What the bloody hell did Farquar know, if anything? And how did he know it?
As he did with many things, Kirke had a contrary relationship with crowds. Like a porpoise surfacing for air, he invariably needed a moment or two of solitude during people-packed soirees, whether or not he’d just been hit in the face. He’d in fact only reached adulthood with his sanity arguably intact thanks to a refuge he’d found near his teeming-with-humanity family home: a secret, secluded patch of clover-blanketed hillside shadowed by a boulder. He supposed that made him a bit likeKeating, who found comfort next to green things. It was in all likelihood the only thing they had in common.
He half smiled to himself. Given a chance, the young men of the ton were going to enjoy discovering Keating. And she them. She had eyes like the view out a window on a spring day and a flatteringly direct gaze, and the lines of her body could make a less jaded man forget his name.
But he was thirty-five years old now. His own appetites and interests did not run to innocents, or to women who wanted anything more from him than a few hours or so of naked oblivion. Innocence was a language he could no longer speak.
Thoughts of naked oblivion and inappropriate sleeves called to mind the perfidious Marie-Claude, who had found time before she’d nearly burned his house down (and who had either fled or planned to flee across the Channel, or so he’d heard today) to order and charge to him something ridiculously expensive in blue silk which had not yet been retrieved from the modiste’s. His man of affairs had only just meticulously accommodated one recent shock to his bank account only to confront another one—the burned house—and was none too pleased to present him with an outrageous dressmaker’s bill on top of all of that. Kirke would of course grit his teeth and pay for it because it wasn’t the hardworking Madame Marceau’s fault.
Though theirs had been a business arrangement—initiated by her—Marie-Claude had ultimately wanted something from him she could not quite articulate, but which manifested in a restless torrent of demands. And while it was no hardship to now and again indulge a beautiful woman, it becameclear the requests would never stop. Whereupon he’d bluntly called an end to things.
At which point the lamp had become a projectile.
He was ardent, but remote. He’d come to understand that this drove some women mad. More than one had sensed that some part of him would never be known to them, and he supposed it was merely human nature to want what one could never reach, on the assumption that the struggle to get it made it worth having.
He woulddefinitelyquibble with this.
Only he knew the truth: before the age of twenty he’d felt nearly everything a man could feel, in gruesome proportions. Soaring love and searing shame. Passion and joy, terror and struggle. Gutting loss. The whole bloody lot had dug such brutally deep channels through him that little he felt in the aftermath was capable of shaking him or leaving a mark. Nearly every emotion he’d felt since had seemed a mere echo by comparison.
For a long time he’d allowed himself to believe that this was the source of his strength. His tireless attempts to right injustices took him to dire places, workhouses and mills and slums, places so desperate they might have broken another man. And while he cared passionately, they never brought him to his knees.
But his hands had shaken when he’d read the letter from Anna a little over a month ago. She’d sent it along with the miniature.
And everything he thought he could never again feel revealed that it had simply been lying in the underbrush to ambush him.
He’d once done something unforgivable. And through a blinding epiphany he’d understoodthere could never truly be atonement, only a reckoning.
He passed a painting of a woman in a blue dress, which reminded him of Keating. In normal circumstances, their paths would never cross. The two of them occupied two entirely different worlds. An innocent from the country; a jade from London. Her life was quiet; his was a tumult. Her future was an open road, a shiny, hopeful blank slate; his present was a snarl at best and his past had just come flapping out at him like an opened Pandora’s box and his future wouldalwaysbe uncertain and complicated.
And yet they apparently both found refuge near plants.
When he came upon a footman relighting a sconce, he slowed.
Then stopped.
He was indecisively motionless for so long the footman looked up and gave a start. “Lord Kirke, sir.” He bowed.
Kirke reached his hand into his pocket, and felt about. When he miraculously found a shilling, he approached the footman almost as gingerly as Keating had approached him earlier with her handkerchief.
He lowered his voice. “My good man. At 10:25 p.m., no later, if you would be so kind as to find Lady Wisterberg and tell her that she is needed at once—atonce—to escort the young lady for whom she is responsible tonight back to her lodgings? Please say nothing more than that. I know you will not mention my name. Do not give up until she is away from the table. Do you understand?”
The footman eyed the shilling glinting betweenKirke’s fingers. After an understandable hesitation—on one hand, a shilling was a handsome sum for a footman; on the other, it was a pittance for the battle he might have on his hands—he accepted it, and his mission. “Very good sir. If ten twenty-five o’clock it must be, then ten twenty-five o’clock it is.”
They exchanged knowing looks. Everyone in the ton knew that once the dowager started in at faro, little short of Armageddon would shift her out of her seat before the sun rose.
It would of course be wildly inappropriate for Kirke alone to escort Keating back to the boardinghouse.
He wasn’t certain why he bothered to intervene. But the notion of the rare light in the girl’s face dimming if she discovered she’d been abandoned and forgotten by her chaperone disturbed him, as though she were the last of her species and ought to be protected. She seemed openhearted and hopeful without being flighty, and kind without being dull, and these were the sorts of people the ton liked to grind into smithereens.
Good luck, Keating, he thought. He doubted she’d last the month in London.
Chapter Five
An hour or so after dinner the following evening, Mrs. Hardy led Lord Kirke into the sitting room with an air of cautious ceremony, as if he were a falcon resting on her gloved hand. He was carrying a book, clearly intending to read while the socializing took place all around him. He seemed altogether tense and restive. Present on sufferance, as the rules of the house required, prepared to either be polite or to bite as the mood took him.
Catherine’s pulse skittered.
She’d spent her own day reading in the park in front of the building—she’d fetched a book from the little library Mrs. Hardy and Mrs. Durand had set aside in a room in the annex. It had been a pleasant enough day—the blue sky gauzed with clouds, blossoms nodding all around her in the briny breeze frisking off the Thames, Gordon the cat lacing between her ankles and purring—but being at loose ends was yet another new sensation. She’d been meant to go to the Montmorency Museum today with Lady Wisterberg and Lucy, but Lady Wisterberg had sent over a note with a footman: