Chapter Twenty-Four
The circulating library on Piccadilly had a frontage of handsome, gleaming wood and two broad windows displaying prints.
On entering, the first impression was of a wall of books.
A long desk bisected the room, behind which industrious clerks spoke in low voices to their predominantly female clientele.
Up a stairwell full of light was the reading room, different in almost every way from the borrowing hall.
Here, the walls were hung with silk. Delicate chairs were grouped around the room, and diffuse afternoon sun came in at the tall windows.
Celine cast her eye briefly over the company and saw very few people actually reading. Most were quietly talking—she caught snippets about the theatre, and politics, some gossip from the assembly halls—and some were drinking tea served by serious young men.
She spied Lord Seaton standing by a window with a number of other matrons, on the lookout for new gossip.
She touched her lips once, then her close silk bonnet. Perfect.
As she approached Lord Seaton, she began to draw a disconcerting level of attention—slowly the general conversation died off as library patrons watched her progress, eyes widening.
“What is she doing?” she heard one young woman whisper, the colour leaching out of her face.
Last to notice her approach was the tight circle of women at whose centre Lord Seaton stood.
“My Lord.” Celine dropped into a deep curtsey. Someone let out a strangled gurgle.
Lord Seaton turned. She cut a grand figure—tall and swaddled up to the chin in lace, her silk turban pinned with an enormous amethyst above a face in whose folds and jowls a high, bladed nose was still prominent.
She stared down her nose at Celine with a chilly, forbidding expression.
One of the other matrons took a large step back and began madly fanning herself.
“And who,” Lord Seaton said, “are you?”
Celine was momentarily taken aback, and then she laughed and said, “I have the advantage of you, My Lord. You could be none but the Earl of Seaton, whereas I might be any young woman in London.” She thought for a moment then added, “Though not Essie Compton, who has come down with the measles.”
Whatever Lord Seaton had expected for reply, it was not this. Nonplussed, she said, “You are French.”
Celine’s accent was getting better, but she’d only been in England a week, after all. She gave what she supposed was a very French gesture of admission.
Lord Seaton’s expression turned arctic. “You are the Duke of Howard’s ward, I suppose? Miss Genet?”
“I will admit to being Miss Genet,” Celine said merrily, “and not a scrap more until I am certain you mean to make friends with me.”
Lord Seaton seemed to grow even taller, and said in stunned tones, “I cannot imagine why I should.”
“Well,” Celine said, “because of the Inheritance Bill.”
The timing of Lord Seaton’s invitation to meet her at the library had not been a coincidence. The only way to guarantee the defeat of Lord Wroth’s bill was for Lord Seaton to throw her social power behind the duke, presenting a united front. The library was a perfect setting to do so.
But Lord Seaton frowned, seeming at a total loss, and behind her several matrons began furiously signalling at Celine to shut up.
Surely she had already been told the news? Celine looked around the room at all the gawping, abashed faces. Was it possible Lord Seaton truly didn’t know?
“Forgive me, perhaps you have not yet heard about the bill Lord Wroth introduced in Lords this morning?”
The matron who had been fanning herself started going double-time.
Lord Seaton said, very coldly, “Of what do you speak?”
No one had told her? It made Celine angry. “Lord Wroth introduced a bill that would disinherit every female lord and heir. He calls it the Inheritance Bill. That is, he proposes to disinherit you.”
She could see the information travel physically through Lord Seaton’s body: a flush so dark it was nearly purple, except around the pinched, white nostrils. The shocked eyes that became hard in a flash, so furious they were pressed into diamantine brightness.
But what came, when Lord Seaton was at last able to speak, was not the explosion everyone was clearly dreading. With her gaze full of cold intelligence, she said, “Tell me, does Richard Howard stand to inherit the dukedom?”
It was so unexpected, Celine lost her footing for a moment. Richard? What did Richard have to do with anything?
And then her brain caught up, and everything shifted awfully.
If Lord Seaton hadn’t heard about the bill, she’d had no reason to invite Celine to the library.
And if she hadn’t invited Celine to the library, she shouldn’t have been able to guess who Celine was.
Unless someone had already brought Celine to her attention.
Young. Short. French. Perhaps Richard had even called her beautiful.
Certainly, he had called her a whore. He had told Lord Seaton who and what she was.
And of course, Richard had invited Celine to the library, to approach Lord Seaton uninvited and be publicly humiliated.
But all was not lost, if she could just keep her head. Richard had underestimated Lord Seaton’s intelligence, and by interfering he had given himself away.
She pulled herself together by force, keeping the tremble from her voice. “Yes, Mr. Howard would inherit.”
“I disapprove of Kate Howard in the strongest terms,” Lord Seaton said.
Celine said carefully, “A fact of which Mr. Howard is aware.”
This gave rise to a more thoughtful pause as Lord Seaton regarded her.
She hadn’t been publicly humiliated—yet.
Instead, it seemed she had caught Lord Seaton’s interest. Perhaps, in her own way, Lord Seaton was even grateful.
No one else had dared tell her what Lord Wroth had set in motion, despite the awful implications to her own title.
She would have heard about it soon enough—but not before she had laid the groundwork for her own downfall.
That, too, Lord Seaton had clearly now grasped.
“Miss Genet,” the grand matriarch said at last—an imperious proclamation that was heard throughout the silent reading room, “you will be so good as to take tea with me.”
Then she turned with as much gravity and import as a ship changing course on the high seas.
The reading room erupted into sounds of furious amazement.
What was happening? Was Lord Seaton really taking tea with a debutante?
A debutante nobody knew, who had dared to approach her without an introduction?
When the tea arrived, Celine did the honours. With great sweetness she enquired after Lord Seaton’s preference for sugar and cream, called the footman back to have the curtain adjusted, and made flattering observations about London.
Lord Seaton’s shrewd, haughty gaze acquired an amused texture that suggested she knew she was being indulged but was enjoying it anyway. Celine was satisfied to see the last signs of Lord Seaton’s extreme agitation ease away.
“Now,” she said, smiling, “you have heard quite enough from me. My Lord, may I suppose you visited my home country in your youth? I can barely remember France as it was in more peaceful times. Isn’t that sad? I long to hear about grapes growing fat in the undisturbed sunshine.”
She lifted her cup and took a small sip.
“Yes,” Lord Seaton said in her grand, stiff tones, “my mother’s family came over from France. Oh, many generations ago, but we made a habit of travelling back. We still own a large estate on the Mediterranean coast, near Cassis.”
“There, I knew it must be so!” Celine exclaimed. “I have never been to the Azure Coast. You must describe it to me—every detail.”
A footman arrived with the sweetmeats Lord Seaton had wanted fetched from Fortnum and Mason—candied ginger, almonds, and macarons—and Celine settled in to listen to the old woman’s reminiscences.
Running from waves at the beach as a child.
Filling baskets of crabs. The herbs growing so hot in summer that when the scullery maids picked them the air would seem to turn green.
Her first taste of wine, sitting on her favourite aunt’s lap.
She had spat it out, right onto her aunt’s pristine skirts, and her aunt had laughed and laughed till Lord Seaton thought she might tumble off her lap and onto the floor.
Celine had in fact grown up very near Cassis, and it was beyond strange to listen to these stories.
She laughed and exclaimed, showing nothing of the way each anecdote landed against the door to that long-ago place. How the girl in the cupboard shivered and shied away from discovery.
A number of older women—they weren’t the first—came over for an introduction to the delightful young Miss Genet. After they’d gone, Celine sent for more tea.
Lord Seaton paused and stared into her empty cup.
Footmen had begun drawing the curtains against the oncoming evening and lighting lamps.
Many of the people who had been their first audience had left, and new library patrons had since arrived, gawping anew at the debutante taking tea with the grand matron.
Lord Seaton placed her cup down and said, “My dear, you have indulged me long enough. I require an accounting, and there is no more putting it off.”
Behind Lord Seaton, a young woman who had been idly looking down into the street started, then called to her friends, who crowded round the window with her, half inside the curtains, giggling.
“You deftly suggested earlier,” the lord went on, “that what Mr. Howard told me was nothing but a malicious lie told for his own benefit. While I applaud your quick wit, I don’t believe you.”
Well, she had known Lord Seaton was clever.
“If you are among us under the false pretences he suggested, you must tell me now. Who are you really?”
Celine rested her teacup against her closed lips and watched the old woman.
She distantly heard the door below open and slam shut.
“We have spoken of your French forebears,” she said, placing the cup down, “and your deep roots in that country. It is not out of the realm of possibility that I am your great-grandmother’s cousin’s grandson’s nephew’s girl … Is it?”
Pounding footsteps sounded up the stairs, growing closer.
Lord Seaton’s eyes gleamed, caught up irrepressibly in the gambit Celine was offering her.
“The Duke of Howard,” Celine went on, “who was a great friend of my father’s, would of course do everything in her power to keep her word to him and see my future secured. Knowing who I might be—”
The urgent tread had cleared the stairs and strode now through the reading room.
“—to you.”
“What,” the duke said hoarsely, “is going on here?” Celine turned to look up at her. The duke was breathing hard, her hat under her arm, and she had brought in the cold evening air and a trace of smoke.
“Duke,” Lord Seaton said comfortably, “do join us. I have been making the acquaintance of dear Miss Genet, who, it turns out, is a distant relation of mine.”