Chapter 3

T he way she jumped when he called her my lady only made Victor do it more. Not to pain her, but to accustom her to it. She seemed starved for recognition of any sort, and Victor wanted to repair that. There was only so much he could do in a bookshop.

Not that he should say or do anything. Everything pouring out of him this afternoon reminded him of the inheritance of his father. Not the title or the estate, but his callous treatment of women, his frightening aspect, his constant lack of sympathy.

Victor had ventured to the Americas to find sympathy. He’d wanted to see the plight of kidnapped sailors first-hand. He’d studied the law to understand sympathy. Gone to Ghent because of it, he’d thought.

Yet in the end he was his father’s only legally-begotten child, and apparently had inherited something of his personality as well as his goods.

It was a revolting thought.

At least here in this bookshop, the sun had set, candles were lit, and a small but steady trickle of customers assuaged Victor’s guilt that for all intents and purposes, he and this unknown woman were treating it like their own private library.

She was a feast for all the senses Victor feared to indulge. Her smile was soft, quick to come but also to go; her voice was low, a little thick, reminding him of honey. The curves that showed under her coat when she reached across the table to pick up a far volume made his body tense, made him feel like a wolf preparing to spring. When she laughed it was worse.

Why was she not married? Why was such a toothsome morsel of a woman shopping alone at all, much less on Christmas Eve? Had she no mother or father to take care of her? No home of her own?

Britain was a land of fools like his father, shooting, drinking, and purchasing whores. Victor should go back to the Americas. He should go back to Ghent.

He should have finished his work instead of listening to others and coming home.

“It’s purely unnatural to have no interest in women.” His father had said so time after time. His hectoring had pushed Victor to pretend even less interest than he had. By the time he’d survived sixteen years of relentless fault-finding, Victor’s only pleasure was in thwarting his father’s every expectation.

He’d rather have absorbed any number of filthy insults—and did—about his supposed proclivities for men, or boys, or perhaps sheep, before giving his father the satisfaction of knowing that they shared even one taste.

As he could not abide society’s extraordinarily dull affairs of drinking and dancing in sweaty ballrooms with too many people around and nothing he wished to eat, he’d also had few chances to meet women suitable for more than an evening’s liaison.

And regarding the ones available for evening liaisons, he had even less patience.

He truly tried to have sympathy for everyone his father didn’t, and that included prostitutes. But their lack of real interest in him, the blank cupidity of their eyes as they estimated not him but the weight of his purse, turned his stomach more surely than the thick sauces served on all the food.

Victor kept alive on apples, bread, and turnips, and the company of his own right hand.

Now he was starving in a London book shop.

Starving for food as always, but also for company. This woman, whoever she was, had a fleet and agile intellect, and no shortage of words. And she was not dull .

Why hadn’t he properly introduced himself?

She looked up at him, eyes sparkling in the bright tallow-candle light. “I don’t wish to appear scandalous, but the words moral and decent don’t speak to me of a particularly engaging novel.”

What on earth did she mean?

Oh, the book.

She was so delightfully prim and so determined to ignore propriety at the same time.

He felt himself almost smile. “You prefer your novels more wicked, madame?”

The peach-pink flush that rose on her cheeks when he shocked her was delicious. Hungry, indeed.

She should not consider him trustworthy.

And indeed she did give him a disapproving look. “I do not ask my novels to be wicked. I merely want something beyond moralization.”

He raised his head. “Perhaps we should investigate other offerings beyond the novels.”

“A splendid idea!” She lit up like one of the candles. There was no sarcasm to her, and no cynicism, which only made Victor wonder more how she had come to be in London alone.

The shelves in the middle of the room must be stacked in some order, but Victor did not know it. His companion didn’t appear to either, only stepped to the nearest one with an enthusiasm born of curiosity.

“ The Natural History Of Quadrupeds and Cretaceous Animals . My goodness. Did I pronounce that right? Oh! A tiger!” The volume fell open in her hands at its most popular plate, and she jumped a little at the appearance of the orange-striped beast.

It made him draw close behind her. “I have no idea if your pronunciation is correct, but it sounded fine to me.” He studied the image over her shoulder. Victor caught a wisp of the scent of her, warmth and candle smoke and the soap she must have used to wash herself.

It was impossible to keep his thoughts from turning animal.

“Do you care for animals?” She turned and her face was so close to his. The question, so near his brutish thoughts, wrenched him out of them. “I should know that already, should I not?” she asked more softly. He wondered if she meant because she maintained she was no fool, or because they were pretending to be married.

They stood so close.

No closer than reasonable for a wife and husband in public. Perhaps if newly wed.

Still closer than any other woman had ever been. And more pleasurable.

“I have no great fondness for animals,” Victor admitted under his breath, continuing their game, sorry to disappoint her. “Perhaps I should visit more farms.”

She gave him one of her fleeting, sincerely sweet smiles. “Only if you find one to feed you. You are too thin.” Before Victor could grow self-conscious—he was, and he knew it—she moved on and resumed her game, delivered a wifely line aloud as she set down the book. “I don’t believe natural history was ever your taste.”

It was a relief, like a heavy weight from his chest. She saw how he was and neither ignored nor belittled him. She had not descended into a catalog of his faults, only observed and moved on.

If the game was to be someone he was not, that was beyond him. He answered truthfully. “No. The law has always been my only interest. But I wish to improve myself.” He meant it.

Isabel had a dozen questions. He must be a solicitor—or a barrister! They had always seemed so important. Did he send letters magistrates? To Parliament? To the Regent himself?

He seemed like someone she would trust if she were charged with a crime. Upright. Serious. But humane. There were flashes of humor behind his wooden facade. There was a person inside there.

He advised her not to trust him, but she found it impossible not to be curious.

Their game required her to keep searching for a book for her false husband when she would rather drop all pretense and interrogate him in the middle of a bookstore.

“I hardly think you need improvement.” She could say that in all truth. He was too thin, and a bit serious; there were hollows behind his jutting jaw and at his wrists, and his clothes were loose. But he was wonderfully attentive, his quick questions and answers full of insight into the books and, uncomfortably, her.

It had never occurred to Isabel that she could simply be what she was, a country spinster living out her years in a rented room alone, and still have an interesting conversation.

Perhaps this was the freedom of being unwanted.

It certainly bolstered her as she moved on through the shelves trying to guess his tastes. “You picked up the Lady’s Assistant , but surely you don’t want any books of cookery?”

“No,” he said with an odd wince.

She didn’t press.

Her fingers ran down the spines of the next shelves. “Would you care for a play? Or poetry?” The slim volume she removed opened to its first page of text.

She read quietly,

Still must I hear?—shall hoarse Fitzgerald bawl

His creaking couplets in a tavern hall,

And I not sing, lest, haply, Scotch Reviews

Should dub me scribbler, and denounce my Muse?

Prepare for rhyme—I'll publish, right or wrong:

Fools are my theme, let Satire be my song.

“I don’t understand,” said Isabel as she looked up. The gentleman stood right at her elbow. “Apparently we’ve come in at the middle of a conversation.” That we felt as comfortable as wool slippers and as exciting as fireworks.

His expression was that of a man carefully considering. “Apparently Scotch Reviews has upset the gentleman. Scribbler is surely an insult.”

“So he’ll publish, right or wrong? Imagine writing a whole book as a tantrum!” Isabel closed the book. “Purchasing it would only indulge him.”

Then she looked up, openly apologetic.

“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to speak for you?—”

“Why apologize when your opinion is the right one?”

His words turned all Isabel’s bones to marbles, rolling over each other and racing for the floor. She braced a hand against the table to stay upright.

How many times had she apologized for being right? Dozens. Hundreds. Millions.

Being right was her least attractive quality. Her mother had always said so. “A man doesn’t want correction, Isabel. Do restrain yourself.”

She’d restrained herself as best she could, and all it had gotten her was a lonely room in Leicester Square.

Perhaps she should forget about restraint.

Victor didn’t want to play this game any more.

It limited her conversation to books. “Look how cleverly this map of Africa unfolds! The land of Bournou. The great desert of Zaara. I believe I would rather have a traveler’s diary than a map, but the names are so alluring. Wergela. Gadamis. Cairo.”

He wanted to ask her about her. Everything he didn’t know. He’d like a diary of every day of her life from birth.

Attention to detail had saved him before, giving him with a useful skill even barristers often did not have. It was his only tool, his only weapon.

It had gained him a place at the right hand of Britain’s Belgian diplomat, a place where he watched every face, read every proposed word of every version of the treaty, advising how the meaning changed with each new paragraph or even comma.

It was his life, and he had never had anyone with whom he could discuss it. He wanted to now.

But the young woman seemed to enjoy skipping from book to book, not the least inclined to share any personal details.

If she wished to play this game he would, but he was finding it more and more painful.

They paused among volumes of geography.

And she did share something. “I have always wanted to go abroad,” she confided, running her fingers over the books’ spines.

He wanted to kiss those fingertips.

He’d never had such a thought before. He kept it, as he kept all his thoughts, to himself.

But the sudden onrushing desire, something he’d never felt before, made him bold.

Reaching over her shoulder, he plucked out a bound collection of Welsh maps. “I thought next summer we should go north. See the countryside. Take long walks.”

This time when she looked up at him he held her gaze.

What could she see in his eyes? How he truly longed to do exactly that? How he imagined checking his stride so it would match hers?

Or did she only see his sad lack of experience with women? The weakness in him his father always derided?

His desperate loneliness?

Her eyes held neither shock nor pity; they looked far away, dreaming, perhaps of walks in Wales. “Wouldn’t that be lovely?” she whispered.

He wanted to whisper back. Yes.

“Has your wife found any books that please you?” asked the bookseller, pausing as he passed with more books in his arms.

Victor felt the lady stiffen, realized they were so close their bodies brushed.

His quiet mother had lived a stifled life and died when he was a boy. Whores out for coin were brash, desperate. He had no idea what a woman would be like if she were cherished.

Perhaps something like this.

Used to hiding his thoughts, Victor addressed only her. “Mrs. Burney’s book appealed to you most, did it not?” He eyed that book in its flat leather binding; it still lay on their corner table. He would forever think of that spot as theirs . Atop it were two other novels. “You wanted those three, if I recall. Bound in leather.”

The shop would bind and deliver whatever they picked. He had a vision of her reclining on a chaise, one of these books in her soft hands, its pebbled leather under her fingertips. He felt himself harden.

“Oh no, no no,” she shook her head quickly, and Victor noticed that she’d paled. It chilled him like spray on the winter sea.

The shopkeeper’s cheeriness drooped, but soldiered on. “For you, sir?”

Victor swept a glance over the table. He’d take them all, if only to remind him of this evening.

His habit was never to move or speak quickly. He’d cultivated it to set him further apart from his father. It remained valuable in both travel and law. Now it saved him from giving in to his most vehement urge, which was to sweep all these books to the floor, set this woman upon this table, and rip apart the plain wool she wore until?—

Shaken, he took a deeper breath. “We have not yet made any decisions.”

The we was for the game. To steady her. But as the shopkeeper departed her eyes were still wide with alarm.

That he could not stand. “What has frightened you?”

“Not frightened, but—you must think me so—terribly common,” she stammered, dropping her eyes. “To meet in these circumstances, accosted by that man?—”

“His fault, not yours,” Victor said calmly, trying to press down on everything roiling in him.

“—I chide you, then spend hours talking to you so familiarly, of course you think me a—of course you think I expect to be paid, but I am not?—”

Understanding dawned. “You think I believe you want to be paid in books? ”

She leaned closer to whisper, which was delightful. Under her breath she said, “I am not a... I do not...”

“Let me set your mind at ease,” he said just as quietly. “I do not think you prostitute yourself for books.”

“Oh.” The flush on her cheeks was blazing now. She was too impossibly innocent to be wandering London by herself, his?—

“I would like to know your name.” The words were out before he could stop them, before he could consider how they broke the rules of their little game.

“Oh,” she said again. She put her hands on her cheeks as if to hide the fire in them. “But that’s not—it isn’t a more gentle way of asking me into the alley?”

Victor did not blush. He never had reason.

Now he felt warmth in his face.

“No,” he simply said, though the image of ravishing her in an alley was in every way appealing. Had he more idea how it was done, he might even suggest it. At least he differed from his father in feeling the urge only when the woman was not suited for it. “You are kind and I only wish to know the name of the lady providing such delightful company.”

“I feel more lucky than kind.”

His heart leaped at the idea that she was enjoying this, enjoying him .

Still she kept her eyes down, and her voice still trembled as she added softly, “This is foolish, but I simply must trust your answer to this question. Is this a sort of... a sort of accosting that proceeds more politely?”

Victor wanted to laugh. He didn’t, because she would think he was laughing at her. But he felt his cheeks pulling toward an unusual new position. Smiling. He could only tell her the truth. “The answer to that is not simple. I encourage you not to trust me.”

She knew, somehow she suspected. The urge he had. Urges. The ones he was suppressing.

If she did suspect, she didn’t say so. She said, “I only came for a new book for myself. Something exciting to while away my Christmas days, and now?—”

“Yes?” he prompted her to go on.

“Now my afternoon has been more exciting than any book. Perhaps I don’t need one after all.”