The Countess Conspiracy

He shifted his stance and glanced over the crowd. “It’s a long-standing truth that all cats look black at night.” Violet didn’t need to be able to make out his expression to imagine a wickedly raised eyebrow. “Still, during the day we must ask the question: Why are there so few tortoiseshell toms?”

Another horrified gasp arose behind her. “Was he referring to—good heavens. That’s…that’s indecent!”

Sebastian gestured. “The science of inheritance that I have outlined over the last few years explains why traits might have a fifty-percent chance of being inherited, or a quarter chance. But the chance that a male cat will show tortoiseshell coloring is so small we cannot calculate it—one in a thousand, perhaps. My theory provides no explanation for such smallness.”

The woman’s voice was beginning to rise in pitch, something Violet would not have believed possible. “He just boasted of his size in public. William, you’re a constable. Do something.”

In her mind’s eye, Violet saw herself whirling around. That Violet—the one who hadn’t a care in the world—would confront the lady in question.

If you do not hold your tongue, she imagined herself saying, I will rip it out by the roots.

But a lady did not make a scene in public. When you have nothing nice to say, she could hear her mother saying, keep your thoughts to yourself. And tell me everything later. It had been a long time since Violet had been able to talk to her mother about her annoyances, but it didn’t make the advice any less appropriate. Silence kept secrets.

So Violet retreated into silence. She pushed away everything she didn’t want to hear. The rest of the world was swaddled in cotton, its sharp edges dulled so it couldn’t cut her.

Some part of her mind was dimly aware that the couple’s conversation continued.

“There, there,” the man was saying, “I must follow the laws myself. I have no warrant, and I am not certain one would issue in any event. Have a little patience, my dear.”

It seemed like good advice.

Have patience, Violet told herself. In a few minutes, they’ll be gone, and everything will be better.

IN A FEW MINUTES, everything grew worse.

At the end of the lecture, Violet maneuvered her way through the crowd, gently nudging other people aside. The crowds grew larger and more unruly at every passing event. The first few months of Sebastian’s career, he had been a curiosity—a man who wrote about inherited traits and occasionally defended Charles Darwin. There had been a few half-hearted complaints from bystanders, but nothing extravagant.

Then he’d published that paper on the peppered moth, purporting to demonstrate Darwin’s theory of evolution in action.

Violet sighed. He was respected by half the world and utterly despised by the rest. With every passing year, the ugly murmurs at his lectures grew. They buzzed angrily around her now, as if she’d landed in a wasps’ nest of ignorance.

She found her way to the front. Oliver Marshall, the friend who had sat beside her earlier, had made his way up already. Sebastian was surrounded.

Sebastian had always been surrounded by large groups, ever since he’d become an adult.

Half the crowd around him was female—unusual at most scientific talks, but hardly out of the ordinary for him.

Violet sometimes wondered if people thought of her that way—as a female who had been trying to attract Sebastian’s attention for years. As if she, too, waited for his eyes to fall on her, waiting for him to see her and only her. Her sister teased her on that score often enough.

If matters had been otherwise, perhaps she might have been. But she was what she was, and there was no point crying over milk that had long since gone rancid. Instead, she pushed her way into his inner circle.

From her seat near the middle of the hall, his features had been a comforting blur. Now she could make out his expression, and she felt subtly alarmed.

He didn’t look well. His cheeks were flushed; his eyes, usually dark and sparkling with humor, had gone flat. The expressive tilt of his mouth had flattened to grave seriousness. He looked like he had a fever.

“You’re wrong,” a big man was saying. He towered over Sebastian, his meaty fists curled at his sides like two ham hocks. “You’re a self-important bag of wind. Every natural philosopher since Newton has been damned. Damned, I tell you.”

A few years ago, Sebastian would have laughed off such an outrageous statement. Now, he simply looked at the fellow. “Thank you very much,” he said, as if by rote. As if he’d memorized the words, and now threw them out like a false lure, hoping to distract the man long enough to make his way out. “That means so much to me.”

“Why, you insolent cur!” The big man took a step forward.

Violet let out a great breath and slid in front of the fellow, taking hold of Sebastian’s sleeve. Look at me. Look at me. It will all be better if you just look at me.

He turned toward her, but as he did, the last trace of false humor slipped from his face.

Violet had been friends with Sebastian a long time. She’d thought she knew him. That he cheerily waved off the public strain of constant criticism, that he thought nothing of that stream of insults and threats. She had to think that, or she’d never have put him under such a strain.

In that instant, she realized how wrong she had been.

Violet swallowed. “Sebastian,” she said, fumbling for words.

“What?” he snarled.

“You were brilliant.” She looked into his eyes, wishing she could make everything better. “Utterly bril—”

Something flared in his eyes—something dark and furious.

It had been the wrong thing to say. She knew it the moment the words came out of her mouth. How must she have sounded to him? Awful. Self-congratulatory.

They were surrounded by a crowd. His knuckles grew white at his side, and he lifted his nose in the air.

“Fuck you, Violet.” His voice was a low, savage growl. “Fuck. You.”

They’d been in this conspiracy for so long that sometimes even Violet forgot the truth. She remembered it now. She felt it in every cell of her being.

That sense of invisibility vanished. Violet sometimes thought that her position in society was something like a fallen log in the middle of a forest: She might not be picturesque, but at least she was accepted as part of the landscape. So long as she stayed still, nobody would discover the truth.

Right now, Sebastian glared at her—utterly livid, as if he were about to take a hatchet to that log. To expose its rotten core to the world, to show them that inside, Violet was a dark, awful, filthy thing, infested by many-legged creatures. If he spoke one word more, everyone would know.