Chapter 20
The disaster happened the next morning, on an empty stomach.
Lucie was running late for breakfast, because she had indulged in a lie-in, lingering on last night’s waltz in the twilight hour between dreams and conscious thought. Then she had asked the lady’s maid for another complicated coiffure and had taken frivolously long to select the best silk flower as a crowning glory.
The moment she entered the breakfast room, three hundred or more heads turned toward her, each movement subtle, but together, it created a veritable disturbance in the air.
She slowed.
The hall was quiet as a tomb. And just as frosty.
Reflexively, her hand rose to her hair. The flowers were still firmly in place. It couldn’t possibly be her gown. . . .
Annabelle was watching her from her seat at the head of the table, wearing a pleasant little smile. Formally pleasant.
Her stomach sank. Something had happened, between the early-morning hours and now, and whatever it was, it wasn’t pleasant at all.
The crowd found its bearing, people moved, and chatter swelled again.
Her thoughts racing, Lucie turned to the breakfast buffet, reached blindly for a plate, and began selecting fruits from the tiered platters. Whatever it was, she wasn’t guilty of it.
The scent of lavender wrapped around her. Lady Salisbury had appeared by her side and pretended an interest in the oranges in the large silver bowl.
“Some of us found something strewn along the corridors this morning,” she murmured without preamble.
“Found what?” Lucie said quietly.
Now Lady Salisbury looked at her. Her usually watery blue eyes were piercing. “Pamphlets.”
A shiver of alarm ran down her back.
Pamphlets of any kind had no place in a ducal corridor. Certainly not when the Prince of Wales was in attendance. Not when Montgomery was trying to restore his reputation. . . .
“It was The Female Citizen,” Lady Salisbury said tightly. “The prince found one, too.”
Her palms turned damp. Apples and oranges began to blur.
She could see the pamphlets on the cherrywood surface of the vanity table before her mind’s eye, placed there carelessly when she had spread out the Discerning Ladies’ Magazines, because who would come to her room and see them, and take offense?
Lady Salisbury had probably seen them there yesterday morning. Did she believe Lucie had done it? Of course. Everyone here believed she had done it.
She turned to the crowd, her plate forgotten.
No one was facing her directly now; they were looking past her, through her. She might as well not exist at all. Wrong—one man was staring right into her. The Duke of Montgomery. His pale eyes were assessing her from his place at the head of the long table, his face as still and cold as if carved in ice. The prince sat next to him, champagne flute in hand, looking deceptively bored.
Her gaze began darting around the room. Every face in her field of vision closed up like a fist.
She did catch Lord Melvin’s eyes.
He glanced away.
“Excuse me,” she said to Lady Salisbury, and made for the exit.
She kept her pace measured in the Great Hall; still, the clicks of her heels were echoing like gunshots off the walls. She overtook a group of chattering guests and they fell silent. Their stares bore into her back until she reached the bottom of the grand staircase. The narrow new skirts forced her to take the stairs one dainty step at a time, step step step. She turned right on the landing, toward the corridor to the east wing.
Two women were ahead of her.
Hazel ringlets, and her mother’s unmistakable slim frame. Lady Wycliffe crept down the hallway like an old woman, slightly lopsided and leaning on Cecily’s arm. Oddly, the sight stung, right into the depths of her chest.
When they vanished into an antechamber, she quickened her stride to follow them and entered without knocking.
“Mother?”
They stood with their backs to her, facing the tall windows. Her cousin glanced over her shoulder and gasped, her eyes widening with—fear?
Lady Wycliffe kept her back turned, her thin frame stiff like a frozen reed. “Leave now, Lucinda.”
The cold contempt in her mother’s voice stopped her hesitant advance like a wall.
Cecily’s gaze had dropped to the tips of her shoes.
“Now.”
Lucie nodded. “As you wish.”
She was at the door when the cold voice came again. “You just had to do this, didn’t you? You simply could not help yourself.”
She stood facing the winter blue of the doorjamb, uncertain what to say.
“You always had a desire to spurn me. So disobedient, so difficult, since you were a girl. I really should not find myself surprised today. But that you would go to such extremes as to humiliate the duke and his wife in front of the Prince of Wales to indulge your politics . . .”
A roar starting up in her ears, she turned back. “It wasn’t me.”
The countess wheeled round to face her, the glitter in her eyes as sharp as broken glass.
“You are selfish,” she said. “You always were.”
Cecily was hiding behind her hands like a child.
She should leave. It appeared her mother could still work herself into a passionate outburst after all, and they had had enough scandal for a day.
“Good day, Mother.”
“Of course. You have no scruples to just walk away from the chaos you create.” The blend of imperiousness and disappointment, so unique to her mother, erased years between them and made Lucie feel like an awkward girl in a woman’s body. Her hand had all but frozen on the door handle.
Her mother’s expression turned oddly triumphant. “There are other ladies who dabble in political activism,” she said. “Have you never wondered why they have not lost their family? Why they are still well-received?”
Beyond her shoulder, Cecily was still covering her face with her palms. Well, when one was not used to them, confrontations could be frightening. And presently, the Countess of Wycliffe very much wanted to confront. Her wrath was an old wrath, pulled from the very depths of her. She would not be appeased.
“If you must know,” she continued, “Wycliffe might have forgiven you, had you not embarrassed him in front of his peers. But you do not care whether you cross a line, do you, as long as it serves your immediate gratification. Indeed, I used to think how similar you and your father were in your selfishness. The difference is, of course, that Wycliffe is a man—he can’t help himself.”
Her gaze traveled over Lucie from the tips of her new slippers to the silk flower in her coiffure. “It was all a ploy, wasn’t it, the lovely gowns and polite conversation?”
Lucie’s skin crawled under her inspection. “Whatever do you mean?”
Her mother sneered. “Please. Do you truly believe that adorning your hair with flowers will disguise what you are?”
The snide words made her feel numb. She opened the door and escaped into the corridor.
“That is what you fail to understand.” Her mother was following her. “Your peculiarities are not skin-deep. They are at the very core of you—how could I possibly have corrected them? I tried. Oh, I tried.” She was right behind Lucie, close, breathing down her neck. “Know that any normal man and woman can sense your masculine nature from afar. Know that nothing will hide what you are, Lucinda—you cannot outrun the truth.”
She stopped abruptly and turned back.
“The truth?” Her tone was metallic, impersonal, the kind she used on heckling strangers. “The truth is that while you speak with great authority, your authority is a mirage, Mother. Wycliffe can take it away with a snap of his fingers, like this. You hold no rights, not even over your own body, because you are a married woman. Your pedestal stands on quicksand, and if you are satisfied with this fate, for yourself, for half the human race, we shall never agree. So forgive me if I would rather run than stay and let you berate me.”
Lady Wycliffe drew herself up to her full height. “There is dignity in quietly bearing a woman’s cross,” she said icily. “There is no dignity in your stubborn refusal to do so—only humiliation. Your shrieking, your marches, your pamphlets: humiliation.”
Lucie’s lip curled. Remember the morning in the library at Wycliffe Hall, Mother? There had been a world of humiliation in your shrieking and pleading for a scrap of your husband’s love while he flaunted his mistresses for all to see. Could there be a humiliation greater than begging for love?
“Do you think these activists you have chosen over your family have a care for you beyond what you can do for them?” Again her mother was rushing after her with quick, angry steps, hissing words under her breath. “They have not. Mark my words, you will be a bitter old spinster with not one child, not one friend to give you comfort in your twilight years.”
“I promise I shall not bother you if that comes to pass.”
“What if your trust fund runs out? You won’t be proud in the workhouse.”
Her foot nearly caught in her hem as the words slithered into her heart, beneath the doors she kept firmly shut between her and a secret world of dread. She could not afford fear. The only way for her was forward, always forward.
As the corridor split to a left and a right, she turned right the moment her mother tried to turn left, and they stood facing each other.
They were both breathing hard.
When she tried to step around her mother, her hand shot out and clasped her arm. “Lucinda.” Her voice was low. “No one can abide a selfish woman. You must know that.”
“Oh, I do. I do know.”
A damp sheen blurred the countess’s blue eyes. “You . . . you could have had everything. Everything.” Her little shrug was almost helpless. “And yet here you stand, wasting your life—and for what? For what?”
For something you will never understand.
For something she, Lucie, could never go without again.
She looked her mother in the eye. “For freedom.”
This time, no one followed her.
The copies of The Female Citizen were gone from her vanity table. Someone had positioned a few of the Discerning Ladies’ Magazines in their place. Well. Whoever had tried to sabotage her, they had succeeded.
Her carpetbag and the travel trunk were stowed in the dressing chamber. Mechanically, she began pulling gowns and petticoats into her arms, carried them to the bed, and dumped them on the counterpane. Her senses were still overheightened, her blood still racing.
Years ago, when she had been new to activism, she had wondered how the other ladies who were taking up the Cause retained their positions and people’s good graces. Their families usually displayed unusual degrees of tolerance. But most ladies also stayed clear of the truly ugly matters and left them to the activists from the middle classes. And usually, they were more patient than her, and contented themselves with gradually carving out space for a project here or there. Another foundling home, another school for girls, an academy for fallen women. A position as policy advisor on health matters thanks to personal connections, as Florence Nightingale had done. All valuable work, none of it enough. And she, Lucie, was greedy. She found the endless waiting difficult. She wanted to see women advisors in the Ministry of Economics. She wanted fewer academies for fallen women, and more changes to the circumstances that made women fall. Her mother was right—she was selfish. She was indulging her impatience and wanted too much, too fast.
She pulled the flowers from her hair and tossed them onto the disorderly heap of clothing. Masculine nature. How many of them had been laughing behind her back at her attempts to look nice?
She began stuffing the dresses into the trunk, crushing velvet and silk.
A soft but determined knock sounded on her door.
“Enter,” she said without interrupting the packing.
Annabelle appeared on the doorstep. At a glance, she took in the pile of clothes on the bed and the open trunk.
She closed the door behind her. “Surely you are not thinking about leaving?”
“I think it would be best, considering the circumstances.”
Annabelle drew closer. “What makes you think so?”
“Please. Everyone thinks it was me. Including you.” Forgivable in her mother, who had never known her much at all. So hurtful in a friend, she couldn’t breathe, thinking about it.
“I do not think you did it.”
She glanced up. Annabelle was staring at her with hurt in her eyes.
Lucie swiped a dislodged lock of hair behind her ear. “I saw how you looked at me when I came into the breakfast room.”
Annabelle shook her head. “It would be stupid, and disloyal, and you are neither.”
It didn’t soothe the jagged emotion stabbing away in her chest.
“I’m glad. But I would have appreciated a warning before I walked into Antarctica.”
Annabelle blew out a breath. “I could hardly leave Montgomery’s side—we were busy pretending that everything was fine.” She hesitated. “But it is true that I had seen the pamphlets on your vanity table yesterday morning. And . . .”
“Yes?”
“And I know that you are not fond of Montgomery.”
Lucie gave a nod. “It is true. I’m not fond of him.”
“He is not hindering our cause now,” Annabelle said calmly. “In fact, he is fighting in our corner.”
“Is it still our corner?”
A look of surprise passed over Annabelle’s face. “Of course—why would you even say such a thing?”
Because you have everything a woman supposedly should have, and it shall be a matter of time before it keeps you from pursuing masculine activities.
Lucie shrugged. “I suppose I do not like how the duke is changing you.”
“Changing me? Whatever do you mean?”
It would be unwise to keep talking. So naturally, she did keep talking. “You are not really part of the student body anymore, and are only present at Oxford two, at best three days a week, when studying the classics used to be your dream.”
Annabelle gave a baffled shake. “I’m a married woman now. I cannot live apart from my husband seven days a week—I do not wish to, either.”
“Precisely. It just strikes me as a lost opportunity, considering how few women have access to anything resembling a higher education.”
“Lucie, Oxford does not even allow women to fully matriculate.”
“Oh, I’m aware of that—I am writing a letter a week and speak to more bigots than I care for to change that. It means we have to fight harder, not withdraw.”
“But I’m not withdrawing—I’m compromising. Just because I am married does not mean I shall ever give up the fight.”
“It usually means exactly that.”
Annabelle regarded her warily, as though uncertain what had got into her friend. “Presently, Oxford does not allow us to take the same final exams as men, and they teach us in the upstairs room of a bakery. We are not deemed fit to enter the same lecture halls as the men. You can hardly expect me to strain my relationship with Montgomery for their disregard and a third-class diploma, especially not when I am perfectly capable of fulfilling much of my coursework from afar.”
She was right, of course. “Still,” something possessed Lucie to say, “you do not walk with us as much anymore because your gowns are too constraining. And your speech is changing—is he making you take elocution lessons?”
And she had gone too far, she knew even before she heard her friend’s sharp intake of breath.
“I should not have said that,” she murmured, a sinking feeling in her chest.
“No,” Annabelle said quietly. Her beautiful face was white. “You should not have.”
“I’m a beastly friend.”
“You are not being fair.” Annabelle crossed her arms, the air around her crackling with the sparks of her own temper. “Has my life changed? Why, yes, it has. I have changed the constraints of poverty to the constraints of protocol—guess which I prefer? I enjoy being safe and well fed. I prefer constraining gowns over having to mend my old ones, over and over, worrying how I would replace them before they turned into rags. I like having strength and resources at my disposal for matters beyond my immediate survival. I am of much more use to the Cause as I am now than I was before. But none of that signifies—what signifies is that Montgomery gave up near everything he once considered important to be with me. And I would have shared my life in a hovel with him. Because there is no one who sees me better, and no one I trust more.”
Lucie was cringing. “I apologize.”
“How could he possibly give me any more? He could lay down his life for me, but I daresay he would do so without blinking if required.” Annabelle’s eyes were blazing like emeralds on fire. She had worked herself into a right mood, and Lucie could hardly blame her.
“I apologize,” she repeated, feeling dreadful. “Truly, I spoke out of turn.”
Annabelle’s arms remained firmly crossed.
Lucie sank onto the bed next to the tangle of remaining gowns.
This was worse than what had just transpired in the breakfast room. Worse than the confrontation with Lady Wycliffe. She was unraveling in some fashion, had been so for days, with resentment sprawling destructively around her like the arms of a kraken. Could she blame her friends for having doubts?
She raised solemn eyes to Annabelle. “It does not excuse my tirade, but for what it’s worth, I felt hurt.” It made her feel queasy to say this out loud, as if she were revealing a soft, pale flank to a marksman. “I was ghastly to you because I felt hurt when I thought you thought it was me. I would never try and embarrass you, in your own home no less.”
Annabelle’s face fell. She rushed to settle next to her and clasped Lucie’s hand in hers.
“I’m sorry, too.” The green of her eyes was muted again, all temper gone out of her. “Please believe me.” She gave Lucie’s hand a squeeze. “I never meant to give you this feeling.”
Lucie shrugged. “It’s all these years of me being known as a troublemaker. It’s bound to confuse people.”
Annabelle’s eyes looked suspiciously shiny. “I’m not people, I’m your friend. My emotions are running high—will you accept my apology?”
Lucie sighed. How could she not?
“There is nothing to forgive,” she said, and gave Annabelle’s hand a squeeze in turn. “And I’m happy for you. I am.”
Even when contrite, with her regal posture and proud cheekbones, Annabelle looked as though she had always been destined to be someone. Poise and pride were in her marrow. It was just a bitter pill to swallow that it had taken the money and the protection of a man to help her achieve her destiny. But that was how it was. And perhaps, she, Lucie, was turning into a bitter old crone before her time.
Annabelle toyed with a tassel on the belt of her dress. “If you must know,” she said, “I don’t relish constraints of any kind, be they gowns, protection officers, or protocol. But Lucie.” She raised her eyes, and the depths of emotion in them stunned Lucie for a moment. “Lucie, I have never been so happy. Perhaps I am greedy, but I wish to believe I can do both: be a wife to the man I love, and work for women’s liberty.”
Lucie had to yet see such a thing.
But if anyone could hope to do both, it had to be Annabelle, hadn’t it. “It’s your prerogative to wish for however much you want,” she said.
Besides, even to her bitter crone eyes, it was obvious that the duke was besotted with Annabelle. He wasn’t an expressive man but inevitably, his attention shifted and settled on his wife, wherever she happened to be in the room. In terms of affection, their union appeared balanced. It was hardly degrading to fawn over a man who was fawning right back.
“What are you going to do now, about the pamphlets?” she asked. “Is the prince terribly annoyed?”
Annabelle scoffed. “Between the two of us, I think he’s dying from ennui, so he is grateful for diversion of any kind. That said, he doesn’t suffer provocations against his person gladly.”
“I imagine—what will you do?”
Annabelle smiled without humor. “Montgomery already convinced him that the pamphlets were the idea of some inebriated ladies in the wee hours after the ball; a wager between foolish women.”
“Ingenious. The most expedient way to take the gravity out of any situation.”
“Of course. No red-blooded male would concern himself with such a frivolous matter.”
“The women, however, are another kettle of fish,” muttered Lucie, remembering the turned backs, Lady Salisbury’s piercing eyes . . . her mother’s seething embarrassment. “They think I tried to make a fool of a duke. Or tried to draw attention. The question is, who did it? And why? Are there any clues?”
Annabelle’s face darkened. “Nothing yet. Montgomery has plenty of detractors among his guests who would like to make him look less than in control.”
“As do I,” Lucie murmured.
Annabelle’s eyes widened. “You think this was directed against you?”
“That was my first thought, although why someone would go to such lengths—oh.” A thought struck her, and it sent her stomach plummeting straight to the floor. She knew one person who might have a rather acute interest in sabotaging her credibility. Someone who had ample experience with playing cruel pranks on her. Tristan.
Her palms turned damp, and she noted that her heart was pounding.
“We will find out whoever it was,” Annabelle said, confidence in her voice. “In the meantime, the whole affair is only a provocation if we make it so. As long as we make light of it, the people who continue to take offense will look terribly gauche. No one here wants to look gauche.”
This was true. She still reached for her bag. Mollified prince or not, the thought of spending another day under covert scrutiny made her skin crawl. The magic of last night, the warmth of Tristan’s hands, the easy laughter and champagne, it had gone in a blink, leaving her chest feeling hollow. Her body was reacting far too strongly to a potential betrayal by Tristan Ballentine.
Annabelle folded her hands in her lap. “Lucie, I don’t want to pry, but . . .”
“Go on?”
“Is there something that is troubling you? If I may say so, you do seem a little angry lately.”
She chortled. “I’m always angry.”
Annabelle shook her head. “This is different. If you wish to speak about something in confidence, I am here.”
Half an hour ago, she would have appreciated the offer. But if Tristan had scattered the Citizen around Claremont, she was back to despising him, a simple emotion that required no further analysis.
A flurry of knocks hit the door, and Hattie and Catriona tumbled into the room a moment later.
“I told you so,” Hattie said as she flung herself onto the bed. “Did I not tell you so?” And, when everyone looked at her blankly, she raised her hands toward the ceiling. “Whenever the four of us attend an event, there’s a scandal.” She shot Lucie a speaking glance. “And this had absolutely nothing to do with me not controlling my intuition.”
Annabelle looked from Hattie to Lucie to Catriona. “Has she taken leave of her senses?”
“Never mind,” said Catriona, and claimed the last available space on the mattress. “Do we have a suspect? Do we know whether Lucie or Montgomery was the target?”
Hattie nodded. “And we need a plan how we will catch the culprit and keep the awkwardness contained at a reasonable level until our departure.”
Lucie’s heartbeat slowed. The hollowness in her chest filled with warmth, and she surveyed her friends with a lump in her throat. “No culprit yet,” she said. “But we will pretend to be unbothered.”
“We are unbothered,” Annabelle said firmly.
Then she rang the bell to order up a tray with a full breakfast for Lucie and more tea and pastries for everyone.
Tristan arrived in the breakfast room bleary-eyed and in need of coffee, black as tar, please. The ball had petered out shortly after midnight, which was when he had convinced a handful of gentlemen including the duke’s younger brother, Lord Peregrin, that it was necessary to play vingt-et-un in Claremont’s blue smoking room. They had dealt cards and poured drinks until everyone was red-eyed and badly disheveled. He had emerged victorious from a drawn-out battle of card games, but because he had still been clearheaded enough to think obsessive thoughts about a certain woman in red, he had coaxed young Lord Peregrin into raiding Montgomery’s port cabinet. The lad, easily inspired because he was only nineteen, had selected an impressively ancient bottle that was now giving him an equally impressive headache.
It was always the last bottle that did it, he surmised as he surveyed the empty breakfast buffet with a vise clamping down on his skull. He beckoned one of the footmen lining the brocade-papered walls, because it appeared that Montgomery’s spartanic household really did clear the breakfast tables before one o’clock. He asked that the footman bring up a breakfast tray and to come find him outside at the back of the house.
Light glared through the tall glass doors leading to the terrace, right into his pounding brain. He squinted. He should have taken a back exit, away from the crowds. The whole regiment of house party guests was promenading out here and in the French Garden below in their Sunday finery.
He was about to retreat when she found him.
“My lord!”
Cecily was bright-eyed and rosy-cheeked, because she hadn’t been drinking and gambling until past the darkest hour. She was of a mind to take a turn around the French Garden, she told him, the hope that he accompany her written plainly in her eyes, while Lucie’s ever-present mother raked him with a cool glare. Unlike innocent Ceci, Lady Wycliffe was not fooled by his meticulously assembled attire and too-tight cravat knot but saw the brandy and port still sloshing in his innards.
He wanted to tell everyone to bugger off.
What he did was offer Cecily his arm, and her small hand latched on with a surprising grip.
She chattered about something as he descended the steps leading to the French Garden—the weather, presumably.
His attention was consumed by the group of women coming toward them at a leisurely pace, their arms entwined, their merry voices drifting toward him. Lucie and her lady friends.
Lady Catriona, the Greenfield daughter, and the duchess returned his greeting when they passed each other.
Lucie gave him a dark, assessing stare, and he just knew she considered him guilty of something. He nearly stopped right then, to demand what had ruffled her feathers, but an ice wall rose around Lady Wycliffe when the quartet passed them by, and short of abandoning the woman on his arm in full sight of the ton and run after another, there was nothing he could do but move along.
“The duchess is very generous,” Cecily murmured as he led her deeper into the garden. “Though some people say it reveals her own radical inclinations to be so forgiving of such a prank.”
He squinted, evidently still too drunk to follow. “A prank?”
“Haven’t you heard?” Cecily said, her voice hushed. “Apparently, Lady Lucie left some radical suffrage pamphlets around Claremont so that the Prince of Wales could find them.”
His expression didn’t change, but she now had his full attention. “Did she say it was her?”
Cecily gave him a puzzled look. “No. At least I did not hear her confess,” she added quickly.
“Ah well. Then it wasn’t her.”
“How certain you are,” Cecily said, her blue eyes amazed.
“It’s a pointless provocation, which is stupid, and considering the duchess is her friend, it would also be disloyal. Your cousin is neither stupid nor disloyal.”
Cecily’s smile was sugary enough to make a man’s teeth ache. “You know my cousin well.”
“You don’t have to know her well to know this about her.”
“How quick you are to judge a person’s character,” Cecily marveled. “Do you think it is your observant writer’s eye?”
Mother of God, help, he thought as he smiled at Cecily so brilliantly, she tripped over her own feet.
Lucie ambushed him on his way back to the breakfast room. She looked as warm as black ice, and he knew he should have had a coffee first before engaging with that.
“Did you do it?” she demanded.
He was unprepared for the bodily reaction to her accusation. His muscles turned rigid. A warmth that had lingered in his chest since last night dissipated.
“Did I scatter a few pamphlets around a ducal palace?” he said. “To discredit you? When no one with an ounce of brain matter would contemplate such a thing?”
Her gaze was sharp like the point of a dagger, trying to make forays into his very soul. “It is no secret that you are trying to outmaneuver me.”
She did not think he had much of a brain, he remembered. Lazy or a fool, she had called him, or maybe both, and it seemed she had returned to regarding him such.
“I suppose you think our dance last night was also part of a ploy,” he said.
“I don’t know what to think about you anymore.” She stepped closer, bringing with her the clean scent of lemons. Her upturned face was tense with rancor. “Sometimes, I think you do not know whether you would rather seduce or sabotage me.”
He shrugged. “It would amount to the same thing, would it not?”
Her chin jutted out. “I admit, I briefly thought there was more to you.”
He could have handled it like the adult man he was. Instead, he allowed the carrot-haired boy to take the reins. “Why not take my offer and be certain, how much there is to me?” he murmured. “It stands for the summer, remember?”
He didn’t bother to watch her walk away. Her back would be rigid, her skirts snapping, and all things considered, it was better that way. He needed a brief respite from her. He might have set out to seduce her, but dancing with her, flirting with her, revealing pieces of himself to lure her in had evidently begun to affect him, too, laying parts of him he had not realized he still possessed bare to her attacks, and he needed to regroup.