by Evie Dunmore
“Indeed. So naturally, I stole away to attend one of Mrs. Butler’s rallies in Islington.”
And there, she had found something remarkable: a woman who had spoken in a loud, clear voice about ugly things. A woman who used words as weapons on behalf of girls who saw no choice but to jump. While the ladies in her mother’s salon drifted over the agony of choosing the correct wallpaper in hushed tones, Mrs. Butler talked about forcibly apprehended women, and injustice, and double standards, and she had hung on every word. A diffuse anger coursing round and round beneath her skin for years had finally found a direction.
“I felt a great sense of relief,” she told Annabelle. “Half my life I had felt strangely asphyxiated in the presence of my mother and her friends. But there, I was at ease. As though I were finally wearing clothes that fit rather than chafed.”
Because these women had mobilized. Fight, she had wanted to tell her mother after the fateful morning in the library. Fight! when Wycliffe’s indiscretions and belittling comments, relentlessly sprinkled over their daily lives, continued. But her mother never fought. She had pressed her lips together, and become thinner, and paler, and haughtier, until she had haunted Wycliffe Hall like a wronged wraith, and the more martyred and quieter she had become, the louder Lucie had wanted to yell. Years later, as her work with the Cause progressed, she had understood that she should have directed all her youthful anger against her father. She had not yet truly comprehended power then, and how treacherously easy it was to side with it, and to ask that the downtrodden ones change before one demanded the tyrant change.
Annabelle was looking at her with a small smile. “And this was how Lady Lucinda Tedbury as we know her was born.”
Lucie gave a nod. “Mrs. Butler introduced me to Lydia Becker that night who had just founded the first suffrage chapter in Manchester. I should lose my birth family not long after.”
Annabelle’s brow furrowed. “But I understand quite a lot of ladies joined the movement against the diseases acts—and I imagine not all of them were banished?”
“They were not,” she confirmed. “However, I worked with Mrs. Butler and Mrs. Becker in secret. My father found out during a rather unfortunate encounter two years later. I had gone to Westminster with a group of suffragists to confront Secretary Henry Bruce—he had not delivered on any of his promises, much like Gladstone today, hence, a reminder was necessary. Unfortunately, Bruce was with my father and another peer. And I chose not to abort the confrontation.”
“Oh, Lucie. It must have been dreadful.”
She shrugged. “It was that, or try and hide at the last moment, which would have been prudent, I suppose, but it felt as though it would betray the women whom I had worked with for two years. It felt as though I would betray myself. So I made a choice.”
“So you did,” Annabelle said softly.
“He did wait until we were home to let me have it.” And her mother hadn’t intervened. She had hovered at the back of the study, looking pallid and appalled, and had not said good-bye when the earl had sent Lucie from the house with just a trunk full of her possessions. Aunt Honoria had saved her from beyond her grave, having set up a small trust for her in wise foresight, and Wycliffe had not objected to Lucie claiming it before reaching the age of majority. He had considered this a grand concession, she supposed. Granted, he had never publicly denounced her—all the public knew was that she had relocated to Oxford to indulge her bluestocking tendencies. It was the reason she was not shunned by society, and found allies for her work, but she had no doubt that Wycliffe had done so only to spare the family name a scandal.
She shook her head. “Old stories are not why I called on you today.”
“What is it?” Annabelle asked. “Your missive was rather, erm, brief.”
“I meant to ask you to tutor me in feminine wiles.”
A baffled silence followed her announcement. “I don’t quite understand,” Annabelle then said.
Lucie sighed. “If I am to steer us through the current situation with Ballentine and London Print, I need every ally. Ballentine will try and paint me as a harridan who should best be ignored. . . .”
Annabelle leaned forward. “Have you really called on him last night?”
She must not blush now, she must not. “I have,” she said, smoothly, too.
“Do tell?”
He is built like a Greek god and his mind is pure filth, and I dreamt of him all night.
She cleared her throat. “I need hardly tell you that it led nowhere. Under the circumstances, we need to concentrate on garnering sympathies for our report elsewhere—which means I must try and inspire some sympathy in men, at least until Parliament reconvenes in September.”
“This sounds wise, and I would gladly assist you,” Annabelle said wryly. “However, I am the Scandalous Duchess, remember? Before that, I was a scandalous bluestocking. I’m hardly in a position to give advice.”
“And yet you brought the most calculating duke in the kingdom to heel—clearly your strategy works.”
“Hmm. But the truth is, I had no strategy. I didn’t make Montgomery do anything he did not wish to do.”
Lucie’s brow flicked up. “I doubt he longed to become embroiled in scandal.”
Annabelle looked amused. “Let me say this: I was the most stubborn, reticent creature the duke had ever encountered—I just said no to everything he offered.” She gave an apologetic shrug. “I suppose when a man truly wants something, he will do what is required. It is quite simple.”
It might be simple, but it also sounded dishearteningly uncontrollable.
Her stomach snarled into the silence, and Annabelle gave her a pointed look. “How do you feel about taking luncheon together?”
“I suppose some lunch would be lovely,” Lucie admitted.
Annabelle was on her feet and headed to the assortment of bell strings dangling from the wall. “An Indian restaurant has recently opened on High Street,” she said as she rang for a footman. “I’m of a mind to try it.”
“It sounds intriguing.”
“We could then return here and read books together for as long as we want.”
“Splendid idea,” Lucie said. “Though I would prefer to work on my correspondence here instead. And I have to go to the reading room at the Bodleian later, they have the legal works.”
Annabelle smiled. “Whatever puts you best at ease.”
She had an inkling she would not really feel at ease for some time to come.
Chapter 13
Later in the day
Oxford had scored a victory over Cambridge during the annual cricket match this evening, hence the Turf Tavern was hot and crammed with obnoxiously exuberant patrons. Tristan used his size to plow a path through the crowd toward the bar, already of a mind to leave. The Turf was damp and reeked of centuries of spilled beer and piss on a regular night. Then again, this was every tavern in Oxford.
His Lagavulin arrived in a sticky tumbler. Braying laughter shook the rafters. There must have been a time when he had enjoyed himself immersed in the noise and excitement of revelers, but tonight, it was simply loud and felt hollow. As though they were all a little lost and tried to cast an anchor in the fray by way of their own booming voice.
Somewhere in the shadows at the back of the room, Lord Arthur Seymour, second son to the Marquess of Doncaster, was lurking and watching him in a sulk, all while pretending to have a jolly good time with his friends. He had noticed the boy’s mop of curly blond hair on his way in. Ah well. Unrequited lust compelled people to do all sorts of ridiculous things.
He would know.
His whiskey glass came down hard on the counter.
Lucie was lying low, the little coward. She had not been in the London offices today, nor had she sought him out this evening, if only to berate him some more. Lust must have compelled his mind to circle around her today . . .<
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“By God, you are beautiful.”
A young man his age had been crowded against his left shoulder. Tall, but not as tall as him. Well-drawn lips. Overlong dark hair curled around his collar. His blue gaze was intent on Tristan’s face, tracing his features with the singular concentration of an artist.
Tristan leaned in close to keep his voice low. “And a good evening to you, sir.”
“Such a face should be eternalized in oil and marble, so that future generations may behold it and weep over the glory of the bygone days,” said the man.
Tristan gave his near-empty glass a little spin. “There’s weeping already, I hear, though it is caused by my lack of character rather than my face.”
The chap threw back his head and laughed. “Don’t be modest. Your beauty causes the tears—the carelessness of a plain fellow is rather forgettable.” He offered his hand. “My name is Oscar Wilde.”
“I know who you are, Mr. Wilde. You won the Newdigate Prize for your ‘Ravenna’ poem two years ago.”
The playwright inclined his head. “Why, I’m flattered. You enjoy poetry?”
“On occasion.”
“You write yourself? Lord Ballentine, is it?”
“Yes, and yes.”
Oscar Wilde was delighted. “A fellow scribe! I shall pay for your next drink. Brandy.” He shouted for the barkeeper and fished for coin on the inside of his coat—a remarkably sharply tailored, midnight blue coat, with velvet lapels and silver buttons depicting peacocks. Tristan would quite like to have it for himself.
He slid his hand over the velvet, over Oscar’s hand beneath the fabric, halting the futile scrabble for money with a light press of his fingers.
Wilde’s gaze jerked toward him, surprise flashing in his blue eyes. Tristan watched it heat to intrigue at a startling speed. He had already dropped his hand again. Playwrights. The one species with even less regard for convention than he.
“Allow me.” He procured a shilling from his own pocket and flipped it at the bartender. “Brandy for my friend, more of the same for me.”
Wilde was still contemplating him with a half-lidded gaze. “Just what are you doing in this student-infested pub when you could have the best of London at your feet?” he murmured. “Or better yet, Italy.”
The corner of his mouth twitched.
And he realized what he was doing—seducing people for the sake of it, as Lucie had called it. Shouted it. Damn, but he was doing exactly that.
The smile faded from his lips.
“London gets old. Variety’s the very spice of life that gives it all its flavor,” he cited, because using someone else’s words could convey a lot without saying much at all.
A second or two ticked past until Wilde gave a wry little nod. “You like Cowper, then?” he asked in a neutral tone, and slid the freshly filled tumbler across the counter toward Tristan.
His nape prickled with awareness as he closed his fingers around the glass.
He looked up and met Lord Arthur’s wounded stare from the other side of the bar. Arthur’s expression was as glum as though someone had just shot his puppy. Well. He would not invite impressionable young things along to an orgy again if this was the result. What a nuisance.
“Oh dear,” Wilde said, his gaze discreetly lingering on the lordling before he peered back up at Tristan. “What an unhappy fellow. A matter of romance?” He chuckled. “But of course not. It’s a matter of sex, isn’t it.”
Tristan clinked his glass to his. “It’s always about sex.”
“Everything in the world is about sex,” Wilde agreed. “Except sex.”
“Then what is the sex about?”
The playwright smiled. “Power. But you know that already, don’t you, my lord.”
When he left the Turf three, maybe five, drinks later, he was not exactly staggering, but his head felt heavy. At least Oscar Wilde was in worse shape; by the end of his last brandy, he had made slurred promises to write Tristan into his first novel, one about the perils of eternal beauty; and the story would be gothic and dark.
How about the twisted tale of an earl intent on sending his own wife to an asylum, Mr. Playwright, gothic and dark enough?
The weather had turned; a fine spray of summer rain dampened the air and smudged rainbows around the gaslights lining Holywell Street. There was a halo fanning out from the pale blond crown of a woman hasting past.
A petite, very much unchaperoned woman.
He halted and squinted.
A rush of cold spread through his chest. Lucie. He would recognize her determined stride anywhere. And only she would be flitting about the town alone at night. She was weaving her way around a flock of students, already shrinking into the distance.
His body was in motion before his head had decided to follow her.
She was out alone when the night was crawling with drunken men, each one of them feeling masterful after a sports event. Foolish, reckless woman. When he got his hands on her—someone grabbed his arm, breaking his stride.
“Ballentine. A word.”
He reacted on instinct, twisted sideways, gripped the attacker, and yanked him close.
Grand. Lord Arthur Seymour was staring back at him, wide-eyed, his hands clutching at the hand that had locked around his throat.
“Never approach me from a dead angle, you fool.” He released his lordship with a shove. His pulse was thrumming fast, the blur of liquor gone. The night had edges again, wet black streets, glaring gaslights.
Lucie, he noted, had just reached the road junction at the end of the row of sandstone buildings. There was a silvery flash of hair as she turned off the main street into Mansfield Road. . . . Incredibly, Lord Arthur lurched back into his path. “Hear me out,” he slurred, unleashing a wave of offending whiskey fumes. Where were his friends to save him from himself?
“You’re drunk,” Tristan said. “Go home.”
At her brisk pace, Lucie would soon reach the eastern edge of the park. Was she contemplating crossing the park?
Arthur latched onto his arm. “Let us meet, just once.”
Tristan’s muscles tensed. Holywell Road was always lively even when it was not a sports night, as the narrow street connected two large pubs and was home to a number of small concert houses. Revelers were passing them on the pavement, and there was a steady supply of patrons tumbling from the closing taverns on the other side of the road.
“I saw you with Mr. Wilde.” Arthur was loud and belligerent. “You drink with him, but not with me—”
He hooked his arm through Arthur’s, pulled him hard into the side of his body and half dragged him along. Now they were just two fellows in their cups, propping each other up.
“Have a care,” he said, his voice low. “Do not approach others in this way, it might get you into proper trouble.”
Arthur’s free hand clutched Tristan’s coat lapel. “I am already in trouble. My every thought revolves around you.”
Christ.
“We have spent no more than three times in each other’s company; we drank, we gambled, as gentlemen do, and once, you were in the same room as I while I fucked. That is where our acquaintance ends.”
Arthur twisted in his grip, hot with rage. “Don’t deceive me. You knew what I was and yet you took me along . . . and your eyes were on me that night, while you were—”
He yelped when Tristan’s arm tightened like a vise.
“Seymour. I may not consistently limit my preferences. It does not mean I have any particular interest in you.” And while he might have been looking at Arthur, it would have had nothing to do with the young lord, and everything with the dark mood to watch or be watched, which sometimes struck at random. Ironically, the abundant stimulations of great debauchery could send his mind sprawling as hopelessly as reading a dull treatise in old Latin. There was, of course, no point i
n explaining any of that to an infatuated whelp.
He pulled Arthur with him when he rounded the corner onto the road to University Park.
People were drifting past them, exuberant and chattering. Lucie’s small form was nowhere in sight.
“This is where we must part,” he said, and abruptly let the young lord go.
The wet cobblestones, or his stubborn efforts to hold on, made Arthur lose his balance, and down he went.
This was bad, Arthur on his knees before him, in the middle of Mansfield Road.
He stepped round him, and an arm lashed around his calf.
“Gad—why are you so keen to see us arrested?”
“You are a monster,” Arthur cried, still attached, “you have no care.”
A group of students moving past hollered and jeered.
“Your pardon,” Tristan said and gripped the white, clinging hands to bend back Arthur’s thumbs. A squawk of outrage, and he was free, his long strides eating up the dark street.
* * *
The gate to University Park was locked after nine o’clock, but there was a well-trodden path to a gap in the fence a few yards to the left, large enough to admit children or slight adults.
Lucie breathed easier the moment she had slipped through the iron bars. She had long resolved to walk alone wherever she went; it was most practical, and furthermore, the idea of a spinster guarding another spinster struck her as ridiculous. However, a woman who walked through Oxford alone should know the university’s schedule for sporting events. She had forgotten it was the day of the annual University Match, an understandable but still negligent lapse in attention after the bizarre encounter in the dress shop. Bands of student athletes and drinking societies roamed tonight, eager for brawls with townsfolk and each other. Shouting and fragments of lewd songs echoed from the street across the dark meadows of the park. The footpath to home, however, stretched before her blissfully empty and well-lit by a row of tall gaslights.
She walked rapidly. The misty rain had turned into a drizzle; cold rivulets ran from her cheeks down into her collar, and her skin rippled with goose bumps. She’d drink a hot cup of tea at home and go to bed; for once, her work would have to wait. Her mother was in Oxford. She’d add some brandy to her tea tonight.