Or they had been chaste until today.
“And this is all the more reason I wonder that you are able to come see me at all,” she went on. “You must have many duties a great deal more pressing than paying an unplanned visit to your cousin.” Leaning forward, she fixed him with a shrewd stare. “So, to what errand do I owe the pleasure of your company?”
Noel’s chuckle was self-deprecating. “I should have known you wouldn’t believe I’d just come by for an idle chat. Though the truth is, it’s not much more than that.” He reached inside his frock coat and extracted a folded square of paper from the inner breast pocket. “This,” he said, handing the paper to her, “is a letter to you from Annabelle. She included it in her most recent letter and asked that I pass it on to you at my earliest opportunity, which happens to be today.”
Honora accepted the missive with a frown of puzzlement and concern. “Why would she not just send it to me directly?”
Her cousin relaxed into his chair, a gesture that made the dainty proportions of the furniture appear almost comically Lilliputian, for Noel’s shoulders rested where the seatback was designed to support the head of its occupant, causing him to hunch slightly to fit within the narrow dimensions. “I haven’t read it, so I can’t say with absolute certainty, but I suspect she wanted to ensure its contents were not inadvertently disclosed to anyone other than you. Since I have my own residence, mine was the only address to which she felt she could send her correspondence without the risk of prying eyes.”
“But why on earth should she be worried in the first place, Noel?” Honora demanded, trying to imagine what news could be so dire that Annabelle would fear it being revealed to other members of the family. The only explanations she could envision were so dreadful as to be unthinkable, but Noel’s tranquil disposition did not suggest anything serious could be amiss. And while Annabelle might wish to write Honora separately from her brother, there was no possibility whatsoever that she would not have disclosed any awful news to him as well.
Noel’s blue eyes twinkled with merriment, providing proof positive that nothing could be very wrong. “It seems that our Annabelle is quite madly in love.”
Honora could not have been more surprised to hear that her cousin had decided to paint herself blue and invade London with a horde of Iceni warriors. In point of fact, she would find that somewhat less improbable.
Cocking her head, she narrowed a suspicious gaze on Noel. “Are you sure we are talking about the same person? The Anabelle who said she could never conceive a passion for any man when art exists?”
“Well,” he said with a grin and a shrug of his too-broad-for-the-chair shoulders, “that is the thing. She has not fallen in love with a man.”
It took several seconds for the implication of these last words to sink in. Annabelle had always been in love with art—and that was, in any case, hardly controversial—so if she had not fallen in love with a man, then… Honora’s eyes widened. “You mean she is in love with a woman?”
Noel cocked his fingers at her in the shape of a gun. “Got it in one.”
Annabelle was in love with a woman. Well, that was something, wasn’t it? And explained her cousin’s desire for secrecy.
Honora turned the letter over in her hand, considering the flowing script in which her name had been written upon it. The more she considered the idea, however, the more it made sense.
Growing up, Honora had always assumed she would one day fall in love with a man and marry him. She had conceived a tendré for any number of boys, including a brief infatuation with Noel and Annabelle’s older brother, Benjamin, whom she regarded until this very day to be the most beautiful male person of her acquaintance. It was only when she had been in the process of considering actual suitors as potential husbands that she had decided love and marriage were not for her. But if she had met Mr. Delgado back then—before she had come to understand the legal implications of the wedded state for a woman—she might have come to a very different conclusion.
But Annabelle had never fancied male persons at all. And while she’d claimed this was because art had her whole heart, Honora recalled that her cousin’s eyes had often followed the prettiest girl in any room, and that when she chose human subjects to draw or paint, Annabelle favored girls and women as her models. Moreover, she always depicted them with a stunning combination of fidelity and romanticism so the resulting image flattered the subject while managing never to seem a work of fantasy.
Her cousin had always loved women. Of course she had. It was obvious, but Honora had been blind to it simply because the possibility hadn’t occurred to her.
“Do your parents know?” she asked, not so much with regard to the particulars of Annabelle’s current affaire d’amour as to her longstanding inclinations.
He shrugged. “I suspect they suspect. Especially Mama. But Annabelle has not told them; that much is clear from the letter she wrote me.”
“And that is why she did not want to send her letter to me here. She feared one of my parents—or worse yet, one of my brothers—might get hold of it.” Honora shook her head. Poor Annabelle! What must it be like to be in love and be unable to share that joy with the rest of the world?
But Honora had an inkling, hadn’t she? Because she was beset by a similar dilemma. Perhaps she could not quite claim she was in love with Mr. Delgado, but her feelings went far beyond mere infatuation. He’d kindled something deep and essential in her, and now the ember smoldered at the core of her being, refusing to be extinguished.
She would never be satisfied. For unlike Annabelle, who had miles and miles of land and ocean between her and anyone who might disapprove of her desires or the object of them, Honora was trapped in the heart of London, under the watchful eyes of her family. Of society. No matter how she might rail against the rules that bound her, she must marry or burn. Those were the only choices.
“I met a man yesterday.” The words were out of her mouth before she even registered the intention of speaking them.
Noel knew her too well not to pick up the implication. “I see,” was all he said.
The rest of the story came tumbling out then. Her reasons for visiting the printer’s shop. The police raid and being shut away in the dark with the man she already admired as a journalist and essayist. She even told him of the kiss, though she did not describe this in detail, for she could scarcely tell her male cousin how that simple meeting of mouths had made her nipples stiff and tingly, and had sent white-hot sparks of pleasure through her limbs, and had caused the flesh between her legs to become wet and heavy with desire. And finally, their resolution never to see one another again.
When she reached the end of her tale, she gestured toward the waste bin, overflowing with discarded papers. “I can’t write. I can scarcely think of anything but him. And I don’t know what to do.”
Her cousin, who had listened to her rambling account, his expression sympathetic and without judgment, shook his head in gentle reproof. “If you are hoping for advice, you will find me an abysmal source. I have less experience in such matters than Annabelle.”
That made Honora’s eyebrows climb. Noel was twenty-four, very handsome—if not quite so implausibly good-looking as Benjamin—and possessed of his own property and a not-insubstantial annual income. A gentleman of his age, appearance, and means was expected, if not presumed, to have had several paramours. “You have never…?”
He gave her a pointed look. “How could I? The very thought that I might sire a child and worse, perhaps never even know it…” A visible shudder ran through his lanky frame. “No, I shall wait until I marry.”
Honora leaned forward and placed her hand over his in conciliation. “I beg your pardon,” she said with the utmost sincerity. “I should have known how you would feel. But I have an entirely different problem when it comes to marriage, as you well know. And yet—”
“You want what you want,” he finished for her.
“Exactly.”
Tilting his h
ead, he studied her for a long, pensive moment. “Can I ask you a hypothetical question?”
She laughed. “Of course.”
“If you could marry without losing your legal status, would you consider marrying this man?”
What an absurd question! “But I would lose my status,” she pointed out. “What possible bearing can my answer have when there is no hope of the law changing? You might as well ask whether I would consider openly taking him as my paramour if I would not be ruined in every possible way by such an action.”
Noel crossed his arms over his chest. “Very well. Pretend I asked you that.”
For several beats, she could only blink at her cousin in blank astonishment. She had read Richard Carlile’s Every Woman’s Book after its publication in 1828. Her mother had gifted her the treatise despite—or perhaps because of, knowing her mother!—its scandalously radical positions on female sexual equality. Honora concurred with Carlile’s propositions vis-à-vis the cruelty and hypocrisy of preventing women from pursuing and expressing their passions, although she dismissed as ludicrous his contention that spinsters grew weak and languid after the age of twenty-and-five. Especially now that she was twenty-and-five.
But while a world in which women had all the rights and privileges of men might well be among her most fervent aspirations, that future was no closer at hand than one in which a wife’s income and property was not her husband’s to dispose of as he pleased. She could no more take Mr. Delgado as her lover without consequence than she could take him as her husband. But if she could…
Good heavens, the answer was so clear, it was almost embarrassing.
“Yes. To both questions.”
Noel nodded. “Then you are sacrificing a chance at something wonderful just because it can’t be perfect. That doesn’t seem wise to me. Does it to you?”
Damnation, she almost wished she hadn’t asked him for his advice. Because he was not wrong and yet, whichever imperfect choice she made, she had so much to lose. Her livelihood. Her independence. Her reputation.
Her heart.
But if Mr. Delgado was truly the man she believed him to be, she had so much more to gain. Moreover, were she to stay away as he had asked, she would never know what might be. What she needed was a reason to spend time with him. Some laudable purpose he he would be loath to refuse his support. And the election, she realized with a start, provided her with the perfect cause and venture. One that, having conceived of it, she would be obliged to follow through on whether Mr. Delgado deigned to join her or not.
She knew now what she had to do.
Leaning forward, she said to her cousin, “I believe I am going to need your help.”
Chapter Seven
“Have no truck with the truck system, but demand nothing less than cold, hard cash for your labor, men of Merthyr, for there can be no fair exchange when the man who sets the wages also sets all the prices.” – Luke Evangelista
Lucas replaced his quill carefully in the ink well and rose from his chair. Somewhat to his surprise, the article he’d just written was one of his best.
In it, he decried the increasingly dire situation in Wales, where unemployed ironworkers were having their property seized to cover debts imposed upon them by the very employers who now refused to pay them. The article had set just the right balance, he felt, between compassion for the oppressed and rage against the oppressors, while also elucidating the blatant fraudulence of the truck system, under which the ironmongers had for decades paid their workers not in real coin, but in credit to be used in the company’s own stores. Granted, his London readers were unlikely to be moved to strike on behalf of the afflicted workers as he had exhorted in the final paragraph, for they had their own struggles and injustices to contend with, but he felt he had made a strong case nonetheless. Perhaps it would have some effect, especially if the piece were reprinted by newspapers in Wales or cities like Manchester or Newcastle.
His passion for the subject took him aback, however, because he’d not been able to put Lady Honora Pearce out of his mind. Not the scent of her. Not the swell of her breasts pressed against his chest or the curve of her hip against his leg. And certainly not the pure pleasure of simply talking with her as though they were friends. As though they could be more than friends.
He supposed there were some parallels between his predicament and that of the Welsh workers he’d been writing about, though. Oh, certainly, he was not at the mercy of anything or anyone as devious or cruel as they, but it all came back to what the wealthy and privileged would allow the common man to have and do, didn’t it? Lady Honora was out of his reach because, like the goods the Welsh ironworkers had purchased from the company stores, he would never be permitted to afford her. He would certainly never forget watching that gentleman draw up to her family’s house in his expensive carriage and truly registering the immensity of the gulf that separated him from her. She would always be subject, in some sense, to repossession.
With a grimace of irritation, he removed his waistcoat, dropped to the one uncluttered patch of floor that he managed to keep clear, and began the series of exercises he always executed after completing a written piece. He found the routine helped him clear his mind and, combined with regular walks, kept him fit despite his relatively sedentary occupation. The fact that he was in considerable mental and emotional turmoil only served to make the activity that much more essential to his well-being. He was breaking into a light sheen of perspiration when there was a knock on the door.
Pausing with his arms extended and supporting his weight, he furrowed his brow in puzzlement. He wasn’t expecting any visitors this morning, was he? He didn’t think so, and his social calendar was not so full that he should have forgotten an appointment, but given his current preoccupations, he wasn’t certain. With a mental shrug, he got to his feet and ran his fingers through his hair. If he had forgotten an engagement, he would apologize for being caught en deshabille, but it seemed more likely to be someone he had not invited, and in that case, they deserved what they got.
The knock sounded again, a trifle more insistent, just before he reached the door, so he pulled it open with rather more speed than usual…and came face to face with a vision straight from his fantasies. Lady Honora Pearce—for even though he had never seen her in female garb, he would have recognized her based solely on the squared line of her chin, the wide cut of her lips, and the stormy gray of her eyes—almost careened straight into his chest. She must have been leaning into the door when he’d yanked it open, and she took several stumbling steps toward him before righting herself with their noses barely inches apart.
Her eyes widened. Her nostrils flared. Her cheeks pinked.
Within a single heartbeat, he catalogued the remaining details of her appearance. The dress she wore was likely the height of fashion, made of India cotton dyed with stripes of tiny red roses and green leaves on a field of light brown fabric and sporting wide, puffy sleeves that looked as though they should have scarcely fit through the doorframe without catching. The waist of the gown was cinched with a dark green belt closed by a gold buckle that Lucas would be willing to bet was actually made of gold. A wide-brimmed bonnet, its color a shade or two paler than the roses on the dress and trimmed with green feathers, covered her head, but several brown ringlets peeped out over her forehead and temples, giving him his first real glimpse of the color of her hair.
She was beautiful.
And if he leaned forward, barely at all, he would be kissing her.
He took two hasty steps backward. “What are y—”
“I beg y—”
They both spoke at once. She laughed, smiled, and shook her head ruefully. He wanted to take back his retreat.
“After you,” he said, mindful of the open door behind her. Best to keep it that way, probably.
The breath she exhaled was slightly ragged, and he remembered he was half-naked.
“I apologize for intruding like this,” she blurted, “but I could not think
of any way to warn you in arrival of my advance.” Her blush deepened as the error in the order of her words registered on her. “That is, in advance of my arrival,” she corrected.
A pulse beat visibly in her throat, just below the ribbon that secured her bonnet. It was all he could not to lean forward and press his lips there. Steeling himself, he turned away from her and went to fetch his waistcoat while he tried to decide which of the questions crowding his brain to ask first.
Why was she here? They had agreed not to see one another again. What could have induced her to visit him in his lodgings? Alone. And how had she known which rooms were his?
Well, the answer to that last was obvious, he thought as he shoved his arms into the waistcoat. She must have asked his landlady, who occupied the ground-floor flat. Which meant Mrs. Durant knew he was entertaining a woman in his rooms. And not just any woman, but a lady, for between her clothing and her bearing, there could be no doubt as to her social class.
Damnation, this might become awkward. Mrs. Durant was not a busybody and seldom interfered in her lodgers’ personal affairs, but he could not imagine what possible motive she would ascribe to his receiving a visit from such an obviously cultured, wealthy, and unchaperoned young woman. He doubted the landlady would conclude that such a woman was his professional colleague. Nor, in fact, could he even be certain the call was a professional one.
He was threading the topmost button of the waistcoat through its hole and wondering whether he ought to fetch a jacket from the wardrobe, when Lady Honora spoke again.
“I know we said we would not see one another again, but—”
Her breath caught and her speech paused as he pivoted to face her again, his simple blue waistcoat now providing him at least one layer of respectability. Of protection. From the flicker of emotion that crossed her features, he felt certain she was well aware he was girding his loins, metaphorically speaking.
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