by Evie Dunmore
She absently stroked Tristan’s cheek. “So the affair with Lady Worthington is not true?”
He chuckled. “I have never spoken to the woman.”
“The incident with Mrs. Bradshaw in the linen closet?”
“Entirely made up by a mad editor at Punch.”
“The jumping into the rosebush from Lady Rutherford’s window?”
He opened an eye. “That one is true.” He turned his head and kissed her stroking fingers. “You are well informed about my movements.”
“It’s Hattie,” Lucie murmured, distracted by the softness of his lips against her thumb. “She reads and shares everything in the gossip columns. Why would you cultivate such a reputation if only half of it is true?”
She felt the slickness of his tongue between her middle and ring finger and snatched back her hand.
“Very well,” he said. “When I was young and juvenile, I noticed that it annoyed Rochester as well as made women I did desire take an interest in me. Such efficiency. So naturally, I fanned the flames. It soon developed a life of its own—the audience decides when to let a persona sink back into oblivion.”
“True,” she said wryly.
“You would know,” he said, his eyes meeting hers. “Tedbury Termagant.”
She smiled as an understanding passed between them, from one notorious figure to another.
He rose to a sitting position, only to wrap her in his arms and pull her back down onto the blanket with him, her back to his chest, his face buried in her hair.
It was astounding, how matter-of-course their bodies melded together these days. As though they had been made for it, despite their difference in height. Lying down, their fit was perfect.
The wool of the blanket was warm and rough against her cheek. A bee hummed and investigated, and she didn’t lift as much as a finger to shoo it. A pleasant drowsiness enfolded her. She hadn’t had a headache in weeks, she realized.
“You often sleep holding me like this,” she murmured.
“I do.” His voice was close to her ear. “It eases the night terrors.”
“Terrors,” she repeated. “Because of the war?” She remembered their conversation on her doorstep in the rain, after the trouble in the park. “Does it haunt your nights?”
“Occasionally.”
She resisted the urge to press him for more and was surprised when he released her and rolled onto his back to say: “It was so ugly, you see.”
She propped herself up on her elbow.
“Ugly,” he said to the sky. “And senseless. The senselessness is the worst of it.”
“Senseless—how?”
He still was not looking at her. “You want my opinion on the war?”
“I do.” As it was, she wanted his opinions on many things.
“It is a crime, against them, and us,” he said, and glanced at her. “Are you shocked?”
“Go on,” she said slowly.
“I remember when I first knew it. I was pitching our tents on this barren plain, and all that surrounded me was foreign—the jaggedness of the mountains in the distance, the animals, the taste in the air. It could as well have been the moon, and was about just as far removed from Britain, as a month of travel lies between our shores. All of Afghanistan could have vanished from the earth, with no Englishman any wiser back in London, and vice versa. Instead, we take the trouble to voyage there, since they never came to us and never shall, and the natives starve and are butchered, and I had to bury good English men in foreign soil. All because of an expansionist Tory manifesto Disraeli drew up in a fit of personal ambition. Yes, there may well be economic interests via a long, convoluted chain of cause and effect, but the feeling of senselessness remains and it is the worst of it—one may well live and die for a worthy cause, but a senseless one?”
She sat up straight and looked down at him with a measure of alarm. “Is this what you wrote in your war diaries?”
He squinted up at her. “Possibly.”
“You mean to ruin London Print with scandalous publications, but forbid me to do the same?”
Openly speaking against the expansionist wars had been tantamount to treason under the Tory government—the people who did so were considered radicals. As far as the current prime minister Gladstone was concerned, at this point she had no faith he would be much different.
Tristan observed her with a glint of intrigue in his eyes. “Are you afraid for me? Do you worry they will put me in the dock?”
She shifted uneasily. She had not expected him to hold such radical opinions. She had also—naïvely, she now understood—underestimated the depths of the scars he had brought home from the war. And yes, she worried.
“I agree with your sentiments,” she said truthfully. “I suppose I have grown overly fond of our publishing house.”
“Our, is it,” he said. “Do not worry. I have a way with words. They shall see whatever they wish to see in the diaries.”
“You are good with words,” she said, and not wishing to stir up his memories further: “What about poetry—will you write more poetry soon?”
Instead of this distracting him, his expression became darker still. “Who is to say.”
“Whyever not?”
“As you made it known rather fiercely at Claremont, you want truth in your art.”
She rememberd it with a faint smile. “It ruffled your feathers.”
“It did,” he said. “For I agree with you. And the truth and I have a rather strained relationship.”
Her frown lines appeared. “Go on.”
He nodded, as if to himself. “My father tried his best to whip me into shape, as you know. He certainly enjoyed doing it more than he should have, but I think in part he did it in the hope it would make things simple for me, teach me very clearly right from wrong. I suppose he thought it would be easier for a man to be upright when things are very clear and simple in his mind. But despite his efforts, I find things are so rarely just one thing or another. And I find there is no end to the truth; reach for it, and it slips away. I only succeeded in holding on to it once, and I turned it into the poems in Pocketful. Then I went abroad, and I have not written anything meaningful since.” He gave a shrug. “So who is to say.”
She understood then that by truth he did not mean honesty, but something more essential: the same mystery perhaps that had Hattie looking vexed for days because her painting lacked “heart,” or saw Annabelle working deep into the night to “capture the true spirit” of a long-dead script with her translation.
She brushed a fingertip over Tristan’s brooding bottom lip. “For what it’s worth,” she murmured, “I believe your father beat you out of shape, not into one.”
He went very still. A parade of thoughts and emotions rushed behind his eyes, there and gone when he next blinked.
He rolled over onto his side and rested his chin in his palm, his expression carefully blank. “And you,” he said. “Have you any aspirations outside your work for the Cause?”
“No.” She shook her head, amused by the ignorance of the question. “Never.”
“Never is a long time,” he said mildly.
“It is a necessity. Do you recall the quote over my mantelpiece?”
He thought a moment, then gave a nod. “‘I do not wish women to have power over men, but over themselves.’”
“Yes. Mary Wollstonecraft wrote this line in 1792. 1792, Tristan. It has been nearly a hundred years, and yet here we are, still fighting.”
His brows lowered with surprise. “That is a long time indeed.”
“And take John Stuart Mill—he has tried to make us equals for the past fifteen years. Did you know that?”
“I did know, yes.”
“He failed. Or take Gladstone—he promised us the moon as long as we supported his campaign. Now I learned he muzzled memb
ers of his cabinet when oppressive policies are tabled for a vote. He warned Millicent Fawcett’s husband in person not to abstain; imagine, he is not even allowed to abstain from voting against us, against the interests of his own wife.”
“It is a shame Gladstone would do that,” Tristan said quietly.
“So you see, when I say never, I mean it. If they wanted to hear us, they would have by now. I try to believe otherwise—I must—but there is a likelihood I shall be cold in my grave before the women of Britain are free.”
Tristan’s hand enveloped hers with warm pressure. “And if that comes to pass?”
She gazed into his searching eyes. “Then I shall leave this world knowing I spent my life on a good cause, and not regret it.”
He moved suddenly, and she was well pinned beneath him. Her surprised laugh faded fast, because he was looking down at her with an ardent glow in his eyes that left her a little weak in the legs.
“Ah, princess,” he said, a rare tenderness in his voice. “How you humble me.”
“As though anything could humble you.” She turned her head to the side when he made to kiss her. “And why do you call me that? Princess?”
He sighed. “You still have not read any Tennyson, have you?”
“I have not.”
“He wrote a poem called The Princess. It is about women like you.”
Her smile was bemused, and a little flattered. “How so?”
“I’ll cite a passage, and you shall see.”
“If you insist.”
He chuckled. “How could I deny such an ardent request?” The smile stayed in his voice as he continued:
“But while they talked, above their heads I saw
The feudal warrior lady-clad; . . .
That drove her foes with slaughter from her walls,
And much I praised her nobleness, and ‘Where,’
Asked Walter . . . ‘lives there such a woman now?’
Quick answered Lilia ‘There are thousands now
Such women, but convention beats them down:
It is but bringing up; no more than that:
You men have done it: how I hate you all!
Ah, were I something great! I wish I were
Some might poetess, I would shame you then,
That love to keep us children! O I wish
That I were some great princess, I would build
Far off from men a college like a man’s,
And I would teach them all that men are taught;
We are twice as quick!’”
Long before he had finished, a peculiar sensation had begun traveling up and down her spine. Thought fragments shifted, trying to find a way to fit together.
“I must admit,” she said. “I do like this much better than Patmore’s Angel in the House.”
“And yet you seem vaguely disturbed,” he remarked; “why?”
She looked at him straight. “This poem expresses admiration for unconventional women, or is there a sinister conclusion at its end?”
His eyes crinkled at the corners. “No. It very much expresses admiration.”
“And yet you have called me princess for years, when we have only recently begun to like each other.”
His eyes turned opaque, like a well muddied by a sudden disturbance in its depths.
He was holding her face, and she felt his thumbs, very gently, touch her cheekbones.
“Perhaps I have always liked and admired you, Lucie.”
Her mind blanked.
It was a statement as well as a question, and it left her breathless and fleetingly disoriented.
“And are you normally in the habit of dyeing a woman’s hair blue when you admire her?” she said.
He did not smile. “I was a foolish boy when I inked your braids. And while I apologize for it, I cannot regret doing it—your hair was the silkiest thing I had ever touched and remained so for years.”
He was touching it now, and she could feel the reverence. It had been the first thing he had asked her to do when they had crossed the line, that she take down her hair. How long had he dreamed of touching it again?
Her heart was beating far too fast. He was rearranging her past one careless sentence at a time.
“I’d rather you not say such things,” she said softly.
His caresses ceased. “And why not?”
“Because I might believe them.”
When he made to reply, she shook her head. Because above all, she was frightened—the racing heart, the shortness of breath, it was fear. It seemed logical and natural that when there was a tender past, and a magical now, there would be a future as well.
And there could be no future.
Nothing thrived, or even survived, unless it could continue to grow, and the attraction that had sprung between them had nowhere to go beyond these stolen, dazzling hours. Even if his words now were spoken in earnest and not part of some careless seduction, she did not wish to marry. He would have to marry. And in this moment, here by the river, drunk on Pimm’s and the tender touch of his fingers in her hair, she wished all of it could somehow be different. And that frightened her most of all.
She glanced up at his handsome face, and her arms slid around his back. “Kiss me.”
There was a hesitation in him, as if he were about to press for answers, but then a thought visibly crossed his mind that sobered him, and just before his lashes lowered, she wondered whether she had seen guilt in his eyes.
* * *
A few days later, she was at her desk, trying to comprehend a pesky legal text on divorce laws she had diligently avoided for days, when Annabelle called on her unannounced.
Annabelle’s serious expression made it clear before greetings were exchanged that this was not simply an impromptu social visit. Lucie asked Mrs. Heath to please prepare some tea and serve it in the drawing room.
“We have a suspect in the pamphlet case,” Annabelle said as she sat down at the untidy table.
It took Lucie by surprise how surprised she was—not about the potential suspect, but how much the dreadful day at Claremont had already faded from her memory. The past weeks had been a blur.
“I’m all ears.”
Mrs. Heath bustled in and placed a tea tray onto the table, and Annabelle waited until she had left.
“We suspect it was your cousin Cecily.”
This did have her sit up straight. “Are you certain?”
Annabelle nodded. “A lady whose description matches her very well indeed was seen entering your room the night of the ball and left again shortly after. We only obtained this information now because the footman who saw her—without thinking any ill of it—had gone on leave the next morning.”
Lucie was quiet for a long moment. “This creates more questions than it answers,” she finally said. “What could possibly be her motive?”
“I don’t know but I asked Montgomery not to take any further steps without having consulted you first. It’s your family, after all.”
“I appreciate it,” Lucie said, “though I’m uncertain what to do. Based on the evidence you have, I think my parents would be inclined to dismiss it, or worse, they will suspect I was trying to blame Cecily and use your influence over Montgomery to do it.”
Annabelle nodded. “Which is exactly what I feared.”
Cecily. Who would have thought such lovely blue eyes hid such deviance. She has always been two-faced, remember?
“I suggest we do nothing about it, for the time being,” she said.
“I am sorry I had to be the bearer of such unsettling news.”
“I’m very glad you told me.”
She decided there and then that she, too, had something to tell. She rose and walked to her desk to pick up Annabelle’s invitation she had written early this morning.
“It’s an invitation for a celebratory lunch hosted by the Investment Consortium.”
“Lovely.” Annabelle turned the envelope over in her hand. “Any particular occasion?”
Lucie’s pulse began to flutter. “Yes.”
Annabelle glanced up warily.
“We are again the majority shareowners of London Print.”
Solicitor Beedle had put it down on paper yesterday, and both she and Tristan had signed on the dotted line. Tristan had been quiet afterward, and she had not felt nearly the elation she thought she would.
Annabelle put the invitation on the table. “Somehow, I feel reluctant to ask how exactly you achieved this.”
“I suppose I crossed the Rubicon.”
Annabelle’s eyes widened. “Oh Lord. It is Lord Ballentine, is it not?”
Lucie gave a tiny nod.
“Oh my.”
For a terrible second, she wondered whether she had been wrong to strain their friendship with such a secret, whether she had been reckless and selfish to unburden herself.
But it was not just a guilty conscience that had just shoved the words out of her mouth. There was an urge to share with the world that Tristan was her lover; she had to frequently rein in the impulse of wanting to shout it from Oxford’s spired rooftops.
Annabelle’s hand moved toward hers. “Are you . . . all right?” Her green eyes were filled with deep concern.
“Oh. Oh yes. It was Lord Ballentine’s idea. But entirely my choice.” And she kept choosing him, night after night. As much as someone partial to opium chose to visit the den every day. . . .
Annabelle must have guessed as much, for her expression changed from worried to apprehensive. “Is he good to you?”
Was he good to her?
She knew she felt light, and dare she say it, happy in his arms. He made her laugh. After the disappointing dearth of strawberry tarts during their outing, he had brought her a whole basketful last night.