PROLOGUE
L’Ecole de Chardonne
Mont Pèlerin, Lake Geneva, Switzerland, 1880
“Do you know why I called you to my study at such a late hour, Lady Alexandra?” Headmaster Maurice de Marchand’s hand disappeared beneath his imposing desk at her approach, but Alexandra dared not glance down to note it.
She didn’t want to imagine what his hands were up to, concealed from her view.
Besides, liars looked down. And a liar she was about to be.
She’d always hated this room. The overstated opulence. Damask everywhere. Splashing together in garish reds, oranges, and canary yellows. Even at this hour, one felt the need to squint against the visual onslaught.
“No, sir, I do not.” She summoned every lesson in deceit and temerity she’d gleaned from the Countess of Mont Claire in four years, and met the shrewd gaze of the headmaster with what she hoped was clear-eyed innocence.
Objectively, she understood why so many of the girls at de Chardonne found him handsome. With patrician cheekbones and an angular jaw, he portrayed the kind of sartorial elegance found in ladies’ novels. Alexandra thought his neck too long on his strong shoulders, an effect exacerbated by a diminutive chin.
Her friend Julia had once mooned over his brooding, dark eyes, comparing their color to a rich, black Croatian stout. But Julia, she’d long ago decided, was incessantly ridiculous. And if Alexandra had to compare his eyes to anything, it’d be whatever Jean-Yves, the gardener, fertilized his hothouse orchids with.
Julia had obviously forgotten about his penchant to lash the girls’ palms when they misbehaved. It wasn’t kindness in his eyes she noted then. But something else. Something darker.
He wanted them to cry. He moistened his lips at the sight of their tears.
De Marchand’s hand reappeared from beneath the desk, and he templed his fingers, resting the index tips against his lips. The sleeves of his black headmaster robes puddled at his elbows where they rested on the imposing desk. It was a desk shadowed by many such men, passed like a scepter and crown to each new lord of their château.
Lord of what, exactly? Alexandra barely suppressed a roll of her eyes. Lord of little girls? How pathetic.
“Come now,” he taunted, his French accent weighting his words with a treacle vibrancy. “You’re perhaps the cleverest girl we’ve ever educated here at de Chardonne.”
Alexandra imagined generations of clever girls before her better trained—or more willing—to hide their intellect. “You flatter me, sir. But I confess pure ignorance as to why I’ve been summoned to your study at so dark an hour.”
His lids lowered to a sleepy cast, his eyes darkening to a rather hostile brunet. “Always so polite,” he murmured, arranging implements on his desk away from his person. A stack of papers trapped beneath a marble paperweight he returned to their leather folder. “So proper and careful.” The uncapped fountain pen he set to the far left. “Perfect marks. Perfect comportment.” He put his letter opener to the far right, equidistant from the pen. “The perfect student … the perfect woman.”
“I am not yet a woman.” The reminder felt imperative. Though she was to graduate de Chardonne in a matter of days, at seventeen she was the youngest in her year, and would remain so for some months hence. “And I am quite aware of my defects, sir.”
Some days she could focus on nothing else.
De Marchand said nothing; his gaze reached for her across the expanse of the desk until Alexandra became so unsettled her stomach curdled against something she couldn’t quite identify.
Something unseemly. An unconsecrated anticipation she should have feared.
Instead, she settled her notice in his hair, the lambent color of drenched sand at low tide. Darker than gold, lighter than brown. An unassuming color for such an insolent and powerful man.
“Do you think, Lady Alexandra, that if you are perfect during the day, no one will notice what you do in the dark?”
Alexandra’s fingers fisted in the folds of her dress, her breath drove into her lungs like a cold rail spike. She valiantly fought the instinct to flee. “I assure you, sir. I’m ignorant as to what you are referring.”
Splaying his fingers on the desk, he stood and loomed over her for a terse moment. A spiteful victory danced across his features. He moved to the sideboard next to the window overlooking Lake Geneva. The waxing moon gilded the mountains with silver, and the town below competed with their own metallic golden light. “Clever people have the most exasperating tendency. They spend so much time overestimating themselves, they underestimate everyone else.”
A frown weighted Alexandra’s mouth and pinched the skin beneath her brows. “Sir, if I’ve done something to offend someone, I—”
“Would you like some port?” De Marchand spun from the sideboard sporting a diamond-cut crystal decanter and two matching glasses.
The sight of it turned Alexandra’s tongue to the consistency of gravel.
She’d pilfered that selfsame decanter from him not two years ago, along with a bottle of port from his extensive collection of wine.
Which meant … he knew.
He’d discovered the cave.
The Ecole de Chardonne for girls had originally been built into the side of Mont Pèlerin as a clever château-fortress by a Frankish aristocrat in the eleventh century. In its depths, the boiler churned and roared, and during a night of exploration four years prior, Alexandra had chanced upon a labyrinthine walkway which, when bravely followed, became less of a hallway and more of a cave until it abruptly ended at a wall of ivy and thorn bushes.
Here, she and her dearest friends, Francesca Cavendish and Cecelia Teague, had created a haven for their Red Rogues Society. Red, because they all had hair of some variant shade of such. Rogues, because they spent every moment away from their so-called lady’s education, to learn all the things not allowed their sex. They read Poe and Dumas, war reports, and lascivious poetry. They taught themselves Latin and algebra. They’d even given each other masculine monikers which they used during their society gatherings and in correspondence. Frank, Cecil, and Alexander.
They’d become too bold over the years, Alexandra realized as she stared at the port decanter gripped in the headmaster’s hand. In their quest to discover and enjoy manly pleasures and pastimes denied ladies, they’d taken to occasionally pilfering a thing or two from the few male residents and employees at de Chardonne. Innocuous things, they thought. Things that would never be missed.
Like one of any dozen of decanters the headmaster possessed.
“Port is not a drink one offers a lady,” he started. “But I think you’ve developed a taste for forbidden things, have you not?” An almost giddy satisfaction dripped from de Marchand as he offered her the glass. “A hunger for pleasures only allowed to men.”
Dumbstruck, Alexandra could think of nothing else to say or do but accept the wine with white, trembling fingers. She dared not take a sip. She couldn’t have swallowed if she tried.
“You assumed no one knew about your little society all these years?” he scoffed gently. “Your trio of redheads. The fat one with all the wealth and no title. The scrawny, impertinent countess.”
Indignation flooded her at his valuation of her compatriots, enough to free her tongue. “I don’t at all consider that a fair assessment of—”