“The whole bloody thing is coarse!”
He could practically feel the heat from her blush. “That’s as it may be—but if you will simply compare the style of the hair on this gentleman’s, er, other parts—”
“You can draw a cock but you cannot say it?”
“The hair on hisprivate areato the hair on his beard, it will be perfectly clear to you that Idid not draw this beard—”
“And the tattoo on my arse?”
She was back to staring out into the night, still blushing furiously. “I assure you, sir, I did not know you had any kind of body modification, and I certainly did not draw that—that—”
“Constellation?” he offered. “That’s Ursa Major.”
“How,” she hissed, “could I possibly know that you havestarson yourbuttocks?”
“A question, your ladyship, which I believe I have already put to you.”
“I did not draw that! I did not draw the beard, nor the scar, nor the constellation, and while I admit that it does look decidedly like your person with those additions,I did not make them.”
“Are you suggesting,” he asked grimly, “that you sent these drawings to the engraver and someone—some later artist—altered them to look like me?”
She was still pale. Her insulting freckles looked like tiny bruises across her cheeks. “Yes,” she said.
“Why in God’s name would someone do that?”
She bit her lip. “I do not know! I—perhaps there was some small resemblance—and someone thought to…” She trailed off, and her teeth sank back into the plump curve of her bottom lip.
He scrubbed his hand over the back of his neck. “I know why.”
She looked up, eyes wide. For the first time, she looked truly alarmed. “You do?”
“Goddamnit.” He crumpled up the pamphlet and stuffed it back into his jacket. He wanted, stupidly, to throw it in the dirt, but it seemed foolish to make more copies of the thing available to the interested public. “For sales, of course.”
It made a kind of sense. Despite himself, he believed Matilda. There really was a noticeable difference in the style of the piece—now that she pointed it out, the facial hair on the man in the drawing looked scratched on, like a child’s defacement in a schoolbook. The stars on his arse were a series of scribbles, nothing like the finely shaded delicacy of the rest of the piece.
And now she had him thinking favorably of her dirty pictures. Jesus Christ, he really was unhinged.
“For—sales?” She looked like she’d been struck in the head.
He exhaled. “Yes. Anyone can make up a lewd story and sell it—but attach it to my name, to my face, and it’s instantly infamous.” When she met his eyes, he felt his jaw tighten. “Have you not heard? I’m a monster. A wife-murderer. And now, thanks to this bloody pamphlet, I am some kind of perverted defiler of innocents as well.”
She licked her lips, and perhaps hewasa monster, because some part of his brain registered the movement with an emotion altogether different from outrage.
“I have heard the rumors,” she said. Her voice was so bloody cool. As though murderers confronted her in dark gardens every evening.
“Are you not afraid?”
That was what he’d wanted, was it not? To make her fear him? To make her regret what she’d done?
Only—it seemed she had not done it. Or, if she had, the drawings had been some kind of cosmic mistake, a coincidence made into a weapon by a printer or engraver with a mercenary hand.
He felt suddenly guilty for this too, one more layer of regret on top of many. For approaching her. For trying to frighten her.
“I do not listen to gossip,” she said. “I have heard enough of it about myself. I have seen scandal sheets so distort the truth that I would not know they were about me if not for our bloody nickname at the top of the page.”
“Yes, well,” he said shortly. “You’re the only one who does not listen.”
He’d had enough of this. It was pointless, all of it. What had he thought to accomplish? He could confront every artist and engraver and printer in the land, and he still would not be able to take the pamphlets back. He could sue everyone in London for slander, and he would not get Bea’s art tutor back to Northumberland. Nor would he change the past.
