The Heiress Effect

Oliver contemplated the shapes of the buildings across the way. In the dark, he couldn’t make out much more than the silhouette of peaked roofs, rough dark pools of windows with lamplight glimmering from them. The sound of Bradenton’s carriage—hoof clops and the creak of leather—drifted to them from the mews behind the building.

“I said meet them,” Oliver replied. “Not use their services. Meet them. Talk with them. See what sort of men they are. My sister-in-law and I are organizing a set of dinners when I return to London, for—”

“You mean I should treat them as my social equals? I do enough charity work, Marshall.” He smiled. “Here I am, talking to you.”

If this is a sample of your charity, I’m sure you’re well-loved on your estate.

But he didn’t say it. He held all his complaints in the stillness of his heart, marking them down to accounts earned but not yet repaid.

“You’ve always been amusing,” Oliver said instead. “But there’s no need to laugh off what I’m trying to tell you. Which is—”

Bradenton laughed. “Leave off, Marshall. I don’t want to talk to you about your precious reform.”

The carriage turned the corner, a dark ghost in the mist.

Bradenton turned to Oliver. “You’re thinking about my proposition. You cannot know how gratifying I find that, to know I judged you rightly after all.”

Oliver’s hand tightened, his knuckles whitening.

“So what did you mean with her tonight, then? I suppose if you want to hurt her by making her fall in love with you and then sending her into a decline, it will serve. Still, that seems overly sordid.”

“You can’t hurt someone you don’t know,” Oliver said. And I know you well. “Sometimes the easiest way to break a person is to make him think you’re on his side and then withdraw your support.”

He shouldn’t have spoken words laden with such double meaning. But Bradenton laughed.

“That is why I need you to do it. I’ll pay you no false compliments, Marshall. I admit, I have a personal interest in seeing Miss Fairfield too unhappy to move about in society any longer.” His lip curled. “But you’re clever and too ambitious by half. I won’t allow you a foothold until I’m sure of you.”

“One choice on my part will make you sure?”

“No.” Bradenton shrugged. “One, you’ll dismiss as accident. Two, you’ll doubt yourself. Three times…” He paused, as if recalling something. “Three times, and you’ll convince yourself you were right to act as you did. Three times doing a thing will change a man’s character.”

“So there will be other tasks, then.” He couldn’t do it. Even contemplating this one made him feel sick to his stomach. It brought back old memories, memories he had long since vanquished to their rightful place.

But Bradenton shook his head. His carriage stopped in front of him, and a footman jumped down to open the door. Bradenton advanced forward, “There’s no need for anything else,” he said airily. “By my count, you’re already at two.”

Chapter Five

There were three skills that Miss Emily Fairfield had found necessary in her current position in life: lying, smuggling—and most important of all—scaling walls. It was the last she’d put to use at the moment.

After a tepid ten-minute walk around the garden at midday, she’d been put down for a nap in her room as if she were a child of four.

She waited until the house grew quiet, the servants departing to mop floors and go to market. Then she’d hastily changed her clothing and scrambled down the stone wall outside her window. She wanted to go away—anywhere, so long as it was not here.

She had an unapproved novel in one cloak pocket, a handkerchief in the other, and a determination to spend all two hours of her ridiculous nap outside.

Titus Fairfield’s house sat at the outskirts of Cambridge. It was a sad, two-story affair of graying stone surrounded by drab bushes. She pulled her skirt close to avoid the thorns of the gooseberry bush, squeezed through a narrow gap in the back hedge, and obtained her freedom on the gravel track leading away from town, across fields and over hills.

This was behavior that Uncle Titus would call foolish—setting out on her own, unaccompanied by a chaperone, walking with real strides instead of taking the delicate steps that befitted her status as a supposed invalid. Going out for hours instead of minutes.

And maybe he was right. A little bit. But the alternative—lying in bed when it was light outside, staring at the ceiling, imagining bludgeoning her uncle with one of his law books—was even more ill advised. That left her feeling shaky, guilty, and almost feverishly restless. When she felt that way, she’d watch him over breakfast, thinking idly of pulling his bookshelf down around his head.

Not the sort of imagery that made her proud. She held her head high on the main road, nodding at passing farmers. Her gown was a little too fine to make her anything other than a lady escaped from chaperonage, but people saw what they thought would fit in. She marched down the road, brushing the fence posts and stone walls with the tips of her fingers, marveling in the feel of wind on her cheeks, the taste of freedom. It was cold; the wind bit through her gloves, and her cloak wasn’t thick enough to keep off the worst of the chill, but she didn’t care.

What if something happens? Her uncle’s mournful voice seemed to drift to her on a memory. He could have carved it in stone and set it above the mantelpiece, he’d said it so often. What if something happens? He’d been worrying about something happening to her for years, with the result that nothing happened at all.

Today, she was resolved to walk through Grantchester. She’d seen Grantchester Road half a dozen times in her stolen ramblings, and while a village might not be the stuff of Mrs. Larriger’s exploits, it was something more than a handful of goats. She would walk and smile, and nobody would know that she’d escaped from the dreadful clutches of…of…

Not pirates. Not whalers. Not the czar of Russia.

“I’ve escaped from the dreadful clutches of a nap,” she announced to the road.

Emily passed a farmhouse, then another, then—a sign that the village was nearby—a grain mill. Students were working industriously inside a grammar school. She nodded at a smith in his yard as he examined a horse’s hooves.

When she reached the main square, she thought about buying an apple from a green grocer, just to prove she could. But it seemed futile to waste her few coins on wizened fruit.