by Lynne Barron
That the spring breeze was warm, the sky a soft blue behind the ever-present haze of soot and smoke and accumulated dust, came as something of a relief. Barring inordinately heavy rains or a drought of uncommon length, Viscount Knighton’s crops ought to grow like the blighted weeds they were and be ready to harvest come autumn.
If the short-sighted man could only practice a bit of patience and pragmatism, he might soon find himself starring in an altogether different role than the one into which he’d been cast.
Oblivious to all around her as she contemplated the principal players, particulars and timetables of the numerous schemes she was currently juggling, Harry only vaguely noticed the group of fashionably attired ladies loitering on the covered portico. Flashing a distracted smile their way, she breezed by without stopping to question the pointed looks her presence garnered or the buzz of laughter and whispered conversation which followed her into the museum.
Nor did Harry pause to consider the oddity of finding the massive front hall filled with young ladies, the lot of them gathered around the cloak check counter where a servant and a beleaguered Mr. Churchill took possession of their capes, pelisses and whatnot.
That the ladies were all speaking at once did not give rise even to the faintest curiosity. In Harry’s experience, girls barely out of the schoolroom tended to create a cacophony of sound not unlike the noise Harry rung from her cello every Tuesday afternoon.
It seemed not the least queer when a girl of about ten and six spotted Harry standing just inside the foyer and fell suddenly and completely silent, prompting the lot of them to follow her gaze and likewise go quiet.
Harry had experienced the phenomenon too often to question the reason for the collection of eyes fixed on her. She did not wonder at the first twitter of a giggle, or the second or even the third, all of them quickly muffled behind gloved hands.
After all, the convoluted concoction of ribbons, bows, gems and feathers upon her head was rather astonishing.
It wasn’t until two identical pairs of hazel eyes distinguished themselves from the rest by sheer dint of familiarity that Harry paused to ponder the peculiarity of finding Evelyn and Eloise Griffith and their friends lingering in the lobby.
Pulling Monty’s old timepiece from the pocket of her skirt, she verified the fact it was coming up on three o’clock. The girls ought to have long since dispersed to the four corners of the museum in search of the day’s treasure.
If that weren’t queer enough to set her nerves jangling, the perimeter of the room was lined with well-dressed ladies, two of whom she recollected having seen at Madeline’s come-out ball. Lady Something-or-other and Mrs. Whomever sidled to the left to make room, as those women who’d previously been loitering on the steps joined the multitude.
By Harry’s estimation there were currently between thirty and thirty-four women of privilege and pedigree congregating in the lobby of a museum which rarely saw half that number walk through its doors on any given day, let alone Wednesday afternoons.
“Miss O’Connell?” The haughty, auburn-haired lady who served as chaperone emerged from the gaggle of gawking girls. “Might I have a word with you?”
Harry was tempted to remain precisely where she stood at far end of the chamber, thereby forcing the woman to come to her.
Then she heard the echo of the woman’s strident voice bouncing off the walls. As if they’d caught the scent of scandal brewing, Lady Something-or-other, Mrs. Whomever and their friends edged nearer to Mrs. Doherty.
Harry started across the room, vaguely aware of Evelyn and Eloise rushing over to take up positions on either side of her like matched bookends propping her up. Which was a ludicrous notion, as she hardly needed propping up, and if she had then two girls barely out of the schoolroom would most assuredly not be her first choice. Still, Harry could not help but recognize the significance of the gesture, if not the relevance of it in the grander scheme of her life.
“Might I have a word with you, Miss O’Connell,” Mrs. Doherty repeated, as if Harry and everyone else within a fifty-foot radius hadn’t heard the words the first time. “Regarding your visits to this institution.”
“I like to think of The Montclaire as an establishment rather than an institution,” Harry replied when she met the other woman in the center of the great hall. “Though it does bear a striking resemblance to an asylum of late.”
The woman’s lips pursed, and her pale eyes narrowed to slits.
The Misses Griffith giggled and twittered.
“That is more than enough, young ladies,” Mrs. Doherty proclaimed. “Wait for me in the Morning Gallery with the others.”
“Oh, but surely—” the girls began in unison.
“This instant.” Goodness, how on earth did the woman manage to speak with her teeth so tightly clenched? “Run along now, ladies.”
When the girls had disappeared from view, Harry waited to be admonished for luring them into the Red Gallery some weeks past. She’d known perfectly well they’d been warned away from the chamber on the second floor. And still she’d sent them scampering inside while she’d watched from the open door as they’d alternately blushed and giggled at the women displayed in various stages of undress.
But as Harry had said to Phin only the week previously, a woman must take her pleasures where she found them. It had tickled Harry’s fancy to see the girls looking up with wonder at the rendering of Bathsheba, naked but for a twist of red silk barely covering the essential parts.
If she must now pay for the pleasure with a lecture on the merits of propriety, she would account it a fair bargain.
Only it wasn’t a lecture Mrs. Doherty handed down, but rather something else entirely.
“The Misses Griffith’s brother has charged me with requesting you no longer visit the museum on Wednesday afternoons.”
“I beg your pardon?” Surely Harry had misheard the woman’s words. Or misunderstood their meaning.
“His lordship would prefer you choose another day to patronize the museum.”
“His lordship?” Harry considered the mathematical probability an altogether different lord might possess the same family name and sisters who regularly attended the museum on Wednesday. Unlikely, but not impossible, the English aristocracy being what it was.
“Lord Knighton.”
Harry felt as if she’d been presented with a column of figures which refused to tally up to the correct sum. Somehow, she’d missed a number, misplaced a decimal or forgotten to carry over a remainder. She need only go back to the beginning to find the point at which she’d mucked up her arithmetic. “Viscount Knighton?”
“But of course I refer to Viscount Knighton,” Mrs. Doherty replied, effectively disabusing Harry of the notion she’d misheard, misunderstood or even miscalculated. “Brother and guardian to the Misses Griffith.”
And still Harry could not reckon the other woman’s words, could not sort them into an equation with any sort of logical sum at the end of it all. “Phineas Griffith, Viscount Knighton?”
“I had hoped we might conclude this business with a bit of discretion and decorum.” Mrs. Doherty lowered her voice by an octave or two, blatantly inviting those nearby to listen. “I see now I was mistaken, and you are quite determined to create a scene.”
A scene was the last thing Harry intended to create. Rather she sought only to make some semblance of sense from the queer conversation. “Why on earth should Lord Knighton concern himself with my weekly visits to the museum?”
“I won’t pretend to be privy to his lordship’s thoughts on the matter, though I’ve my suspicions. As such, it would be best if you were simply to adhere to Lord Knighton’s request.”
“Best for whom?” Between one beat of her heart and the next, Harry comprehended her mistake and the relevance of the Misses Griffith in her life.
“Lord Knighton believes it would be best for all concerned if your visits no longer coincide with those of his sisters.” Every word was a vicious slap, one af
ter another, each strangely independent of the one preceding and the one following, yet all of them running together in a litany of sounds painfully sharp but barely discernable over the rush of blood in Harry’s ears.
Humiliation flooded her, quickly joined by a terrible rage and a wholly unaccountable sense of betrayal. Memories of her childhood rushed into her mind. The village girls pointing at her ragged clothing and giggling behind their hands. The vicar’s wife visiting Jimmy’s cottage to dispense charity and contempt in equal measure. Mothers pulling their children out of her path lest they be contaminated by the cloud of poverty and degradation that hovered around her.
Shame and helplessness and despair bubbled up from their hidden depths. Emotions battered her from all sides, the past and the present mixing to create a noxious sludge as foul and putrid as the sediment lining the banks of the River Thames after a rainstorm.
“I thought to send around a note, but I hadn’t any idea your direction.” Mrs. Doherty’s voice seemed to be coming from a great distance, travelling through a long tunnel which warped the sound until it resembled the droning of hundreds of bees in Harry’s head. “I did ask a few friends and acquaintances at Mrs. Bunwitty’s musicale night before last, and again yesterday when paying calls. Alas, you present quite the mystery.”
Which perfectly explained the unprecedented number of ladies present. There was nothing Society enjoyed unravelling so much as a mystery.
Pinpricks of light flashed in Harry’s peripheral vision, and she blinked in an attempt to banish them, finally looking away from the self-righteous woman standing before her.
So many eyes upon her. Some filled with amusement, others with scorn, and still others with pity. All of them curious. A hard weight formed in her chest, closing off her lungs and burning beneath her breasts before spreading outward, crawling up her neck and slithering along her limbs. Her fingers tingled, her face flamed.
For a moment, Harry considered the entirely too plausible possibility she might faint. Right there in the foyer of the Montclaire Museum.
On a Wednesday afternoon, no less.
They were all looking at her, every last one of them. In their faces she saw her own mortification, remembered with horrifying clarity the reason she rarely ventured beyond the rocky shoals of Society.
The deep end of the ocean loomed on either side of the narrow line she walked, always and forever. That it was a man she’d come to think of as a friend who’d pushed her so near the edge only made her humiliation complete and somehow all too fitting.
But Harry could not, would not think about that just now.
The crowd in the lobby grew, stragglers joining those who’d born witness to the performance that was equal parts tragedy and comedy. They all silently looked at Harry, no doubt wondering about her identity when for years she’d walked these chambers without fear of discovery. Even the tutors and governesses, some of whom had been bringing their charges to the museum since the doors had opened, were likely questioning the origins of the lady hiding behind the absurd bonnets and outrageous gowns.
Surely Lady Something-or-other and Mrs. Whomever recognized her from Madeline’s ball, remembered her standing within the circle of Dunaway’s daughters.
How long before someone put together her single appearance in the earl’s home and her visits to the Montclaire Museum? How long before they dug into her past and connected the dots she’d taken such pains to hide right before their eyes?
Harry wanted to scream at the injustice, to rail against the hand fate had dealt her.
Mostly, she wanted to deliver a scathing set down to the woman standing before her with triumph glowing in her cold blue eyes. She yearned to eviscerate Mrs. Doherty with words too long bottled up, before turning her wrath on the rest of them.
But Miss Harry O’Connell had discovered long ago that histrionic displays were the equivalent of useless endeavors, maudlin thoughts and impossible expectation. A waste of one’s time and effort.
Reining in her fury and gathering the frayed edges of her composure in a tight hold, Harry drew in a ragged breath. “You may tell his lordship I concede Wednesday afternoons at the museum.”
As she forced the words past trembling lips, Harry felt the teetering of the earth beneath her feet and realized her world had gone spinning off its axis.
Chapter Fifteen
Under normal circumstances, Lilith Grimley, Baroness Malleville was not a woman prone to nap in the middle of the day. Alas, the nearly constant state of pregnancy she’d happily experienced since marrying Lord Malleville had tossed normal circumstances right out the window.
Thus it was, Lilith was asleep on a faded blue settee in the cozy, if decidedly untidy, front parlor of her Hanover Square townhouse when Harry pushed past the startled butler and rushed into the room.
To Lilith’s credit, she awoke in a trice, bright eyed and fully in possession of her faculties, proof that some things could be depended upon even in the face of utter catastrophe.
“Harry, good God, what’s happened?” Lilith bounded to her feet, wrinkled yellow skirts settling around her bare feet while her bodice listed slightly to the left over the great mound of her belly. “Have you been in an accident?”
Had it been an accident? An absurd chain of events set in motion when she’d stepped onto the line chalked on the grimy floor? Had each link in the chain led inexorably to this moment?
“Are you injured?” Lilith waddled across the room with surprising speed, clasped Harry’s hands and held them out to the side. “Where are you hurt? Can you move all your limbs? Should you be on your feet?”
It took Harry a moment to comprehend her sister’s questions, to consider what a sight she must be with her hair straggling around her shoulders, her boots muddy and her hem torn as a result of a doomed attempt to save her new bonnet from the wheels of a beer cart.
“Dervish, send for Dr. Nelson,” Lilith ordered.
“Yes, my lady,” the butler replied with a weighty sigh. “Shall I warn his lordship so he doesn’t think your time’s come when he sees Dr. Nelson arrive?”
Harry opened her mouth to protest the need to call for a physician. What came out was a moan, raw and fractured and so pathetic Harry wasn’t at all certain it had come from her until another followed in its wake.
“Harry?” Lilith’s voice was but a wisp of sound.
“I…I… No, he…and then I… Oh, God.” Harry pulled free of Lilith’s grasp and stumbled back a step as emotions pelted her like sharp, jagged hailstones. “It was me… I stepped…no skipped… I skipped off the line. It’s so thin…the line betwixt… I thought…I could navigate…and then he pushed…nudged me.”
A fierce light came into Lilith’s eyes. “A man pushed you? To the ground? Into the street? Dervish, send for a constable.”
“No, no, no,” Harry wailed. “He pushed me…but I ought not… I knew what he was…only I believed… I don’t know what I believed…but whatever…whatever it was…I was so bloody wrong!”
Lilith dipped her fingers into her bodice and came up with one of a multitude of handkerchiefs forever stashed nearby. Slowly and carefully, as if faced with a feral animal, she approached. It wasn’t until she swiped at Harry’s cheeks that she realized she was crying, tears running down her face and collecting at the corners of her lips, salty and so terribly bitter.
“Harry, do you need either a physician or a constable?”
“I ought to have known better,” Harry said, gulping back a sob. “I did know. I knew it from the beginning…saw it before he’d taken three steps. I never should have attended, but Kate said Annalise… And there he was, every blasted time, everywhere I went. There he was, the no-good rake.”
“That will be all, Dervish.” Lilith waited until the door closed behind the butler. “If it wasn’t an accident and it wasn’t an assault, what has put you in such a state?”
“They were all staring at me, Lil.”
“Who was staring at you?”
&nbs
p; “All of them,” Harry cried, batting Lilith’s hands away from her face. “Lady Something-or-other, Mrs. Whomever and all the rest. They were all looking at me!”
“Well, surely you are accustomed to people looking at you.” That Lilith was confused was evident. That she was patronizing the weeping woman in her presence was even more so.
Which only added fuel to the fire burning in Harry.
“You don’t understand! They saw me, Lilith!”
“Harry, you aren’t making sense,” Lilith crooned. “Take a deep breath, there’s a love.”
“They saw me. Me. Not my pretty face, not my hideous bonnet or my gaudy gown. They saw me!”
“Ah, I always wondered,” Lilith murmured. “But never mind that now. Calm yourself, and tell me what happened to you.”
“That rake, that rogue, that no-good wastrel happened to me,” Harry cried, chest heaving and heart clenching at the memory. “That man humiliated me. He humiliated and shamed and exposed me. At the museum!”
“Oh, Harry, no,” Lilith whispered, her eyes filling.
“She said it was a request, but it was no such thing. That man effect…effective…” Harry waved her hands about in agitation. “That man effectively barred me.… I can never go back. Not on Wednesday, maybe not ever. That man has taken the museum from me. He’s stolen my museum.”
“But he would never do such a thing to you,” Lilith protested. “He would never harm so much as a hair on your head. Leastwise, not intentionally. Oh, I know he’s self-centered and careless, but even Dunaway knows how much Wednesdays at the Montclaire Museum mean to you.”
“It wasn’t Lord Dunaway!”
Lilith blinked, and her lips fell open. In shock, presumably. And why not? Harry had quite shocked herself.
“It wasn’t Dun who put you in this state?” Lilith asked carefully.
Harry collapsed onto the settee, suddenly feeling weary right down to her toes. “I very much doubt Lord Dunaway knows or cares I’ve spent… Oh, Lil, every Wednesday, a decade of Wednesdays. And all of them save one…and even that was Dunaway’s fault, damn him.”
