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S
tuart’s hopes died abruptly twenty-four hours later, as his fiancée was shown into his drawing room.

“Sorry I’m late.” She squeezed his hand briefly. “I didn’t mean to be. When you are prime minister, you will do something about the logjams, won’t you?”

She smiled at him, looking very young and very stylish in a dinner gown the color of evergreens in winter.

“Of course, I shall banish them all,” he said, as his heart sank without a trace.

He had betrayed her. There was no other word for what he had done. In the confines of the bath, it had been easy to pretend otherwise, to believe that what he had done and what he wanted to do were both beyond the judgment of the simplistic sexual mores of his time.

It was not the simplistic sexual mores of his time that he faced now, but the trust in Lizzy’s eyes. It didn’t matter that he never had taken and never would take any pleasure with Madame Durant, not even when he was alone. He had touched her and kissed her and held on to her as if he were a beggar and she his last shining penny.

He loved her—in ways he understood only marginally, an emotion too powerful, too primal for a civilized man. And
that
was the ultimate betrayal, far worse than furtive touches in the dark, far worse than even outright fornication.

“Banish them all, eh? Now, that will indeed make me the most popular hostess in London,” said Lizzy, her smile widening.

Her smile was a corrosion of acid upon his conscience.

“Anything to make you the most popular hostess in London, my lady,” he said.

She replied, a witty observation on the current spate of popular hostesses. He probably heard and understood her just fine, because he said something in return and she laughed rather brightly. But he had no idea what either of them had said.

His guests arrived on the Besslers’ heels. Stuart gave dinner parties often enough, usually catered by a capable woman named Mrs. Godfrey, whose cooks took over his kitchen for a day and whose height-matched footmen served in the evening alongside Durbin. The hired footmen were present, circulating trays of amontillado sherry and vermouth. The usual collection of tails-clad men and bejeweled women occupied his drawing room, chatting genteelly with one another.

But tonight it felt utterly unreal, as if he’d walked into the middle of an elaborate tableau and must play along. All the while the woman he loved slaved belowstairs, with no idea that their time together would come to an abrupt end.

His heart struggled and pleaded like a wrongly accused man.
Don’t do this. Don’t do this.
But he had no other choice. Love was a thing of no consequence to a man in his position—only duty counted, duty alone, duty above all.

She was mounting a production aimed to dazzle. He had been informed that the menu was her interpretation of the best-known feast in recent history, the meal enjoyed by Czar Alexander II, the then-future Czar Alexander III, and the King of Prussia at the Café Anglais in 1867—otherwise known as the Dinner of the Three Emperors.

He had not asked her who she thought needed such impressing, and now he would never have the chance. The kind of dinner she used to produce daily for Bertie would have quite sufficiently amazed his guests. Such elegance as she intended for tonight was beyond the experience of most of his guests, with the possible exception of the Arlingtons.

The arrival of the Dowager Duchess of Arlington and her son, the current duke, caused a stir. As Mr. Gladstone’s deputy, Stuart had various dealings with the peers of the realm who took their seats in the House of Lords. He also occasionally attended politics-centered country house gatherings. But on a purely social level, he did not quite move in the same rarefied spheres. The invitation issued to the Arlingtons had been more a whim on his part than anything else, since the dowager duchess had seemed so particularly aware of Madame Durant. He’d been more than a bit surprised that she had accepted.

Lizzy, to her credit, betrayed no sign of discomfort as she greeted the Arlingtons, despite having once been told by the dowager duchess not to look to her son for a husband. Stuart, on the other hand, could only wish that he’d not invited the too-sharp duchess. If she breathed one word of his Verity, his facade of normality would crumble.

At the appointed hour, Durbin announced dinner. Stuart offered his arm to the dowager duchess, and they proceeded to the dining room, where murmurs of “Oh, my” and “Good gracious” immediately broke out.

Stuart had epergnes and vases and candelabra enough. But they remained in storage tonight. Instead, pairs of Corinthian columns marched down the center of the dining table. Between the columns were four-foot-tall reproductions of classical statues. There was Artemis the Hunter, alert and confident, her left hand in the antlers of a young buck, her right hand reaching toward her quiver. There was Venus de Milo, beautiful and sensuous. And nearest to the head of the table there was the Winged Victory of Samothrace, marred and maimed, but triumphant all the same.

He’d seen many an elaborate table in his time, the majority pompous and misguided, a few with a genuine spark of artistry. But he’d never encountered what felt to be a defiant table. True, she was French, and what she used were some well-known pieces from the Louvre. Nevertheless, it was a statement on herself—her reputation, her sensuality, her fearlessness.

The gentlemen waited for the ladies to take their seats. The ladies waited upon the dowager duchess. The dowager duchess stood unmoving, staring at the sugar paste reproductions that mimicked the quality of marble quite uncannily.

When she at last took her seat to his right, Stuart thought he heard her murmur, “She hasn’t changed.”

“I beg your pardon, Madame?” asked Stuart.

The dowager duchess shook her head. “It was nothing.”

The meal commenced with potage
imperatrice
and potage
fontanges.
In all fairness, Stuart thought perhaps he should have attached a note of warning to the invitations: beware the food. But who would have paid him any mind? To his guests, the only perils of dinner were indigestion and weight gain.

The conversation that had reached a steady hum as the soups were brought in faltered abruptly when the first spoonfuls reached unsuspecting lips. Potage
imperatrice
was a thickened bouillon. Potage
fontanges
was, if one must be blunt about it, a soup made from pureed peas. But the looks of amazement on his guests’ faces would have one believe that they’d been given sips from the Fountain of Youth.

She’d outdone herself. He didn’t know how it was possible, but the flavors of the soups were more fierce and more seductive than anything he’d ever tasted. He was robbed of speech, almost of thoughts altogether. The only thing left to him was a hot, brutal grief, and a relentless wish that it didn’t need to end this way—swift and merciless.

His guests’ silence was the one small mercy of the evening. Beside him the dowager duchess ate carefully, soundlessly, the expression on her face halfway between pain and bliss.

Toward the end of the course, the conversation tentatively resumed. No one spoke of the food—the experience was too strange, too unnerving for a roomful of good, solid Englishmen and -women who’d never had their attention commandeered by mere dinner. Instead, they murmured distractedly of the weather and the deteriorating congestion of the roads.

That fledgling conversation ground to a halt each time a new course landed on the table. The hush that descended was half-astounded, half-reverent. There were startled gasps when the
pâté chaud
came around. Even something as mundane as an ice to clear the palate between the courses received solemn, undivided attention.

By the time Madame Durant’s variation of the
bombe glacée
arrived on the table, layered, in deference to the weather, not with ice creams but with vanilla custard, chestnut cream, and chocolate mousse, all the good breeding and restraint represented at Stuart’s table were barely enough to hold back his guests from launching themselves face-first into their desserts.

He held himself together only with the training of a lifetime.

When they had demolished the
bombe glacée,
Lizzy, at the far end of the table, came to her feet. One by one, the other ladies left their seats, slow and dazed. The last person to follow Lizzy’s lead was the dowager duchess. She remained where she was and gazed into her empty plate. For a shocked moment, Stuart thought there were tears in her eyes.

Then she rose, straight and regal, and departed the table.

In the drawing room, while she waited for the gentlemen to join them, Lizzy had to dance attendance on the dowager duchess.

She’d once tried to ingratiate herself with the duchess—then not yet dowager, as her husband still had been alive. To say she was unsuccessful was to call the Thames somewhat muddled. The duchess had let her have it with an icy majesty that had infuriated, humiliated, and impressed her all at once.

The duchess was not a chatty woman. After scant minutes, Lizzy had already exhausted her own limited capacity for monologues. Since she’d received countless unsolicited advice concerning her married life from women who barely knew her, she thought perhaps the duchess might warm up to a request for instructions.

“I’m to be married soon, Madame. I should dearly love to hear your wisdom on the subject of marriage—and husbands,” she said.

“You are not me, Miss Bessler, and you are not marrying my late husband,” said the dowager duchess. “I do not see how my experience could be of any relevance to you.”

“No, indeed,” Lizzy murmured. At least let it be said that she was dressed down by the best.

But then the dowager duchess regarded her a minute. “I have not congratulated you on your impending marriage, have I?”

It was the first time the duchess had ever expressed any kind of interest in Lizzy’s person. She was flustered in spite of—or precisely because of—her fear and awe of the old woman. “No, Madame, I do not believe so.”

“Since you accepted Mr. Somerset’s proposal before his brother passed away and left him Fairleigh Park, I see you’ve finally gained enough sense to appreciate a good man for what he is.”

“I certainly hope so,” said Lizzy, not quite sure whether she’d been praised or insulted by the peeress.

The dowager duchess smiled. “You still believe that I refused to let my son marry you because your father had no title.”

“That was what you yourself told me, Madame.”

“That was a reason you could understand. I forbade the match because you did not care enough for my son. He is kind and gentle. And as such, he deserves a woman who loves him, rather than one who merely sees him as a means to an end.”

Lizzy could say nothing in her own defense. It was exactly how she’d seen Tin, a sweet, malleable chap and the perfect conduit of her own ambitions.

“I imagine I’d have done the same were I his mother,” she said.

The door to the living room opened. The gentlemen had arrived. Her fiancé, after a moment of almost obvious hesitation, came toward them.

“Mr. Somerset,” said the dowager duchess, “I was just about to tender my felicitations to Miss Bessler. I do not believe either of you has ever told me how you decided to marry. It has been a friendship of long standing between you, has it not? What prompted the change?”

Stuart looked almost riled by the question. Lizzy knew, of course, that he wouldn’t blurt out such frank answers as that she’d hounded him with invitations to dinner and her almost continual presence at the Palace of Westminster at teatime. But she panicked nonetheless—the dowager duchess had that effect on her.

“I was unwell for quite a long time,” she said. “Mr. Somerset sent me a beautiful arrangement of flowers every month. They were the one bright spot in an otherwise dreary time.”

Stuart slanted her an astonished look. She supposed that as private a man as he was, he preferred that such details of his life not be shared with others.

“Indeed,” said the dowager duchess. “I did not take you for the kind of man who communed via buds and blooms, Mr. Somerset.”

“I am not, by and large. But a man must make exceptions for an exceptional woman,” he answered.

Lizzy wished he’d continued with the exceptions after her recovery. She missed the flowers, missed the lift they gave to her heart and the sense of kinship they brought her.