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Rafe raised a dark brow. “How intriguing.”
Sylvia frowned. “This isn’t a joke.”
“Very well.” He leaned his shoulder against the wall beside her and crossed his arms. “Please, tell me what makes this so impossible. And keep in mind that I have absolutely no right to cast judgment on anyone else.”
Sylvia stared at him. She had never been so tempted to tell someone else before. Even Georgiana only knew the basic details. But now the weight of it all pressed against her throat, begging to be released.
Rafe might understand the wrongful arrest if she explained it well enough, but what about the rest of it? This was a man used to swanning around London. Not dealing with public slander, blackmail, andtheft. No, she needed to protect him. If he was dragged into this too, she would never forgive herself. But she had to tell him something. Something a man like him could understand.
“I…I lied to you before. I did live in London for a time. After university.”
Rafe looked impressed. “You went to university?”
“Yes. At Somerville College.” She slanted him a glance. “So which did you attend? Oxford or Cambridge?”
“Neither,” he said mildly. “I took correspondence courses.”
Well, that was unexpected. But before she could ask more, Rafe steered the conversation back to her. “What did you do in London?”
“I worked as a typist for a family friend and took a room in a women’s boardinghouse.”
“I’m surprised your parents allowed that.”
Sylvia shrugged. “My mother died when I was fourteen, but I think she would have approved. It had always been her dream to attend university. Then she met my father.” Now wasn’t the time to add that her father had been her mother’s tutor, until she fell pregnant. “He became a scholar who taught the moral sciences at Oxford for a time. Absolutely brilliant, but his work always came first, you see. Everyone said he was too indulgent of my intellectual pursuits, but the truth was he simply couldn’t be bothered to mind me after my mother died. It was easier to let me do as I wished. When I left he mourned the loss of my secretarial skills, but he barely noticed my absence, whether I was at school or in London.”
Or back at home. She could still picture the door of his study, firmly shut as always unless she was taking notes or typing for him. After Mother died, he only came out for supper. And usually only on Sundays. All other meals were taken alone. It was only later, when he was dying, that they spent any real time together away from his work. But the shadow of her scandal had always hung over them. Unspoken but never forgotten.
“But that isn’t the important bit. When I was in London, I met a man,” she said hastily, then squeezed her eyes shut waiting for his censure. But after a moment, Sylvia opened them. Rafe hardly looked scandalized.
“Well, what happened?” he asked with genuine curiosity. As if the answer weren’t painfully obvious.
“His father didn’t approve of me and threatened to cut off his allowance. He made his choice.”
There. That was close enough to the truth.
Rafe’s jaw hardened and he pushed away from the stable wall. “The bastard.”
Sylvia knew she shouldn’t say any more. That was the best reaction she could hope for. But the trouble was now that she had started, she found it was rather difficult to stop.
“We were friends first,” she continued, as the words she had held back for so long rushed out of her. “We met at a lecture given by the Aurelias Society.”
“The political group?”
Sylvia nodded. “Bernard was interested in their ideas. Well, we both were. Eventually we became involved and began planning our future.” Rafe could hardly want to hear all of this, but Sylvia had kept it to herself for so long, she couldn’t seem to stop. “We wanted to find a house near Hampstead Heath with a small barn in the backyard where we could hold meetings and host reading groups of our own. He was so terribly excited by the idea,” she added softly, taking a moment to marvel at how very different her life had turned out. And how very little she had meant to him in the end.
“I don’t understand,” Rafe began. “He did all that, but then he wouldn’t marry you?”
She stiffened at the incredulous note in his voice and gave him a withering look. “You know, for a man with your reputation, you’re awfully traditional. I didn’t care about being hiswife. I wanted to be his partner. And a wife isn’t an equal in the eyes of the law, so I was in no great hurry to wed.”
Not that Bernard had ever offered.
His dark eyes flared with anger. “And yet you thought to live together openly in this little intellectual paradise with absolutely no repercussions?”
She bowed her head. “I suppose I was naive about that. I didn’t realize he was so beholden to his family.” Or their money.
“Yes. But he was also a coward,” Rafe growled. “He shouldn’t have agreed to such a ridiculous idea in the first place. He should have protected you––”
“I am a grown woman.” Sylvia punctuated the words with a heavy stomp of her foot. “I did not need his protection, andIinsisted on our arrangement.”
