Lucy was sobbing facedown on her bed when she heard a creak on the stairs.
“You can’t help, Mr. Malkin!” she muttered. “You loved him too, you jingle-brain.”
“Loved who?” Aunt Marian’s voice was reedy with exertion.
“Oh!” Lucy sat bolt upright. “You shouldn’t have! Your poor knees.”
“My knees aren’t so bad as you’d like to make out.” Aunt Marian’s slow, painful progress across the room told a different story. But Stirling women admitted no weakness.
Lucy was a miserable example of the breed.
“I make no plans to punt on the Thames, but I can climb a flight of stairs.” Aunt Marian set a loaded tray on the side table. “Have the Holroyds ruined you for my pea soup with their veal roast and fruit pies?”
Dear God. What time was it? The hours had run together.
“Of course not,” murmured Lucy. She’d told her aunt she might stay at Kate’s after the salon, as she sometimes did when an opening or lecture ended late. Usually, though, she arrived home the next day filled with stories.
Today she’d raced upstairs with barely a word—well before afternoon lessons concluded—and hadn’t come down for dinner. No wonder Aunt Marian was giving her that quizzical look.
“I was busy painting is all.” She smiled. “I lost track of time.”
Aunt Marian glanced at her empty easel. Lucy had been doing the bulk of her painting in the glasshouse for weeks. She’d described the gorgeous makeshift studio to her aunt faithfully, with only one crucial deviation from truth.
She’d placed it in the corner of the Holroyds’ garden.
Her tiny lies and omissions were catching up to her.
All at once, her smile wobbled. Aunt Marian’s expression shaded into concern and she lowered herself gingerly onto the bed. Her weight, unlike Anthony’s, barely shifted the mattress.
“I wasn’t painting.” Lucy flung herself onto her aunt’s lap as a new storm of weeping overtook her. She used to cry often into her aunt’s scratchy apron as an awkward, half-grown girl mourning the loss of her parents, and later, as an intense, overly impassioned young woman, licking smaller wounds, rejections, disappointments. It had been years since she’d done so.
Now, as then, she felt a light pressure: fingers moving slowly through her hair. Aunt Marian had always had the way of it, stroking without catching on tangles. Lucy curled into her. She could feel a thimble dig into her cheek through an apron pocket.
“I was sniveling, crying my eyes out over a man. I’ve let you down.”
“Nonsense,” said Aunt Marian firmly, pressing her palm to Lucy’s forehead. “You haven’t let me down. You’re my pride and joy.”
Lucy choked on a sob. Her aunt had done everything she could to further her education. “I’m supposed to be beyond all this.” Winning medals. Showing in galleries. Those were the pursuits and accomplishments that rated. “But I went and fell in love regardless.”
“Did you?” Aunt Marian’s voice was mild and her fingers worked again at Lucy’s hair, picking apart knots without snapping a strand.
“You want me to follow a path different than my mother’s,” Lucy whispered. “I’m making the same mistake she did.”
“You’re rusting my thimble is what you’re doing,” said Aunt Marian. “Here. Take this.”
She shifted, and Lucy lifted her hot, wet face, sitting up and accepting a handkerchief. She twisted it so hard her knuckles ached.
“Now, what’s this about your mother?” Aunt Marian adjusted her spectacles.
Lucy squirmed under her aunt’s gaze, afraid to continue but unable to stop herself.
“If she hadn’t fallen in love with my father, she’d still be alive,” she said.
There, that was the crux of it. It hurt to utter the words aloud.
“Perhaps.” Aunt Marian tilted her head. “And you wouldn’t be. Your mother wanted children. She didn’t regret having you, not for a minute.”
Despite her best effort, Lucy’s lips trembled. Her aunt sighed.
“She loved your father, but it wasn’t love of him that killed her. It was a host of things, chance included. Women’s lives are never easy. In love, out of love, married, unmarried—there’s no formula that guarantees happiness.”
She cleared her throat. “I don’t oppose love on principle. But it’s rarely principled in practice, by men, at any rate. You’ve a great talent to pursue. I want you to trust in that first.”
Lucy lowered her eyes. Talent, intelligence, will—they sprang from, were embedded in, the body. And her body was different now. What would that mean for her?
“Do you know . . .” Aunt Marian spoke with crisp casualness. “I was in love once.”
Lucy’s eyes flew up. “What? You weren’t!”
Aunt Marian raised a thin brow. “Hadn’t love been invented yet? It’s true, I’m a dizzy age.”
“It’s not your age,” protested Lucy. “It’s your nature. You’re so . . .” Words bounced around inside her head. “Impervious.”
“Hmm. Is that my nature?” She seemed to mull it over. “Well then, he found the chink in my armor. He was absolutely dashing. I was a fool for him.”
Aunt Marian spoony over a dashing young man! Impossible. Lucy could only stare. Aunt Marian pursed her lips.
“And then,” she continued, “I discovered he was using me to make another woman jealous. An actress.”
“He was an actor?” breathed Lucy, trying to picture the man who could have turned Marian’s head.
“No, an earl.” Aunt Marian smiled wryly. “Which means I might have known better. And so might she have. But I was besotted, and Celestia was an egoist.”
“Celestia Jordan?” Lucy heard fabric tear. Dear Lord, she’d ripped the handkerchief. But truly, Aunt Marian vying for a nob with Celestia Jordan? It boggled the mind.
Aunt Marian laughed at Lucy’s shock.
“He was bankrupt to boot, engaged to a Welsh heiress. When Dodie Thistleship learned of our connection, she threatened to tell the heiress. It was a proper mess.”
Lucy bounced on the bed, sputtering her indignation.
“Blackmail! That’s how Dodie Thistleship came to take the credit for your designs? You were protecting a dashing earl?”
“His creditors were vicious.” She lifted one shoulder in a stiff shrug. “I feared for his life. Of course, the fiancée broke the engagement anyway.”
“Over you?”
“Over Celestia.” Aunt Marian resettled a pin in her hair. “If she were robbing the crown jewels, she’d still have demanded a spotlight.”
Remarkable. Lucy blinked. “And was the earl slain for his debts?”
“He married an American whose father owned a railroad. Your soup is getting cold.”
Lucy took the bowl. The soup was tepid but rich. Heavenly. It felt as though a decade had passed since her last meal. She slurped greedily. Aunt Marian watched her with satisfaction.
“Sniveling, but not starving yourself,” she observed, standing creakily. “I predict a full recovery.”
Lucy put the bowl on the tray and clasped her hands.
“I’m in love with a duke,” she confessed. Aunt Marian froze. The lamplight turned her spectacles into two shining discs. Divine judgment. Lucy looked up at her.
“And is he in love with you?” came the voice on high.
She refused to entertain the question. What did it matter?
“There’s nothing between us,” she muttered.
“Good,” retorted Aunt Marian, moving her head so that her eyes showed again through her lenses, dark and penetrating. “Heartache now means a world of troubles avoided down the road. A duke!” She folded her arms. “And I thought the worst I had to fear was that you’d taken a fancy to that goon of an architect, the handsome Mr. Turner who fell on his head.”
Frowning, she turned and made her way slowly to the door.
Lucy flopped back on the bed, put her pillow over her face, and punched it slowly, over and over again.
Dressed all in black, the professor of perspective was delivering a cheerless lecture on the history of techniques for drawing cubes and circular shapes. Assistants stood beside him holding three-foot diagrams. Lucy sat far back from the raised platform. After two days of missed lessons, she had chosen to make her reappearance at the lecture, hoping to blend with the crowd. But as the lecture stumbled along, the professor shuffling notes and mumbling to his assistants, she felt a tap on her shoulder.
“How do you know the Duke of Weston?” Maude whispered, leaning forward from the bench behind. Jealousy was stamped on her face. Lucy might have laughed if the situation wasn’t so unfortunate.
“I give him art lessons,” she whispered back. Maude’s eyes flashed disbelief.
“At midnight?”
The audience began to clap. Lucy untwisted in time to see an assistant displaying a particularly striking illustration of a reflection in a polished globe. She brought her hands together automatically, clapping as the applause faded. From the row ahead, Constance Pitcairn turned at the sound, caught her eye, and blushed scarlet.
Staggered, Lucy stared at the sketchbook on her knee.
Her worst fears, confirmed.
The story was on everyone’s lips. The Duke of Weston had plucked her from the tableau vivant and whisked her down the hall. To his bedchamber.
Gossip, she told herself. Who could vouch for what happened between whom at a party such as that?
Rumors, though, had propulsive force and gathered strength as they traveled. What if Miss Yardley caught wind that Anthony had a lover and rejected his suit? He wouldn’t inherit, would have no means to acquire the lease on the buildings. She’d have lost him, and gained a scandalous reputation, for nothing. She and Aunt Marian would seek housing in a jerry-built suburb, find something they could afford if they were lucky. If not, they’d look further afield. She might end up in Scotland after all.
Even the professor’s soporific consideration of the rendering of the architectural orders couldn’t settle her pitching mind. Unique among the lecture-goers, she remained for the duration on the edge of her seat.
She stood as soon as it ended, prepared to dash for the door, but Maude was up too, waving to get her attention.
“Where’s Kate?” Maude demanded. She was wearing a blue satin dress with ribbon bows on the shoulders and a skirt foaming with lace flounces. Given the lecture, Lucy couldn’t help but note her elaborate coiffure’s architectural aspect. She looked every inch an impatient debutante. Nothing like a sixteenth-century Huguenot’s imploring lady.
“What do you want with her?” She sighed. It was generally considered rude—answering a question with a question. Lucy gave a close-lipped smile in case there was any doubt.
“We want to sign the petition!” Lucy’s gaze shifted as Susan popped up out of nowhere and stood hovering at Maude’s elbow. There was no censure in her eyes. More a species of awe. Perhaps she now uttered Lucy and dildo in the same titillated undertone.
Lucy rubbed her temples. “Wonderful news.”
“Is it the one Gwen signed?” asked Maude suspiciously.
“It’s the petition for the life class.” Lucy waited for their faces to register the information. Nothing. Susan was staring, fiddling with the tip of her braid.
“Yes, Gwen signed it,” Lucy said, sighing. The Gwen Burgess effect. It was what she and Kate were counting on. Nonetheless, she felt let down by Maude and Susan’s evident disinterest in the issue itself. “Signing tomorrow would be better,” she added, glancing around the room.
Visitors, Academicians, art critics, students, ticket-holding members of the public—people milled about in every corner. But Maude shook her head.
“I want to sign before Agnes signs.”
“There she is!” Susan dove forward, leading the way toward the stage. Kate was standing by the empty lectern, locked in a heated exchange with Simon Poole. Lucy’s eyes met Maude’s, and before she could help it, they’d exchanged identical smirks.
Kate and Simon had understood enough of the professor’s inaudible points to disagree about them? Incredible.
“Perspective must color architecture. It’s atmosphere. Light and shadow. The sensory.” Kate had begun to bellow, flinging out her arms.
“Practicability is the issue.” Simon Poole was tapping his foot with irritation. “A building must stand first and foremost.”
“Mathematics!” Kate ejected the word with disgust. “Forget your numbers and perceive. How do you experience space? That’s the first question for the artist and the architect.”
“Of all the fanciful . . .”
The two were separated, by Maude, only with some difficulty. Kate’s disappointment at an argument ended too soon gave way quickly to delight as she collected new signatures.
“You missed my victory over Davis.” Kate looked at Lucy sidelong as they navigated away from Maude and Susan, who’d turned to greet Constance Pitcairn. “Where have you been?”
“Home.” Lucy cleared her throat. The word felt tender in her mouth. Home. Everything in her future was uncertain. How had it come to this?
“I’ve moved my studio back to the garret. Anthony—” She hesitated.
“It’s true, then?” Kate interrupted, gripping her arm. She looked poleaxed. “You? And Weston?”
Lucy could see her thoughts churning, could read the expressions as they flitted across her face. A tryst was shocking, but Lucy had gone about it boldly, unapologetically. In a way, it was marvelous, very well done indeed. Kate groped toward acceptance when another thought hit.
“Lucy.” Kate’s eyes were huge and her grip tightened. “Do you love him?”
Lucy hesitated. The Pre-Raphaelite brothers were always falling in love with their models, women whose faces and bodies haunted them, showing up in canvas after canvas. True muses. The Pre-Raphaelite sisters hadn’t much considered the possibility.
To admit her love for Anthony was to hazard her friendship with Kate. She didn’t know how Kate would react. It was one thing to tryst, to seize knowledge. It was another thing to lose her heart, to cede herself. Would Kate see it as weakness?
Kate wanted the truth.
“Yes,” said Lucy simply.
After a long moment, Kate nodded.
“If there’s more to him than meets the eye, that’s well and good. And what meets the eye is superb.” She clapped her hands. “I approve!”
The relief Lucy experienced was as keen as it was pointless. There was nothing for Kate to approve.
“Thank you,” she said. “But he’s marrying someone else. Quite soon, I believe.”
“What?” Kate gasped. “The bastard. How does he dare?”
Lucy broke Kate’s first rule of engagement by bursting into tears.
The days and nights that followed offered new, dizzying lessons in perspective. Time seemed both stretched and compressed. Lucy ignored the pointed looks and whispers of her classmates, aided by Kate, who took pleasure in breaking up their hushed conferences. As the porters began to walk the hallway, carrying the first submitted pictures up to the large room in which the Hanging Committee would soon meet to pass judgment, a powerful excitement took hold in the Schools. Conversation returned to its seasonal rhythm. What would characterize this year’s Summer Exhibition? Which genres and artists would the critics hail? What controversies would attend the placement of the pictures?
Now or never. Lucy threw herself into her painting, passing sleepless nights at her easel, burning through pounds of candles and lamp oil, forcing herself to put the cost out of her mind. Concentrate. She used a knife to pile on color, her nose an inch from her canvas, which Anthony had returned to her promptly, as promised. Electrified and exhausted, she let her composition occupy her every thought. She could almost forget he existed. When Maude approached her in the canteen at the end of the week, thrusting the engagement announcement into her hand, she didn’t show a flicker of emotion.
The moment she put the final touch on her picture—late in the night, the lamp turned up, candles burning—her body drooped. She drooped, but Violet did not. The picture was high-toned, arresting, dreamy without the softened edges of dream.
A scant few days remained to submit, but submit she would. She had finished in time.
She allowed herself to lie abed the next morning and made her way down the stairs much later than was her wont, even on a Saturday.
Surely her mind was still sluggish from its surfeit of sleep. Dream clogged her ears. She wasn’t really hearing his voice.
She burst into the shop. Aunt Marian was not at her worktable, gone to the privy perhaps. Anthony stood just inside the front door, a pained smile on his lips, and Miss Yardley, Miss Yardley, was coming toward her in a princess gown of geranium silk, gloved hands extended.
“Bonjour, chérie, comment allez-vous?” Miss Yardley gripped her fingers, kissing the air with rosebud lips. “Do you approve of my dress? Or was it dyed with deadly nightshade?”
She laughed gaily, squeezing harder, until Lucy felt the hard ridge of a ring straining the soft leather of her glove. She extricated her hands, trying to repress the violence of her response.
“It appears safe enough,” she said. Her voice sounded colorless to her own ears. She couldn’t look at Anthony. How did he dare to come here, with her? He was depraved.
“That’s all I need to hear. I trust you with my life!” Miss Yardley smiled a dazzling smile, gaze flitting over the display case to the darker corners of the room, where petticoats piled on the worktables, glowing damningly in the gloom.
“It’s a bit unassuming, isn’t it?” she said, creases of concern bracketing her rosy mouth, but then she shrugged, laughing. “But that’s the charm, I suppose. Lucy—I may call you Lucy?—after what you did for me, I feel I must repay the favor. Come to our wedding!”
She misunderstood Lucy’s look of horror.
“I plan to be a modern duchess. You won’t feel out of place. I’ve invited my old governess, too, and Nancy, who sells me the perfume I so like at the department store. Anthony, tell her you want her to come.”
Lucy stared at the floorboards. A nail was coming up. She wanted to hammer it, hard.
“You’re a perfect boor,” said Miss Yardley after a long pause. “Very well. The truth will out. I had to force him to take me here. He’s embarrassed to face you.”
Lucy looked up.
“Because he still can’t draw a horse!” Miss Yardley laughed again. “Let’s ignore him. I have another reason for my visit.”
Lucy blinked rapidly. Miss Yardley’s radiance was painful to behold.
“I want your aunt to make my wedding dress!”
The silence thundered. Finally, Anthony spoke, warningly.
“We discussed this, Lavinia.”
“And I told you the decision is mine.” Miss Yardley tossed her head. “A groom mustn’t meddle.”
“I meddle in nothing,” said Anthony flatly. “Your mother gave me to understand that your London dressmaker is already at work.”
Lucy kept her eyes fixed on Miss Yardley, who was beginning to pout.
“She’s always at work because she makes everyone’s wedding dress. And they’re horrid dresses! I might as well pay a common laborer to pave me with seed pearls. I want something original, something that Celestia Jordan would have worn.”
Lucy felt a muscle in her eyelid twitch. If only she could travel back in time and sew her lips together before she’d said a word to Miss Yardley about Celestia Jordan!
Don’t scream. Reason.
“Aunt Marian would love to make your dress.” She resisted the urge to still her eyelid with the pad of her finger, tried to open her eyes instead, making them as round and sincere as possible. “But we don’t have the right satin in stock, or the lace. We’d have to order it, and that would take time, too much time. It could delay the wedding. You wouldn’t want that.”
“No,” said Anthony, his voice like smoke. “We wouldn’t want that.”
Despite herself, she let her glance stray. His beauty stopped her breath.
He’d visited his tailor, and his barber. His suit molded to his broad shoulders, his narrow waist, his long, muscled legs. The black waves of his hair had been cut close to the scalp, accentuating the boldness of his features, the strong nose and chiseled mouth. The light straggling through the windows lit his pale eyes between their fringe of lashes. His gaze was hot, bright. The force of it pierced her.
The green dart.
Her face warmed. She had devised this perfect torture. It was all her own doing.
“Miss Stirling!” Miss Yardley rushed to Aunt Marian, who had entered the shop from the back hall, a deep line of perplexity drawn between her brows.
“I’m Lavinia Yardley, soon-to-be Duchess of Weston. Your dear niece Lucy told me you designed Celestia Jordan’s gown in She Stoops to Conquer, my absolute favorite. My grandmother had a scrapbook where she kept clippings of all the sketches of Celestia’s gowns they published in the Ladies Column of the Illustrated News. I adore every one of them. I want diamond trim and shoulder straps on my wedding dress, like on the gown in A Royal Necklace.”
Aunt Marian stared at her. Anthony came a few steps forward.
“Miss Stirling,” he said and bowed.
Aunt Marian’s knees could excuse her negligible curtsey.
“So, you’re the Duke of Weston, are you?” she said, eyeing him with considerable suspicion. “I should have known. And you”—she rounded on Miss Yardley—“are in want of a wedding dress in which to marry him.”
Miss Yardley beamed. Aunt Marian jammed her spectacles up the bridge of her nose, shaking her head.
Another proper mess. Lucy could all but hear her thoughts.
“Well,” said Aunt Marian at last. “I can’t help you with your wedding dress, or with your taste in husbands, but I do have the sketches from A Royal Necklace, as well as the lace evening gown with the rose sequins from The Degenerates packed away, if you’d like to see them.”
Miss Yardley’s face registered shock, disappointment, and excitement in comically quick succession.
“Come along, then.” With a glance at Lucy, Aunt Marian shooed Miss Yardley toward a chair.
Her aunt was giving her the opportunity to make an exit. Silently, Lucy thanked her for it, and yet she failed to take advantage of the moment. Her feet felt rooted to the spot. She looked down at them. Anthony’s boots moved into view.
He’d come closer.
“Congratulations,” she murmured and forced herself to turn away. His hand shot out and closed on her wrist, his thumb warm against her pulse. She froze. Her eyes flew to Miss Yardley, perched on a chair, head tilted to see better what Aunt Marian was pulling from her trunk.
“It is I who should congratulate you,” he said.
She looked up, scanning his face for irony. His look was ragged with intensity, but sincere.
“I assume you’ve submitted your picture.”
“I will. Monday.” She smiled briefly. His thumb moved and the blood in her wrist beat against it. She took a breath through her nose. He smelled different, the scent of his skin masked by an expensive cologne. Had he been drinking? She wouldn’t know. And she shouldn’t. She’d given up her right to know such things about him.
“You must be happy,” he said quietly. He was leaning toward her, and she realized her weight was on her toes, that she’d tipped forward. She jerked, a full-body flinch. She thought she might see triumph in his eyes, superiority, some hint that he reveled in his power over her, her helpless attraction.
What she saw was raw need. Pain.
“Lucy.” Her name rumbled in his chest.
“Very happy,” she said, tugging her arm. His grip tightened. Behind her, she could hear Miss Yardley oohing and aahing.
They were perfect together, Lavinia and Anthony. A fair, feminine beauty paired with a dark, masculine one. They’d look well anywhere. In Weston Hall. At the queen’s table. Not Guinevere’s or Cymbeline’s—Victoria’s.
“And you?” she asked.
“Most happy. Exceedingly happy.” His lashes swept down so black and thick she might have used them for brushes. They’d felt like brushes when his face pressed against her, painting detailed sensation on her skin with each flutter. When they lifted, his eyes, green as dragons’ scales, burned her with dragons’ fire. “Jolly even.”
“Don’t,” she whispered. “Don’t make it harder. You wouldn’t be jollier in Scotland.”
“Not Scotland,” he said harshly, voice suddenly too loud. “That’s not what I—”
“What are you two discussing?” called Miss Yardley. “Anthony, look at this gown. Wouldn’t it be marvelous for Italy?”
Anthony dropped her arm and was at Miss Yardley’s side in a moment. Aunt Marian was holding up a confection of silk and lace, and Miss Yardley pointed out the gown’s four underskirts, silver, cream, and two deep shades of pink moiré, laying a careless, confident hand on Anthony’s forearm. After a moment, he covered it with his own.
Perfect together.
No one looked at Lucy as she left the room.
“What?”
Anthony blinked at Lavinia, fingers drumming against the coach’s window shade. Is that what lay in store for them? A lifetime of his not listening, her repeating.
He ground his molars together to keep himself from saying something unforgivable.
The coach swayed and Lavinia pressed into him, sighing, with irritation, not ardor. She began again, on the subject of their honeymoon in Italy, something to do with the merits of visiting Venice before Rome. His thoughts drifted. An alternative honeymoon played out in his head. He and Lucy on the steamer to Dieppe, leaning on the railing, the wind lifting her curls. She’d be unbelievably vibrant, body too small for the force of life it contained, and so he would press against her, a scaffold for that excess vitality. She’d be lecturing him on the light in Turner’s seascapes, and he’d see something new in the common sunbeams, feel the beams from her eyes light something new within him. And when they reached Paris . . .
The small jerk of the coach as it stopped brought him to his senses. They’d arrived at the Yardleys’ residence at Chesterton Gardens.
He frowned. Tried to relax his jaw before he cracked his teeth into pieces. Lavinia was looking at him.
“You’re hopeless,” she muttered. She threw open the door in a huff.
“Well,” she said. “Aren’t you coming in? Mother wanted to talk to you about the guest list.”
“Another time.” It sounded curt, but he was beyond caring.
He had other designs for his Saturday afternoon.
Alfred Thewes, First Baron Mabeldon, sucked his cigar with appetite, then studied its glowing coal before smiling at Anthony with large, square teeth. He was horse-faced but this chance resemblance only served to underscore Anthony’s distaste.
“You arrived in the nick of time,” Mabeldon said. “I was about to head out the door. I’m meeting Archibald at the club.”
Mabeldon wasn’t dressed for going out. He lounged in his smoking jacket, loosened cravat limp against his chest. Anthony inclined his head at the tinniness of the excuse. They both knew it was claptrap.
“What luck,” he said. He should have been bolder. Done this weeks ago, barged in on a Saturday, when the element of surprise was on his side.
“Scotch?” Mabeldon reached behind him, lifted a decanter. Anthony stared at the amber winking through cut crystal, like mocking eyes.
One drink, five drinks, one hundred. How much is enough. Forever. When Lucy had said those words to him in the canteen, he’d put aside the gin. Maybe it was then he’d had his first inkling of the forever he wanted more. Too bad he was such a slow learner.
He shrugged. “I don’t have the taste for it.”
Mabeldon sucked his teeth, plunking the decanter back down.
“Starting to take after your father. Archie won’t believe it. You know, he always asks after you. This year, we’ll have you both on the hunt. Usually, he goes to Inverness with his college chums, and they waste whole days on the golf links. The promise of your company—a little friendly competition—will lure him back into the heather, I guarantee it. And you’re almost a college chum, aren’t you?”
Mabeldon’s son Archibald had taken all firsts at Oxford the same year that Anthony was sent down. Mabeldon still enjoyed referencing Anthony’s failure, poking the old wound. With some surprise, Anthony realized that the wound had healed over. The young idiot. He smiled briefly.
“We’re colleagues now, at any rate.” Parliament was hardly the heather, but he and Archibald would meet there before long, as Anthony tried to flush political opponents. Archibald, a Conservative MP for Bath, had been one of his father’s disciples. He’d take aim at him soon enough, as he worked through the list.
“You’ve taken your father’s seat?” Mabeldon looked surprised. “Bored of knocking about and raising hell, are you? Good, good, but there’s technique to it. Your letters . . .” He broke off, shook his head, and sighed, as though he’d ignored them out of tact.
Yes, Anthony knew he wrote in a messy hand, that his style lacked finesse. But he’d made his concerns, and his demands, clear.
“Weren’t the characters legible?” he asked. “I can summarize the content. The Board of Works acquired a large site on Charlotte Road, containing several buildings that do not seem to conform to the description given by the inspectors of nuisance and confirmed by Dr. Jephson. I’m prepared to hire a surveyor and bring in the medical officer of the Privy Council to issue an independent report on those properties, which could prove more than an embarrassment, for the vestry and for the board itself. The board is on the thinnest ice with the public, and the dailies want but a whiff of fresh corruption to raise the cry.”
Anthony folded his arms, leaning back in his chair. His eyes flitted over the sheaves of paper on Mabeldon’s desk.
“You mounted your own investigation. Show me the committee’s findings.”
Mabeldon’s eyes skittered and he stuck the cigar back into his mouth, puffing slowly. Was there ever a committee? Despite his best effort, he couldn’t subdue his reaction, swift and violent, his whole body bracing for a bloody contest. The energy it took to hold himself still made the sweat break out across his brow.
Every time he thought he’d come to the bottom of Yardley’s duplicity, he discovered a false bottom, a deeper level yawning beneath. He called up a smile.
“I see,” he said. “All the more reason for me to task myself with unearthing the malfeasance. Rumors are already circulating, as you know, that there is an inner ring within the board, members allied with certain brokers, speculators, contractors, builders, and architects, all peddling influence and services to dispose of surplus lands.”
Through his morning reading regimen, he’d discovered that the Financial News had gone so far as to levy charges of general corruption, calling the board a “den of thieves.” Criticism for the board’s secretive procedures had scarcely been higher at any point in its thirty-year history. Mabeldon was in a weakened position.
If he’d imagined Anthony was too much the fool to be aware of it, he was disabused now. His long face had turned a sickly color. Anthony’s smile felt less forced as he continued.
“I could localize my efforts and resolve, with your help, the misdeeds on Charlotte Road. Or I could, for the good of the metropolis, set my sights higher, and use the evidence of wrongdoing to make a case for a larger investigation. I’ll move in the House for a select committee to investigate all of the board’s affairs.”
Mabeldon stared, his eyes lusterless. “You’re making a mistake,” he said at last.
Anthony raised his brows, made a dismissive gesture with his hand. “You’re making the mistake with those evictions,” he said. “That is, if you don’t want your board dissolved by an act of Parliament.”
Mabeldon stubbed out the cigar. “So. You plan to denounce Jephson? That story will sell papers. Far more than any story about alleged sharp dealing in Shoreditch.”
He bared his teeth and quite a bit of darkened gum.
A vein in Anthony’s temple throbbed as he tried to make sense of this. He kept his face neutral, but he had that panicked feeling again, the feeling of a trap closing around him. Why did Mabeldon say Jephson in that peculiar tone of voice?
He didn’t like how Mabeldon was looking at him, like he was a plate of salade de grouse à la Soyer.
“Michael Jephson.” Mabeldon waited, and when Anthony said nothing he frowned. “Don’t be coy,” he said. “He’s the superintendent of the Putney Asylum. Before that, he was the superintendent of Normand Park.”
Anthony’s jaw slackened.
“The Duke of Weston,” Mabeldon said, raising an arm like a newspaper seller. “Mounting a campaign that targets the doctor who committed his mother! Read all about it!”
He dropped his arm, shaking his head.
Anthony felt a fullness in his chest, redness surging in from the corners of his eyes. Mabeldon pressed his advantage.
“Think, Your Grace,” he said. “It would be painful, that history circulating again, not to mention damaging to your credibility. I owed your father tremendously, and so I’m happy to advise you now. You’re better off leaving this alone.”
Despite the wave of emotion crashing over him, Anthony’s mouth quirked sardonically. His father had played an instrumental role in elevating Mabeldon to the peerage. In exchange for what, he didn’t dare to guess.
He took a deep breath. He wouldn’t let the mention of his mother divert him from his course.
“Who applied for the lease?” He leveled the question, which at first Mabeldon pretended not to hear as he fetched his watch from his pocket and made a show of noting the time.
“I’m late,” he said.
“The lease,” repeated Anthony.
“Joseph Statham tendered for the site. He built the Albany Road estate in Camberwell, a fine fellow,” said Mabeldon impatiently, rising. “Archie will get dull waiting.”
Joseph Statham. The name meant nothing to Anthony, but then again, neither had the name Jephson. He’d never considered the man who diagnosed his mother. In his mind, he’d been nameless, faceless, part of the edifice that had swallowed his mother whole. The diagnosis—defending his mother from it with his fists—was what had consumed him. Certainly, his father had never spoken to him of the doctor involved.
He’d only known his mother died at Normand Park because the schoolchildren mentioned it in one of their vicious rhymes.
Mabeldon’s face looked even longer and more equine from this angle. He wouldn’t allow the man to see through his exterior, to glimpse the welter beneath.
Christ, he was a mess of wounds.
He stood smoothly. “Don’t let Archie get dull,” he said with a laugh, picking invisible lint from his shirtsleeve.
Archibald, dull. He’d never been one to let moss grow under his feet. Too busy trying to climb to the top of every pile. Grasping bastard.
“We’ll walk out together. I’m late, too, to meet with Samuel Lawford.”
“Lawford!” Mabeldon gaped and Anthony hid his smile. He’d been choosing his friends wisely.
“Yes, Lawford,” he said airily. “He agrees it’s high time that a committee form to investigate board practices. How does this strike you? Lawford will be the one to move in the House. The press won’t find a story there. Lawford has no axe to grind with Jephson. Glad that’s settled. And I thank you for the advice. My advice to you? Deal with Charlotte Road.”
He tipped his head. “And don’t be long about it.”
Mabeldon blinked rapidly. Anthony relished the look on his face. Surprise. Dawning terror.
He had just realized the young idiot was a formidable adversary.
Anthony shook Mabeldon by the shoulder as they parted ways.
“I’m looking forward to seeing more of you, and of Archie. Send him my warmest regards.”
Back in the coach, he flung his limbs angrily, struggling to master his breathing. The lancing pain stabbed again, behind his right eye. He could count on liquor to dull this feeling, but he was realizing there was utility in his discomfort. The pain and need honed him. He was alert, restless, all corners.
The day wasn’t over. He would visit Lawford. He would go by the frame maker’s studio to see if he’d finished his job on schedule. Later, the veterinarian was coming to the stables to check Snap’s fetlocks, to ensure the sesamoid bones were still whole. Afterward, Anthony would still have time to work in the glasshouse, sanding the oval he’d planed from the board, rubbing it with linseed oil. And Cecil might call.
He could fill a life even without Lucy Coover.
Because of Lucy Coover, something inside him whispered. Her determination, industriousness, audacity—a lesson. A goad.
If he wasn’t running, he was going to fight.