A Lady's Formula for Love

by Elizabeth Everett

  “Will you tell me?” she asked.

  He didn’t pretend to misunderstand her. Of course, he wouldn’t. Arthur had never deceived her. He had been brutal with his honesty since the beginning.

  “I don’t know if I can,” he admitted.

  Arthur’s walls might be too well-built for him to see the emotions hidden on the other side. What of her own defenses? What did she hold close to her own heart?

  Joy. Regret. Hope. Confusion. Desire . . .

  Taken all together, was this love?

  “I don’t know if I can,” he repeated. “It is so foreign. I think . . . I might be happy?”

  The world spun beneath her.

  Happy. Violet made him happy.

  She lay back and stared at the ceiling, giving him the privacy to wrestle with the epiphany. Maddening, frustrating, embarrassing: These were the states of being she so often invoked in others despite her best intentions.

  Not in this man. She moved her little finger a centimeter to the right, touching the back of Arthur’s hand.

  “Deoiridh, my sister.” He stopped, and she let her whole hand slip over his. “The summer before she died, I made a swing for her name day. It wasn’t anything to look at. A piece of wood I polished for her seat. Two lengths of hemp. You’d have thought I made it from gold.”

  He stopped again; between his words rested long afternoons when a little boy would play with a baby sister while the sky gazed down and the wind ruffled their hair.

  “Sometimes, she would insist I sit with her on my lap so we could swing together. ‘So high,’ she would tell me. ‘So high.’ When I am with you, I have the same sensation as when I watched the ground from the top of that swing.”

  Violet blanketed Arthur in acceptance as the minutes ticked by, until he flipped over his hand and linked their fingers.

  “I would like to have seen it one more time,” he said. “That swing. The farm. Home.”

  “Is it gone?”

  “Aye.” He ran his thumb over the mound of her palm. “I wanted to stay, but I was too young. A cousin had already immigrated to London, and I went to live with him. While I was gone, the landlord enclosed the land and tore down the house. I couldn’t save any of it.”

  “I have a theory about ghosts,” Violet whispered. “They aren’t ethereal forms sent from the other side. They live in the heaviest part of the body, invisible weights that pull our feet onto paths they otherwise wouldn’t have followed.”

  “Can you be haunted by a piece of earth?” he asked.

  Searching within for the answer, Violet closed her eyes. “You can be haunted by any loss. Someone you loved. A place of safety. The person you might have been.”

  “That doesn’t sound scientific,” he said.

  She sighed in agreement. “Setting aside the weight doesn’t mean we forget them, or never loved them. It means learning to move ahead on our own without guilt.”

  “Are you free of your weights?”

  The question was not asked unkindly. Violet didn’t take offense. It took brass for her to tell Arthur to let go of his ghosts when Daniel still grabbed at her ankles.

  Arthur could hurt her more than Daniel ever did.

  She’d lied when she said there would be no attachments between them. Long before Arthur had been inside her body, this silent, solid man had found a way inside her heart. She wouldn’t have had it any other way.

  He’d ushered in her spring.

  “We’d better stand. Unless there are more surprises to come?”

  Even as he finished the sentence, Arthur’s sense of ease vanished, and he sat up. Only one person in Violet’s acquaintance could make that much noise merely walking. The pounding footsteps coming down the hall toward them belonged to—

  “Sweet Jesu,” Grantham bellowed. “What are the two of you doing?”

  Arthur called out, “Watch your head.”

  “Watch my . . . What the—” Grantham stopped short just in time. Even so, the mace almost caught him right between the eyes. “What the hell is that? Beg your pardon for my language.”

  In one fluid move, Arthur rose and offered Violet a hand without looking at her.

  “That is what the ladies of the club have devised for their protection,” Arthur explained.

  “What . . . Why would anyone in their right mind . . . ?” Grantham spluttered as he walked in a circle around the mace, his face red with irritation or incredulity, Violet couldn’t tell. “Lock. Key. A club full of geniuses, and the simplest solution is beyond them.”

  “Fine. We shall revisit the question of a key at the next club meeting,” she allowed.

  The satisfied smirk on Arthur’s face set Grantham’s hackles on edge.

  “Never mind that,” the earl said. “What were the two of you doing messing about on the floor? I told you to keep your distance, Kneland. Do you think this is a game?”

  Not a hair on Arthur’s head moved. Not a sound escaped him. Deoiridh’s brother disappeared, and the man who jumped in front of bullets returned.

  “This has never been a game,” he said.

  Beneath Grantham’s bluster, concern deepened the lines on his brow. “You should have listened to those Valkyries of yours when they warned you,” he said to Violet. “I’ve written to Grey. He will be here by Thursday night.”

  Arthur twitched. In any other man, it might have gone unnoticed. For Arthur, it meant he was readying for attack.

  “Georgie, you had no call to do so,” Violet protested.

  Now the earl rounded on Arthur. “All that talk of eating poison and letting yourself be stabbed to protect your charges. That isn’t the whole truth, is it?”

  Arthur absorbed Grantham’s anger without a word. An unsettling blankness blurred his features, making Violet sick with worry.

  “What are you saying, Georgie?” she asked.

  “I’m saying he’ll do anything to keep a man alive,” Grantham sneered. “Unless he’s fucking their wife.”

  19

  GRANTHAM’S EXPLOSIVE ACCUSATION yesterday had gone unanswered.

  A full armory might have been hanging within reach, yet nothing could have penetrated the bedrock of Arthur’s reconstructed walls as he took in Grantham’s words.

  Arthur had begged their pardon and left, closing the connecting door and setting the mace to swinging again.

  “Where d’you think you’re going?” Grantham had called after him.

  But the damage had been done. No amount of bluster on Grantham’s part would pull Arthur back into the world now. Whatever doors had opened when she and Arthur had lain together for those blissful moments were once again locked.

  Unable to talk to Arthur, Violet had turned on Grantham, furious that he would throw out such a serious charge.

  “What on earth are you talking about?” she’d said.

  “There were stories in the gossip rags at the time. It was a full-blown scandal. He had an affair with the wife of a man he was supposed to protect,” he’d hissed. “Three different men confirmed it.”

  “I never heard a word about this,” she’d countered.

  “Because it was twenty years ago. You were a child in Lincolnshire when it happened.”

  “You were a child as well, Georgie. And so was he—how old would he have been twenty years ago? Seventeen? Eighteen?”

  Even as she defended Arthur, doubts crowded behind her words. Young enough to be reckless, yes, but old enough to know right from wrong. Old enough to end up in a married woman’s bed.

  “What does it matter his age? They packed him off to the continent afterward, and he hasn’t been back to England since. He cannot be trusted,” Grantham insisted. He ran a hand through his hair, exasperated, no doubt, that she wouldn’t fall into his plans as she had in their youth. This time they weren’t sneaking off to go fishing or purloi
ning a handful of plum tarts. “I want what is best for you.”

  “Then treat me like a grown woman and not a child. You are feeding me rumors. There is more to this than you are saying, and none of it has any bearing on me.”

  Ducking beneath the mace, Violet had yanked open the door and slammed it shut behind her, then cursed herself for acting like a child. Still, she ignored Grantham’s bellows and hastened to her workroom, hoping to lose herself in her formulas.

  Instead, visions of what she and Arthur had done together had superimposed themselves over the loose scrawl of her formulas. Such a difficult man to read. What did she know of him, truly? Had he been so enamored of this other woman that integrity and duty ceased to matter? He spoke so sparingly—was there another story entirely amid his silences?

  Falling into a restless sleep, she’d awoken with a deep sense of foreboding in the pit of her belly. In a fit of sentimentality, she’d taken the afghan from her workroom couch and secreted it in her bed. Now, as a cold rain struck the windowpanes, she held the blanket to her nose. Wool and winter.

  “Don’t be such a ninny,” she told herself. “Of course he’s made love to other women before me. That doesn’t change the words he said to me.”

  Self-doubt writhed beneath her skin as she rose and went to her dressing room, widening her hips and thickening her torso, so that every dress she donned made her look lumpy and ungainly. Her hair fell in messy clumps, and Alice did not answer the bell to come help her fix it.

  “I don’t need a lady’s maid,” Violet argued whenever Phoebe upbraided her on her appearance. “I don’t leave the house except to go to the club, and I can’t wear anything too fine when I am conducting experiments.”

  She’d stopped caring about her appearance when she’d stopped thinking of herself as desirable. Her poorly mended chemises and ugly gowns were symptoms of a deeper malaise. She’d heard so many times that her intelligence made her less feminine. This, along with Daniel’s distaste for her physical self, had prompted her to see clothes as merely covering a body she found flawed.

  However, Arthur had convinced her that he wanted her because of her enjoyment of the act, not despite it. She wasn’t a sexless drudge. She could find pleasure in her body and her mind.

  A powerful message.

  What if Violet had simply been one of many women he’d tutored in the affirmation of desire?

  It didn’t matter. She shook the thought out of her head as unworthy. Unworthy of Arthur, and unworthy of the woman she was on her way to becoming.

  Nevertheless, her hair was still a fright. Rather than ring the bell one more time, Violet went to the kitchen. It might be that Alice was engaged in duties somewhere else and another maid could help.

  “This must remain a secret,” she heard as she approached. “You can’t tell a soul.” Arthur’s deep voice gave an outsized gravity to the command, although he’d delivered it gently.

  “I won’t, sir. I promise,” came a quiet vow in response.

  Violet peeked around the door to the kitchen. Arthur and Alice sat in the corner. Cook and Mrs. Sweet would be in the housekeeper’s parlor, planning the week’s menu about now, so the two of them had the room to themselves. On the long wooden table before them sat a covered basket.

  “Go on, try one,” Arthur ordered.

  Violet knew better than anyone how difficult it was to defy the man, so she was surprised when Alice hesitated.

  “What if they don’t taste the same?” the girl asked.

  “They won’t,” he said with his usual bluntness. “Everything changes. You. The folks around you. Where you live now, and where you’ll be in ten years.”

  Arthur pulled back the cloth and sniffed. “Your memories won’t change, though. When I smell these buns, I remember my mam taking a batch from the oven and turning her back on my sister and me. I snatched two for us to eat later, thinking I was a clever one. She did it apurpose, of course.”

  Alice laughed.

  “See.” Arthur nodded. “Don’t even have to taste them for the memory to come.”

  The maid picked up a round, dark bun and brought it to her nose. “One time, Cam—he’s the youngest boy—one time he cut a neep to look like a finger. I don’t know how he did it, but . . .”

  Violet retreated into the corridor and pressed her back against the wall, one hand against her beating heart.

  Everything changes.

  Her own life was a study in change. She’d gone from child to woman, from wife to widow. She’d tried to build a marriage and watched it fall to pieces around her. She’d founded the club and created a shelter for others like her.

  She thought of Lady Elva Perllan, a young woman from Herefordshire, who had recently joined Athena’s Retreat. Her interest lay in botany, and one night she’d delivered a lecture on tulip bulbs:

  They lie beneath the earth, where no sunlight can reach them, yet they never despair. Even in the silent dark, the bulb waits with an unerring belief in spring. Do not think of them as sleeping. Think of the blossoms as crouched and ready, poised to push their way toward the sun at the smallest encouragement.

  Arthur’s tiny moment of connection with Alice, despite trying to stay detached from them all, was a sign of how small gestures could punch through the strongest of barriers.

  Violet could buy a hundred new gowns, but the same woman would be staring back at her. For all the changes she’d wrought at Athena’s Retreat, had Violet been too frightened to take the final step and shed her old skin?

  Pushing through to the light wasn’t just change; it was growth.

  “There are still some left, if you’d like to try one.”

  Arthur had come out into the hallway. Playacting a man at ease, he struck a familiar pose, leaning against the wall. As ever, he swept the corridor with his gaze, and one hand hovered, ready to draw a knife at the slightest hint that something was wrong.

  “Forgive my intruding,” she said.

  “It is your home, my lady. You can go anywhere you please without considering it an intrusion.”

  My lady.

  Violet’s thoughts were so disordered from her earlier self-revelations she didn’t bother to hide her hurt. She pulled her shawl close, grasping for something to say. “You will cause an insurrection by Mrs. Sweet if you keep bringing sweets into the house.”

  “That will not be a problem, as I am leaving today.”

  A draft snuck beneath Violet’s petticoats and grabbed her ankles. She could not remember a spring so cold. Surely, it must be a trick of the light that it seemed darker with every word out of his mouth.

  “Today?” she echoed. The word frosted the tip of her tongue.

  Arthur glanced into the kitchen, then back at her. “After what Earl Grantham told you yesterday, I am surprised you didn’t order my dismissal immediately. I’ve written my own letter to Grey. An apology.”

  His shoulder lifted, then dropped. “I’m ready to go,” he said, as though his words were of no consequence to him, sending Violet falling down a dark hole.

  * * *

  “MR. KNELAND, SIR,” Alice poked her head out the doorway, oblivious of the tension. “There is a delivery wagon outside. It’s supposed to go ’round to the club, but the driver says he won’t go, and . . . Oh dear. Did you catch your hair in Mrs. Pettigrew’s spinning whisks again, my lady?”

  Violet let Alice tease her, but her smile was tempered with melancholy. She did indeed appear disheveled. Her gown was buttoned wrong, and Alice was not far off in describing the state of Violet’s hair. She must not have slept well.

  Arthur wanted to coax her back upstairs and run a brush through her lemon-scented tresses. Then he wanted to push her against the wall and do things to her that would leave her hair an even bigger disaster. Too late now. Too late for that and anything else he’d put off.

  He knew his words had
hurt her. Once again, his lack of experience with intimacy had left him in the dark as he tried to figure out how to make it better. What would Grantham say to her?

  Goodbye. You look pretty?

  Arthur went to sort out the delivery before he said anything idiotic.

  “Oy, what’s this I’ve got to go another street over?” A wagon driver was arguing with Letty Fenley out in the mews, next to the carriage house.

  “This won’t do at all.” Letty Fenley delivered her scold to a driver twice her size without fear. “I specifically told the warehouse not to send them to Beacon House. They were to come directly to Athena’s Retreat without delay.”

  Letty’s dress hung loose and wrinkled on her thin frame, and dark lavender smudges beneath her eyes gave them a hollowed appearance. Like a nervous shadow, Caroline Pettigrew hovered behind her. An outsized cape with the hood drawn far over her head obscured her face.

  Arthur slipped toward the back of the carriage house so that they wouldn’t catch sight of him.

  Peering from beneath the cowl, Mrs. Pettigrew leaned over the side of the wagon and read the labels aloud.

  “Ethanol, acacia gum, ferrous sulfate,” she muttered. “This should be enough to get us through until Thursday night, if we’re not discovered.”

  Arthur’s fists clenched in anger. Here he’d been worrying over Alice and fantasizing about Violet’s hair, and in the meantime these women were receiving secret shipments right under his nose.

  The driver pointed at a trunk buffered from the rest of the boxes by heaps of blankets. “That there is Lady Greycliff’s special order. When it’s my lady’s order, I come to this entrance. I have to pack it different than the rest, on account of it’s contemptible.”

  Mrs. Pettirgrew blinked, and Letty paused in her pacing.

  “It’s what?” Letty asked.

  “Congestible,” said the delivery man, staring at them as though they were deaf. “Explodes if you shake it around.”

  “Combustible?” Mrs. Pettigrew asked.