Three

Lilith burst into the dining room that morning, her mind whirling from drinking cup after cup of unadulterated oolong tea through the night. She wore her lucky lavender gown for the upcoming meeting with her publisher. To fit in it required lying facedown on the floor as their only maid shoved her foot into the small of Lilith’s back and tugged mercilessly at her corset laces. In the crook of her arm, Lilith carried her new, clean chapter, devoid of references to Marylewick.

Frances slumped over a plate of untouched toast and a cupful of steaming tea. Her pallid forehead rested in her hand. Across the table, her husband, Edgar, assumed a matching pose of overindulged, paying-the-piper agony.

Lilith was too hopped up on tea to be brought down. She gazed around to make sure the servant girl wasn’t lurking about and then raised her pages. “My darling cousins, I present you with a masterpiece of sensational fiction. You see, when you threaten your muse, lovely things can happen.” Lilith spoke in that fast, charging clip brought on by caffeine-induced euphoria. “My publisher will adore this chapter and certainly shell out more money. Just listen—‘Colette hold the veil to her scared, tremble head and crouching down in tiny cave made by a collapsed tree. Over her head, she could hear the sultan barking orders rudely at his reticule and’—oh God!” Her face heated. “I wrote this rubbish! The verbs are wrong and the words…this is terrible. Did I really say he barked orders at a lady’s valise? I can’t show this drivel to anyone!”

“No!” Frances bolted up and then swayed for moment, muttering something about never drinking punch again before saying, “I felt your words deep inside me. They stirred my soul.”

Lilith looked at her askew. “Poor grammar stirs your soul?”

“Darling, how can you be provocative and inventive when you use language like everyone else?” Frances linked her arm through Lilith’s and began leading her toward the hall. “Passion knows no bounds or rules. Don’t be a slave to grammar. Live and write freely.” She opened the front door and gently nudged Lilith onto the pavement. In the stark sunlight, Lilith could see the network of tiny wrinkles under her cousin’s tired eyes.

“Is something wrong?” Lilith asked. “Aside from the punch, that is.”

Frances gazed down. “I didn’t want to say this in front of Edgar. But he and I had a dreadful row after the party. He’s terribly worried about money.”

“I’m so sorry.” Lilith embraced her dear cousin-in-law. “I’m going to find what quids I can. I promise. What more can I do? Tell me.”

“He and I just need to be alone for a little reconciliation today. Do you mind staying away until after two o’clock? Please.”

“Of course, whatever you require.” Lilith put aside her vision of returning victorious from the publisher and celebrating by curling up in her bed until the evening parties began.

“Now you go sell your chapter, make a wagonload of money, follow your dreams.” Frances kissed her cheek. “Good luck, my darling. I adore you.” She turned away, stepped inside, and quietly shut the door.

Lilith hurried down the walk, muttering under her breath, “Get quids,” then added, “get wagonloads of quids. Mountains of quids. All that matters are quids.” She practiced the words she would say to her editor all the way to Fleet Street. But when she reached the imposing brick building with McAllister written across the top, she felt like a scared child again, arriving at a new school, unsure of what her life would be like. Would she make friends, would the teachers be kind, or if not, could they be easily bamboozled, would the library have many books? She clutched her pages and remembered Frances’s worried expression when she left that morning. Lilith couldn’t allow her fears to paralyze her. She must face the publisher and demand more money for the sake of her cousin’s marriage and the gallery. But still she remained planted on the spot. A tiny voice in her head reminded her: It’s either McAllister or Marylewick. Choose.

She forced herself to take a step forward, and then another, feeling her confidence rise. A determined smile spread her lips by the time she was ushered into Mr. McAllister’s office.

* * *

A half hour later, Lilith emerged from Mr. McAllister’s office nine pounds richer and holding a document outlining the terms for another story. She wondered why she had been so afraid to ask for money from the publisher before. He was all too happy to agree to her terms and enthusiastic about her new story ideas.

Sunlight gleamed off the roofs and tops of carriages. Lilith released a long breath. She had money, true money, to give the gallery, not a measly shilling here and there. Money that she didn’t have to beg, tease, plead, or lie about to squeeze from George. A small, fragile root of hope burgeoned in her heart: perhaps one day very soon she might be able to support herself as a writer, as well as help Frances, Edgar, and their gallery. She might not need George after all.

She halted in the current of human traffic, raised her head, and laughed. The idea of independence felt like cool rain on a parched desert. “I sing the body electric.” She cried out Walt Whitman’s line and smiled at the confused stares she garnered.

Of course, her writer’s imagination ran wild. As she wove through the crowds, she daydreamed of reaching Charles Dickens’s and Victor Hugo’s literary status. Having her bestselling novels cram the bookshop windows and demands for her to read passages to packed auditoriums. Without monetary concerns, she could marry a chimney sweep if she pleased and have her name appear in fat bold print on a leather-bound book and no blustering Marquess of Marylewick could stop her. In fact, she would send George copies of her bestselling books, signed “Keep the money (and your stiff man part), Lilith Dahlgren.” What would she do with all her delicious money?

But the more pertinent question at hand was where would she pass the time until Frances and Edgar had thoroughly reconciled?

A silly question, really, she thought as she stepped into a bookshop.

The smell of leather, ink, and pages crowded out her thoughts. She was in paradise. All around her were shelves and shelves of glorious books which whispered read me, escape into my delightful world.

She found a vacant chair, as if waiting for her, by a second floor window. For the next three hours—or was it four?—she was lost in the intrigue of Tolstoy’s Russian aristocracy or giggling at the droll irrationality of Alice’s Wonderland.

That she managed to restrain herself from buying a book, or journal, or toffee was a singular miracle. She was very proud of herself. As she headed home, she kept her head and hat low to avoid recognition by any needy artist acquaintance who wanted money to finance a brilliant project. But she couldn’t resist the desperate plea from a barefoot street waif under the draper’s shop window and gave him several shillings.

When she turned onto Half Moon Street a little after two o’clock, all she wanted was to be released from her corset so that she might crawl under the covers. Yet something had her neighbors aflutter. They milled outside their doors, their gazes fixed on an enormous wagon pulled up beside her home.

“What in all that’s good in the world?” Lilith muttered and hastened her step.

As she drew nearer, two boulderlike men clad in workmen’s clothes strode from her house. One held a stack of books while the other, sporting a brown cap, read from a book open in his hands. Her volume of Keats’s poems!

“Aye, Keats was known for his visual imagery,” the man in the cap said. “Whereas his contemporaries Byron and Shelley—”

“That’s mine!” Lilith raced down the street and tried to rip Keats from the stranger. The book fell to the ground, spine cracked and face open—all the lovely words that had sustained her through the dark times, in the mud. When she bent to save the volume, her eyes caught the contents of the wagon. Her other books, prints, and her writing desk where she hid her locked portfolio! “My art! My things!” She released a strangled cry. “Help me!” she begged the crowd.

No one moved to help. A few neighbors snickered behind their hands.

Gripping her wounded Keats volume to her bosom, Lilith attempted to climb into the wagon.

“Another Bedlamer,” a deep male voice said. The powerful, rough hands of the two workmen drew her back. “No, miss, you mustn’t do that.”

Again her beloved Keats poetry fell onto the manure-drenched road.

“Frances! Edgar!” She kicked her captors.

“Now, now,” brown cap said. “Violence is never the proper course.”

“I’ll be as violent as I blooming well please,” she shouted. “Someone fetch the police.”

The neighbors only laughed as if this was a merry game. “Frances! Edgar!” she called again. “Where are you? Help me!”

“Lads, ain’t this a pretty picture?” said a third man exiting the house. He held Lilith’s treasured etching copy of Millais’s drowned Ophelia. Unlike his companions, this workman was thin and wiry. His mouth was the slack type that hung perpetually open. “Why would she drown herself?”

“My Ophelia!” Lilith cried.

“Who?” said the thin man.

“That’s Ophelia from Hamlet, Ronald,” the capped man explained in a calm voice, despite Lilith’s kicks.

“Aye, little Ophelia,” Ronald said. “Hamlet was a right blackguard to her.”

Lilith flung up her feet and then slammed down her boot heels onto the men’s hard shin bones. The grip on her upper arms loosened, she yanked free and raced forward, shrieking, “Let go of my Ophelia!”

The slender man yelped, dropped the print, and slumped onto the steps, crossing his arms over his face. “Don’t let her hurt me!”

She snatched up the print and raised it over her head as if it were a club or sword. “Ophelia might enjoy a little bloody revenge, if you and your friends don’t return my things.”

“What is happening here?” a familiar baritone demanded. Oh no!

She spun around, her picture still poised for striking. George stood in a precision-tailored gray suit, gleaming shoes, top hat, and holding a vase of purple hyacinths and hazel flowers. The edges of his nostrils were quivering and his lips thinned in a scowl.

“I’m being robbed, George! Help me!”

She watched his gaze move from her to the man crumpled on the ground, shielding his face and pleading for mercy, to the men rubbing their shins, to the crowd, and then back to her. The muscles at the back of his jaw pulsed. “Get inside this instant,” he hissed.

“Aye, I’m sorry, guv’nor, but I’m afraid she can’t do that,” said the man in the cap. “Me and me mates work for Mr. Villiers, who owns this row. Seeing how the occupants at this residence are seven months behind on rent, we’ve been ordered to remove the contents of the home, lock the doors, and take everything to Mr. Villiers.”

“Seven months!” Lilith exclaimed. “But I gave Frances and Edgar money every month for rent. They would have told me. Mr. Villiers has made a terrible mistake. Let me speak to my cousins and you will see. Then you must put back everything exactly or I’ll call my solicitor.” Lilith didn’t actually have a solicitor, but the men didn’t need to know that.

“Aye, miss,” said the man. “There ain’t no one in that house. No servants. Nobody.”

She grabbed the iron railing, feeling her legs weaken. “Impossible.”

“Lilith, did I not warn you about them?” George barked.

She was about to scream Shut your stupid mouth, Edgar and Frances could never leave me, when the man hunched in terror on the steps lowered his arms and ventured, “Are you Miss Lilith?”

“Yes.”

“I found this letter with your name on it on a table.” He shifted to reach deep into his pocket and fished out a crumpled letter. “Lilith’s a pretty name,” he told her, holding out the missive. “I love lilies.”

But it was George who snatched up the letter. “I shall have this,” he announced in his authoritative tone. “I’m responsible for Miss Dahlgren.”

“You are not responsible for me. Hand me the letter this instant. It is mine.” She tried to seize it but was hampered by her cumbersome print of Ophelia. In a flicking motion, he snapped open the letter. She could only peer around his arm to read:

Dearest Lilith,

I’m sorry, my love. Edgar and I must retrench, and we can’t take you with us this time. My darling, remember what I told you last night. Keep tempting stiff-rumped George, play upon his guilt. Kiss the fusty frog, and he’ll give you a golden ball.

Sincerely,

Frances Dahlgren

“Right, then,” George said. “I’m a gullible frog. I see it clearly now.”

Lilith sank onto the step, clutching drowned Ophelia tight to her chest.

They had left her.

She had brought them into her life, trusted them, shared her secrets—for God’s sake, they were the only people who knew about Colette and the Sultan. These were the facts of the situation, but she couldn’t feel them. They didn’t feel real. Maybe she had fallen asleep at the library. Maybe this was a nightmare brought on by the Edgar Allen Poe short story she had read.

Wake up, Lilith. This isn’t happening. Wake up!

She stretched her eyes wide, but the nightmare remained. Then the emotions came down like a nasty mudslide. The last fifteen years fell away, all the lessons learned, all the barricades erected around her fears. She was eight again, scared, hurt, and angry. Just this afternoon, she had thought the universe had finally tilted her way. She was going to be the famous, rich writer, liberated from Lord Marylewick and his family. She could live on her own terms.

She bowed her head. Colette had lost. She couldn’t escape the sultan. He had her from the beginning. It would all end tragically.

“There, there,” soothed the worker whose life she had previously threatened.

She was vaguely aware of George striding about, carrying on in his usual commanding manner. “I am the Marquess of Marylewick. My secretary shall see directly to this inconvenience. Please restore the contents of the home to their rightful place. Miss Dahlgren, go inside immediately. Miss Dahlgren. Lilith?”

She pointed to his shoe. “George, y-you’re stepping on John Keats.” She heard a ripple of laughter through the crowd. What was funny?

“What?” She watched him glance down to where a page of Keats’s poems had fallen from its binding and was crushed under his heel. “For heaven’s sake,” he hissed. He bent down and, with the hand not holding the flowers, snatched the page from under his shoe and then the book that rested nearby. He handed her the volume and page. “Go inside. You’ve entertained your neighbors long enough.”

She slowly grasped the poems and then pressed them and the Ophelia print to her heart. She refused George’s offered hand and managed to rise to her feet in jerky, flailing motions. As she turned to enter her home, she stopped. “I’m sorry if I hurt you. Please forgive me,” she told the workmen, and went inside.

* * *

“Lilith, sit down,” George ordered her, trying to keep his anger reined in. He pointed to the only piece of furniture left in the parlor: the sofa where last night they had enjoyed that notorious kiss. Just looking at the pillows heightened his fury. He wasn’t a stiff-rumped, fusty frog! Is that how she—everyone—viewed him?

Well, Lilith had gone too far this time. He wanted nothing more than to wash his hands of her. She must marry. He refused to be her trustee frog to kiss and misuse any longer.

She shrank into the sofa’s corner, still gripping her print and book, her inky eyes large and glassy with unshed tears.

For a quiet moment, he forgot his rage, struck by the picture she formed by the curves of her profile against the hard jut of the wooden frame and the horizontal line formed by the sofa. Her mouth was drawn, her skin almost white; tired brown shadows had formed under her eyes. Even so, she was beautiful, like a gem showing different facets depending on the light. He wanted to rage at her, but at the same time he wanted to study her quietly until he could capture her essence.

Damn her!

He had to get her away from him.

“Lilith, this is it.” He set his arrangement of purple hyacinths and hazel—or, according to the language of flowers, I’m sorry and let’s make up—on the mantel.

“This is the last time I’m pulling you from the suds.” His voice boomed around him. He sounded like his own father when he’d lectured young George. “You will get married. I’ve given you enough time to find a suitable, responsible gentleman and all you’ve managed to do is cavort with half-wit artists and your dubious Dahlgren relatives, all the while spurning my wise advice. And you see where it has gotten you. Nowhere.”

He saw no change on her face, nothing to register that his words had made any least impression on her ramshackle brain. “I dislike being medieval about the matter, but you have persisted in your wild and foolish ways, leaving me little choice but to arrange a marriage for you.”

He expected a fight or a tease. The usual dance. She only gazed out the window. The light illuminated her pale skin and strands of red in her loose hair beneath her lavender hat.

“Once established in a sound marriage, the money is yours, and you’ll become the responsibility of another man, a new frog to kiss and manipulate,” he continued, trying to goad her into a response. “Until that time, you will remain under my care and tutelage. You will obey me.”

She closed her eyes.

“I expect you to be angry,” he said, unsettled by her silence. “I expect you to say that I’m trying to control your life, shattering your soul. What have you to say?”

“‘O Rose thou art sick!’” Lilith murmured. “‘The invisible worm, / That flies in the night / In the howling storm: / Has found out thy bed / Of crimson joy: / And his dark secret love / Does thy life destroy.’”

“Please, Lilith,” he implored. “No more Keats. No more melodrama.”

“It’s Blake, you idiot,” she cried, shaking her spread palms. “William Blake! The Sick Rose.”

“Can you just say what you mean and stop playing games?”

“I’m not…playing… I’m not…” She closed her eyes again and shook her head, as if she had given up on words. On him. “You don’t understand that poem, do you? Your dry, inflexible mind can’t even conceive its meaning?”

“Of course I do!” he replied. “You believe the vulnerable place in your heart, the wellspring of your tender passion, has been destroyed by what you sought to protect yourself from. And I am the invisible howling worm.”

He halted, unsure where the ridiculous words he spoke originated. It worried him that he was capable of such inanity.

But she stared at him now, straight at him and only him. Her eyes, in their glorious gold and brown tones, were luminous.

He slipped onto the sofa beside her. “Why don’t you want a true gentleman to take care of you?” All the hardness had drained from his voice. “To keep you safe? To honor you?”

“I do.”

“Then why do you feel you must manipulate and lie to me? Why do you think I don’t have your best interests in mind? Can you try to trust me?”

“How can I?” She shook her head. “You’re a Maryle. All you and your family ever wanted to do was send me away, pretend that I never existed. How can you have my best interest at heart if you don’t know or care who I am?”

“Then tell me who you are.” He tugged at her print of dead Ophelia, trying to remove it from her white-knuckled grip. “I dearly want to know the real Lilith.”

She tightened her hold on the frame before she slowly released it. He carefully set it at their feet and then reached for her broken book. “Just try to refrain from the poetry for a while.” He chuckled softly, a little white flag that he meant no harm.

“They left me.” Her words were a brittle whisper. “They left me, George.” In the briefest moment, he felt her pain all over him, the years and years of rejection and estrangement. Then she turned her head, closing herself off again.

“But I’m here.” He grasped for her hand. “I haven’t left you.”

Tears welled in her eyes again, pooled in her lashes, and ran down her cheeks.

He panicked. “No, Lilith.”

She brushed off his hands and turned, hiding her face as she wept.

His mind contained one thought: Make Lilith stop crying. Make her angry, annoyed, anything but this. He reached to touch her shoulder, but stopped, unsure. He waited in this awkward, impotent place for several painful seconds, his fingers hovering just above her. She swiveled around.

“Be quiet!” she cried.

“I didn’t say anyth—”

She crushed her head into his chest. Her hat poked his chin and the feather tickled his face. For all his dislike of emotional outbursts and wild displays of emotion, he wrapped his arms around her shaking body.

“I’ll make sure everything is well for you,” he whispered in a soothing voice he didn’t know he possessed. Meanwhile, his rational mind was shouting What in the hell are you doing? Was he being a gullible frog again? Was this a trick? And did he care?

“It won’t be.” Her lips brushed the skin above his collar as she spoke, sending a current of wild energy over him. What magic did she possess? It made no sense that the most annoying female in his life felt like the old ragged blanket he had slept with every night as a child until the nursemaid was ordered to toss it in the fire.

She pulled away.

“I want to be alone.” She gazed at her hands, where she rubbed the palm of one hand with the thumb of the other. “I need to wri—I want to be alone.”

“That’s not wise.”

She jerked her head up, her brows down, eyes hot. “What do you mean?”

“It’s not wise to be alone to stew in dark thoughts when you’re upset.”

She stared at him for a beat more. Then a fragile but devilish smile wavered on her lips. “How would you know? Do you have dark thoughts, George? Is there a black stain on your soul that you have never revealed?”

“Of course,” he quipped, easing back against the cushion. “When I’m not fighting with you, I’m excessively moody, brooding, and brimming with dark desire. Keats and those other chaps are mere shades of gray compared to my opaque blackness as I scribble parliamentary bills and orders for estate plumbing repairs.”

“Stop making me chuckle. I’m very upset. I’ve lost my family…again.”

He rested his hand on hers. “I’m your family.”

“No, you’re not.”

He shrugged. “It says so on the trust paperwork. Bloodlines be dammed if the Bank of England says you’re related.”

“Well, I don’t like you.”

“So you see, we are family. True family members detest each other through thick and thin.”

“You jest. You Maryles are a perfect family. You are idle summers of fresh berries and glacé, fluffy cakes, Sunday strolls in the park with a bouncing baby in the perambulator.”

None of George’s memories included such nostalgic memories. In fact, when he thought of his childhood, he remembered standing terrified before his father’s enormous oak desk. He had waited there, chin down, resigned to the harsh punishment that his father would exact for painting a bright yellow and pink parrot on his wall. A good paddling to ensure his son didn’t grow up to be an embarrassing molly of a man.

The memory made him restless. He desired to get away from this room and into the daylight.

“Let us go to the park.” He reached for her elbow. “A little sunshine will bleach out all the dark spots in your heart.”

“Thank you, but there is something I must…I need to do.” She pulled away. “I just want to stay home and sleep.”

“But Lilith,” he said gently, “you can’t stay here alone. This isn’t your home anymore.”

“What?” she cried, visibly surprised by his words. “You told those men to put everything back. This is my home!”

“I had the furniture and art returned because I have no other place to store it at present. I can’t in good conscience allow an unmarried lady of three and twenty to be on her own.”

“You are not my owner!”

He studied her fierce, defiant face and bit back his sharp retort about how she needed one.

“Do you have any notion of proper society, Miss Dahlgren?” The enormous amount of polishing that she would require before he could pop her off to a respectable gentleman sank in. “You don’t, do you? No. You shall come to my home where you shall be under the wise chaperonage of my sister. While there, you shall practice wholesome habits and enjoy proper company. My sister and I will endeavor to teach you the finer points of manners, polite conversation, and the delicacies of better society—graces a gentleman of proper station will require of a wife.”

Her mouth dropped open as if he had slapped her rather than saved her hide again. He only wished someone would take such good care of him—that he could set down his mantle of worry and responsibility for a day.

“I know all about the so-called finer points of manners, conversation, and delicacy.” She was on her feet now. “I was sent to finishing school not once but twice.”

He refrained from commenting about the waste of good money because he didn’t care to sport a blackened eye to Parliament.

“Has it ever occurred to you, George, that I am the way I am because I desire to be? I am not an ignorant yahoo or a freakish aberration. I know this is shocking to hear, but not everyone finds membership in your elite circle of society the pinnacle of human existence.”

She couldn’t be worked on in this state. Now she waited with her eyes glittering and hands clenched, ready for the battle that he refused to fight.

“Right.” He snatched up a pillow from the sofa and aimed it.

“Don’t you dare!”

He shot her a smile and tossed the cushion in the air. She had to catch it, else it would land on her head. In the meantime, he seized her book of poetry. “Why don’t you tell me what constitutes the pinnacle of your existence during a little stroll in the park,” he said. “You can take Keats along, of course.” But he didn’t relinquish the volume. Instead he walked away with it, using it as a lure.