When they reached the passage at the back of the canteen, she released his wrist, throwing a pained look over her shoulder as she sped ahead, turning down another corridor. He followed.
They were passing under the side stages. The stage machinery made curious obstacles. He watched her navigate around levers and piles of rope. The air was colder but thicker, more redolent of perfume and also horse manure. A goddess peered from a doorway, waiting for someone, not them. The sound of the orchestra deafened. She reached the stairs and climbed. He took the first few two at a time to close the distance between them. When she swayed backward, he caught her against his chest and propelled her up to the narrow landing. In the alleyway behind the theater, cabmen were waiting for the actresses, smoking pipes. His ears rang.
He steered them a ways down the street, then spun her around so she faced him.
She didn’t want to face him. Her eyes darted everywhere else.
“You told Yardley where to find us.” He moved closer, towering over her. “Why?”
She stood by the streetlight, in that glowing circle. The silk of her dress glowed jewel bright. Her breasts rose and fell rapidly, pushing against the lightweight fabric. He ran his eyes over her, the smooth outline of her natural form.
Slowly, things were clicking into place. She’d dressed to stand out, to draw curious eyes, to him.
“Next time paint the dress on your body.” His mouth curled with derision. “See if that gets you more attention.”
Her lips had parted. She was flushed—not with emotion, with drink.
“Was there ever a Mrs. Nixon at the Albion?” He laughed humorlessly. “I’m twice the fool.”
She stared at the ground, the broken glass glittering by her feet.
“He didn’t see you,” she said. “Those men did, with the mustaches, but they’ve nothing to report. I’m the only one who drank.”
She wrapped her arms tightly around herself and met his eyes. Suddenly, she looked vulnerable. Miserable. He forced a laugh.
“What men? Reporters?” Christ. What kind of trap had she orchestrated? She’d tried to blackmail him. Perhaps she’d tried to blackmail Yardley as well. Told him what she knew about Effie and his own late-night pursuits. Threatened to tip off the Pall Mall Gazette. Yardley was devoted to suppressing gossip, removing the tarnish from the Weston coronet. Had he come to the Albion to protect him from Miss Coover? To keep him from making a very public and irreversible mistake? Drunk and on display with a flagrant wanton. “Answer me.”
Miss Coover said nothing. He could see the dizziness sweep over her.
“You’re stewed.” He took her arm and pulled her out of the light, into the mouth of an alleyway, where they weren’t displayed to passersby.
“A smidgen stewed. But so what?” She tried to break his grip. “You’re not,” she said. “That’s what matters. Although”—she tried to free her arm again, and he dropped it like a hot coal—“I don’t know why I care. You’re determined to sabotage yourself. If not tonight, some other night.”
Even in the shadow, he could see her eyes snapping, the shine of bared teeth.
She drew a shuddering breath, then threw her next words in his face. “I think you’re afraid to inherit.”
They stared at each other. The silence grew brittle.
He spoke softly. “Who said anything about my inheritance?”
How could she know about the codicil? The capstone in the arch of family secrets. He let his gaze bore into her until she licked her lips, looked away.
“I misspoke.” Again, she hugged her midsection, but the gesture was exaggerated, a bad performance. “I’m tired. I don’t feel well. Let me pass. I’m going home.”
“Accuse a man of cowardice, then run away?” He shook his head. “That’s hardly sporting.”
“I forgot, you’re sensitive about your heroism,” she sneered. “Apologies, Your Grace, you’re brave as a lion.”
He barred the alley with his arm, and she gave his biceps a hard push. Not hard enough. She pushed harder.
“Welcome to the lion’s den.” His smile was unpleasant. “Push me again, and we’ll stay here all night.”
It wouldn’t be his first night spent in an alleyway.
She abandoned her efforts and regarded him warily.
“Yardley put you up to this.” He said it slowly. “He told you about the will. He wanted to catch me out, and you let him buy your help.”
He pressed his fist into the brick. The double betrayal maddened him. He wanted to stamp and snort, like a horse beset by bees.
He was as weak-minded as everyone believed.
“Blame him, blame me.” She shrugged, her indifference damning. “Anyone but yourself.”
Her hair was half-down, the twist she’d anchored with pins in the process of untwisting.
“You lied to me; he didn’t,” she said. “You said you’d talk to Mabeldon. He said you wouldn’t. Tell me who I should put my trust in.”
“Spare me your justifications,” he muttered. He pounded his fist into the bricks, once, twice, three times, mind reeling. All Yardley’s encouragement, all his prattle about self-control and the House of Lords—worthless. He expected Anthony to fail. Wanted him to fail.
“I don’t have to justify myself.” She was pallid but she didn’t flinch. How had she come by this equanimity? It was dark. It was late. An infuriated male was smashing the wall of the alley in which he’d penned her. But somehow, she persisted. In other circumstances, he’d be the first to admire her mettle.
Overheated, he snatched the cap from his head and stuffed it in a pocket, rocking on his heels. His jaw felt like flint.
“I acted in my best interests, in my aunt’s best interests, in the best interests of my neighbors,” she said firmly. “What would you have me do? Risk the roof over my head to protect your vanity?”
“More than my vanity is at stake.”
“Because you won’t follow your father’s rules.” She shrugged. “You said you’re not a drunkard. Don’t drink.”
“I didn’t drink,” he grated out. He’d pushed away his gin because of the look in her eyes.
“I don’t mean tonight.” She stood straighter. No, he would not be touched by that either, her small, upraised chin, her stiffened spine. “Tonight . . . I was surprised.”
“Surprised? How gratifying.” He smiled. “And here I thought you saw me as an open book. You seem an expert on my shortcomings. Cowardice, vanity. There are others in addition, I know. I’ll defer to you. Gluttony, of course, but it turns out I can allow at least one glass of gin to slip through my fingers.”
“If you can, why don’t you?”
His laughter echoed blackly between the bricks. “It’s not so simple. Why should I follow my father’s rules? He didn’t amend his will because I broke a bloody window. He wanted to break me. Do you understand?”
She didn’t, of course. How could she? But Yardley understood it all, perfectly. Pain twisted in his chest, and he jammed the heel of his hand inside his coat. Miss Coover’s eyes had widened. He could see the glassy whites through the gloom.
“My mother drank,” he said, his voice emerging as a rasp. “She was unfaithful. My father packed her off to the asylum. The doctors said it was nymphomania. I didn’t know the diagnosis, I didn’t know the word, until I heard it in the schoolyard.”
Bloody days. But he’d given as good as he’d got. With George’s help.
“I look like her. I have her face, her weak mind, weak character. That’s what he thought, what he said. Christ, I couldn’t wait to get away from him.”
From George, too. God forgive him.
“The army wasn’t what I imagined. War wasn’t a spectacle, was nothing like Waterloo played on the stage at Astley’s.” There was an understatement. Again, his black laughter echoed, and he had to breathe slowly through his nose before he could go on. “But for the first time, I lived my own life. Mine.”
The ghost of an expression flitted across her face, something akin to tenderness. Then she gave a slight shake of her head.
“I know about the court-martial.” She whispered it, but even so the words cut like a knife. He edged closer, until he could make out the cluster of freckles on her cheek, the Pleiades. How distant he felt from that giddy moment of discovery—the field glasses revealing an asterism of dark gold flecks.
“He told you that too.” He heard himself say it, the deadly calm astonishing him. “And what did he say?”
She was too quick, too perceptive, to mistake his purring tone for velvet. Beneath, it was all claw. She licked her lips, pausing before she formed her words.
“You behaved . . . dishonorably.”
“How?”
She spoke slowly, watching his face. “Conspicuous inebriation.”
“Yardley said I was drunk?” His throat constricted. You don’t have to explain. He had thought Yardley assumed the best of him, not the worst of him. “I was charged with theft and desertion. Theft of the officers’ rum rations, of course. Are you satisfied?”
“You told me you didn’t drink before . . .”
“Before my brother died? I didn’t.”
She fit her knuckle between her teeth and bit down. She wasn’t satisfied. She wanted to believe him. The realization shook him queerly. He took another deep breath through his nose, thinking of those scorching, dust-choked days, the things he’d seen and couldn’t forget, though he’d never put them into words.
“You were at the Battle of Maiwand,” she ventured. “I believe . . . it was a defeat?”
A defeat.
“My God,” he said. “It was a rout.”
In the moment, it had seemed an apocalypse. The end of the world. Would he really talk about this now, speak of that horror for the first time, to her, in a reeking alley? He struggled to find his way. How to begin?
“It was . . . senseless. Dust, blood, smoke, ceaseless flashes of light. Squadrons broke in all directions. By the time the general sounded the retire, we had no formation. Men were trampled by camels, fell onto their own bayonets. Some had made it as far as the village gardens and died fighting or huddled against the wall.”
“Where were you?” She barely breathed it.
“The gardens,” he said. “You talked of flayed men cast for anatomical study. That day I saw bodies peeled apart, ligaments and bones laid bare.”
He stopped short. Began again.
“We made our way back to Kandahar, fifty miles, harassed by the Afghan cavalry, no food or forage. The wounded rode on the guns or in wagons, on camels, donkeys. A few of us had horses. We came to a spring on the main road, but it was dry. The infantrymen broke into the mess supplies and drank what they could, the medicine, the officers’ stores of liquor.”
He read the question in her eyes.
“If I’d walked those twenty miles to that dry spring, with the prospect of thirty more to go, I might have done it too. They were mad with thirst. I wasn’t.”
He hadn’t taken a sip from the plundered bottles.
“The general ordered us to leave the ones too drunk to walk in the road. They’d have been butchered.”
She gave a little nod. “You tried to wake them.”
“I roused who I could. We’d hardly started after the column when we came under fire. Mizoa, my horse, was shot out from beneath me.”
He exhaled. She was gnawing her knuckle again, eyes haunted.
“I hit my head, lost consciousness. One of those infantrymen dragged me behind the rocks, stayed with me while the rest scattered. When the two of us reached Kandahar at last, we were arrested.”
“But you were innocent of the charges!” She uttered it with warmth. “That infantryman could have told them.”
How peculiar: now she was his champion. He shook his head.
“Humphreys wasn’t in any to position to speak.” In addition to sharing the charges, he was nearly dead when they reached the garrison, hallucinating from dehydration. “But regardless, if I was innocent of theft, drunkenness, and desertion, my only defense was insubordination. I disobeyed direct orders to help those men.”
“It’s not the same.” She’d pushed out her lower jaw. “You obeyed the dictates of your conscience. That’s a higher order. If conscience goes unheeded, we’re lost. Sometimes humanity demands insubordination.”
Her stubbornness had the power to charm when deployed on his behalf.
“I’d like to hear you say that to a military judge,” he said dryly.
“He wouldn’t like it when I was through with him.”
“I don’t doubt it.” He laughed, scrubbing a hand across his forehead. He could picture it.
In the end, the judges had barely entertained the case against him. Nothing to do with conscience. Everything to do with his father.
“In any event, I was acquitted. With honor.” Perversely, the acquittal was the beginning of the nightmare.
She was staring, face shadowed, jaw tensed, brows two sable slashes, marking her forehead with a frown. She took a breath, as though to respond, then gave herself a little shake. Her last hairpin had loosened and a mass of curls fell across her shoulders. She shoved it back, peering past him at the street, almost empty.
“What time is it?”
He told her, slipping the watch back into his pocket.
She groaned. “I’ll be ruined for tomorrow.”
“Shall we, then?” He extended his arm. She looked at it until he sighed and took her elbow.
“You don’t hold me in high esteem, I know, but you’re mad if you think I’ll allow you to walk these streets alone at this hour.”
“I walk where and when I please,” she muttered, but she didn’t resist, her weight warming his side.
When they turned off Charlotte Road and stopped in front of the dress shop, she slipped free, leaning her back against the door.
“Run,” she advised, closing her eyes. “If Aunt Marian wakes up and sees you, you’ll wish you were at Maiwand.”
But retreat wasn’t an option. He waited, and Miss Coover spoke again. “I didn’t sleep much last night, or the night before.” She laughed. “Or the night before.”
She sighed and opened her eyes. “You’re still here,” she observed. “Well, I’m going in. As soon as I dislodge this rock from my shoe.”
He glanced down. She was rubbing one muddy slipper on the other. When he glanced up, her eyes were closed again. “Dislodge it inside,” he suggested, and swept her into his arms.
Her room was at the top of a narrow back staircase. As he maneuvered through the doorway, her elbow connected with his solar plexus and he grunted.
“Put me down,” she said. He obliged her, so rapidly she clung to him to keep her balance. Her weight depending from his lapels brought his neck down. He touched the top of her head lightly with his lips, feeling the roughened silk of her curls. Did she feel it, his mouth on her hair, his breath against her scalp?
She held still a moment longer, then turned away from him and lit the lamp. Light flared up along the steeply sloped ceiling. He crossed his arms, afraid to move for the clutter. Canvases leaned facedown against the walls, in stacks of threes and fours, reducing the square of usable space. The crude shelves nailed to the walls displayed a collection of bottles filled with brilliant powders. A little table beside the easel held glasses of murky water. The floor was covered with cloth spattered with all the colors of the rainbow. The bed, small, plain, shoved along the wall, seemed an afterthought.
Sighing, she took off her shoes. She dropped them on a paint-spattered cloth, and it squeaked. The cloth rippled.
She rolled her eyes.
“Mr. Malkin was once the fiercest mouser in Britain. He’s hung up his sword, sadly.”
“That was a mouse?”
“Of course it was a mouse.” Her voice sharpened. “We don’t have rats.”
“Do you make them walk the plank?” he asked. She stared at him; then she followed his gaze to the board propped against the back of a wooden chair and laughed.
“No, that board has a different purpose. I’ll show you.” She made to climb up onto the chair but her tight dress, and imperfect balance, prevented her.
“You do it,” she said. “Slide back the cover.”
Perplexed, he took the narrow board. He didn’t need to climb onto the chair. He raised the board to the ceiling.
“There aren’t any windows up here,” she said. “So I made a skylight. Well, it’s almost a skylight. It’s a hole really, with a pad of oil cloth to cover it when I’m not painting.”
He pushed up and over, sliding back the heavy cloth. The night air sank down through the opening in the roof, a stroke of cold, silvering the room, bewitching it.
“Oh,” she said, her breath catching. “You can see the moon.”
He looked. The moon filled the visible square of night sky. Shut up in an attic, Miss Coover had sawed her way to the sky. She was more than extraordinary. She was marvelous, miraculous.
The moon was directly overhead, high and bright, nearly full. He set down the board with a tap that seemed loud in the sudden hush.
He was in her bedroom, in the night. She hadn’t precisely invited him in. He should go.
Good night. Good-bye.
There were words adequate to the task of leaving. Humans had developed ritualized language to protect individuals from the specificity of their desires. Humdrum phrases.
He cleared his throat, and she looked at him. He saw the quicksilver beauty of her face, the transformation wrought by wonder at something as simple as the moon. Her face was tilted up, hair loose around her shoulders, the jewel-bright silk of her dress muted in the moonlight and the low light of the lamp, a deeper color, closer to claret. His arms could easily span the distance between them. It would be far more difficult to walk the two steps back to the door.
How the tables had turned. It seemed he was now a danger to her.