If I Fall (14 page)

“I believe one might call it a hell, what with the gaming
tables and women, but it was really quite pleasant. Nothing hellish about it.” He smiled wide at his own wit. Sarah rolled her eyes.

“Not astonished? Not horrified?” Jack asked, his observational sense apparently unimpaired by the alcohol. Sarah was beginning to suspect that he was not as drunk as he seemed to be. Perhaps the cheap whiskey was watered down.

“Not at all,” Sarah replied, her posture as straight as ever. “I’m afraid a hell is rather a predictable place for young men to spend their evenings. If you had told me you had gone and milked all the cows in Surrey, that would have been astonishing.”

“I’m so sorry to have disappointed you, Miss Forrester. I shall endeavor to do better next time,” Jack replied.

Silence descended. The light beyond the library windows was turning pinkish. The world was not yet fully awake, but it would be soon enough—and with it, the Forrester household. Maids lighting fires, the kitchen up and running, preparing breakfast and purchasing dinner from the merchants that came to their back door. But as tired as she was, Sarah didn’t want to—nay, for some reason, could not—remove herself to her chamber just yet. She wasn’t ready.

And so she turned her head ever so slightly, and said, “A considerate man would offer a lady a sip of his whiskey.”

He cocked an eyebrow at her, but silently offered her his bottle. Sarah took a swig.

And immediately choked.

There is little more humiliating than being red-faced and laughed at, but at that moment, Sarah couldn’t care. “Good God, how can you drink that stuff? It’s awful!”

Jack’s chuckles died down. “Of course it is. The experience of drinking does not come from the imbibing itself, rather its aftereffects.”

Sarah shot him an unkind look. Oh, very well, she looked at him as if he were the devil. “I know that, Jack. But that doesn’t mean it has to taste like licking a dead man’s shoe.”

“Ah. That has more to do with the bottle’s price than anything else. To taste like licking a living man’s shoe, one must pay extra.”

Sarah could not hide a smile at that. It was moments like
this one, like when he asked if they could start again on the dance floor, that she was almost easy with him. That she felt the possibility of all the tension and silliness falling away, and that they might be able to be friends again.

This can be done, she thought. Surely, easiness can be achieved.

“So, how was your day today? I did not see you until the party this evening.”

“Only because you sleep until the afternoon and spend the few hours in between paying calls and shopping.”

Or perhaps, it wasn’t so easy.

“That’s what I did with my day, Jack. I asked what you did with yours.”

“I went to the naval offices at Somerset House, to see if there was any word of the
Amorata
.”

“And was there?”

“No.”

“Oh.”

Jack took another sip from his reclaimed bottle. “And how was the rest of your evening, Sarah?”

“It was lovely,” Sarah replied. “After you left me on the floor, the Comte de Le Bon rescued me for the next dance. And I spent most of the rest of the evening on my feet.”

“And so the world can rest easy knowing that your popularity was unaffected by my abandonment.” He lounged in his chair, insouciant, and yet brittle and hard.

That was it. The final straw, Sarah thought, rising to her feet. No one could say she hadn’t tried to be polite. But it seemed that politeness to Jackson Fletcher was undeserved.

“A few hours ago, I asked you what on earth I have done to earn such scowls from you. And I think you lied to me. I don’t think my flirting with you set you against me. It began before.” He remained silent, turning the bottle in his hand, examining its amber contents. “Ever since you came here, you have looked down your nose at me. What I want to know is, what on earth have I done to deserve that? And do us both a kindness and answer honestly this time.”

Jack looked at her then, his eyebrows high into his forehead with surprise. She thought he might make his apologies, become contrite and beg forgiveness, as any gentleman might.

But then his eyes narrowed, focused on her. His legs sprawled out again, staking his territory. And Sarah remembered that Jack’s ties to being a gentleman were tenuous. And possibly lost at sea.

“If I look down my nose at you, it is only because you look down your nose at everyone else.” He replied calmly. But in his eyes lay the challenge.

“I do no such thing,” she answered hotly.

“Oh really? The first thing I saw you do when I came to this house was put your sister down. The Sarah I knew would have never done that.”

“Put Bridget down?” Sarah asked befuddled. “When?”

“You do it too often to remember a specific instance, do you?” He tried to smile, but it was too hard an expression, coming out a sneer. “Right there in that hallway. You said with a look and a line that any man that fell in love with Bridget would have fallen in love with you first. You told your sister in no uncertain terms that she was nothing to your incomparable light. The Golden Lady.”

Sarah’s fingers protectively grazed one of the glittering palm trees on her gown. Then she stopped herself, forced herself to not react self-consciously to his jibes. The way the old Sarah would.

“So this is about Bridget?” she said instead, her eyes flicking to the hallway, trying to remember what he was talking about. The day he arrived … well, she supposed she had said something nasty to Bridget, but it was likely only in response to something nasty Bridget had said to her. Indeed, her sister’s unpleasantness had grown even sharper since then. “You’ve decided to hate me to take up her cause? I assure you, Bridget decided to hate me for some unknown reason long before you showed up to feel pity.”

Jack stood on a sigh. “No, this is about you, Sarah. You just don’t see it.” He began to pace, to move, as if footwork would bring forth the words he couldn’t find otherwise. “I look at you and I see somebody lost. It is as if you lost your light.”

“My light?” she blinked. It had to be the whiskey that made him speak so—otherwise Sarah could not countenance a word he was saying.

“Yes!” he continued, his sense of disappointment giving
way to more passionate speech. “What happened to my friend Sarah? What happened to the smart, happy girl who liked to play pirates and looked forward to life and hated piano lessons, the one your mother described in all her letters? I know you were disappointed in love, but these airs you put on cannot—”

She held up her hand immediately. He stopped speaking, but also stopped pacing. Directly in front of her. She felt her feet inching backward. But he advanced with her in time.

“Th … The Event has nothing to do with this.” She squeaked, then cleared her throat, and took a deep, considering breath. “It was his loss, not mine. I’m sorry I don’t fit the preconceived notion you had of how I would be, or how my mother described me. You look at me and expect me to be a twelve-year-old girl, sheltered from the world and full of adoration for a boy in uniform. Well, she grew up. Changed.”

He held her gaze, cocked his head to one side. “No one changes that much.”

They were close, so close. Sarah could feel the library shelves at her back. She could smell the scent of the sea. His eyes were so sad, so terribly earnest that her gaze faltered, dipping—without her consent—to his lips.

She saw those lips part. Heard the sharp intake of breath. Immediately, her eyes shot back to his.

“Why not?” she blurted. “You certainly did.” Ha! Take that, she thought, seeing confusion cross his features. Let us see how you enjoy being the one under the microscope.

“And what is that supposed to mean?” he asked, leaning back.

“Is the
Amorata
going back out to sea?” She narrowed her eyes and cocked her head to one side, a deliberate reflection of how he looked at her.

“It … it may or it may not.” He backed away from her, beginning to pace again.

“What utter lies!” she crowed. “You know very well it will not, yet you can’t give into the idea. You have to hold fast to it, because without it, what are you? Not the boy who loved the sea, who set off with such hope nine years ago, the one my parents adore like their own child.” She took two steps forward. “No, you’ll just be a washed-up lieutenant with no prospects.
And at the one piece of practical advice given to you, you balk like a squeamish nun.”

“Practical advice? You mean finding someone rich to marry? Well, I’m sorry I cannot sell myself as easily as you do yourself.”

Sarah flinched as if struck. But Jack did not notice it … or if he did, he used it to fuel his ranting anger, because he did not stop. Did not look up at her, and did not see the stripe across her flesh that each word inflicted.

“How do you do it?” he mused, his voice little and angry. “How do you package yourself up to be sold? Buy new clothes, tilt your head, laugh coquettishly, flirt with every person who walks past? How do you make someone so intoxicated by you that they ignore the fact that they don’t know you at all, and if they did, they wouldn’t care to?”

His last words came down like a crash. A painful shattering that made the silence that reigned there after ring clear. Eventually, his eyes met hers, and she saw in his reaction that she was no longer able to hide the truth behind her mask: that the words he had just spoken had broken something fundamental between them. And as a single tear betrayed her will and slid down her cheek, she knew that this … this could not be solved with easy banter, or politeness across the dinner table.

“Wait,” Jack cried, as she silently turned and moved to the door. “Wait, Sarah. I apologize.”

He caught her arm and she stilled, just long enough to give him a look as cold as the dawn itself. “I did not mean you. I’m sorry. When I said that … when I asked why someone would get to know a person that they wouldn’t care to, I was referring to myself.”

She raised her eyes to his. His gaze stuttered, dropping to his hand on her arm, and then to his toes, as said hand quickly dropped to his side. “You’re right, you see. What am I without the
Amorata
? Becoming a surgeon or a barrister would take time and money I can’t afford, for work I’m not inclined to. The
Amorata
has to sail, because I’m a sailor, Sarah. Nothing more. Please believe I meant no offense toward you.”

“I do believe you, Jack,” Sarah began slowly, quietly. “And accept your repentance on that score.” Her heart was beating
as if she had just run up and down the stairs, but her feet would not let her move. “But that doesn’t change the fact that you think I sell the world a bill of goods.”

“Sarah, I…”

“No, Jack!” her voice finally broke, a jagged raw edge emerging out of pain and exhaustion. “You want me to be something I no longer am.”

“It’s a lie, Sarah,” Jack finally said, pleading. “Maybe your family won’t tell you because … they want your success. Hell, maybe I’m the only one who
can
see it. But … the men that wait on your doorstep, the flirting, the selling of your dances for fifty pounds … None of your new friends know the real you, because you do not let them. It’s all a lie. It keeps you hidden.”

“It is not a lie!” she said harshly. “It does not hide me, because it
is
me. It is Miss Sarah Forrester. The Golden Lady. And
everyone
loves her.”

Sarah squared her shoulders, and without a backward glance she opened the door, gliding through it like the untouchable goddess she had transformed herself into. But before she was up the stairs and out of earshot, and could let her body breakdown with anger and collapse into bed, she heard his voice echo across the marble foyer, just coming awake with the morning light.

“No one changes that much,” he said softly.

Jack watched as she turned the corner at the top of the stairs, disappearing into the next day. His vision clear for the first time in a week.

“No one changes that much.” He said again to himself. “And I’ll prove it.”

A
FORTNIGHT
later, as he was ducking into an unused cupboard in the London theatre that took up nearly an entire city block, placing a false moustache to his lip and tying a half mask over his eyes and hair, it occurred to Jack that he was in a most unusual situation, and could only marvel at how he arrived here.

“And I’ll prove it.”

Those are the words that had dropped from his lips, that vow. The idea that he could somehow break through the facade Sarah Forrester had built, and again let that light shine through. That was what drove him to this.

It was by no means his first attempt. In fact, some might say this drastic action was a last resort. Jack had spent more than a week trying to ingratiate himself with Sarah, trying to get her to, first of all, forgive him, and then secondly, act like the Sarah he knew of old.

She had built a bitter, hard shell around her real self, put it in a pleasant shape and decorated it in gold and glitter, to distract the world from its brittleness. But the true Sarah, the one that used to walk in light and hope, was sheltered within, like a baby animal, wounded and scared of trusting anyone enough to come out again.