The Governess Affair (Brothers Sinister #0.5)

She’d smiled and shook her head.

We should make one for you.

Her smile had fixed in place. Then she’d let out a sigh. I’ve buried too many children, she’d finally said. I’m not burying anything else that matters. Never again.

“Your mother sounds like a lovely woman,” Serena said beside him.

“My mother told me I would be somebody.” It had been reflexive soothing on her part—sheer contradiction after his father’s tirades.

“Maybe you should listen to her.”

You can be anyone, she’d told him, over and over.

A rich man? he’d asked.

The richest coal miner’s son in all of England, she promised.

“When I left home,” he finally said, “I was fourteen. I’d gone into the mines for the first time three days before, and there had been an accident. A little cave-in, nothing serious, but I was caught in the dark for five hours with nothing to do but imagine my air slowly being used up. After I got out, I said I wasn’t going back.” He inhaled. “My father disagreed. He broke my nose and three ribs with a broomstick. He told me I wasn’t good enough, that I’d never amount to anything.”

“Oh, Hugo.” Her hand rose to trace along his jaw. “You can’t still believe him—not after all these years.”

He shook his head. “I got away because my mother stepped in—drawing my father’s anger down on her. The last thing I remember, scrambling out the door, is the sound of her screams.”

Her arm crept around him. “Oh, Hugo,” she repeated.

“She passed away a few weeks later.” He could scarcely draw breath. “So it’s not enough yet, what I’ve managed.” He balled his hands. “It’s not enough to make up for leaving her. She could not have lost so much for a mere nobody.”

He’d gone back to the park when he’d heard the news, and dug for that jar.

I’m going to be the richest coal miner’s son in all England, he’d promised the grubby glass. And then he’d buried it again where she’d once left it—and hidden his other desires so deep that even Serena could not unearth them.

“And so that’s where we are.” He put his arm around her and inhaled the sweet, lingering scent of her perfume. “You can’t stay. I won’t leave. And now we both know precisely what it is we’re giving up. It wasn’t a good idea.”

She let out a breath.

“But you’ll be safe and you’ll be well.” He kissed her forehead lightly. “And that will be enough.”

THE STORY, SERENA BELIEVED, would go like this: Hugo would change his mind.

She first believed he would change it when he woke up next to her, blinking away his morning bleariness. And yet he didn’t.

Next she told herself he’d wash his insistence on their separation away with soap and water, or scrape it off alongside the bristles he’d acquired overnight.

He didn’t; he washed and shaved and changed his clothing without once altering his decision.

He would change his mind, Serena decided, in the hack he’d hire to deliver her to the stagecoach yard.

But he said only a few words on the journey—just enough to deliver a quiet greeting when they stopped along the way for Freddy. The three of them traveled in unspeaking silence—Freddy clutching the strap, her gloves wrinkling under the ferocity of her grip, even though their conveyance scarcely swayed.

When they arrived, he made no attempt to purchase passage for himself. Instead, Hugo stood back, pretending to busy himself with Serena’s trunk so that the sisters might speak.

“Well.” Freddy peered around the crowded yard of the inn with a deeply suspicious look, frowning at the ostlers. “I suppose you have to thrust yourself out there, do you not?” She punctuated the end of this sentence with a deep, speaking sigh.

“Yes. I must.”

“You always were an unnatural thing.” Freddy raised a handkerchief to her nose as if she could blot the horses from her senses. “Still, I’ll miss you. Things can be rather dull when you’re not present.”

Serena hugged her sister. “Take care,” she said.

Freddy embraced her in return. “I always do. It’s you I worry about.”

Maybe Freddy would always think Serena strangely broken, and Serena would always cringe, thinking of her sister ensconced in her rooms, slowly turning to stone. There was no convincing one another, no understanding one another.

But when Serena had most needed it, her sister had given her a place to stay. For all that Freddy made her stomach hurt, they still shared an affection made bittersweet by all that divided them. Perhaps God gave one sisters to teach one to love the inexplicable.

“Be well,” Serena said. “And go straight home, do you hear? No waiting around until the coach is out of sight.”

Freddy sniffed at that and didn’t answer, but she was pale and perspiring.