AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“Thirty entire minutes?” Miranda said. “Goodness. I’m so glad you’ve ceased to be so self-indulgent.” She looked at Dalrymple. “He’s down to twenty now.”
Dalrymple was just beginning to warm to his subject. “You have no idea how irritating it was. I would repose the greatest confidences in him. He’d listen intently, kindly even—up until the minute he’d interrupt me mid-sentence to inform me that we’d reached our sentimentality quota for the day, and it was back to Virgil with us.”
Miranda let out a delighted laugh.
“It’s not the least bit amusing,” Dalrymple said. “I didn’t have a sentimentality quota, and I resented being subject to his. In any event, he passed me up in Latin in a few months, and had mastered Greek entirely by the end of the year. So maybe it had some utility.”
“Of course it did,” Smite put in. “My studies benefited, and I limited my indulgence in sentimentality, which is a particularly useless waste of time.”
Miranda laughed. “I like you better and better the more I learn of you,” she said to Smite. “If I could have subjected some of the actresses in my father’s troupe to a sentimentality quota, oh, how easy things would have been.”
That was not how things were supposed to be. After what had been said this evening, she was supposed to shrink from him. Instead, there was a playful lilt to her words, but no smile lingering on her face. He didn’t even need to search his memory to understand. After all, it wasn’t an actress’s temper that came to mind. It was her father who’d needed to limit his sentiment.
She sighed in memory, and Smite reached out and took her hand in his.
“There,” Dalrymple said, pointing. “What’s that? That’s sentiment. I can’t believe I’m seeing this.”
Smite looked at her hand, intertwined with his. He turned it in his grip. “I have no idea what you’re speaking of.”
“Hush,” Miranda said to Dalrymple. “I’ve found that if you don’t speak of them, he doesn’t count gestures against the quota.”
Smite met her eyes. Quite deliberately, he folded his other hand about hers. “You’ve both got it entirely wrong,” he said. “The sentimentality quota only forbids the tired relation of mawkish particulars. It has never forbidden action. That is the point of it: to channel what would otherwise be endless yammering into firm resolve.”
“Resolve,” Miranda said thoughtfully. “Is that what you’re calling that particular firmness?”
Dalrymple was overtaken by a coughing fit. When he recovered, he said, “I see I’m about to become extraneous.”
“Indeed,” Smite agreed. “Shall I show you out?”
Dalrymple smiled. “Don’t be so eager, Turner.” But this time, there was no insult in his words.
“I DON’T BELIEVE IN doubts.”
Miranda pulled up her knees beside her on the bed. Richard Dalrymple had left hours before; Smite stood at the window looking out over the city. He’d said very little, but by the twitch of his jaw, he seemed at war with himself.
“Everything fits in its place,” he said to the window. “Things are right or they are wrong; and even when matters are confused, there is a thread I can tug on to unravel the entire mess.”
He was arguing with himself, not with her.
Miranda weighed responses and fingered the dark rock weighing down her pocket. “Not everything is courtroom-simple,” she finally said. “Sometimes you tangle yourself. Sometimes you don’t even know you’ve done it until it’s too late. At that point, yanking strings only serves to tighten the noose.”
She could feel the wax against her fingers.
He turned back to her, a quizzical expression on his face. “The noose?”
“The knots,” she amended.
He turned away, not noticing her own confusion. “But if I have to imagine how Richard Dalrymple felt all those years, must I also think like a drunkard? A murderer? Am I supposed to find compassion in me for every benighted criminal?”
She was marked as one herself. She’d never stolen, never killed anyone. She’d never done anything truly criminal at the Patron’s behest. Still, she didn’t think he’d muster up any great respect for her past life.
But he shook his head, rejecting her argument before she could form it. “No,” he said. “That would make a hash of morality. We’d excuse murder and mayhem. There must be a limit.”
“You are very good at drawing limits,” Miranda said.
He must have caught that hint of bitterness in her tone because he stopped mid-pace and cocked his head. “What is it?”
“Nothing.”
“It’s not nothing.”
She let out a breath. “Only this, then. One day I’ll be wrong. I don’t know when it will be. But it will happen. And when it does, I don’t think you’ll have any warmth for me.”
He didn’t contradict her. She’d been half hoping for that.
“Miranda Darling,” he said. The words came out slowly.
“Is that Miranda, comma, darling, or—”
“Miranda Darling,” he repeated without clarification, “I wish I could tell you otherwise. But I am not a warm person. I’m not the sort who dithers.”
“If it were me, wouldn’t you dither just a little bit?”
He didn’t even have to think. “No.” But then he laid his hand on her cheek. “I don’t dither for myself, if it makes you feel any better.”
“Not even for Richard Dalrymple?”
He gave her a grim smile. “You may not believe this, but we were once good friends. I met him when I first came to Eton, which was not the easiest time in my life.”
“Jonas didn’t much like Eton, either,” Miranda offered.
Smite paused. “Actually,” he continued in more normal tones, “that was precisely the problem. Eton was the easiest time in my life. I had survived my mother’s madness. From there, I’d run to the streets of Bristol. Then my eldest brother came home, fabulously wealthy, and all at once, instead of scraping for bread and fighting for my younger brother’s virtue, my challenges were reduced to the conjugation of verbs. I had been too busy surviving to actually take notice of how horrid things were. At Eton, it all caught up with me. I...” He took a deep breath, looked away from Miranda. “I had nightmares. Horrible nightmares. And inexplicable fits of weeping. It was awful.”
“It couldn’t have been as bad as all that.”
He exhaled. “It was,” he said bluntly. “Nobody needed me for anything any longer, and so I fell apart. That’s when I met Dalrymple. He had just discovered that he was...different. He needed someone to lean on. So I came up with a sentimentality quota. There isn’t any need for doubt. There isn’t any room for dithering. I don’t like this fussing about.”
She could think of a hundred responses to that. But he was arguing with himself more effectively than she ever could.
“For one second, tonight,” he said, “I saw how things must have seemed to him. He wasn’t right. He was completely wrong. There was no excuse for the things he did…” Smite sighed, staring off into the distance. “No. Enough with this dithering. I’m not doubting; I’m being too kind to myself. He would not have done those things if I’d had an ounce of compassion for his situation.” He grimaced. “I knew he thought I’d tell. I didn’t bother to correct him.”
“Are you sorry I asked him back here?” Miranda asked.
He didn’t answer that. He simply turned from the window to look at her. “Miranda Darling,” he said. And then he crossed the room and sat beside her.
There had been a comma-like pause between Miranda and Darling—the closest he ever came to an endearment. She wasn’t sure why a hint of bittersweet invaded his voice at that, why his breath grew just a little ragged. She only knew that he pulled her close, that she felt the whisper of warm air against her forehead.
He held her for a few moments longer, his arms tight bands around her. And then he disengaged, turning from her.
She didn’t know what men typically did w
ith their mistresses, but she wanted to hold him longer. To feel the warmth of him next to her throughout the night. She didn’t want him going home alone to a cold bed.
But he never stayed.
“Smite,” she said softly. She reached for his hand. The grip of her fingers about his was all the entreaty she dared to make.
His other hand found hers. He squeezed her fingers—not hard, but just enough to communicate. When he let go and moved away, it was all the answer she needed.
No.
Miranda wasn’t foolish. She had more of him than any woman had in the past. Quite possibly more than any woman ever would. He gave a part of himself over to her that he didn’t show to anyone else, and she treasured it. Nonetheless, it hurt to have so little. A few hours every day; not even a night’s worth. It was foolish to want more when he’d told her that was all he could give.
He’d also told her he would have her for a month. The days were slipping past too quickly. What would happen when he came to the end of her? Perhaps that month he’d allotted had not been some initial period to determine if they’d suit. Maybe he’d simply given himself a Miranda quota. When he came to the end of those days, would he cut her off as ruthlessly as he cut off all other sentiment?
No use getting exercised over something that hadn’t yet happened. She stared at his silhouette.
No, she vowed. He wouldn’t set her aside so easily. She wouldn’t let him.
Chapter Fifteen
