And above all, he could not trust her with any more details about his past. There was no telling what she would think of him or whom she would share it with.
“The carriage is waiting!” Rosecroft called from the stairs.
“One moment,” Apthorp said over his shoulder. He leaned in and whispered to Constance in a low voice. “We will continue this discussion when we have more privacy. You must tell me everything you know, and then you must promise me that will be the end of this. Promise me.”
“Why should I?” she whispered back. “Because you have proven you are so competent at handling things yourself?”
He breathed in sharply, and her eyes flashed with something smug.
She must have been paying more attention to him all these years than she’d let on, for one could not aim a barb with such precision if one had not made careful study of the target.
She wanted to hurt him.
Well, fine. It had worked.
“I don’t need to be reminded that I’ve made mistakes,” he said quietly. “My entire life is one long vivid reminder of it. I’d like to prevent you from following suit.”
Her face softened, slightly. “That came out harshly. All I mean to say is that I can fix this, Apthorp. You only need to trust me.”
“My God,” he said, sinking back against the wall. “What I trust is that you have never met a problem you weren’t tempted to make a thousand times worse.”
She let forth a bright, acidic laugh. “Ah, yes. I suppose this situation is all my fault. I suppose I am responsible for your affliction.”
“What affliction?”
She smiled and batted her eyelashes. “Your desire for unnatural acts, my lord. Is that not what really ruined you?”
He felt like she had slapped him.
To say such a thing when he’d already explained what Charlotte Street meant to him, and what she’d risked by exposing it, proved she had no business anywhere near the truth.
He turned on his heel and began walking for the door, so he wouldn’t have to look at the victorious expression on her face. Then he thought better of it, and turned back to her.
“I don’t have an affliction,” he said in a low voice. “I am perfectly capable of regulating my desires. But, Constance?”
“Yes?” she said, glaring. He leaned in and inhaled the burnt vanilla of her perfume from the bare curve of her pale throat.
“Don’t call them unnatural until you try them.”
On the way to the opera, Apthorp made polite conversation with the Rosecrofts, as though absolutely nothing were wrong.
That was because he was evil.
Only a very wicked man could appear so serenely unaffected when she was so angry she could breathe fire and singe his perfect eyebrows right off his perfect head.
She knew she had done badly by him. She had accepted her culpability. She was going out of her way to make amends. She was doing so at the ultimate cost of her own family.
And for all that, he chastised her for doing the very thing upon which they’d agreed.
She should not have provoked him, but his maligning of her character was too rich to swallow blandly when she knew he was not innocent. She had not invented his Wednesday evening pastimes, even if she had been wrong to expose them.
Imagine, holding her wholly responsible for his secret membership in an illicit brothel. At the best of times, men felt entitled to freedoms that women would be stoned for, but he’d surely known his actions were not sanctioned by society when he’d made a habit of them. There was a price for freedom, as she well knew. If one wanted to be free, one had to bear the risk of being damned.
Besides, she was no villain. Everybody loved her. She’d spent her entire adult life ensuring it. And tonight she intended to remind him of that fact.
“We’re here,” Hilary remarked, looking out the window. “And the crowd is enormous. Are you sure you’re up to this, Constance? You look fevered.”
Fevered indeed. More like aflush with the fire of vengeance.
“Oh, indeed. I have never been more thrilled to attend the opera in my life.”
She waited for the others to exit the carriage as she took a moment to pinch her lips and smooth her gown. Then she accepted Apthorp’s hand and stepped down onto the pavement.
She held herself poised and swanlike before the swarming mass of jeweled ladies, bewigged gentlemen, alewives, and begging children, letting them take in the sight of her and Apthorp together in public for the first time.
She shifted her shoulders, so that the silver threads in her pink dress would catch in the golden sunset light and make her glow.
The throng stilled. “It’s Lady Constance!” someone squealed.
She smiled. With a dramatic flick of her wrist, she released the silver lace that held her train and stepped forward, allowing her skirts to fan out behind her in a shimmering wave to the approving murmurs of the crowd.
“Repent!” some woman squawked from somewhere in the crush of bodies. “Repent, ye filthy cull!”
She paused.
“Look at Cunny and Arsethorp, fine as can be!” a man shouted from somewhere closer.
The crowd erupted in a sound she had not heard directed at herself in years: laughter.
She smiled and tossed her head and charged onward, clutching Apthorp’s arm. As a child, she had learned the first lesson of mockery: reacting to it is the surest way to invite more abuse. She would ignore her persecutors and let them read about her triumph in tomorrow’s papers. She sailed through the theater doors, all but dragging Apthorp after her, and braced for the usual onslaught of waves and bows from her friends.
Not a soul looked up.
The artistic gentlemen of Covent Garden seemed unusually preoccupied in purchasing refreshments and locating their seats. Fine ladies’ backs turned just as she and Apthorp neared them.
They were deliberately avoiding her.
It sent her back in time. To arriving in France and discovering that she was everything a little girl ought not to be. To returning a decade later to discover her hard-won adopted mannerisms now made her queer, forward, uncommonly direct.
She’d fought her way through that. She’d beguiled, charmed, and bought anyone who didn’t mind her oddness, and made herself bored by or indispensable to those who did, until she had amassed the kind of influence that, when accompanied with unconscionable wealth, made one impervious to judgment.
She’d thought that she was immune.
“Why, if it isn’t Lady Cunny’s cully,” a man’s cultured voice drawled from somewhere a few paces away.
She turned sharply, violating her own rules by trying to locate the source of the titters. The whole crowd seemed to undulate with quiet laughter.
Apthorp tightened his grip on her arm and continued strolling casually to the Rosecrofts’ box, an expression of mild amusement fixed on his features.
Either he was a marvel of equanimity or else he was stone-deaf.
In any case he was elegant and stoic, while she—the master of appearances—was becoming unsuitably upset.
She had been so certain that her popularity would serve as a layer of protection for them both. For the first time a horrible thought crossed her mind: what if she wasn’t enough to save him?
Her slipper caught on a half step, and she tripped over the hem of her dress, stumbling forward. Apthorp gently righted her before anyone could notice.