He bowed and turned to retreat down the terrace steps.
She reached out and touched his arm. It was just the faintest touch, but it went through him like she’d grabbed him by the waist.
He turned toward her, trying not to betray in his face the effect that mere whisper of a touch had had on him.
“I did mean what I said, Mr. Anderson. Tomorrow, should we encounter one another, we will forget this evening ever happened. I will be a woman who once asked you a question about architecture, and you will be a man who was kind enough to answer it. Mere neighbors.”
He nodded. “I look forward to being neighborly.”
“Then perhaps you might consider introducing me to your sister, if I am not too scandalous for her acquaintance,” she said faintly. “It’s quite difficult to find stimulating company here, unless one enjoys being shouted at in the public house.”
She said this over-casually, as though it was an afterthought.
He smiled at her one last time. “I’ll extend the invitation. She’ll be pleased. Good night, Miss Arden.”
As he walked down the steps to the coastal path, he wondered if Miss Arden had summoned him here because she was as lonely as he was.
He could not afford the risk of joining her in bed. But he might, discreetly, venture the smaller one of calling her a friend.
God knew that he could use one, too.
Chapter Five
The only proven antidote to conception is chastity, yet like any virtue, chastity is easier to praise than to uphold. If only the efforts spent condemning carnal vice could be diverted to understanding how best to avoid its consequences. If lust is a sin, then human beings will always sin. But with more knowledge, they might ask God’s forgiveness privately and be spared the damning judgment of their fellow men.
—An Essay in Defense of Ruined Women by Seraphina Arden, 1793
* * *
Seraphina awoke to an ache along the tops of her thighs. A familiar feeling, like her flesh wished to come loose from the bone.
Oh, thank God.
She fumbled for the small, leather-bound diary among the stacks of books and papers at her bedside and fanned through it for her log. She penciled a tick next to the date. Soon the discomfort in her breasts would start.
And then, God willing, she would bleed.
She surveyed the marks and lines hatched across the page where she tracked her monthly courses. In the sixteen years since the incident, she’d made a study of the way her body presaged the tidings of the curse. It had been twenty-seven days since her last menses. During that time, there was an X for intercourse on the twelfth of the previous month—that would have been the handsome abolitionist she’d taken home from Jack Willow’s monthly Equalist Society supper above the printing shop—and then, of course, her evening with Henri.
She was always scrupulous. The drawers of her dressing table were stuffed not with cosmetic balms and pleasant fragrances but jars of sheepskin condoms packed in oil and bags of herbs said to reduce fecundity. She’d made a kind of science of it, interviewing midwives and physicians for their theories on conception so that she might share them in her pamphlets. But the truth was there was little true consensus marking science from the stuff of witchcraft.
She’d been fortunate. There’d been no further incidents. But whether it was the armors or the vinegar or the bitter teas or pure blind luck that kept her barren, she could not say.
In truth, so many years and lovers had passed without conception, it was most logical to assume that she could not conceive at all. Given the grim scene those many years ago and the gravity of her illness afterward, a barren womb would not come as a surprise.
But she would not think of that. As a rule, she never thought of that.
It made her impossibly sad.
Instead, she limited her lovers to men amenable to her precautions. She drank the tinctures, made the hatch marks in her journal. And every month, around this time, the fear set in that the bleeding wouldn’t come. Her life became a vigil for the symptoms of menstruation.
Given the grip that this anxiety had on her, to partake in intercourse at all was a kind of mental torture. As much as she enjoyed the act, every lover was a finger poised along the blade of a knife sharp enough to cut her.
She sometimes looked at women holding babies and wondered if she did it because she wanted to be cut.
She closed the journal, stood, and shivered in the morning air. This house was freezing. A fortnight here and she couldn’t wait to leave.
She washed her face and ignored the plain day dress Maria had laid out the night before, eschewing it for a striking gown the color of a golden egg yolk. It was one of her favorite pieces, a saturated saffron hue that contrasted with her pale skin and dark hair, cut to emphasize her flaring hips and narrow waist. She surveyed the effect in the mirror. Dashing.
She added an amethyst necklace and matching ear bobs. She looked like she was going to a soiree in Mayfair rather than a drafty sewing room to write, but the attire did its job. In it she felt more like Seraphina Arden. Less like little Sera, who’d hated living in this house even before she’d been cast out of it, and hated being back.
If only Mr. Anderson had proven more interesting company, perhaps she might not need to take her creature comforts from her wardrobe. She was not angry that he had turned down her proposal the previous evening, but she could not look at her reflection in the yellow dress without imagining him seeing it and thinking to herself, So there.
She passed through the kitchen and made herself a cup of tea, then sat down at her table in the sewing room and collected the pages that amounted to the draft of her next book. She smoothed out a blank page and picked up her quill.
As had been the case for the last week, no words came to mind.
Nothing.
Only a cramping in her abdomen, the kind she got when she was anxious and trying not to notice.
It was far too quiet here. She had hoped the silence would be more conducive to her writing than the commotion that clattered in through the windows of her house in London, but instead it made her agitated.
She was running out of time.
Her manuscript was due to be published in two installments in early August, which meant the pages would be needed at her printer’s for the proofs and typesetting by the beginning of July.
She had three weeks to write the tale of her undoing.
Usually she wrote quickly and precisely, rarely laboring over drafts. But this time the words had proven slower to arrive and murkier in meaning when she put them down.
The argument that closed the book—the call for funds to build the institute—was finished. But the story that must preface it for her to win the publicity and sympathy she needed to convert readers to philanthropists eluded her.
Her friendship with the Methodists and the antislavery agitators who formed the Equalist Society of which she was a member had taught her a useful truth: people were won over by their hearts, not their faculty of reason. Arguments about injustice did not move them to action. Sad stories did.
And there was a marked appetite for hers. Speculation had been whispered for years over what exactly had turned a ruined Cornish mining heiress with little education into a notorious London authoress and, in time, a divisive advocate for female rights.
She had eschewed the trend of fallen women writing the sordid accounts of their seduction, choosing to write philosophically rather than to reveal the details of her past. But if she was to raise the money they required, she needed fame and sympathy on her side.