What You Will
by Lily White LeFevre
Smashwords edition
Copyright 2011 by Elena Wolf.
This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is a coincidence.
Cover art: public domain: “Lady at a Masked Ball” by Pierra Rivera. Image courtesy of the Art Renewal Center database.
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This book is dedicated to my circle of first readers—without your enthusiasm for this project, I might never have found the courage to take this step. Thank you.
London, 1818
Miss Viola Alexis Gardener carefully examined her appearance in the cheval mirror.
She looked…daring. Almost scandalous, even. Last century’s styles had been much more revealing than the current mode even in England, and her silk and lace concoction was based on a French design. The full skirts were heavy and awkward for a girl used to the relative freedom empire gowns offered, but their flare made her waist look ridiculously narrow. And the top…good heavens, the top. Her bosom threatened to overspill the rim of the bodice when she breathed, even with the two inches of lace her mother had insisted the dressmaker add to attempt a reclamation of modesty.
Viola reached up and tied her matching mask into place, then put her hands back down and reconsidered her appearance.
She looked…mischievous. The mask covered only her eyes and half of one cheek, where the dyed leather curved down in a fanciful curlicue, while a pair of peacock feathers flared in opposite directions over her temple on the same side. Through the eyeholes her irises gleamed back, greener than their usual hazy mix of green and blue thanks to the surrounding color. She looked mysterious and playful at once, although considering how easily identifiable she would be in such a brief mask, Viola wasn’t sure how she could also look mysterious. It wasn’t like anyone was going to mistake her for someone else.
At least, not someone besides Olivia.
Viola tilted her head and smiled flirtatiously. She looked…like her sister. It was undeniable. This was a dress that people would expect to see Olivia wearing, not Viola.
Her mind stuck on the thought. Perhaps it was just the tightly drawn hairstyle, pulling at her scalp and making her lightheaded. Perhaps it was the excitement that accompanied a masquerade ball, and Twelfth Night, and her birthday, making her giddy. Perhaps it was simply that she was tired of being good. But for any of those reasons, or none of them, Viola suddenly felt reckless.
She felt like acting like her sister, to go along with the costume. She knew exactly what she wanted to do, too: get Leighton’s attention.
Leighton, she sighed to herself. Leighton Fortesque, Lord Carrick.
His name had used to make her smile, eight months ago when she had first met him, golden and laughing and touched by the devil. Back when he had been merely Francis’s best friend. Before he had become one of Olivia’s admirers.
If Viola were an ounce more sociable, she might have taken his interest in her sister as a sure sign he would be interested in her, as well—after all, she and Olivia were identical. But Viola was not her sister, was nothing like her sister, in fact, and so she could not believe that his partiality for the elder Miss Gardener would extend to the younger. She had no hope of pulling his attention off of her vivacious sister and onto her own silence. She did not know how to do it, and had too little hope of success to even try, and so she had let her come-out Season pass by in a wave of commonplace greetings and sightings across the ballroom that gradually went from exciting to painful as her own obsession with him deepened and his indifference to her grew more marked. He was one of the men who gravitated to her sister at any social function and, like all the others who did so, ignored Viola. For all that she looked exactly like Olivia, and was therefore imbued with the beauty they all claimed Olivia had, Viola was in essence a wallflower. Ignorable, and, therefore, ignored.
But tonight…tonight, she looked like her sister.
Tonight she could claim his attention for herself. If she did, perhaps she would be able to keep it. If she couldn’t win him even as Olivia, she would know there was no hope for Viola and banish his image from behind her eyelids at night.
Viola gave her reflection a wicked smile, and Olivia smiled back. She was ready for the masquerade.
* * *
Francis Cartwright, Viscount Mabry, was the first guest of the evening to present himself at the Gardener home, as he always was when the family entertained. His father had been the lifelong intimate of Mr. Gardener, and after the elder viscount’s death some years past, the son had taken it upon himself to maintain the familial connection. He had not grown up with the Gardener girls, exactly, being some five or six years older than they and raised on the titular estate some three days’ drive distant, but the families had shared holidays and visits for as long as Viola could remember. The probability that Francis would marry one of Mr. Gardener’s daughters was an open secret; everyone in both families knew it had been the hope of the two men, and everyone suspected Francis’s father had, on his deathbed, exhorted his son to make good on the long-held expectation.
Francis was a solemn and responsible man. He had inherited his title young, but not so young he’d allowed himself to fall into paying someone to run his estates for him. He had excelled in his studies and seemed to take on the management of his father’s properties and investments with ease, if not enthusiasm.
He was dutiful and loyal, and Viola loved him dearly. As one would love a boring older brother who lectured one on the dangers of mischief instead of instigating more clever schemes than one could have come up with alone. Francis had spent a good deal of their visits trying to talk the girls out of whatever cockamamie plan Olivia had come up with, succeeding sometimes with Viola and never with Olivia, and always there to say “I told you so” when things went badly and Viola got caught.
Viola was always the one who got caught. It was simply how the world worked. Olivia came up with outrageous plans, and Viola was the one who paid for that outrageousness. She was the one who fell off the log into the mud hole in her new Sunday dress, after Olivia successfully scampered across with “no harm done.” After Olivia had climbed up to see the baby bird’s nest and back down with no trouble, Viola was the one under whom the tree branch cracked, the one who streaked earthward to land with a broken leg and a concussion.
Much of Viola’s character was formed as a direct result of that law of the world. Where Olivia was blithe and fearless, because she had never suffered the consequences for her misbehavior, Viola was almost timid because she had only suffered consequences for hers. Viola was a pattern card of virtue, more because she was afraid not to be than because she wanted to be. She never lied, and she never swore, and she didn’t set foot off the prescribed path of good behavior, because she knew if she did, she would be found out. She was praised for her apparently inborn virtue and her modesty, but Viola knew it was only level-headedness. If she could have gotten away with anything, she’d have done so. Like Olivia did.
Viola had been very good for a very long time, and for all of it she had watched her sister being not so good—although not very bad, either, not in any way that truly mattered—and envied her. Tonight she was going to be her sister, so that she might be a little bad. Surely she was allowed that much. One night. It was her nineteenth birthday, and it was Twelfth Night, and she was hosting a masquerade ball. If tonight was not the night for her to behave a little outrageously, when was? The thought of being so very, very good—and so very, very dull—for the rest of her life was intolerable. Tonight Viola was claiming back something she had lost…or acceding to the will of the universe and submitting herself to a lifetime of conscientious sobriety, if she was caught out.
And Francis was there to chastise her if that happened. Just like old times.
Since being her sister for a little while was Viola’s own scheme, and one she hadn’t told her sister she planned to do, she didn’t feel it necessary to tell Francis, either. If he lectured her on propriety, she might lose her nerve, and the last thing she wanted was to be talked out of taking her fate into her own hands. So she said nothing of how she intended to behave, other than what her costume said about her, when she went down to the parlor to greet him before the house was officially opened for the night.
Francis was masquerading as a musketeer or a highwayman, depending on whether one considered his black mask to be part of the costume or strictly for the masquerade. It covered him from hair to cheek, forehead to chin. Viola didn’t think she’d have recognized him. Perhaps if she was close enough to see his eyes and note his height against her own, but not at a distance. She was glad she knew his disguise in advance.
He swept off the hat and mask when she came into the room, and he bowed to her with the precision of a courtier.
Her father smiled at her—Viola was profoundly thankful he didn’t take one look at her and demand she turn around and change her dress—and said, “Viola, darling, there you are. I’ve been waiting for one of my ladies to come down before I left our guest to climb into my own costume.”
With that he left them together, now that Viola was there to entertain Francis. Although Francis wasn’t exactly a guest, she reflected, amused that her father thought he couldn’t be left alone in their house for even a moment.
“You’re looking ominous this evening, Francis,” she joked as her father’s footsteps tapped across the hardwood floor of the hall.
“And you look quite dashing.”
“Dashing?” A laugh burbled into her throat. “That’s the best you can do?”
“It is all that I dare do,” he returned, smiling. “That dress is a walking scandal.” Viola’s heart sank, fearing he was about to deliver the lecture her father had abstained from that would quash her determination to misbehave. Then he grinned, and his dark blue eyes and flashing white smile took on a decidedly wicked look. “I like it.”
Viola actually blushed, which had never happened around Francis before. She suddenly felt awkward, and he knew her well enough to read it on her face.
“I’m sorry, Viola. That was too much. Although, decidedly less than most of the men tonight will give you. Are you sure you’re up to it?”
“Did you mean it? Or were you just saying it because the dress would require some such comment, no matter who was in it?”
“Er…”
Viola laughed. “It was only too much if you really meant it.”
He smiled again, but the strange undertone was gone. “You know our families expect me to make you an offer,” he said, very seriously.
His tone was what told her he wanted to talk about that expectation, not the words. He was right; she did know their families expected it.
“Yes,” she agreed with a touch of bitterness. “After all, we are both the quiet ones. The responsible ones. The dutiful ones.”
“Not to mention the long hope your father holds and my father held, to see their children united in marriage.” He paused and ducked his head to stare down at his boots. They were both silent for a long moment. Francis raised his head enough to meet Viola’s eyes. “Will you be very offended if I do not ask?”
It was the last question she had expected. She had always known he would ask her some day, if she did not find a husband on her own. Viola had hoped he would wait until the next Season, or at least the Little Season, had passed—she had wanted time to pin down Lord Carrick or pen up her feelings for him if he rejected her. But that Francis some day would ask her, she had never doubted. Since he had broached the topic, she had been steeling herself to hear his proposal.
But this? Would she mind if he didn’t ask?
The thought induced a mild panic. To hide her fear of never finding a husband, if she lost her back-up plan, Viola told him with all the considerable conviction she felt, “I want to be more than a duty to my husband.”
“So you will not be hurt?”
He was pressing her for honesty, and Viola considered her feelings. Would she be hurt if he didn’t ask? Would either her pride or her feelings be wounded? All she felt was that fear and, oddly, a relief. A sense of freedom she hadn’t had while clinging to the buoy of her family connection’s inevitable proposal.
“No,” she said with a bit of wonder in her voice. Then, to soften that blow to his pride, she continued. “I know you do not harbor a tendre for me, and I think you know I do not pine for you. So, no, my feelings will not be hurt if you pass me over.”
His smile flashed again. “Excellent. Are we agreed, then?”
There was only one other issue to consider. “Can you bear to disappoint my father?”
“Let me worry about your father,” he said with a dismissive wave of his hand. “Mostly I am worried about disappointing you.”
“You will not disappoint me,” she assured him. “It is a relief, in fact, to know that you will not ask. If you did, I might feel obliged to accept, and I cannot think it would be the best thing for either of us.”
Viola smiled ruefully, and Francis picked up both her hands and brought them to his lips. He kissed each one a bit theatrically, and kept his hold as he looked at her with nothing but kindness in his face.
“Thank you. You have made this easy on me.”
“You may thank me by being the one to tell my father.”
He chuckled, and that was it. Viola was no longer an almost-engaged woman. She no longer had Francis’s steady head and watchful eyes to fall back on. She was on her own.
An inner voice that sounded terribly like Olivia began to laugh.
Perhaps, Viola thought, the universe might go topsy turvy and let her get away with something tonight. It was Twelfth Night. If ever there was a time for it, it was tonight, under the reign of the Lord of Misrule.
* * *
Leighton Fortesque, Lord Carrick, felt like a horse’s ass, even if he wasn’t dressed like one. That might have been a preferable costume, actually, he thought, cocking his head to one side as he looked in the mirror. He was festooned in what his man assured him was the pink of fashion for a masquerade, although an endorsement like that should have been his first warning. The second had, lamentably, come too late: when he stirred to life after last night’s revels with the sun already in its descent, he found curling papers in his hair. Girard had outdone himself, that much was certain.
Leighton stared at himself now in the mirror in utter horror. Girard had dressed him like a man-sized babe.
There was no other way to put it. He was dressed as a cherub. Angelic, but not in the powerful, perhaps frightening, archangel sort of way that would have been acceptable, if presumptuous, masquerade attire for a man of five and twenty years, some fashion, and an earldom in his future. He was swathed in streaming white drapes, with bare arms and gilded curls on his head. Girard was hovering determinedly to one side of him with a rouge pot, trying to get a finger in to color Leighton’s cheeks.
It was unacceptable.
“Put that down, man, and get me out of this. I’ll not show my face in this get-up.”
“But sir!” Girard protested. “I bought it specially for you! It is meant to showcase your natural charms!”
“Wear it yourself, if you like it so much,” Leighton growled, suspecting that was why his valet had purchased these particular togs in the first place, “and find me something else! I’ll go bare-faced before I let anyone see me in this folly.”
“Bare-faced at a masquerade? Mais non! You cannot, my lord! Promise me you will not.”
“Find me an alternative, and you may assure yourself of that before I leave the house.”
Girard huffed and minced and put the pot down. “Very well, my lord. You know best, of course. Divest yourself, while I scour your closet for something to suit your modesty.”
“You might check maman’s closet, while you’re at it,” Leighton suggested as he tore at the streamers with alacrity.
“Don’t shred them!” Girard shrieked, turning back to help and giving away his true interest in the garment. Dandying up his employer was all well and good when Leighton could be tricked into it, it seemed, but the Frenchman would give no ground when it came to costuming himself. He helped Leighton out of the straps binding the main robe to his torso and left him to climb the rest of the way out on his own.
Certain that whatever his valet magicked up would not be a full-body costume, Leighton pulled on the pair of drawers Girard had forbidden him under the snowy linen, followed by navy blue pantaloons. He pulled on shirtsleeves and had just finished buttoning up a waistcoat when Girard’s prancing footsteps sounded in the hall. Leighton suspected his man was actually dancing. At least skipping. Success presaged, no doubt.
“I am triumphal!” Girard exclaimed as he burst back into the room.
“Triumphant,” Leighton corrected automatically.
Girard didn’t even bother to sulk, as he usually did at Leighton’s corrections, nor did he chastise his employer for dressing without assistance, also as he usually did. He simply held up his discovery for Leighton’s inspection. It was a mask of black feathers, saved from being feminine by the fact that the feathers obscured the mask’s basic shape—along with most of the wearer’s face—and by the absolute lack of any other color. It was a bit intimidating, actually. All the better.
“With a black coat and cloak, you are a raven. Or an angel of death. Or anything else that has black feathers. Your choices are only limited by your imaginations.”
“Imagination. Singular, no matter how many things I imagine with it.”
Leighton took the mask and tied it on. He turned back to his mirror to examine himself once more. The only parts of his face that could be seen clearly were his lips and chin. Feathers obliterated the features higher up his face, as well as the outline of it, and they slashed across his jawline like blades of shadow.
“It will do,” he decided.
Especially if he wore a hood. His gleaming locks might give him away—but, then again, he did not normally wear curls in his hair, so perhaps not.
Yes. It would do. He was not so obviously the young Lord Carrick, and that alone made this Twelfth Night party for Arthur Gardener’s daughters appealing. Leighton had not been born to inherit the title of Carrick, nor the greater one that would descend upon him when his grandfather passed on, and that lack of training from birth for society’s scrutiny had left him ill-prepared to deal with it now.
He had been born to a younger son, with all the prospects awaiting a mere mister: the church, the law, the army, or the marriage mart, should his personal charm prove sufficiently great that he could expect to win an heiress on strength of his person and family alone. His grandfather, the Earl of Ravensburg, had two sons, and Leighton’s father was the younger. He had been studious and broad-minded, studied and then practiced law, and eventually became a successful member of the Commons, while his older brother raised hell with all the wanton disregard of an entitled young aristocrat for propriety, his finances, and even his health. Where Leighton’s father remained sober and dignified as his youth faded to middle age and his own son grew toward manhood, Leighton’s uncle remained as dissipated and rakish as he had always been. Lord Carrick stalled on the one duty expected of every eldest son—production of a legal heir—for years. It was only when his younger brother died of a fever that he could finally be prevailed upon to take to wife a bedraggled wallflower, a woman whose family was so desperate to marry her off that they would give her to a man like him. He married her only to meet his end within a few months of the wedding and without hope or expectation of a child, given that they had not spent a documented night together beyond their wedding night.
Even in his death he humiliated her: he died the most glorious, or ignominious, death a roué could aspire to have, of a heart failure in the bed of not one, not two, but three beautiful young courtesans. The coroner who examined his body possessed a spectacular sense of humor, for he listed the cause of death as “an excess of women.”
The beleaguered wife wasted no time in returning to her own people, and it fell to Leighton, at one and twenty, to become the old man’s heir.
His year of mourning for his father was interrupted by the reaction to his uncle’s death. All of a sudden, everyone at the university wanted to be his friend. Young men he had barely spoken to offered him invitations to their family homes. His grandfather, who had benignly ignored him before, suddenly had the keenest of interests in his education and his personal life and wrote him a letter every week criticizing and praising him for even the smallest of missteps and successes.
Leighton hadn’t known how to deal with the attention or the sycophancy then, and he hadn’t gotten much better at it in the intervening years. At school he had clung to the friendships established long before his uncle’s decline, and his best friend and rock was still Viscount Mabry. Leighton still got accosted by men who wanted something from him, either his favor or a piece of his notoriety. His grandfather still watched him like a hawk from his remote eyrie in Northumberland.
Now, though, he’d added the attention of females of all ages and fortunes to his woes. The mothers wanted to marry him to their daughters, the daughters wanted to capture his attention or simply his hand by putting themselves in compromising situations with him, and the widows—and even some of the still-married ladies—wanted him as a companion. He’d even been challenged to a duel by a friend whose actress mistress had thrown herself at a man with an earldom to tap instead of a mere inherited fortune.
Leighton had attended the dawn appointment and deloped, which was a public admission of guilt; but what could he do? He didn’t want the woman and hadn’t had her, but it was easier to claim that he had than to actually duel over it, when that activity was decidedly more dangerous than it used to be due to the current advances in the rifling of pistol barrels. After the incident his reputation had taken on a rakish cast that wasn’t really deserved, and it had become deuced inconvenient. His “wicked” reputation made stepping outside the rules, even just toeing the line, impossible with any young lady. What might be forgiven as an innocent lapse in someone else would not be seen in such a harmless light with him. He’d learned fast to step lightly in the company of ladies and confined his flirtations to the most public and unattainable, and therefore unexceptionable, of targets. Beautiful heartbreakers like Miss Gardener.
Tonight, though—perhaps tonight he did not have to be so careful. Perhaps tonight he could be Leighton and not Carrick.
He could see if he still remembered how.
More people needed to throw masquerades, he thought, shrugging on the jacket Girard held out for him. Perhaps when he was Ravensburg he would suggest it.
* * *
One useful thing about being overlooked by everyone, Viola had discovered over the last year, was that she had ample opportunities for observation. She knew, therefore, that Leighton Fortesque, Lord Carrick, arrived late to almost every function he attended—just late enough that he missed the receiving line, just late enough that his arrival went unannounced, and never so late that anyone doubted he would come. He made a point to seek out his hosts and thank them, just to be sure they were not offended by his tardiness, and they never were. Of course no one was ever offended by his lateness; after all, he was the heir to an earldom.
Viola also knew that he hated his title. It was why he came late, and why he had snuck in through the gardens of at least two soirees she had attended, that she had seen: so that he could avoid being presented to everyone. The guests would see him, and those he knew would approach him, and those who wanted to know him would follow him with stares and whispers; but he seemed happier when he was not dangled before them like a prize or a taunt.
His title was immaterial to Viola. Well. It was mostly immaterial. It made him an eligible suitor, one to whom her father could not object; to that extent, it mattered.
But Viola didn’t want him because of his title.
She wanted him because he didn’t want it, because he laughed readily and heartily, because he was kind to everyone, even wallflowers, in his devil-may-care way…because he alone, of all the men she had met, made her pulse pound and her stomach flutter with something that felt like laughter and fear at once.
Viola suspected it was mostly that last which had her missing the first half of her own party to stand in the foyer and wait for him to arrive. She really ought to be somewhere else, she thought for the hundredth time, as the door opened to admit yet another couple. Viola nodded regally to pretend her welcome was a planned part of the atmosphere. She half-turned to follow them with her eyes as she continued to justify to herself her presence there by the door.
She shouldn’t be here waiting for him…but she could think of no other way to be sure she found him. Especially before he found Olivia holding court in her more traditional masquerade costume.
She could also think of nowhere else she ought to be.
Dancing? She rarely danced more than three sets a night, two of them with Francis. He was unfailingly kind to her, or, at least, he always had been while they were expected to marry. Viola wondered if he would bother now.
Flirting? She didn’t flirt, didn’t hold court, didn’t captivate the attention of male admirers the way Olivia did. Perhaps it was the same restraint Viola had learned in her decision-making that made her more reserved in conversation than her sister; perhaps it was the symptom of having grown up with her sister and at some point striking out in a different direction so that she could be more herself and less her sister’s understudy.
The only thing Viola was missing by not being in the ballroom was observing everyone from behind a column or a plant. She could observe just as well here, even if it was only groups of two and three at a time.
And…one.
Viola tried not to spin too quickly to greet the newest latecomer. Her self-control was wasted, alas—the Elizabethan courtier who bowed over her hand was at least half a head too short to be Lord Carrick.
What was the time? Surely it was not so late that he would not come? What if he didn’t come? What then?
The anxiety ate at her until Viola gave in and ducked into the nearest parlor to check a clock. It was scarcely nine o’clock. Relief ran through her.
The sound of the door opening yet again ratcheted her tension back up. What if it was him and she missed his entrance?
Viola took the two steps back into the hall before the footman outside had pushed the door open all the way, and so she was leaning casually against the doorjamb when the man in black stepped inside.
Her heart lurched. It was him.
It had to be. The man was the right height, the right build, the right chinned, and he was looking at Viola with the appreciation of a long-standing admirer.
The lurch became a rushing pound that blew a roaring through her ears and pushed a tunnel between her eyes and her mind.
It was him.
Now or never. Viola smiled a lazy smile and did not trust her balance to stand upright, so she remained in her casual pose against the parlor door.
“Lord Carrick,” she drawled. “Fashionably late, as always, I see.”
“So it’s Lord Carrick tonight?” he asked in a voice that was unmistakably Leighton Fortesque. “What happened to Carrie?”
Of course Olivia would have a pet name for him. For just a fleeting moment, Viola almost hated her sister. She was so careless, with everything; she had given Lord Carrick a pet name, like she owned him or had some claim on his affections, and she did it without really caring about him…or how Viola wanted him for her own.
Viola pouted at him in her best Princess Olivia style. “Do you think you have earned ‘Carrie’ tonight, showing up like this and making me fear you wouldn’t come at all?”
He bowed, and when he stood again it swept the hood of his cloak off his bright hair. Viola stared at its ridiculous tousle; it looked as though he had flipped upside down and run his hands through it instead of combing it. And yet he still made her breath catch.
“My apologies, sweet lady. I did not mean to make you worry.”
“Come walk with me,” she answered, offering forgiveness by way of invitation. She smiled in what she hoped was a coy fashion. Playful, at the very least. Anything but timid, or demure, or uncertain.
“I would be delighted to take a turn about the party on your arm.”
He didn’t sound like he’d already guessed she wasn’t her sister. Phase one accomplished. Now she just had to keep him to herself for long enough to win his admiration—or discover that he wasn’t the man she thought.
“Oh, no,” Viola corrected. “The garden. I was on my way out for some air when I saw your coach pull up,” she lied, smoothly, as if she had not been waiting for him for the past half-hour. “I could not bear to go right back to the party.”
“That much of a crush?”
He sounded sympathetic, and possibly as if he wasn’t ready to face a crowd, and so Viola nodded, hoping by the time they came back in it would be a ridiculous crush. She wasn’t surprised when he offered her his arm.
“Lead on,” he said.
“Through here,” Viola said, and gestured at the parlor behind her. He came up beside her and paused so she could slip her arm through his. Together they walked across the unlit sitting room and through the inner door to the music room, which was lit and did open onto the terrace. From there they would be able to reach the garden paths without crossing the main patio, and therefore without meeting too many people. This early in the evening few revelers had needed to seek the relief of open air; later, every yard of the terrace would be in use.
None of that was on Viola’s mind as they strolled, however; she had planned her strategy for isolating him in advance. All she could focus on at the moment was the energy sizzling up her arm from the friction with his, making her mind fizz and pop and go utterly blank.
She should have known better, she thought with some despair. Of course she would get within five feet of him and lose all ability to think or even converse intelligently. She had relived their one dance, at her come-out ball, a thousand times, until she had been sure she had embellished the memory, imagined up that frisson of…something between them. Or, at least, within her. Viola had no way of knowing if his blood fizzed, too.
Tonight she was learning, to her chagrin, that the physical attraction was real and tangible and distracting. She could quite easily imagine letting him kiss her. She wanted him to kiss her. She could imagine letting him do scandalous things to her, even if she wasn’t quite sure what that might entail. She wanted them, too, in all their nebulous glory.
Very Bad Things. They sounded delightful. At least when contemplated with Lord Carrick. Very delightful, indeed, with him.
He chuckled as they crossed the terrace, breaking Viola’s train of thought.
“I am remiss,” he commented, looking down at her with a smile that made her head spin. “I have completely forgotten to wish you a happy birthday.”
“Thank you, my lord,” she answered, smiling back at him.
“Ah, I am not yet forgiven, am I?”
They stepped together down the few shallow stairs, Viola shamelessly clutching his arm a bit closer for support in case her backless slippers, well, slipped. Thankfully they did not; she wouldn’t really have wanted to trade the embarrassment of falling for the recompense of having him catch her.
“Not forgiven?” she queried as they moved onto the path. As she moved onto the path. Her skirts were too wide to allow him to walk on it, as well, she noticed. She hoped there was not mud. It had not rained for two days—surely that was long enough for the sodden London earth to dry?
“For arriving late,” he reminded her. “I suppose I must earn back my name.”
“Carrie?” She asked it as a confirmation that it was the name he meant, that her sister had not committed the unforgivable breach of using his Christian name—please, God, let Olivia not use his given name—but Leighton seemed to take it as being addressed.
“Yes?” he responded in a tone that said What are you going to tell me? not Yes, that is the name I meant.
Viola thought fast. “I wasn’t really worried that you would not come,” she admitted. Lied. Admitted.
“No?”
“No. I meant what I said: you are always fashionably late, or maybe a hair beyond. Do you not have a functional timepiece?”
His laughter cracked across the small garden.
“Shh,” Viola admonished, though secretly she was pleased he found her amusing. If it had been light out he’d have been able to see the blush of pleasure warming her cheeks. “We should not be out here,” she said, “but I am not ready to go in. Don’t spoil this with your braying.”
“I—” he started, then seemed to give up. Perhaps he recognized he couldn’t argue with her diction. “How do you know that I am always late?”
“Because you are. I started paying attention after I observed you slipping into Rochester’s ball through the gardens. Do you really hate the attention that much?”
It was just a guess, it had only ever been a guess, but Viola knew that she had guessed aright when he sucked in his breath and stopped cold.
“I am sorry. That was rude. I retract the question.” Though she really hoped he would answer it, anyway, Viola didn’t give him time to. She snatched the first subject that came to mind, standing there in the darkness with his arm suddenly tense beneath her hand. “What are you supposed to be, anyway?”
“The Angel of Death,” he said coldly, and she shivered.
* * *
Leighton couldn’t quite believe she had asked it. Olivia Gardener was a tease and a half, perhaps cruel in the way of beautiful women who know they are beautiful, but never rude. Nor had he ever credited her with particular skills of observation. Her revelation genuinely surprised him—though not as much, of course, as her piercingly accurate assessment of his reason. But his reasons were his business, and she had no claim on him to ask such a personal question. She was right to backpedal, and righter still to change the subject.