Untamed by Anna Cowan

out to her from the landing outside his room, and she came back down to his door.
    ‘London’s made you soft,’ he said, smiling his quiet smile, one finger marking his page. ‘You’re not usually out of breath from one flight of stairs.’
    ‘No. Did you need to ask me something, before?’
    ‘Found it.’ He held up the book.
    He studied her, and she wished for once that he didn’t know her quite so well. ‘What is it? Our guest, there’s something wrong, isn’t there?’
    ‘Why do you say so?’ God, how could she explain it? That extravagant woman out there is really a duke and he’ll ruin us if we don’t put up with him? And by the by, it’s possible he means to seduce me right beneath your nose?
    ‘She . . . seems very attached to you.’
    ‘Oh, Tom,’ she said, and laughed. Whatever the Duke planned, affection for her had no part in it. ‘Of all things, no.’
    Tom smiled, embarrassed, but his eyes were still worried. ‘She watches you – all the time. I have the sense she always knows where you are in a room, and when you aren’t she watches the door and is impatient.’
    ‘I will admit that she’s impatient, but the rest of it’s rot.’ She shook her head and turned to leave.
    Turned back. ‘Tom.’
    ‘Mmm?’ He was already lost again in his book.
    ‘You don’t . . . You’re not . . . You’re not lonely, are you? Stuck out here with just me and Ma for company, I mean?’
    He looked, suddenly, as uncomfortable as she felt. One Sutherland stuck in a doorway, the other on the landing. Sutherlands didn’t talk about things. They just got on.
    He shrugged – a combination of mouth and shoulder that tried and failed to express something. ‘We’re lucky to be here. With each other. To . . . have what we do.’ He nodded, awkward-lipped, and closed his door.
    She ascended, less quickly than before. They were all right, living in the old Manor together, until one of them tried to look just below the surface of things. Then they had to pretend they had seen nothing so that the surface smoothed out. And they were all right again.
    She opened her bedroom door, forgetting for a moment, and tripped over her crocheted blanket.
    ‘God damn it!’
    She picked it up, the fabric familiar between her fingers. She and her mother had spent hours sitting together in front of the fire, speaking of this and that whilst they crocheted the squares. That had been just after Abe Sutherland died, and when they began the blanket their smiles had been tentative and rare. Finishing it had been a kind of triumph for them.
    She replaced it on the bed – saw the slide and disorder of her books, her Shakespeare wedged on top of the last Edinburgh Review she’d been able to afford, ruching its cover into a crease.
    On Monday, when she saw Angus about the meat, she would ask him to teach her the filthiest word he knew. And then she would have a name to call the Duke by.
    Kit hammered the last picket into the muddy ground with the back of the axe, then looked up through the rain and nodded to the Duke. He picked up the next piece of cloth and threw it to her. It landed with a wet thud just out of reach. She closed her eyes, letting the rain shut out everything else for a moment. Opened them again and sank her knee with a thick squelch into the earth so that she could reach the cloth. She ignored the cold in her fingers and sewed the heavy material quickly into place with twine and a wool needle.
    She stood and gestured for him to follow her.
    ‘Wait!’
    The day had grown dark, though it was only approaching noon. The rain made his voice – and the wet, sorry blue of him – indistinct. ‘Are we not to go in now?’
    ‘Step where I step,’ was all she said. If a duke couldn’t see order in a pile of books he was most certainly not going to see order in a vegetable garden. She nudged her way into the old shed and hung up her shawl and hat on the peg by the door.
    Christ, it was good to be out of the