“I agree,” he said coldly. “Thank you for your services in providing music lessons for my sister. But I’m afraid that association is at an end.”
He stepped back, the torchlight lending satanic shadows across his face, and Lucasta felt her heart break in truth.
“No,” she choked. “You can’t deny me Judith. She’s learning so much. And I care for her?—”
“As her guardian and brother, it is my duty to protect her from influences that might lead her astray,” he said, and thatvoice she had thought sounded like velvet and brandy together had the quality of cold steel. “I am sure you can understand.”
A new horror froze Lucasta where she stood. “The concert—the foundlings? Are you going to tell the governors to—” She couldn’t even voice the idea.
“I think it is too late to change any plans.” His face was as unyielding as a wooden mask. “I will not attempt to influence the board of governors in either direction. But I hope you will not count on my support or my contribution to the scheme. It will cause Judith distress if she knows I am involved when she cannot be.”
“Cause Judith distress,” Lucasta echoed. And Lucasta’s distress mattered not at all.
She turned away, blinded by tears, hoping the path she chose led to the safety of her friends in the Rotunda, and away from him. This had been his plan all along: to hold out something tantalizing and exhilarating, to make her dream of something she’d never considered possible, then crush her dream in one careless fist.
“I shall escort you back,” he said sharply. “You can’t be left alone in this crowd.”
“As if you care for my safety,” she cried. “As if you care anything but your own pride.”
She plunged into the crowd, glad she didn’t have Minnie’s spear, for she would have been tempted to ply it on anyone who prevented her from fleeing Jeremiah Falstead as quickly as possible. She felt him beside her, clearing the path as she fought her way back to the building and refuge, providing protection when he was the last person she wanted to be near her. When he was the one responsible for shattering her hopes and grinding them beneath the heel of his gleaming boots.
“Lucasta! Dearest, what is the matter?” Cici stood with the Gorgons by the orchestra box, and she held out her hands as Lucasta rushed toward them. “Has someone hurt you?”
The urge to tell everything was overwhelming, but Bertie turned to her as well, watching with alarm as Jem, stone-faced, shouldered his way toward them. Trevor stepped forward to block his path.
“What have you done, Rudyard?”
“Nothing more than a discussion about whom I approve of her associating with, and whom I do not,” Rudyard said grimly.
His high-handed delivery did not go over well with his audience. “Cad!” Cici cried, then clapped a hand to her mouth in horror. She had never called names in her life.
“As if it is your decision to decide whom Lucasta associates with,” Minnie exclaimed.
Trevor took another step forward. “It appears it has not been to her benefit to cultivate an association withyou.”
The men were of an equal height, and equal mass when it came to that, both broad of chest and lean of hip, a shape approved by fashion but in their case not formed by it.
“Oh, don’t start a mill here, Trevor,” Annis snapped. “You can’t call him out, and Selina’s about to faint.”
Selina and Bertie clutched each other, wide-eyed and trembling, like two frightened chicks clinging together for safety.
“Who says I can’t call him out?” Trevor answered. “Did he insult you, Lucasta?”
Lucasta pulled away the hand she’d clamped over her mouth. Had he misled her? Yes. He let her think his interest in her was genuine, when he was merely looking for a weakness to exploit. And she’d shown him several weaknesses—all of them, in fact. But had he insulted her?
He’d intended for her to become the object of scrutiny; she understood that now. All the new attention and opportunitiesthat had come her way from being an admired figure. All the people she had met who might in time become patrons of a musical school, or employ her for lessons, or in some other way support her dream; all the people who had extra smiles for Cici now that her cousin was admired by Smart Jeremy; all the famous singers she’d approached about her benefit concert who might have simply refused to see an obscure vicar’s daughter, including Signor Marchesi, who had acted as if she flattered him by translating and making a new arrangement for his song—all of that had been so Jeremiah Falstead could watch in amusement as she foundered on the public stage.
It was cruel. It was beneath him. It didn’t match at all with the kind, generous man he was with his family, the benefactor of foundlings and unprotected women, the orphaned boy and draper’s son now thrust into Polite Society. He knew she came from the same place she did, the despised fringes of the aristocracy. He knew what it was like to stand in the unrelenting light of public scrutiny, and he’d meant for the same scrutiny to descend on her.
“He did not insult me.” It took everything in her to compose her voice, but she was a singer, after all. She lived by controlling her voice. “I disagreed with him over the Foundling Hospital concert. But he did not insult me.”
He’d only broken her heart.
There was something tense and furious in Jem’s posture, but a guarded, almost plaintive look as well. Lucasta realized what it meant. What she knew about his family—his sister’s blindness, his half-caste siblings—she could make public at any time. She could turn his secrets into a weapon against him, just as he had used his attention as a weapon against her. He was watching her very carefully to see if she’d try to hurt him in response.
When to do so would hurt his siblings more. And hurt Bertie, too. She’d come to care about them all. That he feared she mightdo something to retaliate against him, something that would hurt people they both cared about—that was the deepest wound yet. He didn’t know her at all.
“Queen Hera! Goddess descended to earth again, I beg you will not flee me this time. I am your most humble servant.”
