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She wished that Stuart, in his haste, hadn’t sent the telegram from the post office nearest Lyndhurst Hall. Not that they could keep their arrangement a secret for long—discretion was the best they could achieve—but she did not want it known to the Dowager Duchess of Arlington so soon.

The dowager duchess had ways to track Verity’s movement—how else could she know to deliver a letter to 26 Cambury Lane within days after Verity had moved there? If the dowager duchess learned that Verity had returned to London again, and that Stuart, too, had cut short his stay at Lyndhurst Hall in favor of London, would she not infer that something was going on between the two of them? More importantly, would she interpret it as another attempt by Verity to reclaim her old identity?

Verity arrived in London in a strangely uneasy mood. But Stuart had left her a key to his town house before he departed Fairleigh Park, and the feeling of unlocking his front door and gliding inside quite buoyed her. At last, no more service entrances for her where he was concerned.

But her pleasure fizzled a little when the house turned out to be empty. Where could he be? She’d thought he’d be waiting for her. She lifted her valise—the rest of her things would be sent along later—and trudged up the stairs.

She used the water closet and washed her face in the washbasin in the bath. It was when she contemplated repeating history yet again—waiting for him in the tub—that she heard the front door open and close below.

She rushed down and quite knocked him into the wall on the first-floor landing. Without a word, she threw her arms around him and kissed him until she was completely out of breath.

Only then did she bother to ask, “Where were you?”

Before he answered, he took her face between his hands and kissed her back with a hunger that made her whimper. “Out on a heroic quest.”

“For dragons?”

“No, for something that apparently doesn’t exist in England.”

“What is it?”

He pulled up her skirts, his hand blazing a trail of fire up her thighs. Then she gasped, for he went directly for the ribbons of her drawers. The drawers fluttered to a heap around her ankles.

His hand found her and toyed with her, his touches barely there, yet etching paths of fire. “Would you like me to show you?”

“Yes,” she panted.

At her fervent affirmative, however, his hand left her. She gripped him by the arms, her body pulsing in stark need. He returned shortly, and touched something round, soft, and smooth to her inner thigh.

“I went out and bought it today. You can’t begin to guess the trouble I had.” He braced her legs farther apart and stroked her with the silky cover of the sponge. “Every place I went to assured me that they carried nothing of the sort—why, they were a proper, decent, God-fearing establishment. Every shopkeeper assumed that I was there to land him in hot water with
somebody,
because a dried-up prig such as myself couldn’t possibly have a personal use for something so nefarious.”

He twirled that nefarious something slowly, against a most sensitive point. She gripped his arms even harder, this time to help her remain standing.

“It was a woman, in the end, who took one look at me and promptly emptied my pocketbook. I think she sold me all the sponges in the sea.”

The travels of the silk-wrapped sponge continued. She bit down on his lapel, tasting warm wool, hungrily inhaling the scent of the clean, starched linen of his shirt.

Now he pushed the sponge against her. It resisted, then slipped in suddenly, his finger sinking inside her all the way. They both gasped.

“God, I hope I bought enough,” he said.

For a moment, reality intruded and her heart wrenched. She’d brought along a supply of sea sponges herself. But the length to which he’d gone forcefully reminded her that as much as he loved her, he could never go for a stroll in the park with her, never mention her in polite company, and certainly never give her any children—because any children they produced would be illegitimate, and he was the last man to willingly contribute to the creation of illegitimate children.

But then he freed himself from his trousers and entered her. And she forgot everything else. She shuddered and convulsed almost right away, her pleasure-starved body releasing—and releasing and releasing—years of pent-up desire in one sustained, glorious peak after another.

“I adore this room,” she said. “But I didn’t expect you’d sleep in a place like this.”

The room was done up entirely in shades of white. Chairs and stools were upholstered in ivory brocade. Counterpanes were the color of a distant clipper’s sails. And the curtains were an inner layer of translucent muslin and an outer layer of sugar-white grosgrain, with pipings of airy blue.

“My mum always pined for whites. So for me white was—is—the color of luxury.”

After their lightning-like lovemaking on the stairs, the doorbell had rung, and it had been the delivery of the substantial tea that he had ordered from the Savoy Hotel. They’d eaten, and made love on the dining table. Afterward, Stuart had gone down to the basement and packed the boiler with enough coal to last the evening. Then they’d taken a bath together, and only finally made it to his bedchamber minutes ago.

In her dressing gown, she climbed on top of the bed and stood on her knees to study the seascape that hung above the headboard. “Who painted this? It reminds me of the little piece in the main hall—not the Constable, the new one.”

He hesitated only briefly. “You’ve a good eye. They were both painted by my mum.”

His answer surprised her. She looked closer. “She was talented. Her technique wasn’t perfect, but she had a good understanding of color and composition.” She turned toward him. “I didn’t know you ever visited with your mum after your relocation to Fairleigh Park.”

“I didn’t,” he said. “Except once.”

His father had forbidden his mother to ever contact him, in person or by post. But Stuart hadn’t known it. For years he’d assumed she’d abandoned him. But when he’d been sixteen, he’d accidentally found out that Sir Francis paid Nelda Lamb a quarterly allowance—which quite put the lie to what his father had always claimed, that he didn’t know where she was.

Sir Francis had put her in his house in Torquay, where Bertie’s mum had lived out the last years of her life. It had been a brilliant move: It took Nelda away from Manchester, where Stuart might more easily find her, and also gave her something greater to lose should she renege on her promise to Sir Francis and contact Stuart.

Quietly Stuart dug up the address of the house in Torquay. At the end of his Easter holiday, he left two days early, ostensibly to return to Rugby. On the way he switched trains and headed farther south, to the Devon coast.

He arrived in the middle of a balmy spring afternoon. The entire coastline was in bloom, the bay as blue as a rain-washed sky. He left his luggage in storage at the train station, inquired for directions, and made his way up the hill behind the Strand.

His heart thrashed in his chest like a bagged weasel. He imagined her standing before her window, watching the road, the way he used to climb to the top of Fairleigh Park’s wrought-iron gates and look out to the country lane beyond, hoping to see her arrival. Or perhaps she would be at devout prayer for him, tears streaming from her eyes. Or writing to him, loving letters that she’d preserved, hundreds of them, for the day when he would come.

He broke into a run at the sight of the house, white and demure. The green door opened. A maid, her apron askew, looked him up and down, disappointed. “You are not my Bobby!”

His heart sank. Such an untidy and insolent maid would have been sent packing from Fairleigh Park without a character. A mistress who tolerated such a maid was at best of questionable respectability.

Hysterical laughter exploded inside the house, laughter both female and male, laughter that would have been considered too shrill and uncontained even for the servants’ hall at home.

“Is this Mrs. Lamb’s house?” he asked, hoping for a negating answer.

“If you’ve a card, I’ll take it to her,” said the maid.

He pushed past the maid into the front hall. The laughter still hadn’t subsided. Through a half-open door, he saw a man in a brown day coat and a woman wearing a yellow-on-blue polka-dot frock, sitting on his lap.

When he reached the parlor, he saw that the woman in polka dots wasn’t the only one on a man’s lap. A woman in a shade of scarlet far too provocative for daytime wear wriggled and giggled on another man’s lap. The third woman, a kohled, rouged hag, had a hookah in hand. And at barely four o’clock in the afternoon there were already half a dozen empty wine bottles all about the parlor.

“Mrs. Lamb, who’s your darling young friend, and where have you been keeping him?” gurgled the woman in scarlet.

Only then did he see a fourth woman, clad almost entirely in white, seated on a bench before the piano and slumped over the lowered lid that covered the keys, an empty wineglass at her elbow.

He didn’t recognize her. He remembered his mother as a weary, fading woman, aged before her years, her hair thin, her face haggard, her skin always splotchy either from the cold or from some dermatological ailment. The woman with her face down on the piano lid seemed hardly older than himself, beautiful, creamy, languorous.

She didn’t recognize him either. Not immediately. Nor after a good long, dazed look. He realized to his disgust that she’d overimbibed as much as the woman in scarlet, only her reaction was torpor instead of lasciviousness.

Suddenly she leapt off the bench and lurched at him, tripping over one of the bottles on the floor. He barely caught her.

“Stu! My God, it’s you.” She clutched him so hard he thought she would break his left humerus. “It’s my son, everyone. My son!”

Stuart coldly endured the awkward introduction to her friends. The men were no more lecturers and artists than he was a Druid priest. And if the two women supposedly married to them didn’t belong to a brothel—and if the hookah-smoking hag wasn’t their madam—then the trip south must have wreaked havoc with his powers of perception indeed.

He’d always thought his mother a lady, despite her poverty. He’d remembered a gentleness to her, and she’d spoken with more refinement than everyone else. But now he heard her hopeless accent, saw the coarse way she waved her spoon in the air when tea had been brought in, heard her laughter, as loud and shrill as that of any of her guests.

All he could think was how right his father had been to insist on a complete severing between mother and son. She was not a lady. She wasn’t even half so respectable as Fairleigh Park’s housekeeper.

He rose to go, citing a tight schedule that did not permit him more time for visiting. She ran after him out of the house.

“What’s the matter, Stuart? Why are you leaving?”

“I already told you, I have to go.”

“But you’ve only just come. Stay for dinner at least.”

“I don’t think I will.”

Tears rolled down her face. “I was afraid this would happen. You’ve changed. And I’m not good enough to be related to you anymore.”

“
I’ve
changed?” he exclaimed, aghast. “What about you? Who are those people?”

“They are my friends.”

“Friends? They are confidence men and prostitutes.”

“My friends have always been confidence men and prostitutes. Tom Fiddle was a confidence man. Don’t you remember Tom Fiddle? He taught you how to read from the
Manchester Guardian.
And Polly and Midge, you used to play cards with them—what do you suppose they did for a living?”

“That was different.”

By the time Stuart knew him, Tom Fiddle’s career in chicanery had long ended and he owned the pub down the street. He didn’t remember Midge so well, but Polly had been a quiet, tidy woman who prayed a great deal, nothing like the slatterns in the parlor.

His mother shook her head. “No, the only thing that’s changed is you, Stu. You think you are so grand now. You look down on us, all of us.”

Stuart’s temper slipped away from his control. What happened to his industrious mother? Who was this indolent woman with no moral compass? “I wouldn’t look down on you if you weren’t drunk in the middle of the day!”

When Nelda Lamb died that winter of influenza, Stuart insisted that her remains be interred in Manchester, so he could pretend that the events of Torquay had never happened.