“Are you all right?” he asked, not sure what to make of her countenance. “Are the wedding preparations coming along?”
“They are coming along. And I’m very well.” She flexed her fingers and coaxed an even greater sparkle from the diamond. “How can I not be? My dearest one has just given me the ring of any woman’s dream.”
There was something in her tone that wasn’t quite all right. He should ask more questions, massage the problem out of her, and put her mind at ease—it was not too early for him to give her comfort and succor. But the guilt in him chose to latch on to her words. She said she was very well, didn’t she? Then all must be well, and he could console himself that his unfaithful thoughts were entirely without significance in the greater scheme of things.
“Will you stay for dinner?” she asked.
“I’d love to, but I can’t tonight,” he said, rising. “I’ve called a meeting at the club over dinner. May I have the pleasure of taking you for a drive tomorrow afternoon instead?”
“Of course. I shall look forward to it.”
“As shall I.”
He kissed her on her cheek and took his leave, departing her house with a sense of escape: he need not face his fiancée—or his conscience—for another twenty-four hours.
He had not done anything wrong, but God did he want to, and the list of wrongs he wanted to commit with Madame Durant rivaled a Dickens novel in length. It didn’t seem to matter at all that she was a woman of questionable character and ill-considered judgment; he wanted her as a caught fish craved the sea.
He wouldn’t touch her. And he would send her away after the wedding. But for now he allowed himself to crave, and to dream of an existence without fiancées, rigid social classes, old fears of the taint in his blood, or anything else that would hold him back from joining her in that warm, deep tub.
I was thinking of you. You, sir.
Verity stood on the outside steps leading down to the service entrance and waited for Mr. Somerset to return home.
A London fog was always an unwelcome visitor. It smelled of slop and had the wet fingers of a horny drunk, poking into tender parts where a fully clothed woman didn’t think mere weather could penetrate.
But the fogs she’d known in her years in London were gentle mists compared to the thing that had materialized this evening. While she’d cooked dinner, traffic in the street above had moved as if underwater—slink and slither of darker forms in a soupy opacity. As the evening wore on, visibility had reduced further. Light from the nearest street lamp was now a dim orange halo that illuminated only itself. And she could barely see her own hand when she held her arm out straight.
She was worried. He should be back already. Had Wallace become hopelessly lost? The fog was the color and consistency of a cheese soufflé, the kind of atmospheric obliteration that had pedestrians walk open-eyed into the Thames. It would be all too easy to misjudge the distance and miss a turning.
The vapors kissed her cheeks with icy lips. She pulled her shawl tighter about her person and lit a cigarette, preferring the harsh acridness of tobacco to the softer smother of the miasma.
She didn’t hear his steps until he was almost directly above her, the fog curling thick and yellow around the edge of his frock coat. Though he couldn’t see her—didn’t even know she was there—her heart pounded as if he’d caught her naked again, her hand between her thighs.
The entire day she’d passed in a daze, interrupted now and then by bouts of severe anxiety—not that he would want his cook, but that he wouldn’t. Now that they’d met—after a manner—and that she’d professed her desire for him, it would be intolerable if he didn’t return it in some measure.
Keys jangled. Then stopped. Then the tinny sound of something metallic brushing against stone—the buttons of his frock coat on the half wall at either side of the front steps?
“Who’s there?” he asked. In French.
Fear needled her, until she realized that it was only the cigarette that had given away her presence, the lit end of it far more visible than her black-clad person.
“Bonsoir, Monsieur,” she answered. Her voice sounded different to her ears when she spoke the Proven?al French of Monsieur David—lower, scratchier, more vigorous than refined.
The keys jangled again, this time against the top of the half wall. “Madame Durant,” he acknowledged her, calmly, courteously. “You received my message?”
“Yes, sir.” The meeting that he’d scheduled for the evening had to be canceled due to the fog. And instead of rescheduling it at the Reform Club, he’d invited six ministers and MPs to his house the day after next to confer over breakfast. “I’ll have everything ready.”
“See that you do.”