“Why don’t you show me your artistic form,” he said lecherously, running a cigar-stained finger along the neckline of her bodice. “I suspect it’s far more beautiful than the art.”
“Dear Lord Harlan,” she said airily, though her pulse was beating like a rabbit in her throat. “Have you never been to a gallery? The art is on the walls. But this collection is insipid. Come, let’s return to the others. I want to arrange a game of vingt-et-un and relieve you of your money.”
He edged so close that her shoulders pressed into the curtains and she could smell his breakfast on his breath. “Not just yet. There’s more beauty in this room I’d like a look at.”
And then his hands had been everywhere at once.
His mouth was wet and suffocating, leaving moist trails slugged upon her neck and throat. His fingers smelled like damp tobacco. She tried to edge away, to politely signal he’d misread her cues. But the more she wriggled, the more forcefully he writhed against her and the more frightened she became.
“Stop it,” she’d whispered, but she was scared, and her voice was so faint she could scarcely hear herself, and he’d dragged his rotten lips up to her face, and tried to kiss her on the mouth, and it was so awful that she’d jabbed the filigreed edge of her silver fan to his neck and scraped it from his neckcloth to his ear, not stopping until she felt the tip meet bone.
“Damn you!” he’d hissed, rearing back with outrage in his eyes. She’d tugged her bodice and her skirts back into order, furious, unable to look him in the eye, praying the faint stubble at his jawline had not left telling marks along her neck.
Just then the door had opened.
And there he was.
Lord Apthorp.
Looking from her, flushed and disheveled with her gown askew, to Stoke, panting.
“We’re busy, Apthorp,” Stoke had sneered, whipping around.
Apthorp had stood completely rigid, looking from Stoke to her.
“Lady Constance,” he said in a voice that was not angry, but something worse: gravely concerned. “Do you need assistance?”
Still so aghast and humiliated she did not trust her own voice, she could only shake her head.
He jerked his chin in silent acknowledgment and shut the door without a word.
Wait, she’d wanted to cry. It isn’t what you think. It was a game, and he broke the rules.
Stoke had only adjusted his cravat and smirked at her, like it had all been a joke. “For a girl who acts like a tart, you kiss like a bloody goat.”
Tears had welled up in her eyes as he’d sauntered from the room.
Later, she’d found a curl of his skin dangling from the serrated blades of her fan.
She’d burned it in her fire like a witch.
Neither Lord Apthorp nor Lord Harlan Stoke had spoken a word to her for the remainder of their time in Devon. Apthorp left that very night, indicating he’d been called earlier to Cheshire.
But Stoke had remained for a week, and had made no secret of his contempt for her.
First he made a show of courting all the other girls, just to see if she was watching. He found his most willing audience in Lady Jessica Ashe, who was just fifteen. The poor girl looked like she might faint from pleasure when he spoke to her, and soon became his favorite, following him around like a loyal, lovesick puppy.
I should warn her about him, Constance had thought. He’ll probably paw her too.
But she’d felt so numb and guilty and sickened by her part in what had happened that she’d just ignored the unfolding flirtation and said nothing.
And when, not a year later, there came to be whispers about Lady Jessica … a girl who’d gotten into trouble, and would never have a season …
She hated that she had not sounded a warning.
She promised herself that the next time she had an inkling a man did not play by the assigned rules, she would act.
She would use her innate gift for observation to fashion herself a position in the world that gave her information others lacked. And she would use it as a scythe.
Not because she was cruel. Not because she was reckless in matters such as this.
Just the opposite: because she had learned her lesson.
Women must protect one another.
And if, in the same spirit, a man was being foolish and shortsighted, well, by God, she could protect him too.
Yes. She would do exactly as she always had: use the information she possessed in the service of what her gut told her was right.
And so she pulled herself out of bed and sat down at her desk and took out her most effective weapon: her quill. She wrote until she was ink-speckled and exhausted and the action she must take was starkly written on two letters.
One addressed to Gillian Bastian. And the other to Apthorp Manor, Cheshire.
She sealed them and delivered them to Rosecroft’s secretary to be put into the post.
And then she summoned her maid to remove her gown and dressed in her coziest old nightdress from the nuns and curled up on her bed, too tired to even climb beneath her swans-down quilt though it was only half past eight, and slept.
Until a knock at her door roused her at half ten.
“Lady Constance,” Winston said. “I’m sorry to disturb you so late, but Lord Apthorp is here, and he requests a word with you.”
The Rosecrofts’ parlor was dim, the last embers of the fire dying low. Apthorp anxiously adjusted the ribbon tied around his gift.
“You’re nervous,” Rosecroft observed, swirling brandy in his glass.
Apthorp glared at his cousin. “Not nervous. Just impatient.”
Rosecroft grinned and stretched his legs lazily before the fire. “Constance has been in a state ever since you went tearing out of here. I don’t like to see the girl upset.”
Neither did he, apparently. He’d left here determined not to speak to her again until he must, and by the time he was halfway to Westminster, the guilt of what he’d said and how he’d left things was so urgent he’d gone tramping out to procure the kind of silly, sentimental gift that had its roots in made-up stories.
Why had he pressed an argument with her, when speaking candidly only ever seemed to make things worse? Why could he not just ignore the thing she’d done a week ago and grit his teeth around bland pleasantries until he could get on with the bloody business of forgetting her?
But the truth was obvious enough that he could not avoid it no matter how angrily he stomped along the dirty streets.
Because it goes back longer than one week. Far longer.
Years.
He’d always hoped that if he ignored it—the kernel of unhappiness between them that they’d never spoken of—it would simply fade away, like a bad dream. He’d hoped that by the time he could be honest with Constance about his feelings, a few unpleasant moments in their youth would be irrelevant.
But it was relevant, clearly. It had become a kind of constant, seething tension that roiled beneath their every conversation. If he didn’t address it now, it might very well combust before his bill passed.
And then this torture would be for nothing.
“I did something I regret,” he said to Rosecroft, not quite knowing if he meant this afternoon, or years before, or all the other times that, looking back, were colored by that moment in the portrait gallery.
“It happens,” his cousin sighed. “You’re smart to have a word with her before she goes to sleep. If you want my advice, never let bad feelings linger overnight—they only turn to rot.”