But the maids seemed to enjoy it soverymuch.
Lady Lillias Vaughn looked out of the window of the dungeon to which she’d been consigned for the past week (a pretty, bright suite at The Grand Palace on the Thames Annex; her little room featured a rose-colored counterpane and a blossom in a vase). Two sketchbooks sat beside her, one full but quite ruined. One new and blank. She’d gotten her paints out.
She hadn’t so much as made a twitch towardthem since she’d arrived at The Grand Palace on the Thames.
Her current view offered rooftops and distantly, like hairline cracks in the blue sky, the masts of ships with furled sails going anywhere and everywhere from the East India docks. Dover. China. America, from whence her new nemesis—that bloody American—had come.Hewas the reason she was confined to the room.
The nerve of him, looming up out of the dark like a cliff, the sort ships founder on in storms. Shoulders blocking the light, the shadows clinging to the valleys created by his cheekbones and jaw sculpting him rather starkly, and when he’d come closer—she perhaps should not have allowed him to get so close, but then, he’d felt like a dare from nearly the moment he appeared, and frankly, once she began looking at him it had been strangely difficult to stop—she discovered his eyes were not as she’d expected. Somewhere between blue and gray.
Alas, he in fact proved to be not atallwhat she’d expected.
But was she to blame for that? It had, after all, begun with him staring as if she were a genie he’d accidentally summoned from a lamp.
You might as well stare. They all do. That was the first thing she’d said to him.
If only she’d had the sense to make it the last thing she’d said to him.
Well, it was true. Because most men were exactly what she’d expected.
For instance, there was the “poem” that accompanied a great wad of hothouse flowers some handsome young fool sent to her a fortnight ago.
I took one look at you
and my heart broke in two
Lady Lillias Vaughn’s mere presence could break a heart the way a soprano could shatter glass—or so the bloods of thetonloved to pretend. It had been exhilarating at first, a silly game, typicaltonnonsense. She couldn’t quite pinpoint when it had all gotten away from her. She was reminded of that gray mare Giles had begged her not to attempt to ride at Heatherfield when she was twelve years old—which of course had only ensured that she would. Now there were times she felt as though she was standing outside of herself, watching that gray mare with a twelve-year-old girl clinging to its back disappear into the distance.
“Broke in two” made heartbreak sound as simple as treading on a twig—snap! She could now speak with some authority that the sensation in the actual moment—two months and two days ago, to be precise—was less a break and more of a swiftharpooning—she had full access to her father’s library and read a good deal; she was good at choosing words. And there was nothing simple about it. It wasn’t just one emotion. A whole flapping Pandora’s box full of them had been released: astonishment, wounded pride, mordant amusement about the wounded pride, mordant amusement about the astonishment, confusion, scalding grief, a flailing loss. They took to tormenting her in turns, until she got used to them. Now their combined efforts only made her numb. It was a testament to how stalwart her pride truly was that not one other soul suspected her condition. Particularly—and most inexplicably and maddeningly—the person who’d unwittingly done the breaking. Her family would have fussed, and she could not have borne their suffering over her. Thetonwould have whispered and laughed, and that would have been just as bad if not worse.
Restlessly, reflexively, for the thousandth time, she fished from her reticule the little river rock she’d carried about for the last two years. Silvery, etched into little tiers on one side, smooth and speckled with olive green on the other, impulsively given to her during a picnic in Richmond on a gloriously sunny day. It used to reliably bring a jolt of joy; it had felt like a promise. Now she could almost feel it lodged in her chest, cold and angular, like the thing that had cracked her heart instead of the thing that had stolen it.
She rubbed it between her fingers and entertained an impulse to hurl it out the window. At least the rock could be free.
Upon reflection, she put it back into her reticule instead. She was practical enough to consider that she might occasionally need a reminder to never be a sentimental fool again.
If she could at least... oh, go for a ride in The Row. Or a long walk, somewhere new. She could do nothing to assuage her own restlessness, and it was because her new nemesis, Mr. Cassidy, had tattled on her for smoking a cheroot.
“Why?”
This was the word—really more of an exasperated sigh—her father had finally produced after he’d fixed her with the stare he usually deployed to elicit babbling admissions of guilt from hischildren. It was about the cheroot. It was their first night at The Grand Palace on the Thames. St. John and Claire had gone to bed and Lillias had been kept up for castigation purposes.
Her mother sat beside her father. Her expression was awfully similar.
It wasn’t the first time she’d faced a matched set of incredulous parents.
“You... never said I couldn’t?” she tried. She could usually make her father laugh with a little cheek.
His face remained stony.
“That’s what you said when we caught you in the garden at midnight in your night rail last month,” her mother replied evenly. “Perhaps try another excuse, if only for the sake of variety.”
She’d been caught in the garden at midnight in only her night rail and a shawl. She’d been outside because she’d suddenly very much needed to know what it would feel like to be in the garden alone at midnight in a night rail and a shawl.
Which was almost the same reason she’d climbed up to the top of the tower of their country church. She’d wanted to. And she’d suddenly, desperately needed to see as far as she could see.
And while up there, she’d rung the bell, because there it was and why not?
And coincidentally it was the reason she’d suddenly torn off on her mare at such a breakneck speed that the startled groom chasing her had taken her bonnet in the face. It had broken free of its pins.
