London was never at its best in autumn. Much as Caroline loved the City, she was willing to admit that.
Four weeks had passed since she left Lancashire, narrow weeks of vivid silks cloaking bleak moods. The silks and the moods were equally of her choosing, for she had spent those weeks at the home of her dear friend and cousin Frances and Frances’s husband, Henry. Henry was an artist by training, and he and Frances took students together. Consequently, their cottage was always full of bright paintings, some lovely, some lamentable.
It had been a comforting visit, friendly and familial. Caroline admired the life her old friend had built. But there was nothing so cozy waiting for Caroline herself. The man who had offered her the chance to be needed… well, he needed nothing from her except her money. Since Miss Cartwright would do as well in that regard, he might even be married to her already.
She wished them well. Somewhat.
As Caroline’s carriage rolled up to her narrow Albemarle Street house, she saw no color in the world but gray. The sky dropped cold drizzle, ruffling and spraying behind the wheels as they rolled down muddy streets. Her stuccoed house appeared the dull color of an old bone.
A footman let down the carriage steps for her, then helped her hop down under the cover of an umbrella held by her watchful butler, Pollitt. She could not help but remember the time she rode home with Michael, when she had much, much more to look forward to than a solitary evening in a poorly lit house.
Her heart didn’t seem to beat in time with the City’s tonight. Maybe because she had been gone for so long, or maybe because she’d left her heart behind her.
Such reflections were not helping her mood either.
Under Pollitt’s sheltering umbrella, she bustled up her front steps and inside the house. Once in her entry hall, things seemed a bit more cheerful. Her chandelier—not Venetian glass like Lady Kettleburn’s, but lovely all the same—cast its hot little lights down on her, brightening the tiles of the floor and the plaster and paper on the walls.
She looked around as though she were a purchaser seeing it for the first time. Narrow, stretching steps. Glossy marble and clean white trim. Blue plaster and dentated moldings.
She had arranged this house to her liking, and here she would probably live out her life. Surely there was nothing so melancholy about that. She had been alone before. It was nothing she couldn’t handle.
“I’m for bed, Pollitt,” she sighed.
Tonight she was too tired. She would handle it in the morning.
***
In the morning, Caroline awoke with renewed purpose. There was no need to be lonely just because she had fallen in love with a stubborn man who was a stranger to all feelings but honor and duty.
She covered her face with a pillow, as though she could smother her own feelings. But it only made her recall his presence in her bed. It made her wish to breathe him in, his scent as clean and sharp as desire itself.
Damnable man.
He would be difficult to forget again—more difficult than ever before, because he was twined through her wholly, body and heart and mind. But forget him she would. Eventually. She just needed the right distraction.
She tossed the pillow aside and slid from her bed, then padded across her room and retrieved her heavy red banyan from her wardrobe. She shrugged into it as she crossed to her writing desk.
There, lined up next to her writing paper, was the penknife Michael had used to cut her corset strings.
Caroline shook off this reminder, which brought with it an unwelcome plummet of the stomach. She rang for her maid, ordered a bracing amount of coffee and toast, and set to work.
An hour later, the coffee and toast were gone, and she had scrawled and sealed a tidy pile of notes. She nodded her satisfaction. Now she only needed to get ready for her grand new plan.
***
At two o’clock that afternoon, Caroline Graves, the dowager Countess of Stratton, stood in her drawing room awaiting her callers. She had taken great care with her appearance. Her hair was a neatly coiled mass of honey-gold; her dress was elegant but demure, a Paris-green silk with a high waist, beaded bodice, and long sleeves trimmed with gold lace. With emeralds at her ears and around her throat, she knew she looked regal. Respectable. Ready to conquer.
When she heard a tread on the stair, she lifted her chin and smiled her brightest, most welcoming smile.
In the doorway appeared the fair head of Lady Kettleburn—wife to a much older baron, hostess of that fateful ball at which Michael and Caroline had discovered one another. Gowned in a silk of her favorite pale blue shade, the baroness looked as frosty as the weather. “How do you do, your ladyship?” The stiffness of her greeting was another icicle.
“Come, none of this formality.” Caroline took the younger woman’s hand. “As you’re first to arrive, Lady Kettleburn, you must pick the best chair. I can tell you not to choose that spindly beech chair in the corner. It will positively reshape your spine.”
The baroness permitted herself a small smile, and Caroline pressed her advantage. “I’ve heard that you are fond of a lemon tart, as am I. My cook is rather vain about her abilities with pastry. Won’t you give one a try?”
Today Caroline had taken as much care with the room as with her own appearance. Instead of the customary hothouse blooms from her callers, every surface had been covered instead with eatables—trays of pastries, small sandwiches—all arrayed on her favorite Sheffield plate tea service. There was something very welcoming, she thought, about a groaning platter of food.
By the time Caroline had finished plying her first guest with confections and assuring the young lady she had selected the best chair, Lady Halliwell had arrived.
“Darling!” Caroline called. “You are wearing peach again. How lovely you look.” Lady Halliwell was too round of feature for true beauty, but she was cheerful, which was quite as good. Caroline did not exaggerate the effect on that lady’s appearance; the light color warmed Lady Halliwell’s hair and brought a lovely rose into her cheeks. As this new guest beamed and air-kissed Caroline’s cheek in greeting, Caroline marveled at the ability of a simple compliment to make not only one person happier, but two.
One after another, women arrived, filling the drawing room not with the booted feet and raucous laughter of suitors, but with demure low voices and the costly click of bugled trim on lacquered furniture.
This was Caroline’s grand plan: she would rediscover the joys of friendship. As much as possible, she would surround herself with kind and delightful people. In time, they might assuage her feeling of loss as substitute suitors never could.
For Michael was right; her puppy suitors brought her no real pleasure. Instead, there was a pleasure in being needed within the scope of a drawing room. Keeping conversation flowing, introducing new acquaintances, making sure every lady had her favorite sweet and beverage. If Caroline made sure they had a wonderful time, they would come back. They would invite her to their homes too. And eventually, she might end with friends. Not just friendly acquaintances, but people who truly cared about Caroline herself, as Lady Tallant did.
Well, about Caroline and about her cook’s lemon tarts.
If there was some initial awkwardness between nodding acquaintances as the drawing room filled, cup after cup of sweetened tea and a few amusing anecdotes about the rigors of travel to and from Lancashire helped to honey over any rough spots.
“And then,” Caroline concluded, leaning forward with just the right air of intimacy, “the innkeeper let the coachman into my room, as though we were… well, you know.” She rolled her eyes dramatically, and Augusta Meredith giggled. Even Lady Kettleburn pressed her lips together to smother a laugh.
Jovial Lady Applewood chuckled. “It wouldn’t be such a bad thing if the coachman was good-looking, would it? You being a widow, I mean, rather than an unmarried girl.” Again, she laughed. “Do you all want to hear a story that will really curl your hair?”
The fifteen minutes allotted for a visit of mere courtesy were long past, Caroline noticed. Yet her guests made no move to go, as the marchioness began a bawdy tale about the France of forty years earlier, in which she had slipped away from her mother to explore Paris and found herself, a maiden, alone in the Moulin Rouge.
“I surely would have been ruined,” Lady Applewood continued, her plump bosom jiggling within the velvet casing of her gown. “But for Wyverne, that is.” She pressed a hand to her heart and allowed herself a soft sigh.
Caroline’s own heart flipped. “Wyverne?” Just in time, she remembered to lift her brows in an expression of mild curiosity.
“Oh, yes.” The older woman winked broadly at the room. “Not the present duke, of course, but his father. Such a libertine, he was, and so handsome! Wyverne saved me from ruin that day and brought me safely back to my mother. When we were back in London, though, Wyverne and I met often, and we never quite shook the topic of my ruination.” Her cheeks grew pink under their powder.
Caroline laughed along with the others, but a question pressed at her lips. She was grateful to Miss Meredith for asking it first. “The present duke isn’t much like his father, then?” Under her copper hair, Miss Meredith blushed.
“He’s the fair spit of his father in face and form.” Lady Applewood’s hands fluttered, fanning herself. “My, yes—both such handsome devils. But young Wyverne is much more serious-minded, not nearly the ladies’ man the old duke was.”
“Oh, I don’t know about that.” Lady Kettleburn leaned in as though ready to impart a secret to the whole room. “Wasn’t he hunting himself a wife with your help, Caro?”
All eyes turned to Caroline. Her mouth dried under the sudden scrutiny, but she tossed off a careless laugh. “Yes, that’s right. But it’s hardly improper to search for a wife, is it?”
“Did he marry, then?” The baroness cocked her proud head.
“If he hasn’t yet, he will soon.” Caroline smiled with frozen lips. “An heiress to an industrial fortune who shares his interest in modern improvements. They’ll deal well together, I am sure.”
“He was growing you a special flower, wasn’t he?” Lady Halliwell clasped her plump hands together over her peach-clad bosom, her starry eyes wide.
“That didn’t work out, I’m sorry to say. It couldn’t survive in London.” An apt summation of their entire relationship.
But if Michael could not survive in London, she would. She hid a throb of anguish under a smile, offering a plate around. “More lemon tarts?” Pastry never failed to divert a conversation, and her guests swooped on the sweets.
Just as Caroline settled herself in her chair again, she heard the tread of approaching footsteps on the stairs.
“Expecting someone else, Caro?” Lady Applewood raised her eyebrows. “If that’s Lady Tallant, I shall have to scold her for being late. She shan’t get a lemon tart.”
Caroline’s brow furrowed. “It can’t be Lady Tallant. She’s not yet back in London.”
Darling Emily, to remain at Callows for the rest of the house party, serving as hostess for Michael’s guests. She had sent Caroline a letter to that effect during Caroline’s visit to her cousin Frances, though the letter had been irritatingly short on further details—just a simple “things are progressing as planned,” and a reassurance that Caroline need not worry herself.
And a request for the date of Caroline’s return to London.
Caroline had sent Emily the date and her thanks. And she had worried—but not enough to return to Lancashire.
No, she had been sent packing as surely as Stratton had, though at least she’d been permitted to set the time of her departure herself. When a man told one he was determined to sell himself in marriage, there was no more reason to stay with him, or to hope for anything to be different.
“That sounds like the tread of boots,” said Augusta Meredith. “A man would not intrude on our time together, would he?” Bless the girl, she looked eager.
Caroline realized in a flash who it must be. Stratton. Stratton, who would see a roomful of women to harass. Perhaps he meant to begin some rumor before a crowd.
There was no help for it; she would simply have to murder him.
“If you’ll pardon me,” she said to the room at large. She rose to her feet and sidled toward the fireplace, where she could easily lay her hand on the poker.
Not that she would really kill him. But if she waved a poker at him, he would surely retreat. And then she’d have to smooth things over with her roomful of startled guests.
She would need a lot more lemon tarts for that. Drat.
She waited for the door to open, her hand hovering in readiness over the poker.
Her butler, Pollitt, poked his narrow head into the room. Caroline deflated, sagging against the carved marble of the chimneypiece.
“My lady, a gentleman wishes an audience. I told him you were not at home to male callers, but he was most insistent.”
“Throw him out the window,” Caroline muttered. The ever-tactful butler pretended not to hear her. “Very well, Pollitt. Show him in. Between the lot of us, surely we can dispose of him.” She looked around the room with a we’re-all-in-this-together smile, bracing herself with her guests’ friendly expressions.
A swift drumbeat of boots up the stairs, and the door was flung open again. Stratton, she was ready to say.
But it was not Stratton. It was Michael.
And he looked furious.