My Lady's Choosing

by Kitty Curran

  “What is this?” you ask quizzically and take it from him.

  “A new beginning,” he says, casting his eyes downward. A diamond dewdrop of a tear slides down his plush lashes and shatters on the box.

  You remove the lid to find a letter of recommendation on his finest stationery commending your governessing skills as well as full first-class passage to America. Your mind is scrambling to work out what this means when he speaks again.

  “Of course, I will give you all the money you need, any amount at all, for whatever it is you choose to do. A woman of your skills and drive will most likely wish to work, even if she does not need to. Hence the recommendation. But if you do not wish to work, and perhaps want only to travel, that is just as well. I can pay to—”

  “Pay me to leave you?” you interrupt, your broken heart lodged in your throat.

  “No, love, I—” he stammers. “This is not payment. It is the best way I can think of for you to be free.”

  “What if I do not wish to be free?” You allow your tears to fall like daggers. “Do you not love me?”

  “Of course I love you, woman! I love you more than life and breath and reason! I love you more than wind and air and—”

  “Then why send me away?” you say, your voice trembling.

  “Because I am terrible for you. I am a monster, and you are an angel—” He is unable to finish, interrupted by you snorting and rolling your eyes. “A fallen angel, fine. But still, you are more angel than I.”

  There’s a lot to take in here…and a decision to be made.

  Do you wish to heal this tortured soul with your love—and some loving? Turn to this page.

  Or do you wish to take him up on his kind offer and leave? Turn to this page.

  “Rebecca Caddington. One of my dearest friends. We found ourselves rejected by society and therefore found support and companionship in each other. Along with the group, of course,” Madam Crosby says, sipping from a glass of fine champagne to punctuate the more elegant of her thoughts.

  “The group?” you ask, emboldened by your umpteenth flute of bubbly. You can scarcely believe how finely appointed the rooms of the Rose & the Smoke are, and in your half-waking state, you fancy that the curtains and diaphanous silken decor are in fact bewitching glamours cast on filth and trash by the lovely madam’s magical voice.

  “The women,” Madam Crosby intones, and she beams her quiet smile your way. “The ladies of the New New Female Coterie. A group of self-selected castoffs and strangemakers who found their solace—and their mettle tested—with one another. Years ago, Mrs. Caddington was one of our liveliest members. She was one of the sharpest wits I’ve ever known. She could have done much better than that stuffed shirt she chose after her first husband lost his mind.”

  The last sentence pulls your focus so tightly that you gasp for breath.

  “You mean, after he died?” Lady Evangeline asks.

  “Oh, that’s right. Men die, don’t they?” Madam Crosby signals to a rather handsome manservant for another bottle of champagne.

  “Whether he died or not, you said he lost his mind. A most curious sentence,” you say.

  “It isn’t so curious when taken as point of fact,” Madam Crosby drawls. You can’t place her accent. American? French? Nova Scotian? “Lady Caddington’s first husband was a renowned theater critic in his day. The flourish and restraint she showed on the stage, he commanded on the page. It’s how they met, you know. He had taken her to task on an off night, when she was doing a version of Othello. He had written some line about a distracted performance. She consulted us all on what she should do. I initially thought it merely a blow to her vanity, but she turned to me and said, ‘The way he phrased it. How he saw it, how he heard. So few have that sense. It is the language of the soul, and he thinks me a novice speaker.’ I suppose if one must love a man, one who is able to speak the language of the soul is acceptable. Of course, he wrote only favorable reviews of her from then on. What they say is true of language: If you do not use it, you lose it.”

  Madam Crosby is a woman who knows when she holds another in her thrall, and she has the presence of mind to pretend ignorance to her considerable power. She also has quite the tolerance for alcohol. Your mind, however, is far adrift in a sea of champagne. You attempt to anchor yourself to the weight of her words.

  “So you’re saying,” you force out between hiccups, “that the mad first husband…is still…alive and well?”

  “Alive, certainly. Well…,” Madam Crosby downs her sparkling beverage as if it were water. “How well can anyone be when they’ve spent the better part of their twilight years in Bedlam?”

  “Bedlam?” you say, stunned.

  “As you know, my dear, Bedlam is the vilest asylum in all of England,” Madam Crosby says, regarding you with a gaze of practiced calm, laced with something like primal anger. “Which Mrs. Caddington knew full well when she sent her first husband there to rot.”

  “Why the devil did she do that?” you say. You reach for a finger sandwich from a tray the handsome manservant produced moments ago. You take a satisfying bite and relish the late-night pairing of watercress and intrigue.

  “Why wouldn’t she?” counters Madam Crosby. “He could no longer give her good, or even interesting, reviews. He could not feed her ego or pay her bills. He could, however, be secreted away in a living death while she moved on to a wealthy nobleman to solve some of her other problems.”

  “You can’t mean…Lord Granville? Benedict’s father?” Your eyes widen, and you help yourself to just one more sandwich.

  “I can and do,” Madam Crosby responds, and her voice is edgier than before. For a moment, you see the whole history of this heartless Mrs. Caddington written on her face. Perhaps they were lovers, perhaps very close friends, but in any case, the lady Madam Crosby so admired had taken a turn for the very dark when she sent her first husband away.

  “This means Cad’s claim is invalid. Benedict’s claim is safe. Cad is still a damnable bastard. I must tell them so at once. Madam Crosby, thank you. Lady Evangeline, please. Let’s away back to Kent.”

  You grab one more watercress sandwich for the road and hurry to leave, but you run smack dab into…Benedict!

  Turn to this page. Go on now, git!

  “You failed!” you hear Manvers cry out, stiffly, to an unknown conversation partner. “The chit should be gone by now! Did you not give her the false diary? Did you not warn her of the sinful beast that she dares to bed, desecrating the memory of my lady?”

  “I tried!” cries a familiar voice you cannot yet place. “But the young lady turned out to be made of stronger stuff than either of us realized!”

  “No, it is you who has turned out to be weak and incompetent! The girl needs to go or, I swear, I will expose you and ruin you for your sinful exploits with my sweet lady!” The manservant’s voice rises and becomes uncha​racte​risti​cally agitated. “My lady was not made for your base desire! Nor for Lord Craven’s! She was pure and true, and you tried to muddy her waters!”

  “I muddied nothing! I was naught but her plaything!” cries the second voice. “She used me. She took my joy for vanity! We were all her playthings, until she tired of us! Me. Craven. We were wanted until we were no longer desired.”

  “Do not speak ill of my lady!”

  You cannot take it anymore. You throw open the door of the morning room to see Manvers arguing with none other than…

  “Reverend Loveday?!” you cry, unable to contain your surprise. The handsome vicar cowers in shame. “What have you done, sir? What have you done?”

  The vicar drops to his feet. “The late Lady Craven, many times over,” he weeps. “I should have married a simple girl. But Lady Craven was so exotic, so fiery, so…hungry. I could not stop myself. I am sorry! I am shamed!”

  “You ruined my life!” Lord Craven cries, raising his hand as if to strike the Reverend Loved
ay. He lowers it almost immediately, upon seeing the angrily arched eyebrow you throw his way.

  “Please, have mercy on me. Forgive my sins. I am a man, I am but a man!” The vicar claws at your face and pulls it close, then whispers, wild-eyed, “The boy. Manvers has the boy.”

  You pull your face from the wretched vicar’s grasp, spin on your heel, and witness Manvers striking a match on the side of a portrait of the dead Lady Craven. He holds the flame to the small Master Alexander, who is tied to a wooden chair, which is tied to the rest of the wooden furniture in the room.

  “Manvers, no!” you yell.

  “Miss!” Alexander calls. Your head snaps to him, his little face peering knowingly at you from its roped confines. “Find your move.”

  You can’t know for sure, but it seems that the child flicks his little wide eyes to an area just beneath the portrait of the late Lady Craven. You act on instinct and crash past Lord Craven, the vicar, and the insane Manvers until you face the portrait dead-on.

  Find your move. Master Alexander’s echoing of your own words echoes in your mind, and suddenly you punch through the portrait’s eyes. You are both shocked and unshocked to find your fist tear through the canvas as if it were no more than a spider’s web.

  Your hand, now busted through the face of the late Lady Craven, feels its way around a small, secret shelf. Your fingers detect the outline of a pocket-sized leather volume, what you guess is the lady’s true diary.

  As you snatch up the book, the scent of fire and smoke snatches your nose. You spin around to see Manvers setting fire to anything he can reach while training a small golden pistol on your heart. Craven and the vicar desperately attempt to untie Master Alexander.

  “You should never have come here, girl,” Manvers spits at you. “All of this could have been avoided if not for you. You angered her, you see. You angered her ghost, and so I must take action to protect her.”

  “Nonsense,” you spit back. Acting on instinct, you flip to a random page in the diary. You begin to read with all of the confidence you can muster: “ ‘I despise it here, and I should never have come. Craven is terrible since the baby has been born, so fatherly and kind. It repulses me, how dull he has become.’ ”

  You cringe at the words and the effect they have on Lord Craven. Still, you read on. “ ‘I have taken the vicar to my bed. It thrills me to corrupt a pure man.’ ” You shudder. The vicar slumps in disgrace and self-loathing. “ ‘Plus,’ ” you continue, “ ‘his manhood is always as hard as it is for me to pay attention at chapel.’ ” At these words, the vicar blushes even more deeply.

  “What is the use of reading her secret thoughts? These thoughts belong to my lady!” Manvers takes dead aim at you with the pistol.

  “ ‘Manvers is worse than the others,’ ” you continue. “ ‘He is so simple and devoted, I often think of asking him to jump off a cliff to please me.’ ” As you utter these words, Manvers deflates. “ ‘He is as obsessed with me as a father would be with a child. He disgusts me. I anxiously await the day he dies, so that I may dance on his grave and then forget where he is buried.’ ”

  “Stop your lies! Stop your lies!” Manvers drops the pistol, half begging, half damning you. Though doing so crushes you, and seriously makes you question Craven’s prior taste in women, you continue.

  “ ‘I’d wager if this secret diary were ever read aloud to him, Manvers would beg for it to stop being read, so ridiculous is his devotion to an entirely false version of myself.’ ” You close the sinister little tome and throw it aside.

  Manvers sinks to the ground. Lord Craven and the vicar have freed the child, at last. It took them long enough. Manvers looks from you, to the portrait, to the men, and then to the child.

  “Nothing matters anymore,” he sobs. And with the kindling of some hidden spark, all of Hopesend Manor is aflame.

  Turn to this page.

  Your eyes come to rest on Fabien’s statuesque form as he stokes the flames. His eyes may be the misty green of the Nile, but his skin is the dusky color of the desert sand. In the past, at some of the ton parties you attended while the Dragon’s companion, you would wander near groups of married women, free from the constraints of paid companionship. Sometimes you would hear these women speak in hushed and tipsy tones about men with certain body parts like “steel wrapped in silk.” You were never entirely sure what they meant, but now you know. Fabien’s entire body is a firm girder wrapped in taut, tawny velvet.

  The object of your thoughts flashes his eyes up at you. Their Nile green is now flecked with golden fire. “You look at me with the weight of the world,” he says, while holding your gaze steady in his own. There is a barely composed thirst in his eyes, which he drops to drink deep of the oasis that is the sight of your body.

  You realize that you are parched for him as well. How majestic would it be, you wonder, to feel those hands as big as twin sphinxes, but twice as mysterious, run all over your curves?

  You must know. And you must escape. You know exactly what you will do.

  “I want you,” you say, “to put my blindfold back on.”

  The massive man’s breath catches in his throat. “Am I so displeasing to look upon?”

  “You know you are not.” Your voice remains even.

  “Then why do you wish to lose your sense of sight?” he asks, his eyes now burning brighter than the fire itself.

  “I wish to lose all of my senses with you,” you say. You feel a deep pull of pleasure in your sex as he shudders with visible delight.

  He retrieves the blindfold from his belongings and wraps it delicately over your eyes. As he tightens the fabric, his bare chest brushes against your breasts. Your nipples harden, the apexes of two pleasure pyramids ready to be pillaged by vandals.

  His own nipples respond to the response of your nipples, and as your sight darkens, your other sensations come alive.

  “Kiss me,” you whisper. You sense his plush mouth hovering near yours. You feel the heat from the fire warm your face, and the heat from your own desire warm your sex. “My neck first,” you say, just before his lips brush your own. “Make me wait.”

  The giant man with the sphinx hands sinks into the sand and expels a sigh of total lust and abandon. He kisses your neck as Cleopatra did Antony for the first time: with nothing but total certainty, epic cleverness, and deadly desire.

  You feel more womanly than ever before, full and free and wild, yet also wholly in control. “Lower,” you whisper into what you think might be his ear. He obliges, and you feel his hands stroke the line of your neck, all the way down into the valley of the pharaohs between your breasts. Your body spasms with delight.

  “I have taken orders most of my life,” Fabien whispers harshly, but not unkindly, into the shell of your ear. “I will happily continue to take yours, but I beg you, now let me please you with mystery, my lady.” He slides his tongue across your collarbone. Caresses the inside of your elbow. Traces the outline of your knee.

  “You are the charmer, and I am the snake,” he says, before filling your mouth with a kiss that makes you strain against your bindings for more. “But let this snake dance…for you.”

  You are heady with not knowing where his charmed-snake tongue will strike next. You kiss, hungrily, deeply, softly, and soon your sex is filled with the charm of Fabien’s agile tongue and clever fingers.

  “Yes,” you cry. “Oh yes!” You think you will wake the spirit of Nefertiti with your pleasure. With only a vague memory of what started you on this delightful excavation of your own desire, you straddle what you soon feel to be Fabien’s erect obelisk.

  “I have known longing before, but not this kind of desire,” you say. “It feels as if we are two halves of a scarab torn asunder, finally rejoining our fates in this desert midnight.” You undulate rhythmically atop him, a genie rubbing its own lamp. “Free me from my bindings, and let two become one.”


  “Yes,” he cries. “Oh yes, my queen.” He unties your binds, freeing both his hands and yours to grant your wishes deep into each other—and into the night.

  Together, you set off on a truly magic carpet ride.

  Afterward, basking in the afterglow, you ask to share a cup of wine. He procures two earthenware mugs and pours a bit of wine from a flask into each.

  “I feel drunk enough on you, chérie,” he says with a laugh. You can tell that, for the first time in a long time, he feels genuinely relaxed and happy. You would think the same of yourself, had you not recently been kidnapped and taken into the desert. Still, your heart twinges with a little guilt as you kiss him deeply and, while he is distracted, slip into his wine a drop of the sleeping draught you always carry in case the Dowager Dragon had trouble falling asleep after a long night of hateful and petty gossip.

  “A toast to two becoming one,” Fabien says, his Nile-green eyes almost smiling.

  “To two becoming one,” you echo. Fabien drinks deep. He is sleeping like the pharaohs in their tombs when you take the camel meant for you away from him, far into the desert, and deep into the night.

  Turn to this page.

  You race after the apparition in double time, hitching up your skirts almost to your thighs, hurrying with ground-eating strides.

  You chase the filmy, flimsy thing up the stairs, almost to the entrance of Lord Craven’s sleeping chambers, and you think you have it cornered. You reach out a hand to grab the flying raven hair, but the ghost rounds a bend and you trip on the final stair.

  You are sent flying, throwing out hands out to break your fall. You slide across the runner, burning yourself along the way. Yet when you rise, you are alone. All that is left of the ghost is the pain in your palms.

  What the devil is going on here?

  If you think this is a bunch of damned nonsense, go to Lord Craven and demand answers. Turn to this page.