A Most Improper Request
Harriet
It had rained every day since the first of April, and Lady Brandreth’s ballroom smelled of it: wet wool, wet feathers, three hundred candles fighting the damp and losing. Somewhere behind the orchestra a window had been propped open for air, and every few minutes a gust came through and set the chandeliers trembling, so that the light shivered over the dancers like the surface of a pond.
I stood beside a pillar in grey-lavender silk and counted the reasons I was not going to do what I had come here to do.
There were eleven. I had numbered them in bed the night before, as other women count sheep, and I had fallen asleep somewhere around the seventh and dreamed of nothing useful.
One: I was the widow of Sir Gerald Ellery, baronet, and fourteen months out of black.
Two: I was the daughter of the late Earl of Wexcombe and the sister of the present one, and Edmund had enough troubles without his sister adding a scandal to them.
Three: I was twenty-nine years old, which was too old to be foolish and too young to be forgiven for it.
Four through ten were variations on the theme of my reputation, which was spotless, and of my prospects, which were poor, and of the fact that a spotless reputation was the only coin I had left to spend.
Eleven was the Duke of Ravensworth himself, who was standing on the far side of the room with his shoulder against a door frame, looking at the quadrille the way a cat looks at a bowl of cream it has decided, for the moment, not to want.
“You are staring, Harriet,” said Clara Pendleton at my elbow.
“I am observing.”
“You are staring at Ravensworth as though he were a sum you could not make come out.” She snapped her fan open. Clara had been widowed two years before me and had spent the interval becoming, by careful degrees, the most contented woman of my acquaintance. “Everyone stares at him. He is used to it. He probably finds it restful.”
“I was not staring at him. I was thinking.”
“About him.”
“About,” I said, with great dignity, “the general condition of my life.”
Clara’s fan paused. She knew the general condition of my life; she was one of perhaps three people who did. She knew that Gerald’s estate had gone entire to his nephew, who disputed my jointure quarterly and paid it late when he paid it at all. She knew I lived on my brother’s charity in my brother’s house in Upper Brook Street, in the bedchamber that had been my schoolroom, and that my brother’s charity had lately grown thin and anxious and inclined to stare at the decanter. She knew that Edmund wished me married by the end of the Season, and to whom.
“Kestwick is coming this way,” she murmured.
I did not turn. I did not need to. The temperature of the air changed when Ambrose Vane, Viscount Kestwick, approached a woman, and it was not a change in the direction of warmth.
He was six-and-forty, tall and narrow, with pale hair brushed forward in the style of a younger man and eyes the colour of weak tea. He had been a widower for three years. His first wife had been the youngest daughter of a bishop, a laughing, round-faced girl whom I remembered from my own first Season; she had gone into Northumberland with him at nineteen and come out again, five years later, in a lead-lined coffin. A decline, it was said. People said it with their eyes lowered.
“Lady Harriet.” He bowed over my hand. His glove was dry and very cool, and he held my fingers a moment longer than was polite and pressed them a little harder than was comfortable, as though testing the ripeness of fruit. “You are not dancing.”
“I am in half-mourning, my lord.”
“So you are. Lavender becomes you. I prefer it to the black.” His pale eyes moved over my gown, not lingering anywhere in particular, which was somehow worse than if they had. “Your brother tells me you have been unwell.”
“My brother is kind to worry. I am perfectly well.”
“Good. I dislike illness in a woman. It argues a want of discipline.” He smiled. He had small, very even teeth. “I shall call on Wednesday. Wexcombe and I have some matters of business, and I hope afterward you will give me half an hour. There is a subject I wish to raise with you, and I think you can guess it.”
I could guess it. Edmund had guessed it for me, at breakfast, in a voice that kept cracking upward like a boy’s.
“Wednesday,” I said.
“Wednesday.” He released my hand at last. “Don’t be unwell before then.”
He went away through the crowd, and Clara let out a long breath beside me.
“Harriet,” she said, very low. “You cannot.”
“I can do whatever is necessary.”
“That man—”
“Has eleven thousand a year and no debts, and he wants a wife with good blood and good manners who is past the age of being silly. I have all three qualifications in abundance.” I watched his narrow back move between the dancers. “And Edmund owes money to half of St James’s Street. And Louisa is increasing again. And Gerald’s nephew writes to say my jointure may be delayed until Michaelmas, owing to the wet spring and the failure of the hay.”
“There are other men.”
“Name one who has offered.”
She could not, and we both knew it, and she was too honest to pretend. I loved her for it.
“Then before you go to Northumberland,” Clara said slowly, “you should at least—” She stopped.
“At least what?”
“Nothing.”
“Clara.”
She fanned herself. Her cheeks had gone pink. “You will think me very fast.”
“I have known you since we were twelve. I already think you very fast. What should I at least do?”
She leaned close, so her breath stirred the curl over my ear. “Know what it is supposed to be like,” she whispered. “Once. Before you spend the rest of your life without it.”
I had told her, the winter after Gerald died, in the small cold hours of a long night with a bottle of his best Madeira between us. I had told her that I had been married for seven years and had never once understood why poets made such a fuss. I had told her about the dark, and the weight, and the brief sour breath against my neck, and the way Gerald had always said, afterward, as he rolled away, that a cold wife was a trial to a man, and that he supposed I could not help it. I had told her that I had come to believe him.
Clara had not laughed. She had gone very quiet, and then she had said a name.
The name was standing across the ballroom with his shoulder against a door frame.
“He is the only man in London,” she had said that night, “who seems to think a lady’s pleasure is the point of the exercise. Not a happy accident. The point. I have heard it from four women and I do not believe all four of them are liars.”
“Have you—?”
“Once,” she had said, and smiled into her glass, and would say no more, then or ever.
Now, in Lady Brandreth’s ballroom, I watched the Duke of Ravensworth push himself off the door frame, nod to his hostess with exactly the degree of courtesy owed to a woman whose champagne he had drunk, and slip out through the door behind him, which I happened to know led to the library.
Eleven reasons.
I put my glass down on a passing tray.
“Harriet,” Clara said. “Where are you going?”
“To be very fast,” I said, “before I lose my nerve.”
Lady Brandreth’s library had been furnished by someone who had bought books by the yard and never opened one. It was long and low and lit only by the fire, and it smelled of leather and coal smoke and, faintly, of the cigar the duke was not supposed to be smoking.
He was standing at the window with the curtain held back, watching the rain sheet down the glass. He did not turn when I came in. He said, to the window, “If you are looking for an assignation, madam, the conservatory is the usual place. This room is reserved for people who wish to be left alone.”
“Then I am in the right room,” I said, “because I wish to be left alone with you.”
That turned him.
I had seen him at a distance a hundred times over the years. At the opera, in a box with a woman who was not his wife, because he had no wife. In the Park, on a black horse that looked as bad-tempered as its owner was reputed to be. Once, very long ago, at close quarters: my first Season, the Duchess of Rutland’s ball, when the old duke was still alive and Sebastian Thorne was merely the Marquess of Hale, five-and-twenty and already notorious. He had asked me to dance because his mother made him, and I had told him, three bars in, that he was stepping on my hem with the regularity of a metronome, and he had laughed so loudly the couple beside us turned to stare.
I did not suppose he remembered.
He was taller than I recalled, or perhaps simply nearer. Dark hair, worn a little too long. A face that was all planes and edges, hard at the jaw and unexpectedly soft at the mouth, as though he had been carved by two sculptors who had disagreed. His eyes were grey—not the weak grey of Kestwick’s but a deep slate, the colour of the Thames under a winter sky. They went over me once, quick and thorough, and I had the uncomfortable impression that he had learned more from that glance than Kestwick had in ten minutes of looking.
“Lady Harriet Ellery,” he said. “You told me I danced like a cart horse.”
My face went hot. “I said nothing about horses. I said you stepped on my hem.”
“Seven times. You counted aloud.” He let the curtain fall. “I was crushed. I went home and practised with a footman.”
“You did not.”
“No,” he agreed. “But I thought about it.” He tossed the end of his cigar into the fire and came a few steps nearer, not so near as to be improper, near enough that I could smell the smoke on him and something beneath it, clean and sharp, like cut cedar. “You did not follow me in here to discuss my dancing. And you are not the sort of woman who follows men into libraries. So I am curious, which is a rare condition for me and one I would like to prolong. What do you want, Lady Harriet?”
I had rehearsed this. I had rehearsed it in my bedchamber in Upper Brook Street with the door locked, speaking to the washstand. I had found several elegant formulations. Every one of them fled me now.
“I am going to be married,” I said.
His eyebrows rose a fraction. “My felicitations.”
“To Lord Kestwick, I think. Or to someone like him. Someone safe.”
Something moved behind the slate-grey eyes and was gone. “Safe,” he repeated.
“Solvent,” I amended. “I have no money, Your Grace, and no prospect of any. My brother has a great many debts and a growing family. I have a name, and good health, and, I am told, a pleasing countenance, and before the summer is out I shall trade all three for a house and a settlement and the right to stop being a burden on people I love. I am not complaining. It is a perfectly sensible arrangement. It is what women do.”
“It is,” he said, watching me. “Go on.”
“I was married before. For seven years.”
“To Ellery. I remember. A man who talked about drainage at dinner.”
I almost laughed, and caught it, and the catching of it made my throat ache. “He was a perfectly respectable husband.”
“I’m sure he was.”
“He was,” I said, “and I did not enjoy one single moment of it.”
The fire popped. Outside, the rain drummed on, and from very far away the orchestra began a waltz, thin and sweet through the walls.
The duke did not move. He did not smile, or look shocked, or look away. He only went on watching me, very still, the way a man watches a bird that has landed unexpectedly near his hand.
“Not one,” I said. My voice had dropped. “Not the first night, nor the last, nor any night in between. I was told it was my fault. That I was cold. I believed it. I still half believe it.” I made myself hold his gaze. “But I have heard it said, Your Grace, by women I trust, that you do not believe any woman is cold. That you consider her pleasure the point of the thing. And I find that before I go into another man’s house and another man’s bed for the rest of my natural life, I should like to know, just once, whether they were right about you. Or whether they were right about me.”
The silence stretched so long that I thought I would die of it.
“You want me to take you to bed,” he said at last. His voice was very even.
“No.” I swallowed. “I want you to teach me. There is a difference.”
“Is there?”
“I want lessons. A finite number of them, on terms I set. I want to understand what it is supposed to be. What I am supposed to feel. I want to know what my own body is capable of, so that whatever happens afterward—” I stopped. “So that afterward, I shall at least know what I am doing without.”
Something in his face shifted at that. It was not pity; I would have walked out if it had been pity. It was something rawer and more startled, as though I had reached out and pressed a thumb into a bruise he had not known was there.
He turned away from me, toward the fire. He braced one hand on the mantelpiece and looked into the coals, and for a long moment I could see only the line of his back under the dark blue coat, the breadth of his shoulders, the hand on the marble with its signet ring catching the firelight.
“Do you know what they say about me?” he asked the fire.
“That you have had half the married women in London.”
“An exaggeration. A third, perhaps.” He did not turn. “They also say I am heartless, which is true, and that I ruin women, which is not. I have never touched a girl in her first Season or a woman who did not know exactly what she was choosing. I have never once been the cause of a lady’s disgrace, because I am very careful and very discreet, and because the ladies I keep company with have as much to lose as I do and less reason to lose it.” Now he turned. The firelight was behind him and I could not read his face. “You, Lady Harriet, have a great deal to lose.”
“I am aware.”
“Kestwick would not take a widow with a stain on her.”
“Then I shall not be stained. You just said you were careful.”
“And if I say no?”
“Then I shall go back into the ballroom and dance with nobody, and on Wednesday I shall receive Lord Kestwick’s offer and very likely accept it, and in forty years I shall die in Northumberland having never known.” I lifted my chin. “And you will have the satisfaction of having been, for once in your life, entirely respectable.”
He laughed.
It was not the laugh I remembered from the Rutlands’ ball—that great startled crack of sound. It was low and short and seemed to surprise him, and for a moment the hard face opened and he looked younger, and almost unguarded, and I felt it low in my stomach like a missed stair.
“God help me,” he said. “You haven’t changed at all.”
“You do not know me well enough to say.”
“I know you counted to seven out loud in the middle of the Duchess of Rutland’s ballroom when you were nineteen years old and every other girl in the room was simpering. I know you walked into this library to proposition a man you’ve spoken to exactly twice, and you’ve done it without a single blush.” He tilted his head. “Well. One blush. When I mentioned the horses.”
“You said I called you a cart horse. I did not.”
“Lessons,” he said, ignoring this, as though tasting the word. “And terms. Your terms.”
“Yes.”
“What are they?”
I had them by heart. I had written them out twice, burned the first copy, and folded the second into the bodice of my gown, where it lay against my stays like a small hot coal. But to say them aloud here, in Lady Brandreth’s library, with the waltz playing and the door unlocked behind me and this man looking at me as though I had become, quite suddenly, the most interesting object in the room—
The door handle rattled.
We both went still. Voices outside: a woman’s laugh, a man’s murmur, the slither of silk against the panelling as someone leaned on it.
“The conservatory is the usual place,” the duke said under his breath, and the corner of his mouth lifted. “Some people never learn.”
He crossed the room in four long strides, put his body between me and the door, and called out in a bored drawl, “Occupied, I’m afraid. Try the music room. Lady Brandreth has had the pianoforte moved against the wall, and it is just the height.”
A muffled shriek. Giggling. Footsteps retreating, quick and guilty.
He stood there a moment with his back to me and his head bent toward the door, listening. Then he turned, and he was much nearer than he had been, because I had followed him without meaning to, and suddenly there was perhaps a foot of firelit air between us and I could see the pulse beating in his throat above his cravat.
He looked down at me. I looked up at him. Neither of us moved.
“Not here,” he said quietly. “Not tonight. If anyone saw you leave this room with that colour in your cheeks, Lady Harriet, you would be ruined by breakfast.”
“Then where?”
He was silent so long I thought he would refuse after all. His gaze went over my face slowly, feature by feature, as though committing it to memory. It stopped at my mouth, and stayed there one heartbeat too long, and I felt the look as surely as if he had touched me.
“Half Moon Street,” he said. “Number eleven. There is a door from the mews, painted green. Thursday, at four. Come veiled, in a hackney, and pay the man off at the corner of Curzon Street.”
“Thursday,” I whispered.
“Bring your terms. Written down. I find people are bolder in ink.” He stepped back, and the cool air rushed into the space where he had been. “And Lady Harriet?”
“Yes?”
“Think very carefully between now and then. Think about what you are asking for.” His voice had gone rough at the edges. “Because if you walk through that green door, I will give you exactly what you ask for. Nothing less. And I have a suspicion you have no idea how much that is.”
He went out without looking back, and I stood alone in Lady Brandreth’s library, with the fire hissing and the rain coming down and my heart going like a drum, and the folded list of terms burning against my breast.
I did not need until Thursday to think about it.
I had been thinking about it for seven years.
Terms of Engagement
Sebastian
I did not sleep on Monday night, which was not unusual, and I did not go out on Tuesday night, which was.
Freddie Lyle came round at ten to drag me to a hell in Pickering Place where, he swore, a Russian count was losing his estates at hazard one serf at a time. I told my butler to inform Mr. Lyle that His Grace was indisposed. Freddie, who has known me since Eton, shouted up the stairwell that His Grace had never been indisposed a day in his life unless there was a woman involved, and demanded to know her name. I threw a boot at the banisters. He went away laughing.
He was not wrong. That was the trouble.
I sat in the library at Ravensworth House with a decanter I did not touch and a book I did not read, and I thought about Harriet Ellery standing in Lady Brandreth’s firelight with her chin up, saying I did not enjoy one single moment of it in the voice of a woman reading out a sentence passed on someone else.
I had been propositioned before. I had been propositioned in carriages and theatre boxes and once, memorably, in a confessional at the Bavarian Embassy chapel. Women came to me for pleasure, or for revenge on their husbands, or for the thrill of being able to say, in the privacy of their own heads, that they had once been reckless. I understood all of that. It was a fair trade and I was good at my end of it.
Nobody had ever come to me for an education.
Nobody had ever looked me in the eye and said, in effect, I have been told I am broken, and I would like you to tell me whether it is true.
And the worst of it—the thing that kept me in that chair until the candles guttered—was that I could see exactly how it had been done to her. I could see Gerald Ellery in his nightcap with his drainage schemes and his thick satisfied neck, taking what he was owed in the dark like a man collecting rents, and then telling her it was her fault there was nothing in it. Seven years of that. Seven years of being informed, nightly, that she was cold, until she had stopped expecting to be anything else.
I knew a thing or two about growing up in the house of a man who told you what you were.
My father had been the fourth Duke of Ravensworth, and he had been a thorough man. He was thorough with his estates and thorough with his tenants and thorough, above all, with his wife, whom he had married for her fortune and kept for her silence. I was eleven before I understood that the sounds from my mother’s rooms at night were not nightmares. I was nineteen when I stood at her graveside and made myself a promise, the only one I have ever kept: that the Thorne line would end with me, and no woman would ever have reason to be afraid of my footstep in a corridor.
I had kept it for sixteen years. I had kept it by never staying anywhere long enough to matter. A season, two at most. Widows who wanted a diversion. Wives whose husbands had their own diversions. Pleasure, given generously and taken without apology, and never, ever anything that looked like a claim.
Six lessons on her terms. It was, I told myself at three in the morning, the most harmless arrangement I had ever been offered.
At four, I admitted I was lying.
Half Moon Street was a narrow house on a narrow street, three storeys of brown brick with a fanlight over the door and a small garden behind, running back to the mews. I had bought it four years before through my man of business, under his name, because I wanted one place in London where nobody would come looking for the Duke of Ravensworth. I kept two servants there—an elderly couple named Bright who had been with my mother—and a great many books, and a pianoforte I played badly, and nothing else.
I had never brought a woman there. My liaisons were conducted in the ladies’ own houses, or in rooms I hired for the purpose and never visited twice.
I did not examine too closely why I had given Harriet Ellery the address of the only place in the world that was mine. I simply told Mrs. Bright to lay a fire in the back sitting room and to make tea at four and then to take the rest of the afternoon to visit her sister in Clerkenwell. She looked at me over her spectacles for a long moment, the way she used to look at me when I was eight and had been in the jam, and said, “Very good, Your Grace,” in a voice that made it clear it was nothing of the kind.
At ten minutes to four I was standing at the window of the back sitting room watching the mews, and I realised I was nervous.
I had not been nervous with a woman since I was seventeen. I stood there and examined the sensation with something like scientific interest—the tightness under my breastbone, the restlessness in my hands—and decided I disliked it intensely.
At four precisely the green door in the garden wall opened.
She came through it like a woman stepping onto ice. She wore a dark grey pelisse buttoned to the throat and a bonnet with a veil so thick she might have been anyone—a governess, a lady’s maid, a nun. She paused just inside the wall, and I watched her look up at the back of the house, at the windows, at me, though she could not have seen me through the rain-streaked glass. She stood there a long moment. Her gloved hands closed and opened at her sides.
Then she walked up the garden path without hurrying and knocked on the back door, three times, firmly, the way a woman knocks when she has come to collect a debt.
I opened it myself.
“Your Grace.”
“Lady Harriet. Come in out of the wet.”
She stepped past me into the narrow back passage, smelling of rain and lavender water, and stood dripping on the flagstones while I shut the door. She did not lift the veil. I could see the shape of her face behind it, and the glint of her eyes, and nothing else.
“You may take that off,” I said. “There’s no one here but me.”
“No servants?”
“Sent away. There’s a fire and there’s tea, and there’s a key in the sitting room door, and you will hold it.”
A pause. Then her hands came up and lifted the veil back over the brim of her bonnet, and I saw her properly for the first time in daylight.
Lady Brandreth’s candles had been kind to her and they had also lied. In the flat grey light of a rainy afternoon she looked older than she had in the ballroom, and tireder, and a hundred times more interesting. She had a straight, decided nose and a wide mouth held too firmly closed, as if from long habit, and brown hair with a reddish cast where the light caught it, scraped back under the bonnet with merciless efficiency. Her eyes were hazel—not one colour but several, green at the rims and amber at the centre, like light through a glass of cider. There were faint shadows beneath them. She had not slept either.
“Well,” she said, meeting my inspection with one of her own. “You look much less like a debauchee by day.”
“Disappointed?”
“Relieved. I was afraid you would be wearing a dressing gown and an expression.”
“I own several dressing gowns,” I said gravely, “and a great many expressions. I put them all away for you. Come and sit by the fire.”
The back sitting room was small and warm and crammed with books on every wall. I had chosen it because it had only one door and one window, and because the window looked out on the garden and nothing could look in. She walked into it, and stopped, and turned slowly in a circle, looking at the shelves.
“These are read,” she said.
“Most of them.”
“Lady Brandreth’s are not.”
“Lady Brandreth buys books by the colour of their bindings to match her curtains.” I took her wet pelisse and hung it by the fire. Beneath it she wore a walking dress of the same lavender-grey as her ball gown, high at the neck, with long tight sleeves that ended at her wrists in a narrow ruffle. Every inch of her was covered. It made me think, absurdly, of a letter sealed with too much wax. “Whose house did you think this was?”
“I did not know. A house you keep for—” She stopped.
“For women,” I finished. “No. It’s a house I keep for myself. You are the first visitor it has ever had, apart from the coal man.”
She looked at me sharply, to see if I was mocking her. I let her look. After a moment something in her shoulders eased a fraction, and she sat down on the edge of the sofa nearest the fire as though she might at any moment have to get up and run.
I poured the tea. She watched my hands do it.
“Did Kestwick call?” I asked, giving her a cup.
Her fingers went tight on the saucer. “Yesterday.”
“And?”
“And he made me an offer. A very handsome one, as these things go. A house in Brook Street for the Season and his seat in Northumberland for the rest of the year. Pin money of four hundred a year. My brother’s—” She stopped again, and drank her tea instead of finishing. “I asked him for a fortnight to consider it. He was not pleased. He said a woman of my age and situation ought not to require a fortnight to recognise good fortune. But he gave it.”
“Generous of him,” I said, and heard the edge in my own voice.
She heard it too. “You dislike him.”
“I don’t know him well enough to dislike him.” That was not quite true. I had seen his first wife once, at Almack’s, the spring before she died. She had been dancing, and laughing, and when her glove slipped I had seen the marks on her wrist above it, four of them, neat and blue and exactly the width of a man’s fingers. I had told myself it was none of my business. I had told myself that for three years. “I would not sell him a horse.”
“I am not a horse.”
“No.”
“And I am not being sold. I am being provided for.” She set down her cup with a small decisive click. “I did not come here to discuss Lord Kestwick, Your Grace.”
“No,” I agreed. “You came with terms. Let me see them.”
For a moment I thought she would lose her nerve. Her hand went to the front of her bodice and hovered there. Then she reached inside the high neck of her gown—I looked at the fire, and was ashamed of how much I wanted not to—and drew out a folded sheet of paper, warm and slightly curved from lying against her body, and held it out to me.
I unfolded it. Her handwriting was small and very upright, without flourishes.
Terms of an arrangement between the undersigned parties.
First: There shall be six lessons, and no more.
Second: There shall be no kissing upon the mouth.
Third: Neither party shall fall in love.
Fourth: The lady may end the arrangement at any time, for any reason or none, without explanation, and it shall be at once concluded.
I read it twice. Then I looked up at her over the top of the page.
“Why six?”
“It seemed a sufficient number to learn something and too few to grow accustomed to it.”
“Why no kissing?”
Colour crept up from the high collar of her gown. She held my gaze. “Because a kiss on the mouth is—” She searched for the word. “Particular. One may teach a woman a great many things about her body without its meaning anything. But a kiss is a thing lovers do. I do not want to confuse myself.”
“And the third?”
“Is self-explanatory, I should think.”
“For you or for me?”
“For both of us.” Her chin came up. “I am told you never fall in love, so it should cost you nothing. And I cannot afford to. I am going to marry another man at the end of this. I would like to go to him with my eyes open and my heart where I left it.”
I looked down at the paper again. Neither party shall fall in love. Written in that small, upright, merciless hand, as though love were a thing one could simply decline, like a second helping of pudding.
“And the fourth,” I said. “You may end it at any time.”
“Yes.” She leaned forward slightly. “That one is not negotiable.”
“I wasn’t going to negotiate it. I was going to say it was the only one of the four I’d have insisted on myself.” I took a pencil from the table beside my chair. “I’ll accept all of them. But I have conditions of my own.”
Wariness in the hazel eyes. “Go on.”
I wrote beneath her fourth term, in my own large, slanting hand, and spoke as I wrote.
“Fifth. The lady will tell the truth. Always. If something pleases her, she will say so. If it does not, she will say so. If she is frightened or uncomfortable or bored, she will say so. She will not pretend to anything to spare my feelings, because I have none worth sparing and because a lie in this particular room would make the whole exercise worthless.” I glanced up. “I need to know what you feel, Harriet. That’s the entire lesson. I can’t teach you if you’re being polite.”
She had gone rather pale, but she nodded.
“Sixth. There shall be a word, and the word is enough. If the lady says it, everything stops. At once. Not in a moment, not after one more thing. At once. And she will never be asked to explain why.”
“That is the same as my fourth term.”
“No. Your fourth ends the arrangement. This ends the moment. You may want to stop an afternoon without stopping everything. You should have a way to do it that costs you nothing.”
Something moved in her face—a quick flicker of surprise, quickly hidden. She said nothing.
“Seventh,” I said, and paused with the pencil on the paper. “Nothing will be done that the lady has not asked for.”
“But I don’t know what to ask for. That is rather the point.”
“Then I’ll tell you what each lesson is, before it begins, and you’ll say yes or no. And you’ll go on saying yes, or you’ll say enough.” I signed my name at the bottom of the page—Ravensworth, just the title, the way I signed bills and letters to my steward—and held it out to her with the pencil. “That’s my offer. Seven terms. Six lessons. If any of it is unacceptable, tell me now and you can go back through the green door and we will never speak of it again.”
She took the paper. She read what I had written, slowly, her lips moving very slightly on one or two of the words. I watched her come to enough and stop, and read it again.
“You have done this before,” she said quietly. “Made terms.”
“Never.”
“Then why—”
“Because you told me what was done to you,” I said, “and I would rather cut off my hand than do it again.”
The fire hissed. A cart rattled past in the mews. She sat with my terms in her lap and looked at me for so long that I began to feel it on my skin, the weight of that cider-coloured gaze, testing every word for false coin.
Then she held out her hand for the pencil, and signed. Harriet Ellery. Small and upright, beneath the slanting scrawl of my title.
“There,” she said, and her voice shook only a very little. “Now it is a contract.”
“Now it is a contract,” I agreed. “Give me your hand.”
She hesitated. “Is this a lesson?”
“It’s a demonstration. You may refuse.”
She gave me her hand.
She still wore her gloves—grey kid, buttoned at the wrist with three tiny pearl buttons. I turned her hand palm up in mine and looked at it, and did not touch it otherwise. I could feel her breathing. I could feel the slight tremor running through her fingers like current through a wire.
“I’m going to take off your glove,” I said. “That’s all. Yes or no?”
A pause. “Yes.”
I undid the first pearl button. It was very small and the buttonhole was very tight, and I took my time with it, and when it gave I felt her fingers jump against my palm. I did not look up. I undid the second. Beneath it, a sliver of white skin showed at the inside of her wrist, and the faint blue thread of a vein. I undid the third, and then I took the tip of each kid finger in turn between my thumb and forefinger and drew it loose, one by one, slowly, and peeled the glove down over her palm the way one might peel the skin from a ripe peach.
Her hand lay bare in mine. It was narrow and cool and slightly damp, with an ink stain on the second finger and a pale band on the fourth where a wedding ring had sat for seven years.
I heard her breath catch, very softly.
“Tell me the truth,” I said, still not looking up. “What do you feel?”
“I—” Her voice cracked. She tried again. “Warm.”
“Where?”
A long silence. Then, so low I almost lost it under the sound of the fire: “Everywhere.”
I raised her hand and set my mouth against the centre of her palm.
Not a kiss, exactly. I parted my lips against the soft hollow of her hand and breathed out, slow and hot, and let her feel it, and that was all. Her fingers curled helplessly toward my face. I felt the pulse in her wrist leap against my thumb like something trying to get out.
Then I lowered her hand and gave it back to her, and sat back in my chair, and folded my own hands on my knee where she could see them.
She was staring at me. Her lips had parted. There was colour high in both her cheeks, and her breasts rose and fell beneath the prim lavender bodice in a way that told me exactly how hard her heart was going.
“That,” I said, “is the beginning of lesson zero, which is that your body is not cold, Lady Harriet. It never was. It has simply never been asked a civil question.”
She closed her bare hand into a fist in her lap, as if to keep something in it.
“When is the first lesson?” she whispered.
“Tuesday. Four o’clock. The green door.” I stood, because if I did not stand I was going to do something that was not on the paper, and fetched her pelisse from beside the fire. “That gives you four days to come to your senses.”
“I won’t.”
“You might.”
“I have been sensible for twenty-nine years, Your Grace.” She rose and let me put the pelisse around her shoulders. For one moment she stood with her back against my chest and my hands on the grey wool at her shoulders, and neither of us moved, and I could smell the lavender water in her hair and feel the heat of her through every layer between us. “It has got me precisely nowhere.”
She stepped away and buttoned the pelisse to her throat with steady fingers. She pulled the veil down. She picked up her glove from the arm of the sofa, looked at it, and then—to my astonishment—did not put it on. She tucked it into her reticule, and walked out with one hand bare, and the green door closed behind her.
I stood in the back sitting room for a long while after, with the contract in my hand.
Seven terms. I read them over again. Six lessons. No kissing. Tell the truth. Enough.
Neither party shall fall in love.
I had broken every rule anyone had ever tried to set me. I had made a career of it. And here was the first set of rules I had ever signed my name to, and I stood in my own house with the taste of her palm still on my mouth and understood, with perfect clarity, that I was going to keep every one of them if it killed me.
I had a strong suspicion it might.
Lesson the First
Harriet
My brother told me about the vowels on Saturday morning, over a breakfast neither of us ate.
Edmund was two-and-thirty and had our father’s height and our mother’s chin, which is to say he looked like a man of resolution and was not one. He had inherited the earldom at twenty-four, along with a house in Upper Brook Street, an estate in Wiltshire that had been mortgaged since the American war, and a conviction, which no amount of evidence could shake, that his luck was due to turn on the next card. He was kind to his wife and kind to his children and kind to me, and he had been ruining all of us with great sweetness for eight years.
“Kestwick has been buying them up,” he said to his plate of kidneys. “Since February. I didn’t know until Wednesday. He told me after he’d spoken to you. Very civil about it. Said he thought it would be simpler, in view of the family connection, if I owed it all to one man rather than to a dozen.”
“How much?”
He named the sum. I put down my cup because my hand would not hold it steady.
“He’s not pressing,” Edmund said quickly. “That’s the thing, Hattie. He was very clear. Between family, he said, there’s no hurry at all. He said it twice.”
“And if there is no family connection?”
Edmund looked up at last. His eyes were red-rimmed. He was not a cruel man, my brother; he was only weak, and weak men can do a great deal of cruelty by simply standing still and letting it happen.
“He didn’t say,” he whispered. “He didn’t have to.”
Upstairs, in the nursery, my nephew was banging a spoon against the bars of his cot. Louisa was in her room being sick, as she had been every morning for a month. Rain streamed down the dining-room windows, as it had streamed for a fortnight and more, and somewhere in Wiltshire the hay was rotting in the fields.
“I have a fortnight,” I said. “He gave me a fortnight.”
“Hattie, I would never ask you—”
“You are not asking me. Nobody is asking me.” I stood. My chair scraped on the floorboards. “That is what makes it so very elegant.”
I went up to my old schoolroom and locked the door and sat on the narrow bed with my hands in my lap, and for a long time I did not think anything at all.
At eleven there was a knock, and Louisa’s voice, thin through the panels. I let her in. She was in her wrapper still, her fair hair in a plait over one shoulder and her face the colour of skimmed milk, and she sat down beside me on the bed without a word and took my gloved hand in both of hers.
“He told me,” she said. “Last night. He cried.”
“Edmund always cries. It is one of his few reliable qualities.”
She did not smile. Louisa was six-and-twenty and the gentlest creature I had ever known, and in eight years of marriage to my brother she had learned to say very little and notice everything. “Hattie. You are not to do it for us. Do you hear me? I would sooner live in a cottage in Wiltshire and keep hens.”
“You have two boys in the nursery and a third child coming at Michaelmas. You cannot raise three children on hens.”
“Other women do.”
“Other women have not been raised in Grosvenor Square by a mother who fainted at the sight of a turnip.” I squeezed her hands. “It is not so very terrible, Lou. He is a viscount. He is rich. I shall have a house in Brook Street and a carriage of my own and nobody will ever again ask me to account for the price of a pair of gloves.”
Louisa was quiet for a long moment, looking at our joined hands.
“I knew Caroline Vane a little,” she said. “Before. We came out the same year, you know. She sat beside me at a musicale the spring before she died, at Lady Jersey’s, and in the interval she leaned over and asked me, quite low, as if she were asking where I had my bonnets trimmed, whether I knew of an apothecary who would sell laudanum to a lady without sending the bill to her husband.” She raised her eyes to mine. They were full. “I told her I didn’t. I’ve thought about it every day for three years. I don’t know which answer would have been worse.”
The room was very quiet. Upstairs the spoon had stopped banging.
“I have a fortnight,” I said at last. My voice did not sound like my own. “I shall think about it, Lou. I promise you I shall think very hard.”
She kissed my cheek and went away, and I sat alone again with the rain.
Then I took off my right glove.
I had worn gloves in the house since Thursday. It was absurd; Louisa had remarked on it, and I had said I had a chill in my hands. The truth was that I could not bear to look at my bare palm in front of other people. I was afraid it would show on me somehow—the place where he had breathed against it, the heat that had gone through me from that one small point and spread like ink in water to every part of my body, to places that had never in seven years of marriage felt anything at all.
I looked at my hand now, in the grey light of the schoolroom. It looked like a hand. The ink stain had worn off. The pale band where Gerald’s ring had been was fading a little more every month.
I raised it, slowly, and pressed my own lips to the centre of my palm, where his had been.
Nothing happened. Of course nothing happened. It was only my own mouth, and my own hand, and I felt foolish and sad and twenty-nine.
But then I remembered his voice—tell me the truth; what do you feel?—and I remembered the way he had not looked up, the way he had kept his eyes on my hand as though it were the only thing in the room, and I breathed out against my own skin as he had done, slow and warm.
And something low in my belly turned over and woke.
I told no one where I was going on Tuesday. I told Louisa I had a headache and meant to lie down, and I told Dawes, my maid, that I meant to walk to Hookham’s library to change a novel, and I let her lace me into the plainest walking dress I owned and did not meet her eyes in the glass. Dawes had dressed me on my wedding morning. She had undressed me on the night Gerald died, and held my hand while I sat dry-eyed by the window until dawn. She looked at me now for a long moment over my shoulder, her mouth folded small, and then she fetched the thick grey veil from the back of the press without being asked, and pinned it to my bonnet herself.
“It’s coming on to blow, my lady,” was all she said. “Mind you keep it down.”
In the hackney I counted the eleven reasons again, the way a woman going to the gallows might say her prayers. I found I could only remember nine of them. The rest had worn away somewhere between Thursday and today, like the ink on my finger, and the nine that were left had a thin, threadbare sound, like a sermon heard too many times. Your reputation. Your brother. Your prospects. Your age. I said them over to myself as the carriage lurched down Park Lane, and every one of them was true, and not one of them was as loud as the memory of a man’s breath against the centre of my palm.
I thought of turning back. I truly did. At the top of Curzon Street I had my hand raised to rap on the roof and tell the driver to take me home to Upper Brook Street, to my schoolroom and my narrow bed and Kestwick’s offer waiting on the hall table like an unpaid bill. I held my hand there, raised, for the length of a street.
Then I thought of the cracks in Gerald’s bedroom ceiling, and how well I knew them, and I put my hand back in my lap.
Dawes had been right about the wind. It had got up while we drove, and it drove the rain sideways down Half Moon Street and tore at my bonnet and plastered my skirts against my legs, and by the time I had paid off the hackney at the corner of Curzon Street and walked the length of the mews with my head down, I was wet to the knees and so frightened I could barely feel my feet.
The green door opened before I could touch it.
“You’ll catch your death,” the Duke of Ravensworth said, and drew me through by the wrist, and shut the door on the weather.
He had come out to meet me. He stood in the little dripping garden without a hat, in his shirtsleeves and a dark waistcoat, with the rain beading on his black hair and running down the side of his face. I stared at him. I had never in my life seen a gentleman out of doors without his coat. It seemed somehow more indecent than if he had been naked.
“You’ll catch yours,” I said stupidly.
“I have a very strong constitution. Come inside.”
In the back passage he turned me toward him by the shoulders and looked at my face through the veil, and then reached up without asking and lifted it back. His fingers went to the ribbons of my bonnet. The wind had knotted them, and the rain had shrunk the knot tight, and he stood frowning at it under my chin for a moment before he bent his head and set to work picking it loose with his fingertips.
I could not breathe.
He was so close. Closer than he had been in Lady Brandreth’s library, closer than in the sitting room with his mouth against my hand. His head was bent and his eyes were lowered to the knot, and I could see each separate drop of rain caught in his eyelashes, and a small white scar at the edge of his jaw I had not noticed before, and the shadow of a beard beneath the skin though he must have shaved that morning. His knuckles brushed the underside of my chin. His breath stirred the damp curls at my temple. He smelled of rain and cedar and clean linen, and I could feel the warmth coming off him through his wet shirt.
The knot gave. He drew the ribbons apart, slowly, and lifted the bonnet from my head, and then he did not step back.
He looked at me. I looked at him.
I do not know which of us moved. I think it was me. I think I swayed toward him like a plant toward a window, without meaning to, without deciding anything at all—only that his mouth was there, a few inches above mine, soft and grave and slightly parted, and I had been thinking about that mouth for six days and nights, and my chin tipped up of its own accord, and his head came down by a fraction of an inch, and I felt the heat of his breath against my lips—
He stopped.
So close that when he spoke, I felt the words more than heard them.
“Second term, Harriet.”
I closed my eyes. “I know.”
“Your rule.”
“I know.”
Neither of us moved. His hand had come up, somehow, to cradle the side of my face; his thumb rested on my cheekbone. I could feel it trembling very faintly. That undid me more than anything—that the most notorious rake in London, a man who had had a third of the married women in the ton by his own count, was standing in his back passage holding my face as though it were made of eggshell, and his hand was shaking.
“Tell me to step back,” he said.
I opened my eyes. His were very dark, the grey gone almost to black.
“Step back,” I whispered.
He did. One pace, and then another, and the cold air of the passage rushed between us. He turned away and hung my bonnet on a peg by the door, and stood with his back to me a moment longer than the task required.
“Well,” he said to the wall, lightly, “we have established that you are capable of breaking your own rules. That is very useful information.”
“I didn’t break it.”
“You came within half an inch.”
“So did you.”
He turned. For a moment there was something wild in his face, and then it was gone, folded away behind the old sardonic half smile like a letter into a drawer. “So I did. Come and get warm. You’re shivering.”
I was. I was not cold.
He had built up the fire in the back sitting room until it roared, and he set me in front of it and took my wet pelisse and my wet half-boots and brought me a pair of thick wool stockings that I suspected belonged to Mrs. Bright and turned his back while I changed into them. Then he poured me a glass of sherry, not tea, and sat down in the wing chair across from the sofa with a glass of his own, and the key to the sitting-room door lay on the little table between us, where I could reach it and he could not.
“You’ve had four days,” he said. “Have you come to your senses?”
“No.”
“Good.” He turned the glass in his fingers. “Before we begin, I need you to tell me something, and I need you to keep the fifth term while you do it.”
“The truth.”
“The truth.” He looked at me steadily over the rim of his glass. “What did he do?”
My face burned. “Your Grace—”
“Sebastian. If you are going to sit in my sitting room in Mrs. Bright’s stockings, you can call me by my name.”
“Sebastian,” I said. It felt strange in my mouth. Too intimate by half, and not nearly intimate enough. “I would rather not discuss my husband.”
“I know. But I can’t teach you what it should be if I don’t know what it was.” His voice gentled. “You don’t have to look at me. Look at the fire.”
I looked at the fire. It was easier. I took a swallow of sherry, and then another, and then I told him.
I told him about the dark—that Gerald had always put out the candle first, every time, for seven years, so that I had never once seen him without his nightshirt. I told him that he came to me on Tuesdays and Saturdays, and that I always knew when it was a Tuesday or a Saturday because he would drink two glasses of port after dinner instead of one. I told him about the weight of him, and the smell of port and snuff, and the way he would push my nightgown up only as far as was strictly necessary, as though the rest of me were an irrelevance. I told him that it hurt, at first, and afterward it did not hurt but it did not do anything else either. I told him that it took four minutes, perhaps five; that I used to count the seconds in the dark to have something to do; that I knew the cracks in that bedroom ceiling better than I knew my own face.
“And afterward,” I said to the fire, “he would roll away and tell me that I was very cold, and that a cold wife was a great trial to a man, and that he supposed I could not help it, being a Wexcombe. My mother was said to be cold, you see. It was a family failing. Like the chin.”
The fire crackled. I could not look at him.
“I tried,” I said, more quietly. “In the early days. I tried to—to feel something. I thought perhaps if I moved, or made some sound, it would help. Once I put my arms around him and he stopped and asked me what on earth I thought I was doing. He said it was not seemly. He said women of good family did not behave like opera dancers.” I drank the rest of my sherry. “So I stopped trying. And then after a while I stopped wanting to try. And then I stopped wanting anything at all, and I thought—I think I thought that was simply what it was. For everyone. And that the poets were liars.”
“The poets,” said Sebastian, in a voice I had not heard him use before, low and flat and very controlled, “are frequently liars. But not about that.”
I made myself look at him then.
He was sitting forward in the wing chair with his elbows on his knees and his glass held loosely between his hands. His face was quite still. But there was a muscle working in his cheek, and his knuckles had gone white around the stem of his glass, and I understood with a strange cold shock that he was angry. Not at me. At a dead man in a Wiltshire churchyard whom he had met perhaps three times in his life.
“He never once saw you,” he said. “Did he? In seven years.”
“No.”
“And you never saw him.”
“No.”
“Then you’ve never seen a man at all. Not properly. Not in the light.” He set the glass down on the table beside the key. “That’s where we’ll begin.”
My heart began to pound. “Begin how?”
“Lesson the first,” he said. “I’m going to tell you what it is, and you’re going to say yes or no.” He held my gaze. “You told me Ellery made you ashamed of your own body by never letting you look at his, and never looking at yours. He made it a thing done in the dark, quickly, because it was shameful. So today, you will look. I’m going to undress, Harriet. As much as I need to. And I’m going to touch myself, the way a man does when he’s alone, and I’m going to tell you exactly what I’m doing and why and how it feels. You won’t have to do anything. You won’t have to touch me or move from that sofa or take off so much as a hairpin. You’ll only watch.” A pause. “And you’ll see something that nobody, I think, has ever bothered to show you. That a man is not a force of nature. That he’s a body, like yours, that can be wanted and learned and governed. Yes or no?”
The room was very quiet. Outside, the wind threw rain against the window in fistfuls.
I thought of Gerald putting out the candle. Seven years of darkness and four minutes at a time. I thought of my bare palm and my own breath against it, and the thing that had woken in me in the schoolroom on Saturday and had not gone back to sleep since.
“Yes,” I said.
He watched my face a moment longer, as if checking the word for cracks. Then he nodded once, and stood.
He began with his waistcoat. His fingers went down the row of buttons without hurrying, and he shrugged it off and laid it over the back of the chair. Then his cravat. He tugged loose the knot and unwound the long strip of linen from his throat, turn after turn, and dropped it on the waistcoat, and the open neck of his shirt showed a triangle of skin at the base of his throat, and a few dark hairs, and the strong line of his collarbone.
I had stopped breathing. I made myself start again.
He pulled the tail of his shirt free of his breeches and drew the whole thing over his head in one movement, and let it fall.
I had never seen a man’s bare chest. Not once. Not a footman’s, not a labourer’s in the fields, not my husband’s. I had seen statues, of course, at Lord Elgin’s exhibition, where the Society ladies giggled behind their fans, and I had thought them beautiful in the cold, faraway manner of marble. This was not marble.
He was broad through the shoulders and narrower at the waist, and his skin was paler where his shirt had covered it and golden at the wrists and throat. There was dark hair across his chest, not thick, and a line of it running down the flat of his belly and disappearing beneath the waistband of his breeches. He had a long pale scar across his ribs on the left side that looked old, and the muscles of his stomach moved when he breathed. The firelight ran over all of it like warm water.
He stood there and let me look. He did not pose, or preen, or smile. He simply stood, his arms at his sides, and let my eyes go where they would.
They went everywhere. They went to his shoulders and his chest and the scar and the line of dark hair, and down, and stopped at the waistband of his breeches where the hair disappeared. And I saw that beneath the close-fitting buckskin he was already—that the fabric was strained—
I looked back up at his face, scalding.
“No,” he said softly. “Don’t do that.”
“I wasn’t—”
“You were. You saw something and you looked away because you were taught it was shameful to look. It isn’t. Not in this room.” He sat back down in the wing chair, slowly, his knees spread, his bare chest rising and falling in the firelight. His hands came to rest on the buttons of the falls of his breeches. “This is the whole lesson, Harriet. Everything after this is just detail. You are going to look at me. All of me. And you are not going to be ashamed.”
The fire roared. My pulse roared louder.
His fingers slid the first button free.
“Watch me,” the Duke of Ravensworth said, low and rough, his slate-dark eyes holding mine. “Don’t look away.”
