Page 29 of Lady Petra and the Wolf

His aunt, after a meaningful glance with his uncle, returned her attention to him. “What makes you different is the guilt you feel now. From what I know of him, your father never would have contemplated such a thing. Because that feeling will lead to action to address the hurt you caused. Pretty words are all well and good, but you showed up to see your uncle.”

His aunt’s words could not shake the vise that now gripped his chest and his head remained down.

“Unless,” he could feel his aunt glance back at his uncle, “unless it was not just us you feel you wronged. This person you trapped, you mean in marriage?”

His mouth tight, he finally looked up at his aunt.

“Oh Jules, you fell in love, didn’t you?”

Giving a small tip of head, he turned his glance to the ceiling, unable to bear her gaze. “As I said, I did almost the same thing my father did to my mother. I ran roughshod over her wishes and took what I wanted for myself.”

It was his uncle who spoke next. “Don’t you see the difference? Your father never felt an ounce of guilt for what he did to my sister, for how he secured her hand. You can make it right.”

Wolf shook his head. “I destroyed her trust in me. I don’t deserve—” He drew a deep breath. “She has disappeared, there is no way I can make amends.”

“Jules, do you care for this girl?” His aunt’s hand came to rest on his, her fingers nimble yet strong from years of work. While Elliot worked at the dock offices, she was always one to aid in the warehouse when needed.

“More than my next breath.” He had not meant to reveal so much to his aunt and uncle, and yet sitting with them in his childhood home stripped him bare.

“Then hopefully she will come back to you,” his aunt said softly. “But in the meantime…”

“In the meantime?” Hope, which felt so foreign to him mere moments earlier, suddenly sprung like a shoot from his chest.

“In the meantime, you can do better. You can make right not for the sake of winning her back, but because it is right. What does your lady care about?” Diana exhaled through her nose, her eyes alight as he imagined a thousand thoughts coursing through her mind. “How can you see the world from her perspective?”

“How can I see the world from her perspective?” Wolf repeated, his mind’s eye taking to Petra racing through Covent Garden in a muted gray cloak. Then, another gray cloak swam to the top of his vision. A woman with pride and dignity, who would not take from him but for the sake of her child. And, with that image firmly rooted in his mind’s eye, an idea came to him.

It was mad, bad, and dangerous. Something he would never share with a single soul.

And yet, it might help him understand Petra better.

“I think he has an idea, Di. Care to share, nephew?”

“Not one whit,” Wolf murmured, “but I thank you for the inspiration.”

Chapter Eleven

This experiment was ridiculous even for him.

If a whisper of his endeavor ever made its way to Polite Society, he would be a pariah for life. Despite years of indolent behavior, all doors would surely close to him for this one day of his life.

And yet, something in his aunt’s words stuck with him: to consider Petra’s perspective. All he could envision after that was the image of Petra weaving through Covent Garden in her gray cloak. Of the Italian woman who had put him in his place, then turned and fled in her threadbare cloak.

The Italian woman’s words strangely recalled that night in the library. There was something in their last meeting, not only betrayal but utter disappointment in Petra’s eyes. The knowledge that he would truly never know what it meant to be trapped as she had. To be a woman alone in the world.

And so he decided to correct that extraordinary gap in his knowledge. If only for a day. After calling on several actresses he had known over the years, he found himself walking away from Drury Lane, his face veiled beneath a hat, wearing the outward clothing of a very tall woman. Earlier, Yvette and Barbara found the task of locating anything in the theatre that would fit him quite amusing as they wheezed at his surprisingly innocent request. Perhaps another man, one not quite as secure in himself, would feel emasculated. Yet Wolf strode from Suffolk Street in the largest boots the women could locate yearning only to understand Petra’s experience of the world.

Mayhap experiencing the world from this perspective for only one day would not make up for his horrible actions. But it was a start.

A deuced uncomfortable start. How women made it a block down the street, he did not know. The corset he wore cut into his skin and the crinolines forced him toward a newfound awareness of his proximity to all those traversing the street. As a man, he could take up whatever space he wanted. His attire was always relatively comfortable and he did not have to calculate the space between him and others.

Did women have to think about their proximity or distance from others every hour of every day? Shaking his head, on which he wore a thickly veiled bonnet, he peered through the veil to survey his surroundings. In his simultaneous wonder and discomfort, he had lost track of where he was going. Now he was close to…the intersection he had seen Petra that day when he was coming back from the docks.

Wolf warred with himself. On one hand, he wanted to respect her wishes and not seek her out, particularly if it could risk bringing her father to her door. But on the other, how could he make amends if he could not find her?

Head in his thoughts rather than before him, Wolf was jolted backward as he ran into two tall men.

“Excuse me,” he gasped, quickly remembering to disguise his voice. While he would never excuse his presence as a man, he was trying to do what he thought a lady might do in his situation.