The House of Commons was inside St Stephen’s Chapel in Westminster. Lady Penworthy led Viola up a narrow-winding staircase to the attic, where several women were already crowded around the ventilation shaft, peeking through gaps to get a glimpse of the MPs below. Viola saw a table with books and the mace, a golden, ornamented ceremonial staff, and some gentlemen sitting in the front row, but not the speaker himself.
They were already in the middle of a heated debate. A gentleman was presenting his view why the reduction of customs duties was not only necessary but of dire urgency.
Lady Penworthy seemed to agree with his views. She nodded. “Quite right. Barnwood is the man. He’s a reliable Whig.”
“Hear, hear,” some men grumbled, and Barnwood sat, satisfied.
“But now watch Fane take him apart,” muttered a lady next to her, bending forward. She wore a purple turban and seemed quite invested in the debate. “Things always become interesting when Fane takes the floor.”
“Fane?” Viola’s head perked up.
Lady Penworthy pulled a face. “Indeed. The man’s power of rhetoric is unfortunately unparalleled. I hope Barnwood will withstand him.”
“Shh. He is speaking.”
Viola held her breath. Indeed, Sebastian had got up. She hadn’t spotted him in the front row, but now he was standingdirectly beneath her. She saw the top of his thick, dark hair and his aquiline nose.
“The Honourable Member has spoken at length on the cruelty of Irish taxation, though he has been notably silent on how the loss of revenue is to be made good.
“I have tried, truly I have, to take the Honourable Gentleman’s proposal seriously. It has not been easy.”
He spoke freely, without papers, gesturing with his hands. His voice carried clear and crisp through the room, and it was so silent one could hear a pin drop.
“How much, I wonder, does the Honourable Gentleman believe his reforms will cost? Fifty thousand pounds? Five hundred thousand? A million? He does not seem eager to guess. Sir, his mathematics is so careless that even my wife, who can’t tell a tariff from a teapot, could spot the error!”
The audience tittered.
Viola gasped. Had she heard right? What had he just said? He didn’t! He couldn’t!
Sebastian continued mercilessly. “Yet he stands before this Honourable House, demanding we dismantle a pillar of national finance, a pillar which yields perhaps four million pounds sterling, and he proposes to repair the gaping chasm with a thread barely worth sixty thousand! It is a proposal fit only for a schoolroom exercise which he has miserably failed!”
“Arrogance!” someone shouted from the opposition benches.
“Order!” the Speaker bellowed.
Sebastian smiled thinly. “The mastery of mere subtraction, Mr Speaker, is not, I should have thought, a mark of political arrogance, but a basic, necessary competence for any gentleman who presumes to meddle with the finances of the nation.”
She heard a ripple of laughter from the Treasury benches as Sebastian resumed his seat.
“Fane is as brilliant as always,” one lady said with grudging admiration. “He just destroyed Barnwood.”
“Unfortunately so,” Lady Penworthy muttered. A deep frown creased her forehead.
Another man stepped up to counter Sebastian, but to no avail. Sebastian had clearly won.
Viola was speechless.
He’d just mentioned in front of the entire Parliament that he was married? He just mentioned—her? In a not-too-flattering light, too, never mind that he wasn’t entirely wrong, for she truly had no clue about tariffs, and for the life of her could not summon any interest in them, and this made it slightly worse. But that was not the issue.
They had had an agreement to keep their relationship a secret!
And here he was, blurting it out to all and sundry?
She turned to Lady Penworthy abruptly. “Don’t you find it odd that Fane turns out to be married?”
“Not at all.” Lady Penworthy lifted her skirts as they descended the narrow staircase. “Of course, he’s married. It isn’t a secret.”
Viola came to a full stop in the middle of the staircase so that the lady behind her bumped into her. “It is not?”
