As he worked, Lady Caroline told him about each plant he sketched. Strictly speaking, she didn’t need to be there, but Ash had the sense that she didn’t want to be parted from her specimens, and if carrying on a tutorial about asymmetrical flowers and other botanical rarities provided her with an excuse to keep an eye on him, Ash didn’t object. He enjoyed her impromptu lectures, and once he discovered that she didn’t mind interruptions, found himself asking questions.
“Sisymbrium Sophia,” he said, reading the words at the bottom of the page. “What does that mean?”
“Sisymbrium is a genus in the cabbage family.” Lady Caroline pronounced the word differently than Ash had.
“And Sophia means wise. I know that much. But wise cabbage?” To Ash it looked like a weed, spindly and unbeautiful, not to mention nothing like a cabbage at all. If it appeared in the gardens behind this conservatory, the gardener would surely pluck it out.
“Not cabbage, per se, but Brassica. It’s a large family of herbs. Really, it’s a common hedge mustard, found all over England and the continent and beyond. But it was used at some point to treat various ailments, hence Sophia.” She went on at some length about lobes and leaf hairs and other characteristics, but concluded with, “But really, you could find something almost identical along any roadside.”
“This didn’t come from the side of any road I’m likely to travel along,” Ash said. The bottom of the page bore the inscription “East Anatolia, 1812.” “How did this specimen come into your hands?” She launched into a tale of a sea voyage in the Aegean, and for a moment he forgot that she had not been on this adventure. “Do you ever wish to travel?” he asked. “To collect specimens by foreign roadsides with your own hand?”
She was silent for long enough that Ash wondered if he had said something offensive. Finally she sighed. “I am not able to travel. I have duties keeping me in London.”
She said the words as Persephone might speak of being trapped in the underworld for six months a year. Startled by the sorrow in her voice, he looked up. “Your husband is in Parliament, then, my lady?” He assumed that the loud, bellowing man whose return home signaled Ash’s immediate need to leave was a member of the House of Lords, which would fit right in with Ash’s impressions of lords and with the overall sensibility of that governmental body.
“Husband? Heavens, no, I have no husband. God save me from husbands. I have a brother and a father, and they’re quite bad enough.” Then, evidently realizing she had spoken too much, and before the hired help, no less, she shook her head. “I beg your pardon. Forget I spoke. My father, the duke, is an invalid and my brother is a widower. I keep house for them.”
He suspected that Lady Caroline Talbot’s definition of keeping house was not the same as Verity’s. He doubted she put on an apron and dislodged bats from the chimney, or worried about how to feed unexpected guests on mutton chops. Arundel House—for he had gathered from the servants’ chatter that such was the name of this place, and its owner none other than the Duke of Arundel—had nothing in common with the house on Holywell Street.
After several moments of no sound but the scratching of Ash’s nib on the paper, Lady Caroline cleared her throat. “Are you perhaps one of the Somerset Ashbys? Any connection of the Thaddeus Ashbys of Bourton Grange?”
“No, my lady.” He had been christened John Ashby at about seven years of age by the highly unimaginative rector of St. John’s church in Ashby, Norfolk. He did not know what his name had been before that time or indeed whether he had any name at all.
A quarter of an hour later she cleared her throat again. “I wonder if I might have known your parents. You look familiar. Perhaps I know your mother?”
Ash gritted his teeth. He ought to have expected an aristocrat to be fixated on bloodlines. “I know nothing of my mother’s people. Nor of my father’s.”
“You know nothing of your family?” she asked, a peculiar look in her dark eyes.
“Less than nothing,” he said curtly. All Ash knew was what Roger had told him: at some point in his early childhood he was sent out to be fostered and had in due course been sent away by a succession of families who considered harboring an epileptic to be either a bad omen, a public embarrassment, or simply not worth the remnants of the funds Ash had initially been left with. Ultimately he had been sent to a charity school. His health hadn’t suited him to school, however; when he was about ten or eleven he had suffered a seizure after playing at bat and ball with some other children and was ordered to be sent home. And so he would have been, if not for the fact that he had no home and nobody to claim him. One of his schoolmasters had noticed Ash’s talent for drawing and arranged for Ash to be apprenticed to a friend who worked as an engraver; that engraver had been Roger.
“I see,” she said. “I see.” A furrow appeared between Lady Caroline’s eyebrows. She opened her mouth to speak but he cut her off with a question about root systems. He did not want to talk about his illegitimacy, nor about his strange and confused childhood—his inability to remember most of it being chief among its peculiarities—with this woman in her costly dress and her enormous conservatory.
Bitterness tinged his thoughts. Ash was well aware that he had fared well compared to many unwanted and illegitimate children, and indeed better than many legitimate children who suffered from seizures. Whoever had brought him to that first foster home—presumably his mother—had at least paid for his keep, thus sparing him the orphanage or the workhouse. He remembered the condition Charlie had been in when Mr. Plum brought him from the workhouse—thin, pale, bruised, and frightened—and doubted he would have lived out a year in such a place. Ash had a vocation he enjoyed, and whatever hand of fate brought him to Roger had probably saved his life or at least his sanity; he knew well that there were people with his condition who ended their days in Bedlam. With perfect authority, Roger had declared his new charge perfectly sane and unpossessed of either devils or evil humors, and Ash had believed him. He had been lucky: he had learned a craft, he had found a tiny foothold in the world, and he shouldn’t feel that every glance in a looking glass asked a question that he couldn’t answer.
He worked the rest of the morning in silence, only stopping when they heard Lady Caroline’s brother arrive. Ash slipped out into the garden, struck again by its eerie air of almost familiarity.
It was the evening of Portia’s salon, and while Verity didn’t go every month, she feared that if she didn’t attend this time, only a week after the visit from the redcoats, she would look like she was in hiding. She needed to show her face to the world, prove that she was strong enough to contend with a thousand soldiers and a dozen reckless brothers. Even if by some unlikely chance the news of her shop’s raid had not spread as far as Mayfair, she needed to prove it to herself. So she brushed the dust and lint from her most presentable gown, dressed her hair with more care than usual, tucked her cleanest fichu into the neckline, and fastened her mother’s silver locket around her neck. Her dress was not fashionably cut but she thought the brown worsted suited her. Strictly speaking, she probably ought to wear a hat, but they always made her feel like her head was in some kind of cage, and that sensation wasn’t conducive to intelligent conversation. Holding her small hand mirror at arm’s length, she decided she didn’t look like someone who was on the brink of financial ruin, nor a woman who was worried for her brother’s life and possibly his sanity.
“You look well.”
She spun to see Ash leaning in the doorway, his topcoat slung over his arm and his hat in his hand. She hastily looked away, afraid her gaze might linger tellingly on the cut of his coat, the strong lines of his jaw. Now that she knew what his arm felt like when it was wrapped around her, knew that his chest was hard beneath her cheek, she couldn’t look at him without thinking about his body and how it felt against hers. “Oh,” she said, putting the mirror back in the drawer of her clothes press. “Are you going out?”
“I was thinking of going to Mrs. Allenby’s, if you wouldn
’t mind the company.”
Of course she wouldn’t, and it was just like Ash to realize it. She was already dreading the prospect of walking alone into Portia’s house and wondering whether all the other guests had heard about her predicament. It was a stupid concern, the kind of thing that ought to occupy the mind of a girl ten years her junior, someone with no real troubles to plague her. But she drummed up a fair bit of business at Portia’s salon—courting writers and readers alike—that being received there as an outcast would do her no favors.
Ash made the offer so easily and naturally that Verity was able to accept without feeling indebted to him. She was half-frantic coming up with reasons she wasn’t fond of the man, grasping at any glimmer of unattractiveness on his part that might quash her burgeoning interest in him. And here he was being decent, the utter bastard.
It was a long walk to Portia’s house in Bruton Street. Verity would have been content to walk the distance in silence, but Ash made a few remarks, first about the weather, then about a passing dandy’s appalling waistcoat, and finally about a play he had seen. She knew he was casting lures, trying to see which conversational gambit she’d take him up on, and rather than leave him floundering she gave in. By the time they reached Bruton Street, they were engaged in a lively debate about the merits of an actor who had newly arrived on the London stage.
When Portia’s butler took Ash’s coat and Verity’s shawl, Verity went to the cloakroom to brush some of the street dust from her hems. When she emerged, Ash was waiting for her, a glass of punch in each hand. She noticed something she hadn’t been able to see in the gloom of their house or the dark of the street: Ash had shaved and tied a fresh cravat around his neck. He had taken extra care with his appearance tonight, and Verity wondered if that effort had been for her. She had made an effort as well, conscious that many people would see her and think of her brother’s increasingly troublesome writings. That Ash might consider such a thing was touching, and made her resent him to the core.
She drank half the glass of punch in one go, then saw Ash regarding her quizzically, and downed the other half. She handed him the empty glass. “Walking here was thirsty work,” she said inanely, and took the full glass from his hand.
When he looked at her, his gaze trailed over her body for a fragment of a moment longer than necessary. She felt a spark of want, and tried to stamp it out as if it were an ember that had alit on the hearth rug. She knew what came after one gave in to desire: the disappointment on a loved one’s face, the blame and recriminations, the stilted awkwardness she had with Portia. She didn’t think she could bear that with Ash.
“It’s to be a poet first, and then an Egyptologist,” Ash said, explaining the night’s program.
“We had an Egyptologist last month,” Verity said, glad they had returned to their ordinary mode of discourse.
“Ah, but this one has had a row with the last one, and Portia had to have this one give her point of view, lest there be a civil war among Egyptologists.”
Ash led the way through the crowded room to the recess at the back where they usually sat. Without Nate in between them, it seemed intimate, but Verity firmly shoved those thoughts out of her head and surveyed the guests. One of the nice things about Portia’s salon was that Verity could count on not being the shabbiest person in attendance. For every person of wealth and culture, there was a man whose renown was based on having calculated the orbit of some astral body that might not exist, or a woman who had translated Beowulf into Latin. Geniuses, Verity had come to realize, did not always take care with their appearance. Verity, in her worn-out brown frock, blended in.
Any awkwardness between them dissipated by the time the poet stood at the front of the room. Verity knew nothing about poetry. They stocked volumes of poetry in the bookshop, and occasionally included verse in the Register, but Verity left its selection to Nate. Did that mean she was prosaic? Perhaps her hours of balancing accounts and marketing for potatoes had sapped her of whatever it took to rise above the mundane. The prosaic and the domestic were one and the same, she suspected, and her thoughts had been so consumed with the fate of her brother and her business that there was hardly room left for anything else, not even the things she valued. When had she started to worry more about the market price of haddock than about universal suffrage? She wondered that even without the burden of a husband, she might yet wind up like her mother—crushed by duty, constantly fretting, with little existence beyond her responsibilities to others.
She wanted something for herself, damn it. She wanted to be selfish, to take and grab and do something for herself alone. If she were another woman, she might pick a posy or buy some sweetmeats. But Verity was in no mood for gentle pleasures. If she picked flowers, she’d stomp on them with the heel of her boot. Sweetmeats would taste like bile on her tongue. What she needed was a pleasure that would push back, something that was half self-indulgence and half a fight, something she had denied herself for too long.
A gentle pressure on her arm interrupted her thoughts, and she looked down to see Ash’s hand on her sleeve. He still had his attention at the front of the room, but he had somehow known that she was lost in unwelcome thoughts. Or maybe he had just wanted to touch her. For the tiniest moment, she let her hand rest atop his, heard his sharp intake of breath, felt the warmth of his skin beneath hers. For the space of two heartbeats she let herself enjoy his closeness, then she stood and let it all slip away. She crossed the room to Portia so she could remind herself what lay on the other side of love.
Portia greeted Verity with the usual effusive enthusiasm and murmured commonplaces. “Darling,” she breathed, pitching her voice too low to interrupt the poet who was still speaking, “I’m so pleased you came.” Her brow furrowed in slight concern. “I see you don’t have your brother with you.”
“He’s in Derby,” Verity answered tersely. Then, seeing the mystification on her hostess’s face, she added, “For the executions.”
“Perhaps it’ll do him good to see an execution,” Portia said, as if the problem was that Nate was unclear on what execution entailed.
“I’m afraid he’ll think they die as martyrs.”
“He’d do well to remember that martyrdom involves death.”
“He’s sincere in his beliefs,” Verity started, in a defense of Nate that she wouldn’t have believed herself capable of an hour earlier. But she was interrupted by the prickle of tears in her eyes.
“Oh, my dear,” Portia said, and her sympathy was so sincere and obvious that Verity wanted to flinch. She didn’t want sympathy, however well deserved, however sincerely expressed. She didn’t want anything from Portia, and momentarily regretted that she had gone along with Portia’s insistence that they remain friends even after their affair had run its course. Sympathy from a former lover was a bitter brew indeed. “If there’s any way, any way at all, that I can be of assistance, you’ll let me know, won’t you?” Portia asked.
“No,” Verity said too quickly. The idea of accepting help from Portia made Verity feel something like shame. Their time together had been markedly unbalanced, with Portia putting forth most of the effort. Verity had been—still was—fond of Portia, and she had been more than eager to go to bed with her, but it never quite matched Portia’s sentiments towards her; by the end Verity had feared that she was cheating Portia out of a proper love affair. She winced at the idea of taking anything further from the woman. “I’ve got the matter in hand.”
Portia rolled her eyes with an uncharacteristic inelegance. “Good heavens, Verity. We’re friends, I hope. And friends do help one another. You don’t have to have to put red in your ledger every time someone comes to your aid.”
Verity was rather sure that she did have to do precisely that, but wasn’t about to embark on an argument. When another guest appeared at Portia’s side, Verity gladly relinquished her hostess’s attention and returned to Ash. She carefully avoided looking at his face, but he must not have returned the favor, because she found a c
lean handkerchief being pressed into her hand.
God only knew what was in Portia Allenby’s punch, Ash thought as he and Verity half stumbled back to Holywell Street. The night was foggy, and even though they kept their path to streets well lit by gaslights, it was sometimes hard to see even the cobblestones beneath their feet. Ash kept close to Verity and prodded her gently with his elbow; she took the hint and rested her hand on his arm. He reminded himself that it was a meaningless gesture; they both walked arm in arm with any number of people. But he thought he detected something almost caressing in the way she let her hand drift up from his elbow. Not that he minded her touch—far from it. But it would be a very bad idea to combine spirits with half-arsed amorousness, especially since she was in a rather vulnerable and lonely state of mind and he was finding it increasingly difficult to pretend he didn’t want her. With a sense of dread but also inane gratification, he realized that she had been doing the same thing; these touches were what happened when they both let their guard down for an instant. She did want him, or at least wasn’t averse to the idea. Her hand slid up his arm with increased intent. Definitely not averse. He rolled his eyes at his stupidity—Verity had never been “not averse” to a damned thing in her life. She was either for it or against it. His heart stuttered at the thought.
“You mustn’t do that, Plum,” he choked out.
The tactful response would have been either to remain silent or to murmur something vague, the sort of apology you issued when stepping on a person’s toes, but Verity had never been interested in tact. “No?” she asked, dropping her hand to her side. “Why not?” Her face tipped up towards his in plain consternation. Sometimes he forgot how small Verity actually was; she seemed larger than life, taking up so much space in his mind that it was hard to remember that the top of her head reached only an inch or two above his shoulder.
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