The Heiress Effect (23 page)

The next morning came on a wash of gray clouds.
Oliver awoke with the memory of the previous night in his head—like
a dream, gauzy and insubstantial, the sort of thing that could not
really have happened.

He sat up. He was in a spare room in his
cousin’s house. He waited for his head to clear. And instead of
dissipating into impossible nothingness, as dreams were wont to do,
his recollection solidified, memory after memory coming atop each
other. Jane’s smile. Her gown. The look on her face as she’d smiled
and said,
I am ablaze.

God.
What was he going to do?

A knock sounded on his door. “Are you
ready?”

It was his cousin. Yesterday, he’d foolishly
agreed to accompany Sebastian on his morning ramble. Oliver rubbed
his eyes, looked out the window. It was early yet, dawn still
combing gray fingers of mist through the fields. From the back
window, he could see fog stretching over the River Cam and the
fields beyond.

“Hurry up, Oliver,” Sebastian called.

“It’s not fair,” Oliver responded. “Why is my
cousin the only rake I know who
likes
getting up in the
morning?”

The only sound that came in response was
Sebastian’s laughter.

It took half an hour to get dressed and
leave. The mist was beginning to burn off in the early sunlight,
and a bird called somewhere. But for the first few minutes of the
walk, it was too cold to do anything but tread briskly, rubbing
gloved hands together, until the exercise brought its own warmth.
They crossed the Cam, went up the backs of the colleges, and
wandered out into the fields before Sebastian spoke.

“Are you going to finally tell me what you’re
up to?”

“Here? I told you already. Bradenton—”

“Hang Bradenton,” Sebastian said. “I never
liked him anyway. That’s not what I mean.”

Oliver quirked up his mouth, perplexed. “I
don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“I don’t mean your Miss Fairfield, either.”
Sebastian sighed. “I’m talking about something far more important.
The
most important thing, if you will, the center of the
universe, Copernicus be damned.” He smiled broadly. “I’m talking
about me.”

Oliver glanced at Sebastian. His parents had
told him about his sire when he was young. They’d described his
half-brother, living in a grand house with a less-than useful
father. Oliver had known all about Robert.

He hadn’t known about his cousin Sebastian
until he was twelve years old.

The Duke of Clermont’s elder sister had
married an industrialist in a desperate—and as far as Oliver could
tell, futile—attempt to fill the Clermont family coffers. Sebastian
Malheur was the result of that marriage. He was dark-haired and
handsome, and he smiled at everyone. He had always been up to
mischief when they’d been in school together. And somehow, that had
never changed.

This sort of charming boast was precisely the
sort of thing that Sebastian did best. Oliver was never sure what
his cousin believed because he was so rarely serious.

Sebastian was smiling. “You keep asking me
open-ended questions such as, ‘How are you?’ and ‘Are you really
delighted to hear…’ All this stuff about my
feelings.
I
thought I would give you the opportunity to be direct. You act like
I’m going to die. Why are you doing that?”

Some things never changed, but…

Oliver sighed. “It’s your letters. Since I
was heading down here anyway, Robert asked me to see how you were
doing.”

“My letters.” Sebastian looked around as if
expecting some Greek chorus to pop up and serenade him in
explanation. “What have I been doing wrong in my letters?”

“I don’t know.” Oliver shrugged. “But Robert
says there is something wrong with them. That you’re not yourself.
And you know how he is. He’s always right about those things. He’ll
never figure out what’s wrong on his own, or how to fix it—but he
knows when something is off. And he says that you don’t sound
happy.”

Sebastian beamed beatifically. It seemed like
a ridiculous charge to make with the early morning sun touching his
cousin’s face.

“Not happy?” Sebastian said. “Why
wouldn’t
I be happy? I’ve achieved the sort of success that
most men only dream of. I have set all of England—indeed, the
entire world—on its ear. I’ve wrought mischief of the highest
order, and the lovely thing is that I am demonstrably, provably
right. So tell me, Oliver, under those circumstances, why wouldn’t
I be happy?”

Oliver glanced at his cousin and then
shrugged. “I don’t know,” he said. “But in all that lovely, long
speech just now, the one thing you never said was that you were
happy.”

Sebastian looked at him, and then gave a wry
shake of his head. “Minnie,” he said, as if that were an
explanation. “Robert married her, and now the two of you are
parsing language for all the meaning you can shake out of it. It’s
a good thing she’s not here, because if she were, she’d see what
wasn’t
happening. You’re an amateur.”

“What isn’t happening?” Oliver asked.

Sebastian ignored him. “Let us suppose for
the sake of argument that you are correct. I am deeply wounded and
unhappy to my toes, but I don’t want to explain why.” He smiled as
he spoke, as if to show how ridiculous the notion was. “Wouldn’t we
all be better off assuming that I had reasons for that choice and
respecting them?”

“Maybe,” said Oliver slowly. “But… I feel as
if you aren’t really yourself lately. There’s something different
about you.”

“Again, assuming that you are right,”
Sebastian said, “you won’t make me feel any better by telling me
how miserable I appear to be.”

“Very well, then,” Oliver said. “Have it your
way. This is just like old times.” They walked on down the path,
past a yard where a farmer’s daughter was feeding geese, past a man
carrying water in yokes about his neck.

“What did you mean back then,” Oliver said
finally, “about what wasn’t happening?”

“So many things aren’t happening,” Sebastian
said airily. “I’m not flying. You aren’t turning to gold when I
touch you. I have yet to strike a deal with the devil.”

“If you want to tell me something, you should
come out and say it.”

“Here’s the thing.” Sebastian looked serious.
“If I
had
signed a Faustian contract in blood, so to speak,
it probably would have a clause that enjoined me from speaking. So
let me just say this. Being me…is not as amusing as it once
was.”

Oliver could believe that. Fame had come
quickly to Sebastian. It was not so long in the past he’d been just
another indulgently wealthy man, born of good family with no reason
to exert himself. He’d done what indulgently wealthy men of good
family so often did—he’d sampled the ladies of town and developed a
bit of a name for himself as a hedonist.

Yes, he was clever. And he had always been
riotously funny. But if someone had asked Oliver a decade ago what
Sebastian would do with his life, he would never—not in a million
years—have guessed that his friend would achieve fame in the
natural sciences.

And then quite out of the blue, Sebastian had
published a paper on snapdragons, of all things. It had been well
received; he’d put out another paper six months later on peas, and
then another a few months later regarding lettuce.

A mere three months after the bit on lettuce,
Sebastian had announced that what he had discovered was not a few
oddities to be noted about the breeding of flowers and vegetables
but a system—a system demonstrating that traits were passed down
from progenitor to child in a systematic fashion, one that could be
predicted mathematically.

This, Sebastian had said, served as a
measuring stick. One could use it to determine what random chance
would unleash on offspring—and one could therefore see how nature
deviated from random chance. If it differed significantly,
Sebastian had argued, in response to changing conditions, it would
prove Mr. Darwin right.

He could not have published a more
inflammatory piece. That paper had contained four examples
demonstrating how nature had deviated from random chance. And that
was the moment when Sebastian Malheur had stopped being seen as a
mildly eccentric scientist with hedonistic tendencies. He’d become
a heretic and a heathen.

“I worry about you,” Oliver finally said. “I
worry about you a great deal, Sebastian.”

“Well, worry more productively.” Sebastian
spoke decisively. “I don’t need any of your pity. In fact—”

“Ah, indeed!” called a voice behind them.
“Mr. Malheur? Is that you, Mr. Malheur? Hallooo!”

Sebastian turned and saw a man shuffling
toward them at something half between a walk and a jog. He waved an
arm at Sebastian in greeting.

“Who is that?” Sebastian squinted and swore
under his breath. “Whoever he is, I don’t want to speak to him.
Hide me, Oliver.”

Oliver looked around. There was nothing but
the path they walked on, marking its way alongside the river and
ankle-high grasses. The landscape was punctuated by a few scrubby
bushes, but was empty of anything that could serve as cover. “He’s
already seen you. You can’t hide.”

“Pretend I’ve turned into a tree?” Sebastian
shrugged. “I would do a very good job pretending. I promise.”

The other man was practically on top of them.
He tripped down the last section of the path, breathing hard.

“Mr. Malheur!” he said. “I’ve been looking
for you ever since last we spoke. I’ve sent you messages—did you
not receive them?”

“I receive a great many messages.” Sebastian
frowned at the man. “Who are you again?”

“Fairfield,” the man said. “Mr. Titus
Fairfield.”

Oliver blinked and examined the man once
again. Fairfield. It was a common enough name. It could have been a
coincidence. On the other hand…

Mr. Fairfield reached up to wipe his
handkerchief across his sweating brow. “Of course I don’t expect
you to remember me. Of course not. I am a gentleman who resides
here in Cambridge.” He smiled—a weak smile that looked as if it
were out of practice. “A gentleman, yes. No need to work, although
from time to time I take on a promising student as tutor.” He
nodded at them both.

A private tutor taking on only one student,
instead of a team? He couldn’t have been much good.

Sebastian must have thought so, too, because
he gave a little half-sigh.

“I make it a point to keep my time open, so
that I might live the life of the mind. Like you.” Mr. Fairfield
drew himself up a little uncertainly. “A little like you.”

Sebastian caught Oliver’s eye, and twitched
his lip.

“Your work,” Mr. Fairfield said after an
awkward silence, “your work—it has absolutely confused me and left
me in wonder. I have thought of nothing else, since last I saw your
talk. The implications, Mr. Malheur, the implications! For
politics, for government, for economy.”

Sebastian simply looked at Mr. Fairfield. “I
didn’t realize that my work on snapdragons had an implication for
politics and economy.”

“I have not quite grasped it,” he said. “You
are my superior in knowledge here. But doesn’t it follow that if
there is some inherited basis for evolution we might as a species
triumph? Ought you not put your mind to that?”

Sebastian’s answering smile was sharp as a
knife. “What, with a managed breeding program amongst humans?”

Fairfield blinked.

“That’s what I would have to do. Breeding
humans is far more difficult than propagating snapdragons. As a
general rule, humans prefer to breed themselves without outside
direction. I myself have that preference. I’d hate to impose it on
others.”

Fairfield frowned. “You could pay…”

“
You’re
the tutor in law. Is it now
legal to pay people for intercourse?”

“Ah. A good point. I see. That does make
things difficult.” Fairfield frowned. “This needs more thought,
more thought indeed. Perhaps we might meet to discuss it?”

“No,” Sebastian said with a brilliant smile.
“We won’t. That sounds hideous and disgusting.”

“But—”

“No
buts,”
Sebastian said. “Now if
you’ll excuse me, my cousin and I must turn off the path here.”

There was no path leading absolutely
anywhere. Sebastian pointed vaguely across the fields.

“Good day,” Sebastian said, waving. “I’d love
to stay and chat, but I must abscond instead.”

“Wait,” Oliver started. But his cousin took
hold of his wrist and plunged into the grass. The field was still
dew-soaked. In a matter of seconds, Oliver’s stockings were damp.
Sebastian smiled the whole time, a brilliant, awful smile. But he
pressed on at a punishing pace, not letting go of Oliver’s wrist
until they’d gone half a mile.

“There you have it,” Sebastian said. “One of
my supporters. Now tell me, Oliver, why shouldn’t I be happy?”