The Heiress Effect

So saying, she shoved the scarcely filled-out paper and a heavy coin at the woman.

She turned back to Dorling. Behind her, she heard the mechanical gears of the register whir and click, the rustle of a bag as the woman started filling it with candy.

Pretending was so easy.

“My aunt,” Jane said, “is the most tiresome woman. She was driving me mad with her complaints this morning. ‘No, Jane, don’t wear those gloves.’ ‘No, Jane, stop talking so much. Nobody wants to hear about coal aniline dyes again.’” Jane heaved a put-upon sigh and looked down. She’d tasted something sour when she’d said those words, driving me mad.

“How untoward of her,” Dorling said softly. “Putting off a woman as sweet as you? She must be unbearable.”

Across the counter, the woman slid a bag of peppermints to Jane and a handful of small coins.

Would she even send the telegram, incomplete as it was? Would it even matter?

It didn’t, actually. The paper had done its job. Whether he got it, whether he came… Jane didn’t feel as if she were alone any longer. That left her with a renewed sense of purpose. She wasn’t going to let anyone steal her sister away.

She looked over at Dorling, who smiled warmly. Even though her skin crawled, even though she wanted to go home and scrub herself all over to rid herself of the thought of his persuading her, she gave him a saucy wink.

“My aunt,” she repeated, “is driving me mad. I can’t spend another night in the same house as her.”

“Can’t you?” He smiled back. It wasn’t affection in his grin or even pleasure. It was, she imagined, the smirk of a cat facing a mouse in a corner.

“I can’t,” Jane confirmed.

Luckily for her, she wasn’t a mouse. She was an heiress, and good mousers could be bought for a few shillings.

“You,” Jane said, “are just the man I was looking for. You are going to help me.”

Chapter Nineteen

Oliver had lost something in the time between his mother’s telegram and the time when he escorted his sister home. He felt as if he were constantly checking his pockets; when they turned up the usual contents, he’d glance at his watch.

But it wasn’t a forgotten appointment or a mislaid coin purse that plagued him during the days that followed. It was something deeper and more fundamental.

After a few morning meetings on one bright day in May, he went back to Clermont House and retreated to his chambers.

It was the same room that he’d been assigned when he was twenty-one—when his brother had come of age and had first invited him to London. Robert had said that Oliver should treat Clermont House as his own.

“You understand,” the young duke had said when Oliver had demurred, “that I don’t intend that to be an analogy. I do not want you to treat this house as if it were yours. It is yours. If matters had been different, you would have grown up here. You are my brother, and I won’t hear any argument to the contrary.”

After the first few months, Oliver had stopped feeling like an interloper and started believing that he belonged. He’d stopped apologizing when he rang the bell. He’d started acting as if he had a place in this world.

But now… Now he saw his surroundings through doubled vision.

He wandered to his window. It overlooked a square below, a well-trimmed affair equipped with a few trees, a bit of a shrubbery, and a bench on either side.

His mother had sat on that bench when Oliver had been nothing but a bulge in her belly. She’d been denied entry to Clermont House, had gone unacknowledged by the old duke. Hugo Marshall—Oliver’s real father, the man who had raised him—had worked here, but he’d come and gone by the servants’ entrance.

It was all well and good for Robert to say that Oliver had a place here, but nothing that either of them said or wanted could alter the history that was woven into this home.

He felt like a pretender.

His sisters had no place in this massive edifice. Oh, when Free had stayed the night, she’d been welcomed politely. She and the duchess got on famously, in fact. But Free had been a guest, and this was not her home.

She had laughed when Oliver had rung for food. “Can’t you get it yourself?” she’d asked. “Does being a lord make you lazy?”

“I’m not a lord,” he’d informed her.

She’d raised an eyebrow at him. “Not legally, I suppose. But you’re rescuing young maidens” —a roll of her eye had shown what she thought of that—“and hobnobbing about in Parliament. There’s little enough difference that I can see.”

“They see the difference,” Oliver had said shortly, thinking of Bradenton.

But she’d shrugged. “You’re turning into one of them.”

Was he?

“Why couldn’t you have needed a proper rescuing anyway?” he’d teased her. “I’m your elder brother. You have to make me feel useful.”

“No, I don’t,” she’d contradicted. “You’re a grown man. Find a use for yourself.” But she’d smiled as she’d said it, snuggling into his side as she had when she was young.

Decades had passed since his mother had sat in that square, insisting on recognition.

Still, the sight of her bench shouted out to him. Your place isn’t here.

Oliver sighed, looked upward, and then left his room and its unsettling view.

His brother’s suite of rooms was in the other wing of the house, separated from his by a wide staircase. He made his way there, held his breath and contemplated the door to Robert’s chambers.

Behind the thick wooden planks, he could hear Minnie laughing. “No,” she was saying, her voice an indistinct murmur, “not like that. I—”

There was nothing for it. He would be interrupting no matter what he did. He knocked.

All of Minnie’s bright laughter disappeared. There was a pause, then, “Come.”

Oliver opened the door.

His brother and his wife were sitting on a sofa together, looking as if they’d put inches between them just a few seconds before. Minnie’s hand was curled in Robert’s, and her cheeks were flushed. Oliver was clearly interrupting.

Oliver had grown up knowing he had a brother, but the discovery of Robert Blaisdell, the Duke of Clermont, in the flesh had been something of a revelation. Robert had been like a baby bird that left its nest too early. Nobody had ever taught him anything important. He didn’t know how to make a fist or duck a blow, how to tie a lure or where to cast his line so that the fish might choose to nibble.