Chapter Eighteen
Bea sharpened her pencil until the point was fine enough to do damage.Not to anyone in particular, of course.Merely…to reputations.
The household had settled into the quiet rhythm of late evening—footsteps softened, lamps lowered, voices tucked away behind closed doors.From her little sanctuary of a sitting room, Bea could hear the faint tick of the clock and the distant sigh of London beyond the windows, as if the city were finally exhaling.
Bea, however, could not seem to breathe properly at all.
She stared down at the blank paper in front of her and found her mind stubbornly refusing to land on the subject at hand.
Langford.
Sir Edwin Langford,if one wished to be respectful, which Bea most certainly did not.
She straightened her shoulders, set the page squarely, and began with the thing she always began with: the shape of his head.
It was astonishingly satisfying to reduce a man’s sense of importance into a few cruel lines.
First, the jaw—too square, too self-satisfied.Then the cheeks—fattened with complacency.Then the nose, which Bea elongated just enough to make him look perpetually offended by the scent of other people’s existence.
She darkened the eyebrows until they became two furious caterpillars.
Much better.
Still, her pencil paused as she considered what to do with his mouth.
Langford had the sort of mouth that never smiled without condescension.A man who believed laughter was an instrument: something to wield, not share.She drew it thin and pinched, a line of disdain.
Then she added the smallest suggestion of spit at the corner.
Bea sat back, pleased.
There were some men in this world who deserved to be immortalized.
Not in marble.
In mockery.
She angled the paper toward the lamplight, assessing.The resemblance was excellent—if Langford were ever to see it, he would erupt like a kettle left too long to boil.
Bea’s lips curved faintly.
She could already imagine the caption.
THE GREAT PROTECTOR OF ENGLISH STABILITY,it would read,TERRIFIED OF VOTES FOR THE COMMON MAN.
She raised her pencil to add a ridiculous little crown atop his head—something pompous and absurd—when her hand stalled again.
Because the moment she thought of that salon—of Langford near the hearth, red with self-importance, preaching about “contagion” and “hounds”—she could not help thinking of the other man who had stood there.
Nicholas.
She scowled at the paper as if it were responsible.
She had not meant to think of him.
She had meant to think of Langford’s smug face and the delicious satisfaction of skewering it.
But Nicholas had been there in the middle of it, hadn’t he?Not lurking at the edges like most men did when a woman’s temper threatened to embarrass them.Not tugging her backward with a whispered,Beatrix, do hush.Not glancing around as if to say,Please don’t make this awkward for me.
