“It isn’t slander,” Adam bit out. “I agreed. I just didn’t know it would be published.”
“And you would not have agreed if you had. You were tricked.”
“No, not tricked. I’m sure she didn’t—”
“Don’t defend her!” Mayhew sputtered. “We must undo this. Pendrake’s supporters are planning to show up at her lecture tonight to rally against this libel of his son and show their support. Bell’s organizing it. You’ll come with me and make a speech revoking this pledge and avowing our support for Pendrake and public decency.”
Adam shook his head. “No. She is a friend, James, and this is a misunderstanding. You can speak to Pendrake privately to explain we have changed our minds. I will not renounce her publicly.”
“Renounce her publicly? Have you gone mad? We will not have any chance at the armory if we are viewed to be her conspirators. You do not have a choice. You must disown any connection with her. Think of my sister’s children. How will we find a husband for Adeline if she’s marked as a daughter of a radical sympathizer? How will we find a place in school for Jasper?”
The unavoidable, ill-making fact was that Mayhew was not wrong.
Adam did not believe Seraphina had meant harm to him. But after naming Pendrake as an enemy, she would be a target.
If he wanted any kind of future, he had no choice but to do what Mayhew asked.
“The rally is at seven o’clock at Jack Willow’s bookshop. I had better see you there, Adam. Now is not the time to moon around indulging your Whiggish principles. If we are to save this business, you will join me in the crowd condemning Miss Arden.”
The crowd condemning Miss Arden.
He thought of the four dead birds carefully left in a basket at her door.
The posters nailed to her gates and around the town where she had been a child, likely at the direction of the very man who had abandoned her.
The fact was that Pendrake and Trewlnany deserved this harm to their reputations.
If they lost a bit of their good name, she had lost everything.
He would not join a crowd in condemning her.
He would not let her show up at Jack Willow’s without knowing what awaited her there.
The right thing to do was obvious, and he no longer had the capacity to pretend otherwise.
He had to warn her.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Seraphina was no longer a flesh-and-blood woman. She was made entirely of nausea.
She had meant to spend the day refining her lecture but instead had spent the better part of it reclining on the sofa, trying not to vomit.
“Jack is here to collect you,” Tompkins said, popping her head into Seraphina’s bedchamber. “He’s waiting downstairs with the ladies. But I don’t think you should leave the house. You look positively green.”
“I have no choice. Help me down the stairs, would you?”
Tompkins offered a sturdy shoulder, to which Sera clung unsteadily as she walked down the staircase. The effort of putting one foot in front of the other seemed to be taking six times as much effort as usual. Suddenly, her stomach was in her throat. “Wait,” she cried. Tompkins paused just in time for her to brace herself on the wall of the landing in front of them, to regain her balance.
Tompkins gripped her arm more tightly. “Back upstairs with you. I’m sending for a physician.”
“No, no. I just need a moment.”
She did not need a physician. The nausea had been just as bad the first time she was pregnant, making her so ill she could barely get out of bed. There was no cure for childbearing. One simply had to get on with it and hope for the best.
As soon as she finished this lecture, she could take to her bed for a few days, in hopes that rest would soothe her stomach. But if she canceled tonight for so-called reasons of illness, her opponents would see it as fear and cast it as a victory.
Jack was waiting in her parlor, along with Thaïs, Cornelia, and Elinor.
“Christ, you look terrible,” he said. “March yourself right back upstairs to bed.”
“Absolutely not. If I don’t appear, they’ll say I’m hiding. Now is the time to show exactly how steadfast we are.”
“Steadfast. Seraphina, you look like you might collapse at any second and the crowd won’t help. The street is already packed with protesters—Bell’s men arranged such a mob I’m half inclined to think they’ve paid them to show up.”
“Then they are fools. The size of the crowd will attract even more press, all of whom will report my ideas.” She looked worriedly at Elinor. “But if Bell is involved, surely Elinor should not come with us. It’s dangerous enough that she’s in London at all.”
Elinor winked at the girls. “Shall I tell her my plan?”
“What is your plan?” Sera asked. Something about Elinor seemed different since she’d been away. Sprightlier.
“I’m going to provoke Bell into petitioning for divorce. It’s the only way of being free of him.”
Jack looked grim. “Elinor, he’ll never do it.”
Elinor smiled. “Unless he is so enraged . . . he does.”
Sera could think of a hundred ways this could go wrong. “And what if he recaptures you tonight?”
“Then I shall resist, and the press will see him taking his wife hostage like a criminal. He’ll look like a brute. You know he hates to seem less than gentlemanly.”
Cornelia winced. “If his vanity is all that protects your freedom, I might wait for more reliable armor.”
“I’ll have a carriage waiting behind the arcade, so I can run out the back and flee through the alley if he tries to apprehend me. It may not work, but what choice do I have? Hide forever? I want to live.”
Thaïs clapped her hands. “That’s the spirit. It’s better to fight. We promised each other that we would fight.”
Cornelia slowly nodded. “I suppose there is a kind of advantage to be won, if we are clever. We can use the outrage over Elinor’s divorce to stir up interest for the next phase of our plan. I could paint Elinor as a whore for my Jezebels series. Nude.”
Elinor threw back her head and laughed. “Me, posing nude! Oh, what a scandal. Can you imagine?”
Jack had a strange look on his face, like he was imagining. He cleared his throat. “Sera, we need to leave. But before we go—I suppose you saw the afternoon papers? You should be prepared to answer all the latest attacks.”
She glanced at the pile of newspapers sitting untouched on the table in front of them. “To be honest, I’ve been in bed trying not to cast my accounts. What have I missed?”
Jack rummaged through the papers and held up one to show her. Baron Trewlnany Denies Claims. “He’s vowed to take you to court for libel.”
She nodded. “Nothing we did not expect or prepare for.”
She had letters between Pendrake and her father proving the substance of her claims. If they went through with a lawsuit it would not succeed in court, but any trial would do much for the celebrity of her cause.
Jack held up another paper. “Three other women have come forward saying that Trewlnany injured their virtue.”
She winced. She had suspected she was not the only one. “Poor girls. Bring that one for me, will you? I’ll read it in the carriage.”