A Little Light Mischief

by Cat Sebastian

  “We’re eating,” Verity pointed out, knowing it was hopeless. “Maybe we can save the talk of disembowelment for later.”

  “Or never,” Ash suggested. “Never would do.”

  “You are missing the point,” Nate said, entirely ignoring his sister and directly addressing Ash. “For them to be killed at all is barbaric. It’s nothing less than murder.”

  “Of course it’s nothing less than murder,” Ash said in that deep, steady voice that he had always used to calm Nate down. “It’s worse than murder, because it will go unpunished. And of course the trial was grossly wrong and unfair. We all know that. We all agree at this table.” My God, they had been through this often enough in the past months. Verity opened her mouth to say as much but Ash, without looking at her, made a shooing gesture under the table which she interpreted as Shut up, Plum. “The only point on which we disagree is whether you’re going to print a lunatic screed that gets us all arrested.”

  “What I wrote is the truth,” Nate answered, sounding more like a child of ten than a grown man of past twenty.

  “A fat lot of good the truth has ever done anyone,” Verity burst out, unable to hold her tongue. “Besides, even the truth can be couched in words that don’t get anyone brought before a judge.”

  “Wooler was acquitted!” Nate protested, referring to a publisher who that summer had been tried for seditious libel after publishing material criticizing the House of Lords. “And I’m certain Hone will be, when he’s tried later this autumn.”

  “And Mr. Cobbett went to America to avoid another turn in prison,” she shot back, alluding to a fellow reformer who had once spent two years in prison for a pamphlet that was critical of the government. As soon as Lord Sidmouth ordered the arrest and prosecution of anyone suspected of printing sedition, Cobbett had sailed to New York.

  “William Cobbett is an old man,” her brother retorted.

  “My father says he’s done with politics,” said one of the young printers, adopting a self-consciously conciliatory tone that made Verity want to crack her dinner plate over his head. “He says he’ll only trade in obscenity from now on. Says people will always pay for that, paper duty or no paper duty.”

  “Less time in prison too,” said another man. “And no chance of being done up for treason. Three years hard? Piddling stuff.” Verity could not determine whether he was joking.

  “Better than transportation or hanging,” pointed out the first young man.

  “Or disembowelment,” agreed the other. They clinked their glasses together in happy salute of the manageable punishment for printing obscenities.

  Verity sighed. “I’m so sorry,” she told Amelia once the young men had all resumed their quarrel. “They haven’t any manners at all.”

  “This is much more interesting than the dinners I usually attend,” she said brightly. Seventeen was young enough for anything to be interesting, Verity supposed.

  “I daresay your mother has kept you well clear of sedition and blasphemy. I’ll have to apologize to her.” Verity groaned inwardly at the prospect. It had been half a year since she and Portia Allenby had ceased being lovers. But they had been friends before, and Portia seemed determined that they would remain friends, even though every moment they spent together reminded Verity of how very ill-suited she was for affection, romance, and possibly even friendship.

  Amelia furrowed her brow. “All those scientists she has on her Wednesday nights are quite blasphemous, at least if my understanding of their science and general theology are correct.”

  Portia Allenby had once been the mistress of a wealthy nobleman and now held a salon at which writers, scientists, and other luminaries gathered. She let her daughters have run of the house no matter what topics were being discussed. But Verity had to think that Portia might not want her eldest daughter to be at a dinner table where there was frank disparagement of the government without the benefit of decent food and wax candles. Good wine helped a great deal to make conversation seem academic rather than something that could at any moment spill out into the streets and end with pitchforks and treason trials.

  “Would you ever trade in . . .” Amelia bit her lip, plainly at a loss for words. “In the sort of material the young men were talking about?”

  “Lewd novels?” Verity supplied. “Explicit prints? If they were any good, perhaps.” Beside her, she heard Ash’s low laugh. “Well, I would,” she insisted. “We don’t put out many books, but I’d make an exception. My father always said that more than one bookseller made his fortune on clandestine printings of Fanny Hill. But I wouldn’t put out another Fanny Hill, which I dare say a number of gentlemen have found very amusing, but it doesn’t have much in it for the ladies.”

  Now she could feel Ash’s gaze on her and it gave Verity a strange feeling to be talking about obscene literature so close to him. With so many people crowded around the small table, her shoulder nearly touched his.

  “You and your brother are no different,” he said, an indulgent half smile playing on his lips. “Any other person would be coming up with law-abiding ways to keep the business afloat. The two of you are fighting over which laws to break.”

  “If I printed that sort of thing, I’d be most careful, I assure you. Only the best filth for Plum and Company’s readership.”

  Later, after Nate and his friends left to get soused at a gin house and Amelia had been collected by her mother’s carriage, Ash and Verity sat amidst the remains of supper and the wine from Ash’s room.

  “Revolution is all he speaks of,” she said while splitting the last roll and giving half to Ash. “And in turn all I talk about is the need for prudence, and so we go round and round. I think we’ve been having the same conversation since you left for Bath.” The wine had gone to her head a bit. Her thoughts were muzzy and her speech was free. “I feel like a prison warden. Or a very cross nursery maid. I’m always scolding Nate or counting farthings or wondering where the last candle went.” These repeated quarrels were robbing her of her affection for her brother, the bookshop, and her work. There was so little joy in it, and these days there wasn’t even the thrill of working for a good cause, because she felt precious little hope for success in the face of a government bent on tyranny. She drained her glass. “With you here, though, I’m not alone.” Good God, she was more than a little drunk if she was being that maudlin out loud.

  Ash emptied the wine bottle into her glass. “You’ve never been alone. You have dozens of people in and out of this house every day—your writers, workers, customers, other booksellers. I’ve been back less than a day, I haven’t left the house, and I’ve already seen almost everyone I know in this city.” The firelight glinted off his dark hair and cast shadows across the strong planes of his face. She hastily looked away.

  “That’s not what I meant.” All those people who came and went wanted or needed something from her. That was the common thread running through every relationship Verity had known, starting with her overbearing father and continuing right through to Portia Allenby. What Verity offered was never enough and now she had nothing left to give. Giving more would mean nothing remained for herself. And maybe that made her hard and unfeeling, but she’d live with that if the alternative was self-effacement.

  She felt the warmth of his hand on top of hers and nearly startled in her seat. By unspoken consent, they seldom touched. They had never discussed the parameters of their friendship, but they measured out these touches as carefully as any housewife measured out the lumps in the sugar bowl. They were for special occasions, feast days, homecomings. Two, three touches a year. Any more frequent and heaven knew what would happen.

  Verity knew exactly what would happen, though. Sometimes she let herself think of it, when night had fallen and she had the sheets pulled up to her chin. It was important that it never actually come to pass, because Ash was the type who would get ideas and insist on marriage. And the last thing in the world Verity needed was a husband. She had seen what marriage had done to h
er mother: it had worn her down, whittled her away at the edges until she had all but disappeared. Partly that was because her father had not been a particularly kind man. He had been a radical and a democrat; he had memorized passages from Mary Wollstonecraft’s book. But as far as Verity could tell, the man had never once thought to apply those ideas to his own wife. It was, Verity assumed, the old adage about power corrupting: marriage gave a man too much unchecked power over his wife and children, transforming otherwise decent men into petty tyrants. Her mother had ultimately been dependent on the whims of a man who was both mercurial and self-serving, critical and harsh. Verity had fought hard to maintain a degree of control over her fate: Plum and Company was hers as much as it was Nate’s, both on paper and as a matter of practical fact. The only people she relied on were those whose wages she paid. The prospect of a husband—and children, presumably—would make that independence impossible.

  “Look at me,” Ash said, his voice low, and Verity managed to tear her gaze away from where their hands touched. She turned her face up to his. The candles had burnt down and the room was lit only by the fire and one weakly flickering lamp, but she could see the dusting of new beard on his jawline, the dark gleam of his eyes. She allowed herself to appreciate how very handsome he was, another practice she allowed only in the strictest moderation. His hair was nearly black and fell in haphazard waves across his forehead. His jaw was strong but his eyelashes were decadently pretty and he had a few utterly incongruous freckles scattered across his nose. There. She had noticed all those things and still was quite in her right mind.

  “Plum,” Ash said, and she had the fleeting impression that he was looking at her with the same tightly leashed admiration. He shook his head and let go of her hand. That ought to have been enough to restore their normal equilibrium, but she could still feel the traces of his touch on her. Later, when she was back at her desk, working by the light of a guttering candle, she caught herself wishing that Ash were with her, that his hand was on hers and his body beside hers. She had the uneasy sense that something between them had shifted out of place and she did not know how to put it back the way it belonged.

  About the Author

  CAT SEBASTIAN lives in a swampy part of the South with her husband, three kids, and two dogs. Before her kids were born, she practiced law and taught high school and college writing. When she isn't reading or writing, she's doing crossword puzzles, bird watching, and wondering where she put her coffee cup.

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  By Cat Sebastian

  The Turner Series

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  The Lawrence Browne Affair

  The Ruin of a Rake

  A Little Light Mischief (novella)

  The Seducing the Sedgwicks Series

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  Coming Soon

  The Duchess Deception

  Copyright

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Excerpt from A Duke in Disguise copyright © 2019 by Cat Sebastian

  a little light mischief. Copyright © 2019 by Cat Sebastian. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins Publishers. For information, address HarperCollins Publishers, 195 Broadway, New York, NY 10007.

  Digital Edition AUGUST 2019 ISBN: 978-0-06-295103-8

  Print Edition ISBN: 978-0-06-295104-5

  Cover design by Patricia Barrows

  Cover illustration by Frederika Ribes

  Cover photographs © Jenn Leblanc

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