Chapter One #2
“I have some ideas,” she said instead.
Farah looked at her. “Ashley.”
“I have the beginnings of ideas.”
“Tell me the beginnings.”
Ashley put down her own cup and looked at the ceiling, because it was easier to speak to the ceiling than to Farah’s far too perceptive face.
“There is a logical sequence to it. He keeps himself away from me in the evenings, which suggests that proximity is the issue—he is afraid of what happens when we are close. Therefore, the first step must be finding reasons to be in his proximity. Innocuous ones.” She paused.
“I have been engineering reasons to be in the library at the same time. That has had some success.”
“What kind of success?”
“He read to me out of a horse-breeding manual for forty minutes and seemed almost to enjoy it.”
Farah’s expression was exquisitely controlled.
“That is an excellent first step,” she said, after a moment. “Step two?”
“Dinners. I’ve been having dinner with him more often. I’ve been—” She hesitated, because step two, when said aloud, left her feeling exposed. “I have been wearing slightly different necklines. Nothing improper. Just. Slightly lower…”
“And?”
“He knocked over his wine glass last week and seemed annoyed at himself.” Ashley allowed herself a small private smile. “I chose to take that as encouraging.”
Farah laughed, a genuine one, bright and delighted. “Oh, he’s suffering. Good. That’s exactly where you want him. What’s step three?”
Ashley was quiet.
Farah waited.
“I haven’t finished working out step three,” Ashley admitted. “It requires more information than I currently possess. About the mechanics of—” She gestured, a gesture that encompassed a significant amount of ground without naming any of it specifically. “You know.”
Farah blinked. “You want to learn how to—” She also gestured.
“I want to learn what works. I want to learn what makes a man who is determined to resist, stop resisting. I want—” Ashley stopped.
Started again. “I was raised to be an ornament, Farah. I know how to pour tea and how to play the pianoforte and how to decline an improper invitation, which is a great deal of preparation for a life I am apparently not going to have, and no preparation at all for the one I am actually living.”
The room was quiet. Farah was watching her with an expression that had gone from delighted to soft, which Ashley found considerably harder to manage.
“I know,” Farah said. She reached over and touched Ashley’s hand briefly. Then, because she was Farah and softness was always followed by something bracing, “You know, Rockwell’s bachelor days club isn’t the only such establishment in London.”
Ashley’s eyes narrowed. “What do you mean?”
“I mean there is a house on the edge of Sloane Square with a red door,” Farah said, with perfect casualness, smoothing the fringe of her shawl.
“Very respectable, from the outside. Very well-regarded, on the inside, by men who know what well-regarded means in that context. They call the woman who runs it Madam Chloé. I’ve heard she’s extraordinarily clever and rather particular about her clientele. ”
The silence that followed was complete.
Ashley spluttered. “How on earth do you know—”
—“Valora followed Fane there one night just to see where he went.”
“Farah,” Ashley said carefully, “are you suggesting I go to a brothel?”
“Gentlemen’s club. Fane uses it, I believe, or so Valora says, and where Fane is concerned, Valora knows all,” Farah corrected, with perfect gravity.
“It’s an important distinction, apparently.
And I’m not suggesting you participate. I’m suggesting—” she tilted her head, eyes bright—“that a woman of imagination and determination, who needs a particular kind of information, might find it rather more forthcoming from someone whose whole profession is the application of it.”
Ashley stared at her. “You have thought about this,” she said.
“Not at all,” Farah said. “But I have thought that I could come with you.”
“Come with me?”
“In disguise, obviously. Rockwell would never know.” The smile that curved Farah’s mouth was the same smile she’d had at sixteen when she had suggested they climb out of the bedchamber window to watch the village bonfire.
“I know where he keeps his old, caped greatcoat. I’d have to wear heels.
We could be two gentlemen calling on Madam Chloé to inquire about membership. ”
Ashley looked at her, at this woman who had been her friend since they were both in the schoolroom, who had a genuine talent for chaos, who was deeply, irrationally, completely loved by her enormous bear of a husband, and who had never in all the years Ashley had known her suggested something that wasn’t, in the end, the right thing to do.
She thought about it. She genuinely thought about it. The red door, the woman who ran the most discreet house in London, the particular kind of education available inside, and felt, to her own surprise, not fear but a low bright spark of something she had almost forgotten lived in her chest.
She was still alive, under all this propriety. She was still here.
“Absolutely not,” she said.
“Ashley—”
“You will not fit into Rockwell’s greatcoat, you are not as tall as you think, and if we are discovered together outside a Sloane Square brothel in disguise, it will be the most spectacular scandal in a generation and Tiffany will never forgive us.
” She met Farah’s eyes. “However. I could go. Alone. In a very thorough disguise, with a completely watertight reason for being out of the house. Then it might be worth considering.”
Farah’s expression transfigured into pure delight. She did not say I knew it. She was too much of a friend for that. She simply smiled, and Ashley felt the spark in her chest glow a little brighter.
“I’d go in the daytime,” Ashley said, thinking aloud now, the plan beginning to arrange itself with the pleasant click of things falling into place.
“Not at night. I’ll write a note—not in my name—and request a meeting to discuss the membership of a friend.
Something that requires delicacy. Something that gives her reason to see me and gives me reason to ask questions.
” She paused. “I will need to find the place first. I cannot very well hail a street hackney from my own front door.”
“Send one of the grooms to find it first,” Farah suggested. “A perfectly ordinary errand.”
“Yes. And I’ll need a veil. A proper one, not the sort that merely suggests privacy but actually guarantees it.
I believe Tiffany used one when she visited the stock exchange.
I’ll use that.” She looked at the window.
“I told Raven I was walking around the corner to visit Tiffany last Thursday and he never questioned it. His hours are not regular.”
“There’s your alibi,” Farah said.
Ashley nodded slowly. “And once I have the information, once I actually understand what I am doing—” The plan continued unspooling, each step finding the next with the particular satisfaction she had always felt when a problem became solvable.
“I shall need to change my approach entirely. No subtle dinners. No strategic necklines. Something that forces the issue.” She tapped her finger against her knee.
“He responds to warmth. That night in the garden that started all of this, he needed my touch, my warmth. Which means he is the sort of man who has needs himself. He wants a connection.”
Farah was watching her with a particular expression. “You have been thinking about this for a long time,” she said.
“Three months,” Ashley agreed. “I have had excellent thinking time.” She looked at the fire. “I’m not going to be passive about this, Farah. I decided that in the first week. I may have made a bad start, but I’m going to work out a better one.”
“I know.” Farah was quiet for a moment. Then, more gently: “Does he know? About the scandal? About Carstairs?”
The name still landed with a small, cold shock, even now. Ashley kept her face even.
“He knows there was a scandal. He knows I was found in a carriage. He knows society chose to believe the worst.” She was quiet.
“He doesn’t know why. You’re the only one I told because I know you’d never gossip.
Even the other ladies don’t know because I can’t have Ivy finding out.
” She had to protect her sister at all costs.
And the reason for it was the thing that lived in the back of her chest like a stone she’d learned to breathe around. She had never told anyone the whole of it—not even Farah, not the full truth.
Ivy had been seventeen. Just seventeen, and grief-mad from losing their father, and so hungry for someone to think she was wonderful that when Carstairs had turned that particular smile on her, she had written him letters.
Foolish, adoring, utterly ruinous letters, full of things a young girl believed when she thought herself in love with a man who was only ever interested in her dowry.
When Ashley had found them, well, found one, actually, an unopened letter from Carstairs, that she spied on Ivy’s writing desk and which of course she opened and read, her world changed.
It detailed an elopement, and she had done the only thing that made sense.
She had gone to the rendezvous and confronted him.
She had told him he would return the letters and leave Ivy alone or she would go to her brothers.
And he had listened to her very pleasantly and then demonstrated, with a carriage and a bruising grip on her arm and thirty miles of night road, exactly how little he feared her brothers.
Lady Featherington had seen Ashley get into that carriage. That had been enough.