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It should have ended with that letter, and indeed would have done if he had been halfway reasonable. But among all the acts of which Rob had rightly and wrongly been accused, nobody had ever accused him of making reasonable choices in matters of the heart.
P.S. I refuse to believe that you are a woman. There is something inexpressibly masculine about expecting to be believed.
Surely, you will protest that I ought to keep your secret out of the goodness of my heart; the trouble is that my heart isn’t in the least good. I am, to the core, a mercenary creature.
what kind of coward must you be to fear their anger when the alternative is their grief, not to mention your own?
Ill-tempered women of middling looks seldom are the recipients of tender feelings; this is not a complaint, as my experience with men is such that I’d be perfectly happy to live out the rest of my days inspiring no feelings whatsoever, tender or otherwise, in any member of that sex.
“Dear Sir, Under ordinary circumstances you might congratulate yourself on having achieved the rank of my chief enemy, but as things stand, you’re only third on the list, quite possibly lower if we consider the rightful claims of my eldest brother and several members of Parliament.”
The man was still breathing, but he was also still bleeding, and as the carriage raced along the London road, he was doing rather more of the latter and less of the former.
“You have been busy,” he murmured, thinking of what a waste it was that in all the thousands of love poems written across the ages, nobody had ever thought to catalogue their beloved’s proficiency in crime.
She sniffed and carried on following him through a neighborhood that seemed to consist entirely of taverns, graveyards, and still more churches.
It was no good. In her mind, she would have to think of him as Rob, and she held him fully responsible for not being a person one could think of in a sensible way.
Now he was increasingly drawn to the charms of a soft mattress and clean sheets, and wasn’t that a depressing thought.
“I’ve never heard of it,” she said, dismissing rhyme, merchants, and possibly all of East London.
What a trick it was to be able to say I beg your pardon in a way that meant fuck off and die, and to look serene and saintly while saying it.
The fact that she could manage irritation at a time when most people would have drowned in panic was a testament to her backbone. And the fact that Rob was ready to rhapsodize over such a thing as backbone was a testament to his own besottedness. He was fully disgusted with himself.
Rob was right that she needed to rest, but she didn’t like how he seemed to anticipate her needs and then act on them. She was dimly aware that what she was objecting to was simply basic consideration, but it had been a long day. It had been a long year, during which one of the few lessons she had learned was never to let anyone know that you needed anything. Need was only weakness by another name. And if someone could give you what you needed, they could just as easily take it away.
“You are ridiculous. I let my life get thrown into an uproar by a ridiculous man. How lowering. Villains are supposed to be serious.” “I, a villain?” He put his hand to his heart. “You wound me.” “I wish I wounded you,” she grumbled.
She had a dimple in her cheek and Rob smiled at her like she was a butter pudding just for him. Marian disliked her on principle.
Whenever she thought the conversation was about to careen into one of the many prickly briar patches that littered her mind, it instead changed course. And that, she was forced to acknowledge, was because Rob made it change course. This meant that he was likely learning the entire landscape of her being, just by feeling out the brambles and thorns.
“Marian,” he said, a horrible knowing quality to his voice, “are you jealous?” “Ha! What on earth could I be jealous of? I don’t want you to flirt with me.” “I flirt with you incessantly.” “You flirt with old ladies and inanimate objects.”
He needed to put that smile away before he did some mischief with it.
she said lightly, in the way people did when the truth couldn’t be spoken aloud, so an unconvincing lie was a serviceable second best.
“Enjoy your kittens,” she called over her shoulder as she strode across the innyard. “And make sure that hoof is tended to.” She spoke both parts of that sentence with an equal degree of brisk authority, as if everything from Rob’s amusements to the horse’s welfare fell under the shelter of her command.
So far, he had avoided touching her unnecessarily, primarily because not everyone found touch comforting, but also he was afraid that all it would take would be a squeeze of her fingers and he’d tumble from admiring her to adoring her, or from adoring her to whatever was even worse. But by now he knew that if she didn’t want him to touch her, she’d move her hand away, and if he didn’t want to fall in love with her, he was already fucked.
She was right, of course, but she had never seen the point of arguing with men when they got emotional.
“In the winter, you can imagine that the land could become anything. In the summer, all that’s left is for winter to come.” Rob had never heard anyone express anything of the sort and didn’t know what to say, or even to think, beyond reflecting that if anyone were to enjoy an uninterrupted view of mud and dirt it would have to be Marian.
“A grand lady. A fine figure of a woman.” That wouldn’t be how Rob would describe Marian, but he supposed it wasn’t untrue, if one’s ideal of womanhood extended to scrappy termagants with acid tongues, which Rob’s admittedly did.
She moved so slowly and deliberately it was as if she were inventing the concept of kissing right there on the spot, as precisely as if she were counting change in the marketplace.
He wore rainwater and mud the way other men wore silk coats,
And now he was looking at her as if she were a cake, if cakes were also religious icons, and she was possessed of a mortifying certainty that she was looking at him in precisely the same deranged manner.
“It would mean days in a carriage with a fractious infant. She’s exceptionally fussy and belligerent,” Marian said, a little proudly. “I’m accustomed to traveling with fussy and belligerent companions,” he said softly, too affectionately for Marian to take offense.
He was reckless in his kindness, extravagant to the point of decadence.
“Unless you’d prefer that I stay in London. I don’t want to be a bother.” “Ha! You long to be a bother. You would not, however, succeed in this instance.”
She wanted to kiss him—she wanted to check him for frostbite—she wanted to yell at him for traveling in dangerous weather and for all the other risks he had ever taken in his life.
She had spent a long time—months, the better part of a year—trying very hard not to have any feelings at all, except for anger, which was highly motivating, after all. And now that she no longer had a reason to be so ruthless with herself, all her emotions came rushing back uncomfortably, like sensation returning to a limb.
That was always the trouble, wasn’t it? The act of confession took private shame and guilt and made them irrevocable. Once one gave voice to one’s more sordid truths, there was no ignoring them anymore. Perhaps that was why the Catholics thought it was a sacrament; perhaps it really was a sacred mystery, or perhaps it was just the horror of having one’s worst parts exposed.
But when she looked at him, what she felt wasn’t attraction. Or it wasn’t only that. It was a bright spark, something warm and glowing that took up residency in her chest and refused to budge. It was something like contentment, only sharp and with teeth.
She didn’t know if, after everything, she was capable of falling in love, or indeed if she ever had been, but she knew she could lose things, and she didn’t want to lose him.
There were too many parts of her, and none of them good—daughter to a man who didn’t know her, mother to a child she barely knew, wife to the man she had killed, sister to a man she counted as an enemy. She knew there was more to her than that, that she was more than the sum of those roles, but she couldn’t put a name to any of those other parts, so it was hard to believe that they counted for much.
“No, love. When there were people who wanted to hurt us, I dealt with it. And one thing I learned to a certainty is that when you’re busy trying not to starve or freeze, there are plenty of people who want to hurt you in all kinds of interesting ways.”
In his arms she felt as sharp as a knife and as sure as a promise and he never wanted to take his hands off her.
God help him, he loved that she could say the most innocuous phrase in a way that sounded like the type of insult that usually preceded street brawls.
“Oh, for Christ’s sake, Marian. If you acted sweet, I’d think you were a changeling. I’d call for the doctor. I love every prickly, sour, difficult inch of you.”
“I wish I could stay near you. I wish I could eat at your table and sleep in your bed, or you in mine. I wish there were even a half measure that I could think of. I suppose I could dress in my best coat and call on you and perhaps drink tea in your parlor once a fortnight.”
Even though they had spent the entire day side by side, Rob somehow missed Marian anyway. He missed her preemptively; he regretted any future where he couldn’t simply turn his head and see her.
He didn’t conceal his fondness, whether it was for someone he had just met or for someone he had known his whole life. And he didn’t try to hold it back, either. His friendship was like a creeping ivy—all one had to do was let it be, and it covered the whole barn.
all I can think of is that I miss you. It’s hardly a surprise; I’ve been dreading missing you for days now, but the reality exceeds the anticipation.
I’d also understand if you can’t get away from whatever it is that people like you do—and I don’t even mean that in an insulting way, only that it kills me not to be able to picture you, not to know what you’re about, after having been in your pocket for so long. I want nothing more than to be in your pocket, Marian. I would alter my life in any way you required and that thought terrifies me.
indeed the idea of cramming an elderly earl, a highwayman, a baby, the bigamous wife of a duke, and whatever on earth Percy considered himself these days under one roof was too farcical for Marian to take seriously.
He wanted to ask her to repeat that, to demand if she meant it, to ask for it in writing. But Marian never said anything she didn’t mean. If she said she loved him, she loved him. She had once said that she didn’t love people the way he did, whatever that meant. Nothing could have mattered less; if Marian loved him, then that was precisely the sort of love he wanted.
It wasn’t quite a lie, because if she didn’t want to marry him, then he wouldn’t bother her with the notion. If she did, he’d marry her immediately. He’d devise different pseudonyms in order to marry her more than once in a succession of churches. He’d convert to different religions and travel to foreign lands to marry her in every way imaginable.
