Chapter 2
Christian was indulging in a kind of sick glee at her discomfiture when Matilda Halifax went dead white and collapsed in a heap in front of him.
Goddamnit. It was not sporting.
He crouched on the ground and reached for her wrist, cursing himself as he did so. He could not take her pulse now and then go on to murder her.
It had taken him a moment to recover from the shock of her. She was so far from what he had pictured—all freckles and curves and sweetness, the very picture of an innocent English country lass—that he had forgotten his outrage for a moment.
But when she’d made to deny her involvement in the engravings, it had flared back to life. Anger—but mixed with something else.
He’d felt—
Well. He hated to admit it, but he’d felt a vague kind of admiration for the way she’d stood up to him.
Gently bred young ladies quailed in his presence typically, and though she was one of the bloody Halifax Hellions, she also couldn’t be more than five-and-twenty or so. He’d expected her to run. Or weep.
Perhaps both.
But she’d tipped her chin up like the queen of the milkmaids and admitted that she was the artist of a whole library of lewd engravings.
It was bold and fearless and slightly insane.
The woman was a bloody pornographer. If she were revealed, he thought she could face imprisonment—though as the sister of an earl, perhaps not.
Why would she do it? He knew the Earl of Warren through the Lords, knew the Halifax family was rich as the devil and connected somehow to a royal duke. She did not want for money or notoriety.
Perhaps she simply enjoyed taking jackasses like himself and dragging them through the mud.
Her pulse was normal. He dropped her wrist, and her entire arm fell limply to her side.
“You’re fine,” he said, rising. “Stand up.”
“I prefer to remain where I am,” she said faintly. She appeared to be gazing into the middle distance, her eyes glazed.
He gritted his teeth. All of English society might think him a monster, but obviously he had some idiotic scruples left. He could not shout at a half-swooning woman sitting in a rumpled heap in the gravel.
He caught her elbows and hauled her up, dropping her arms as soon as she seemed steady on her feet. “I tracked you down,” he began, but the goddamned woman would not let him launch into his prepared remarks.
“Wait.” She bit her lip, and her eyelashes fluttered as she looked at the ground, his waistcoat, his buttons. Anything but his face.
“I don’t—”
“Wait,” she said again, more desperately. And then she looked up, and her ridiculous blue eyes were wide and shining. “I’m sorry. I’m—oh God, I’m so sorry.”
He had not expected that.
“Why—”
She cut him off again. “Sir—your lordship—Lord Ashford. You must believe me. My drawings did not look like that when I sent them to the engraver.” She fumbled for the pamphlet he still held in his hand, opening it to the page he’d shown her before.
It was a picture of him, not a stitch upon his body, standing over a little dumpling of a woman. Her enormous breasts had come entirely out of her gown, and her hands were bound behind her. Above her, the illustrated Christian glowered and pointed his riding crop at her nude, dimpled bum.
Jesus Christ. Even the bloody expression on his face was right.
“Look,” said Matilda. She flattened out the pamphlet, tracing her fingers across illustrated-Christian’s angry brow.
“This part, I drew. The eyebrows, the hair, the eyes. The nose, yes, that’s mine too, but here”—her fingers caressed the neatly trimmed black beard, the scar on the man’s left cheek that precisely mirrored his own—“surely you can see that it’s been added later. ”
“You cannot be serious—”
“Look,” she demanded again. “Look at the lines, for heaven’s sake.
I use a stippling technique to make it easier for the engravers to replicate.
Look at the delicacy of the brow—and then this beard, how harsh the lines are.
” She fixed her blue gaze back on him, her expression the horror of the offended artist. “Surely you can see that I did not draw that. The style is coarse. It’s completely different. ”
“The whole bloody thing is coarse!”
He could practically feel the heat from her blush. “That’s as it may be—but if you will simply compare the style of the hair on this gentleman’s, er, other parts—”
“You can draw a cock but you cannot say it?”
“The hair on his private area to the hair on his beard, it will be perfectly clear to you that I did not draw this beard—”
“And the tattoo on my arse?”
She was back to staring out into the night, still blushing furiously. “I assure you, sir, I did not know you had any kind of body modification, and I certainly did not draw that—that—”
“Constellation?” he offered. “That’s Ursa Major.”
“How,” she hissed, “could I possibly know that you have stars on your buttocks?”
“A question, your ladyship, which I believe I have already put to you.”
“I did not draw that! I did not draw the beard, nor the scar, nor the constellation, and while I admit that it does look decidedly like your person with those additions, I did not make them.”
“Are you suggesting,” he asked grimly, “that you sent these drawings to the engraver and someone—some later artist—altered them to look like me?”
She was still pale. Her insulting freckles looked like tiny bruises across her cheeks. “Yes,” she said.
“Why in God’s name would someone do that?”
She bit her lip. “I do not know! I—perhaps there was some small resemblance—and someone thought to…” She trailed off, and her teeth sank back into the plump curve of her bottom lip.
He scrubbed his hand over the back of his neck. “I know why.”
She looked up, eyes wide. For the first time, she looked truly alarmed. “You do?”
“Goddamnit.” He crumpled up the pamphlet and stuffed it back into his jacket. He wanted, stupidly, to throw it in the dirt, but it seemed foolish to make more copies of the thing available to the interested public. “For sales, of course.”
It made a kind of sense. Despite himself, he believed Matilda.
There really was a noticeable difference in the style of the piece—now that she pointed it out, the facial hair on the man in the drawing looked scratched on, like a child’s defacement in a schoolbook.
The stars on his arse were a series of scribbles, nothing like the finely shaded delicacy of the rest of the piece.
And now she had him thinking favorably of her dirty pictures. Jesus Christ, he really was unhinged.
“For—sales?” She looked like she’d been struck in the head.
He exhaled. “Yes. Anyone can make up a lewd story and sell it—but attach it to my name, to my face, and it’s instantly infamous.
” When she met his eyes, he felt his jaw tighten.
“Have you not heard? I’m a monster. A wife-murderer.
And now, thanks to this bloody pamphlet, I am some kind of perverted defiler of innocents as well. ”
She licked her lips, and perhaps he was a monster, because some part of his brain registered the movement with an emotion altogether different from outrage.
“I have heard the rumors,” she said. Her voice was so bloody cool. As though murderers confronted her in dark gardens every evening.
“Are you not afraid?”
That was what he’d wanted, was it not? To make her fear him? To make her regret what she’d done?
Only—it seemed she had not done it. Or, if she had, the drawings had been some kind of cosmic mistake, a coincidence made into a weapon by a printer or engraver with a mercenary hand.
He felt suddenly guilty for this too, one more layer of regret on top of many. For approaching her. For trying to frighten her.
“I do not listen to gossip,” she said. “I have heard enough of it about myself. I have seen scandal sheets so distort the truth that I would not know they were about me if not for our bloody nickname at the top of the page.”
“Yes, well,” he said shortly. “You’re the only one who does not listen.”
He’d had enough of this. It was pointless, all of it.
What had he thought to accomplish? He could confront every artist and engraver and printer in the land, and he still would not be able to take the pamphlets back.
He could sue everyone in London for slander, and he would not get Bea’s art tutor back to Northumberland. Nor would he change the past.
“It will pass, you know,” she said. Her face was clear and pale in the dark night, and he almost could not pull his eyes away. “The scandal. People will forget about this pamphlet in time.”
“Will they?” His frustration was useless, as useless as his empty hands at his sides that fisted and then relaxed.
“How long? How long will it take them to lose interest? Long enough for my sister to forget that she was to be brought out in society next spring? Long enough for her to forgive me for involving myself in another bloody scandal so outrageous that her art tutor will no longer live in my house?”
“Your … sister?”
“Yes,” he said. “Her name is Bea. She’s eighteen years old. Her mother is dead—she has no family, no friends, no one but this bleeding female painter who now refuses to step foot in my house. Now she has nothing left but me.”
Matilda’s hand came to her throat. “I’m sorry. I’m so terribly sorry.”
He thought she meant it. He thought it was not really her fault, the pamphlet, the scandal, the gossip.
He thought, as he left the party to a swirl of curious whispers, that it was cold comfort.