A single painting remained swaddled, leaning against the wall at the end of the row. Oliver was already moving to unwrap it – those sketches hadn’t opened any lost memories for him – and Genevieve put her hand over his.
He stilled at her touch, hunched and tense. ‘You don’t want to know?’
‘There is, perhaps, some poor behaviour from, perhaps, both of us, that we are going to see next.’
Oliver looked doubtful. ‘That your mother openly painted?’
‘That my mother’s painting may impel us to remember.’
He turned his hand so he could hold hers. ‘I don’t see that either of us could have done so very wrong by the other, Gin.’
‘I know you have a dragon inked on your chest,’ she blurted. ‘And a…ring. On your…’
She made a vague gesture with her free hand, towards her own chest. He flinched and let go of her hand, which was all the confirmation she needed, though she was seething at herself. She was a grown woman, a married matron. She could say the words. She could say it like the twins would. Oliver, we’ve fucked and we’re about to remember it.
‘I think we’ve had relations.’ She scrunched up her face, despising her mealy mouth.
‘No,’ Oliver said.
‘No?’ she said, taken aback. Oliver could be monosyllabic but that was unusually abrupt.
‘I did not. I wouldn’t have.’
‘But I…’ I remember you writhing under me. I remember you staring at me like you’ve never wanted anyone more in your life. I remember feeling like I was on fire, and not in the Art way. ‘I really think you did. We did, I mean.’
‘Even if you somehow saw my dragon…’
Genevieve turned her indignation outwards. ‘Then why do I remember sucking on your nipple ring, Oliver?’
That was better. More Locke-like, though not as much as she could have been. She could very well have been exceedingly more explicit about the parts of each other’s bodies she was increasingly sure they’d mutually sucked on.
He blushed, mortification written all over his expressive face. He had to clear his throat before he answered. ‘I can’t say. But I would never treat you with such disrespect.’
‘Or you managed to treat me like an Artisan for once instead of this endless priggish—’
‘I would not have fucked you and not married you, Genevieve!’ he said over her, almost strident.
Despite herself and every last intention, the vulgarity still made her blink. ‘Artisans—’
‘Still don’t get to fuck each other willy-nilly.’ Oliver folded his massive arms. ‘We’re still bound by what’s right. And that wouldn’t have been right.’
‘Perhaps it felt right, at the time,’ Genevieve said, quieter now, finally registering that he was truly distressed at the thought he might have engaged in such disreputable behaviour.
‘I’d’ve hoped,’ he said, and stopped.
His gaze turned plaintive; in his distress, he was losing his eloquence, but she could read the rest of his thought: I’d’ve hoped you knew me well enough by now to not assume I am dishonourable because I was born poor.
‘I am aware it would have been very unlike you, Oliver,’ she said. ‘For all we know, I fucked you and then refused the marriage. Perhaps I am the disreputable one here.’
He smiled, then, a little. ‘Miss Genevieve Locke,’ he said, with a decided effort towards lightness which nonetheless fell heavy. ‘Did you attempt to seduce a poor innocent working boy?’
She heard his qualification. He accepted that Miss Locke, the self-centred, headstrong girl she’d been back then, might have tried. He still didn’t think he’d have partaken.
Well, then. She held out her hand to him again. ‘Shall we find out how far I got, Mr Oliver?’
Their fingers tangled together, like the very night they’d met. And both their hands were warm, because they were Artisans, and they were friends, and that meant something, and she hoped to God it always would.
Still holding hands, they pulled the wrapping free together.
It was nothing but flames, Genevieve the merest suggestion at the centre, a shadow within the heart of a conflagration.
She remembered.
As it happened, Oliver visited that very afternoon, after Mother and the twins had departed on a shopping expedition for last-minute travel necessities and Father had gone to his club. It was Genevieve’s turn to host a gathering of the leaders of Cecelia’s Society faction. The next vote on some tiny arcana nailing down the structure and governance of the nascent agency would happen very soon. It was like hammering water to a tree, Mrs Murphy always said with a sigh, but each round of votes was another chance to influence its eventual shape when it finally froze into place.
Oliver, Cecelia, Mrs Murphy and Miss Adler took tea in the cosy family parlour. The women delicately enquired after the well-healed injury to her ankle, while Oliver maintained an entirely disinterested expression, giving her not a flicker of either complicity, embarrassment, or distaste. Then they hashed out their strategy for the larger Society meeting taking place in a few days.
When that was done, Genevieve raised her own suggestion. ‘I wonder if we could not have a different salutation for women Artisans. Miss or Mrs are limiting.’
‘We generally solve that by not marrying, Miss Locke,’ Mrs Murphy said, rather bewilderingly.
Genevieve managed to not look at Oliver – damn the twins – but said, ‘I don’t have that option, Mrs Murphy. Could we not propose another term? The historical mistress, perhaps? It obscures marital status.’
‘Very witchy in its connotations,’ Cecelia mused, though not disapprovingly.
‘Not to mention the modern meaning,’ added Miss Adler, and all three women looked at Genevieve with varying quantities of curiosity, while Oliver conspicuously aimed his gaze elsewhere.
‘I am aware of the modern meaning, thank you,’ Genevieve said crossly. ‘I’m not that innocent.’
They gave her the courtesy of not doing more than smiling, quickly smothered. Miss Adler said, more gently than Genevieve perhaps deserved, ‘I suggest that if you’re concerned about the loss of status to a woman Artisan when she marries, you might direct your attention to improving the plight of all women, hmm? Married or otherwise.’
Genevieve’s shoulders slumped. ‘Yes, of course. I see that.’
Cecelia gave her an encouraging pat. ‘And, if you really must, marry yourself a sympathetic fellow Artisan in the meantime. That helps. Right, William?’
There came the business of leave-taking then, the easy friendliness of the others smoothing Genevieve’s latest blunder. As they made their way out, though, she called, ‘Mr Oliver, if I might have a private word before you depart.’
She thought she’d field askance glances from the other three, but they did not seem to find it unusual, or at least did well in their pretence as they said their final farewells. Oliver remained sternly neutral.
Genevieve hesitated over the door of the little parlour before finally choosing to close it.
She turned in time to catch Oliver giving the closed door a look she might have called panic on a less phlegmatic man.
‘Artisans are allowed to be alone together,’ she said, more sharply than she’d intended.
He nodded, appropriately chastened. She sat on the divan, and gestured for him to do the same. He picked a chair about as far away as he could get.
‘I’m not going to bite, Oliver.’ Lord, she was having trouble controlling her temper, in direct proportion to the trouble controlling her nerves.
Smiling, he moved to a closer seat. ‘Miss Locke.’
She fidgeted, searching for words. But there was really only one way to say it. ‘Is it your intention to simply ignore what happened?’
‘Yes,’ Oliver said, dismayingly quickly. Her heart fell within her chest, a stone cast down, until he added, ‘Be assured there are no circumstances under which I would besmirch a lady’s reputation.’ She raised her eyebrows at him, forcing him to go on. ‘You don’t deserve to be punished for a moment of…ill-advised…’
He trailed off, apparently unsure how to finish his sentence without insulting her. Without insulting her further.
‘It was not ill-advised,’ she informed him crisply. ‘It was not impulsive. It was not imprudent, or reckless, or anything else of which you might like to accuse me.’
‘Not accusing you.’
‘Excusing me,’ she said. ‘Like I have not a thought in my head, nor the capacity to make my own decisions. I kissed you, on purpose, and I don’t want to ignore it, Oliver. So how do we proceed?’
Oliver looked down at his lap, and Genevieve made herself bite her tongue and let him think. He was a thoughtful man, of few words, and his next words were going to be the most important words she’d ever heard.
‘We do not proceed,’ he said at last. She gazed at him, unable to hide her hurt. ‘No, Miss Locke. I cannot marry a woman of your standing, I will not make a woman of your standing into a mistress, and—’ He frowned, heavily, almost scowling as he pushed out the rest. ‘And frankly, I will not make of myself an agent of your vengeance against your father.’
She leapt to her feet. ‘Is that what you think this is?’ she demanded, heedless of her raised voice.
‘I need you to think about what this is.’
‘I know what this is,’ she shot back. ‘You are acting as if it’s an inconvenience for you, when I am the one making the sacrifice.’
She regretted it the moment the words were out of her mouth. Oliver stared at her unsmilingly. ‘Miss Locke, would my family come to our wedding?’
‘If you’re implying my father is so snobbish as to refuse to allow them—’
‘They won’t,’ he said, ‘because they’ll be so intimidated by the very thought of ever moving in these circles—’
‘Then we will marry at your church. The banns are read in both parishes, it’s pure tradition that compels us to marry in mine.’
‘And the wedding breakfast in my stepmother’s parlour amid the coal smut and discarded bottles?’
‘If we must,’ she said.
‘Starting the sacrifice right from the very beginning, are we?’
She looked down, shamed. ‘I shouldn’t have called it a sacrifice.’
‘I don’t see why not,’ he said. ‘It’s nothing but the truth. You recognise that.’
‘I do not,’ she said, unable to wash the sulk from her voice. ‘We’ll conduct the wedding breakfast however it suits us to conduct it.’
‘That appears to be our wedding day planned,’ Oliver said. ‘And the marriage?’
‘We shall conduct that however it suits us, too!’
‘My family will not know how to speak to me.’ He sounded dreadfully tired. ‘We will be estranged.’
‘Why do you care?’ she snapped. ‘They treat you terribly.’
He folded his arms. ‘They’re my family.’
‘Then they will come round to the notion, as I trust mine will, too.’
‘Miss Locke—’ He stopped. ‘Genevieve.’
Again, he stopped, rubbing at his forehead, but the use of her given name had restored a modicum of optimism. Though he occasionally slipped into the nickname with which he constantly heard the twins address her, it was the first time he’d deliberately spoken her given name, a rapid step forward in intimacy that suited the topic.
Eventually he said, ‘We are too removed from each other in status.’
‘We are both Artisans, equal in status,’ Genevieve insisted. ‘The sole relevant question is whether or not you wish to marry me.’
‘The highborn lady happily marries her salt-of-the-earth gardener in stories only,’ he said. ‘Her family and his do not go on to coo over the grandchildren together.’
That was the most blatant deflection she had ever encountered. ‘Answer the question. If it’s no, it’s no, but say so, Oliver.’
He opened his mouth and she braced herself for the end of her hopes. Then he closed it again. He stared at her like a starving man stared at a feast. No. Like Dickens’s Oliver and his fellow orphans, staring at the copper, with such eager eyes, as if they could have devoured the very bricks of which it was composed.
She moved closer to him, a step or two, so she could hold out her hand, her bare fingers open to his. ‘We’re Artisans, Oliver,’ she said again. ‘We don’t have to abide by any rules but our own.’
He looked at her hand, and the fingers folded in his lap gave a responsive twitch.
The parlour door opened. Mother said, ‘Genevieve, I shall not return home to find my daughter unchaperoned behind a closed door. Mr Oliver, I certainly expected better of you.’
Oliver clenched his hand back to himself on the instant.
Perhaps if it had been her father, Genevieve might have taken the sharp reprimand with some semblance of good grace. But it was her mother, who had until now been on her side when she had claimed Artisan freedoms, keeping that metaphorical window open onto the fresh air, also metaphorical in London, that blew the stultification from her heiress role.
‘Artisans. Are. Allowed,’ she snarled, and her flames erupted out of her, and obliterated all else.
She came to herself a few moments later, collapsed onto folded knees on the rug, Oliver clasping her from behind, his wards in full effect. She twisted her fists into her puddled skirts. Her last memory was of her mother’s shocked cry and a slam of the offending door.
‘Is anyone hurt?’ she gasped.
‘No. You controlled it yourself,’ he said gently. ‘My wards were a precaution. You kept yourself under control, Gin, it’s all right, you’re all right, love.’
This last was because she had burst into tears as suddenly as she had burst into flame. He tightened his hold, shifting so that he was cradling her properly. He was pressed up against her back in the most intimate of positions, and he must have noticed it as much as she did, but he made no move away, merely held her as she cried.
After a little while, he ventured, a smile in his voice, ‘You do not like being thwarted.’
‘I am a Locke,’ Genevieve pointed out, sniffling. ‘I do have the Locke temper.’
Of course, it was perfectly well for the Lockes to indulge their tempers; Cecelia and Miss Adler, and their families, no doubt had their tempers too, and could not ever risk showing it, not to their supposed betters, their employers, their husbands, not even their persecutors.
No wonder Oliver wanted nothing to do with the selfish and self-entitled heiress who expected a marriage proposal to follow on from an indeed ill-advised kiss, and who recognised only the sacrifice on her side, and none on his.
Thus, though her heart pained her, she managed to say, ‘Let me go, Mr Oliver, before you find yourself forced to marry me, whether you desire it so or no.’
‘We are unlikely to be disturbed. I dare say the floor, if not the house, has been evacuated,’ he murmured, but he did disentangle himself, and then helped her up.
Looking up at his sombre face, she tried to accept his reasons for refusal: that she was immature and spoilt was foremost, but the mismatch of their positions loomed insurmountably large. She was as condescending about her willingness to descend as she was presumptuous about his readiness to ascend. His doubt about her motives was the single point she could justifiably refute, and she could barely summon the heart for it.
But she would not allow herself to remain daunted. As much as the flowery speeches of the most popular novels tried to flood into her head, she decided he would respond best, and perhaps only, to a simple and honest declaration.
‘I used to judge all men by Alex,’ she began, ‘and now I judge them all by you, and even Alex comes up lacking. This has nothing to do with my father and my feelings towards him. It is solely about you and my feelings towards you. Oliver, I love you. You are the best man I know. I wish for nothing more than to spend my life with you in a marriage of equals.’
Oliver was mute. She had laid out her heart to him, and he had nothing to say.
Quelling the sick roil of humiliation, Genevieve made herself face it, and him. ‘But marriage to me is not what you wish.’
He shook his head.