Chapter 1
Threadneedle Street, London
May 31, 1753
“Bloody codding hell,” Archer Stonewell, the Duke of Westmead, murmured to the midnight darkness of his deserted counting-house. Beside him a lone wax candle flickered and went out, as if in sympathy. There was no one here to see him slump, a grown man unmoored by a single slip of paper from a girl no more than twenty.
Your days as a bachelor are numbered, my dear brother, Constance had scrawled in a script so curlicued it gloated. The ball is set for the end of July and it is going to be sensational. No lady who enters Westhaven will wish to leave as anything other than your duchess. Try to enjoy your final month of grim, determined solitude—for I intend to have you married off by autumn. (And do stop glaring, Archer—I can feel it through the page!)
Rain splashed across his expensive leaded windows, a fitting accompaniment to the dread pooling in his stomach. Normally he took pleasure in the empty counting-house, with its rows of ledgers chronicling the growth of his investments into empires and the maps that slashed the country into markets ripe for exploitation. The building was a temple to the gods of order and control, and there was no match for its soothing effect on his soul.
Except tonight, it wasn’t working.
Already, the old fog was descending.
He was not insensible to his absurdity. It was he, after all, who had gritted his teeth and declared the begetting of an heir a matter of urgent moral imperative. It was he who had hired architects to restore the ravaged halls of Westhaven and proclaimed it time to expunge the decaying pile of its ghosts and find a wife to install in it instead.
He’d ordered it. He’d paid for it. Never mind that he preferred his life the way it was: deserted. Pristine. Absent of all reminders of the past.
Never mind that the only thing he wanted less in this world than a wife was a child.
Enough. He picked up his quill and did what was befitting of his responsibility to his tenants, to his family, and to the Crown. He dashed a word of thanks to Constance for her efforts, scrawled his signature, melted a puddle of vermilion wax across the folded paper, and stamped it with the seal of the title that he’d not for one day wanted, and was duty-bound to protect at all costs: the Duke of Westmead.
He put on his coat, extinguished the fire, and walked down the dark staircase to Threadneedle Street, where his coachman was waiting.
“Home, Your Grace?”
He hesitated.
He had been so very, very careful for so very, very long.
“A stop first. Twenty-three Charlotte Street.”
He closed his eyes and sank back into the rhythm of the carriage as it wound its way west toward Mary-le-Bone. It had been weeks since he’d visited the address. Weeks during which rumors of the establishment’s existence had made sneering speculation about the acts that were administered there—and the kinds of men who craved them—a sport in gentlemen’s clubs and coffeehouses.
His interests were precarious. Now was not an ideal time to be branded deviant, or worse.
But some nights, there was a limit to one’s capacity for caution. Some nights, a man needed to be wicked.
And he’d be damned if he wasn’t going to enjoy it.
The town house looked the same. Pale bricks, an unobtrusive terrace. The old black door unmarked, discreet as always. The street blessedly deserted.
At his knock, the maid, a sober girl, took his iron key from the cord he kept around his neck and led him without comment to the proprietress’s parlor. Elena sat by the fire in her customary black weeds. Unlike most women of her profession, her attire was chaste and severe—more like the robes of a papist nun than a courtesan’s plunging silks. Which was appropriate, given that her métier was closer to punishment than pleasure.
“Mistress Brearley,” the maid announced, “a caller.”
He said nothing. Elena knew him well enough to surmise that if he was here, he would not be in the mood to exchange pleasantries.
“Choose your instruments, undress, and wait,” Elena said.
The maid led him to the spare, windowless room. It was lit by candles and held little beyond a hassock and a rack. The girl left him, and he went through the ritual he had perfected over a decade’s attendance in these chambers. From the shelves along the wall, he scanned Elena’s wares. Leather straps, cat-o’-nine-tails, all manner of restraints. As always, he gathered the crisp rods of birch, kept pliant and green in a shallow tub of water, and an elegant braided whip with golden tails. He laid them neatly on a velvet cloth left for that purpose on a sideboard, and folded his clothes beside them. Nude but for his linen shirt, he knelt, facing the wall, to wait for her.
She would keep him waiting. Testing one’s endurance for suffering was, after all, her gift.
He heard her footsteps down the hall before she entered. “Be silent,” she said as she came into the room. “Or I shall gag you.”
She placed a rough black cloth over his eyes and tied it tightly, so it bit into his hair. The fabric smelled of lye.
“Did I not instruct you to undress?”
She had. But defiance made the proceedings far more interesting.
She jerked his shirt back by the collar and he felt a prick of metal at his nape—the cold blade of a pair of sewing shears. He heard a snip, and then the ripping of fine fabric. His shirt fell from his shoulders to pool around his thighs. And with it went the rod of tension that he carried in his neck.
He could feel her skirts brush against his skin as she tied a fist of birches into a sturdy switch. He braced, listening for the high-pitched whir as she tested it against the air.
The first stroke shocked him, though he had expected it, invited its bite. He sank his palms into the floor and arched back against the next lacerating hit.
His mind emptied.
For the first time in days, he smiled.
He closed his eyes at the relief and felt himself, at last, begin to stir.
Chapter 2
Grove Vale, Wiltshire
July 14, 1753
Opening shipping crates was not a ladylike activity. But Poppy Cavendish had precious little faith in the advantages of being mistaken for a lady.
She thrust her hammer claw around the final nail and bore down with all the considerable force her wiry body could muster. She had waited months for this particular box, stamped with its labels from Mr. Alva Carpenter across the Atlantic. She had no intention of waiting any longer.
The nail gave way with a satisfying pop. The smell of dried leaves and sphagnum moss wafted out around her. She closed her eyes and breathed it in—it smelled like musk, and earth, and opportunity.
Inside the box the trays of roots and bulbs had been packed gingerly, each item tagged with numbers corresponding to a sheet of sketches of the mature plants they would become. She willed her hands to unwrap them steadily, careful not to damage the dry, fragile cuttings that had traveled so long and so far. She held her breath as she reached the bottom of the crate.
Her hands found what they were seeking. Magnolia virginiana. At last.
The cuttings had survived the moisture and jostling of the journey across the sea and up the Thames and down the bumped and winding country roads to Wiltshire. There were eight of them here, thick, sturdy branches, their waxen leaves gone dry and dull but still intact.