The boy reached out a hand and touched Dad’s shoulder. It looked like the gentlest of gestures, but Steve Hadley crumpled slightly as if he’d been winded, and a soft groan escaped his mouth. The Young Master’s expression was almost bored, but beneath the mess of hair Abi saw his eyes narrow in concentration. What was he doing?
Daisy stood next in their makeshift line. Abi felt proud of her little sister’s fearlessness as the boy brought his hand down even more lightly, and Daisy blinked and swayed like a flower in the breeze. Mum, when touched, merely ducked her head and winced.
Then Silyen Jardine stood before Abi, and she swallowed as he reached out . . .
. . . and it was like the giddy pull of standing in a high place and looking down; like the queasy surge of terror after shoplifting just that once for a dare. It was the millisecond after downing an unwise triple shot of Sambuca on her eighteenth birthday; the stunned joy of opening her exam results in the kitchen that day, before she remembered she’d be doing her days, not going to uni. Her heart raced madly – then stopped, for just an instant.
She was suddenly cold to her core, and felt naked in a way that had nothing to do with clothes. It was as though something had carefully turned her inside out and inspected everything she contained. Then, finding nothing of use or interest, had put her back exactly the way she had been – to outward appearances, at any rate.
When the boy’s hand lifted from her shoulder Abi shuddered and thought she might be sick.
The Young Master was already back in the saddle, exchanging brief words with the second horseman before kicking into a canter away through the gate. Abi wasn’t sorry to see him go. The labour bureau woman’s words came back to her, about her preference for her ‘own kind’. Neither Abi nor her family were among their own kind any more.
The second rider came towards them, leading his glossy chestnut horse.
‘You must be the Hadleys,’ he said with a smile. ‘I’m Jenner Jardine. You’re very welcome to my family’s estate.’
‘Are you nicer than that other one?’ asked Daisy.
Abi wanted the ground to swallow her up, even as her mother’s face blanched. But astonishingly, the young man before them simply laughed.
‘I try to be,’ he said. ‘And I’m sorry for what you just experienced. It’s unpleasant, but necessary. I do ask Silyen to at least warn people, but he never does. He says he finds their reactions interesting.’
‘It was horrid,’ said Daisy. ‘Why don’t you do it, then maybe it wouldn’t be so bad?’
Abi wanted to put her hands over her sister’s mouth before anything even more ill-advised came out.
‘I can’t,’ was the unexpected response. ‘I mean, none of us could do it quite like Silyen, but I can’t do it at all. I possess as much Skill as you do, Daisy Hadley. I presume you are Daisy,’ he added gallantly, ‘unless you are Abigail, and a little on the small side for your age, while this tall young Daisy here . . .’
Jenner Jardine turned to Abi, while Daisy spluttered and giggled and assured him that no, no, he had them the right way round.
Abi had been going to apologize to the Kyneston scion for Daisy’s big gob. And she had intended to ask him what he meant about having no Skill, because they all had Skill, all the Equals.
But her words died behind her lips when she looked at Jenner Jardine. Not from a distance on his horse, or with one eye on her indiscreet little sis, but properly at him.
He had warm brown eyes and coppery hair. His face was dusted all over with freckles, and though his mouth was wider than usual in a man, it was balanced by strong cheekbones. Abi took in all these details, yet none of them really registered. She felt giddy again. Felt naked again.
But none of it was due to Skill. And it didn’t leave her cold. No, not cold at all.
Jenner was looking at her oddly, and Abigail realized she had been staring. Her cheeks scorched.
A wash of shame, heavy and humiliating, broke over her. She stood before this man not as the bright, quick, passably attractive girl she knew herself to be, but as a slave. That seemed to Abi, in that moment, the worst and cruellest thing the slavedays could possibly do. It could take away everything that made you who you were. Then place you in front of someone whom, under wholly different circumstances, you might let yourself love and who might even have loved you back.
Jenner’s words were kind, but she shouldn’t delude herself. He was an Equal. And despite his inexplicable claim to be Skilless, he was a Jardine. He would never see Abi for who she truly was. It was as that Millmoor brute had said: to the Equals they were all simply chattels, things to be used – or rejected as useless.
Her humiliation burned away in a flare of anger and guilt about her little brother. It was Abi’s carefully crafted plan that had exposed Luke to the pitiless judgement of the Jardines. His banishment to Millmoor was all her fault. She shook her head, dizzied by the force of this realization.
‘Are you all right?’