It wasn’t a particularly convincing vow.
“I mean it,” she warned him. “Let your friends throw their lives away as they wish, but promise meyouare clever enough never to even appear as though you might have been involved in something punishable by law.”
He lifted his chin.
She ground her teeth.Thiswas why she hated the Wynchesters. Aspiring to be like them was going to get her cousin killed. At eighteen, Quentin was still young enough to believe himself invincible. At eight-and-twenty, Viv was old enough to have seen firsthand how tragically mortal her loved ones really were.
She tried again. “The Seditious Meetings Act alone—”
“No one knows our secret society exists but you, and I’m sorry I ever told you,” Quentin burst out. “I said we’re being careful. But if it makes you feel better, I’ll suggest we move our meetings. No one will overhear us if we convene in the cellars of a sympathetic church, or deep in the canal tunnels, or if we’re outside the city in the mining caves.”
“Canal tunnels?” she choked out. “They’d find you when your body floats up because you can’t swim! Either let me teach you how or stay away from the river.”
“No matter what I say or do, you always manage to find fault with it,” he said with disgust. “When will you stop treating me like a child?”
Was that what she was doing? Viv’s fears were well founded,but did that supersede his autonomy? She wondered if this was how mothers felt whose sons Quentin’s age eagerly joined the army, knowing the next time they saw their child, he might be in a casket.
If they could find the body at all.
“All right,” she forced herself to say. “I can script plays, but not your life. That’s for you to write. But as someone who loves you with all my heart, I can’t promise to stay silent if I think you’re making a terrible mistake.”
He snorted. “The only time you’re silent is when you’re sleeping, and probably not then, either.”
They exchanged tentative smiles, but the tension was still thick between them. At least today he’d left his fresh twists alone and looked mostly like himself. If a bit overdressed for eight o’clock in the morning.
She raised her brows. “Who are you supposed to be this time?”
“Baron Vanderbean,” he said proudly.
Viv frowned. “Didn’t he die a few years ago? As an old man?”
“The Wynchesters’ estranged adoptive brother inherited his father’s title.” Quentin smoothed his hands down the lapels of his finest dark-blue frock coat. A coordinating pale-blue waistcoat peeked beneath his extravagantly folded cravat. “Today, that’s me.”
Viv didn’t have the heart to tell him his clothes were handsome, but not aristocratic quality. A more pertinent detail would give up the ruse at first glance.
“Wouldn’t that be… a white man?”
“He doesn’t have to be. The Vanderbean barony is from Balcovia. That’s an abolitionist nation. Which means the baron could look like anyone, including me.”
“Still improbable,” she murmured.
“Is it?Mynatural father was a white British lord. If he’d married my mother, I would have an aristocratic title right now.”
“But he didn’t and you don’t. And you wouldn’t have anything to do with the Wynchesters if you were titled, either.”
“You don’t know that. In fact…” His eyes lit up. “You can do anything you put your mind to. Find a way for me to have an audience with the Wynchesters!”
“Over my dead body.”
His face fell, anger replacing his hopefulness. “Then I wishyouwould meet them all. I’m sure they’d change your mind if you got to know them.”
“No one has ever changed my mind,” she snapped, “and the first to do so certainly won’t be the dangerously irresponsible Wynchesters. Speaking of dangerously irresponsible, do you know how illegal it is to impersonate a peer of the realm?”
“Balcovian peer,” he reminded her. “Not British. It’s not this jurisdiction, not that England respects Balcovia anyway. Their royalty hasn’t been invited back since the day the Queen of Balcovia and her retinue argued for abolition of slavery throughout all the British territories.”
“Well, I don’t want youdeported, either,” Viv said dryly.
“My club suspects Baron Vanderbean isn’t even real,” Quentin protested. “I can’t be prosecuted for impersonating a peer that doesn’t exist.”
