A Study In Seduction (32 page)

“Will charges be filed, Inspector?” Sebastian asked.

“I don’t yet know, sir, but first the nature of the riot needs to be determined to see whether it’s a misdemeanor offense or possible treasonous—”

“Treason!” Lydia repeated.

“Well, miss, I don’t mean to suggest that’s the case here, but with the war and all and Lord Northwood’s… er… A couple of the workers remarked that he’s got sympathies with the czar.”

“As we know,” Sir George added, “that is not a new charge.”

Sebastian gave a hollow laugh. The inspector shifted with discomfort.

“That’s all yet to be determined, sir,” he said. “But his lordship will have to appear before the magistrate. And nothing I can do about the accounts people give.”

Alexander exchanged glances with his brother. A single thought passed between them. No matter what the investigation yielded, their name would be linked to a deplorable situation.

He looked at the inspector. “How many people were harmed?”

“Last I heard, a dozen.”

Lydia gasped. Sebastian swore. A rock sank to the pit of Alexander’s stomach. He rose and gestured to the door. “Gentlemen, it’s late. As I’m sure you know, we’re all tired. If we can take this up tomorrow, I would appreciate it.”

Lord Hadley nodded and picked up his hat. “We’re informing the rest of the council, Northwood. We haven’t made any decisions about a replacement for exhibition
director, so you’re still the one in charge. Best be prepared for the consequences.”

The men filed out. Sebastian looked at Alexander, who gave him a short nod. Then Sebastian followed the men from the room.

The door clicked shut. Lydia’s apprehension spiked. She twisted her finger around a lock of hair, pulling it hard enough to hurt.

Alexander strode to the sideboard and removed the stopper from a decanter of brandy. He poured two glasses and took a swallow from one before pressing the other into Lydia’s hands. She stared at the amber liquid for a moment before taking a fortifying sip.

Alexander watched her, his expression brooding, a red scratch marring his cheek.

“Tell me,” he said.

Lydia drew in a deep breath, knowing she owed him the truth even though it would mean the death of their relationship. Only one other person knew the whole story, and that person was now gone.

“Joseph Cole was the mathematics professor at the University of Leipzig.” The past began to encroach upon her mind, all the hopes she’d had for herself, all the mistakes she’d made. “His father was British, his mother German. Dr. Cole had spent his childhood in London, then attended university in Berlin before receiving the Leipzig position.

“After I took the examinations, he expressed great admiration for my aptitude and agreed to take me under his instruction. He and his wife offered to provide me with room and board.”

Silence stretched from Alexander, hard and cold. His knuckles whitened on the glass. “His wife.”

Lydia nodded, shame curdling like bile in her stomach. “He was married. His wife…” She forced the name past her lips, punished herself with the memory of a soft, brown-eyed woman who rarely seemed to speak above a whisper. “Greta. That was her name. Greta. She was a good person. They’d met when he first accepted the teaching position.

“My grandmother had accompanied me to Germany. She wanted to find me a suitable companion, a chaperone, so that she could return and help my mother. She soon realized that Greta would serve well in that role, so my grandmother went back to London within a month. And Greta… it was so easy for her to be a companion. She taught me some German, ensured I wrote to my father and grandmother every other day. They had no children. I think she… she wanted to treat me like a daughter.”

“What happened?”

Lydia’s heart thumped hard against her ribs. An image of a younger Dr. Cole burned through the back of her mind, the man for whom she’d developed a dark fascination—elegant Dr. Joseph Cole with the brilliant mind and the cold, sharp eyes of a true intellectual.

“With special permission, I was able to take classes at the university, though I couldn’t matriculate,” she explained. “I didn’t make many friends. There were no other girls, and the ones in the village didn’t know what to make of me. The boys just thought I was an oddity. I spent nearly all my time with Greta and Dr. Cole. Then her mother became ill and she had to take a trip to Bremen. That left Dr. Cole and me alone. His elderly aunt
came to stay at the house to avoid the illusion of impropriety, but she was frail and a bit forgetful. She spent most of her time in her room.”

She shifted, still not looking at Alexander but aware of his unmoving, rigid presence. Her skin pressed against her clothes, sweat dampening her throat. She took another swallow of brandy.

“I was… I was taking a bath. He knew it; he’d seen the maid bring up buckets of water. He came into my room when I was…”

Her voice broke. She squeezed her eyes shut, the mist-filled memory congealing, forming behind her eyelids. Her initial shock giving way to wary intrigue as Dr. Cole approached the bath with deliberate intent. His fingers sliding over her ripe but untouched body, awakening her skin, her blood, her arousal.

“But he didn’t… it wasn’t…” Alexander’s voice was strangled.

Lydia shook her head. “It would be easier if I could tell you he forced me. He didn’t. He made an advance, yes, and perhaps he might’ve stopped if I hadn’t… if I hadn’t responded. But I did. I allowed him to do what he wished, and I… I liked it.”

Her face burned with mortification, but she forced herself to continue as if this confession were penance for having enjoyed the illicit pleasures of her own body.

Long-suppressed memories seeped into the edges of her mind, the way Dr. Cole had shifted from a cerebral professor to a heated lover, the dispelling of her inhibitions like the shedding of a snake’s skin. The freedom of her own nakedness, the delicious rasp of flesh against flesh.

“Before him, I’d never… I’d lived only inside my mind,” she said. “Never gave much thought to corporeal matters. Certainly nothing like that. I was astonished. I… I didn’t want it to end.”

“But it did.”

“Eventually. We continued even… even after Greta returned. When she wasn’t home or in the middle of the night. Sometimes at his university office. If she suspected anything, I never knew. She treated me no differently, which should have made me put a stop to the whole sordid thing.”

“How long did it go on?”

“Four, five months. Until I realized I was with child. I was terrified, of course. I told Dr. Cole, and it was like dousing a fire with cold water. In a very deliberate manner, he told me I would never be able to prove the child was his and that if anyone found out, I would be ruined. He took me to see a woman who supposedly could… could get rid of the child. I refused. Couldn’t do it. He said if I didn’t, I was no longer welcome in his house.”

She looked down at her hands, realizing she was gripping the folds of her skirt. Her jaw ached with the effort of holding back a flood of tears.

“I knew my grandmother had gone to Lyons with my mother. They were staying at a sanatorium run by nuns. I had nowhere else to go. I certainly couldn’t return to London. So I sent word to my grandmother to expect me, then took the train to Lyons. I… I never said good-bye to Greta.”

“Did you ever see her again? Or him?”

“No. Not until today.”

“What happened when you arrived in Lyons?”

“My father met me at the train station.”

“Your—”

“He’d come to visit my mother a fortnight prior. I didn’t know.”

And then it was as if she were no longer in the room with Alexander. The smell of coal swept through the air, the screech of wheels against the train tracks, voices rising from passengers, porters, vendors selling their wares on the platform.

And there stood her father, waiting for her, unaware of her disgrace. His glasses perched on the end of his nose—the wire frames appearing so fragile against his features, his coat flapping about his legs like the wings of a crow. Lines of worry furrowing his brow, concern over his wife, his mother-in-law, his daughter.

“What is it?” Sir Henry had asked. “What’s happened?”

She couldn’t respond, could only fold herself into his arms with the dreadful knowledge it might be the last time he would ever want to embrace her.

And so it had been. But never—thank the good Lord a thousand times over, thank her father a million times—never once since the day Jane was born had Sir Henry Kellaway withheld his affection, his genuine love for the girl.

“Did you tell him?” Alexander asked.

“Actually, I told my mother.” She gave a humorless laugh at the utter absurdity of the statement. “I don’t know why. I hadn’t seen her in several years. She was… they kept her on laudanum. I thought she didn’t even know I was there, but I had a burning need to tell
someone
the truth. So one night I sat beside her bed and confessed all.”

“Did she respond?”

“No. At the time, I didn’t even think she’d heard me. But the next day she told my father.”

“What?”

“She’d heard it all. Understood it, even. And she told my father what I’d told her. My father confronted me that night, and I had to confess a second time.”

“What did he do?”

Lydia fell silent.

If p is a prime number, then for any integer a, ap − a will be evenly divisible by p. The sine of two theta equals two times the—

No.

She suppressed the proofs, the theorems, the identities, the equations. Suppressed everything that made any sense. Forced the dark memory to the surface. The side of her face bloomed with an old, latent pain.

“He was enraged. He…” She touched the side of her face, shuddering as memories ripped through her—the pain of the blow, her father’s shock over his lack of control, her own fierce belief that she deserved any violence he chose to exact.

He inflicted no more—the one strike upon his own daughter was enough to stun him into immobility. For three days, he didn’t speak to her, didn’t look at her. Then one morning he and Charlotte Boyd called Lydia into a private room and explained in cold, blank tones that she would adhere to their plan or be left to fend for herself.

“It was my grandmother’s idea,” she told Alexander. “She said we would remain at the sanatorium for the time being. I think she and my father might have sent me off immediately if they hadn’t realized I was the only person who’d gotten through to my mother—even with such a
disgraceful secret. So my father told me to continue to sit with my mother and try to reach her.”

“Did you?” Alexander asked.

“For several weeks, yes. Until it became clear her condition was worsening. My father spoke with the nuns about keeping me there during my confinement, and they agreed.

“No one else knew about my condition except Dr. Cole, and of course there was no danger of him telling anyone. So my grandmother said that after the child was born, we would tell people it was my mother’s. My father donated a substantial sum to the sanatorium to ensure the nuns went along with that story. That… that drained his finances significantly. He was never able to repair them.”

Her heart pounding with fresh trepidation, Lydia finally lifted her head. Alexander stood across the room, his gaze fixed on her. Wariness shone behind his eyes, but there was none of the censure or disgust she had feared.

“Go on,” he said.

“After the birth, we remained in Lyons for another year. Then when my mother died, we returned to London with the story intact and unbreachable. Jane became the daughter of my mother and father. She became my sister.”

“And you’ve kept the secret all this time.”

“Yes. Although people knew my mother was unwell, they had no reason to believe Jane wasn’t my father’s child. If we hadn’t told them, they still would have assumed she was the legitimate child of my parents. Even our distant relations believed that. Of course, we never wanted to change that assumption. And so we haven’t.”

“You’ve told no one?”

“My grandmother said that if anyone knew the truth, it
would cause irreparable damage to our family’s reputation, and I would have to leave,” Lydia said. “So I was allowed to serve as Jane’s tutor, to continue my work in mathematics, though somewhat anonymously to lessen the chances of encountering Dr. Cole again. Of course, my grandmother has insisted on absolute propriety, irreproachable conduct. Considering the circumstances, I can’t say I blame her. And so it’s been for almost twelve years.”

Until now. Until you.

He paced to the windows and back again. “Jane didn’t know the truth?”

A wave of pain pounded against the numbness around Lydia’s heart. “She… the locket, Alexander. There was another compartment behind the first. My father had it specially made.”

Tears pushed against her eyes. “He’d placed a coin of good fortune inside the locket before he gave it to my mother. The coin was lost long ago, but the locket has held a key ever since Jane was born.

“I kept her birth certificate in a locked copper box, and I put the key inside the locket, in the hidden compartment. No one knew it was there except me.” She glanced at him. “You had the locket for almost three months. You never noticed there was another compartment?”

“No. I didn’t spend untold hours examining the thing. I’ve never even heard of a locket having two compartments.” He frowned. “You didn’t answer my question. Does Jane know the truth?”

Lydia’s tears spilled over. “After you gave her the locket, she found the key. And she figured out that it belonged to the copper box, which has always been in my father’s study.”

Alexander was silent for a moment; then he cursed. “Christ. Is that why she went to meet Cole? Bloody hell, if I hadn’t—”

“No. Don’t do that. Not now.”

The sound of his boots shuffling against the carpet drew her head up. He stopped closer to her. His hands flexed at his sides, tension lining his body like steel.

Oh, so many mistakes. So much pain.

“I’m sorry,” she whispered. “So sorry.”

“I… I was relentless, wasn’t I?” Self-disgust laced his words. “Wouldn’t leave you alone. Couldn’t.”