Chapter 18
Verbena shivered as the bathing machine opened to release her and Flora. They stumbled like newborn foals onto the rocky shore, assisted wordlessly by Prudence. The moment her feet touched the ground, Flora walked straight toward the path that rose from the beach, leaving Verbena behind.
“Flora?” Verbena called to her retreating shape.
She did not pause even a moment at Verbena’s cry.
Verbena tried to shove her feet into her slippers, but she gave up, instead stuffing them in her pocket bag alongside the damp sheet and shift. “Flora, wait for me, and we will walk together!”
Flora gave no sign of having heard. She climbed up the path to the manor grounds quite alone, her back straight as an arrow.
Prudence regarded Verbena with some concern. “Did your friend get seasick on the way back? I had the horse go as gentle as possible.”
Verbena dredged up a smile for her. “I’m sure she doesn’t blame the horse.
Thank you for a lovely excursion.” There was the matter of money to be paid for the service, which Verbena furnished with a pang.
How few coins remained in her reticule. If only she could make Flora understand how dire her situation was—but she had explained perfectly, and the stubborn girl wouldn’t budge! It made no sense.
Prudence paused in the middle of placing the bit in the horse’s mouth in preparation for her journey back to town. “Would you like a ride back to the house? I can drop you on my way.”
“No, thank you.” Verbena clapped her hand atop her bonnet, lest the wind carry it off.
Its strings dangled in the breeze, whipping along her cheeks.
“I think I shall walk along the shore.” What Verbena needed was time and space to think.
Surely she could come up with some alternative plan that would make Flora see the light.
With a short directive to take care, Prudence led the horse to the path, the machine’s wheels obliterating any trace of Flora’s footprints in the sand.
Verbena watched it happen, then turned and began walking down the beach, her pocket bag dangling from her fingers.
The water shushed in and out in a way that proved a balm to her racing thoughts.
A few times a wave arrived bolder than the ones before, washing over Verbena’s bare feet and soaking the hem of her dress.
She felt very alone, and very stupid, and not at all ready to face the other guests or her hostesses or anyone at all.
Especially not Flora.
Of all the results Verbena had steeled herself for, she had not expected this one.
It would have been easier, she thought, if Flora had merely rejected her outright.
If she had not kissed her in return. But she had, and despite this miraculous confluence of matched desires, they could not agree on the shape of their union.
It seemed deeply cruel, to have been given a glimpse of Flora’s sweetness only to have it wrenched away.
And for what reason? Because Flora would have all of Verbena or none of her? What a perverse ultimatum!
Verbena kept her gaze on the press of her toes in the sand as she walked, watching the dampness etch out an echo of her form.
“Miss Montrose, is that you?”
Verbena shut her eyes and ground her teeth. The voice was among the least desirable sounds for her to hear at that moment: it belonged to Lord Byron. Still—she opened her eyes and lifted her head with a worn smile. No need to be rude.
Byron was seated on a flat, smooth rock that jutted out from an outcropping that met the sea. He wore no cravat nor hat, and his coat had been pressed into service as a blanket upon which he sat. His boots remained in place, however, which made sense given the rumors regarding his clubfoot.
Verbena was very aware, all of a sudden, of her own state of undress—her stockings and shoes stuffed into the dripping pocket bag, her feet scandalously naked.
She dug her toes into the wet sand in a belated attempt at modesty.
He gazed at her with those starkly blue eyes, not noticing her feet or not caring.
“I’m terribly sorry,” he said, “but if you’re looking to brood in this lonely spot, the position has already been filled.”
“Pity, I have excellent references,” Verbena said, grasping at jests where nothing else would serve. “Apologies. I will leave you to your brooding.” She turned to go.
“Please don’t.” Byron rose with only a little struggle. “I daresay you won’t find a better place for your own. Be my guest.” He waved a hand at his crumpled suit coat.
“I couldn’t steal your spot,” said Verbena, hesitating.
“Well.” Byron looked out over the sea. “It may be unorthodox but perhaps we could brood together.” Verbena inhaled sharply at that, but he turned his gaze back to her and threw up his hands.
“That was not an insinuation, for once! I only meant, if two people are burdened by the weight of their thoughts, and they wish to consider those thoughts in private, but there is no damn privacy to be found in a Welsh madhouse, for example, those two might…commiserate. In a way that does not imply anything untoward.”
The distrust Verbena felt in her belly melted away in the face of Byron’s pleading eyes.
It went against her better judgment, being alone with a rake—the rake, the one to which all others were compared.
Yet he seemed sincere enough. Furthermore, he had been very generous with Anne and Bette, so he couldn’t be all bad.
While she hesitated, his gaze dropped to her bulging pocket bag.
“If my behavior takes a turn for the worse, you may bash me in the head with that. Fill it with rocks first if it pleases you; here, there are plenty about.” He stooped and began picking up stones and seashells that had collected in the nooks of the outcropping.
Verbena rolled her eyes. “Leave them,” she said, and handed him her bag so that she might sit upon his spread-out coat, covering her feet as best she could with the hem of her dress.
Byron returned the bag to her with a wry look—“In case you need to defend yourself”—before sitting a foot or more away on the other side of the rock.
They shared a somewhat awkward smile before Verbena turned to look out at the waves.
For many long minutes, they sat in a silence that proved not entirely uncomfortable.
“Though you have no obligation to listen,” Byron finally said, his voice nearly drowned out by the wind that whipped along the shore, “shall I tell you what I am brooding over?”
Verbena, being the sort of woman who hoarded information like a dragon does gems, could not let the opportunity pass her by. “It would be my pleasure,” she said. “Tell me what weighs upon our great poet.”
“What doesn’t?” He sighed. “His wife has cast him out; his one daughter is a stranger whilst the other is in desperate need of proper schooling, which requires funds he does not have; he is in debt up to his ears; he must keep to the shadows whilst in his own homeland for the shame of it—”
Verbena made a sympathetic noise, but it made no difference. His Lordship wasn’t done by half.
“—his Italian lover is likely about to cast him aside as well, at the behest of said lover’s husband, who has quite inconveniently changed his mind regarding the entire arrangement; his writings are getting more hackneyed with every passing pen strike; and he cannot spend a single evening at an extremely accommodating house without unleashing bloody disaster on the poor inmates. ”
“Ah,” Verbena said. “You were the one who stoked the fire.”
Byron cut his eyes to her. “Yes. I stoked the fire. And I regret it terribly.” He flicked a pebble over the water, where it skipped thrice on the waves before sinking.
“I’ll be lucky if Bette and Anne don’t have me bundled into a carriage before luncheon.
Not that I blame them; I am mad, bad, and altogether miserable.
I’d hoped to stay until at least the end of the week, but—well, I’m fast running out of friends who will have me.
There seems not a soul left in Britain who loves me any longer. ”
He pressed his face to his upturned knees and began to weep. Verbena was shocked by this naked display of emotion—poets were certainly a different breed. They were not like the other gentlemen of her acquaintance, who kept their loves and sorrows locked away behind a door marked Propriety.
Say what you like about Lord Byron, but even the harshest critic had to admit he did not shy away from that which made him human.
Verbena was not sure how to react. Her lifetime of etiquette lessons had not touched on a situation like this. She lifted a hand, retracted it, then committed to placing it delicately atop Byron’s shaking shoulder.
“There, there,” she said, patting him. “It can’t be as dire as all that.”
This was, she knew almost right away, the wrong thing to say. Similar things had been said to her at her lowest points—a flash of how betrayal felt, even all these years later, like a poisoned blade in her spine—so she parroted them.
Foolish, she told herself. Very foolish.
Byron, though, was too polite to say so (perhaps for the first time in his life).
He merely raised his head and gave her a watery smile through his tears.
“Yes, I’m sure you’re right,” he said, though of course they both knew she wasn’t.
He dabbed at his wet face with his lacy shirt cuff.
“Enough about my woes. Do you care to share your own?”
“No, thank you,” Verbena said, swifter than she’d meant to.
She tucked her hand back in her lap and faced the ocean, watching the waves roll in, then recede.
There was no reason to share even the vaguest shape of her troubles with anyone, least of all a man well-known for his loose tongue and quick pen. Then again…