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And then they’d part.

She turned her eyes on the hotel. “What goes on at meetings of the Hesperus Ladies Club?”

“A little of this, a little of that. There’s food and drink, singing and dancing. Poetry recitations. Masques. Tableaux vivants. Bridge. Whist. Faro. The occasional lecture. The occasional lovers’ quarrel.” He sounded ever so slightly wistful.

“You went often?”

“Whenever I could.” He paused. “Until the hostess forbade male attire.”

She glanced at him. His jaw had clenched. “Why would she do so?”

“Several reasons, the most understandable being self-preservation. The neighbors were looking askance. At myself, Octavia, and Harry. I’m a dandy, as you know. Octavia dressed like a dragoon. Harry favored kilts.” He gave a shrug. “Octavia switched to gowns with lace jabots, but Harry and I figured we’d rather bugger off. I’d been planning to relocate anyway. Not long after, I left for Cornwall.”

“And became a man,” she said, and blushed. “Maybe that’s not the way to put it. Began to live as the man you always were.” She blushed brighter. “I’m sorry if I’ve misspoken.”

“Language is a crude medium.” His teeth flashed, luminous in the dark. “Intention matters. Tonight, some of the ladies might call me by my old name, out of habit. And some might do so out of disrespect. I’d rather not hear that name, either way. But there’s a difference.”

Her shoulders had hitched with indignation. “It sounds like a continuum of disrespect to me. They should make the effort.”

“My truculent one,” he murmured. “Don’t go scouring the grounds for acorns just yet. Perhaps they will make the effort. Miss Swanwick did.”

“You’re a man.” She gnawed her lip. “You could join a gentlemen’s club instead.”

“And spend my evenings surrounded by gentlemen? It happens so often already. I’m not fond of men en masse.” An ironic smile tipped up the corner of his mouth. “They’re too embattled, always trying to prove their natural superiority, which gives the lie to the whole idea. The smart ones know it, so they’re anxious and aggressive. I prefer the ladies of Hesperus.”

Light from the lower hotel windows spilled onto the grass ahead. They passed in and out of bright squares, walking the length of the building toward the entrance.

“Your father’s a successful businessman.” She was thinking aloud. “Your mother wanted to wed you to a duke.”

“A viscount would have done for her,” he said dryly. “But yes, in essence.”

Her brow furrowed. He’d grown up with every luxury, in one of London’s affluent districts. Towering plane trees enclosing quiet streets. Redbrick townhomes built around garden squares.

Eyes and ears monitoring a daughter’s every move.

“Didn’t they have you closely guarded?” she asked.

“Apparently not, if I cavorted with sapphists.” His eyes met hers, silvery with mischief. “But that’s your question, isn’t it? Did I elude my protection officers, or were my parents unfathomably lenient?”

“Your mother mustn’t have been.” Muriel remembered what he’d said of her. “She forced you to take deportment classes. She was trying to fit you into a mold.”

“For a time. Mine was the stronger will.” He raised a shoulder and let it drop. She knew he was willful. At the moment, he seemed pensive.

“Not to mention my father undermined her at every turn,” he continued, a line between his brows. “He comes from a stolid West Midlands family of carpet manufacturers. No one wanted him to go to London, to dabble in finance. They swore he’d end up bankrupt and bedeviled. He felt like the black sheep. I think it made him tolerant of nonconformity. And my notoriety didn’t hurt his reputation in the city. He’s notorious himself, after a fashion. Known for wild investment schemes and unorthodox ideas. He likes thumbing his nose at polite society. He supported my enrolling in the Royal Academy Schools. Eventually, I lopped my hair and started running up bills at the tailors’, wearing three-piece suits to dinner. Even then, he didn’t balk. He called it enterprising.”

Griffith grinned and brushed his hair back from his forehead. A lock sprang forward. If they had more nights together—a hundred, or a thousand—she’d brush that lock back herself, again and again. She’d become accustomed to the silken feel of it against her palm, and the skin of her inner thighs.

She swallowed. “What did your mother call it?”

“Enterprising wasn’t the word.” His grin faded. “The day I cut my hair she went sick to bed, and the next evening she sent false curls to my room. She wanted me to pin them on when I went to church and to balls. I obliged for several years. On my twenty-sixth birthday, I told her I was finished. No more church. No more society parties. I stopped sleeping at home.”

“Those garrets in Chelsea,” she sighed, with a flutter of her lashes. As she’d hoped, his grin resurfaced.

“I spent most nights on a cot in a friend’s studio.” Humor sparked in the depths of his eyes. “My mother took it badly—at first. But within a few weeks of my moving out, she’d transferred her energies to her dishwashing machine and quite forgotten me.”

Muriel’s brows winged upward. “Did I hear you correctly? She transferred her energies to her dishwashing machine? Not to her nieces or her cocker spaniel?”

“Dishwashing machine.” He nodded. “She hates it when the servants chip the china. The machine is for washing dishes without excessive handling. You place them on wire racks that rotate on a wheel inside a boiler as a pump sprays hot water and soap.”