Chapter Forty-Six
When Kate woke, she was alone.
She didn’t feel alone. Celine’s presence lingered in bed with her. In the warm sheets, the ache in her body, the dark smell that seemed inked into her fingers and filled her with wonder at all they had done. She ran a hand down her torso and stretched.
It was the quiet before the storm. Once broken, news of her engagement would spread like wildfire. The king would require an accounting. Her social calendar would explode. Was this … happiness? She was looking forward to the day ahead. She was looking forward to every day.
Maybe Celine had thought they shouldn’t be discovered in bed together before the engagement was announced. It was more delicacy of feeling than Kate could muster. She was in a mood to proclaim it from the rooftop, naked. I am the luckiest woman alive! Celine Genet has said she will be my wife!
The door snicked open, and she flung the bedsheets back and was halfway there before it had completed its arc.
She thought of the confections Celine sometimes wore when she really wanted to dress up—sleeves ruched at the elbow with three rows of ribbons; voluminous skirts that made her look dainty, gorgeous; her black hair wound through with silk that was tied fussily in a bigger bow at the front, smaller at the back.
A shiver of anticipation went through her.
She would pick Celine up, skirts and all, against her naked body.
It wasn’t Celine who entered, but Celine’s lady’s maid.
“Forgive me, Your Grace,” the maid said, curtseying. Her colour was high, her breathing quick and sharp. “We’ve looked everywhere. Just everywhere. Miss Genet seems to have … disappeared.”
“Disappeared?” Kate said, stunned, the word meaning nothing yet.
“No one saw her leave, Your Grace, but she ain’t nowhere to be found.” The maid’s voice broke with distress. “Not in the garden or the stables, not even in the street.”
The maid suddenly cringed away, and Kate felt ill when she realised her hand was raised as though she had been going to spend the violence of her feelings on a servant. The blood left her body in a rush, and ice filled it.
She didn’t waste time trying to find excuses or reasons that might explain Celine’s absence: She knew what had happened.
The worst had happened. Somehow, Lord Wroth had found out what Celine meant to her.
Celine had none of the defences Kate had of money, name, and title.
Celine only had her sharp wit inside its vulnerable casing.
Kate thought of Markham turning up last night at the Demi Lux, where she had no right to be. She thought of Markham’s cute little observation about the sweetness of the night dissolving in the morning, and how Celine had reacted. Markham had done something to Celine.
She washed in the freezing water from the basin and pulled on whatever clothes were closest.
This morning, the Inheritance Bill was being read in Lords. She felt nothing about the bill—let them pass it—but an awful relief that she knew exactly where to find Lord Wroth, and lurking somewhere nearby, his bastard.
Shaw was in the entrance hall when she came down, with his hat on and papers under his arm.
They must have been supposed to leave for Lords together, a plan made in a different universe.
He startled at her appearance and said something.
She let him come with her because it was quicker than putting him off.
The carriage drove through an unusual level of activity on the streets of London.
Clusters of pedestrians seemed to form, then break into sprinting, excited parts, then re-form; hundreds of voices spoke over one another.
Drifts of white fluttered everywhere one looked, settling around doorsteps like snow kicked out of the street. Kate saw none of it.
The one thought she wouldn’t allow herself to contemplate sat dense and deathly cold within her mind. The Wroth bastard was capable of anything.
She leapt down from the carriage before it had fully stopped in front of Westminster Palace and took the stairs two at a time.
As she came to the top of the first flight, she saw a figure leaning in a corner of the landing, hands in pockets, looking up towards the Lords Chamber with an unreadable expression.
The figure turned as Kate’s boots slowed—then straightened, hands releasing.
Markham.
This was no innocent servant who depended on Kate for her livelihood and was a third Kate’s weight. This time, Kate let the full violence of what she was feeling into her fist, and this time, her fist landed.
She used to fantasise about bringing the Wroth bastard out of the shadows and turning their fight into a good, clean physical contest. She had imagined punching Markham would be as brutal to her as it was to Markham, like punching granite. She had looked forward to it.
The reality was nothing like that. Markham saw her coming but seemed totally unprepared for the assault. Markham’s body made no resistance and her single eye widened in a curiously vulnerable expression, as though until the very moment the punch landed, she hadn’t thought Kate would hit her.
Kate grasped Markham’s collars, and the bastard swayed in her grip. Blood poured from her nose.
“Where is she?” Kate roared, shaking her. “What did you do to her, you worthless bastard?”
For one more moment the eye was fixed on her with dazed and naked shock, and then all at once Markham seemed to rouse and come back to herself. The eye thinned into a look of pure loathing. Markham spat blood into her face, pushing her off.
She stumbled back a few paces, nearly tripping onto the steps. Shaw caught her elbow.
“You can take it out on me all you like,” Markham rasped, “it won’t change the fact that she’s the one who betrayed you, not me. I guess it really fucking hurt.” She gave a slow smile that smeared blood across her teeth.
Kate shook Shaw off. Betrayed you. She’s the one who—
“My father,” Markham said, “wanted to wait for you, before he read the letter aloud to the lords. I suppose he wants to see the look on your face.” Another bloody smile. “Yes, just like that.”
She’s the one who … She tried to recall Celine accepting her proposal and couldn’t. She’s the one who betrayed you.
“Tell me what you have done to her,” Kate said, “or I swear I will dedicate the rest of my life to making you suffer.”
“Only the rest of it?” Markham asked negligently. Then she laughed. “My God, it’s almost too good. You really have no idea what’s happened! You wrote a letter, Kate, to your friend Bastien du Ponte. It was treason, and it killed your family.”
She felt as if all her skin constricted at once. Celine had given Lord Wroth the letter?
“This morning your little fraud, Miss Celine Genet, had it sent over to”—a brief, frustrated glance up the stairs—“to my father. She was only too happy to work with us against you. I will hear the contents soon, too. He has promised to give it to me when he’s done.”
The letter. Of course it had been the letter. That calamity would follow what had happened last night was inevitable. Why hadn’t she been ready for it?
Celine had given the letter to Lord Wroth …
Celine had betrayed her in the most brutal, effective way possible. Of course. Of course. It was no more than what she had always known would follow from the kind of intimacy she and Celine had shared. In a way, it was intimacy, as she understood it.
Such betrayals, such setbacks she had experienced in her life—they were the losses that had defined her. Yet this time, neither icy distance nor hatred would come to her aid. She had no protection against the devastation she felt. She could only love Celine.
It’s going to hurt a lot more than that, Celine had promised her the night she turned up in London.
Kate had thought everything had changed since then. She had thought anger and hatred had fallen away. It was breathtaking. Only someone of Celine’s calibre could have planned out such a careful revenge and would have the nerve to see it through.
And nothing had made Celine’s revenge sweeter, she was sure, than her private admissions of love.
She thought of herself begging Celine for mercy at the ball; she thought of herself, head on a soft pillow, spilling every sordid detail of her childhood.
She took out her handkerchief and wiped her face clean.
“What does she mean, treason?” Shaw asked urgently from her elbow. “Duke?”
“Just what it sounds like,” Kate said, without inflection.
The colour left Shaw’s face. “We need to go now,” he said. “The debate in Lords will already have started. If there’s anything you can do to stop what is about to happen—do it.”
And so, she went to face the punishment Celine had deemed fit.