The Assembly Rooms closed at the early hour of eleven o’clock; even so, Augusta expected to find the rented house in Queen Square all but bedded down for the night. Lady Tallant, Augusta’s hostess and friend, had been instructed by physicians in both London and Bath to take a great deal of rest.
Lady Tallant rarely did as ordered.
Thus, when Augusta bade the servants close up the house for the night, then tiptoed up the stairs to her bedchamber—damn, she had forgotten that the third step creaked—she found the young countess stretched out on a settee, pretending to read.
“Lady Tallant. Emily.” Augusta stopped short, then glanced around to make certain she had entered the correct room of the rented house. Yes, this was her chamber: dark brown wallpaper printed with trellises, and an equally dark flowered carpet stretching across the floor. Emily’s room was done in shades of blue. “You ought to be asleep; you should not have waited up for me. Or did I wake you when I returned home?”
“Of course you didn’t wake me.” Without even glancing at her book, the countess shut it and let it fall to the carpet with a muffled thump. “In London, this is practically midafternoon. I should be finishing my tea right now and thinking about which dress I’d like to wear for dinner.”
Augusta said nothing. She simply raised an eyebrow, a trick she’d recently seen Joss Everett put to good use.
“You’re trying to intimidate me. It can’t be done, I’m sorry to tell you.” Emily subsided against the settee, clutching her peach-colored dressing gown more tightly around her form. The lamplight gilded her brown hair and hid the too-pale cast of her complexion, though there was no disguising the shadows under her eyes. “I’m a countess and an invalid, and therefore, I can do whatever I wish. Besides, this was your first Bath assembly and I must hear all about it.”
“You’ll go to bed right away afterward?”
“I will if what you tell me is boring. If it’s extremely boring, maybe I’ll go to sleep right here.”
Augusta relented with a smile and seated herself in a slipper chair facing Lady Tallant. About five years Augusta’s senior, the countess had befriended her in London the previous season. Their polite chatter at a ball had turned into an invitation to call, and another, and another. That had been around the same time Augusta had first met Josiah Everett. Joss. A man of nicknames and unreadable, dark eyes and acid humor.
A man of kind hands and unexpected honor.
Augusta cleared her throat. “The rooms were crowded. I joined in several country dances.”
Emily faked a snore.
“And,” Augusta added, “I met an acquaintance of ours.”
Emily’s green eyes grew wide. “Indeed? Was it a handsome male bachelor sort of acquaintance?”
“Not exactly.” The fire had been built high for Emily’s comfort; Augusta stretched her slippered feet toward it with feigned nonchalance. “I mean—yes, he was a bachelor male. And some might think him handsome, too. Mr. Josiah Everett.”
“Some might think him handsome? I suppose some might, at that. You offer no opinion on the matter, I note.” Emily’s lips pressed together with suspicious humor. “He has black hair, which is a point in his favor.”
Emily’s husband, Lord Tallant, was also dark-haired. Their marriage was a happy one, though the earl and the couple’s two young sons had remained in London during Emily’s convalescence.
Shrewd eyes met Augusta’s. “And did he have the good sense to dance with you?”
“Yes, but only because I forced him to. And that was only because he was at hand when I needed not to dance with someone else.”
“So neither of you wanted to dance together, yet you accomplished the matter all the same. Well done, my dear.” Emily beamed, and the shadows under her eyes seemed less dark for a moment. “Mr. Everett enjoys a bit of intellectual sparring, if I recall correctly.”
“About that.” Augusta began tugging at the fingertips of her gloves. “I have a confession to make.”
Emily raised herself to one elbow. “That you’re pretending to be a widow named Mrs. Flowers? Or is there something else you wish to confess?”
A glove shook free and fluttered to the floor. “Uh. I. Yes, that’s—that’s basically all.”
“Basically all,” Emily repeated. “All right. I can be satisfied with that.”
“How did you know?”
The countess gave an airy wave. “I bestirred myself to the Pump Room this morning to try the famous mineral water and thought I’d sign the guest book while I was there. The master of ceremonies informed me that my young friend had already seen to the matter and showed me the entry.” She frowned. “The water is quite nasty, by the by. It looks like old milk and smells like old eggs. I must assume something so foul is doing my health some good.”
“Yes,” Augusta said vaguely. Anything she said might be too much, now that Emily knew Augusta had taken advantage of the countess’s benevolence.
“Shall I ask why you are passing under a false name?” Emily’s light eyes caught Augusta’s for just a moment before Augusta bent, scrabbling for her fallen glove. Coward. “No, I shan’t press you. We all need to flee ourselves sometimes. Though if you wish to tell me what has caused your flight, I shall be glad to hear it.”
The second unexpected kindness of the evening, following Joss Everett’s insistence that he would keep her secret. Which was, apparently, not nearly so much of a secret as it ought to have been.
Now, and many a time before, the countess would have been within her rights to cut Augusta’s acquaintance. But Emily’s goodwill was unstinting.
“Thank you, ma’am. I suppose I did need to flee myself, and becoming a widow seemed as good a way as any to do that.” Augusta straightened, glove in hand, and blurted, “Do you ever regret marrying Lord Tallant?”
The young countess leaned back against the settee again, her gaze drifting to the plaster roundel on the ceiling, then to the fireplace. “I don’t think,” she began slowly, “there’s an honest woman alive who doesn’t sometimes regret her marriage. Human beings can be so irritating, and when both spouses are irritating at once—well.” She smiled. “But I am fortunate not to be troubled, as so many are, by financial worries or by mistrust of my husband. So the irritating moments pass, and we are still married, and I am glad of it. The permanence of marriage is one of its finest qualities, if one is married to a good man.”
And if one was not…marrying a bad man would make a prison of each day. How could a woman ever know? A man could fake a smile indefinitely, unless some accident forced him to show his true face.
It was better to leave marriage to women with less money and more power. A false widowhood was quite enough for Augusta.
“Ought I to worry about you? Are you troubled by regrets?” Emily’s voice was quiet.
“No more than usual.” Augusta made herself smile, meeting her friend’s eye. A quick image of Joss flashed into her mind, how he had appeared regretful as he declined her offer. She was unsuited to a dishonorable liaison, he thought.
Yet once Colin Hawford had thought her unsuited to an honorable one. So really, she was suited for…nothing. Always, she had been in between. Caught between trade and society, between the life she’d been born to and the one her parents wanted her to have.
We all need to flee ourselves sometimes, said Emily. Yet Joss had insisted there was no way to do so; that Augusta was still herself, no matter how she might pretend to be a merry widow. And if he was right, there was nowhere she could go to get away. No name she might adopt that would let her be free.
Enough. Enough. She had dwelled on this enough for today.
“Shall I read to you, Emily?” she offered, noticing the weariness that tugged at the countess’s lids.
“That would be lovely,” her friend replied, shutting her eyes.
Augusta rose, picked up the volume Emily had dropped, and settled herself on the floor next to the settee. “It’s William Blake. Is that all right?”
Emily nodded, a sliver of movement. “Read ‘Infant Joy.’”
Augusta turned the pages until she found the correct poem. This edition reproduced Blake’s paintings, and the words were tucked within an illustration of a fire-red flower cradling a mother and infant, a haloed angel blessing them.
“I have no name,” she read.
“I am but two days old.
What shall I call thee?
I happy am,
Joy is my name.
Sweet joy befall thee!”
“Stop,” said Emily. “Stop. Stop reading.”
Augusta looked up from the small volume. Emily’s eyes were still closed, but a tear had trickled beneath her lid, tracing the hollow of her cheek.
“I think I ought to go to bed.” The countess’s voice was choked and flat. “I shouldn’t have waited up so late.”
To repay her friend’s kindness, Augusta refrained from saying I told you so. Instead, she helped Emily to rise to her feet; she pretended not to notice the second tear that followed the first, or the ones that came afterward.
Emily’s much-wanted daughter had no name, had never drawn a breath. And just as Augusta had held Emily’s hand after the terrible loss a month earlier, she held it again now, leading her down the corridor and settling Emily into her own night-blue room.
Augusta helped the countess climb the steps to the bed, then drew the counterpane up to her thin shoulders. “I’m here, Emily. If you wish to talk, I shall be glad to hear it.”
The echo of Emily’s own offer seemed to rouse the countess. “You know why I asked you to accompany me to Bath, Augusta?”
“Yes.” Augusta sat on the edge of the bed. “You wanted company during your recovery.”
A pause followed, though the room was too dark for Augusta to read her friend’s expression. “I did want company. But were it only that, I could have traveled here with my husband and sons. Though I now I miss them terribly, I never considered bringing them along.”
“Why is that?”
“Because they remind me of what I’ve lost.” Emily raised herself onto her elbows and stared at the glowing coal fire. “Of all the friends I could have invited, you were the one whose companionship I wanted. Because you understand what loss means.”
Oh. “Yes,” Augusta said again. Though this fire, like the one in her own room, was built up high, her fingers had gone numb. Her feet, her toes. The stone of her heart.
“You know,” Emily said, “how loss can make a person feel mad. Or how it can show her sides of herself she never knew she possessed.”
Augusta felt Emily’s words not as a reprimand, but as a plea for understanding. “Loss can make a person reckless.”
Loss could slash a person with a grief so deep, she might throw away all the good she possessed and let it burn. Not caring. Not wanting to care. Not wanting to feel anything; willing to pursue any promise of oblivion.
Yet that promise, along with so many others, had been broken. Oblivion had never yet been hers.
“You should go to sleep now,” Augusta said, and Emily lay down again without a word of argument.
Simply revealing what brought them here had been difficult enough. Neither of them was ready to talk about why yet, or how they would move beyond this house, this time away from the world they knew.
As Augusta crept from the room and back down the silent corridor to her own chamber, the sardonic face of Joss Everett came to mind. He had named himself her ally, yet he had picked at her character. Taunted her, even. Why? What did it serve? Maybe he felt she had taunted him first by implying he wasn’t trustworthy.
She should have told him that no one was trustworthy. No one but Lady Tallant. And once upon a time, Augusta’s parents, lost so suddenly.
Certainly not Augusta herself.
Handsome and unpredictable as he was, the idea of taking Joss Everett as a lover had a sort of brute appeal. But it terrified Augusta as much as it enticed her. He would not be satisfied to take her body and leave the rest of her alone.
It was better that he had said no. For his sake…and for hers.
***
He couldn’t believe he had declined Augusta Meredith’s offer.
Joss regarded himself in the cracked glass over his battered trunk, tugging his cravat free with careful fingers. He hadn’t the linens to spare for spoiled neckcloths, nor the coin for unnecessary starching and laundering. As deliberately as he had knotted the cloth earlier, so did he now coax free its folds and lay it flat.
His lodging was like his dress: outwardly adequate, secretly scrimping. He had taken a room on respectable Trim Street—but in the top story of the building, a narrow chamber to the side of the house. The walls and ceiling sloped beneath the mansard roof, and the plaster walls were unpapered, the floor of bare wood. Mildew had made a spot on the ceiling, and the room smelled faintly of damp during the near-ceaseless drizzle. Had this building belonged to a single family, Joss’s room would be in the servants’ quarters.
Well. That was what he was, wasn’t he? For now. Maybe not for much longer, if he had his way.
If he had his way. He turned aside from the glass, disgusted with the blurred, cracked surface that made a horror of his face. Only too much would he like to have his way with Augusta Meredith. She wore costly bespoke silks as carelessly as other women might pin on a nosegay. She moved with determination, yet possessed a heartbreaking uncertainty. She was ripe for seduction; she asked to be seduced.
If he obliged her, though, she was the one who would suffer—either in the loss of reputation or the burden of an unwanted child. He could not take his pleasure only to leave suffering in its place.
That was, after all, how Joss had been knit into existence.
He crossed the room to his desk, wishing for more moonlight to leak into the lamplit attic space. So many letters for him to read; so many questions to answer. Yet instead of taking up his work at once, he shuffled aside the papers on his desk and found a thin octavo-sized ledger. The black leather binding was unstamped and plain, worn from decades of handling.
Why did he carry it about? Why did he bother to look at it? It was not as though he would find more enlightenment within its covers this evening than he had in the past.
Yet he flipped it open, skimming the curling Devanagari script of his grandmother’s native Hindustani, the English translations his mother had later jotted in the page margins. Here and there was a spidery botanical drawing, the ink browned with age. He remembered some of these plants from his youth, when his mother still lived to tend them. Their names twisted and lilted over the tongue: ghikumari, which could soothe burns; tindora, the ivy gourd, which strengthened the blood and quieted palpitations. Shikakai and reetha, for cleansing hair. Neem, a tree too tall for the shelter of the glassed-in conservatory. Before a series of cold winters nipped it, its seed oil had been pressed for use in nearly every stillroom concoction, from drinkable tonics to skin creams to treatments for rheumatic joints.
And here was a drawing of somalata, a deceptively innocent-looking grass. It could ease the terrifying symptoms of asthma—or, as the present baron had discovered, it could stimulate the mind and body. Over the years, Sutcliffe had given over more and more of Sutcliffe Hall’s conservatory to its cultivation, until it had edged out all other plants.
Decades before, when Joss’s grandmother had the care of the conservatory, a much greater variety had grown. In her day, Jumanah, Lady Sutcliffe, had coaxed a small corner of India to flourish.
Apparently. Joss had never known her, for within a few years of her arrival in Somersetshire, the English winters had chilled her just as they had the neem. This small, handwritten book was all Joss had left of his grandmother, who had long ago stepped from the soil of Calcutta onto a boat alongside a cook, an ayah, and the English soldier she had wed in haste. She had served him as bibi; she now carried his child. His unexpected ascent to a barony required their marriage along with their swift journey to England. The future heir to the Sutcliffe barony—for did not all parents assume they would have a son?—must be born in wedlock.
In only one generation, though, their branch of the family tree snapped and fell. The hoped-for heir had been a girl—a daughter unprotected by settlements from a marriage contracted in haste, unshielded by a dowry. If her parents had lived, all might still have been well.
But they hadn’t. And when their orphaned daughter Kitty met the worthless Jack Everett, scandal and ruin soon followed. Thanks to the forceful persuasion of her uncle, the father of the present baron, Everett had married her. Her son, Josiah, had not been born a bastard. That was the only selfless act Jack Everett had ever managed.
Cloaked and shielded in notes and coin, Augusta Meredith had no idea how vulnerable she was. How much she had to lose if she placed her trust in the wrong person.
No, Joss would have to watch her carefully. Another item to add to his list of urgent, top secret, must do at once tasks while in Bath. Where he had told Augusta no, someone else was sure to tell her yes.
People who had grown up with unstained birth and reputation could never comprehend how difficult a stain was to remove.
Shutting the book, Joss peered out the small window above the desk. The room overlooked a mews, and at the street level, watery moonlight revealed a boy hauling an empty Bath chair, likely ready to head home for the night.
Joss pried at the latch, opened the window, and called down to the boy in a hoarse whisper. “Will you deliver a note?”
With canny greed, the boy laid down his burden and agreed to a small fee. Squinting into his room—not much brighter than the street, as his lamp was turned low to save fuel—Joss located writing materials and scrawled a quick letter asking Augusta to meet him the following day. He folded it, sealed it, then twisted it around a coin and dropped it into the waiting hands of the boy three stories below.
“Do you know Lady Tallant’s house?”
“Coo,” said the boy. “Her what stays in Queen Square? The countess?”
“Indeed. That note is for her friend, Mrs. Flowers. And the coin—”
“Is for me. Right you are, gov’nor.” With the admirable energy of the young, the boy tucked the note in a pocket and hoisted the handle of his chair again. And he was off, the echoes of their conversation still dying in the quiet street. The rattle of his chair wheels faded, leaving nothing behind except rows of houses with shuttered faces, their golden stone washed gray by the starless sky.
Tomorrow, if Augusta agreed to his request, Joss would meet her again. He would take her at her word: that she truly did trust him to sort through possible lovers for her, and that she could help him make the land deal that would free him for a new life.
He hoped she planned to be more forthright than he did.