigue, deep in her bones.

She sighed. “Very well.” She rested her forehead on her knees, overstimulated and exhausted.

“Allow me to carry you to the bed,” she heard him say after a pause.

She raised her head warily.

“I’ll not bother you with my attentions,” he said, sounding sarcastic, but the expression in his eyes was sincere.

“I’m so tired,” she murmured. “Being petty is surprisingly taxing—I’ve tried my utmost in the past few days, but I don’t think it suits me much.”

“Believe me, you were a natural.”

She avoided looking at his face when he scooped her up. Secretly, she marveled at how effortlessly he carried her, and why a deep, instinctual part of her would be so at ease in his arms.