Mayhew’s eyes grew wide. Adam had not cursed at him since they were children. “Look here—” James said, puffing himself up.
“Get out of my way,” Adam snarled, barreling past. He shouldered and elbowed his way through the crowd of men until he had edged his way inside the shop. Seraphina was on a dais, already addressing the crowd.
The audience, made up almost entirely of women, gazed on with a rapt admiration. He leaned in to hear over the din of the men shouting outside.
“The moral of my tale should not be overlooked amidst the scandal of my naming Baron Trewlnany. In publicly identifying him, I wanted to illustrate the stark difference in the outcomes of our lives. He is a titled heir to a peer. He holds an elected seat in the House of Commons and will someday ascend to the Lords. His family—four children, I believe—live in comfort on an estate. Compare that to me. A woman who cannot attend the celebration of her own book without being jeered by crowds of screaming men.”
There was a trickle of vulgar cries from the back of the room, near Adam, where the men in question had begun fighting their way inside the crowded shop.
Sera looked out at the back of the room and chuckled. “Thank you, gentlemen. You illustrate my point handsomely.” She smiled out into the crowd. And then she saw him, and the smile left her face.
He held up a hand, a silent greeting. I’m here for you, not them, he tried to tell her with his eyes. I’m sorry.
For a second she seemed to falter, staring at him mute. She looked back at the women in the front. “I did not tell this story to earn your pity. I am very fortunate; with the freedom my ignominy has given me I may be luckier than many men.”
And then she looked directly into his eyes and added, “Including the cowards standing in the back of this room.”
He felt like he’d been slapped.
The ladies cheered again as the protesters rumbled more loudly.
“My friends,” Sera said above the din, “our struggle is going to be a long one, as these men here demonstrate. Unfortunately, those in possession of unfair advantages see equality as a danger. They believe we want to take their power. They cannot see that we simply ask for parity. Power of our own.”
There was a scuffle at the door and a crowd of men the room could ill accommodate came bounding inside, chanting.
“Stop the liar!” they shouted. “Stop the whore! Silence her forevermore!”
The ladies looked up in alarm at the commotion. Willow and several men came rushing from near the dais to the back of the room to confront the intruders.
Sera looked out to address them directly. “May I help you, sirs?” she asked pleasantly.
Her voice was clear and strong but he noticed she gripped the podium in a way that seemed unnatural, and sweat glittered on her brow. Tompkins’s words echoed in Adam’s mind: she is not immune to the toll it takes.
“Slanderer!” a bald man shouted, charging closer to the stage. “Lying whore!”
Even from behind, Adam recognized his egg-shaped build.
“Lord Bell,” Sera said, smiling. “How kind of you to come to my talk. Which of my words do you find dishonest? That ladies suffer injustice? Or that society would benefit from the equality of all people?”
“Miss Arden is an inveterate liar and a criminal,” Bell intoned to the room. “Her filthy book is full of slander and her crimes are not limited to her words. This woman has abducted my wife, and I will be taking her to the magistrate.”
Seraphina glanced at someone near her in the audience, as if amused. The lady rose and climbed up to the dais beside Sera.
It was Lady Bell.
The room exploded into pandemonium.
“Good day, my lord,” Lady Bell called to her husband over the noise. “As you can see, Miss Arden has not abducted me. I merely found I did not enjoy being locked in an insane asylum, and contrived to leave at my earliest convenience. Through a window, as it were.”
The men erupted into a frenzy. Lady Bell smiled knowingly at the women. Standing there so calmly, she looked poised, matronly, sane. She shook her head wryly at the rioting men, as if to say—can you imagine, them, thinking we’re the mad ones?
Lady Bell held up her hand, demanding quiet. “That my husband was and is perfectly within his rights to imprison me and take away my children is a testament to exactly the injustice Miss Arden’s book denounces.”
Bell was fighting his way to the stage, like he intended to pull his wife off of it, but Jack Willow and his men formed a barrier, protecting her. Lady Bell kept talking, clear and serene.
“Everything you’ve read about my supposed adultery is untrue. The source of my husband’s ire is that I disobeyed him. I disagreed with him politically, and I had the audacity to write down my views.” She leaned forward, and addressed Lord Bell directly. “My lord, if marriage to me is so unpleasant, you needn’t take the trouble of locking me up—being married to you is already like prison. Why don’t you just divorce me?”
“Divorce the whore,” a man behind Adam shouted. The men in the crowd raised their fists. “Divorce her!” they began to chant.
Lady Bell smiled. “Finally, something on which we all agree.”
She curtsied to the crowd, walked behind a curtain, and disappeared, leaving a chaos of screaming men behind her. The room throbbed with shouting.
“Apologize!” “Recant!” “Kidnapper!” “Adulteress!” “Whore!”
Bell threw himself toward the dais, attempting to shove past Willow’s men.
“Lord Bell,” Seraphina chided, looking bored. “The stage is mine tonight. If you have an argument to make, do as I have done and publish a book of your own.”
“If you haven’t committed kidnapping, you’ve certainly committed libel,” Bell shouted, shoving his way past Willow. “I’m taking you in to have you arrested. Submit, or we shall take you by force.”
Adam stepped into the skirmish and went running for the dais.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Seraphina was accustomed to being jeered.
When one made a life’s work of speaking on inflammatory topics in public, one learned to see derisive shouts and the occasional piece of lobbed fruit as atmosphere that added gravity to one’s message. If you were offensive enough to be harassed, you were being heard.
But she was not accustomed to being charged by an aristocrat like he was a bull.
Don’t show fear, Sera commanded herself as Bell hurtled toward the stage and the bookstore erupted into a mass of violent bodies. She would not run. She had done nothing wrong. If he wanted to drag her to a magistrate, she would go in peace.
But as he stormed toward her, a small woman emerged from the front row and stepped in front of him. As she stood, her hat fell to the floor.
It was Tamsin Rowe. And she was squaring off against Bell like she was twice his size.
“My lord, you have no case against Miss Arden,” Tamsin said in a loud but quaking voice, marching toward him. “What she wrote is true.”
“And who are you to slander the Baron Trewlnany?” a tall man beside Bell sneered, stepping in her way, like the portly lord required protection from a woman not five feet tall.
“I am his wife, the Baroness Trewlnany,” Tamsin sneered back. “And as such I know for a fact that the story Miss Arden printed was not slander. Every word of it is true.”