Julia accepted another cigarette, and they smoked for some time in silence, both absorbed in the starless night sky beyond the French doors. Sleep at night? Would she ever again sleep in quite the same peace?
At last she spoke. “You might call Eva a murderer, but her action was the single jot of justice in this whole appalling affair.”
“Agreed,” Philip said amiably.
“She chose her death, you know. She wanted Jerome to live.”
“And now you’ve helped her succeed.”
Julia traced an aching groove along the bridge of her nose. “I was a fool, Philip. A monstrous fool. I was taken in. I believed him. I fell for his charm. No, that’s not right. I fell for his refusal to ply me with charm. I thought that made him honest and direct. Trustworthy. And attractive.” Her cheeks stung to remember her desire. “I thought I knew him. I mocked your warnings, but I was careful. I chose to go with him that night. I wanted to go with him.”
She looked away, aghast at what she was telling Philip. She didn’t even speak to Christophine about such things. Was she drunk? Or simply so shaken that every normal signpost in her life had toppled over? She was finding her way through a landscape she’d thought she knew but didn’t. She couldn’t bring herself to say it: she’d been seduced.
“Yes,” he said, a sound as pensive as his rising smoke ring.
“But we were interrupted,” she went on, “and I had to leave. I wanted to stay, Philip. Is that shameful? I mean, that I gave myself to him, not seeing any hint of the man he truly was? Yet even at the time, some small part of me was glad to go. Maybe that bit, that tiny bit, saw his treachery, though I didn’t know it at the time.”
“Shameful?” Philip mused. “Hardly. But maybe old Kessler did one thing right by you in this whole wretched business, eh?”
It took a long moment for Julia to process. Kessler? How did Philip know it was Kessler who had telephoned at that ungodly hour that night? She sat up. “How on earth . . . ?”
“Surely one has a few prerogatives.”
“You? You asked him to telephone? To call Wallace away?” She could barely speak for rising outrage. Her suspicions that night had been justified.
He lifted his palm, both accepting and halting the barrage.
“Not even a brother—which you are not—should ever interfere like that.” Her voice dropped at the secret, though no one could hear it.
“I’m sure you’re right, under most circumstances.”
“Under any circumstances.”
He sat back, face suddenly dark. “No, you’re wrong there. I stand by what I did, however heinous in the faux-sibling department. You need to hear a story. Or I need to tell it. Either way, you must swear never to repeat it. Do you swear?”
She did, cautiously.
“Yes, I’ve pestered you about Wallace from the start, and it has nothing to do with your virtue or our little lark of passing as siblings. This isn’t my confidence to share but Leah Macready’s, and today she gave me permission to tell you.” He gripped his knee.
“Wallace raped her when she was nineteen.” Julia’s head swerved to dodge yet more excruciating news. “Yes. And it’s worse than that. She was poor then, very poor. Working the streets. She was a prostitute, Julia. She was beautiful, charming, smart—every bit the woman she is today—but she was a prostitute. Wallace took a fancy to her, and not in the debonair ways you so extravagantly experienced.”
Julia listened with closed eyes. She felt blindfolded, condemned to hear what had once been (and still at times remained) unimaginable. Certainly unfathomable. How a man she’d found caring and considerate could once have been so vile. She held her breath, bracing for Philip to go on. Every muscle feared what he would say next.
“He was ruthless, violent. He tracked her down, repeatedly. He damaged her inside. That’s why she never had children. He scarred her. She has several small burns, from cigarettes, on her left hip. He called it his brand. He treated her like an animal.”
Philip tapped a column of ash into the overloaded dish at his side as Julia absorbed the word. Brand. She saw again the constellation of small scars on Eva’s hip. Was it over now? The worst of what she would have to live with for the rest of her life?
“So when I learned you’d gone with him, I understood what would happen. Oh, I never doubted he’d treat you with every gentlemanly care—you’re nothing like a prostitute or chorine, of course—but I simply couldn’t let him take his pleasure. Not from you. Preferably not from anyone, but especially not the one woman in this world for whom I can claim some right—however misguided, however fraudulent—to intervene.”
Julia had never seen Philip like this. His low voice might punch through tin. In a moment his wry mask would return, but in that instant his dark eyes loomed bottomless.
Words clotted in her throat. She remembered the white bearskin, its teeth and claws. Wallace’s attraction had been beguiling, almost a drug. “I seem,” she said, “to have vastly overestimated my powers of discernment.”
A smile quirked Philip’s cheek. “You’re a dervish of discernment, my dear. With one or two lapses.”
The levity helped but faded. “I once thought I’d fare rather well in the men department, you know,” she said. Since they might never again share such a frank conversation, it seemed safe to sustain it a moment longer. “I’d hoped to find someone in New York, you know. Not a boyfriend, not a husband. Just someone. You understand?”
He nodded, wry again. Of course he understood.
“And now my two prospects have both gone awry. One turns out to be a killer, and the other, well, more of a brother.”
They smiled. In truth Austen had never really been a
