A Restless Truth (The Last Binding #2)

Chapter 13

13

Lord Hawthorn and Maud played chess while they waited for Ross. Violet had flung herself onto the chaise longue with the only book that Hawthorn had in his possession, a biography of Alexander the Great.

Maud espied an opening for her knight that was possibly a trap. She took it anyway, lifting her fingers decisively as soon as the knight touched down. Your game falls apart when you start second-guessing, Edwin had told her.

Maud had never quite picked up the knack of conversation with Edwin Courcey. She loved him for how happy he made her brother, but he had a way of looking at you as though he saw all your worst qualities and was waiting to have them turned onto himself like knives.

He played a beautiful game of chess, though.

Maud considered the Baron Hawthorn as he considered the board. She thought of the easy, drawling way he’d declaimed the idea of romance. She thought of his hand disappearing beneath Violet’s clothes.

Robin didn’t lie to Maud, but he did on occasion let truths slide by unmentioned if he was trying to protect her; or to protect Edwin. And Edwin’s bitterness towards Lord Hawthorn, along with the edge to Robin’s manner whenever the man was mentioned, spoke volumes.

Hawthorn reached for his queen. Maud opened her mouth to ask the Edwin question at the most distracting moment possible, but they were both forestalled by a knock on the door.

Ross had said he had more pornography than the messenger bag. He had, in fact, an entire small suitcase.

“Oh, my,” said Violet, abandoning Alexander without a qualm.

Maud turned to Hawthorn. “Will you give me an estimate of its value? I want to make sure I’m paying a fair price.”

“Not being outrageously fleeced, you mean.” Hawthorn took the suitcase and emptied an extensive amount of books and pamphlets onto the table. Violet dived for one and flicked through it as Hawthorn counted and sorted.

“Well, what did you intend to demand?” Hawthorn asked when he’d looked over the whole lot.

Ross named a price. Maud winced. Hawthorn named a much lower one. Ross called Hawthorn an inbred skinflint arsehole, pointed out that he was including the suitcase, and lowered his own price by an infinitesimal margin. Hawthorn, wearing the same expression he’d directed at the chessboard, called Ross a bloodsucking Mediterranean gutter-rat.

A few minutes later, they’d come to an agreement. Hawthorn fetched his chequebook.

“Wait,” said Maud. “I’m the one making the purchase.”

“Don’t be silly. There’s no point in you spending that much on material you’ve no interest in,” said Hawthorn. “And I’m sure I can afford the sum more easily than you can.”

“I can afford it!” snapped Maud. She couldn’t justify using another of Mrs. Navenby’s jewels on this, but she had a little money of her own. “I’m the one who made Mr. Ross the offer. It’s very rude of you to try to pip me at the post. Though I will,” she added after a moment of consideration, “need to appeal to you for a loan, until we reach London and I can pay you back.”

Hawthorn slapped the chequebook onto the table. “You won’t let me buy it, and now you insist that I finance you? Spreading baseless rumours for the hell of it is one thing, but this does count as corrupting an innocent girl.”

“No,” said Maud. “I’m corrupting myself. You’re merely giving me a gentlemanly loan. It’s none of your business if I spend it on—educational tracts.” She turned her shoulder on him. “Mr. Ross. Talk me through my purchases.”

“Don’t even think about it,” growled Hawthorn.

“Most of it is aimed at an audience of men, Miss Blyth. Perhaps you should let Lord Arsehole here buy it instead.”

“Nonsense,” said Maud. “I’m not completely ignorant of the—the mechanics of the thing. Mrs. Sinclair let me sit in when she talked to Liza about what to expect on her wedding night, because she said I don’t have a mother to do it for me when my turn comes.”

“I’m not sure that counts as useful information,” said Violet, laughing at her. “Two awkward minutes on lying back and thinking of England, and not whimpering too much?”

Maud glared. She felt covered in bristles that poked out painfully through the shell of her cheerfulness. Her enemies had nearly poisoned Hawthorn and had been in her cabin laying nasty charms to do God-knew-what, which made her skin crawl whenever she remembered it. She’d made a fool of herself with a single glass of wine. She was a silly girl, only pretending to know what she was doing.

But she wouldn’t be patronised.

“Pornographic literature is no sort of practical education either,” said Hawthorn. “It’s titillation. It’s not supposed to be accurate.”

“Isn’t it?” Ross reached for a purple-covered booklet and skimmed it, then read aloud. “ At the touch of his hand upon my bare thigh I could not have moved even if the ropes that held me had melted into nothing. I was just as much a prisoner to the hot rasp of my own breath and the quiver of need that sang along my nerves, and the more I wanted the more I was set ablaze in the shame of the wanting. If he removed his hand I would die. If he moved it I would die. I was no longer a man, only desire encased in flesh .”

Maud forced herself to loosen her hand, which had clawed around her skirt. She had felt each word of that like—like music. Her breath was hot. All of her was hot.

“You’ve never felt like that, your lordship? You must be doing it wrong.” Ross tossed the book back onto the pile. “Or choosing your partners poorly.”

Maud wondered at his choosing that particular book to needle Hawthorn. A preference for other men could be a dangerous accusation both to make and to receive. Was there some sort of signal ? She’d never asked Robin how he knew, with Edwin.

“Well.” She thought of what Edwin would do in this situation. “Let’s have a variety of texts, or I can’t say I’ve done a comprehensive survey.”

She gathered up a selection and took it over to settle herself on the chaise longue, where she opened the first that came to hand. The title page read Memoirs of a Fallen Lady . That seemed promising.

“I had little inkling of what awaited me, that fateful night in April when I first came across the house with the red door.”

Hawthorn, when he realised that Maud also intended to read aloud from her purchases, rubbed a hand over his face and collapsed in an armchair. He cast a longing glance at the tainted whisky.

Contrary to Violet’s assumption, Mrs. Sinclair had given a version of the wedding-night talk, which had leaned hard on the idea that women deserved pleasure just as much as men, and that a sensible modern girl might do a bit of experimentation to see what caused herself pleasure before she let her husband anywhere near the anatomy in question. Liza had spent the entire time moaning “ Mother! ” while holding a cushion over her face.

Maud had taken mental notes.

She wasn’t sure how much of what she’d learned lined up with her new collection. There seemed to be a lot of swooning and hysterical sobbing in these stories, which sounded unpleasant. There was also a tendency to refer to a certain part of a woman’s anatomy as the red hawthorn berry, which made Violet wheeze with laughter.

The purple booklet was entitled In the Dark Duke’s Dungeon. By a Roman . A few paragraphs into that one Maud’s voice thinned into nothing and she had to put it down; she couldn’t stop thinking about Robin and Edwin, which was frankly horrifying. Mysteries of the Red Dew purported to be a vision-dream that the narrator had experienced after consuming a potion.

“Before I’d travelled much further on the emerald road, I came across a tall oak tree, with a ravishing nymph entangled in vines which held her fast to the trunk. ‘What manner of creature are you?’ I inquired.”

Violet stood, snatched a white silk scarf from where it was draped over a chair, and flung it around her neck. She adjusted her posture and became, quite suddenly and despite her lavender gown, mannish .

“What manner of creature are you?” Her voice was no over-gruff impression of a man but a silken, ambiguous rasp that matched the new cant of her hips and the arrogant angle of her jaw.

Maud’s thighs clenched together hard. A shiver rose from the middle of her spine. She wanted to slide onto the rug and rub her bare skin against it. She wanted—

“Maud,” said Violet, a prompting whisper.

“Yes. Ah— The nymph turned upon me a pair of limpid eyes. I felt Priapus stir at the sight of her skin, barely contained within the meagre rags which strained across the curve of her hips. ‘Oh, sir!’ she cried. ‘Will you not help me?’ ”

Silence. Violet looked about her.

“Oh, sir . Will you not help me?”

Maud nearly dropped the book.

Alanzo Cesare Rossi had leapt onto the stage. He was a less accomplished actor than Violet, and didn’t manage to transform himself into a nymph merely by shifting his posture. He tangled his ankle around a chair leg and batted his eyelashes in her direction.

“Dear God,” said Hawthorn.

Maud managed to continue. There was some dialogue laden with innuendo—some of which Maud caught, and some of which she could only guess at based on the leering faces that Violet made—before the narrator agreed to unfasten the nymph from the tree in exchange for the favours of her nubile body.

The action carried Violet and Ross closer to Maud’s chaise longue, where they teetered in something only vaguely resembling a passionate embrace. Ross’s shoulders shook as he fought against laughter.

Maud was close to bursting herself. “ As I held her fast, there emerged from the nearby wood an imposing figure. He had the head of a bull and the body of a man, and his erect member was of such girth as to make the nymph in my arms gasp in lusty anticipation and fear. ”

The room turned, as one, to the Baron Hawthorn.

Hawthorn raised a single eyebrow. A breathless silence hung over them.

“You can all go and fuck yourselves,” he said.

Violet released Ross and collapsed across Maud’s legs, howling with laughter. Maud heard herself shriek out the dregs of her own embarrassment. Ross sank to the ground, where he drew up his knees and buried his face in them. His curls were unruly, his face stained with tears of mirth when he lifted it.

“You’re all mad,” he groaned. “And I must be too. Utter Bedlam, this place is.”

Maud gasped for air. Violet emitted a pleading moan—“Maud, please, I can’t stop ”—and continued to laugh herself silly.

Hawthorn’s mouth twitched. He glanced at the walls. For the first time Maud realised that the racket they were making was likely to be audible.

“My reputation as a master of orgies would appear to be complete,” he said. “Miss Blyth. Give your unfortunate troops their marching orders for tomorrow. And then be so good as to march them out of my cabin.”

Maud wouldn’t sleep for hours if she lay down now. Her heart skipped with laughter and with a restlessness that she’d only just begun to recognise; a melody stuck in her head, to which she’d just been handed the words.

A whole suitcase full of words.

“Come on,” she said, gripping the suitcase more tightly, and Violet followed her out onto the dark and star-spangled stage of the small deck where the Pipes and Drums had rehearsed.

It was one of the best things about Violet. Even Robin had a tendency to humour Maud’s enthusiasms in a way that said he was sure they would burn themselves out. It had taken weeks before he’d agreed to let her go to America.

Violet never told Maud not to do something. She followed cheerfully along and laughed at the consequences.

Violet had stolen Hawthorn’s white scarf. It glowed in two slim columns down the front of her gown, pearlescent in the meagre moonlight and few electric lights that turned the deck into a chessboard of shadows. The moonlight silvered her hair. Maud wanted to take it down, pin by pin, and watch it fall around Violet’s shoulders.

“Ohhh.” Maud leaned against the wall, facing the open sea, and inhaled the fresh night air. “I do love this. I could spend my whole life on boats, couldn’t you?”

“No. There are only so many games of quoits and shuffleboard I’m prepared to play in a week, no matter how nice the view.”

“It’s not…” Maud struggled to pull the words together. “We’re not in one place or another. We could be going anywhere, in the darkness. The sun could rise tomorrow and we could be in—Alexandria, or Venice, or among the islands of Japan.”

“ That would take more magic than I’ve ever heard of.”

“It’s liminal, ” said Maud, pleased. The word was one of Edwin’s favourites; he used it a lot when discussing Flora Sutton’s system of magic.

“Liminal,” said Violet, as if tasting it. It wasn’t quite the rasp of a voice she’d used when playacting, but it was close, and the restlessness in Maud whirled all at once into a near-hurricane of incoherent want. She really would burst. She would rend at the seams like something poorly stitched.

If she opened her mouth she just knew she would babble more nonsense about boats.

She set down the suitcase and reached out to catch Violet’s wrist, and used it to tug her closer. Fabric slid on fabric, glove on glove, but Maud held fast. Violet looked down at her, amused and questioning, and Maud seized a desperate burst of courage and moved her hands to rest on either side of Violet’s waist.

Maud’s back was on solid wood. They were in shadow. The deck was empty and the stars were kind, and glittering, and very far away.

“Maud?” said Violet softly. “What are you doing?”

“Looking,” said Maud, above the din of her heart, “for a more practical education.”

Violet said nothing. Moved nothing. Her expression was difficult to make out, lit only on one side by the dim glow of electric light. Beneath Maud’s hands were layers of fabric and an elusive heat; she couldn’t feel whalebone or metal. Perhaps Violet wore softer corsetry. Perhaps nothing, just camisole and combinations and skin, skin, soft, tasting of all the things that skin might taste of.

Violet let out a slow breath. Their faces were close enough that the very end of it caught at Maud’s lips, which tingled as if bruised. Images from the suitcase’s selection flooded through her mind and down into her body.

She heard herself make a tiny, lost sound. If Violet kissed her, she would die. If Violet didn’t kiss her, she would die. She was filled with a great deal of sympathy for the young man in the Dark Duke’s dungeon, even if he had brought his fate upon himself by sneaking into a mansion owned by someone called the Dark Duke—

Maud tried to rope her flyaway thoughts. She could smell Violet’s nearness, her scent. She was burning with it.

Violet pulled back, out of Maud’s grasp.

“I’m sorry, Maud. But I don’t think that’s a good idea.”

Why? screamed Maud’s body—every nerve in every limb. She wanted to argue. She was good at arguing.

But she had just enough sense left to realise that to ask for the answer would be to demand a bed of knives and then fling herself upon it.

“No. I’m sorry.” She heard a shaky laugh come out. “I shouldn’t have—I apologise if I made you feel uncomfortable.”

Violet’s own laugh was pure relief. “We’re friendly, aren’t we, Maud? Let’s leave it there.”

Which was the answer, really. Violet, by her own admission, had no problem going to bed with all sorts of people. So the issue was with Maud: an inexperienced girl must not be what Violet looked for in a partner. Maud could hardly blame her.

“Yes, let’s.”

“I’ll see you tomorrow,” said Violet, and squeezed Maud’s arm before she left.

Maud stood there a minute longer, alone on a deck that was suddenly empty and cold and dark. She took the suitcase and made her way back to her own cabin, and once she was there she took a long time to fall asleep.