A Rogue of One's Own

“The Prince of Wales is particularly supportive of the campaign in Afghanistan,” Rochester continued. “Act normal when he approaches you.”

“Yes, yes.” He tucked the list into his breast pocket. “And I have already taken steps to bolster my reputation.”

Rochester’s gaze turned suspicious. “What are you planning, Tristan?”

“It shall be in the Pall Mall Gazette tomorrow evening. Or in any other newspaper in Britain.”

After the scene with Arthur Seymour, he had no choice but to do something distracting. And society loved few things more than a grand reveal.

In the west wing, his mother was asleep. She didn’t wake when he pulled back the curtains and daylight slanted across the room, right into her face.

Another untouched tray had gone cold on her nightstand.

“Mother,” he said loudly. “You have a visitor.”

She didn’t stir.

He drew closer to the bed. Her cheeks looked sunken. A pale blue silk ribbon kept her braid together, a ludicrous scrap the color of the sky.

When he sat down on the mattress, the bed dipped under his weight. No reaction. She was as cooperative as a sack of flour. Would she even care where she languished? Perhaps she’d be the last person to notice the difference between General Foster’s guest room and a bed in an asylum.

His hands clenched and unclenched by his side. Perhaps he was playing along in Rochester’s ridiculous marriage game and laying himself bare in newspapers and entangling himself with one of the most ruthless businessmen in Britain—for nothing.

“Is it worth it?” he asked the room. His voice sounded harsh to his own ears.

He looked back down at the stubbornly sleeping countess.

“Are you doing this to be closer to Marcus?”

Perhaps they were meeting in the twilight into which she had descended. Perhaps she liked being there. He certainly saw more of Marcus in his nightmares than he had during his lifetime. They ended with Marcus staring at him with blood pouring from his eyes, when he had in fact cleanly broken his neck and would have experienced neither bleeding nor suffering. Neat and efficient, Marcus, in death as he had been in life. But he, Tristan, woke covered in sweat from these encounters with a crushing weight upon his chest. Why? He sometimes wondered. As a child, he had devotedly trotted after Marcus whenever he had been released from heir duties for some play. As adolescents, their relationship had been courteous, for their roles had been clear: Marcus was the heir, Tristan the misfit—but he had never envied his brother his position. After his marriage, Marcus had distanced himself thoroughly, his wife fearing Tristan’s bad influence, presumably. But there had been a continent between them by then. So why the dreams? Perhaps because the good die first, as Wordsworth said, and they whose hearts are dry as summer dust burn to the socket. The weight on his chest might well be guilt because the good brother was gone.

He picked up the spoon from the tray and held it under his mother’s delicate nose. As the metal turned misty from invisible breaths, a tension drained from his muscles.

He gave the spoon a little spin.

“Did you know Rochester hates me?” he asked. “I’ve known it a long time, since when he had Jarvis drown Kitten—do you remember her? You had given her to me for my thirteenth birthday.”

Mother slept. Not a flutter of an eyelash.

“She was a beautiful little thing, ginger and white, and soft as down. She came hopping when I whistled, as a puppy would. And I remember thinking the only reason one could possibly stick such a charming creature into a bag and toss it into the pond was hatred.”

It had been an autumn day, crisp blue skies, the smell of dry leaves in the air. The splendid weather must have distracted him from his Latin translations. Or he had bolted one time too many to go and run around the park instead of doing tabulations. He could not quite recall. He remembered very clearly Jarvis’s glee as he hurled the bag containing the kitten out over the pond. After the splash, the bag had floated on the dark surface of the water. Rochester’s hand had been heavy on his shoulder. Do you see this, Tristan? This is what happens when you are careless and unfocused. This is what happens when you do not do your duty. You will fail, and things in your care will perish.

The bag had bopped erratically; a tiny cat inside had struggled and cried for her master to save her. Her master never came. He’d been pinned to the banks of the pond by an iron grip, his throat aching from the screams he was holding back. Kitten and bag had been swallowed by the waters, leaving barely a ripple.

Afterward, he still had not mastered himself enough to sit still for the length of a day, to concentrate on tasks he found dull. He had rejected the fluffy puppy his mother had tried to gift him for his next birthday.

He rubbed a hand over his neck. There was a certain irony in that he could keep comrades safe under fire but not the women in his coddled life at Ashdown, not even the felines. Useless. Within these walls, he was that.

He put the spoon back onto the tray, and something on the nightstand caught his attention. A wooden figurine. It had not been there during his previous visit. A Christmas angel, and the clumsy carvings and mop of gilded wires miming hair looked familiar. He picked it up and turned it over in his hand.

“I made this for you,” he murmured. “It was the first thing I carved with the pocketknife you gave me.”

Somehow, the misshapen thing had survived over two decades.

He carefully put the figurine back among the medicine bottles.

He pulled the blanket up over his mother’s shoulders. “I don’t know if you still read the papers,” he said. “If you do, don’t be surprised to read about me sometime this week. I published some poetry a while ago and circumstances are compelling me to own it.”

There were other things he contemplated telling her. I offered to shoot five men for Lucie Tedbury, and I am not certain what it means.

“I’m attending a house party at Claremont this weekend,” he said instead. “I shall come back and bring you all of the gossip.”

* * *

Monday afternoons were Lucie’s least favorite part of the week, for they were dedicated to the administrative matters pertaining to the Cause: sharing the latest news, processing membership applications, settling the accounts for the Oxford chapter, compiling the schedule with meetings and events for the upcoming week. And because Annabelle had to be with her duke in Wiltshire four days a week, their ranks had been diminished. She had drafted Mabel, Lady Henley, to replace her, as the widow had long been a member of the chapter and she lived next door. However, since the foiled interlude with a certain lord in their front yard shrubbery, Lady Henley had become too busy on Monday afternoons to help. No good deed went unpunished.

Then again, pitting herself against an avalanche of tasks and duties diverted her mind sufficiently from recent events. The night in the park. Tristan, looking stern and masterful, at her doorstep.

“Thank you for coming,” she told Catriona and Hattie, who had faithfully gathered round the table in the drawing room, their notebooks and pens prepared. Hattie was also munching on one of the dainties she had brought from the bakery in Little Clarendon Street, liberally scattering crumbs.

“To begin, here is a copy of Millicent Fawcett’s latest lecture at the London School of Economics; it is quite a riveting read on the education of girls,” Lucie said, and slid the transcript to the middle of the table.

Hattie peered at them. “‘These considerations force upon us the conclusion that the popular view of the duties of wives and mothers is a very low and incorrect one,’” she read, “‘one which assigns almost supreme importance to the animal rather than to the intellectual and moral functions of womanhood . . .” She looked up. “It’s quite odd, isn’t it—Millicent is allowed to give clever lectures in London, and yet here at Oxford the female students are not permitted to matriculate and graduate in the same fashion as the male students?”

“Oxford was created for monks, and has since been administered by living fossils,” Lucie said. “Time moves differently here. But also, don’t forget Millicent’s husband has a position at the LSE. Now, as for the first point on our agenda: have we found a solution for our Property Act report? I have not. I wrote to the Manchester Guardian again to request a meeting and have not even been graced with a rejection.”

Catriona shook her head with a regretful shrug.

“I asked my father what he would do if he wished to publish a piece no one wanted to publish,” Hattie said.

“And?”

“He said he would just create his own publishing house,” Hattie said apologetically.

“Hear, hear,” Catriona muttered, irony drenching the words.

Lucie rolled her eyes. “Very well. On to the second point: the current state of the Property Act letter count?”

Catriona, in charge of everything pertaining to numbers, glanced at her notebook. “The current state is at fourteen thousand, nine hundred and some. However, we are still missing the count from the Scottish chapters—I suspect a delay in mail delivery.”

“Right. The mail shall be the demise of the Cause one day.”

“What do you mean?”

“The delays—or think of the mail lost altogether,” Lucie said. “For example, take the letter Millicent sent along with her lecture transcript. It contained outdated information—I had informed Lydia Becker about a notably conservative shift in the Primrose chapter at least two weeks ago, and she should have passed it on to Millicent. It keeps happening, and it is getting worse—Millicent sends us commentary, or is in need of aligning a plan, and we comment, send it back, she sends it to Lydia Becker, who comments, and sends it to Rosalind Howard, and so on.”