by Emma Newman
“Such a shame,” she sighed. “I wanted to see if you were as good at poker as you are at the waltz. One can tell only so much from the way a man dances.”
He enjoyed the thrill her flirtation sent through him. “Am I to understand that it’s different in Londinium?”
“Oh yes, at certain soirées the ladies and gentlemen play at the same tables. It makes it so much more interesting.” The way she said it made the thrill pulse into excitement. He wanted to touch her cheek, to stroke the back of her neck. He hadn’t felt this way since Sicily, and never before in Society. “You’ll have to come up for the season. I’m sure Cornelius would sponsor you if I introduced you to him.”
“I would very much like to meet your brother,” he replied. The way she spoke and held eye contact was quite intoxicating. There was none of the shyness nor the coy games played by the young ladies of Aquae Sulis about her. She was a delight for the eyes too. Again, Will hoped the opal would turn black. “Is Princess Rani here?”
“She’s having her own Grand Tour. Aquae Sulis was just one place on a very long list.”
“Not tempted to accompany her?”
“Not when there’s so much to hold me here. I hope you will dance with me at the next ball, Mr Iris.” She waved to someone behind him, leaving him with a smile to remember her by.
He deliberately settled at a table on the other side of the room to the Gallica-Rosa, forcing himself not to think of Amelia. He feared if he played a hand with Horatio, the Rosa would make a comment committing him to a path he didn’t want to take without knowing if his fiancée had any honour to defend.
When he was almost two hundred of the Queen’s pounds up and in need of a drink he left the table and returned to the main reception room. Imogen slipped her arm into his on the way, fanning herself excitedly.
“I’ve heard the most fascinating rumour, dear brother,” she said, and Will steeled himself for disaster. “Apparently, the Gallica-Rosa has told Cecilia he has a surprise that will make the princess seem dull in comparison.”
Will hid his tension behind a bored expression. “Oh? What does he have up his sleeve? A Prince from Atlantis?”
“A house in Aquae Sulis apparently, but that is to go no further. Cecilia told me in the strictest confidence.”
“Are you certain?”
“Cecilia is. And she’s trying very hard to make it up to me for not telling me he was coming for the season. He’s dripping with money, too. I think she’s hoping to catch his eye but I’m certain I can–”
“Keep away from him, Imogen,” he said, too sternly.
“He’s been sponsored in by your best friend.”
“Under duress. Father has a very low opinion of his family. It won’t go anywhere.”
“He may change his mind if he becomes a resident,” Imogen said with a smile. “Oh, and by the way, what in the world is Catherine Papaver wearing? I’d give her my seamstress’s details, but I fear she would wear her creations so poorly I’d be forced to find another.”
“I believe Cecilia is trying to catch your eye,” he said, glad to have a reason to get rid of her. He didn’t need her prattling to distract him.
He scanned the room for his fiancée, spotting her brother still talking to Oliver’s father, probably about cricket or rugby; they were both sports bores. He caught sight of Lucy’s red dress and saw her leading Catherine out of the room and onto one of the balconies. Intrigued, he got a glass of punch and went to the french doors in an effort to listen in.
“I had no idea it was going to happen,” Catherine was saying. “I’m so sorry.”
“It’s fine, really,” Lucy replied. “Tom nearly burst a blood vessel but that’s not your fault. I’m just glad you were able to come back to us.”
“I just wish he could have let me come back to your house, not right into the ball. That was so awful.”
“Well, it’s all done now and you’re the toast of the Papavers.”
“Hardly.”
“Well, I’ve heard nothing but good things. It’s been a long time since one of us has been a favourite.”
“Do you mean the Rhoeas or Californicas?”
“Either.”
There was a pause. Will sipped the punch and tried to look like he was watching people go by, rather than being tuned into the conversation outside.
“So how are things? Was it as bad as you feared?”
“Worse.”
That piqued his interest.
“Oh, Jeez. I wish they would let you stay with us. I’d like the company.”
“I wish they would too, but that’s never going to happen.”
“At least William seems like a nice young man.”
There was a longer pause.
“I don’t want to talk about him,” Catherine finally said. “I don’t want to talk about any of that.”
“You’re gonna have face up to it sometime, honey,” Lucy said, sounding far more American than he’d realised. “We all have to.”
“Not tonight,” Catherine said, and the finality of her tone made him worry she was coming back in. He had to take the opportunity to get her alone. He went out onto the balcony.
“Good evening,” he said, ignoring the dread on Catherine’s face as they both curtsied.
“Mr Iris,” Lucy smiled. “I was just singing your praises.”
“How kind of you, madam, I hope my fiancée didn’t contradict you.” He earned the blush he was hoping for on Catherine’s cheeks, then berated himself for playing such games with someone so inept. “I would very much appreciate the opportunity of a moment with my fiancée, if I may be so bold?”
Lucy raised an eyebrow, gave Catherine an encouraging smile. “I’ll be just inside.”
Catherine looked as if she were going to be sick.
The balcony overlooked a modest garden but, having spent so much time in Mundanus, he realised how pathetically fake it all appeared without proper sunlight. The Charms required to keep the plants alive were more a demonstration of wealth than anything else. He’d never appreciated before how hollow a gesture it was. Although he found it distasteful he was grateful they both had something else to look at.
Catherine moved to the stone rail, avoiding his eyes. It gave him the opportunity to palm the opal; it felt cold and the heat of his hand failed to warm it. The neckline of her dress was far higher at the back than he’d hoped it would be and barely any of her flesh was exposed; even her gloves came up to where the short sleeves of her dress ended. He wondered how he was going to test her without her knowledge. Perhaps he’d need to come up with a story to explain it away instead.
“Did you want to talk about something?” she said nervously.
“I wanted the opportunity to see how you are.”
“And whether I’m going to be civil?”
He went to stand next to her and she shuffled away a step. “Perhaps we can start again?”
She still couldn’t bring herself to look at him. “I know you’re trying really hard. And I know I’m not very good at all this.”
“I just want you to relax,” he said. “That’s why I came out here, I thought it would be easier without an audience.”
She nodded. “I don’t like everyone watching. I don’t know why they’re so interested.”
“You’re Lord Poppy’s favourite.”
“And your fiancée.”
“That too.” He moved closer and she twitched. “Why do you insist on keeping me at arm’s length? It’s almost as if you don’t want to get to know me.”
“I just–”
“I wonder if you’re scared that if you do get to know me, you may actually want to get married.”
“There’s nothing worse than an amateur psychologist,” she muttered.
“Perhaps, if you gave me a chance, you’d change your mind.”
“What if I were to suggest your ego simply can’t handle the fact that I’m not falling over myself to marry you?”
That made him pause
. “Has anyone told you that you may be too clever for your own good?”
“Frequently,” she said bitterly and looked back out over the garden. “I know I’m supposed to smile and go along with all this, but I just can’t. You know, the last couple of days I’ve actually wished I could? It would be so much easier.”
“Then why not just let all this tension go? Why not let me win you over?”
She pulled a face. “Did you read some schlock romance novel whilst you were on the Grand Tour or something?”
“Catherine,” he sighed.
“Perhaps this works on silly girls who think the only thing to aspire to is marriage, but it won’t work with me.”
“I don’t think you’re a silly girl.”
“Then stop treating me like one,” she snapped.
He almost turned on his heels, but decided on a different course of action. She was trying to keep him away with words; no matter what he said, she had a way to shoot him down. The only way he was going to get close enough to test her was to stop talking.
The plan was to gather her into his arms and kiss her passionately, pressing the opal to the back of her neck as he did so, in the hope that she’d be so caught up in the clinch that she wouldn’t notice. He gently put a hand on the back of her waist, and she jumped and looked at him in surprise.
“What are you doing?” she asked as he slid his hand up her back, slowly, gently.
“I want to show you that it’s not all bad,” he said, slightly concerned by how she winced as he moved his hand upwards. Did she find it so unpleasant? “I want to stop treating you like a silly girl and as the woman I’m going to marry.”
He slipped his hand upwards to brush the back of her neck, leaning closer as he gently angled her towards him, pressing the opal against her skin as he did so. He hoped she would accept the kiss, but instead she started to move away. He caught hold of her arm with the intention of pulling her into an embrace that all of the young women he’d kissed on the Grand Tour would have melted into.
He wasn’t expecting the yelp of pain. Keeping the opal in place and her as close to him as he could with his hand on the back of her neck, he looked down at the arm she was trying to pull away from him. Without saying a word, he rolled the top of the glove down to expose her skin, revealing a deep purple bruise and then another only inches away.
Speechless, he let go of her neck, dropped the opal into his pocket without taking his eyes off the injuries and pulled down the other glove. Two horrendous bruises covered that arm too, and he wondered if the reason she’d flinched when he ran his arm up her back wasn’t because she’d resented his touch but because there were other bruises.
She looked terrified, but not of him. “Your brother?” he asked, but the immediate shocked expression told him it wasn’t Thomas. “Your father?”
She looked away and he let her go. “Don’t tell anyone,” she said in a timid voice, not the one he was used to.
He was too furious to speak so he left her on the balcony hurriedly pulling her gloves back up to cover the evidence. He no longer cared about what the opal could tell him.
23
Cathy sat hunched over her dressing table, head propped up on her hands. She ached all over. Where she wasn’t hurting from the beating she was stiff from the seemingly endless dancing.
She felt sick with worry. William looked furious when he saw the bruises but she had no idea what was going to come of it. If anything did, she knew it wasn’t going to be good.
She got up and paced. It was all she did these days; she lay on the bed, she sat at the dressing table, she walked back and forth. This was the ultimate punishment: being locked in a room with only herself for company. No books, not even innocuous ones, and, of course, no television or internet. She was driving herself mad. All of the things she was missing out on, all of the worlds she was being denied, and the endless speculation about Josh and whether he was still staying with that coat hanger of a woman haunted her.
Surely Josh would be bored of the redhead by now. Perhaps she was doing the woman a disservice but Cathy knew Josh valued a woman’s mind more than her looks; she herself was the proof! She had to get back to Josh, explain it all and apologise. If she could find a way to escape and stay hidden, she could protect him too, surely? She pushed to one side the fear that he wouldn’t want her back.
She had to get out of the Nether and hide again, but her current plan was as flimsy as a mille-feuille pastry: to escape when William took her to Mundanus.
That’s as far as the plan had got and it had two major flaws. One was that she would be married by then, the second was that Lord Poppy would be able to find her, even if she did manage to wheedle another Shadow Charm out of the Shopkeeper. If she could find out how the Fae lord tracked her down, there was a chance she could stay hidden, but without that knowledge the risk was too high. Being an Iris would add another layer of complication to the pudding; rich and powerful families weren’t generally known for their sympathy when it came to any potential disgrace in Society.
She fantasised about climbing out of the window and somehow making it down to the gravel three storeys down without breaking her neck and out of the grounds without being seen. She made constant mental lists of what she’d do next; speaking to the Shopkeeper was always first, and there was a Way to the Emporium from Aquae Sulis. Getting there without being seen would be difficult. Next a mad dash to Manchester, going to one of her friends, getting the keys to the storage place…then it all unravelled, unable to keep its own integrity so far from anything realistic.
When she ran away the first time she was in Cambridge and had only a minder who liked his whisky too much and a chaperone who never wanted to leave the house as the modern life of Mundanus terrified her. She had the time and the means to research her options and carefully formulate a plan. Now she was locked in her room, high in a house in the Nether, full of staff briefed to keep a close eye on her, with hourly checks that she was still there and not up to mischief. Her father was never going to underestimate her again.
His comment about disowning her kept coming back. That’s what she really needed: to be completely abandoned by the family and kicked out of the Nether. For anyone else in Society it was a terrifying threat, being denied a life of privilege and condemned to aging and scrabbling for survival. For her, it would be bliss.
But being disowned would earn the wrath of Lord Poppy, against not only her but the rest of her family, and as much as she hated her parents and her sister, she didn’t want to cause them that amount of distress. They simply wouldn’t be able to cope. Elizabeth would probably be taken in by another family as she was too beautiful and talented musically to lose to Mundanus, but her parents would be broken. Tom, with his own household now, would escape the worst, but still be devastated.
She leaned forwards until her forehead was on the polished wood, wishing she could climb out of her skin and fly away. The memory of Will’s kiss made her groan with embarrassment. She just couldn’t handle his attention. He was obviously trying so hard and he was right; she did keep throwing it back at him. Her stomach twisted with guilt. It wasn’t his fault he’d been betrothed to such a freak. He must think so little of her, not able to even be polite, but every time he tried to be civil it made her want to scream with rage at his efforts to weave her back into being a little doll, existing only for male attention and care. Having seen what life could be, she couldn’t pretend to play the game he’d urged her to.
“There has to be a way out of this,” she muttered. “Don’t give up. Don’t–”
She heard the doorbell clang in the hallway below and the sound of the butler’s shoes clipping across the tiled floor. Hurrying to press her ear against the bedroom door, she chewed her lip, wondering if it was William, and what disaster his discovery was going to bring.
It was impossible to tell who had come; she couldn’t make out the voices, but she deduced it was a woman from the sound of the shoes on the tiles. Lucy?
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br /> The sound of the drawing room door closing relaxed her; it must’ve been a guest for her parents. She sat heavily on the bed, tired of this life already. She wanted to play Mass Effect and eat chocolate and forget about it all, just for a few hours.
Then she heard footsteps running up the stairs and towards her door. Her stomach tightened as the key turned in the lock and the maid came in.
“The mistress says you’re to be dressed for a visitor,” she said breathlessly, rushing to the wardrobe, which had been filled with new dresses.
“Who is it?” Cathy asked, glancing at the door, which had been left open. She felt so tempted.
“The Censor herself!” the maid said, pulling out a cream day dress matched with a jacket to cover the evidence of her father’s beating.
“She wants to see me?” Cathy said, now in a full-blown panic. “Why?”
“She wants to take you out for tea,” the maid said, closing the door and beginning to unhook the back of the simple day dress Cathy had been put into that morning.
“Me?” Cathy mumbled, trying to puzzle it out. Had William said something to her? Was the Censor going to ask her about the bruises?
Should she tell the truth? The Censor was her aunt, after all, but there was no love lost between them, and the Censor would be keen to avoid any embarrassment seeing as the beater’s wife was her only sister.
By the time she’d been laced into the new dress and the jacket buttoned high, she’d decided to let the Censor speak first and bring it up if it was on the agenda. That was probably what form would dictate anyway.
The Censor was waiting in the hallway as she descended the stairs. Cathy’s sweating hand gripped the handrail so she didn’t trip over the frills of her petticoat.
“Good morning, Catherine,” her aunt said with a smile as her mother lingered nearby, watching.
“Good morning, Lady Censor,” Cathy replied, curtsying at the bottom of the stairs.
“Your mother tells me your diary is free today. I trust you have no objection to spending the day with me?”