London
May 1883
The Duke of Cranbrook did not kneel to propose. Over the years of their acquaintanceship, Lavinia Yardley had thanked the heavens more than once for the man’s rheumatic joints, which limited his range of motion. She’d been able to sidestep his pinching fingers, dodge his kisses.
Most of the time.
Nasty old goat. Of course, she’d never had the satisfaction of addressing him thus.
“Would you do me the honor of becoming my wife?” The Duke of Cranbrook repeated the words. Oh, he was goatish indeed. Staring back at her hungrily, lips curling away from yellow teeth. His hair, tufted above his ears, thinned to wisps near the crown.
“Miss Yardley,” he said. “Or should I say, Lavinia. Dear Lavinia. I want to give you so much more than trifles, these little tokens of my regard.”
His gaze trained on the bouquet of bloodred roses sitting atop a battered cabinet. The room was hot—uncomfortably so—but Lavinia felt cold, cold to her very bones. How foolish she’d been, to believe her mother.
The roses? I bought them. Aren’t they cheerful?
What other tokens had her mother accepted on her behalf?
“I know you’ll give me much happiness in return.” The way he dropped his voice, the insinuating note. He slid his knuckles down the side of his face, tugged at his silver whiskers. She crossed her arms over her breasts.
Her throat tightened. “In truth, I’ve known little happiness of late. I’m in no position to give it out.” She spoke haltingly.
The Duke of Cranbrook took a step forward, lips twitching. The eagerness of his expression revolted her.
“I was stunned to hear that the prosecution pressed the matter, took things to such an extreme. Stunned. Stunned and frankly aghast. To be dispossessed of your very home.”
He laid a hand on his chest, moved more by his own reaction to her plight than by the plight itself. He hadn’t removed his gloves. A relief, to be spared the sight of those puffy white fingers. She still remembered the night they’d kneaded her thigh below the table at Lady Chatwick’s dinner party, how her stomach had seesawed with disgust. She’d kept silent. Her father’s architecture firm had just submitted plans for the renovation of one of Cranbrook’s country houses.
“It was a great miscarriage of justice, I believe that firmly,” he said. “Weston acted out of turn. But alas, a man abandoned by the woman he loves is capable of anything.”
He referred to the rumor—one of many that had circulated in the winter months—that heartbreak explained her former fiancé’s ungentlemanly insistence on bringing her father to trial, standing by when she and her mother were turned out of their residence at Chesterton Gardens. An enduring bit of gossip, its juiciness guaranteeing its popularity. Even she could see the appeal. A notoriously hotheaded aristocrat, jilted and vengeful. A capricious beauty whose family was ruined by her faithlessness. Pure romance.
Pure nonsense.
Miss Yardley’s brilliant engagement to the Duke of Weston had been short-lived. According to the papers, she had ended it.
She hadn’t, though. He had ended it. Anthony had never wanted to marry her. He’d been manipulated into the engagement by her father. One of her father’s many abuses of power. Her dear, doting papa had exploited his position as the trustee of Anthony’s family estates. He’d lied, and he’d stolen, and worse. He’d wronged Anthony, and he’d wronged Effie, Anthony’s sister.
In so doing, he had wronged her, his own daughter. She, too, had been betrayed.
“A man in love is also capable of anything.” Cranbrook parted his lips. Those yellow teeth protruded. He took a step toward her, and she caught a whiff of something sweet and rancid. The scent of his sweat and cologne mingled with the roses spoiling in the heat.
There was no mirror in this dim suite of rooms—the Rossell Hotel was shabby, even squalid—but the windows gave her back her reflection, confirming she was just as beautiful as she’d been when she debuted. Every social column of 1880, of 1881, had agreed that she was perfection itself. And yet . . . perfection wasn’t penniless. Perfection’s father did not reside in Holloway Prison.
She’d taken comfort in her old gowns, toiling to dress herself each morning without the help of her maid, but now she wished she were wearing sackcloth. Something that hid her body. Or at least something that squared better with her surroundings.
She was standing near the window, behind a chair, and she gripped its back. She would ram it into him, if need be.
“Perhaps shame holds you back. I confess, visiting you here . . . seeing the reduction in your prospects, knowing you are quite cut off from Society . . .” He shook his head. “Most men would hesitate to connect themselves with a woman in your situation. But I am not most men. My wealth and status confer upon me absolute freedom in my choice of spouse. Fondness is my first and only guide.”
A pause, while she stared at him blankly.
“Love,” he clarified. “Will you deny that a certain sympathy exists between us? My heart has ached for you these past months, as though your suffering were my own.”
A strange sound escaped her. Perhaps a strangled laugh. Sympathy? Was that what he labeled his furtive, repulsive liberties? She would say it, finally.
Nasty old goat. You disgust me. You have always disgusted me.
She drew a breath, but before she could speak, she heard a faint squeak. Every hinge in the Rossell Hotel wanted oil. Her mother had cracked the door that separated bedroom from parlor. Her mother was listening. Why didn’t she burst out and interrupt this preposterous scene?
An ugly old lecher, twice widowed, spouting vileness to her only daughter in a tawdry hotel! It couldn’t be borne. Her mother, for all her meekness, would surely charge forward, outrage transforming her from mouse to lioness. Mothers protected their young.
Lavinia waited. A pulse fluttered her eyelid, and she tried to pin it down with the pad of her finger.
“You weren’t meant for such a dreary existence,” continued Cranbrook with a sweeping gesture. “No soirees. No evenings at the theater. Nothing gay. How long can you stay in these rooms? Mr. McCabe is a generous man, but his charity isn’t limitless.”
She started. Mr. McCabe owned several hotels, some grand, some—like this one—decidedly less than grand. Her father had helped him win his election to the Metropolitan Board of Works. How did Cranbrook know that Mr. McCabe had offered up this vacant suite?
“I worry for you, dear Lavinia. I worry for you, and for your mother.”
There. Almost too quick to catch. He’d cast a glance toward the cracked door. Ah. So he knew her mother stood behind it. He knew . . . because they had planned it.
The edges of her vision softened, then everything snapped into focus. Sudden mental clarity sharpened her perception. The dark pores studding Cranbrook’s nostrils. The soot streaked on the ceiling. That smell . . . roses, musk, dirt, lust, desperation, spoilage.
Did it matter in the end, if Cranbrook had approached her mother or if her mother had gone to Cranbrook? They’d arranged this meeting. No doubt they’d already settled the terms. What would those terms be? A June wedding. Her mother would want to move into Harcott House as soon as possible. Or perhaps Cranbrook would set her up in a house of her own. Even better. What else? Could it be that her mother had negotiated for Cranbrook’s intervention on her father’s behalf?
She tried to bore a hole in the door with her gaze, to meet her mother’s eyes. Was this truly the only option? She’d assumed that her mother—pale and calm, even when the bank accounts were emptied, the house seized—was devising some plan, some solution. She’d hoped—foolishly—every day for an unexpected announcement. A distant relative, an American millionaire, had invited them to New York. The queen had commuted her father’s sentence.
Lavinia saw clearly now. She was the plan. She was to be sold like meat.
Breathe. She had to remind herself. Breathe. You can refuse.
Refuse and do what? Wait in the Rossell Hotel for someone to save her? Her mother? That invented millionaire? The queen?
She’d been bred for marriage, nothing else. She could dance, hold a tune, play the piano, speak French, flirt, sulk, decline cakes and pudding at a banquet, appear fascinated while half-asleep. Skills that didn’t possess value beyond the drawing room, the ballroom, beyond her cossetted little world. For most of her life, she hadn’t regretted it. She’d believed she’d marry George. She’d acted on that belief. She’d ruined herself. No one knew. But a husband—a husband would find out. And that meant marriage was no longer an option.
She had no future.
Governess. But who would trust the moral education of their children to the daughter of a convicted thief?
Shopgirl. She’d have to live in a filthy dormitory with real shopgirls who picked their teeth and tinted their hair. And what if someone she knew came up to buy a bottle of scent? Why, she’d die right there, behind the counter!
Parlormaid?
Her eyes were beginning to water. She blinked rapidly. She wondered if her mother was looking back at her, if she would be able to read her expression.
“Lavinia.” Stars above. Cranbrook was reaching inside his frock coat, producing a round ring box. He thumbed it open. One large diamond flanked by sapphires.
“Or should I say . . . Duchess of Cranbrook?”
Her breath exploded. How grotesque, that her destiny should have gotten so hopelessly knotted.
She’d spent years waiting to be styled duchess. Dreaming of the day. Ever since that spring afternoon when she’d run after George, waving his mislaid cigarette case, and he’d reached out to pocket it, then ruffled her curls, smiled, and said, That’s my Vinnie. She, a girl of seven. He, already grown, broad and golden and gorgeous—the infamous Marquess of Stowe. It was more than a decade before anything happened between them, but that afternoon she apprehended everything at once, in a flash.
His Vinnie.
Her George.
Duke and Duchess of Weston.
Then George had died, and he’d taken it all with him. Love. The fairy-tale wedding at St. James’s. The holiday afterward in Paris. The two children she’d already named, a boy and a girl. The title. She’d grieved in secret. Then, for a strange, short interval she’d thought she’d been reprieved. Anthony was the closest she could get to George himself. She might have unburdened herself, confessed her love for his older brother, told him, even, that George had been her lover. He might have understood.
She hadn’t had time. In quick succession, he’d broken the engagement, married his outlandish painting teacher, and ruined her family.
She looked up at Cranbrook’s face, at the greedy, red-rimmed eyes, at the bloated cheeks, permanently flushed by wine, at the abundant jowls and insufficient chin.
The marriage might be, in a sense, a success. A man so old, so besotted, so doddering and goatish, perversely fixated—she’d be able to wrap him around her finger. If he noticed she wasn’t a virgin, he wouldn’t protest. No, he would pinch and knead to his heart’s content. And she, his wife, his duchess, she would live a life in which luxury offset loathsomeness.
To refuse, to choose dignity—that path led to poverty, to utter abjection. How long would she preserve her dignity then?
Here it was. The solution. The future.
Her lips were glued together. Her arms hung limp at her sides. Cranbrook gripped her forearm, lifted her hand, set the ring box on her palm. The jewels glittered.
At least she was selling dear.
She closed her fingers around the ring box. It felt good to make a fist. To squeeze.
Yes was an impossibility. She nodded and didn’t flinch as he peeled off his gloves, trapped her face with his naked fingers. When he forced his mouth hard upon hers, she heard a click.
Her mother, shutting the door.