29

Sir Kingsford had also replied. With his simple, awkward generosity, he gave Genevieve back the Locke townhouse.

It was always yours, he wrote.

Genevieve passed this silently to Oliver and took herself to bed for the afternoon before she broke down into tears of gratitude and relief in front of the others. She felt drained – was, in fact, drained – and aching all over, pain radiating from her lower back down both legs and from the back of her skull into both temples and neck.

She was, typical of the Artisan constitution, much improved when she awoke, and came downstairs to find none of the others about but a hearty meal of thick stew on offer in recompense. Bridget had done what Genevieve so desperately wanted to do, and called in her mother. This august personage had taken over the kitchen with ruthless efficiency, and emerged from her domain, iron grey hair tucked neatly under her mop cap, to meet the lady of the house and be sure she ate.

This proved slightly difficult, since the other occupants of the household had also been busy that afternoon. Fletcher had found definitive records in the opened safe, and so could aver that the house and carriage were on lease contracts, but the furniture was owned. And so he and Cecelia had sent every piece they reasonably could to consignment while Oliver and Mass brought all of Genevieve’s mother’s furniture out of storage and helped Bridget beat the dust out of every cushion and drape before bringing it inside.

Genevieve looked about at the miracle they’d wrought and had to fight not to cry for the third time in one day.

Their thoughtful industry meant the dining room was entirely empty, and she had to perch on her mother’s sofa to eat her stew in the drawing room in a most unconventional manner. The old pieces did look shabby in this modern room, and couldn’t begin to fill it. Most of the polished parquet floor was empty now. She saw that Fletcher had even had a workman in to remove the melted gold and scorches from the far end.

Genevieve scraped her bowl clean and then lay on the sofa like she’d done as a child and revelled in the shabbiness with furious pleasure.

She began to feel sleepy again, in a more natural way than the drained exhaustion that came with depleting her Art to its dregs. She might have dozed off, if Fletcher and Cecelia had not returned from the consignment office.

Fletcher made embarrassed ahems from the doorway. Genevieve sat up. ‘I apologise for my lack of decorum,’ she said dryly.

Fletcher grimaced as he followed Cecelia to settle in the old stuffed armchairs across from Genevieve. ‘I know you think me a fusspot,’ he began.

‘Not at all,’ Genevieve hastened to assure him. ‘This—’ She gestured about. ‘Only you could have managed all this in a single afternoon, Fletcher. You have my gratitude.’

‘It was Cecelia’s idea,’ he said, looking deeply mortified and deeply gratified.

‘Oh, Oliver’s,’ Cecelia said, ‘to be fair. I merely pointed out that Belgravia is somewhat more convenient for Mrs Murphy than Holland Park.’ She gave a confidential nod towards Genevieve’s mound of a belly, as if her meaning might have been unclear. ‘If we can make shift within the next few days, that is.’

‘Oliver’s gone to see about opening the Locke townhouse, with Massimo,’ Fletcher added. His face was still telegraphing discomfit. He harrumphed, mostly at himself. ‘Might I beg permission to add myself to your lodgers, Genevieve? It seems safer than risking the journey to and fro from my own apartment, since we cannot know how wide McAvey will cast his stones.’ His mouth twitched. ‘Hailstones.’

‘Of course, Fletcher, you are always welcome,’ Genevieve said sincerely.

Cecelia, on the other hand, took the opportunity to twit him. ‘Goodness, Fletcher, if you already had an eligible bride turning up her nose because you visited us, how ever will you find yourself a suitable helpmeet if it gets about that you cohabited with us?’

‘As to that,’ Fletcher said. ‘I…’ He wore a strange expression as he fidgeted in his chair. ‘I have not been my best self this past year.’

Genevieve smiled at his prissy tone. ‘I do not think any of us can venture to lay claim to that.’

‘No. But, despite all, I feel a lifting of my spirits, now that the drain on my Art is gone.’

‘I, also,’ Cecelia said, nodding along. ‘We have all been low, have we not?’ Genevieve was silent. Cecelia winced. ‘I do not mean to say that we do not feel the very great injury—’

‘I know,’ Genevieve said quickly. ‘Go on, Fletcher. You have had some sort of revelation, it seems?’

‘I no longer think I can quite go along with this notion that I should marry a near-stranger simply so I have what amounts to a live-in servant for less cost than hiring a staff, when I am perfectly well capable of shifting for myself.’

Cecelia clapped her hands, her delight burbling up as she recognised her own argument. ‘Mr John Fletcher, you iconoclast.’

He smiled thinly to her teasing, but was painfully earnest as he went on, ‘And I am troubled, also, by the notion of marrying a woman with no Art. What if something like this happens again?’ He waved a hand about to denote the spectre of McAvey lurking about the street. ‘She would have no means to defend herself. Worse…’ Swallowing heavily, he muttered, ‘She would have no means to defend herself against me.’

Genevieve felt her brows rise, and exchanged a surprised glance with Cecelia.

‘This past year, I have become dreadfully complacent about using my compulsion Art. What if she thought I was doing it to her? What if…what if I did do it to her?’ He turned to Genevieve. ‘Did you see how quick I was to make Mr Stiggins march off to Miss Adler?’

Yes, she thought. And you saw how quick I was to turn my Art on another living being.

She should have been heavy with guilt; part of her was. But she couldn’t let that part of her win out until she’d taken vengeance on McAvey.

Fletcher at least had the excuse of aiding the frostbitten street preacher, and Genevieve said as much. Cecelia added, ‘And I believe you are too upstanding to use your Art in such a disreputable manner, my old friend. Do not give up on a happy home quite yet.’

‘I am not declaring I will never marry,’ he said, blushing a little. ‘I shall…leave myself open to the vagaries of love. Cecelia—’

‘I am flattered, but I must decline,’ Cecelia said promptly, and then burst into laughter as Fletcher immediately descended into a flurry of disavowal, until she was moved to say, ‘I’m beginning to be insulted, dear!’, exponentially increasing his fluster.

Genevieve chuckled along too, much soothed by the beginnings of a return to normality between her and her friends. A great deal of bitter bile had been sapped from her along with the outrush of Art at the clockwork shop. The cold determination left in its wake was a relief, for it could abide while she waited for their next step to make itself apparent. It did not infect her like the bitter anger had.

It made her thoughts clearer, her resolve steadier.

She found herself thinking about Gallentry, where they’d taken the knife from Varley, and McAvey had in turn taken it from them. Fletcher had had no qualms about misusing his Art then, but he, like all of them, had been under the influence of his own compulsion Art pulsing out from the pendant, corrupted into a blanket injunction against questioning McAvey and the strange gaps in their memories. The control had not been total, as Fletcher’s control was not total when he wasn’t touching his victim. Cecelia had at least tried to resist, when told to raid Whitely’s memories without permission. Genevieve had been worse than both of them, because she’d been prepared to use deadly fire on Whitely, if McAvey – her beloved husband, and it made her want to throw up – had ordered it. She wouldn’t have done the same to her cousins; small comfort for her, none for Whitely.

Whitely hadn’t had to dodge her fire in the end, but he did have to dodge McAvey’s ice spears, which he’d managed with his own twisty teleporting Art. That nimble facility didn’t prevent Alex from wanting the man all the way out of the country rather than tangle with McAvey’s Art again.

Genevieve looked at her two friends, a long-time team that mostly worked the courts, always well protected by mundane policemen when they had to lay fingers on a criminal. They had useful, strong Art, but they had even less defence against ice spears than Whitely did.

When she went after McAvey, they would be at best a distraction, and at worst a pair of liabilities.

Oliver and Mass came in then, both damp from a fresh scrubbing. She hadn’t heard the door: they’d come in the servants’ way, to wash up in the scullery. They must have been coated in both the dust and sweat from shifting furniture about all afternoon and the additional grime of the miasma of heat and clinging stink of the summer streets.

Oliver, coatless, had his shirtsleeves folded back, tattoos on display. She looked at his strong, decorated forearms, looked away, remembered he was her husband and she was allowed to look, so did, and then remembered he’d barely spoken a word to her since she had almost incinerated a man right in front of him, and looked away again. By this time, he’d rolled down his sleeves over damp skin.

Bridget brought in dinner trays with more bowls of stew, including more for Genevieve. Afterwards, she began to unstoppably yawn. Despite the long nap that afternoon and the hearty food, she was not fully restored from the excesses of Art overuse, nor from the strain on her body from her advanced condition. Cecelia’s voice, as she read aloud to Mass, became hazy.

Oliver returned again, this time from accompanying Fletcher while he fetched a small trunk of necessities from his lodging. Her husband held out his arm to her, silently offering to escort her early to bed.

On the threshold of her room, he finally spoke. ‘May we talk?’

This time he didn’t demur when she drew back in a wordless invitation to enter her chamber. They’d cleared so much of the elegant, modern furniture that there was nowhere else private to sit, unless they wanted to take to the floor.

She sat on the bed, he, awkwardly, at her dressing table. He lit the small lamp there, and touched the charred marks, tracing the shape of Genevieve’s fingers.

‘You’re feeling better?’ he asked.

‘Recovering.’ She held up her hand, showed him a play of flame limning her fingers. ‘Full force in the morning.’

‘Good,’ he said, distractedly. He shifted, and the chair creaked. It was a delicate thing, too small for his bulk. She’d been cautious on it herself, as her condition had progressed.

Oliver rose and paced a few steps. ‘I always admired how you used your Art.’

‘Oh?’

‘You were born with privilege but no power. And then you were handed great power, and it would have been a simple, easy thing to abuse the status it gave you. But from the very start, you questioned your right to it, you looked for ways to make it useful, you worked incredibly hard to be sure you would never accidentally hurt anyone, and you undertook to never, ever, purposefully hurt anyone. And then today…’

Genevieve, having begun flattered, grew indignant as she saw the direction of his thoughts. She felt ambushed. ‘My other husband has sullied the moral purity of your wife, is that it?’

‘That’s not what I’m saying,’ he said, sharply, and then sharper still, the words slicing out of him and into her, ‘And stop calling him your husband, he never was.’

She took a breath and bit down on an escalating answer. Oliver, too, turned away, rubbing his face. ‘I didn’t mean to snap,’ he said wearily. ‘I’ll go.’

‘But you’ve been doing so well,’ she said, drier than she’d meant to. He shook his head with a small, frustrated grimace. ‘No, wait. You have been. We were good at being happy together, weren’t we, but we always did have a tendency to ignore our bad days. Let our small tensions simmer and boil over instead of facing them before a crisis point. I see you making a concerted effort to break that habit. It’s a little alarming, that’s all.’

‘If we’d been better able to talk about our troubles as well as our joys,’ he said, ‘he might not have found such an easy wedge.’

A pattern, culminating in last summer. Her grief, and his, and each of them keeping it to themselves. She could pretend she was trying to protect him from her frailties, but she’d been scared he blamed her. He could pretend he was giving her space to mourn, but he’d been scared she didn’t love him anymore. They’d mutually made a crack into a gap and Reuben McAvey had stepped on in.

With a great deal of irony, Genevieve realised that she and Oliver had been better at listening to each other this past year as dearest friends, the single sentiment the necklace’s influence had left to them, than as an old married couple accumulating bad habits and laden baggage.

‘Fair,’ she said. ‘Ignoring our conflicts while you’re doing a half-arsed wooing job—’

He huffed, crooked smile growing. ‘Oh, come now!’

‘Oliver,’ she said, very severely. ‘You proposed to me against the highly unromantic background of a row of dildos. I grant you no grounds for appeal.’

Oliver said, ‘Condom drying stands, Gin,’ only just managing to suppress his smile to match her mock-seriousness.

Genevieve laughed, and then she sighed. With true gravity now, she said, ‘It’s all fun and games during a courtship, but it doesn’t work in a marriage, does it?’

‘No, it doesn’t.’

‘So you have something to say?’

Oliver nodded slowly. ‘I hear you, Gin, that you’d rather not think too closely about what he did to you.’

‘I am very much trying not to dwell on that, for now.’ Genevieve took a slow breath. ‘I’m aware it came out somewhat inappropriately at Gatwick’s.’

‘Somewhat inappropriately.’ She thought for a moment he was fighting disapproval, but then realised he was struggling not to laugh.

‘I’m being a twat,’ she said frankly. ‘All right. It was awful behaviour. I cannot feel bad about it at the moment.’

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘You won’t feel bad about it until you’ve murdered McAvey.’

Genevieve paused, but knew better than to deny it. ‘How did you know?’

‘My love. I know you. And I know you will feel terribly, afterwards.’

‘Afterwards is far enough ahead to not yet concern me.’

‘Fine,’ he said. ‘Cram those feelings down if you must. And make me the most injured party if you must. But if you also will not allow me to express my own distress, or even my distress on your behalf…’

He’d seen it then, her flare of irritation when he mourned his part in creating the necklace. ‘Yes, I see. You end up carrying it all. I am sorry for that. You may speak as you need to, and I’ll do better in that regard.’ Making an abrupt decision, she patted the quilt beside her. ‘Come lie with me now, Oliver.’

He paused, gazing at her.

‘We’ll keep talking,’ she assured him. ‘We’ll talk in the dark.’

They’d shared their bed, before the necklace. It would only become more awkward the longer they left it, particularly once the baby came to give the readymade excuse to put it off for weeks more. And it was a little easier to contemplate now, when there was no possibility of congress, given her imminent condition and their current state of unresolved tension.

Her stomach was still fluttering with nerves, or perhaps that was the baby, as she stood and opened her arms, inviting him to help her undress.

He’d done this during the first year of their marriage too, when their work for the Society had earned the merest stipend and they’d been getting by mostly on his piecemeal work at the docks, much of his wages still funnelled to his stepmother for the sake of his youngest half-brothers, who his whole family acted as if he’d abandoned with his high-society marriage. They’d had a charwoman come into their little lodging, but otherwise made do without.

Of course, back then, his hands across her skin as he unbuttoned and unlaced her, laying her bare, almost invariably led to a tumble into the sheets, his mouth tracing the paths his fingers had taken, over her throat, down her back, across her thighs.

Genevieve closed her eyes, the memory of then interweaving with the feel of him now, big hands deft and gentle but very, very careful about where they touched. The air, so warm, still felt cool on her bare body as she stood nude before her husband, breasts swollen and veined with blue, nipples darkened and stippled with bumps, hips and thighs dimpled and silvered with stretchmarks, belly grotesquely taut, great with another man’s child.

Oliver tugged her nightdress over her head, following its hem down over her thighs, the barest brush of his hands across her hips to smooth the clean, soft fabric into place.

As she undid her hair and brushed it out, Oliver began to strip his outerwear. He hesitated with his hands at his shirt buttons. ‘I’m older than I was when we first did this.’

Genevieve gestured down at her own body in the cool linen nightdress, the distended swell of her stomach beneath loose pleats, the sagging heaviness of her breasts straining the bodice. ‘Oliver, I’m a whale.’

‘You’re beautiful,’ he said, so matter-of-factly it made her breath catch.

He bared his broad chest, and she put down her hairbrush to touch the gleaming tattooed dragon, as wonderingly as she’d touched it on their wedding night. Index finger circling the golden hoop she remembered sucking on, she raised her gaze to meet his. His body responded to her, nipples stiffening under the touch of her fingertips.

‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘My mind is trying to tell me this is the first time you’ve touched me after I’ve wanted it for fifteen years.’

‘Don’t be sorry,’ Genevieve said. ‘I wish I could…’ She hesitated. ‘I could…’ If they’d failed to address their troubles head-on, they’d at least always managed to be open about sex, so she looked at him with a feeling like defiance and said, ‘I could kneel for you.’

When she’d offered it to McAvey during their false marriage, trying to rekindle the lost pleasure of lovemaking with her husband, he’d turned her down with such disgust that she’d felt sordid. As transgressive as such acts were held to be, it was cleansing to be able to offer her real husband something no other man would ever have from her.

Oliver cupped her face and kissed her. ‘Just lie with me for now, love.’

She crawled without grace under the sheets, and he put out the lamp and joined her in the dark, stripped to his drawers – he’d cheated, there, by dousing the light before showing her his magnificent thighs. He lay on his side behind her, cuddling around her, arm looped over her waist so he could rest a big hand on her bulge.

For a moment, the shock took her again. She lay rigid, mind roiling with the surging strangeness of it, cozened in a bed wearing a thin nightgown with a man not her husband. The confusion of it, the shameful sense of betraying her husband, and then the flood of anger of what McAvey had done to them, was overwhelming.

Oliver’s big body settled closer to hers, he murmured her name, and all at once, familiarity, rightness, swept over her. Her tense muscles relaxed and she melted into him, interlocking her fingers with his and closing her eyes.

She nestled further, and felt familiarity there too. ‘Sorry,’ he said again, shifting. ‘My mind thinks it’s been fifteen years, my body knows it’s been at least eighteen months.’

She’d abstained as soon as she’d sensed she was quick with life, for both this pregnancy and the last. This one, because she hadn’t wanted her husband touching her. The last one, because she most assuredly had, but she’d been too fixated on following the useless advice books to heed Mrs Murphy’s calm and consistent counterindication. It meant she and Oliver hadn’t made love since perhaps the Christmas before last, months before McAvey had usurped their marriage.

She was not particularly aroused herself, the fatigue and bodily discomfit at this late stage overwhelming any better reaction at having her true husband wrapped around her. On the other hand, she wouldn’t refuse it, even at this scandalously late stage, if it would definitively erase the crawly echo of McAvey’s touch. Transgression as cleansing, again, because it was with Oliver.

She pushed back against the hard ridge. ‘You could…’ she began, and then stopped as she properly parsed his words. ‘I thought we’d decided to be merciless in our honesty. You don’t have to spare my feelings.’

‘I do want you,’ he reassured her, squeezing his fingers about hers. ‘So much.’

‘No, I mean… You’ve thought yourself unattached for a year, with false memories for years prior. You must have been lonely.’

His silence was entirely baffled.

‘It has not been eighteen months for you, Oliver. I accept that.’

He still made no response. She could feel him tilting his head on the pillow beside her.

‘Your previous landlady was fond of you, I believe?’ she tried.

‘Oh!’ Oliver said. ‘No. Not so much as looked at another woman since the night we met, Gin.’ He misinterpreted the blank silence she now returned him. ‘Or man. The twins made you think seafaring buggery’s much more prevalent than it actually is. I wasn’t in the royal navy, after all.’

She clarified her confusion. ‘Since the night we met?’

‘Alex made that stupid joke about Ginnie and a limey, and you tried not to laugh,’ he said. ‘And then you did.’

She was utterly asea. ‘But…’

His rumbling voice growled deep and slow into her ear. ‘I’m not sure you entirely comprehend what it’s like to be smiled at by you, Gin. Damn well flattened me. Every moment with you since then set me on fire. How could anyone else compare?’

’But you were so—’ She lifted their joined hands off her stomach so she could give them an indicative wave. ‘Calm and self-assured. Always.’

‘You were a Belgravia heiress. I was hardly going to profess undying devotion that instant. Or ever, really, outside the confines of my own head. You did have to prod me into it, remember.’

She breathed a laugh. ‘That’s right, I did. You pillock.’

She earned his low chuckle. Then he said. ‘In the interests of honesty, I want to say this. I felt, and do still feel, that I took too much from you. You said, in that carriage ride home from the first Society meeting, that you wanted so much more than what I gave you. You wanted what your cousins have, travel, and freedom, and opportunity. They’ve explored half the world – Alex is off to explore the other half – and we married and barely left London. You told me what you wanted that day, and I didn’t give it to you.’

‘Oh, Oliver,’ she said. ‘All my verbiage that day was because I was too naïve to realise what I really wanted was for you to fuck me right there in the carriage.’

Oliver coughed in something between alarm and surprise.

She wriggled against him, as much as her condition allowed a wriggle. ‘I can say that now…’

‘Because we’re married,’ they chorused together. Genevieve gently shifted their joined hands so he was cupping her heavy breast, and felt him sigh against her neck.

He said, stubborn in the face of provocation, ‘But I was wrong to offer you a divorce last night. It’s symptomatic of running away. We’re not doing that.’ He paused, then, meaningfully.

‘We’re not doing that,’ she agreed. ‘We’re worth more than that.’

‘Yes, my love, we are.’

He nuzzled into her hair, lightly laying kisses over her head, as he had done in the ruined cottage all those years ago. His thumb moved restlessly, stroking her nipple through the thin fabric. It tightened under his touch.

Genevieve rubbed her fingers over his, encouraging this train of thought. ‘He managed to get your wedding ring off, too,’ she said, since her unobstructed touch had reminded her she’d noted his bare fingers earlier.

‘Yes. I see how he could’ve got your rings off. Not sure how he got mine.’

She tensed, letting go of his hand. ‘Apt metaphor.’

He stroked over her shoulder and down her side, trying to soothe her sudden stiffness. ‘How so?’

‘You see how he could have…’ She hissed through her teeth, then said, fiercely, ‘How did he get that fucking necklace around my neck, Oliver? You were wondering it yourself, earlier. Did he… Did I…’

Oliver suddenly moved away; it chilled her all the way to her core. He sat up and spoke into the dark. ‘That was guilt, Gin, not suspicion. I gave you the necklace, after your lying-in. It was a birthday gift, remember? It was delivered to the house, as expected, and I left it by your bedside on the morning of your birthday, in the hope that if you wore it…if you wore it, it would mean you still loved me. Stupid, cowardly. Pretty tokens instead of honest words! Never again.’

‘Come back here,’ Genevieve commanded.

He obeyed. He put his arm tight about her, pulling her close against him. ‘I didn’t realise you didn’t remember that yet.’

‘None of my memories around the crisis point are clear yet,’ she admitted.

‘Ah. Well. You came downstairs, wearing the necklace, and kissed me. I took you out to the Clarendon. And then when we came home, my trunk was packed and waiting in the hall. You graciously thanked me for the lunch, and I thanked you for letting me stay with you and McAvey while my lodging house underwent essential repairs, and I took my trunk, and I left. And I knew where my lodging house was, had been for years, and I went there, and never had so much as a second thought about it. I don’t recall seeing my wedding ring again. It would have puzzled me no end if I had. I probably slipped it off sometime during the lunch without even noticing myself do it, and absently discarded it.’

His was probably gone, then. Hers were most likely gone, too. They could be replaced, she knew. She still panged over the loss of those silly, pretty tokens, that Oliver now so strongly decried.

She cleared her throat, and said steadily, ‘It wouldn’t have been different if you’d handed the necklace to me in person, you know. It would merely have increased your guilt exponentially. The trick was already done, either way. But I am immensely relieved I took it from your hand, not his.’

‘In the interests of honesty…’

‘That will get old fast, my dear,’ she said severely. ‘Go ahead and say it.’

‘Not pleased to hear you think it was a possibility.’

‘I didn’t! I was very confused about it, thank you.’

He chuckled, face pressed to her hair. ‘Quantities of that going around. One last thing, and I’ll let you sleep. This notion you’ve taken, of killing McAvey before I can.’

‘Better me than you,’ she said stubbornly. ‘Better the rich woman from the sort of background society will feel sympathy for when she accidentally kills a fellow Artisan with her dangerous Art, than the tattooed navvy who murders his wife’s lover, yes?’

He made a demurring noise deep in his throat.

‘I have unwarranted privilege,’ Genevieve told him. ‘Let me use it.’

‘I would not stoop to gainsay you,’ he said, ‘but it appears we are in a race to see which of us will get to him first, and…’ He stroked the side of her belly. ‘…you’re also in a different race. I shall win by default, I think.’

‘That would be cheating, Oliver.’

‘I am,’ he said warmly, ‘completely willing to be dishonourable in this case, Gin.’

‘Oh, and do we think upper-class twats play fair, do we?’ She hesitated. ‘You will think less of me?’

‘Never,’ he said. ‘I despise the man with every fibre of my being. He deserves everything he’s got coming to him. I simply want it to come from me.’

‘You don’t want me to take your vengeance away from you?’

‘Vengeance rightly belongs to you. But I don’t think vengeance is good for you, for anyone.’

‘You sound like Alex.’

‘Good for Alex,’ Oliver said. She could feel him smiling into her hair. ‘Standing firm against the Locke women, quite a feat.’

‘But you plan to take vengeance… Ah. You are protecting me from myself.’

He nuzzled in closer, murmuring, ‘Yes.’

‘Pillock.’

‘I love you, too, Miss Locke,’ Oliver said, very gravely, and her laughter burbled out of her.

She felt asleep wrapped in her husband’s arms, and slept like the proverbial baby she was due to meet any day now.