The Heiress Effect (7 page)

He stopped on the street, tipping his hat to
her. And that was when something awful happened.

She looked into his eyes. They were ice-blue
and mobile. In the bright mid-morning, his spectacles made him look
sharp and intelligent. He didn’t look over her head as if wishing
her elsewhere. He didn’t curl his lip in disgust or nudge his
companion as if to say,
That’s her; she’s the one I was telling
you about
. He looked at her straight on, his eyes flickering
over her as if he were wondering what lay beneath the blinding
orange-and-green pattern of her day gown. And he smiled at her as
if she deserved more than a few scraps of surface civility.

She wasn’t in heels any longer, so he had
several inches on her now. His hair was a bright copper, and when
he lifted his hat at her, the wind caught the ends. He seemed open
and uncomplicated—so far from the dark, brooding gothic hero that
filled the pages of Emily’s novels.

Still, she felt something that she’d only
read about in the pages of a book. There was a slow prickle in her
throat, a flush of heat that slid over her skin. She felt a sense
of pure awareness. A
frisson.
She felt a real live frisson
just from looking into his eyes.

How dreadful.

She looked away. “Mr. Cromwell,” she said,
almost desperate to erase that feeling from her skin. “How lovely
to encounter you again.”

He didn’t seem annoyed at her
misidentification. He didn’t blink or correct her. “Miss
Fairfield,” he said, and gave her a smile so friendly that she
almost stepped back.

Mr. Marshall’s companion was a dark-haired
gentleman who would have fit the brooding hero mold rather better.
He blinked and looked between the two of them with a curious
expression on his face. “Cromwell?” he asked in low tones.

“Yes,” Mr. Marshall said. “Did I forget to
mention that? I’ve been politiciking under an assumed name. Play
along, Sebastian.” He turned to Jane and said, “Miss Fairfield,
might I introduce my friend? This is Mr. Sebastian—”

The other man took a step forward and took
her hand. “Sebastian Brightbuttons.” This, with a glance at Mr.
Marshall. “If you get to assume a name, I want one, too.”

In all the months in which Jane had been
operating under a charade, she’d learned to deal with almost every
emotional response to her mannerisms. She could manage everything
from anger to disbelief.

Playfulness? That was new. She swallowed and
tried to do what she always did. She imagined the conversation as a
prime coach-and-four. She imagined it racing along a road at top
speed, the wheels glinting in the sunlight. And then she imagined
driving it straight into a hedge.

“Sebastian,” Jane mused. “Like Sebastian
Malheur, the famous scientist?” A comparison guaranteed to put this
gentleman off. Malheur was a name that one heard around Cambridge a
great deal—a man who was known for giving lectures where he openly
talked of sexual intercourse under the guise of discussing the
inheritance of traits. His name was cursed alongside that of
Charles Darwin, and sometimes with greater vituperation.

But instead of flushing, Mr. Marshall and Mr.
Brightbuttons exchanged amused glances.

“Very much like him,” Mr. Brightbuttons said.
“Are you an enthusiast of his work? I am.” He leaned in a little
closer. “Actually, I think he’s brilliant.”

Marshall was watching her again, and Jane’s
skin prickled under his perusal.

That was when Jane realized she’d made a
mistake. Those freckles, his background—they’d all misled her into
thinking that he was a quiet little rabbit.

He wasn’t. He was the wolf that looked as if
he were lounging about on the outskirts of the pack, a lone
hanger-on, when in truth he had adopted that position simply so
that he could see everything that transpired in the fields below.
He wasn’t solitary; he was waiting for someone to make a
mistake.

He looked willing to wait a very long
time.

But he hadn’t had to. She’d used the
wrong-name trick on Marshall the other night, and here she was,
repeating it again. Use a stratagem too many times, and people
began to be suspicious.

She blamed that damned frisson.

Mr. Brightbuttons, or whatever his name was,
was grinning at her, too.

“Tell me,” he said, “do you
really
think that I’m like Sebastian Malheur? Because I’ve heard that he
is excruciatingly handsome.”

He smiled at her, and Jane realized she’d
made another mistake. He wasn’t Sebastian
some-random-name-that-he-hadn’t-admitted-to. He
was
Sebastian Malheur in the flesh.

Mr. Marshall was friends with the infamous
Malheur. Jane swallowed.

“You can’t be very much like Malheur, then,”
she managed. “I’ve been looking at you for a full thirty seconds,
and I haven’t had a single flutter of interest.”

Mr. Marshall let out a crack of laughter.

“Very well, Miss Fairfield,” he said. “You’ve
earned it. May I introduce Sebastian Malheur, my friend and cousin.
He won’t assume you’re as dreadful as rumor says, so long as you
give him the same credit.”

Jane opened her mouth to agree. She almost
did, before she realized what he’d said—and what she’d almost
assented to. She had to physically yank her hand behind her back to
keep from offering it in friendship.

“What are you talking about?” Her voice
sounded far too high. “I haven’t got a dreadful reputation. And
Malheur—isn’t he some kind of evolutionist? I have heard that his
lectures are entirely wild.”

“I’d planned to call the work I’m preparing
now ‘Orgies of the Peppered Moth,’” Mr. Malheur said brightly.
“It’s a series of heated interrogations of winged insects,
completely unclothed, doing nothing but—”

Mr. Marshall jabbed his friend with an
elbow.

“What? Have you got some sort of vendetta
against moth-on-moth—”

“Really, Sebastian.”

His friend shrugged and then looked back at
Jane. “Only one way to find out,” he said. “Come to my next lecture
in a handful of months. I’ll start off with snapdragons and peas.
Nobody can object to a discussion of plant reproduction. If they
did, we’d require flowers to don petticoats instead of wandering
around, showing their reproductive parts to all and sundry.”

Jane choked back a laugh. But Mr. Marshall
was watching her, a quizzical expression on his face.

She swallowed and looked away.

“Miss Fairfield,” Mr. Marshall said, “are you
familiar with chameleons?”

“I dare say I was just reading about those,”
Jane said officiously, trying to regain her balance. “Those are a
species of flower?”

Mr. Marshall didn’t even twitch at that, and
that made Jane feel all the more uneasy. He was supposed to smile
at her. Better yet, he was supposed to sneer.

“Or maybe it was a hat,” she added.

Not so much as a curl of his lip.

“The chameleon,” Mr. Marshall said, “is a
species of lizard. It changes its coloration so that it hides in
its surroundings. When it darts across the sand, it is
sand-colored. When it slips through the forest, it is
tree-colored.”

His eyes were the color of an unforgiving
winter sky, and Jane shifted uneasily in her tracks. “What a
curious creature.”

“You,” he said, with a small gesture of his
hand, “are an anti-chameleon.”

“I am an ant-eating what?”

“An anti-chameleon. The opposite of a
chameleon,” he explained. “You change your colors, yes. But when
you are in sand, you fashion yourself a bright blue so that the
sand knows you are not a part of it. When you are in water, you
turn red so that everyone knows you are not liquid. Instead of
blending in, you change so that you stand out.”

Jane swallowed hard.

“Well, Sebastian,” Marshall said, turning
back to his friend, “what think you of that sort of adaptation?
What kind of creature tries to stand out from its
surroundings?”

Mr. Malheur frowned and rubbed his forehead
as he considered the question. “Poisonous ones,” he finally said.
“Butterflies do it all the time. They are brightly colored so that
birds cannot confuse them with other creatures. ‘Don’t eat me,’ the
color shouts. ‘I’ll make you vomit.’” He frowned as he said this.
“But one ought not apply the principles of evolution to human
behavior. Individual choice is not the product of evolution.”

And yet the comparison was all too apt. That
was precisely what Jane intended, even if she’d never thought of it
that way. She
did
want everyone to notice her—and she wanted
them to think her poisonous.

“Well, then, Miss Fairfield. You have it
yourself, from Mr. Malheur’s mouth.” He gestured at his friend. “We
can conclude nothing.”

“Mr. Cromwell…”

Mr. Marshall held up a hand, cutting her off.
That frisson went through her again, tingling at the base of her
spine.

“It’s Mr. Marshall,” he said quietly. “But I
think you’re clever enough to know that.”

God, she was in dire straits.
You’re
intelligent enough to remember two syllables
was hardly a
compliment, but she’d not received any praise at all in months. It
left her feeling warm and utterly confused.

“I—I’m not sure—” She took a deep breath,
tried to gather the shreds of her charade about her. “Was I
mistaken then? I’m so sorry, Mr. Crom—I mean, Mr. Marshwell.”

“I am not going to lie to you,” Mr. Marshall
said. “And might I suggest…”

She looked at him, looked up into those eyes
like a winter storm. She looked up into a face that should have
been ordinary, and Jane felt her whole body come to a standstill.
Her heart ceased to beat. Her lungs seized up in her chest. Even
her hair felt like a heavy burden. There was nothing but him and
his foolish not-even-compliments.

“Might I suggest,” he finally said, “that you
don’t need to lie to me, either.”

“I—”

He held up a finger. “Think about it,” he
said. “Think carefully, Miss Fairfield. And once you’re done
thinking… Well, the two of us might have a very productive
conversation.”

She swallowed. “About fashion? You don’t
appear to be the sort to care.”

He smiled, just a curl of his lip. “About a
great many things. And yes, Miss Fairfield. About fashion. About
the colors you wear, and what they are hiding.”

He touched the brim of his hat and gestured
to his friend.

“Good day,” he said pleasantly, as if he’d
not just uttered a horrendous threat, and he walked off.

“Good God,” she heard Mr. Malheur say as they
walked away. “What was that all about?”

If Mr. Marshall answered, the response was
swept away in the clop of horse hooves from a passing omnibus.

The third time Jane met Mr. Marshall was even
worse. She scarcely had a chance to speak with him at the Johnsons’
dinner, but she could sense his eyes on her all through the meal.
He sat just down the long table from her, close enough to converse
with. It didn’t matter what she said to him. It didn’t matter how
she said it. He never gave her that freezing look that suggested
that he’d been offended.

Instead, he looked…amused.

She felt wrong the entire evening—as if her
shift was too small, as if she no longer fit in the armor of her
clothing.

When the gentlemen joined the ladies in the
library after, she found herself uncertain, constantly aware of
him. Her responses were forced, not flowing. She felt like—what was
it he had called her?—an
anti-chameleon
, burning brightly in
the middle of the room.

Don’t marry me; I’m poison.
She was
poison. She was a blight. Her gown tonight was a wasteland of
red-and-black silk, devoid of good taste and fringed with
clattering beads. She loved it almost as much as she loved the band
of polished silver on her arm. She’d perfected the art of holding
her wrist just so—moving it back and forth so that it reflected
light into a gentleman’s eyes. But she’d hit Mr. Marshall three
times now, and he hadn’t so much as grunted.

God, what was she to do?

Mr. Marshall suggested that music might be a
good way to spend the evening, and she breathed a sigh of relief.
Everyone would be looking at the performers, and they’d never ask
her to join in. Jane wouldn’t have to be
on.
Being dreadful
was such wearying work. The company adjourned to the music
room.

Jane stayed in her seat, holding her breath,
hoping nobody would notice she wasn’t moving.

Nobody did. They all filed out without
glancing in her direction. Of course not; they didn’t want to see
her.

She slumped in relief as the door closed
behind the last man. Alone at last. Alone, with no need to pretend.
She could
breathe
. She could stop thinking, stop examining
every smile, stop worrying about why it was that Mr. Oliver
Marshall kept glancing in her direction.