A Restless Truth (The Last Binding, #2)

by Freya Marske

At which point Elizabeth had called him an imposing busybody and strode past, leaving Miss Blyth making apologies in her wake. Pointless. Men would never learn to behave if you apologised at them.

“Oh my heavens,” Maud heard herself squeak, and sagged back against the door. She felt a ludicrous pang of disappointment. Firstly, that she had squeaked. Secondly, that she hadn’t seized the opportunity to say Fuck. She’d never been game enough on any lesser occasion, and surely this was the most obscenity-deserving situation she would ever find herself in.

The more colourful facts boiled down to this: Lord Hawthorn, in Edwin’s firm opinion, was an arrogant, insulting, self-absorbed bastard. Robin, who’d only met the man once, had agreed with this assessment. “Though at least,” he’d added, “he’s the kind of bastard who wears it on his sleeve.” The Blyth siblings had exchanged a look of perfect understanding. Honest unpleasantness was to be chosen, every time, over hypocrites and liars.

“Why do you insist on being so outrageous? What do you possibly have to gain, apart from making us all a laughingstock and yourself a pariah?” Because if I try hard enough, Clarence, you might not propose to me at all. She didn’t say it. It was only a quarter of the truth; and besides, he’d never understand. He wasn’t born a girl, let alone one of five. He’d never grown out of childhood feeling himself get taller and taller as the life expected of him grew smaller and smaller, until he could barely breathe for the confines of it.

“Oh, you—” Maud looked as though she was contemplating her threat to tackle Hawthorn around the knees. “Even without Violet’s magic, you have all the advantages of rank and wealth. Using it to trample all over human dignity, against a person’s will, is not what power is for.” “It’s the only thing power is for.” It was Ross who’d spoken. The young man climbed to his feet. “If you think otherwise, you’re a fool. Even without—sodding magic”—with a whirl of his index finger—“that’s the way the world works. Powerful people are out for more power. And they don’t care who they tread on, on the way.”

Violet bit her tongue on telling him that he exuded an aura of being so uninteresting that it was bizarre to think of him having interests.

“A person is an act, Maud. A person is a theatre. You change the set dressing depending on the season. The real parts are the parts that aren’t meant to be seen.”

“Perhaps I did shove myself in where it wasn’t my business, wasn’t my fight, because my parents wouldn’t lift a finger for other people. Oh, they were great philanthropists. But they wouldn’t give a beggar on the street a single penny if nobody was around to see them do it.” “And you would,” said Violet. Of course Maud would. She’d probably start a petition on the spot for more shelter houses too. “Mrs. Sinclair says you look at the world and decide you can live with it or decide you can’t. And if you can’t, you decide what you’re prepared to do about it.”

“Most men stop looking closely when you start being the person they expect you to be.”

Violet might wear her sparkling recklessness well, but beneath it she was careful, careful, careful. Maud was not; but she would learn to be. She would choose to be, as she chose every day to be generous and kind and all the other things that defied the coiled snake of her inherited nature.

“No, I don’t. But if I have to create myself every day, with every choice I make, then I want to make the choices I won’t regret when I look back on my life at its end.”