October 16th, 1805
London
Marcus read the character reference again, his eyes skimming over the words—honesty, sobriety, good head for figures—to fasten on the signature at the bottom. Mr. Charles Appleby, Esq. He glanced at the young man seated across the desk from him. “And you say that Mr. Appleby is dead?”
“Yes, sir.”
Christopher Albin had an open, honest face, with a scholar’s broad brow and child’s wide gaze. His coloring was fair—blond hair, hazel eyes.
“How old are you, Mr. Albin?”
“Twenty-five, sir.”
Marcus rubbed his face. Scabs were rough on his brow and cheek. When did I start feeling so tired? He felt decades older than Albin, not a mere half dozen years.
Marcus glanced at the character reference again, at the scrawled signature of a man who was dead. “You were Mr. Appleby’s secretary for five years?”
“Yes, sir. Until his death, sir.”
In my experience, Charles Appleby had written, Mr. Albin is a competent, reliable, and efficient Secretary.
There was no way of checking the character reference; he’d have to take Albin at face value. Marcus put down the sheet of paper, steepled his hands, and studied the young man. Albin’s neckcloth was atrociously tied. It added to his appearance of youthfulness.
“What are your views on the slave trade, Mr. Albin?”
“I believe it’s wrong, sir.”
Marcus grunted. Damned right. “Can you fight?”
Albin blinked. “Fight?” He glanced down at his hands. “I guess so, sir. I’ve never tried. Why?”
Marcus tapped his steepled fingers against his chin, studying Albin. Do I want this lad as my secretary? Wouldn’t it be better to hire someone older? Tougher? Better able to defend himself in a fight?
But for all his fresh-faced youth, Albin’s shoulders and height were encouraging. He’d have a better chance in a fight than poor Lionel.
Marcus sighed and lowered his hands. “I’ve been having some . . . trouble lately, Mr. Albin.”
“What sort of trouble, sir?”
“Windows broken. Nightsoil left on the doorstep. Last week, I was attacked in St. James’s Park. It wasn’t random; the footpads called me by name.” Memory gave him the sound of Lionel’s wheezing, agonized breaths. His stomach tightened. “My secretary was injured. He’s at my Kent estate, recuperating, but it’s doubtful he’ll be able to write again. Among his injuries, his right arm was badly broken.”
Albin was silent for a moment, his eyes on Marcus’s face, examining the bruising, the healing cuts. “Do you think it will happen again, sir?”
“There’s a risk it will, yes.”
Albin nodded. A faint frown creased his brow. Cogs were almost visibly turning in his head.
A mood of gray fatalism descended on Marcus. This was where the last three applicants had balked. Albin was going to balk, too. And how can I blame him?
He looked down at his hands, at the bruising, the scabs across his knuckles. He flexed his fingers, feeling the scabs pull. I should have run, as Lionel wanted me to.
“Why are you being targeted, sir?”
Marcus looked up. “I don’t know. It could be political. Or personal.” The admission brought a sour taste to his mouth. Do I have so many enemies? “One of your tasks will be to help me find who’s responsible.”
Albin nodded, but said nothing. His gaze turned to the carpet. His frown deepened, furrowing between blond eyebrows. He was thinking, weighing things up. Deciding he doesn’t want to risk his neck for me.
Albin looked up and met Marcus’s eyes. “I’ll take the position.”
Surprise held Marcus stunned for a second, and then optimism surged through him. “You will?” He found that he was smiling, that he was leaning forward across his desk. He held out his hand to Albin. “You won’t regret it.”
Charlotte returned the handshake. She tried to squeeze back with a grip as strong and manly as the earl’s.
Cosgrove released her hand and sat back in his chair. The fleeting smile vanished, leaving his face grim once more.
Charlotte stared at him. Her employer.
Cosgrove was a tall man, with a face that was almost harsh—strong jaw, strong cheekbones, strong blade of a nose. His hair was coal-black, his eyes dark gray. A striking man, despite the signs of violence on his face: half-healed cuts veering across his brow and right cheek, bruises dark around one eye.
Charlotte gave herself a mental shake. You’re a man now, and a man wouldn’t think about what Cosgrove looks like.
“Let’s start with a list of my enemies.” The earl pushed a sheet of paper towards her, and his inkwell and quill.
Charlotte pulled her chair closer to the desk, dipped the quill in ink, and sat with her hand poised over the paper. For a brief, dizzying moment, her fingers were too large, too long, wrong. She shook her head fractionally, dispelling the notion. “How many are there, sir?”
Cosgrove gave a humorless laugh. “How many? Half a dozen that I can think of.”
Half a dozen enemies? Charlotte kept her face carefully neutral. “Who are they, sir?”
“Lord Brashdon and his set. Sir Roderick Hyde. Keynes.”
The names were vaguely familiar. Hadn’t her uncle spoken of them? “Anti-abolitionists?”
“Yes.” She heard contempt in Cosgrove’s voice, saw it in the curl of his upper lip. “Men who place profit above human life.”
“And you are an abolitionist, sir.” It was a statement, not a question.
“Yes.”
Charlotte wrote down the first name. Lord Brashdon. She watched her fingers wield the quill—large, blunt-tipped, male—and the dizzying sense of wrongness came again: her hand was too large, the quill too small.
The letters came out lopsided and awkward, like a child learning to write.
Charlotte exhaled sharply through her nose. Don’t think about it.
She wrote the next two names without watching her hand. Sir Roderick Hyde. Keynes.
There. That was much better.
Alongside the names, she wrote: Political enemies. Anti-abolitionists. “Who else, sir?”
“My heir. Phillip Langford.”
He counted his heir among his enemies? Charlotte tried to keep her eyebrows from lifting. Phillip Langford, she wrote. Heir. “Yes, sir?”
“Gerald Monkwood. The brother of my late wife.”
Charlotte glanced up.
“I’m a widower.” Cosgrove said the words stiffly, as if they fitted uncomfortably in his mouth. “Monkwood blames me for Lavinia’s death.”
“I’m sorry, sir.”
Cosgrove made a twisting movement of his lips, silent negation of her sympathy. Charlotte looked down at the paper again. Gerald Monkwood, she wrote. Brother-in-law. Had the marriage been an unhappy one? Was that what that brief grimace implied? She glanced up. “Anyone else, sir?”
Cosgrove didn’t immediately answer. He looked down at his hands, as if studying the fading bruises. He spread his fingers, clenched them, looked up. “Sir Barnaby Ware.”
“And he is?”
Hard lines pinched on either side of Cosgrove’s mouth. “He was a friend of mine—until he had an affair with my wife.”
Charlotte wrote the name silently. Sir Barnaby Ware. Ex-friend. Adulterer. She glanced at the earl. He looked like a man who had everything: wealth, a title, an attractive face, a strong body. A man in his prime. A man who led a charmed and privileged life.
Except that perhaps his life wasn’t as charmed as it appeared from the outside.
She glanced back at the list, reading the six names. Brashdon and Hyde and Keynes. Langford. Monkwood. Ware. “Where would you like to start, sir?”
“With Monkwood. Tomorrow.”
She looked up. “Because you think he’s the most obvious, sir?”
“He’s been the most vocal of my detractors.” Cosgrove rubbed his brow. He looked weary and battered, slumped in the chair, his right eye shadowed by bruises, his forehead and cheek scored by half-healed cuts. A man who’d been beaten too many times. And then—as if to prove how wrong her imaginings were—the earl pushed vigorously to his feet and strode across to a mahogany bookcase. “You’ll also help me with my speeches. I’ll write them, but I shall expect you to check them for me.”
“Speeches?”
“To the Upper House.” Cosgrove opened the bookcase’s glazed doors. “About abolition of the slave trade.”
Charlotte glanced around the room. Uncle Neville described abolitionists as mean little men trying to drag the nation down into ruin. They resent our wealth, he liked to proclaim, his face flushed with brandy. They want to bring us all down to their level of destitution. Cosgrove clearly wasn’t destitute. The study was spacious, the furnishings handsome: the thick Aubusson carpet, the two desks with their cabriole legs and gleaming marquetry, the winged leather armchairs beside the fire, the cabinets and bookcases lining the walls, the heavy brocade curtains.
Her gaze returned to Cosgrove. His clothes had the austere elegance that spoke of a master tailor.
No. Not destitute.
“We lost the last vote—but by God we’ll win the next one.”
Charlotte believed him. The determination on Cosgrove’s face, in his voice, was the sort that won wars. Agamemnon would have looked thus—grim, implacable—when he contemplated the walls of Troy.
“Here.” Cosgrove held a sheaf of handwritten papers out to her. Behind him, tall windows framed a view of Grosvenor Square, now fading into dusk.
Charlotte stood and took them. “What are they, sir?”
“My last three speeches. And this.” A book was thrust at her. “An essay on the slave trade.”
“By you, sir?”
“No.” Cosgrove closed the bookcase. “Take them back to your lodgings. Read them. It will give you a better understanding of the issue.”
Charlotte read the speeches huddled in bed in a nest of musty blankets. She’d pawned her mother’s jet necklace and brooch in Halstead, but the fare to London and clothes for Christopher Albin had consumed most of those shillings. There’d been barely enough left for a few nights’ accommodation in one of the poorer lodging houses.
But once I’m paid, I’ll be able to afford a room with a fireplace.
Excitement stirred in her belly. She was making her own way in the world now, she was independent, she was earning good money.
Charlotte wriggled numb toes and glanced around the bedroom. It was scarcely larger than a cupboard, with a bare wooden floor and one grimy, cracked window. Mold and water stains crept down the walls, the bedding reeked of tallow candles and fried onions, the horsehair mattress was lumpy and sagging, but she wouldn’t swap this bedroom for her old one at Westcote Hall. Or swap her old life for this one.
Excitement twisted in her stomach again, like a snake tying itself in knots. She was no longer Charlotte Appleby. She had a new face, a new body, a new name—and a career that was better than any she could have as a woman. No poorly paid governess or schoolmistress, but secretary to an earl!
Memory gave her a glimpse of Lord Cosgrove—the strong-boned face, the gray eyes, the cuts and bruises. His admission echoed in her head: Last week I was attacked in St. James’s Park. My secretary was injured.
Charlotte put the speeches aside. Working for Cosgrove might not be the wisest choice, but the wages he offered were astonishingly generous. Far more than she’d dared hope to earn. A few years in his service and she’d have a comfortable sum saved.
She shrugged inwardly. If she was attacked, she could use her Faerie gift. Turn into a bird and fly away.
Charlotte scratched the prickly stubble on her cheeks, and picked up the book Cosgrove had given her, a slender volume with the title and author’s name stamped into the calfskin cover: An Essay on the Slavery and Commerce of the Human Species, Particularly the African, translated from a Latin dissertation, by Thomas Clarkson.
She opened it and began to read. The pages were dog-eared. Cosgrove had underlined passages and made extensive notes in the margins.
It was almost midnight by the time she finished. Charlotte closed the book and looked at it, rubbing her thumb over the cover. A better understanding of the issue—yes, she had that . . . but did the earl realize how much of himself he exposed to her?
The speeches revealed his public face—articulate, championing an end to slavery—but the notes he’d written in the margins of the essay were more personal, more private. This was the man uncensored. Each jotted word, each underlined sentence, gave her a glimpse of who he was. His thoughts, his opinions, his values—all were laid out for her to see.
I like him.
Charlotte put the book aside and shrugged out of the blankets. She pulled the chamber pot from under the bed—and hesitated. Every time she urinated using her pego, she ended up with splashes on the floor.
She stood for several seconds with the nightshift half-raised, then let the hem fall and wished herself back into her own shape. Her skin itched intensely, as if a thousand ants crawled over her, and then the sensation vanished.
The room became blurry.
Charlotte groped for her spectacles. The room came into focus. The nightshift hung voluminously, pooling on the floor around her feet.
She peed quickly, and with a strong sense that she was cheating. If she was going to live as a man, she needed to learn how to handle her pego.
She wished Swiffen’s Cyclopaedia had an entry on the pego, explaining its peculiarities. Why was it so stiff when she woke in the mornings? How could something so soft become so hard? And what did one do to control it? Using her Faerie gift to wish it limp again worked, but she’d never seen a man walking around with his pego tenting his breeches, so there must be a way of controlling it that didn’t involve magic.
Unless there was something wrong with hers?
There was no one she could ask. She would have to figure out the answers for herself.
But not tonight.
Shivering, she looked at the drawing she’d pinned to the wall, concentrating on the young man’s face. Broad brow. Wide-set eyes. Curling hair.
Clean-shaven cheeks, she reminded herself. And perfect vision.
Charlotte took off the spectacles, closed her eyes, and wished herself back into Christopher Albin’s shape. One thousand invisible ants crawled over her skin again. When she opened her eyes, the nightshift no longer puddled on the floor; instead she saw large feet wearing thick woolen socks.
She touched her face. The shape of cheekbone and jaw was Christopher Albin’s. The prickly stubble was gone.
How interesting it was to be a man, she thought, climbing into the sagging bed. People spoke to her more bluntly and met her eyes more directly. They treated her with a different kind of respect from what she was used to. As if I am somehow more than I was.
Charlotte curled up in the cocoon of blankets and blew out the smoking tallow candle. Anticipation fizzed in her blood, like the bubbles in a glass of champagne. She was a man. She was independent. She had a career.
I’m glad I chose this path.