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He had not done anything wrong, but God did he want to, and the list of wrongs he wanted to commit with Madame Durant rivaled a Dickens novel in length. It didn’t seem to matter at all that she was a woman of questionable character and ill-considered judgment; he wanted her as a caught fish craved the sea.

He wouldn’t touch her. And he would send her away after the wedding. But for now he allowed himself to crave, and to dream of an existence without fiancées, rigid social classes, old fears of the taint in his blood, or anything else that would hold him back from joining her in that warm, deep tub.

I was thinking of you.
You,
sir.

Verity stood on the outside steps leading down to the service entrance and waited for Mr. Somerset to return home.

A London fog was always an unwelcome visitor. It smelled of slop and had the wet fingers of a horny drunk, poking into tender parts where a fully clothed woman didn’t think mere weather could penetrate.

But the fogs she’d known in her years in London were gentle mists compared to the
thing
that had materialized this evening. While she’d cooked dinner, traffic in the street above had moved as if underwater—slink and slither of darker forms in a soupy opacity. As the evening wore on, visibility had reduced further. Light from the nearest street lamp was now a dim orange halo that illuminated only itself. And she could barely see her own hand when she held her arm out straight.

She was worried. He should be back already. Had Wallace become hopelessly lost? The fog was the color and consistency of a cheese soufflé, the kind of atmospheric obliteration that had pedestrians walk open-eyed into the Thames. It would be all too easy to misjudge the distance and miss a turning.

The vapors kissed her cheeks with icy lips. She pulled her shawl tighter about her person and lit a cigarette, preferring the harsh acridness of tobacco to the softer smother of the miasma.

She didn’t hear his steps until he was almost directly above her, the fog curling thick and yellow around the edge of his frock coat. Though he couldn’t see her—didn’t even know she was there—her heart pounded as if he’d caught her naked again, her hand between her thighs.

The entire day she’d passed in a daze, interrupted now and then by bouts of severe anxiety—not that he would want his cook, but that he wouldn’t. Now that they’d met—after a manner—and that she’d professed her desire for him, it would be intolerable if he didn’t return it in some measure.

Keys jangled. Then stopped. Then the tinny sound of something metallic brushing against stone—the buttons of his frock coat on the half wall at either side of the front steps?

“Who’s there?” he asked. In
French.

Fear needled her, until she realized that it was only the cigarette that had given away her presence, the lit end of it far more visible than her black-clad person.

“Bonsoir, Monsieur,”
she answered. Her voice sounded different to her ears when she spoke the Provençal French of Monsieur David—lower, scratchier, more vigorous than refined.

The keys jangled again, this time against the top of the half wall. “Madame Durant,” he acknowledged her, calmly, courteously. “You received my message?”

“Yes, sir.” The meeting that he’d scheduled for the evening had to be canceled due to the fog. And instead of rescheduling it at the Reform Club, he’d invited six ministers and MPs to his house the day after next to confer over breakfast. “I’ll have everything ready.”

“See that you do.”

His keys lifted, jingle and clatter. They’d come to the end of the conversation. He would see himself into the house now.

But she couldn’t bear to let him go yet. Their encounter had shaken her, but it had also unchained an appalling need to be closer to him—she’d missed him so. And no matter how much she reminded herself that he was engaged to marry another, there was a part of her that insisted that, no, he was hers. All hers, always.

“Sir, Wallace didn’t come back with you?” she asked.

The keys stilled. “I had him put himself and the carriage up some place closer to Inner Temple. It was too dangerous to drive.”

“Then how did you come back?”

“By tram. And on foot.”

“And that, that was not dangerous?”

“It was.” His walking stick tapped. Once, twice. “But if I were to take a hotel room, I would be deprived of your food.”

He’d come more than three miles in this weather, facing very real risks of getting lost and getting injured, for her food? “I didn’t know you liked my cooking this much.”

“You didn’t?” He chuckled softly. “Well, now you do.”

“But the first time I cooked for you, you sent the food back to the kitchen without touching it.”

Silence. The fog twisted and slithered. Then the sound of a match being struck, a small burst of orange flame—he’d lit a cigarette. The reddish light at the end of the cigarette glowed with his inhalation.

“Do you know, Madame, what happens to a man who spends decades in the dark, then steps suddenly into full sunlight?”

“No, sir.”

She heard him expel a breath. She smelled the smoke, a warm pungency that swirled about them both.

“He is blinded by the light,” said Stuart Somerset. “And I didn’t want to be blinded. Good night, Madame.”

Chapter Thirteen

M
ichael’s letter came on the afternoon post, a short missive, not even quite one page. He acknowledged the two letters Verity had sent, but made no apologies for not replying sooner. He’d been busy: He’d taken over as the editor of a student journal and his team had just defeated the Cotton House team at rugby.

Verity sighed, in pride and frustration. He let her in on so little of his life these days; she hardly knew him anymore. Had she been wrong to send him to an elite school? Was it the snobbery of his classmates that had made him chill and distant?

But she didn’t think the snobbery of the middle-class boys at a more ordinary public school would have been preferable. And the thought of sending him to a mere state school had never occurred to her. No, she’d always been determined that it would be Rugby and Cambridge, as it had been for the men in her family for generations.

Well, perhaps not always. And certainly not before that chilling letter from her aunt ten years ago. Until then she’d have been happy to see him grow to manhood, be he a farmer, a clerk, or a gamekeeper, like his adoptive father. After that she’d pushed him as hard as she pushed herself—she’d never managed to impress her aunt in all her years at Lyndhurst Hall, but now that her aunt’s eyes were on her again, she couldn’t stop herself from trying.

She instructed Michael in elocution, eradicating from his speech every last trace of Mr. Robbins’s broad Yorkshire vernacular. She taught him all the foreign languages with which her governesses had tortured
her.
She initiated him into the myriad and mysterious rules of etiquette that governed the deportment of the upper echelon. By the time he was ten he spoke English like a royal duke, acquitted himself in French, Italian, and German, and knew that a gentleman removed his glove before shaking a lady’s hand and that should he be present for a luncheon, the last thing he should do was offer a lady his arm—that was how one spotted parvenus and pretenders from a furlong away.

But all the courtly manners in the world weren’t enough for the adopted son of a gamekeeper. So she’d drummed into him that he did not want a life like hers, that he owed it to himself—to her—to be the best at everything he did, because it was the only way he’d ever be treated as an equal of those to the manor born.

She opened the locket she wore around her neck and gazed at the picture inside—Michael and herself, her hand draped possessively over his shoulder. It had been close to the start of term his first year at Rugby. She’d taken him to Manchester and bought him all new clothes of the best material and workmanship, from hats to linens and stockings.

On that trip they’d had their portrait taken at a photographic studio, their lips clenched tight to prevent overly broad smiles not suited to the solemn occasion. They’d been drunk on possibilities then—both of them seeing Michael’s future through nothing but rose-tinted glasses.

She closed the locket and reread Michael’s terse letter twice before putting it away. There was another letter, the envelope addressed to her by an unfamiliar hand. Mr. Somerset’s secretary had said that Miss Bessler might have instructions for her concerning either the wedding breakfast or the wedding cake. She stared at the envelope for some time, then sliced it open with one hard flick of her letter knife.

The piece of paper inside contained no instructions either on the wedding breakfast or the wedding cake. Nor was it even a letter. There were dates listed, and underneath each date, a few brief words.

21 November

Unwell. Could not keep down his supper.

22 November

Still unwell. But attended his classes and met with the journal staff.

23 November

Played in the match against Cotton House against the advice of many. His team won.

She started shaking. Michael. The observations were again about Michael. Her aunt had a minion at Rugby, with easy access to Michael.

She added coal to the grate and made herself a cup of tea. The tea calmed her down some. Perhaps her aunt thought Verity would try her luck again with Bertie’s brother. Perhaps she believed that the warning needed to be renewed every decade or so. It didn’t really matter why her aunt chose to do what she did. As long as Verity kept her mouth shut about her origins, Michael was safe. And keep her mouth shut she would, for the rest of her life.

For now, the important thing was that Michael was unwell. She couldn’t see him, couldn’t nurse him, couldn’t even berate him for his neglect of his health without making him ask questions.

So she must cook for him.

Stuart smelled the madeleines the moment he walked past the front door. But when he asked Durbin and Mrs. Abercromby about the sweet, haunting scent, they only looked puzzled and said that they did not detect a thing.