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She took Dulcinea’s bridle and greeted her instead. The jennet rubbed her nose in the velvet of Sophronia’s spencer jacket, part of the smart new riding attire she’d had made for her in London. Henry had liked for her to be fashionable, for others to remark on and approve of her; he felt it reflected well on him. But now she could choose her clothing in her own comfort and style, and she liked to be a bit more dashing than Henry ever would have approved.
“I had thought you would want nothing more to do with me, after I teased you with prospective brides yesterday,” Sophronia said.
“Arendale would never let one of his precious sisters have a rogue like me. Surely you know that.” He bent and cupped his hands for her foot, and she hesitated the briefest second.
He sensed her hesitation and looked up at her. The light caught in his eyes, turning them amber.
Somewhere in there was the Rowden she had loved, and overlying that was the mature man she suspected she could easily fall in love with. She might be head over ears in love with him already.
While he despised her for what she had done to him. To them.
She steeled herself and placed her foot in his hands, her hand on his shoulder, trusting him as she always had. He was her solid, fierce Rowden, and he was dangerous to everyone else but her.
No, that was not true any longer. She busied herself arranging her full riding skirts and tucking her crop beneath her elbow, trying not to stare as he lifted himself atop Hercules and became a centaur, doubly powerful, a man who might command an army and conquer the world.
He was dangerous to her now, too. That was the sting of it. He might lure out all the childish fancies she had walled up in brick in her girlish heart, and he might beguile her into having new fancies, the longings of a woman who had never properly had a companion, never properly been loved.
And then, when her tender heart was enticed into the open, he could crush it beneath his boot. He could leave her with the same shearing ease with which she had abandoned him when she turned to broad, square Henry Hinton to be the solid foundation of her life.
It was no more than she deserved, and she couldn’t bear for it to happen.
“Green Park again?” she said lightly. “I should think you have enough to recommend you to nearly anyone. Shy of a royal princess, of course.”
“My occupation is not quite that of a gentleman. Running a club that admits gambling. Occasionally carrying information for the government.”
“So you admit it then.” She reined her horse beside his as they turned from Clarges Street into Piccadilly. “You have played the part of the spy.”
“I have played the part of the traveler abroad, holding conversations and observing what I can,” he corrected her. “Conveying secret information can be a dangerous business, as the trials at Maidstone show.”
Sophronia absorbed this. The trials at Kent were reported in the papers every day, the nation hungry to follow the progress of the suit against the United Irishmen for conspiring against the King. Lily nearly wept at the tales the charming and debonair ringleader, O’Coigley, told at the bench of his heroic efforts during the French Revolution, before he changed his allegiance to the Irish cause.
“I think your sympathies also veer toward the Irishmen,” she remarked. “Though they have committed treason.”
“Betrayal is a crime only in the eye of the beholder. It depends where your loyalties lie.” Rowden swung easily from his horse, and she held the gelding while he opened the gate to Green Park, a vast emerald lawn studded with the white heads of narcissus. “To the Irishmen, they are fighting for their own country. A country they wish to be free.”
“I wonder what the French are fighting for?” She shivered at the internal image of Rowden on trial for treason, Rowden swinging from a rope, and all for his loyalty to a cause.
“I think at first it was freedom. Now I think it is dominion. The Directory wants more territory and wealth. That is why Napoleon is in the Mediterranean. I wonder if they have made things better for their citizens, really.”
“That is all that the Irishmen want, I think. To make lives better for the common man.”
But the revolts around Ireland had been put down, or as the papers put it, “tranquilized.” Sophronia knew no more than that, but she could understand that wish to govern oneself, to be treated fairly under the law. To have one’s work recognized, one’s personhood respected, and to be allowed to go about one’s way without harm so long as one did no harm to anyone else.
“Now you sound sympathetic to the cause.” He led her horse through the gap, Dulcinea going willingly, snuffling his coat as she passed in search of the sugar lump she knew he had for her somewhere.
Sophronia understood. She had the insane urge lately, growing stronger, to nuzzle against Rowden herself, begging for the treat of his affection.
Another kiss. The memory of the last one made her shudder. Her extremities tingled, and a warm bead formed in her belly.
“I think all persons should have the liberty to choose their own life,” she said. “Men as well as women. That is why I want to establish a school. My only choice, when I needed support, was to marry. I want other young girls to have more options.”
He swung back onto the horse, not looking at her. “It wasn’t your only option, Ro.”
“That is how I saw it at the time. Shall we race to the pond?”
“No, come with me down the Queen’s Walk.”
They turned down the track that traced the east side of the park, from Piccadilly to St. James. The walk, like the basin, had been named for Queen Caroline, wife of George II, a foreign princess who had made her home in a new land and ruled it the various times her husband was abroad in Hanover. Sophronia wondered what the queen had thought about as she wandered through the shorn park, glimpsing the crenellated towers of St. James through the trees. Did she think on her children, her household, her husband’s mistresses, court intrigues, the fate of the nation?
