The Suffragette Scandal (Brothers Sinister 4)

He shrugged. “I don’t know. Nothing but a big wad of metal.”

“This is beautiful,” Free said slowly. “Beautiful and somehow, sad. And harsh. All at the same time. I’ve never seen its like. Where did you find it?”

He shrugged indifferently. “Just outside Strasbourg. Some six years ago.”

“Did you commission it yourself or did the artist have a regular stock of these paperweights?”

Edward snorted. “I commissioned it,” he told her. “It’s just a trifle.”

She didn’t think it was a trifle. She turned the piece around, catching hints of half patterns hidden in every twist of metal. “Was this to commemorate some occasion? The artist that made this was an incredible genius. The loops look random at first, but they’re not. When I look at it from this angle, I almost see…a rose? There are thorns on that part, I think, and these loops from this angle form petals.” She gave it a quarter turn. “But this looks like a hawk. I could stare at this for hours.” She looked up at him and suddenly frowned. “Edward, are you well?”

“Perfectly so.” The smile he gave her was just like every smile he’d ever delivered—easy, untinged by emotion and, Free realized, utterly false. His left hand gripped the arm of his chair so tightly that his glove bunched. His other arm was ramrod straight, braced against his leg as if it were the only thing that held him upright.

He was lying to her. Of course he was; he hadn’t given her this piece because it was an inconsequential paperweight that he’d commissioned on a whim. It was because it meant something to him.

“Don’t be such a man.” Free stood, rolling her eyes. “You’ve gone pale. Here. Let me get you a glass of water.”

“I am not pale,” he said brusquely. “I don’t need a glass of water.”

She came around the desk and she set her hand on his wrist. “Your pulse is racing.”

“It is not,” he said in contradiction of reality. He had begun to breathe fast, and his skin was turning paper white.

Free rolled her eyes again. “Stop being ridiculous. Now are you going to stay here while I fetch you something to drink?”

“Hmph.”

“That wasn’t definitive agreement, Mr. Clark. Let’s try this again: If you get up now, I’m kicking you in the shins. Your shins won’t like it, and my toes will like it less.” She gave him a tight smile and ducked away.

But as she found the pitcher of water, she considered. He’d said he needed to tell her a great deal the other night, but that he wouldn’t. She’d thought he didn’t wish to. She of all people should have realized that the memories he held were so painful that he couldn’t. After everything he’d told her, she should have understood that much.

He was still in her office when she returned. Instead of seating herself in the chair on the opposite side of her desk, she leaned against the edge of the table, a few feet from him. “Better, Edward?”

He took a sip of water. “I thought you wouldn’t do this caretaking stuff. You know, too feminine. Too motherly.”

She simply smiled. “I believe that women are human beings. That belief is not diametrically opposed to thinking that men are human beings, and that if one human being has the opportunity to be kind to another, she should do so.” She looked at him. “And I knew you would say that. That you’d say something to provoke me to avoid talking about yourself. You’re always deflecting my questions.”

“Only because you ask impertinent questions. I’d have no need to deflect anything, if you stopped snooping.”

She pushed to her feet, walked to her door. But she didn’t leave. Instead, she made sure it was firmly shut. “Mr. Clark,” she said softly. “Edward. I don’t think you gave me a lump of metal that you’d been carting around for six years for no particular reason. Talking about this particular lump of metal is difficult for you. You don’t have to tell me anything.”

He took a breath. “I lied when I said I commissioned it.” He didn’t look at her. “Or, rather, it was a mangling of the truth. I commissioned it, but the artist was myself.”

She blinked and looked at it again. “Oh. My.”

“Don’t look so surprised. You’ve seen my sketches. You know I have some capabilities as an artist.”

“Some, of course. But sketches are one thing. Any number of people can manage a creditable sketch. This is something else entirely.”

“I spent two years with a blacksmith.” He shrugged. “I learned a few tricks. And I had to decide who I was. I couldn’t be the useless little rich boy I had been all that time. I felt as if I were trapped in a labyrinth with no way out, traveling tangled paths that could not lead me to the surface. I made that”—he nodded at the paperweight—“trying to find myself in the man I became.”

Free looked at the piece again.

“No,” he told her. “You won’t find me in there. That’s the whole point. I only ever found a collection of twisted passages leading nowhere. I never found a place to go, a person to be. I learned to believe in nothing, because that way I would never be disappointed.”

“So.” She picked up his paperweight and turned it over. “This was your search for a heart?”

“No.” His voice was ever so quiet. “I made that when I gave up on having one altogether. I didn’t think there was any point in looking for such a ridiculous object until I met you. At some point in the weeks of our acquaintance, I realized I did have one buried somewhere.” He looked over at her. “There’s no point in searching it out now. By the time I realized it existed, it was already yours.”

Oh. Her chest felt too tight. She could almost feel her eyes stinging in response. “And still you’re leaving.”

“I am.”

Free knew that she was the sort to push others. She knew because she’d been told it, time and time again, and because…well, frankly, it was true. Other people were often wrong, and she had no qualms about letting them know.

But if she had one regret in her life, it was pushing too much at the wrong time. When she was younger, she had pushed her Aunt Freddy. Freddy had been beset by a complex mix of fears, ones that Free still didn’t understand. Still she’d pushed, as if she somehow knew better than her own aunt what Freddy needed.

And what had she accomplished by that? They’d both been miserable, and in her aunt’s final days, she’d made Freddy feel as if she were not good enough.