Chapter 36

It was like the last time she had left Wycliffe Hall: she felt nothing at all. The pace back to Newbury was civilized; the pony was returned without further ado. On the train, her eyes were dry but saw nothing of the landscape flying past the windows.

Back home, she petted and fed Boudicca, then methodically went through the mail Mrs. Heath had left on her desk. Annabelle’s card with a note, inquiring whether she was all right. Annabelle must have seen her hurry from the Randolph’s luncheon room. Next, a missive from Lady Athena, reporting that people from the Manchester Guardian had visited Tristan’s office yesterday. . . . She turned the letter facedown. The mere sight of his name stung.

While tidying up the desk, she decided to pack for Italy in the morning. No one knew about her, suffragists, or Lord Ballentine in Tuscany.

* * *

Lord Arthur stumbled into his dorm room at Merton College shortly before midnight. He fumbled with the light switch, muttering to himself and smelling of alcohol.

He was as embarrassingly easy to ambush as a lone gazelle.

The moment the door fell shut, Tristan moved.

In a second, Arthur was in a choke hold, his head forced sideways at an awkward angle.

The keys clattered to the floor.

Arthur was stiff as a salt pillar, with his back flush against Tristan’s chest. Strong fingers had clamped over his mouth, making any sound die in his throat.

Tristan brought his lips close to his ear. “Do not move. I’m a hairsbreadth from breaking your neck. A pity if it snapped by accident.”

It was not true—a neck did not snap quite so easily. But his lordship would not know this; all he presently felt was a mean pain and murderous intentions.

“I can make you more comfortable. But struggle or yell, and you shall regret it. Understood?”

A pause, then Arthur made a noise of acquiescence.

“Good.” He spun the young man around and shoved him back against the wall, his hands coming down hard on either side of his head.

Arthur’s eyes were frozen wide with confusion, but the sickly-sweet smell of fear was already pouring off him by the buckets. The anger roiling in Tristan’s chest forbade him to commiserate.

He leaned in close. “My day was very, very unpleasant,” he said, “and would have been worse if not for your poor eyesight.”

Arthur pressed back into the wall. “What do you mean?”

“Or were you just too distracted to properly decipher my tattoo?”

Arthur turned white as chalk. “Cecily?”

“Cecily.”

“God,” he croaked. “I never—crikey, women. It was merely an idea. I never expected her . . .”

“She claims it was your master plan.”

Arthur’s mouth opened, but no words came.

Odd.

After the fierce displays of jealousy and the drunken nonsense in Holywell Road, he had expected more of a struggle. But then, he had several inches of height and a few stone of muscle over the young man. Who did look rather young, with his blond fluff glinting above his lip. Was he trying to grow a mustache? The thought interfered inconveniently. Thinking of Arthur as a puppy was not conducive to strangling him.

He shook his head. “If you were me right now, what would you do?”

Arthur’s throat moved convulsively in the silence.

He was staring straight ahead at Tristan’s cravat, sweat dampening his brow.

“More interestingly,” Tristan said, “are you planning to trouble me again?”

A moment passed, and then Arthur raised his pale face and looked him in the eye. “No.”

He could smell whiskey on the boy’s breath.

He realized he had shoved Arthur up against a map—a faded and battered map of Greece. In fact, the whole room was decorated with maps of all sizes, some colorful, some plain. He had no clue what subject Arthur was reading—archaeology, cartography, the Classics? Perhaps he just liked maps. He had never asked.

“Well.” He stepped back. “Excellent.”

Arthur sagged into himself and touched his throat.

A sour feeling spread through Tristan’s gut. He suddenly could not leave fast enough.

“You don’t know what it is like.” The abject bitterness in Arthur’s voice stayed his hand on the doorknob.

Arthur’s eyes were bitter, too, but he had raised his chin. “You don’t know what it is like, knowing beautiful people like you exist but shall never be mine. Not even for a moment.”

Tristan gave him an incredulous look. His lordship only tipped his chin higher. Judging him.

He leaned against the doorjamb with one shoulder and contemplated Arthur’s haughty face more closely. Defiance might have edged out the fear, but the misery beneath was plain as day to a keen eye.

“You are right,” he said slowly. “I don’t know what it is like.”

Surprise flared in Arthur’s eyes, then quickly darkened to suspicion.

“I have yet to meet the person who would not, eventually, have me, for an hour, or a night, if I set my mind to it,” Tristan continued. “One could say Fortune has dealt me an appallingly favorable hand.”

Arthur’s jaw clenched with silent resentment.

“It may please you, then, that the only woman I ever loved rejected me,” Tristan said coolly.

He made to finally take his leave, when Arthur bit out: “Why won’t she?”

He glanced back. “I suppose because in order to share her life with me openly, she would have to marry me, thereby sentencing herself to life in a prison of sorts.”

Arthur’s lips twisted. “Not unlike me, then—prison, for but sharing my affections openly.”

Tristan stilled. “Indeed,” he then said softly. “Not unlike you.”

“At least her jailor wouldn’t thrash her on the daily,” Arthur said, mockingly. He cocked his head, his gaze assessing. “Or perhaps he would.”

Well, hell.

He had made the comment about prison without much thought, but it struck him now with the brilliant clarity of an epiphany that he was a fool. He had heard Lucie. But he had not understood her concerns, not truly—he would protect his wife with his life, could she not see? He understood now, as Arthur’s antipathy washed over him in waves, and he imagined the boy dirty and hungry behind bars. A heavy feeling filled his chest. It all bled together in his mind now, the concepts of desire and prison and marriage.

His gaze locked with Arthur’s. You knew what I was and yet you took me along . . . you are a monster, you have no care. . . . An emotion, hot like shame, rolled over him. Many developed an attraction to him, he could hardly help it, but the truth was, he hadn’t cared either way.

He ran his hand over his face. “I apologize.”

Arthur gave him a hard look. “What for, exactly?”

For not giving a damn. For these dire times, where the laws made it a bitter thing to be alive and in love, at least when one had not been born a man, and one who happened to love in accordance with the rules. He had not made the rules, but he had never set out to change them, either. He had wasted a lot of time fighting the wrong wars.

“For several things, I suppose,” he told Arthur.

“I’m not in need of mollycoddling,” Arthur said curtly. “In the end, I only wished for some respect.”

“Do you prefer men exclusively?”

Arthur drew back. “What is it to you?”

“You are a younger son. It is not imperative that you marry. There are ways . . . a confirmed bachelor can keep another close. A valet—”

“Blimey.” Arthur waved a slender hand, looking bemused and annoyed. “Of course there are ways. We have always found them, and we always will. However, there was precisely one reason why I would have desired for you to surprise me in my chambers at night, Ballentine, and assault or matchmaking gossip was not it. So, if you please, get out.”

The hallways of Merton College drifted past in a blur on his way out. He had come to settle a score and left feeling humbled and distracted instead.

* * *

The morning sun filled Lucie’s reception room with a cheerful brightness, as though it were a regular summer day. But today she was leaving. She had packed; she had her papers.

Catching Boudicca, however, was another matter. The cat hated the travel crate as if it were a portal to the underworld and had been in hiding all morning.

When Boudicca finally tried shooting past to reach her food bowl, Lucie lunged. She had a firm grip on the cat’s middle, but the beast made herself impossibly long and she had to let go, unwilling to be left holding just a white-tipped tail.

The cat was already on top of the cherrywood cabinet in the drawing room. Her ears were completely flat.

Lucie moved the footstool and climbed on it.

“Give up,” she said, rising onto her tiptoes. “I know all your tricks, and I always win—ouch!” She stared at the beads of blood blooming on the back of her right hand.

She glared. “Have you lost your mind?”

Boudicca’s irreverent stare said she’d do it again, scratch her. Possibly bite her, too.

“Just you wait.” She stomped to the washbasin to follow the burn of the scratch with the sting of soap. “Don’t move, you mad beast.” She kneeled by the carpetbag and rifled through it for her leather gloves.