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“You’re mad. Completely mad. She might be the most impossible, brattish, bedeviling woman I’ve ever met. And that’s to say nothing of the tripe she writes.”
“You said she was possessin’. You said she was divine.”
“She’spossessinganddivinein the same way poppy makes you feel like you’re floating until you wake up. Only her poison is twice as potent.”
“But you’re still hoping to run into her again. I can tell, I can.” Lamb edged away. “Now, don’t look at me like that, Fletch. We’re the same, you and I. It’s like me and Emma—”
“Trouble and I are nothing like you and Miss Everman. There’s no payment between us, for one.”
“Only those poems you nicked.”
Benjamin sighed. “You know that’s not…” He didn’t bother arguing back. Lamb was right, in a twisted sort of way. There had been no consensual greasing of palms between him and Lady Charlotte, but it did not mean their acquaintance was not somewhat transactional. He needed her—and he needed her to stay quiet. “Sometimes, you almost manage to convince me the space between your ears isn’t filled with pudding.”
Lamb shrugged, feigning modesty. “So, are you going to give them back?”
“What do you mean?” Benjamin sucked in a breath. “The poems? Egad, no! And for what? To be chased out of London?” He began pulling at a loose seam in the quilt, his chest swelling with worry. He tucked it away as he always did. “We’re stuck, the both of us. She cannot reveal my deception any more than I can. She’d be scandalized, if she’s even believed by those tossers in parliament. No, I’ll keep receiving the notes for as long as they come in, and by the time I’ve run out of poems to sell, we’ll be long gone.”
“But Fletch…” Lamb looked away, suddenly quite serious. He pinched his nose. “What if she knows who you are? That you’re the one that took them, too?”
Benjamin swallowed hard. He hadn’t wanted to consider the matter. In point of fact, he had spent no time at all thinking back on the night they had first met. It served no one, least of all him, to remind himself of his villainy. “I don’t believe she does.” He thought back to her face, her beautiful, pained expression as he first laid eyes on her poems—his grail. “I don’t believe she ever will.” He remembered her sobs as she ran after him. “She thinks me a liar, not a monster. It’s my one saving grace.”
“What is?”
“Women like her... they don’t know that men like me exist.”
CHAPTERNINE
Each turn of the carriage’s wheels against the cobbles made Charlotte want to scream. She had just about managed not to burst into tears as the printer handed her back her pamphlets. They were all she had to show for her morning, that and an address. Her dreams of retribution dashed away by the appearance of her darkly handsome enemy.
If the man had any grace about him, she might have thought he had orchestrated his being there—that he was one step ahead, not by luck as he was, but by cunning. There was nothing clever about him, no decorum, no heart. He was a leech through to the bone, and it was from her that he fed.
She twisted her fingers around the stack of pamphlets, their edges fraying for her anger. She didn’t care, not even when Matthew glanced over and tutted disapprovingly. There she sat, every nerve in her body lacing to keep back the tide of her emotion, and she was utterly spent by the time they reached Richmond Court.
Charlotte swung open the coach door before the footman could jump from the back and clutch it, paying no mind to any spying neighbors. One shoe connected with the pavement, the other coming ankle-deep into a puddle, and the lapping of mucky water at the hem of her coat was the straw that broke the camel’s back.
She stormed through the front door, running up the double staircase and almost knocking the butler off his legs. She let out her first sob as she turned the ceramic knob to her room, the others spilling from her as she closed the door behind her. She ripped off her coat and threw it at her armoire before falling to the floor to snap off her shoes. Then came the hat and ribbons from her hair, the rouge from her cheeks, her earrings, her necklace, her wet stocking, her golden spencer—until finally, in her embroidered linen day dress, one sock down, she felt she could breathe again.
It was not enough. It wouldneverbe enough to quell the fury that he had ignited within her. For as long as she aspired to write poetry, for as long as she still held the dream of it, she would be living a half-life, not quite alive, not yet dead—a ghost, for the poems were her lifeblood. Yet, they had been claimed by another.
She let out a vicious, wild screech and threw the pamphlets to the fire that burned in the inglenook. Their edges burned first before the pages all curled in on themselves, taken away by the flames so violently, so peacefully... it sparked the devil’s whisper within her. Running to her desk, she tore open the lowest drawer where she had stored her restored anthology. There lay the root of all her torment, on pretty green stationery with illustrated lavender borders.
Her heart skipped a beat, the weight of the collection heavy like a rock—like Sisyphus and his boulder, only she paid the price foranotherman’s trickery. If she could only summon the courage to tear them apart, perhaps her toil would be at an end. If she could only find it within herself to set aside her ambition, to live as was intended—as a woman. If she could only—
She tore a line down the center of a poem titled “AnteMemoria”, and her anger slipped between parted lips like a will-o’-wisp. It floated away, a little orb of light, and landed in the fire, where it became fuel for the flames. She followed the steps to its dance as if in a trance and succumbed completely to her madness.
By the time she was done, not a single poem remained. A through Z, they had been torn apart and burned, but the fire was low, and the burning was slow. A tiny ember leaped from the flames and landed on her foot. She hopped back with a cry and awoke all at once to what she had done.
“Oh, heavens, no,” she mewled, clasping her hands to her mouth, “No, no, no!” Her voice was like the strangled crying of a banshee. “What have I done?”
She looked around the room, for what, she did not know. Her eyes swept over the empty basin, her marble vanity, the pink bedding of her four-poster, until they finally returned to the fire. The simmering, hellish fire of her own making. She darted toward the mantle, snatching the fire iron. She tore the grate away, and the hot metal seared the palms of her hand.
“I’m sorry! I’m so sorry,” she whispered between sobs and cast the grate aside. She couldn’t evenfeelthe burn on her skin for all her shock, prodding at the open flame with the poker to try and save her life’s work. She dragged a poem from the coals, half of ‘One night, from sleep’. She rescued a third of another,‘On lovers tongue”,scouring the blackened kindling for more... but the rest were gone. “Everything is gone.” With a whimper, she fell back on her bottom before the hearth. “I have ruined it all.”
Finally, she cast her gaze to her palms, which were branded by her folly, and let out a dizzying wail as the echo of her pain coursed through her.
* * *
By the time Charlotte had come to her senses, the skies had opened wide beyond the mullioned glass of her window. London had returned to her as a murky slate grey, but her room was all amber, glowing red from the light of the fire. She couldn’t bring herself to look at the hearth, fearing the specters of her art—that they might materialize before her to remind her of her ruin.
