A Rogue of One's Own

by Evie Dunmore

  She was right, of course. “Still,” something possessed Lucie to say, “you do not walk with us as much anymore because your gowns are too constraining. And your speech is changing—is he making you take elocution lessons?”

  And she had gone too far, she knew even before she heard her friend’s sharp intake of breath.

  “I should not have said that,” she murmured, a sinking feeling in her chest.

  “No,” Annabelle said quietly. Her beautiful face was white. “You should not have.”

  “I’m a beastly friend.”

  “You are not being fair.” Annabelle crossed her arms, the air around her crackling with the sparks of her own temper. “Has my life changed? Why, yes, it has. I have changed the constraints of poverty to the constraints of protocol—guess which I prefer? I enjoy being safe and well fed. I prefer constraining gowns over having to mend my old ones, over and over, worrying how I would replace them before they turned into rags. I like having strength and resources at my disposal for matters beyond my immediate survival. I am of much more use to the Cause as I am now than I was before. But none of that signifies—what signifies is that Montgomery gave up near everything he once considered important to be with me. And I would have shared my life in a hovel with him. Because there is no one who sees me better, and no one I trust more.”

  Lucie was cringing. “I apologize.”

  “How could he possibly give me any more? He could lay down his life for me, but I daresay he would do so without blinking if required.” Annabelle’s eyes were blazing like emeralds on fire. She had worked herself into a right mood, and Lucie could hardly blame her.

  “I apologize,” she repeated, feeling dreadful. “Truly, I spoke out of turn.”

  Annabelle’s arms remained firmly crossed.

  Lucie sank onto the bed next to the tangle of remaining gowns.

  This was worse than what had just transpired in the breakfast room. Worse than the confrontation with Lady Wycliffe. She was unraveling in some fashion, had been so for days, with resentment sprawling destructively around her like the arms of a kraken. Could she blame her friends for having doubts?

  She raised solemn eyes to Annabelle. “It does not excuse my tirade, but for what it’s worth, I felt hurt.” It made her feel queasy to say this out loud, as if she were revealing a soft, pale flank to a marksman. “I was ghastly to you because I felt hurt when I thought you thought it was me. I would never try and embarrass you, in your own home no less.”

  Annabelle’s face fell. She rushed to settle next to her and clasped Lucie’s hand in hers.

  “I’m sorry, too.” The green of her eyes was muted again, all temper gone out of her. “Please believe me.” She gave Lucie’s hand a squeeze. “I never meant to give you this feeling.”

  Lucie shrugged. “It’s all these years of me being known as a troublemaker. It’s bound to confuse people.”

  Annabelle’s eyes looked suspiciously shiny. “I’m not people, I’m your friend. My emotions are running high—will you accept my apology?”

  Lucie sighed. How could she not?

  “There is nothing to forgive,” she said, and gave Annabelle’s hand a squeeze in turn. “And I’m happy for you. I am.”

  Even when contrite, with her regal posture and proud cheekbones, Annabelle looked as though she had always been destined to be someone. Poise and pride were in her marrow. It was just a bitter pill to swallow that it had taken the money and the protection of a man to help her achieve her destiny. But that was how it was. And perhaps, she, Lucie, was turning into a bitter old crone before her time.

  Annabelle toyed with a tassel on the belt of her dress. “If you must know,” she said, “I don’t relish constraints of any kind, be they gowns, protection officers, or protocol. But Lucie.” She raised her eyes, and the depths of emotion in them stunned Lucie for a moment. “Lucie, I have never been so happy. Perhaps I am greedy, but I wish to believe I can do both: be a wife to the man I love, and work for women’s liberty.”

  Lucie had to yet see such a thing.

  But if anyone could hope to do both, it had to be Annabelle, hadn’t it. “It’s your prerogative to wish for however much you want,” she said.

  Besides, even to her bitter crone eyes, it was obvious that the duke was besotted with Annabelle. He wasn’t an expressive man but inevitably, his attention shifted and settled on his wife, wherever she happened to be in the room. In terms of affection, their union appeared balanced. It was hardly degrading to fawn over a man who was fawning right back.

  “What are you going to do now, about the pamphlets?” she asked. “Is the prince terribly annoyed?”

  Annabelle scoffed. “Between the two of us, I think he’s dying from ennui, so he is grateful for diversion of any kind. That said, he doesn’t suffer provocations against his person gladly.”

  “I imagine—what will you do?”

  Annabelle smiled without humor. “Montgomery already convinced him that the pamphlets were the idea of some inebriated ladies in the wee hours after the ball; a wager between foolish women.”

  “Ingenious. The most expedient way to take the gravity out of any situation.”

  “Of course. No red-blooded male would concern himself with such a frivolous matter.”

  “The women, however, are another kettle of fish,” muttered Lucie, remembering the turned backs, Lady Salisbury’s piercing eyes . . . her mother’s seething embarrassment. “They think I tried to make a fool of a duke. Or tried to draw attention. The question is, who did it? And why? Are there any clues?”

  Annabelle’s face darkened. “Nothing yet. Montgomery has plenty of detractors among his guests who would like to make him look less than in control.”

  “As do I,” Lucie murmured.

  Annabelle’s eyes widened. “You think this was directed against you?”

  “That was my first thought, although why someone would go to such lengths—oh.” A thought struck her, and it sent her stomach plummeting straight to the floor. She knew one person who might have a rather acute interest in sabotaging her credibility. Someone who had ample experience with playing cruel pranks on her. Tristan.

  Her palms turned damp, and she noted that her heart was pounding.

  “We will find out whoever it was,” Annabelle said, confidence in her voice. “In the meantime, the whole affair is only a provocation if we make it so. As long as we make light of it, the people who continue to take offense will look terribly gauche. No one here wants to look gauche.”

  This was true. She still reached for her bag. Mollified prince or not, the thought of spending another day under covert scrutiny made her skin crawl. The magic of last night, the warmth of Tristan’s hands, the easy laughter and champagne, it had gone in a blink, leaving her chest feeling hollow. Her body was reacting far too strongly to a potential betrayal by Tristan Ballentine.

  Annabelle folded her hands in her lap. “Lucie, I don’t want to pry, but . . .”

  “Go on?”

  “Is there something that is troubling you? If I may say so, you do seem a little angry lately.”

  She chortled. “I’m always angry.”

  Annabelle shook her head. “This is different. If you wish to speak about something in confidence, I am here.”

  Half an hour ago, she would have appreciated the offer. But if Tristan had scattered the Citizen around Claremont, she was back to despising him, a simple emotion that required no further analysis.

  A flurry of knocks hit the door, and Hattie and Catriona tumbled into the room a moment later.

  “I told you so,” Hattie said as she flung herself onto the bed. “Did I not tell you so?” And, when everyone looked at her blankly, she raised her hands toward the ceiling. “Whenever the four of us attend an event, there’s a scandal.” She shot Lucie a speaking glance. “And this had absolutely nothing to do with me not contro
lling my intuition.”

  Annabelle looked from Hattie to Lucie to Catriona. “Has she taken leave of her senses?”

  “Never mind,” said Catriona, and claimed the last available space on the mattress. “Do we have a suspect? Do we know whether Lucie or Montgomery was the target?”

  Hattie nodded. “And we need a plan how we will catch the culprit and keep the awkwardness contained at a reasonable level until our departure.”

  Lucie’s heartbeat slowed. The hollowness in her chest filled with warmth, and she surveyed her friends with a lump in her throat. “No culprit yet,” she said. “But we will pretend to be unbothered.”

  “We are unbothered,” Annabelle said firmly.

  Then she rang the bell to order up a tray with a full breakfast for Lucie and more tea and pastries for everyone.

  * * *

  Tristan arrived in the breakfast room bleary-eyed and in need of coffee, black as tar, please. The ball had petered out shortly after midnight, which was when he had convinced a handful of gentlemen including the duke’s younger brother, Lord Peregrin, that it was necessary to play vingt-et-un in Claremont’s blue smoking room. They had dealt cards and poured drinks until everyone was red-eyed and badly disheveled. He had emerged victorious from a drawn-out battle of card games, but because he had still been clearheaded enough to think obsessive thoughts about a certain woman in red, he had coaxed young Lord Peregrin into raiding Montgomery’s port cabinet. The lad, easily inspired because he was only nineteen, had selected an impressively ancient bottle that was now giving him an equally impressive headache.

  It was always the last bottle that did it, he surmised as he surveyed the empty breakfast buffet with a vise clamping down on his skull. He beckoned one of the footmen lining the brocade-papered walls, because it appeared that Montgomery’s spartanic household really did clear the breakfast tables before one o’clock. He asked that the footman bring up a breakfast tray and to come find him outside at the back of the house.

  Light glared through the tall glass doors leading to the terrace, right into his pounding brain. He squinted. He should have taken a back exit, away from the crowds. The whole regiment of house party guests was promenading out here and in the French Garden below in their Sunday finery.

  He was about to retreat when she found him.

  “My lord!”

  Cecily was bright-eyed and rosy-cheeked, because she hadn’t been drinking and gambling until past the darkest hour. She was of a mind to take a turn around the French Garden, she told him, the hope that he accompany her written plainly in her eyes, while Lucie’s ever-present mother raked him with a cool glare. Unlike innocent Ceci, Lady Wycliffe was not fooled by his meticulously assembled attire and too-tight cravat knot but saw the brandy and port still sloshing in his innards.

  He wanted to tell everyone to bugger off.

  What he did was offer Cecily his arm, and her small hand latched on with a surprising grip.

  She chattered about something as he descended the steps leading to the French Garden—the weather, presumably.

  His attention was consumed by the group of women coming toward them at a leisurely pace, their arms entwined, their merry voices drifting toward him. Lucie and her lady friends.

  Lady Catriona, the Greenfield daughter, and the duchess returned his greeting when they passed each other.

  Lucie gave him a dark, assessing stare, and he just knew she considered him guilty of something. He nearly stopped right then, to demand what had ruffled her feathers, but an ice wall rose around Lady Wycliffe when the quartet passed them by, and short of abandoning the woman on his arm in full sight of the ton and run after another, there was nothing he could do but move along.

  “The duchess is very generous,” Cecily murmured as he led her deeper into the garden. “Though some people say it reveals her own radical inclinations to be so forgiving of such a prank.”

  He squinted, evidently still too drunk to follow. “A prank?”

  “Haven’t you heard?” Cecily said, her voice hushed. “Apparently, Lady Lucie left some radical suffrage pamphlets around Claremont so that the Prince of Wales could find them.”

  His expression didn’t change, but she now had his full attention. “Did she say it was her?”

  Cecily gave him a puzzled look. “No. At least I did not hear her confess,” she added quickly.

  “Ah well. Then it wasn’t her.”

  “How certain you are,” Cecily said, her blue eyes amazed.

  “It’s a pointless provocation, which is stupid, and considering the duchess is her friend, it would also be disloyal. Your cousin is neither stupid nor disloyal.”

  Cecily’s smile was sugary enough to make a man’s teeth ache. “You know my cousin well.”

  “You don’t have to know her well to know this about her.”

  “How quick you are to judge a person’s character,” Cecily marveled. “Do you think it is your observant writer’s eye?”

  Mother of God, help, he thought as he smiled at Cecily so brilliantly, she tripped over her own feet.

  Lucie ambushed him on his way back to the breakfast room. She looked as warm as black ice, and he knew he should have had a coffee first before engaging with that.

  “Did you do it?” she demanded.

  He was unprepared for the bodily reaction to her accusation. His muscles turned rigid. A warmth that had lingered in his chest since last night dissipated.

  “Did I scatter a few pamphlets around a ducal palace?” he said. “To discredit you? When no one with an ounce of brain matter would contemplate such a thing?”

  Her gaze was sharp like the point of a dagger, trying to make forays into his very soul. “It is no secret that you are trying to outmaneuver me.”

  She did not think he had much of a brain, he remembered. Lazy or a fool, she had called him, or maybe both, and it seemed she had returned to regarding him such.

  “I suppose you think our dance last night was also part of a ploy,” he said.

  “I don’t know what to think about you anymore.” She stepped closer, bringing with her the clean scent of lemons. Her upturned face was tense with rancor. “Sometimes, I think you do not know whether you would rather seduce or sabotage me.”

  He shrugged. “It would amount to the same thing, would it not?”

  Her chin jutted out. “I admit, I briefly thought there was more to you.”

  He could have handled it like the adult man he was. Instead, he allowed the carrot-haired boy to take the reins. “Why not take my offer and be certain, how much there is to me?” he murmured. “It stands for the summer, remember?”

  He didn’t bother to watch her walk away. Her back would be rigid, her skirts snapping, and all things considered, it was better that way. He needed a brief respite from her. He might have set out to seduce her, but dancing with her, flirting with her, revealing pieces of himself to lure her in had evidently begun to affect him, too, laying parts of him he had not realized he still possessed bare to her attacks, and he needed to regroup.

  Chapter 21

  I favor this one.” Lucie slid the magazine toward Hattie across the office desk, her index finger on the open page.

  Hattie briefly peered at the fabric sample beneath the black-and-white lithography, then shook her head with such vigor, the pearls on her earrings clicked together. “You need them to be heavier, and they most certainly should not be purple. Purple, Lucie?”

  “Why not?”

  “Because it is purple.”

  “A color that has gravity, but is not gray, which is drab, as you informed me. And I prefer a lighter fabric over a thick one—airy rooms lift the human spirit. It says so in the piece on page twenty-seven in this magazine.”

  Hattie’s lips remained firmly pressed into a line.

  “All right,” Lucie said evenly. “No purple.”

&n
bsp; She should have never become involved in selecting curtains—there were only twenty-four hours in the day and there was presently little progress on more pressing tasks on her list. But since last week at Claremont they had decided on a gentle reform rather than a coup, it stood to reason that London Print would continue to exist, if not expand, and therefore it required a look reflecting their new direction and a space accommodating of female employees. To her surprise, Tristan had simply nodded and signed off her budget proposal when she had presented the measures required for the refurbishment. Ever since, new furniture arrived, worn carpets were discarded, and a partition was being torn down. The process stirred up a lot of dust, and the heavy thud of workmen’s boots echoed up and down the hallways of the office floor. The staff grumbled as they continued to work amid the chaos. They could not just take a week’s leave, thanks to an explosion in orders for Tristan’s works—word that the Prince of Wales had endorsed the diaries had quickly spread far and wide. The production manager was already in an uproar. “We can manage one of the books on time, but not both of them, certainly not if you also wish to redesign the periodicals,” he had cried at their last meeting, red in the face with exasperation.

  A faint ticking began in Lucie’s temples as she recalled the meeting. Her life, so carefully calibrated over the years to accommodate all her different duties, was perilously close to staggering around like a drunk. Consider delegating more . . . delegating is an art form. Easy for Melvin to say. She could of course put Hattie fully in charge of the décor, but just yesterday her friend had proposed wall tapestries depicting kittens for the women’s office, and much as she loved cats, this was not her vision for London Print. If she tasked someone other than Hattie, her friend’s sensibilities would be hurt, which would result in a drawn-out sulk. Lord help whoever got between Hattie and her quest for her next project.

  “What do you think of midnight blue?” Hattie said. “Blue is calming—”