This was making her angry. Did they not see that by asking him to make any choice at all, she was setting herself up for something excruciating? Rejection for Pendrake’s sake if Adam chose one way, being responsible for his shattered dreams if he chose the other.
“And if he decides he is so moved by the prospect of my pregnancy that he will sacrifice his entire future for me, what then? Am I to let him? Am I to carry that? Become his most regrettable mistake?”
Thaïs sank down and put her head on Sera’s knee. “Ah, I see. You love him.”
“What?” Sera sputtered.
She most fervently did not. If she had allowed herself to become attached, it was only out of some misplaced desire to receive redemption from a male. It was the catechism all women were raised with, after all, to see their value as a reflection of what man would choose them.
She knew better. She had argued for better in her books. But some lessons ran so deep that one had to be vigilant, lest the rotten thinking creep back in.
“I do not love him,” she said. “It is a question of respect. Of how he sees me.”
Elinor, always the arbiter when it came to wisdom of the heart, cleared her throat.
“Dear, if you didn’t care for him, his future wouldn’t matter to you. You would demand he think of his responsibility to your child, or you would cut him for choosing his reputation above you. His feelings would not factor. Your lovers’ feelings never have.”
“No, that isn’t true,” Sera shouted. She had never raised her voice to Elinor before, but this sentiment erased the girl she’d been before she’d known these women. “They did once. And what did that get me other than a broken heart?”
“But, Sera, Adam isn’t Trewlnany,” Cornelia said cautiously. “He’s not Pendrake or Bell or any of their lot. He’s nothing like them.”
Wasn’t he though? Had he not chosen their values, by attesting that their power meant more to him than her life?
“You’ve had a shock,” Elinor said gently. “You needn’t decide tonight. You’ll think about it more and get some rest. And we will support you no matter what you choose to do.”
“Thank you,” Sera said.
“But, Sera?” Elinor added, looking intently into her eyes. “If you do care for him . . . I’ve never known you to give anything up without a fight.”
Adam had already been in the studio working for hours by the time Mayhew stomped in, looking cross and disheveled. His face was as red as his hair.
“Something the matter?” Adam asked, barely looking up. Mayhew had always been a sensitive, temperamental creature, and today Adam didn’t have the patience for dealing with someone else’s turbulent emotions. He had more than enough of his own.
James pulled a slim pamphlet from under his arm and smacked it down on top of Adam’s plans. “This is what’s the matter.”
The book was embossed with Memoirs of a Rakess, Volume II.
“That slut Seraphina Arden is going to be the ruin of us,” James said. He slammed his fist on the book so hard it shook the drafting table, sending Adam’s pencils clattering to the floor.
The draftsmen in the room looked up in alarm. Feeling their stares, Adam took care to remain calm, though he felt like knocking Mayhew into the wall.
Adam lowered his voice to a growl. “James, with respect, don’t you ever let me hear words like that out of your mouth again.”
“No? Read it,” Mayhew shouted at him, not at all chastened. He picked up the book and riffled violently, jamming his finger against a page toward the back. “Read it. Right now.”
Adam picked up the book.
The world pulses with the sad stories of women like myself. Ladies who felt a hunger or a flash of vanity or a tenderness—a mad desire to indulge in a transcendent moment of pleasure with someone who made them feel like they were loved. We are no different from men who act impulsively, out of lust or passion. Yet we are the ones punished for our transgressions.
The blood appeared on my linen three months before the child’s term was due.
The child. That was how I thought of her.
I resented her for springing up inside of me, a living embodiment of my shame.
He stared at those words, trying to make sense of them.
She’d lost a child? When?
The tale went on, harrowing. A betrayal. A birth. A death.
She’d borne all this and said nothing? She’d listened to him tell his own story, patted his hand, and been silent on the fact that they had this loss in common.
“Adam!” Mayhew barked.
He looked up, dazed.
“You’re reading the wrong bloody page,” James barked. He pointed at the opposite page of the book.
I did not value my daughter’s life until I lost the chance.
And so I thought, as I grieved her, of how I might make it up to her. For she was not a nameless bastard conceived by a foolish girl. She had a mother and a father. A father who whispered vile things about me around town, lest anyone suspect. Who never replied when I wrote to tell him of his baby’s death. Who allowed his own father to offer mine a sum equal to the price of three cows to compensate me for the loss of my future.
To this day I’ve never seen another message in his hand.
But you can find his signature on bills in Parliament.
Jonathan Marcham, Baron Trewlnany. Heir to the Marquess of Pendrake.
Adam let out a breath. “Pendrake. Dear God.”
Trewlnany was Pendrake’s heir. Suddenly it all made sense.
The posters strung up by Trewlnany’s groundskeeper.
The expression on Seraphina’s face when he’d said Pendrake’s name the night before.
He’d sat in her parlor and told her he was leaving her for her betrayer.
And she hadn’t said a word.
He felt like vomiting.
“It gets worse,” Mayhew said.
Adam put his hands to his face. “I don’t know how it could.”
Mayhew took the book and riffled the pages. “She calls for females to be educated and trained to work in trades only fit for men and lists a slew of people who’ve agreed to take apprentices. You won’t believe who she includes.”
He smashed the book on the table, his finger jammed so hard at the page it turned white beneath the nail.
Anderson Mayhew, Architects
“Surely, Adam,” Mayhew said, his voice vivid with sarcasm, “this must be a terrible misunderstanding.”
Adam closed his eyes.
He’d forgotten all about this.
“Tell me, Adam, that it is a mistake,” Mayhew said quietly.
“I agreed to hire a female apprentice when I met her in Cornwall. I didn’t see the harm in it. I’d forgotten.”
“You bloody forgot you pledged our firm to a radical? You bloody forgot you’d destroyed us in her book?”
Adam took a deep breath. “I wasn’t aware she intended to publish our firm’s name. She didn’t mention it.”
That was the least of what she hadn’t told him.
Did she think he wouldn’t care? That her past would mean nothing to him?
“It’s slander,” Mayhew seethed. “It’s bloody slander.”