Chapter Four
“WHAT THE HELL happened tonight?” Gavin asked his empty hansom cab as it rumbled away from Mrs. Sullivan’s.
What had promised to be an utterly ordinary evening had turned completely on its head, and now he was engaged to be married. To Ina. His Ina.
“I’m marrying Ina,” he murmured as the cab jolted and clattered along the cobblestones of Cumberland Street before making a left on Howe Street and rounding the Royal Circus. He was far too wound up to go home to his bachelor rooms on St. Giles Street. Instead, he was headed for a large stone building where he knew at least two of the city’s hard-working citizens would still be awake.
When the hansom pulled up in front of the offices of the Lothian Herald-Times on High Street, Gavin paid the driver and leapt down. He let himself into the building, for he knew that knocking would do no good. The giant steam-powered presses were going with such speed that the din could be heard out on the street.
Crossing the entryway of the newspaper office, Gavin nodded to one of the press operators who’d come out of the print room for a cigarette. With a hand on the smooth banister, he ascended the three flights of stairs to the office of the owner and editor in chief, Jonathan Moray.
Just as he’d expected, Gavin found his friend leaning over a mocked-up broadsheet, jacket cast aside and sleeves rolled up to expose his forearms. A pencil stuck behind Moray’s ear looked dangerously close to falling from its perch.
Next to him stood Eva Wilis, the paper’s managing editor, with whom Moray shared the office.
“You can’t cut that graf, Moray,” she said, pointing to a section of print as her glasses slipped down her long, straight nose. “That’s the very heart of the story.”
“If I don’t cut it, I’m left with a widowed line at the bottom of this column. If I do cut it, the story’s no good anymore. What would you have me do?” asked Moray, glancing up at Eva and catching sight of Gavin for the first time. “What do you say, Barrett?”
Gavin pushed off the doorframe from where he’d been watching his friends. “That you’d do well to listen to the best editor in Britain. You did hire her, after all.”
Moray grunted, managing to catch the pencil as it slipped off his ear before it clattered to the newspaper-strewn table. “I should have known you’d side with her.”
“Because I’m right,” said Eva, shooting him a dirty look before smiling at Gavin. “What was it tonight? A supper? A salon?”
“A salon,” he said, dropping into a chair opposite the desk and picking up a discarded page. He pointed to an illustration depicting a man and woman strolling in Princes Street Gardens. “This etching is rather good.”
“It is, isn’t it?” said Eva, peering at the paper.
“We’ve commissioned Michael Russell to do a series for us,” said Moray, replacing his errant pencil.
“Lana Russell’s husband?” he asked. “I didn’t realize he did etchings.”
“He’s an artist with rent to pay just like the rest of us. He’ll do whatever brings money in,” said Moray.
Eva rolled her eyes heavenward. “Ignore him. His mood will vastly improve when the front page is done.”
Moray pointed at the huge iron clock hanging on his wall. “It’s nearly two o’clock and we haven’t printed it. This is the third time this week.”
“And whose fault is that?” Eva asked.
Moray just grunted.
“One of the presses broke down earlier,” Eva told Gavin. “By the time it was running again, Moray had dismantled the entire front page with that pencil of his. Now he’s determined to reset it.”
“You don’t have to stay,” said Moray. “Go home to Catriona.”
“I’d just drive her to distraction pacing around until the paper landed on my doorstep, and I’d rather have you annoyed with me than her,” said Eva.
Eva and Catriona styled themselves as widows who shared the financial burden of a home. Few people understood what Moray and Gavin knew: that the two women were in their eyes, if not the law’s, a married couple. They hid it from all but their closest friends, knowing they could weather rumor but wouldn’t survive if anyone could prove the real nature of their relationship, and Gavin and Moray both protected that secret with a familial fierceness.
“What brings you here?” asked Moray as he crossed something out and scribbled in the margins.
“A strange night,” Gavin said.
His friend looked up, the sharp curiosity of a journalist clear in his eyes. “How strange?”
“This is not for print.” One always had to be sure to make that explicitly clear when speaking to Moray, for while the man was most involved in the Lothian Herald-Times, he also owned the wildly popular scandal sheet the New Town Tattler. Moray had expressed more than once how vital it was to keep the Tattler well supplied with tidbits about Edinburgh’s elite.
With crossed arms, Moray leaned back in his chair. “Fine.”
“What our friend means to say is, ‘I’m concerned that something has happened and you’re involved. Please tell me so that I may be of assistance in any way possible,’ ” said Eva.
“He knows that already. Why waste my breath?” asked Moray.
“Why indeed?” said Eva.
“There was an incident at Mrs. Sullivan’s home this evening,” he said, easing into his news as gently as he could.
Gavin didn’t miss the way Eva’s hand twitched toward a scrap of paper and pen lying nearby. Once a reporter, always a reporter.
“Ina was nearly compromised,” he said.
“What?” Eva asked at the same time Moray asked, “What happened?’
“She came across Sir Kier Gowan in the library and he tried to force himself on her,” Gavin said, struggling to calm his breath as he thought about smashing the man against a wall all over again. “He won’t marry Ina to protect her against ruin, so I’m going to.”
“What?” Moray asked in shock.
“You’re engaged?” Eva asked. “To Miss Duncan?”
“I told you sooner or later that girl was going to land you in trouble,” Moray said.
“Careful,” Gavin warned, his nerves still raw from all that had unfolded that evening.
Eva’s hand fell heavy on Moray’s shoulder. “Why don’t you go see McLeod about the printing press?”
“Who cares about printing presses when Gavin’s gone and got himself entrapped? And McLeod already fixed the problem. You said so yourself,” said Moray.
Eva gritted her teeth and shoved him toward the door. “Check again.”
Moray looked down at her hand and then back up at Gavin. “Oh. I see. You want some time to give him some womanly advice.”
“Just go,” she ordered, giving her publisher another shove.
“Fine, fine,” said Moray, hands up by his head.
When the door shut, Eva turned on her heel and placed her hands on her hips. Gavin immediately sobered. A stern Eva was not to be trifled with.
“Tell me you’re entering into this with clear eyes and not just so you can play the hero, Gavin.”
He tugged at his hair, the pain distracting him from the invisible weight pressing down on his chest.
“I don’t know,” he finally said.
“You don’t know.”
“It’s complicated.”
“You don’t have to tell me that life is complicated,” Eva shot back. “Catriona and I live with that every single day.”
He slumped back in his chair. “I know. I’m sorry.”
Her expression softened. “I know you are.”
“Ina needs me,” he said. “What sort of friend would I be if I left her on her own now?”
“One who might want to choose his own life.”
“When she doesn’t get to make her own choice?” He shook his head. “I won’t make her go through all that on her own.”
A long pause fraught with unasked questions stretched between them, broken only by the hum of machinery underfoot. Finally, Eva said, “I’ve resisted asking this of you for a very long time out of respect for your privacy, but tell me truthfully: what is between you and Miss Duncan?”
That question was the one that had been his constant companion for years, plaguing him most at night when the city was quiet and he was alone with his thoughts. For he was the idiot who’d fallen in love with his best friend.
It had happened so gradually he’d hardly noticed at first. He’d been young when he’d arrived in Edinburgh to lick his wounds after the disaster at Oak Park. Already out of Cambridge but green enough to still be mistaken for a student at the university, he’d struggled to find his place in the drawing rooms of the city’s fine houses and the salons of its preeminent intellectuals. But then, inexplicably, Arthur Duncan had heard through one of his few friends that Gavin was interested in Horatio McCulloch’s landscape paintings. The scholar had summoned him to his home, and the two men, one middle-aged and the other just out of school, had spent hours together debating the merits of Scottish genre painting versus historical works.
He’d met Ina when she knocked on the study door and asked her father about some minor detail of household management. Her father had been short with her, but she’d smiled at Gavin and he’d noticed a streak of white dust marred her otherwise presentable light blue skirts. Her father had muttered something about her playing at being an artist and then launched back into a screed against the Pre-Raphaelites.
It had been quite by coincidence that Gavin had stumbled upon Ina’s studio a few weeks later. The door to the servants’ stairs had been open, and he’d heard the repeated tap-tap-tap of chisel on stone and the soft swish of a rag smoothing dust away. Intrigued, he’d grabbed Cappleman, the Duncans’ butler, and asked about the sound.
“That would be Miss Ina in her studio,” Cappleman said. “If you’ll follow me, sir.”
Down the stairs they went until they passed the kitchen and stood in front of a half-open door.
“Mr. Barrett to see you, Miss Ina,” said Cappleman before stepping aside and revealing the room’s occupant.
Gavin would never forget his first glimpse of her in her studio. She stood over a twenty-inch-tall block of marble, dust clinging to every inch of her. A broad linen apron covered a set of plain old clothes, and her bright red hair was slipping out of the pins on top of her head. She was wild, unconfined, and utterly fascinating—a total departure from the put-together and polished ladies he’d known his whole life.
“Can I help you?” she’d asked, trying to push a lock of hair out of her face. All she succeeded in doing was smearing dust on her forehead.
“You’ve got a little . . .” He gestured to her forehead.
One tool in each hand, she glared at him. “Mr. Barrett, if I’m not covered in the stuff by the end of the day, my work has been a failure.”
He looked her over from head to toe and then nodded. “Then I’d say you’re succeeding spectacularly.”
There’d been a pause, and then Ina had burst into laughter. She was fresh air sweeping through a house that was somber with scholarly seriousness. With a grin, he’d dropped onto a little stool in the corner, and, although she’d complained she couldn’t work with him there, she was soon carving again.
Over the years, they’d fallen into a comfortable rhythm of friendship as he’d set about building himself a life in Edinburgh. She continued to cobble together classes from whichever artist was traveling through the city and willing to give an ambitious young woman his time. He wrote a novel. She carved her first truly accomplished piece—a small Venus that stood sixteen inches high and seemed to glow with vitality. Then, sometime after Ina’s eighteenth birthday, Gavin strode into her studio as on any other day and was struck by a horrible realization: his friend, mischief-making enabler, and confidante was quite beautiful. Arrestingly, heart-stoppingly, life-ruiningly so.
That day had been the first step in a long descent into hell.
Knowing that he had little to recommend him as a suitor and wary of risking their friendship by declaring his attraction, he’d set about building an impenetrable tower around her, walling her off so that he could never get to her no matter how tempted he was. It helped that she was the princess locked away who refused to let down her hair. She didn’t want to marry. That much had been clear from the moment her aunt began parading her by eligible men. None of them would do. None were as important as her work.
It was Gavin who stood by her side through it all, the guard who kept her safe. Defending her from those who thought sculpture was an inappropriate pursuit for a woman. Understanding that this wasn’t an idle hobby but her work. Laughing with her when she needed a companion in her merrymaking. Trying his best to fall out of love with her.
He could feel Eva’s coal-black eyes watching him, and he knew the answer she wanted to hear. Still, he couldn’t give it to her, because saying the truth out loud would open up old wounds that were still raw.
“Friendship. That’s all,” he said.
Eva sighed. “It’s a shame, really. I like the lady more than I can say.”
“She likes you as well,” he said, smiling as he thought back on the few times the pair had met at the theater.
“She’ll make you a good wife, Gavin.”
He could hear the “but” in his friend’s voice, and he hardened his heart against it. “You and Catriona will come to the wedding?”
The wedding. There was going to be a wedding.
But not a wedding night.
He’d been out of his mind to agree to that condition, but surely it would be better to live in a state of denial than to torment himself by tasting the very thing he’d wanted for years. He’d be her husband in name only but her loyal friend in every way possible. It had to be enough.
A clattering at the door made them both turn. Moray was rapping on the glass, brandishing a clutch of broadsheets in his hands.
“Are you finished?” he shouted.
“Lord, give me the strength to endure the company of men,” Eva muttered.
Gavin cleared his throat, trying to regain some of his composure.
She gave Moray an exaggerated wave. “You can come back in, you pigheaded lout.”
The publisher burst into the room. “Tell me everything.”
“No,” said Eva stubbornly. “It’s none of your business.”
Moray cast an eye over the two of them and shrugged. “I’ll have the full story out of him sooner or later.”
“What can I expect to read in the Lothian tomorrow?” asked Gavin with a nod to the papers so fresh and hot he could smell them across the room.
“There’s rumblings that Tsar Alexander II will make a state visit this year,” said Moray. “And there’s a breach-of-promise case that everyone is talking about. A woman named Caroline Burkett is suing her fiancé after he jilted her for an American heiress.”
“She must be desperate,” said Eva. “No woman ever comes out of a case like that unscathed.”
“But they do sell papers,” said Moray, handing his stack over.
The black ink smudged Gavin’s fingertips as he peered at an item tucked away in a low corner. “That new football club that was formed last year looks respectable.”
“Heart of Midlothian?” asked Moray.
“That’s the one. It was about time Edinburgh got its own club. Mind if I take this?”
“Not at all,” said Moray, who was already leaning over the paper-strewn table once again, lost in some nuisance of layout that needed to be resolved.
“Go home and sleep,” said Eva.
“Remember me to Catriona,” he said.
His friend smiled but then bowed her head too, already back in her world of newsprint and column inches.
The carriage ride back from Mrs. Sullivan’s was tense but mercifully silent. Ina’s aunt sat bundled up in a corner, disapproval oozing out of each one of her pores. It wasn’t until they shuddered to a stop in front of the house that Mrs. Coleman turned on her niece.
“I suppose this has worked out just as you planned,” said the older woman.
“As I planned?” Ina asked, stunned. “If you mean to imply that I wanted to be ruined and forced to marry—”
“That man has been waiting for his chance for years,” said Mrs. Coleman with a sniff.
The idea was so absurd she couldn’t help but laugh. “Gavin?”
“Mr. Barrett has few prospects and nearly no money. He’s had his eye on your fortune for ages now.”
“You may say whatever you like about me, but Gavin has been my loyal friend for years. He’s sacrificing his own happiness to help me, and I won’t hear an ill word against him.” Her aunt opened her mouth as though to protest, but Ina leveled an icy look at her aunt. “Not a word.”
Mrs. Coleman snapped her mouth shut with a clack as the driver opened the door to help her down and flounced through the house’s open door without stopping to divest herself of her wrap. Ina gritted her teeth and followed her in, nodding to the family butler as she undid the closure of her cloak.
“Good evening, Cappleman,” said Ina. “Is my father still awake?”
“Mr. Duncan is writing in his study, miss.”
“Did he take any supper?” she asked.
“Some consommé, a beefsteak, and a half bottle of claret in the dining room,” said Cappleman.
Good. If her father had eaten outside of his study, that meant he wasn’t in the deepest of writing spells.
Exhaustion seeped into her bones as she climbed the stairs to the second floor. A faint light emanated from under the study door. He was still awake and at work. He was always at work.
Tentatively, Ina knocked.
“What is it?” came her father’s voice, distant and scratchy with lack of sleep.
“I’m home, Papa.”
The pen stopped its incessant scratching for a moment before picking up again. “I didn’t realize you’d gone out.”
Ina took his response as all the invitation she’d get and entered the study.
“I’ve returned from one of Mrs. Sullivan’s salons.” She addressed her father’s back. “She inquired after your health and asked whether she might not expect you in the future.”
Her father didn’t even look up. “If I were to attend one of Mrs. Sullivan’s salons, I would be required to take time away from my work. It would be an interruption.”
Interruption. The word stung as sharp as an angered bee. She was an interruption. Not a daughter. Just a nuisance. It shouldn’t hurt, not after this many years, but Ina couldn’t help but feel as though every carelessly slung insult chipped away at her heart just a little bit more.
“Papa, I have some news. I’m to be married.”
The pen stopped, and slowly he looked over his shoulder. “To whom?”
Unused to his attention, she clasped her hands in front of her. “Gavin. There was another gentleman who tried to . . . make advances. He was stopped, but there was a maid who saw. Gavin offered to marry me in order to—”
“Will there be any scandal?”
She nearly flinched under his scrutiny. “No.”
That at least wasn’t a lie. There would be rumors—always rumors—and she was certain some people would speculate as to why, after all this time, Gavin Barrett had made up his mind to marry Ina Duncan. Mrs. Sullivan had offered to help assuage some of that, promising to secure them invitations to dine at some of the most important homes in the city. It seemed that the matchmaker’s secret network of happy couples was wide-reaching indeed.
“Good,” he said, turning around again. “Can’t abide people showing up with their prying eyes, trying to get a bit of gossip. Tell Cappleman I’m not to be disturbed. And you can also tell him that I won’t touch another tea tray. I don’t need food. I need time.”
“Papa, I—”
But when he finally looked up from his paper, glasses perched on the very end of his nose, and peered at her as though she were some intruder rather than his daughter, her chest constricted. Rather than containing the fatherly warmth she sought, his expression was vacant. It was as though he could look right through her to the back wall.
“I will tell Cappleman,” she said quietly.
Ina let herself out of the study as quietly as she could and the door closed with the click of metal against metal. She sagged against the wall, looked up at the ceiling, and tried her best to contain the tears that threatened to spill. Temper she could have handled, but this . . . this vacantness was too high a mountain to climb. Her father’s work wasn’t just his first priority. It was his second, third, and fourth too. Ina, flesh of his flesh, blood of his blood, ranked somewhere near the house that sheltered him and the wealth that supported him. It had been that way ever since she could remember, and she didn’t know why she ever expected it to change.
“Enough,” she murmured, touching the sides of her index fingers to her lower lashes and wiping away the tears. “Enough.”
There was nothing more she could do tonight. Tomorrow she’d have to face the world as an engaged woman.