Not because of the peccadilloes of which he’d been accused. The rumors were inaccurate—mostly—and in any case, he never took a lover who didn’t share in his enthusiasms.
No. He would forbid any woman from marrying him on grounds of his sheer, asinine stupidity. For only a fool would allow himself to be ruined twice.
The first time could be forgiven. He hadn’t known what he was doing when he’d staked the remnants of the family fortune on a pair of failing salt mines, and he’d spent a decade correcting that misstep. Proving he was not, in fact, incompetent. Building a coalition that would restore his own estate and the greater western Midlands to prosperity.
Now, for all his efforts, Westminster was covered in woodcuts of his flayed and reddened backside. He’d be lucky if he could afford to keep his holdings in another month of coal.
He poured more brandy in his cup. It splashed onto the table. He couldn’t even drown himself in drink properly.
“God’s elbow,” he muttered. A weak invective, for in his penitent years he’d eschewed cursing. “Dam-fucking-nation,” he tried again.
Yes. That was better.
More like how he felt: alit with wrath at whoever had exposed secrets that were supposed to be better protected than the royal jewels.
But mostly fury at himself. Because he was going to fail at a pursuit most men in his position seemed to scarcely need to try at. Again.
Faintly he heard a rapping at the kitchen door downstairs. That would be Tremont, his valet, with the effects he’d ordered sent here from his usual lodgings at his cousin Rosecroft’s house in Mayfair.
Tap tap.
“Becalm thyself,” he muttered. “No need to rush the gates of hell.”
He walked down the stairs to the cellar kitchen and threw open the shutters.
The face that greeted him through the window was not that of his valet.
It was one Lady Constance Stonewell.
No. Oh, dear God. No.
She waved, gestured for him to let her in, and darted beneath the eave to protect her elaborate silver-blond coiffure from the drizzle.
What was she doing here? Someone was going to see her alone in his garden, and then they would both be ruined.
He threw open the kitchen door, put a finger to his lips to urge her silence, pulled her inside, and scanned above the mossy garden walls for roving eyes.
The garden was quiet. The shutters of the house next door were closed.
Of course.
No one lived on the Strand anymore. At least not the kind of people who would recognize the sister of the Duke of Westmead.
He stepped back inside and shut the door behind him.
“Heavens, Apthorp, what is this place?” she asked, wrinkling her nose at the damp. “Tremont said you’d moved to Apthorp Hall. He didn’t mention it was abandoned.”
That was because he’d not found the force of will to inform Tremont that his new lodgings had stood unoccupied since 1742, and had the mouse droppings to prove it.
A large false widow spider lowered itself from a rusted iron chandelier above his head and dropped directly onto Constance’s gloved hand. She raised a pale, wry eyebrow and flicked it off. “Tell me, is it the ghosts that drew you here, or the spiders?”
He wanted to laugh, but if he did so, he would surely weep. And one did not weep in front of a woman like Lady Constance Stonewell.
God, she was a vision, with that ever-upturned mouth and those luminous blue eyes and hair as pale and silver as some fairy out of myth.
She leaned forward and touched his shoulder with a single, impossibly dainty finger. “Apthorp? Are you well?”
He found his voice. “You mustn’t be here. I’m going to find a litter to take you home.”
“No need, my coachman is waiting in the mews. I told him I’d be an hour. I need to speak to you. Have you somewhere more … tidy … where we might have a little chat?”
“Constance!” he said more forcefully than was polite. She was accustomed to his finest self—the one that was always a gentleman, no matter his true feelings. Perhaps his improper use of her Christian name would shock her into hearing him. “You must leave. Right now.”
In answer she craned her neck, leaned toward him, and sniffed. Her eyes lit up with that glow of mischief that made her such a divisive presence in the nation’s most aristocratic drawing rooms.
“Why, Lord Bore,” she said, with a sly smile. “Have you been drinking?”
“Not nearly as much as I’d like to,” he muttered. “Please, you have to leave.”
She chuckled as if he had made a splendid joke and remained planted where she stood.
It physically hurt to look at her, standing in this filthy kitchen with her laughing eyes in her beautiful yellow dress, her pale hair frizzing in the damp.
He had to save her.
“Come with me upstairs. If you take a sedan chair and keep the drapes pulled, no one will know you were here. I’ll send your carriage home.”
“Very well, if you insist. But first, I must speak with you.”
He drew a shaky breath. There was only one explanation for her resistance: she hadn’t heard the rumors. Which, in keeping with his luck, would make today the only time in history Lady Constance Stonewell was not the first to know every scrap of gossip on two continents.
He had to do the honorable thing. The miserable, but honorable, thing.
He had to tell her what was being said about him.
He drew up his last shred of dignity. “Lady Constance, I hope you will forgive me for speaking of improper matters, but you see, there has been a scandal. If anyone were to learn you were here, you’d be—”
“As ruined as you are?” she cut in dryly.
He sank back against the door. “So you know. Of course you do. Everyone knows.”
The amusement in her eyes faded. She looked up at the damp-stained ceiling and let out a shaky breath. “I know because I wrote the poem.”
She nodded stiffly, blinking, as though she couldn’t quite believe it herself.
His frantic desire to get her out of his house by any means necessary was suddenly replaced by a very still kind of quiet. A quiet that began in his bones and rose up through his blood. The kind of quiet the body undertook when the mind needed all the energy one possessed to make sense of what one had just heard.
A statement that could not—must not—be true.
He had never begged for anything in his life. He was far too proud.
But today, in this moment, he could only whisper a plea: “Tell me that I misheard you.”
Constance glanced up into his eyes, then quickly looked away. “I suspect you will be very cross with me,” she said in a low voice.
Cross was not the word. He gripped the dusty table to keep from retching.
She walked around it to come closer, the butter yellow of her dress collecting gray strands of dust as the hem dragged across his dirty floorboards.
She was saying things as she approached him, speaking in an uncharacteristic high-pitched clip that he barely understood.
“Please trust I didn’t mean you any harm. It was only meant for the eyes of a few ladies. I was trying to avert disaster. But then, what is disastrous for Miss Bastian and what is disastrous for you are not quite the same, and in any case, I don’t know how it came to be in Saints & Satyrs. But you see, all is not lost because—”