Chapter 7 #2
“Well, I’ll be damned,” Mr Mainwaring muttered. “One rarely runs into Fane outside of Parliament. I wonder why he’s here.”
“Yes.” Viola’s breath came out in short, painful hacks. “Why is he here? Isn’t he supposed to be in Dublin?”
She’d enquired. Three, four, five times.
She’d been so certain he was out of the country.
That was the one and only reason she’d dared to come to London.
“Is he still the, uh, what did you say he was? Chief Secretary of Dublin-or-other.” She waved the lemonade glass about, not that it mattered since its contents were now adorning Mr Mainwaring’s waistcoat, of which the man was still blissfully unaware.
Mr Mainwaring laughed. “Chief Secretary for Ireland. A most prestigious position, as everyone knows, carrying the same consequence there as the Prime Minister here. He will use it as a stepping stone for greater things.”
“Yes.” Viola swallowed. “Why didn’t he stay in Ireland?” Blast the man. He was supposed to stay on that island!
Mr Mainwaring looked at her, amused. “Because, Lady Viola, Parliament is in session? And the Chief Secretary for Ireland is expected to attend. He is required to represent the Irish government, introduce Irish legislation, answer questions on Ireland, and defend Irish policy. As everyone knows.” He paused.
“It must be quite tiresome to have to travel constantly back and forth between Dublin and London by sea and boat.”
The crowd thickened, and Viola felt the urgent need to disappear before it parted again.
Georgiana and Lily notwithstanding, wherever they were, whatever they were doing, she could no longer wait for them and risk running into him. She would leave. Now.
She mumbled an excuse to Mr Mainwaring, something about having to visit the lady’s retiring room. He wanted to accompany her.
She declined. “As everyone knows,” she told him with a sweet smile, “the lady’s retiring room is exclusively visited by ladies.”
She elbowed her way through the crowd, hailed a footman, scribbled a hasty message on a slip of paper that she requested from him, and told him to find her cousin and deliver it to her.
Her excuse was simple: she was ill and had to leave immediately before she hurled the contents of her stomach all over the ballroom floor. It wasn’t even a lie. She most definitely felt unwell. She prayed Cousin Georgiana would understand.
Then she climbed into her carriage and fled.
Away.
Far, far away.
When she arrived at her little town house in Bird Street, which wasn’t that far away, unfortunately, she was shaking from the aftereffect of the shock she had just experienced.
The maid drew her a hot bath. As her muscles relaxed, her mind could slowly think again.
So. Sebastian was in London.
She uttered a string of curses under her breath.
Of all the ill-fated, unfortunate circumstances!
She slid down in the water until it covered her chin.
What was she to do now?
Return to Inverness?
Run away to the Continent?
Under no condition could she flee to Ireland; wild horses could not drag her onto that island that he governed.
To the colonies?
India, perhaps. They said the weather was nice and hot there.
Viola groaned and splashed water onto the wooden floor.
Stay in London anyway?
Assuming she stayed… Maybe, maybe it wasn’t for the worst.
He must be staying in the family residence on St James’s Square.
But she was here. Not nearly far enough away as she would have liked, but maybe that was not a problem.
For they never, ever needed to meet again. Not if she was clever and took particular care not to meet him. She could hide in her guise as a spinster cousin and stay with Georgiana and Lily. No one would even notice her.
She’d have to stay far away from Parliament, of course. Make a detour about St James’s Square.
The hard, icy knot inside her eased somewhat. That seemed doable.
And she was fairly certain Sebastian would never visit the anatomy school, nor Newgate prison.
She would avoid Almack’s like the plague from now on, as well as other balls. She didn’t need to attend any ball ever again, or other social events. In fact, she could just wall herself into her house on Bird Street and never set foot outside until she finished her novel.
That was what she had come here to do, after all.
It had been nine years.
Nine dreary, long years.
Where had the time gone?
It had flitted away as if it were nothing at all.
Deep inside, she still felt like the gauche seventeen-year-old who’d fallen so deeply, hopelessly, desperately, painfully in love with him, from the moment she’d climbed that crumbling tower and seen him stride into her life out of nowhere at all.
A sad smile crossed her face as she remembered that fateful day.
A well-dressed, neat and trim young man, tall and handsome, the stuff of every girl’s dream, had wandered into her life just like that.
He’d set a foot on a stone and looked pensively over the land that spread out before them.
He looked vulnerable. Lonely. She’d blinked and rubbed her eyes and leaned out of that tower window to catch a better view of that miraculous creature, and then her foot had slipped, and she’d lost hold and stumbled, right out of that window and down to her doom.
Right into his arms.
And when he’d caught her so efficiently and their eyes had locked—much like they had today, and a shiver ran down her spine as she remembered it—she thought she’d drowned in a sea of molten blue-green.
Then he’d tossed her into the nettles.
Viola snorted.
Lord, how he had detested her from the very first.
She rubbed her arms in a half-hearted attempt at washing herself.
She couldn’t really blame him. She’d done her best to make him notice her, to be a thorn in his side.
But there was something about him that always drew out the worst in her.
He made her so nervous she kept stumbling, falling, spilling, spitting, and who knew what else whenever he was around.
She had followed him around like a lovelorn puppy, attempting to be in whatever room he occupied in that vast mansion.
She was surprised he’d never noticed. Or had he? She wasn’t sure.
She’d been so in love.
And then there was George…
…George, with whom she’d always thought she had been in love, until she’d truly fallen in love.
With his brother.
George, to whom she’d written immediately to call off the engagement as soon as she realised the true state of her emotions.
A letter he’d never received.
Tears dropped into the milky bathwater.
Confound it. Now she was crying.
And the bathwater was lukewarm.
She stepped out of the bath, pulled her nightgown over her head, rang the bell and told the maid to take it away.
“Pull yourself together, Lola.” She had to put them out of her mind.
George. Sebastian. Nana. It all happened so long ago.
She was no longer the awkward, gauche, lovelorn girl, and he was no longer the reserved, grave young man who had looked at her, just once, as though she were something precious in his eyes.
They had both matured, and that was good.
“Turn the page,” Viola growled to herself.
She’d come to London with a mission, and that was to finish writing her book.
Peregrine, curse the man, had forcibly reminded her of her duty.
She had no choice; she must write.
But how?
She sat in the middle of the bed, her favourite place to write, and chewed on her pencil.
What was the problem?
The problem was her brain.
It kept wanting to go to him. She could no longer think of anything else. Because of that, she could not write.
She’d read in a medical treatise somewhere that was all about galvanising corpses, that possibly one could galvanise a dead brain and stimulate it, get it to think again.
That would be one method to try out, she thought. But she lacked an electrical current that she could apply to her brain. A look out the window told her that an electric storm was unlikely to happen that night as well.
A second theory she’d read was that the brain ceased functioning when it lacked blood. Ergo, she could try doing a headstand to get it to fill with blood. This would reignite her creativity.
That sounded like a more reasonable thing to try out.
Since she lacked men’s trousers (she really ought to ask Peregrine to lend her a pair the next time she saw him), she tied her nightgown in makeshift pants around her legs.
Then, with one, two, three attempts, she made the motion of doing a headstand on the mattress, with her legs propped up against the headboard of the bed.
It was the most interesting exercise.
It seemed to work. She felt the blood rush to her head as her cheeks heated. Her breath went faster, and the perspective of the room was decidedly different.
“Inspiration, inspiration come,” she muttered, like a magical incantation. She had to remain in this position and make it at least to ten beats. “One, two, three, four...”
The door opened.
Curse it. She should have told the maids to stay out.
But the shoes that stepped into her upside-down field of vision were not a maid’s shoes. The pair of long legs that appeared were encased in silk stockings and elegant dress shoes. Masculine. Expensive.
Her gaze travelled up.
And up.
And met a pair of bluish-green eyes staring down at her with an expression of absolute incredulity.
No.
The blood was definitely rushing to her head now, because her brain was suggesting that the man standing frozen in the doorway, watching her attempt a headstand in a nightgown tied into makeshift trousers, was none other than Sebastian.
She shrieked.
Her legs slipped.
She went down in an avalanche of pillows and tangled linen, landing in a graceless heap with her hair in her face.
By the time she clawed her way free, gasping, he had closed the door behind him.
He regarded her for a long moment. Then he smiled coolly.
“Madam wife.”