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“My sister has chosen a most opportune time to develop a taste for the out-of-doors, I must say. And with our Aunt Letitia in the country, the curse of suffering that taste has befallen upon me.”
Charlotte huffed, folding up her pamphlet. She turned to Benjamin, “What Matthew means to say is that he loathes all things fun and cannot wait for my aunt to return to London to take up the ever-so-taxing business of chaperoning me in his stead.” She opened the pamphlet again.
“Case and point. I take it you have no sisters, Huxley?”
“Not a one.”
“Right, I see. And your parents, are they quite—“
“Dead? Yes, they are.”
“Oh, that’s… right.” Seemingly placated, the Marquess looked away.
Benjamin eased the crumpled note from his pocket, upon which Charlotte had scrawled the poem she wished him to recite. It was an older of her poems, she had said, one that had meant quite a great deal at the time of its writing but now seemed, as most did to her, juvenile. The readers of the Ladies’ Journal had lapped it all up regardless—this again of her recounting.
Benjamin, in truth, couldn’t find a thing wrong with it. He was as intimate with the poem as he was to his own fingers and toes, having learned it by heart to dazzle the afternoon’s audience. To dazzle Charlotte, too—do her proud. He shot a glance around, his light, wooden chair creaking for his curiosity.
The hall swelled with each passing minute as more prospective erudites dragged themselves in from the gardens. It would be a fair show if nothing else. He caught the eye of some young ladies at the very back of the hall, one of whom, a pretty young thing, gave him a gentle wave. Her chaperone quickly batted her hand down. In another life—
“Are you quite done gawking at the merchandise?” Charlotte hissed beside him. It was so quiet, so quick on the air, that her brother hadn’t noticed a thing.
Benjamin snapped his head around. “We’re not at market, Lady Charlotte.”
“No? You might want to tell your tongue, wagging as it is.” She shot a dark glance at the girls at the back of the hall. “Mr. Huxley would never settle for a woman so... so…”
“Pretty? Vibrant? Bold?” He was teasing her, though it was hardly winning. She scoffed, ever the lady. “Tell me then,” he leaned in close, “What sort of lady would a man like Huxley want to secure?”
A blush swept across her chest where it lay bare beneath her pearls. Her eyes were full of fire, dare he say, jealousy, too. “A learned lady, for one.” She turned back to her program. “One not so like to be as flippant as he is, for another.”
Benjamin let out a laugh and quickly excused himself. “I take it you find my rendition of Huxley lacking.”
She simpered. “You’ve added great color to the character. I will give you that. Now hush, lest you draw the attention of the hall entire.”
Hush, he did. All the better to watch Lady Charlotte Fitzroy simmer in her state of envy.
She was more envious,somuch more, when at last he took to the stage.
It was a strangely singular experience to be stood before so many unknowns. He was no stranger to fear, of course, and he wouldn’t exactly call that which bubbled in his gutfear. Fear was the glint at the end of a bayonet in the beating, oppressive sun in Portugal. Fear was the hellish roar of canons over the sea, the crash of waves against a ship, the hull of which slowly filled with water. Fear was watching the life drain from the eyes of a comrade a day shy of the end of their campaign, in the same way water could be drained from a basin.
This was notfear, but it was certainly unnerving. In a way, he was grateful for the time Charlotte had spent lecturing him about poetry in the greenhouse. He had not rememberedallshe had said, naturally, but to hear her speak of the art with such passion certainly helped him emulate her poet’s pride.
He was called to attention by the creaking of the floorboards beneath him. The salon’s mistress, a lady whose name he hadn’t heard for all his meditation—for all his teasing of Charlotte beforehand, too—seemed to edge toward him as if to tell him to begin. He supplied her a weary smile, his fingers working against Charlotte’s note.
He looked out. Coiffed and perfumed and painted faces bobbed in a sea before him. But there was the sun as well, sat beside a cloud personified. Blazing. Curled toward him. Gorgeous. Benjamin had never felt quite so unworthy of her.
Suddenly, he was speaking. The verses tumbling from him as if they were the first words he had ever spoken; as natural asmother, asgoodbye.
They wreathed around him until they were all that remained of that hall. His face, and Charlotte’s voice, swapped places. Heknewher as he spoke her words, more than he had ever known a woman for all his rakish deeds. He could hear her humor in the second verse. He could feel her shielded heart in the third. Then came the second stanza, and she all but came apart before him—bare, hot, inviting him beneath a willow, by a lake, or wherever the poem chose to deliver them, to take her as she so dreamed to be taken.
A woman’s desire had fueled these writings. A woman’s—not a lady’s.
“Very good, old chap! Very good indeed!” St Chett clapped Benjamin on the shoulder, clearly quite contented to have attended the salon with its shining star, or so he had been called. “Now, do dazzle us with anotherwhile the ladies are looking.” The last part had been mouthed.
The poem had been dubbed a success if the laurels were to be believed.A work of genius, old as time,one sir had professed; another,the greatest piece of art to come out of London all year. Questions of all nature had been unleashed at the end of the presentation, on Benjamin’s inspiration, on his intentions, where one might acquire an anthology of his work, and whether such a place was close. Regrettably, he had no answers to give and no desire to give them. It would mean scorning Charlotte further.
She stood at the end of the refreshment table, running the tip of her finger along the rim of a glass of lemonade, pouting in one breath, seething in another. She flicked a ringlet of dark hair from her eyes as Benjamin excused himself from Matthew’s party and walked toward her, a fuming marvel in her gown of yellow.
“I thought you would have been quite satisfied with the crown,” he purred. “Must I acquire a throne for you too?”
