A Rogue of One's Own

Tristan clinked his glass to his. “It’s always about sex.”

“Everything in the world is about sex,” Wilde agreed. “Except sex.”

“Then what is the sex about?”

The playwright smiled. “Power. But you know that already, don’t you, my lord.”

When he left the Turf three, maybe five, drinks later, he was not exactly staggering, but his head felt heavy. At least Oscar Wilde was in worse shape; by the end of his last brandy, he had made slurred promises to write Tristan into his first novel, one about the perils of eternal beauty; and the story would be gothic and dark.

How about the twisted tale of an earl intent on sending his own wife to an asylum, Mr. Playwright, gothic and dark enough?

The weather had turned; a fine spray of summer rain dampened the air and smudged rainbows around the gaslights lining Holywell Street. There was a halo fanning out from the pale blond crown of a woman hasting past.

A petite, very much unchaperoned woman.

He halted and squinted.

A rush of cold spread through his chest. Lucie. He would recognize her determined stride anywhere. And only she would be flitting about the town alone at night. She was weaving her way around a flock of students, already shrinking into the distance.

His body was in motion before his head had decided to follow her.

She was out alone when the night was crawling with drunken men, each one of them feeling masterful after a sports event. Foolish, reckless woman. When he got his hands on her—someone grabbed his arm, breaking his stride.

“Ballentine. A word.”

He reacted on instinct, twisted sideways, gripped the attacker, and yanked him close.

Grand. Lord Arthur Seymour was staring back at him, wide-eyed, his hands clutching at the hand that had locked around his throat.

“Never approach me from a dead angle, you fool.” He released his lordship with a shove. His pulse was thrumming fast, the blur of liquor gone. The night had edges again, wet black streets, glaring gaslights.

Lucie, he noted, had just reached the road junction at the end of the row of sandstone buildings. There was a silvery flash of hair as she turned off the main street into Mansfield Road. . . . Incredibly, Lord Arthur lurched back into his path. “Hear me out,” he slurred, unleashing a wave of offending whiskey fumes. Where were his friends to save him from himself?

“You’re drunk,” Tristan said. “Go home.”

At her brisk pace, Lucie would soon reach the eastern edge of the park. Was she contemplating crossing the park?

Arthur latched onto his arm. “Let us meet, just once.”

Tristan’s muscles tensed. Holywell Road was always lively even when it was not a sports night, as the narrow street connected two large pubs and was home to a number of small concert houses. Revelers were passing them on the pavement, and there was a steady supply of patrons tumbling from the closing taverns on the other side of the road.

“I saw you with Mr. Wilde.” Arthur was loud and belligerent. “You drink with him, but not with me—”

He hooked his arm through Arthur’s, pulled him hard into the side of his body and half dragged him along. Now they were just two fellows in their cups, propping each other up.

“Have a care,” he said, his voice low. “Do not approach others in this way, it might get you into proper trouble.”

Arthur’s free hand clutched Tristan’s coat lapel. “I am already in trouble. My every thought revolves around you.”

Christ.

“We have spent no more than three times in each other’s company; we drank, we gambled, as gentlemen do, and once, you were in the same room as I while I fucked. That is where our acquaintance ends.”

Arthur twisted in his grip, hot with rage. “Don’t deceive me. You knew what I was and yet you took me along . . . and your eyes were on me that night, while you were—”

He yelped when Tristan’s arm tightened like a vise.

“Seymour. I may not consistently limit my preferences. It does not mean I have any particular interest in you.” And while he might have been looking at Arthur, it would have had nothing to do with the young lord, and everything with the dark mood to watch or be watched, which sometimes struck at random. Ironically, the abundant stimulations of great debauchery could send his mind sprawling as hopelessly as reading a dull treatise in old Latin. There was, of course, no point in explaining any of that to an infatuated whelp.

He pulled Arthur with him when he rounded the corner onto the road to University Park.

People were drifting past them, exuberant and chattering. Lucie’s small form was nowhere in sight.

“This is where we must part,” he said, and abruptly let the young lord go.

The wet cobblestones, or his stubborn efforts to hold on, made Arthur lose his balance, and down he went.

This was bad, Arthur on his knees before him, in the middle of Mansfield Road.

He stepped round him, and an arm lashed around his calf.

“Gad—why are you so keen to see us arrested?”

“You are a monster,” Arthur cried, still attached, “you have no care.”

A group of students moving past hollered and jeered.

“Your pardon,” Tristan said and gripped the white, clinging hands to bend back Arthur’s thumbs. A squawk of outrage, and he was free, his long strides eating up the dark street.

* * *

The gate to University Park was locked after nine o’clock, but there was a well-trodden path to a gap in the fence a few yards to the left, large enough to admit children or slight adults.

Lucie breathed easier the moment she had slipped through the iron bars. She had long resolved to walk alone wherever she went; it was most practical, and furthermore, the idea of a spinster guarding another spinster struck her as ridiculous. However, a woman who walked through Oxford alone should know the university’s schedule for sporting events. She had forgotten it was the day of the annual University Match, an understandable but still negligent lapse in attention after the bizarre encounter in the dress shop. Bands of student athletes and drinking societies roamed tonight, eager for brawls with townsfolk and each other. Shouting and fragments of lewd songs echoed from the street across the dark meadows of the park. The footpath to home, however, stretched before her blissfully empty and well-lit by a row of tall gaslights.

She walked rapidly. The misty rain had turned into a drizzle; cold rivulets ran from her cheeks down into her collar, and her skin rippled with goose bumps. She’d drink a hot cup of tea at home and go to bed; for once, her work would have to wait. Her mother was in Oxford. She’d add some brandy to her tea tonight.

She heard them first, raucous singing that made her ears prick with caution.

She slowed.

A group of men appeared on the footpath ahead.

Her shoulders tensed. It was five of them, some in pairs, arm-in-arm, weaving toward her. They must have set up camp in the park, drinking until night had fallen. Or perhaps, they had avoided the gates via the Cherwell, and their abandoned punt was now drifting downstream.

Wet steel glinted as they passed beneath a streetlamp. Foils. Her stomach gave a nervous lurch. Members of the fencing club? They frequently practiced in the park. They were also known to cause trouble around town.

Their bawdy singing ceased, and she knew they had spotted her. Bother. They had not stopped out of politeness. A woman alone in a park near midnight was not a lady, and the awareness crackled in the dark air between them. Their faces came into focus: leering mouths, eyes keen. Three sheets to the wind, each of them, and wealthy, judging by their top hats. The entitled ones were the worst.

Her heart was beating unpleasantly fast. In a moment, she’d have to walk right through them. There was no evading to the right—risky and humiliating, to leave the lit footpath and stagger over the lumpy grass of the meadow. The copse of trees to her left was a menacing black mass.

She squared her shoulders. They were young, just students.

As if on a silent command, the men fell in line next to each other, shoulder to shoulder, a wall of smirks and lewd anticipation.

Fear ran down her neck, cold like ice water. They were not going to let her pass.

Her right hand slid into her skirt pocket.

Too late, she noticed the man who had come up from behind.

Her body recognized him before she did, from the familiar warm scent of tobacco and spice, and it quelled the rush of alarm.

“There you are,” Tristan said lightly. “For someone so short, you are bloody fast.”

His hand slid around her waist and pulled her flush against his side. She let him sweep her along, dumbfounded, wrapped in the strength of his arm.

The rigid front the men had formed across the path dithered. Tristan moved toward them as if they were not there at all. And then he slowed. Intent coursed through his body in a dark current, and for a breath, panic flared. Was he not aware there were only two of them and five of the others? No, he became slower still, his heels grinding to a halt on gravel.

“Bloody hell,” someone said. “It’s Ballentine.”

Tristan stopped in front of the tallest one of the group, an inch too close as was polite. The stench of liquor breath and male sweat assaulted her senses. Her right hand was in her pocket, clutching cold metal, but she turned her face into Tristan’s coat and held her breath.

“Gentlemen,” he said. His voice was amicable. His voice lied. She was held snug against him, and through the layers of wool and cotton, she sensed something sinister crawling beneath his skin, something primal and keen. The feel of it raised all the fine hairs on her body.