“Miss Greaves!” Lady Hero Reading looked up at their approach. “What a lovely surprise. I hadn’t known you’d be accompanying Phoebe here today.”
“Lady Penelope has lent her to me,” Phoebe said as she felt for a chair and lowered herself into the seat. “We’ve been shopping.”
Hero rolled her eyes at Artemis. “She didn’t take you to that terrible tobacconist, did she?”
“Well…” Artemis tried to think of how to answer.
“It’s not terrible,” Phoebe said, rescuing her. “Besides, how else am I to surprise Maximus with snuff?”
“Maximus has quite enough snuff as it is,” Lady Hero said as two girls began placing tea things on the little table between them. “And I can’t help but think ’tisn’t quite respectable for an unmarried lady to be seen in such an establishment.”
Phoebe’s brows drew together ominously. “That’s the very shop you buy Lord Griffin’s snuff at.”
Hero looked smug. “And I’m no longer a maiden.”
“Shall I pour?” Artemis hastily cut in.
“Please,” Lady Hero said, distracted. “Oh, there are fairy cakes. I always like fairy cakes.”
“I did get something for you as well,” Phoebe said and fished the little bumblebee notebook from her pocket.
“Oh, Phoebe, you are a dear!” Lady Hero’s face shone with genuine delight.
Artemis felt a twinge of sadness. Of course the notebook wasn’t for Phoebe herself—she wasn’t sure the girl could see to read or write anymore. She looked down, careful to steady her hand as she poured. It wouldn’t do to spill the hot tea.
“It looks just like the one Mother used to have,” Hero murmured, still examining the notebook.
“Really?” Phoebe leaned forward.
“Mmm.” Her elder sister looked up. “Do you remember? I showed you it when you were in the schoolroom. Mother used it to remember names. She was dreadful at it, you know, and she hated to admit it, so she always had the notebook and a small pencil with her…” For a moment Lady Hero’s voice trailed away, and she stared into space as if looking at something far distant from the cozy teahouse. “She forgot it that night, for I found it in her rooms months later.” Lady Hero frowned at the small notebook. “It must’ve vexed her—they’d gone to the theater, you know.”
“I didn’t know,” Artemis said, though she wasn’t sure Lady Hero had been speaking to her. “I thought they were killed in St. Giles.”
“They were,” Lady Hero murmured, tucking the little notebook away before accepting a dish of tea. “But why they were there no one knows. St. Giles is quite the opposite direction home from the theater they’d attended. What’s more, they were on foot. The carriage was left streets away. Why they left the carriage and why they headed into St. Giles is a mystery.”
Artemis knit her brows as she poured a second dish. “Doesn’t the duke know why they went that way on foot?”
Lady Hero glanced at Phoebe before staring into her tea. “I don’t know if he can remember.”
“What?” Phoebe looked up.
Lady Hero shrugged. “Maximus doesn’t like to talk about it—you know that—but over the years I’ve gleaned bits and pieces here and there. As far as I can tell, he won’t talk about anything that happened that night after the last act of the play.”
For a moment they were silent as Artemis poured herself the last dish of tea.
“He saw them killed, I have no doubt,” Lady Hero whispered. “When the coachman and footmen found them, Maximus was lying over their dead bodies.”
Artemis blinked at the terrible image and carefully set down her teacup. “I didn’t know he was wounded.”
Lady Hero looked up, her eyes weary with an old sorrow. “He wasn’t.”
“Oh.” Unaccountably, Artemis’s eyes blurred. The thought of Maximus, so strong, so sure, broken as a boy and huddling over the bodies of his parents… it was simply too awful to contemplate.
“I wish I could’ve known them.” Phoebe broke the silence. “And Maximus, too, before… Well, he must’ve been different.”
Lady Hero smiled, as if at a fond memory. “I remember he had a terrible temper and was quite spoiled. Maximus once threw a plate of roasted pigeons at a footman because he had wanted beefsteak for his dinner. The plate hit the footman’s face—his name was Jack—and broke his nose. I don’t think Maximus had meant to hurt the footman—he simply hadn’t thought before he acted—but Father was furious. He made Maximus apologize to poor Jack, and Maximus wasn’t allowed to ride his horse for an entire month.”
Phoebe wrinkled her brows in thought. “I can believe the temper—Maximus is quite frightening when he loses his calm—but I can’t even imagine him acting that impulsively. He must’ve been very different as a boy.”
“He was different before Mother and Father were killed,” Lady Hero said pensively. “Afterward he was so quiet—even when he started speaking again.”
“Strange how people can change,” Phoebe said. “It’s disconcerting, isn’t it?”
“Sometimes.” Lady Hero shrugged. “I personally find it stranger how often people don’t change—no matter what happens around them.”
Artemis lifted her brows. “Have you a particular person in mind?”
Lady Hero sniffed. “Certain males can become quite ridiculously protective. Can you imagine? Griffin thought I should stay abed today just because I felt a little ill this morning. You would think he’d never seen…”
Lady Hero swallowed the rest of her sentence, but she seemed unable to stop her hand drifting to her middle.
Artemis raised her eyebrows.
“Never seen what?” Phoebe asked.
“Well…” Lady Hero actually blushed.
Artemis cleared her throat, a smile tugging at the corner of her mouth. “I may be wrong, but I believe you are about to become an aunt, Phoebe. Again.”
A good deal of squealing ensued.
Artemis signaled the maid for another pot of tea.
When Phoebe had at last quieted and Artemis had poured everyone a fresh dish of tea, Lady Hero sat back. “It’s just that he becomes so brooding.”
Artemis mentally thought that Lord Griffin—a rakish man who often had a grin on his face—could never touch the brooding of Hero’s brother, but she forbore pointing this out.
Phoebe piped up. “Your confinement with sweet William went well. Surely he’ll remember that?”
“I think he may have some type of wasting brain disease,” Lady Hero said darkly. “He’s been hovering.”
Phoebe bit her lip as if quelling her amusement at her brother-in-law’s worry over his wife’s condition. “Well, in any case, this explains why you were so insistent that we visit the modiste this afternoon.”
Lady Hero immediately brightened. “Yes, I ordered a dress before I knew and that will have to be altered, but besides that I’ve seen some lovely new gowns from Paris especially for ladies in an interesting way. And of course we’ll have to get something for Miss Greaves.”
Artemis blinked, nearly dropping her dish of tea. “What?”
Phoebe nodded, looking unsurprised by her sister’s non sequitur. “Maximus already instructed me this morning to make sure she had at least three new gowns as well as everything else she might need.”
“But…” A lady could never accept a gift of clothing from a gentleman. Even with her spotty education and upbringing, that one rule had been drummed into her. Only a mistress accepted such financial obligation from a gentleman.
But wasn’t that what she already was?
“It’s only right,” Phoebe was saying stubbornly. “You came to stay with me without any thought for your own schedule.”
Artemis crimped her lips, trying not to laugh. What schedule? She lived at the beck and call of Penelope. She had no plans of her own.
“Besides,” Phoebe said more bluntly, “I’m tired of looking at that brown thing.”
Artemis smoothed a hand over her lap. “What’s wrong with my brown dress?”
“It’s brown,” Phoebe said. “Not coffee or fawn or that delicious shade of dark copper, but brown. And not your color at all, in any case.”
“No,” Lady Hero said thoughtfully, “I think some shade of blue, or perhaps green, would be quite interesting.”
Phoebe looked startled, then thoughtful. “Not a light pink?”
“Definitely not.” Lady Hero shook her head decisively. “Mind, I saw a lovely cream with red, pink, and dark green embroidered flowers we might look at, but no pastel colors overall. Her own coloring is too delicate. Light shades would simply wash her out. Dark and really rather dramatic, I think.”
Both ladies swiveled to examine her, and Artemis suddenly realized what a lump of dough might feel like under the scrutiny of a master baker. She knew from this morning that though Phoebe had trouble discerning shapes, she had no trouble with colors if the object were large enough.
“I see what you mean,” Phoebe said, squinting.
For just a second, Lady Hero’s face revealed a deep sadness, then she straightened with determination. “Yes, well, I do think we ought to get started, then.”
Nodding, Phoebe sipped the last of her tea and set her teacup down.
Artemis watched the ladies as they rose. They thought they were simply giving her a present as friends, but the money for the dresses would come from Maximus, that much was clear.
She’d slept with Maximus.
Her mind caught on the thought, here in this respectable tea shop. She’d run her hands over his bare back, wound her legs over his hips, and clenched deep inside when he’d thrust his penis into her.
He was her lover.
To take a gift from him now was to make her no better than a bought woman. A bought woman was the lowest of the low. Little more than a whore. For a moment the breath stopped in her throat in panic. She’d become everything she’d been warned against. Everything she’d struggled not to be in the last four years. She’d succumbed both to her own weakness and the perils of her position.
She’d fallen.
And then she drew breath again, almost in a gasp. Because there was something liberating in reaching the depths. It was a strange place, true, new and foreign, the way murky with hidden perils, but she found she could breathe here. They’d been wrong all along, all those who’d warned her of this place. She could live here well enough.
Perhaps even flourish.
Artemis lifted her chin and rose from her seat, meeting the curious stares of her friends. “Yes, please, I would like a new dress. Or even three.”
Chapter Thirteen
On the night of the next autumn harvest, Lin ventured out into the dark bramble wood. She stood in a clearing, shivering, and waited until the moon rose, huge and round, in the sky. She heard a rushing, like a thousand voices sighing in lament, and when next she looked, there were ghostly riders urging their silent mounts through the clouds. Leading them was a giant of a man, intent, strong, his crown a silvery glow in the moonlight. She just had time to catch the flash of his pale eyes before the Herla King reached down with one great hand and took her.…
—from The Legend of the Herla King
The full moon lounged in the black velvet sky as Maximus crept into St. Giles that night disguised as the Ghost. He glanced up and watched as she draped herself in the wisps of white clouds, mysterious and coy and everything he could never have.
He snorted derisively to himself and stole into a dark alley, ears and eyes alert to danger. What kind of fool longed for the moon? The kind that forgot his duty, his obligations, the things that he must do if he were to continue to call himself a man.