The Countess Conspiracy

“Just as well that Violet Waterfield never got her start publishing scientific works,” Violet said. “I’d be a pariah. A nothing. My sister would hate me.” She picked up another needle, but didn’t use it. She brandished it instead as if it were a sword. “My mother already does. Nobody would have paid the least attention to my work. So it’s just as well. This way, at least I’m someone, even if nobody knows who I am.”

“That’s heartbreaking,” Sebastian said.

She looked over at him, her lips compressed. “My heart’s not broken.” She jabbed the needle into the soil. “I’ve never needed recognition for myself. Recognition is the last thing I want. It’s just that…awful as it makes me, this is the thing that I do. I wake up thinking about it. I dream of it when I sleep. The thought of doing all this and having it evaporate into nothing is more than I can bear. I want to do something, and have someone notice.” She swallowed, and then reached out and touched the leaf of a bean sprout, ever so gently. “This is as close as I will ever come to having children.”

She had never talked about children before. Sebastian knew only that she had been married eleven years without bearing one, and that her husband had wanted an heir very, very badly. So badly that at the end, he’d encouraged Sebastian to spend untold hours with his wife—giving his implicit approval to a cuckoo in his nest. Better that, apparently, than an empty one.

One didn’t have to have much intelligence to figure out that something had gone wrong. Whatever it was, he suspected it had soured more than just a marriage.

He wondered if she was recalling any of that. What those events had looked like from her eyes, colored by her emotions. But Violet rarely admitted to having emotion.

“There is more to you,” he insisted.

She looked up at him. “You’re only saying that because you don’t know how little there is in my life.”

She said there was nothing in her life the way someone else might state that there was nothing in his cup: as if it were a matter of a minute’s worry.

And that’s when he made a mistake: He reached out and touched her hand.

He hadn’t meant anything by it. He’d have touched anyone he cared about who said something that bleak, and when that person was Violet… He didn’t have it in him to hear a thing like that and not respond, to not want to make it better in whatever way he could.

But Violet froze, every muscle tensing. All the color rushed from her cheeks. And before he could apologize, she snatched her hand away, cradling it to her chest as if he’d burned it.

Sebastian considered himself something of an expert on female response. Often, quickened breath suggested a heart that raced in anticipation. But not when it came in sharp bursts. Violet’s gasping respiration did not suggest anything other than panic.

He knew better than to touch her. Not even in friendship.

Sebastian put his offending hand in his pocket and bit back a curse, trying for nonchalance in his tone.

“Violet,” he said, “we’re friends.”

She started to open her mouth but he waved her into silence.

“I know you’ll say you don’t know what that means, but I do. Just because I won’t present your work any longer doesn’t mean I no longer…”

Care, he had been about to say. But she wouldn’t want to hear that word.

“…have an interest in your happiness. This matters to you. Things have changed since you wrote your first paper. I can introduce you, if you’d like. Your work would be read. They’d listen to you now. If I told them to do so.”

For a moment, her entire expression changed. Her eyes widened. Her hands clenched into fists, and her lips parted. She turned to him—and then just as swiftly, all that hope drained from her. That light dissipated from her features, leaving her eyes nothing more than dark, dull orbs.

“No,” Violet said. “Almost nobody cares about me now. I’d hate to see it become nobody at all.”

“Then…” Sebastian paused. “I don’t know how to proceed, how to find a new balance that will work for both of us. But I’ve been thinking since we spoke a few weeks ago. It’s not as simple as me or nothing. I have another idea.”

She looked over at him quizzically.

“Let me talk to someone. Get a little advice on how best to proceed.”

She blinked, considering this. “Telling secrets only creates trouble.” But her gaze slid away from his. “Who did you have in mind?”

“Simon Bollingall,” Sebastian said. “He’s been my mentor for these last years. I trust him as much as I trust anyone. I wouldn’t tell him your name. I would tell him…a little of the surrounding circumstances. Maybe he’d have some idea of how we can both be happy.”

She stared fixedly at the dirt. “Do you think he might help?”

“Maybe.”

She didn’t say anything for a long while. “I like his wife,” she finally said. “Alice Bollingall. We’ve met at your lectures. She’s a photographer by hobby. She takes pictures of the countryside.” She set her needle down. “She offered to have me sit for one of her photographs. I think she develops the pictures herself. She’s a very clever woman, and he…treats her with respect.”

“May I talk to him?”

“My mother would kill me.” Her lips compressed. “But then… it’s not as if she wants to know. It’s awful to even think of it. Awful and selfish. To want this, even knowing what I’m risking.”

“So that’s a yes, then.”

She turned and looked at him. And then, because Sebastian had nothing to lose, he winked at her.

“God.” She waved a hand at him in dismissal, but he could see a hint of a smile tilting the corner of her lip.

So long as he could still make her smile, he hadn’t lost yet.

“You,” she said with a shake of her head. “Yes, then.”

SEBASTIAN BOARDED A TRAIN for Cambridge the morning after he talked to Violet. The familiar journey had calmed his cycling worries. He left the station, walked along the riverbanks, and then made his way up the cobbled streets wending up through the market, all the while telling himself that this was his usual journey, that he need not think of his mission. He made his way from there to his friend’s office, where he was greeted and ushered in with good grace.

Five years ago, Sebastian had sat on this precise chair, in this precise position, watching Professor Simon Bollingall read a paper he hadn’t written. In those first years, he’d provided advice. He’d helped Sebastian at every step of the way.