A Lady’s Code of Misconduct

by Meredith Duran

  She had tried to disown credit today. He understood the reason. She had done it as a kind of apology for all the things she had kept concealed.

  But he did not want her apologies. He wanted her to own herself, brazenly and unabashedly. She had shown him only one part of herself in these last few weeks—an extraordinary part, tentative and earnest and kind despite her better judgment, clear thinking and funny, compassionate and full of wit. But she had closed away all the rougher, sharper angles. The grit, the steel mettle at her core, the defiant anger that had kept her safe for so many years. And he wished to see those as well. To show her, to prove to her, that those parts of her could be admired and loved, too.

  He could lie here for hours, staring at her. Slowly, slowly, he wrapped the curl around his hand. Gentleness, tender care, reverent praise—these were what she deserved. He had a great deal to make up for. In the rain, that night, when he had grabbed her—

  His hand fisted.

  She murmured in her sleep, reached up to scratch her head. He opened his hand, watched the curl escape from it. That was the only movement of which he felt capable. He held himself very still, waiting.

  Her hand crept languidly back under the pillow. After a moment, she rolled to her other side, nestling deeper beneath the blankets.

  He counted her breaths, waited until she had drawn a dozen or more. Then, with the greatest care he had ever granted any movement in his life, he slipped from the bed and stole across the carpet. Eased open the door and guided it closed again.

  His house. He stood in the moonlight flooding through the skylight above, heart pounding, and stared out over the balconied walkway, seeing nothing of what lay below.

  So. This was how it came back to him, then. Not in some flooding rush, but as the aftermath of such a flood. The river of Lethe, the waters of forgetting, subsiding as he slept, leaving him standing, with no sense of surprise, on the ground that had been concealed only hours before.

  He stepped forward to grip the railing, though he did not feel unbalanced. Unknitted, disjointed—no. He knew who he was, how this body worked, how unthinkingly he could rely on it.

  Elland. He had asked her to listen for him. Christ, he had not asked, he had blackmailed her into it. But what had she discovered? There were deep waters here still. He could not remember the attack that had felled him, or what had led to it. He could remember her at Marylebigh, her bastard cousin’s savage enjoyment in humiliating her, not even realizing how he failed—her dignity unbreakable, her contempt quiet and cutting. The dark beauty of her chignon so heavy against her nape, the foulness of imagining her wed to Archibald, who so maliciously squandered the only opportunity he might ever have to know a woman better than himself.

  But his admiration had been calculative. Cold. He’d had no interest in the complication of a woman who could match his own wit, who might outthink him, given the chance, whose presence would prove exhausting for the same reason it proved enlivening. He could not remember what came after that night, when he had helped her back to the house in a driving rain.

  His hand ached from gripping the rail too tightly. He squeezed harder yet, until the bones in his hands threatened to break. It felt like a drug in his system, a drug and he the recovered addict, this black cast into which his thoughts might so easily slip again. He understood his coldness. He knew why he had forced the kiss on her that night in the countryside. He remembered his own manufactured indifference to his family, who had misjudged him once too often, abandoned him for the final time. No atonement will ever be possible. You will always be the villain to them. So be it. Accept the verdict, he had thought. And also: They think you useless. Prove the opposite.

  But that cold, dark cast had been blinding. These past weeks proved it. Half-dead, he had woken into his family’s arms. And into the care of a woman who might so easily have spat in his face and walked away. This marriage . . . he felt deeply confused. How had it happened? And afterward, with his memory gone . . . Wives had walked away before. Nothing would have stopped her. But she had chosen to stay.

  For her father’s money. Of course. That was what she’d been waiting for. The signature from her uncle.

  He pivoted toward the bedroom, feeling gutted.

  What had happened in there tonight. The rapport between them. Their laughter. Their triumph. None of that had been feigned. And tonight . . . She had taken his hand and followed him to that bed. She had pulled the clothes from his body of her own will, and put her mouth to him.

  To the man he had been. To the other Crispin, scrubbed clean of the sins of his past.

  He ran a hand up his face. His throat felt raw, as though he’d been screaming.

  Once she knew he remembered—how would he blame her for anything she did then? The contract forged in that bed today had not been for him. She had not consented to him, but to the other man.

  He could be that other man to her. He could remain so. Could he not?

  That was a better man by far. His regrets were ancient, not fresh. His sins accidental, not designed. He knew how to love the woman in that bed. He had a feel for it, a growing talent, a desire never to cease learning more.

  Crispin exhaled. Yes. Why not? He could be a son again, to his parents whose concern and love were even stronger than their doubts. He could be a brother. Charlotte desired nothing more. And today, Atticus’s embrace, his congratulations, had forged a new path as well.

  Above all, he could be a husband to her. He could persuade her, even once her damned uncle signed the papers, that she belonged here. That New York had never been meant to claim her. That there could be freedom with him, too.

  Only one flaw marred this plan. He remembered enough now to know that he was caught up in something very dark. Elland, the penal colony that did not exist, whose operators, their true identities frustratingly difficult to prove, had so handsomely funded Mason’s campaigns—that mystery had sharp and long-reaching claws.

  And today, in the Commons, he had dared them to aim for him.

  He had pulled her into this mess. Had asked her to spy for him.

  And then married her.

  God above. She was no safer than he was.

  He felt for the scar on his scalp and imagined her prone and lifeless on the pavement, bleeding out . . .

  No, he could not regret remembering. He knew enough now to protect her truly. Even the crushing clarity of his regret felt tolerable, for it was his regret, not some stranger’s that had been saddled to him unjustly. He had earned this dark weight. He knew its contours well. He knew how to carry it without letting it brush against her.

  She never needed to know.

  Some noise came from below. The sound of a settling foundation. Or of a prowler’s careless footstep.

  He made his way down the stairs. Naked—it made no matter. His body was a weapon that he remembered now how to use. He walked through every room twice. The windows were all locked. He stood alone in the darkness, listening.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  When Jane woke, it was dawn. She sat up, alone in the bed, amazed she had slept so long—soundly, dreamlessly. Hot visions rolled through her mind. She heard a footstep at the door and braced herself for embarrassment. She had not been modest. She had not been a lady.

  Crispin stepped inside, already dressed for the day, a tray in his hand. She clutched the sheets to cover her nakedness.

  “I bring coffee,” he said, “for the tradesman’s daughter.” When she laughed, he added, “Tea and chocolate are also on the way, but only if you insist, to my regret, on playing the lady.” He sent a slow, suggestive smile to her as he laid the tray on the table. His lingering look down her body was hot, unmistakably admiring.

  Modesty suddenly felt like an empty reflex. Her grip on the sheet loosened; she smiled back at him. “Are you so very thirsty?”

  “Very,” he said, coming to sit beside her on the bed. His hand found her knee beneath the sheets. There was something possessive in the heavy drape of his palm.
He pressed a kiss to her throat. “Hungry as well,” he murmured against her skin. “You smell . . . edible.”

  Her laughter felt so easy. As though this was precisely how it was meant to be, nothing to marvel at. So familiar and right.

  As though she were some other woman who had not lied to this man to his peril.

  He sensed, perhaps, the sudden shift in her mood. He stood again. “So? Will you wait for tea, or may I tempt you now?”

  The words were pleasant, but they felt emptied of suggestive undertones. His perceptiveness would never fail to amaze her. “Coffee, please. My brain feels furred. And . . . would you hand me my wrapper?”

  “If I must,” he said reluctantly. And as simply as that, she was smiling again.

  Once the cups were poured, they took seats by the window that overlooked the small garden that ran along the eastern wall. He opened the window, allowing a fresh, cool, flower-scented breeze to drift over them. It seemed to carry away something else with it: her comfort and ease.

  Having been honest with her body, she had hoped this other honesty might come easier. Instead, she felt she had gained something new, which now, like so many other things between them, stood to be lost.

  “You asked me to spy for you,” she said. There was no elegant way to begin this conversation.

  His nonchalance, as he sipped from his cup, seemed a kindness to her. “Rather low of me.”

  “Yes,” she said. “So it was.” But she felt no animus for the man sitting across from her. He’d had nothing to do with it. “It wasn’t you.”

  His hand hitched briefly as he laid down his cup, causing a few drops of coffee to splash into the saucer. “But it was,” he said evenly. “This body, this brain. I won’t ask to be forgiven for it.”

  “You did me a favor in return.” Now she was defending the other man, for the sake of this one. But it was true. “My uncle had arranged a trap to force me into marriage with his son. You helped me to escape it.”

  He studied her. The rising light caught his face slantwise, illuminating the blueness of his eyes, painting in crystalline detail the curve of his mouth and the square angle of his jaw. “You once claimed not to mince words,” he said. “A favor is something one does without repayment. You were backed into a corner, Jane. One which you should never have found yourself in. I think the better word for my assistance would be blackmail.”

  For a moment, she felt startled; he spoke as though he remembered it. But she supposed this man, guided by nobler principles, could neatly distill the injustice even from the scant details she’d provided.

  She shrugged. “There was no one else to help me. So whatever it was, blackmail or a favor, it came in handy for me.”

  Those words were not kindness, she realized, but plain truth: had it not been for Mr. Burke, she might well have been bullied into submission.

  No. She never would have submitted. But her uncle was a master of rationalization. Had he gained the advantage over her that night, guaranteeing that his guests would spread word of her supposed disgrace with Archibald . . . then she would have had no choice but to turn openly defiant. And defiance, the unsheathed force of will—that, he would not tolerate in a woman. She knew that from watching him with his wife. She knew that from her painful first months at Marylebigh. He would have persuaded himself then that the time for bullying was over, that no choice remained to him but force.

  Crispin was waiting, his silence patient and watchful. She remembered suddenly a moment last night . . . the way he had used his keen perception as he’d touched her to study her face, gauge her reactions, adapt his movements to what she liked best.

  Her face warmed. She looked down into her cup, cleared her throat, and rose to fetch more sugar.

  When she came back to her seat, she said, “The main point is this: you asked me to listen for the name of Elland. It is not a man’s name but the name of a penal colony.”

  “I see.”

  “But this penal colony doesn’t officially exist.”

  Nothing else. He watched her as steadily and unblinkingly as a great cat.

  She sighed. “I don’t know the whole story of it. But from what you told me, it was never used for ordinary prisoners. It was opened decades ago, during the Luddite risings, to house insurgent leaders. The kind of men whose followers would deify them, call them martyrs, if they were hanged. It became a place to hide these men. To make them disappear, as if they had abandoned their people and their cause overnight.”

  “How democratic,” he said flatly.

  “Yes, well, you found some private intelligence that suggests it was decommissioned in the forties. But then . . .” She paused, trying to recall as precisely as possible the explanation that Mr. Burke had given her. She remembered too clearly the mild amusement he’d shown at her shock. “My uncle, you know, took over my father’s seat in the Commons. But while he promised to carry out my father’s plans, he quickly showed himself a liar. He knew he would not retain the seat in the next election, but he managed to endear himself to the right people, who invited him to stand for a different borough. That campaign did not begin promisingly. Then, of course, the peculiar miracle—well, of course you don’t recall it. His opponent vanished. Ran away with a mistress, everybody said—he was last seen in the company of a very flamboyant woman. I think you were suspicious of my uncle’s role—I’m sure you weren’t alone in that. So you looked into it, probably hoping that it would yield information that would help you keep my uncle in line.

  “Instead, somehow, you uncovered mention of Elland. You never told me how. But you started to hunt down that lead instead. Perhaps it was connected to my uncle’s sudden extravagance? The ball, the new coach . . . He could not have embezzled so much from my trust without getting caught. It must have come from elsewhere. At any rate, you told me to report anything I heard of Elland.”

  She heard him release a long, measured breath. “And what did you hear?”

  “Not much,” she said. “Almost nothing, in fact, until one night . . . My uncle received a letter. You asked me to copy it, but all it held was a single line—‘Elland in revolt’—and three names. I think . . .” It sounded mad. “I think you suspected them to be men imprisoned at Elland. Forgotten there for the last twenty years.”

  He nodded slowly. “Do you remember the names?”

  She remembered how frightened she had been, slipping into her uncle’s bedroom to hunt for his keys. How her hand had shaken so violently that she’d dropped the key ring in the hall outside his study. No explosion had ever sounded so loud as the clatter of that key ring on the bare wooden floor. Nor had time ever dragged so slowly, minutes turning into hours, than when she’d unlocked his desk drawers, combing through them one by one.

  “I do remember the names,” she said softly. Her hand had been trembling so hard that she’d botched the words, nearly spilled the inkpot. She’d had to recopy the whole thing before it came out with clarity. “All three of them,” she said. They had burned through her brain that night like a drumbeat, the terrible tattoo played at an execution.

  She had been so wild, so desperate, to escape from that house. It had been shaping, all around her, into her coffin.

  The fierce grip of his hand on hers brought her back to the present. He was leaning close, whispering her name. “It’s all right,” he said. “You are safe now. Here with me.”

  “Am I?” Her voice was unsteady. “Crispin, you loathed me. You will do so again.”

  “I did not loathe you.” A sharp, fierce denial. His hand hooked through her hair, still heavy and loose on her shoulders. He pulled her into him, kissed her deeply.

  She relaxed in his grip. His mouth had magic in it. Sweet, languorous nectar, drugging her into ease.

  But a drug wore off. She pulled away. “You don’t understand,” she said. “You don’t remember. But once you do—”

  “I will remember this,” he said, and kissed her again, dragging her up and onto his lap. “This,” he said hung
rily, nosing through her hair, finding the sensitive spot beneath her ear, brushing his mouth against it until she shivered. “And this,” he whispered, kissing his way down her throat. His hand slipped under her robe, palming her breast, his skin hot and rough against hers. “This,” he said very low. “Do you think I won’t?”

  This argument could not be won. She did not want to win. She threaded her hands through his hair. “Take me back to bed.”

  * * *

  Crispin’s public resurrection in the Commons, and the explosive results of his speech, made two-inch headlines in the morning newspapers. As his wife lay beside him reading the florid accounts amid giggles (“ ‘His eyes flashed like Caesar’s as he strode the floor, the indignant flames of justice transfixing his peers’—Crispin, do flash your eyes at me!”), a great agitated knocking came at the door. It was the kind of knock that announced a crisis, something on fire, somebody shot. As Jane grabbed for her robe, Crispin strode naked to the door and opened it a crack.

  “Sir.” His majordomo looked too harried to remark on his master’s dishabille. “There is a—a line of visitors, sir, coming and going. I told them you are not receiving, but they refuse to believe it.”

  “They?”

  “Some of them claim to be your constituents, sir. Four or five colleagues—I have seated them all in the drawing room, where they are growling at each other. A passel of young men came to beg tickets of admission to the Strangers’ Gallery—they seemed content to write their names on a list and come back tomorrow. But the others . . . I do wonder . . .” Cusworth’s jaw ticked. “You might wish to hire a secretary, sir. It is very difficult to manage this business, and the household’s besides.”

  “I’ll be down momentarily,” Crispin said, and pulled shut the door again.

  Jane looked wide-eyed as she finished knotting her wrapper. “Will you manage?” she asked. “Cusworth will announce them by name, of course.”