Chapter Nineteen
Lucy saw the concern rise in her mother’s pinched expression and did her best to ward it off. “Mama, this is perfectly respectable—there is no law against protesting!”
Her attempts did not work. “It’s not very elegant though dear, is it?” tutted the Countess of Lindow, standing in the melee of women standing outside the Brighton courthouse. “If only there was a way to do it elegantly.”
“If I can discover a way to thrust a placard in the air at a protest gracefully, Mama, you’ll be the first to know,” Lucy retorted—though most of her words were overcome by the chant that the Prison Reform Society had started up.
“End transportation! End transportation! End transportation!”
“And do they have to shout so, dear?” the countess asked, lifting a hand to her head and wincing. “I was up all night with your father—”
Lucy recoiled. “Mama!”
“—working out the logistics of a family matter that we discussed at Stanphrey Lacey,” continued her mother, raising an eyebrow. “Honestly, Lucy, I had not considered you a prude.”
It was quite one thing to be a prude, Lucy pondered wryly, and quite another to consider one’s parents… Oh, of course they’d had to at some point, but one rather presumed that sort of thing was behind them.
The crowd outside the Brighton courthouse was not quite what she had hoped for when Lucy had rallied the Prison Reform Society troops at their last meeting.
Over fifty women had signed up and committed themselves for this on Friday, and as half of them were unwed, Lucy had hoped for at least twenty chaperones as well.
As it was, only about fifteen women had actually arrived, and though a few of them had brought their children, the scamps had wandered off to play, leaving a much smaller crowd than she had hoped.
But there it was, Lucy told herself briskly, raising her placard and allowing her mouth to shout their protest slogan without much thought. She had done it—and it had been weeks since she had done anything truly meaningful for the Prison Reform Society.
She had been a mite distracted.
“Lucy, I can do this. I can be anything you need!”
“But I don’t want you to fabricate who you are just to please me.”
Lucy pushed the memory right out of her mind—or at least, as best she could. The man was quite irritatingly infringing on more than one part of her day, refusing to be kept out of her sleeping hours as well as her waking ones.
But here she was doing what she had been made for. This was surely what she had been put on the earth to do, to change the world and make it a better place.
Lying, spying viscounts notwithstanding.
“And we really plan to stay here all day?” asked her mother faintly, glancing around them.
Lucy sighed. “I told you that you didn’t have to come, Mama.”
“Yes, but Percy is off with Benjamin doing something I probably don’t want to know about, and as my own maid is under the weather, Beachem is mending my favorite bonnet, and I couldn’t possibly send her off with you,” said Lady Lindow lightly.
“And you are still an eligible young lady, Lucy. Just about.”
‘Just about.’
Lucy whirled around, almost whacking one of her Prison Reform Society companions with her placard. “What is that supposed to mean?”
“I believe it says, ‘Reform our justice system,’ dear,” said the countess, peering at Lucy’s placard.
“I-I know what it says! I meant—”
“Well, honestly, Lucy, I would not have thought I’d need to explain it to you,” her mother said, swallowing before she spoke again. “Gadding about Brighton with him, dancing at the ball. I even heard that you went swimming together.”
Heat burned Lucy’s cheeks as she swiftly looked away. “I don’t know what you’re talking about, Mama.”
“Hmm. My point is, you still have your reputation, just, and the nasty criminal has gone. And he’s not likely to come back, is he?”
Lucy knew her mother meant well, in that special way that mothers everywhere had of saying the most heart-wrenching thing and then smiling because they’d meant it as encouraging.
“He’s not likely to come back, is he?”
No. Bernard Dixon, or whoever he was, would not return.
Oh, it had been exciting, and that was perhaps how she had managed to get utterly swept up in the whole thing.
There had been an exhilaration to him, a wild, rebellious freedom in falling in love with a man from what she’d thought had been a completely different class, whose biggest problems in life had been finding food, not keeping Lady Romeril happy.
But when it came down to it, they were too different. That was what Lucy had decided when mulling over the argument they’d had.
They wanted such different things from life, had done such different things in life—was it any wonder that they could not find happiness together?
Lucy swallowed down the lump threatening to rise in her throat. Not that she hadn’t want to give him a chance.
“End transportation! End transportation! End transportation!”
“It’s all very noisy, isn’t it dear?” opined her mother.
Lucy tried to smile. “It is a protest, Mama.”
“Yes, but you would think the gentlemen in charge might respond better to kindness.” The countess shrugged, showing all the hallmarks of boredom creeping in—never a good sign.
As she had done from a young ago—Percy had taught her this trick—Lucy said vaguely, “Yes, I suppose they might…if only we knew the odds of that approach succeeding.”
A sparkle shone in her mother’s eyes, and before Lucy could say another word, she had dived into her reticule, pulled out notebook and pencil, and was eagerly opening it up.
“Yes, yes, that’s interesting—one would have to take into account the temperament of the judge, and the number required to enact law—bring in Parliament, yes, and the time of year and how many other bills were being considered… ”
It was remarkable, even Lucy had to admit, how swiftly her mother could be lost in her numbers. She herself was like that with the Prison Reform Society. Or at least, she had been.
Stupid Bernard Dixon. The man had utterly distracted her from her life’s goals, and where had that left her?
“End transportation!”
Right, right. Protesting outside the Brighton courthouse.
Lucy took a deep breath, raised her placard to shake it in time with the chant, and tried not to think that the last time she had been here, she had just acquired a supposed criminal of her very own.
Bernard Dixon.
“Mr. Dixon,” said her mother vaguely.
Lucy glared at her mother, who was now leaning against the wall with a furrowed brow as she stared at her notebook. “Why on earth would you bring him up now?”
“Why, I was only saying good day,” the countess said hazily, gesturing with her notebook.
Lucy’s entire body froze.
No. No, he couldn’t have been here. She had only just decided this morning that she was definitely not in love with the man anymore, and so she would be able to go through life without regret at all.
Except for the sickness she felt every morning.
And the question of how best to provide for the child who might appear in less than a year’s time.
She’d considered her options, how best to avoid the gossip rags.
But there had simply been no way to shield her child from the bitter effects of Society’s condemnation of the mother and for Lucy to stay in cities in order to keep up her work with the Prison Reform Society.
So she was making the best of the time she had until her confinement in the countryside.
Not that she’d give up once there. There would always be letters to write.
But Society couldn’t know she’d had a child out of wedlock, and her family—all the Chances—would help her out in that regard.
She was sure of it, though she’d yet to let them know.
Her pulse quickened as the roar of the protest faded into the background, all her senses focused on one thing: turning around incredibly slowly and not dropping her placard.
Slowly, slowly, entirely unsure how she was able to move an inch when her whole body felt like ice, Lucy inched around and saw…
Bernard Dixon.
He was holding a placard of his own and he was shouting along with the rest of the group, his eyes fixed on the courthouse in a way that Lucy could only guess meant he was determinedly not looking at her.
“End transportation! End transportation! End transportation!”
He was here. Bernard. He was actually here.
A very small part of her had hoped that when she saw him, if she saw him again, that all the affection would fade away and Lucy would realize she had in fact fallen in love with the idea of love, but this was not the case.
Quite the opposite, in fact.
“Bernard,” Lucy whispered.
She loved him. He had been right; she had known the him of the present, so what did it matter where he had come from or what he had done in the past? Criminal, spy, viscount, it was all the same—though she probably would not verbalize that in front of her uncle the Viscount Pernrith.
Bernard Dixon, or whatever his name was, he was the man that she loved. The man with whom she needed to be.
And that was going to start right now.
“Take this,” Lucy said distantly, thrusting her placard in her mother’s direction.
“Ouch!”
She did not wait to see what injury she had inflicted and instead stepped forward in a daze, hardly able to believe it was him. Perhaps if her mother had not spoken his name, she would have believed he were naught but her imagination, proof of her desperate need to see him.
“End transportation! End transportation!”
Lucy pushed past a pair of protestors who had linked arms and found herself mere feet from the man she loved. He had stopped shouting with the chant and was looking at her with an expression of…well, of nerves, from what she could tell.
Her mouth went dry. He was here. Did he want to see her, or was he merely here because of the protest?
That couldn’t have been it—could it?