Chapter 30
The next afternoon when he arrived in his lodgings in Logic Lane, he had a letter from General Foster on his desk—it would be his pleasure to accommodate Tristan and his mother in Delhi until Tristan had set up a household of his own. The confirmation elicited no sense of relief, for at this point, he resented the idea of leaving Britain almost bodily. He still instructed Avi to purchase three tickets for a ship leaving Southampton in three weeks. It would give him enough time to settle his financial and administrative affairs and to oversee the production process at London Print. To lengthen his workdays as required, he decided to spend a few nights a week in the director’s apartment on the publishing house’s top floor. He resented that, too, for it would mean spending nights away from Lucie. He had, of course, not told her a thing this morning. Her eyes had been filled with an emotion that he, very selfishly, had not wanted to destroy. He would find a solution first; if he had to confess, he would not do so without being able to offer a solution along with the confession, whether she still wanted him or not.
Could he entice her to stay in the offices in London with him? Hardly. He wanted to bed her on silk, not another battered settee. Besides, she would balk at being taken away from her duties in Oxford. Only during their parting this morning, she had told him not to come see her tonight, as her work was weighing upon her.
He sorted through his remaining pile of mail. Another kindly threatening note by Blackstone, from the looks of it. He binned it unopened.
A cable from the editor of the Manchester Guardian. He set it aside on the important pile.
An envelope without a sender’s address, the handwriting distinctly female, nearly followed Blackstone’s letter. It wouldn’t be the first time a woman had ferreted out his current address and sent an unsolicited love letter . . . and then he did a double take. Cold foreboding trickled down his nape. It was the hand of his mother’s lady’s maid. Familiar from occasional correspondence when his mother had been too listless to write herself. He ripped the envelope open.
Milord,
I write to inform you that my lady, the countess of Rochester, has disappeared from Ashdown last night, and there is no certainty of her whereabouts. There had been talk she might not be safe at Ashdown among some of the staff. I believe she would have wanted your lordship to be informed; your return had reawakened some of her strength. I hope this missive reaches you, as I have reason to believe that I am being watched. . . .
The letter was dated three days ago. It meant his mother had been missing for four.
“Avi,” he said. His voice was ice. “Get ready. We are going to Ashdown.”
Jarvis, his father’s valet—spy—bodyguard stood in front of the door to Rochester’s study, feet apart.
“You can stand aside now, or die,” Tristan said pleasantly.
Jarvis leapt out of the way as though he had found himself barefoot on hot coals, and Tristan strode into the office unobstructed. “Where is she?”
Rochester was behind his desk, assessing his crouching stance with narrowed eyes. “Tristan. How timely. I was about to send for you.”
“Strangely, a change in rules is not what I had expected from you.”
Rochester was observing his approach warily. “I told you I was watching you. And what I saw was the usual lack of cooperation—”
Tristan had walked straight around the desk and gone toe-to-toe.
“You gave me three months,” he said, thrusting his face close to Rochester’s cold visage. “They are not up.”
“There was no need since—”
“Where is the countess?”
“Sign this. And she shall be back.”
Rochester never broke eye contact, but his fingers were tapping one of the documents laid out on his desk. Tristan glanced at them, barely deciphering the script through the red haze before his eyes, but it was enough to understand that it was a marriage contract. Already signed and sealed by the honorable Earl of Wycliffe.
He stepped back and pulled the blade from his cane so fast, a high-pitched ringing sound filled the air.
Rochester stood still as stone, his eyes flitting from the sharp steel vibrating near his cheek to Tristan’s face. “You would not dare,” he said, his lips barely moving.
“Dare what,” Tristan said. “Slicing up Harry’s old carpet? But I think I do.” And the tip of the sword dug into Rochester’s beloved royal tapestry, right into the heart of the tree.
“No!” Rochester made a grab for the blade, before thinking better of it and going for Tristan’s throat.
Tristan was faster.
His father’s fingers were digging into his arm, trying to dislodge the fist twisting his cravat.
“Where is she?” Tristan demanded.
“This is undignified,” Rochester growled as he grappled.
Tristan gave a shake. “Where is she?”
“I don’t know.”
A flick of his right wrist, and century-old silk threads parted like butter.
“I don’t know where she is,” shouted Rochester, his handsome features distorted with fury.
Damnation.
Bright hot anger was pulsing through Tristan, but his intuition was rarely wrong—his father was speaking the truth. His mother was gone, but not the way Rochester had planned.
Which meant the bastard had just tried to get him to sign his life away by bluffing. Which meant he was worried that his leverage over Tristan had significantly dwindled.
He released his father’s cravat. He did not lower the blade.
“What does her lady’s maid say, or is she gone, too?”
Rochester touched the tip of his tongue to the corner of his mouth. The look in his eyes was murderous. Tristan had to look more murderous, for Rochester to stay put and compliant like this.
“The wench had run off,” Rochester said. “We found her, but she claims she knows nothing, so we let her go.”
“And put her under surveillance.”
“Of course,” Rochester snapped.
Tristan made a mental note to seek out the woman, to see whether she had been harmed, and whether she did know something. She had tried to speak to him during his last visit, after all. Bloody Jarvis has deterred her, and he had let it happen.
The earl peered at the foot-long gash that Tristan had inflicted on the tapestry. “I shall cut your allowance to nothing for this.”
Tristan shook his head. “I have never seen you act as concerned toward a human being as you are acting toward this piece of cloth.”
Rochester’s upper lip curled with contempt. “People die,” he said. “Ideas and traditions and glory survive—long after your flesh has rotted into the ground.”
Tristan nodded. Spoken like a tyrant, then. True to their ancestors eternalized on the tapestry, who had gained and defended their titles and estates by cleverly using their underlings as cannon fodder in this war or that. Considering the same blood rolled in his veins, he could probably be a lot worse than he was: an outright monster in addition to being a careless libertine. Except that . . . he was not.
He was not.
He stared at the family tree, the swirling names of all those who had come before him, and knew in his bones that he would save a beggar in rags before he worried about saving a material thing. There was a rightness to the realization, an instinctive quality like that of drawing breath. He gave a bemused shake. Here in this study, before the now maimed tapestry, Rochester had tried to beat this instinct out of him, year after year. Had killed a kitten or two in between, too. He beat you out of shape, not into it.
He sheathed the blade. He gave Rochester a pointed look. He strode from the room without a backward glance. Was his disposition twisted in places? Undoubtedly. But Rochester had not succeeded to upend his foundation. He had not succeeded at all. And the most remarkable thing was that it had taken him so long to see it.
As he climbed aboard the carriage awaiting his return at the back entrance, it occurred to him that his mother had perhaps planned her flight all along. In hindsight, her parting words during his last visit sounded suspiciously like parting words for good.
Now he just had to find her before Rochester did. Annoyingly, the one possible clue he had thus far required him to call on two ladies he would have gladly never called upon again. Back in Oxford, he stopped by at the Randolph Hotel and left a card addressed to Lady Wycliffe with an invitation to an outing.
He returned to Logic Lane to answer a few important letters and to write a couple of his own, then he made his way to Lucie’s house against her orders, for he needed her tonight.
She didn’t open the kitchen door. But she had to be home; he had seen the flicker of light behind the curtains of her drawing room from the garden. When she did not react to knocks on the drawing room window, he took the liberty of picking the kitchen door lock and let himself in.
“Lucie,” he said softly into the silence. Her housekeeper was probably home, asleep upstairs. It was careless of him to be here. Lucie would be spitting mad. It would be worth it, he supposed.
He halted two steps into the drawing room.
She was curled up on her side before the fireplace, asleep on a pile of letters.
Behind her, the logs on the grate had collapsed into a softly crackling heap of embers, the glow delineating her curled-up form with a fiery edge.
His men would sleep like this, after battle, not caring where they lay.
Boudicca was sitting on her skirt, her yellow eyes fixing upon him in a quiet warning when he approached. The little black fury was guarding her mistress better than he could have hoped.
“Good girl,” he murmured.
Her tail twitched, but she did not sink her claws into him when he lowered himself to his knees next to the slumbering Lucie.
She slept as she lived: entangled in her work. One hand lay palm up next to her cheek; the other was trapped beneath a still-open book, a big legalistic-looking tome that would send him snoring in minutes.
He felt a pang of tenderness, but also, guilt crawled uncomfortably down his neck. Pure exhaustion must have claimed her. He made demands on her most every night, and she never refused him, for her newly found ability to reach the highest heights with him made them both greedy. Then she worked relentlessly during the day. Because she was afraid she would be cold in her grave before she and her fellow women were free.
He carefully lifted the book from her hand. Lucie didn’t stir. Her forehead was smooth as a babe’s in her sleep, her mouth relaxed into a rare softness.
His fingers lightly traced between her brows. He had to tell her about India. God, but he did, he should wake her and tell her now. He supposed he could ask her whether she wanted to travel with him. He certainly wanted her to, he realized, very much so. Embarking on a journey, any journey, with a woman like her by his side would make the difference between a chore and an adventure. He froze, there on his knees, mindless for a moment. Had he just acknowledged that there was joy to be had from shackling himself to a woman?
Not a woman.
Lucie.
The one who had dedicated her life to fighting the marriage laws of England.
“Well, then.”
His arms slid beneath her knees and shoulders, and he lifted her up against his chest.
The stairs leading up to her bedchamber creaked under their combined weight.
The moon threw a rectangle of pale light across her chamber floor. Her bed was narrow, just wide enough to accommodate a lone woman.
She burrowed into him when he tried to deposit her under the coverlet.
“I told you not to come,” she murmured, drunk with sleep.
He kneeled down next to the bed and leaned his forehead against hers. “I know. I did not listen. I shall leave.”
Her hand searched and slipped beneath his coat, and he stilled.
“Stay,” she said.
“Your housekeeper is in residence, my greedy one.”
Her fingers became a fist in his shirt. “Stay,” she slurred. “In here. Shall send . . . her away tomorrow.”
“Right,” he said. The floorboards were already uncomfortably hard against his knee.
He took her hand, now limp against his chest, and tucked it under the blanket.
He unlaced his shoes, took off his cravat, and stretched out on the rug before her bed.
Lucie rustled, making discomfited sounds.
“Tell me something,” she murmured. “I like your voice.”
He stared into the dark, fleetingly wondering whether there would be a way back to his life as an infamous seducer from this. But already, melodies were flooding his mind. . . .
“How do you feel about Yeats?”
“Hmm.”
He took this as a yes.
When you are old and grey and full of sleep,
And nodding by the fire, take down this book,
And slowly read, and dream of the soft look
Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep;
How many loved your moments of glad grace,
And loved your beauty with love false or true,
But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you . . .
A snoring sound came from the bed above.
He lay still. “Philistine,” he then muttered. Hell shall freeze over before there is a way back from any of this, whispered a mocking voice in his head.
Spending the nights together in her home rather than Adelaide Street meant they could work together in the drawing room between breakfast and noon as long as she had sent Mrs. Heath away on a long errand in the next town. It was perfectly sensible to do so, since they would have to consult one another on major editorial decisions. And yet. Lucie kept stealing wary glances at Tristan. He lounged in her wing chair and made notes in the small notebook he always carried in his breast pocket while Boudicca irreverently climbed all over his person.
It was vaguely alarming, how lovely it was to work on her task list with him present in her space. She felt highly defensive of this room of her own, her sanctuary, and yet a comfortable domesticity had settled over them here, which felt entirely natural. Quite as though they had done this before and should be doing it again.
“I’m thinking about introducing a column where I explain how various unjust policies may affect the details of women’s daily life,” she said. “In simple words for the layperson, of course, and I have to find a way of making it sound pleasant, I suppose. What do you think?”
Tristan looked up, taking in the picture of her kneeling at the center of a circle of open Discerning Ladies’ Magazine galleys with her yellow skirts carelessly bunched behind her.
He rose and meandered over, then kneeled next to her.
“A splendid idea at first glance,” he said.
“I am also wondering whether I should remove a few of these advertisements.”
She paused, half distracted by his fingers caressing the small of her back through the fine cotton of her morning dress. She had gone from a lifetime of never being touched by another to being kissed or petted in abundance when he was near, and the wondrousness of it was not wearing off.
She cleared her throat. “Look.” She pointed at an open galley, where a written advertisement filled half a page. “For reducing and shaping the waist to pleasing proportions—has your middle thickened beyond pleasing plumpness? Have tapeworm cures left you with an unbecoming pallor? If you wish to please your husband, send a telegram to Dr. James Mountebank today to order your first sample of highly effective chemical Reduction Pills. I do not like the idea of women ingesting worms, but I do not like the sound of these pills, either.”
“It is probably just snake oil,” Tristan said. “Some herbs and flour and glue.”
She leaned into his side, and he absently snuck his arm around her waist.
“What about this one.” He nodded at another page showing the portrait of a smiling matron with a big bow tied beneath her chin. “I am 50 today, but thanks to Pear’s soap my complexion is only 17,” the confident red letters claimed across her bosom.
“A bold-faced lie,” Lucie admitted; “she does not look seventeen.”
“Because she is near thrice that age, so it is her good right.”
She turned her face into his neck, shamelessly indulging in his scent. “It appears the previous editors thought not everyone would be as partial to women of a certain age as you are.”
He brushed a kiss across her forehead. “Allow me to hand you these weapons behind the back of the brotherhood: if only women knew the minds of boys trapped at Eton and men trapped in Her Majesty’s army, they should never squander a thought on tapeworms in order to delight an admirer again.”
“This simple, is it.”
“It is. Most men will be glad just to win the favour of a willing woman.”
“We should have you write the column on successful husband hunting.”
“You are brimful of fantastic ideas this morning,” he said, and kissed her mouth. A touching of tongues, and the contact became voluptuous and needy. Too needy. He had created a monster.
She drew back, breathing hard. “I had another grand idea. The St. Giles Fair begins on Monday.”
“Yes?” Perhaps it was her imagination, but the glow in his eyes appeared to have dimmed.
“I thought, perhaps we could have another outing.”
“To the fair . . . together?” There was an affected lightness in his tone, and she felt heavy with disappointment. He was not keen on the idea of going to the fair together.
He took her hand. “To hell with the absolute discretion about which you were so adamant, then?”
No, of course not. But in the milling crowds of the fair, their proximity could have appeared accidental. Or perhaps she had been telling herself so against better judgment. Her daydreams had been precarious for a while, revolving around outings with Tristan, on horseback, or in a closed carriage, headed to unknown destinations. She’d had warm visions of them smiling at each other over a sun-dappled breakfast table at a quaint seaside hotel, away from paperwork and paragraphs. Most unsettling were her fantasies of him sprawled in a wing chair, absorbed in his writing, his fingers absently scratching behind Boudicca’s ears. . . .
She sighed ruefully. “You are right. It was just an idea.”
His smile was vague. “It was a good idea,” he said, and pressed a kiss into her palm. “We must go. Some other time.”