A Rogue of One's Own (A League of Extraordinary Women #2)(10)

He flicked his fingers toward Tristan’s right ear. Tristan had it pierced with a diamond stud. He liked the stud. He gave his father a cold stare and rose.

“I have survived the Siege of Sherpur and I walked to Kandahar while carrying a half-dead man on my back,” he said. “My days have been steeped in more death, blood, and filth than I care to remember, so forgive me if the matter of lily-white wives and gossip rags strikes me as trivial.”

He had nearly reached the door when the earl said: “If you wish for your mother to stay at Ashdown, I suggest you begin to see the gravity of these matters.”

He froze. Several things were happening at once: heat and cold, the spike of his pulse, the roar of blood in his ears. Part of his mind was racing; another had gone deadly still.

He turned back with deliberate slowness. His body was still all too ready for combat: useful on enemy territory, but not when the territory came in the shape of a nobleman’s study. Kill or be killed was but a figure of speech on British country estates, wasn’t it?

“What does it have to do with Mother?” His soft voice was softer still.

Rochester’s face was all shadows and hard angles. “As I said: she is unwell. She might be better cared for elsewhere.”

Tristan’s fist was white around the cane. “Be plain.”

“There are places more suited for people with her moods—”

“Are we speaking of Bedlam?”

The earl tilted his head, his smile thin as if slashed with a knife. “Bedlam? No. There are private asylums that are quainter, more suited for her care.”

Private asylums. The places where perfectly sane but inconvenient wives and daughters were still sometimes sent to die.

As he walked back to the desk, wariness flickered in Rochester’s eyes—the bastard knew he had gone too far. He had done it anyway, so he must be feeling bloody emboldened.

“She’s grieving,” Tristan said, his gaze boring into his father’s. “Her son is dead.”

Another flicker of emotion. “So is mine,” the earl then said, roughly.

On another day, in another life, he might have commiserated. “She does not belong in a mental institution. It would kill her, and you know it.”

“Tristan, I can only accommodate so much irregularity in my household. You may decide whose it is going to be: yours, or hers.”

It was an act of extortion, one to which he would have to bend, and every fiber of his body strained to eliminate the threat to his freedom there and then. He drew a breath deep into his body, and another, until the wrathful heat in his veins abated.

Rochester gave a nod and said, almost amicably: “I appeal to you to do your duty. Marry, make an heir and a few spares. You have three months to reestablish a tolerable reputation. Prove you are not altogether useless.”

Useless. Another deep breath. Useless—Rochester’s favorite insult. Everyone who was not serving the earl’s plans in some capacity fell into this category, and yet, growing up, useless had always cut the deepest.

Well then. Visiting Mother in Ashdown’s west wing had to wait.

By the time he was back in the carriage and speeding down the driveway, he had formed a conclusion why Rochester was using the countess to force him rather than, as usual, his bank account: first, he must have become aware that he, Tristan, was close to achieving a modicum of monetary independence. And second: the marriage business was serious, and Rochester rightly suspected that another cut to his allowance would not yield results. Marry a woman of Rochester’s choosing, and have their children remind him of the earl for the rest of his days? Hardly. Hence, his father’s blackmail, a life for a life, his or his mother’s.

If he gave in, Rochester would turn his mother into the noose around his neck when it suited him for as long as she lived. It meant he needed a plan, too. He would send word to Delhi, to General Foster’s residence—perhaps he would be inclined to house two English guests for a while and not ask questions. This would take time, damnation; letters took weeks to travel back and forth such distances. He could use the submarine cable to telegraph a message to Bombay, but the cables from there to New Delhi were often cut. Briefly, he toyed with the idea of setting off with an invalid into the unknown; to hell with Foster, to hell with plans. But this kind of impulsiveness had rarely served him well.

What was clear was that he needed to increase and secure his money supply a lot faster than expected. Lucie’s face flashed before his eyes, and a fresh wave of resentment hit his gut. She was, unwittingly, on the cusp of crossing the plans he had made for his new, settled life in Britain. And as of fifteen minutes ago, her interference had become a threat.

He was looking out the carriage window, not seeing a thing, as Lucie kept barging into his thoughts. By the time he had reached the train station, he wondered whether a part of him, the one that had sometimes filled his long nights in the East with memories of her and unencumbered English summers, had been keen on being in the same country as her again.

His coach was empty, and the silence was blaring. He fished for the whiskey flask in his chest pocket. For a while, he would have to play along in Rochester’s game to buy time. But first, he would get drunk.





Chapter 5




Lucie woke with a cat on her face and her toes cold as lumps of ice.

“Blast it, Boudicca.”