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After the second time he caught her looking at him, she turned her face and looked outside instead, into rain plastered against the streaked window, while the men talked politics, breaking down the likely Irish Home Rule votes constituency by constituency.

Somewhere north of Peterborough she realized that the compartment had gone quiet: Her father had drifted off to sleep. Mr. Marsden watched her, his lips curved into that hated smile that made her feel as if she had under her skirts a drunken lover who was liable at any moment to burst into a loudly slurred rendition of “God Save the Queen.”

“Do you mind if I ask a personal question, Miss Bessler?” said Mr. Marsden.

She didn’t bother to conceal her frown. “That quite depends on the question.”

“You’ve beauty, poise, wit, and connections—everything a woman needs. Why haven’t you married?”

It was a question that no one else had dared ask to her face. Beneath her carefully cultivated insouciance, her lack of a ring had chafed and incensed. To ask the question was to declare his intention to be a thorn at her side.

“You forgot to mention charm,” she said coldly. “I’m generally acknowledged to have the charm of at least a Madame de Pompadour, if not outright that of a Josephine Bonaparte.”

“Charm too, of course,” he said, accompanied by a smile of irony. She’d never used her charm on him. “Which boggles the mind even more that so many ordinary girls of your particular vintage of debutantes are comfortably settled in matrimony, while you remain unattached.”

He was trying to get her to admit something. What did he want her to say? That she’d aimed too high in her youthful pride? That she’d believed that there was no one more qualified to be the wife of the country’s richest peer or its leading intellectual? That she’d been sincerely convinced that anything less would be an insult to herself—to her beauty, poise, wit, connections, and charm?

“There is such a thing as luck in matters of matrimony, as in anything else,” she said. “Those who admire me and those whom I admire have not coincided—until recently.”

She wasn’t supposed to refer to her three-day-old engagement until the announcement was in the papers, but she couldn’t help it. Besides, as the person in charge of Stuart’s calendar, Mr. Marsden had to know that she and his employer had been seeing a great deal of each other in recent months.

His reaction—a flicker of mordancy tangled with something she couldn’t read—told her he quite understood. “I see,” he said.

“My turn to ask a personal question,” she said, though she, like he, was less interested in the answer than in the bloodletting of the questioning itself. “You come from one of our best families, sir. Why have you chosen a career as a lowly secretary?”

Everyone knew, of course, that he had been disowned and disinherited by his late father. That he didn’t even have the dignity of a choice. He was forced to work.

“The life of idleness is not for me,” he said, looking down at his hands, which were well-kept, except for what appeared to be a permanent smudge of ink at the edge of his right palm.

She twisted the knife she’d already stuck in him. “But surely, there are so many productive ways of passing time without becoming someone else’s employee. You could have devoted yourself to the arts, the letters, the sciences. You could have helmed any number of charitable endeavors that would benefit from your skills of organization. You could have become a Member of Parliament.”

“Alas, none of those noble pursuits pays a farthing,” he said. “And it pains me, as I’m sure it pains you, to contemplate life without enough farthings in it.”

Oh, had it ever pained and distressed her.

At her father’s passing, the house would go to her eldest brother. Her father had never been a rich man. Her mother, certain that Lizzy would marry well, had distributed most of the money she’d brought to the marriage to Lizzy’s two brothers. Were Lizzy to end up a spinster, she would have to subsist on the harshest of economies, a thought she’d carelessly dismissed for years before suddenly cowering under the looming shadow of its increasing likelihood.

But she wasn’t about to admit any such thing to him.

“No, I’m afraid you are quite alone in your contemplation. Poverty is your lot, sir, not mine.”

He glanced at her and she was struck by the starkness of it.

“Ah, Miss Bessler,” he said lightly. “Your cruelty would break a heart less stalwart than mine.”

The scene was set in a manner identical to that of the previous evening: the big black brougham coming around the bend, its bell chiming softly in the evening air; the drive before the house awash in golden light that shimmered against the purple and crimson of dusk; the perfectly matched pair of footmen leaping off the carriage.

Except this time, Mr. Somerset was the one who greeted the arrivals, two gentlemen and a lady. The news that the lady was to be the next Mrs. Somerset had spread everywhere. The maids were excited by the thought of a grand wedding. Mrs. Boyce winced at the likelihood of unruly children in the near future.

From the solarium, Verity watched the young lady descend from the carriage. She was very tall, very beautiful, and very fashionably clad. Her coloring, like Mr. Somerset’s, was dark and dramatic.

Their mutual affection was evident. When they greeted each other, their clasped hands remained linked a moment too long, even for a betrothed couple. As they walked arm in arm toward the house, they made a handsome pair—a breathtaking pair—their heads bent toward each other, speaking softly, listening closely.

Verity stamped down an urgent need for a fag. It was only the merest coincidence that he hadn’t already married. He needed heirs. Fairleigh Park needed a mistress. He was doing everything he was supposed to do.

The master and his guests entered the manor; the servants carried in the luggage; the brougham drove off. She stared at the empty drive.

He had moved on. But she, she was a relic, a fossil, a fly caught in amber, unaware that eons had passed and the world had changed beyond recognition.

Now she had no choice but to leave.

Dinner was a struggle from beginning to end.

Stuart did not know why, but he was vulnerable to Madame Durant’s food in a way that defied all logic. While his guests reacted favorably to the courses—Marsden in particular was ecstatic—Stuart was in the middle of seismic shocks, a piece of himself coming undone with each mouthful.

But he could not walk away tonight as he had done the night before, nor could he refuse to be served while there were others at the table. He ate as little as he could, but a small serving of lightning was still lightning, and even the most modest of flames still burned.

Sometimes he didn’t even know what he was eating—what was the taste of falling off a cliff?—he only knew he was eating because the rest of him swung between shock and dismay, unwilling to submit to, yet unable to impede this violent reawakening from taking place.

The sensuality of her cooking did strange things to him. He couldn’t stop thinking of the woman in the kitchen who wielded such power and magic. Did she possess the alchemy to distill brutal longing and infuse her food with it? Or did she serve forth undiluted desire, disguised as nothing more alarming than a dish of crème caramel?

“In Paris, they speak of her as a goddess,” said Marsden reverently.

No, not a goddess, a sorceress who exerted a dark enchantment. Who wooed him with decadent and impossible pleasures. Who made him forget that he was a most respectable middle-aged man about to become even more respectable with marriage and political ascent.

When he ate, there was only the food. And there was only the cook.

Chapter Seven

July 1882

H
unger made Verity panic.

Her appetite had been feeble for weeks. She hadn’t eaten this whole day. But now, suddenly, she was starved.

With hunger came the stirring of old fears—dying in a gutter, languishing in a workhouse, becoming one of those women with rouged cheeks and hard eyes who blew kisses at passing men and took them upstairs.

She’d not had the foresight to purchase something on the way back to the inn. And she could expect no help from the innkeeper. He’d been quite put out with her for returning so late, after he’d already locked the front door—his was a respectable establishment, he’d grumbled, no comings and goings at all hours.

Her mind intervened, suppressing the grim dread of hunger, substituting in its place a different panic, one equally unnerving but lovely: the panic of Stuart Somerset.

Ah, yes, it was so much better to think about him, even if she could only do so rather incoherently, zigzagging between scraps of recalled conversation, fragments of Bertie’s scathing commentary, and whole, long minutes of warm-cheeked euphoria.

Now that she put her mind to it, she realized that she knew quite a bit about Stuart Somerset, from Bertie and from the gossip she’d heard before she became Bertie’s mistress. Mr. Somerset’s mother had worked for Manchester’s premier modiste. In the spring of 1854, Sir Francis had summoned the said modiste to Fairleigh Park as a rather desperate enticement to lure his wife, who’d refused to leave her bed since her confinement three months before, out of her invalidity. The modiste brought with her dozens of the shop’s best bolts of fabric and two of her most capable seamstresses.

Lady Constance did not abandon her sickbed so easily. But Nelda Lamb, on the other hand, quite took leave of her good sense. Nearly ten years later, after Lady Constance was no more, Nelda Lamb returned to Fairleigh Park and brought with her the shameful result of her previous visit, a nine-year-old boy who was the spit and image of Sir Francis.

The boy, for all that he came from the gutters, quickly adapted to life at the mansion. Sir Francis raised brows when he sent the boy to Rugby, one of the nine great public schools singled out and named in the Public School Act of 1868. But the boy did not disappoint his father. He excelled at everything he did, quietly yet inexorably outshining his brother, who was a gifted athlete in his own right and no intellectual midget.

It’s as if he were some sort of automaton,
Bertie had said more than once. A windup mechanism that kept marching in one direction and one direction only—toward greater brilliance and distinction.

Boring. Dry. Moralistic. Wouldn’t know how to have a good time if it rolled in crème anglaise and rubbed itself all over his lapels.