Half the crowd around him was female—unusual at most scientific talks, but hardly out of the ordinary for him.
Violet sometimes wondered if people thought of her that way—as a female who had been trying to attract Sebastian’s attention for years. As if she, too, waited for his eyes to fall on her, waiting for him to see her and only her. Her sister teased her on that score often enough.
If matters had been otherwise, perhaps she might have been. But she was what she was, and there was no point crying over milk that had long since gone rancid. Instead, she pushed her way into his inner circle.
From her seat near the middle of the hall, his features had been a comforting blur. Now she could make out his expression, and she felt subtly alarmed.
He didn’t look well. His cheeks were flushed; his eyes, usually dark and sparkling with humor, had gone flat. The expressive tilt of his mouth had flattened to grave seriousness. He looked like he had a fever.
“You’re wrong,” a big man was saying. He towered over Sebastian, his meaty fists curled at his sides like two ham hocks. “You’re a self-important bag of wind. Every natural philosopher since Newton has been damned. Damned, I tell you.”
A few years ago, Sebastian would have laughed off such an outrageous statement. Now, he simply looked at the fellow. “Thank you very much,” he said, as if by rote. As if he’d memorized the words, and now threw them out like a false lure, hoping to distract the man long enough to make his way out. “That means so much to me.”
“Why, you insolent cur!” The big man took a step forward.
Violet let out a great breath and slid in front of the fellow, taking hold of Sebastian’s sleeve. Look at me. Look at me. It will all be better if you just look at me.
He turned toward her, but as he did, the last trace of false humor slipped from his face.
Violet had been friends with Sebastian a long time. She’d thought she knew him. That he cheerily waved off the public strain of constant criticism, that he thought nothing of that stream of insults and threats. She had to think that, or she’d never have put him under such a strain.
In that instant, she realized how wrong she had been.
Violet swallowed. “Sebastian,” she said, fumbling for words.
“What?” he snarled.
“You were brilliant.” She looked into his eyes, wishing she could make everything better. “Utterly bril—”
Something flared in his eyes—something dark and furious.
It had been the wrong thing to say. She knew it the moment the words came out of her mouth. How must she have sounded to him? Awful. Self-congratulatory.
They were surrounded by a crowd. His knuckles grew white at his side, and he lifted his nose in the air.
“Fuck you, Violet.” His voice was a low, savage growl. “Fuck. You.”
They’d been in this conspiracy for so long that sometimes even Violet forgot the truth. She remembered it now. She felt it in every cell of her being.
That sense of invisibility vanished. Violet sometimes thought that her position in society was something like a fallen log in the middle of a forest: She might not be picturesque, but at least she was accepted as part of the landscape. So long as she stayed still, nobody would discover the truth.
Right now, Sebastian glared at her—utterly livid, as if he were about to take a hatchet to that log. To expose its rotten core to the world, to show them that inside, Violet was a dark, awful, filthy thing, infested by many-legged creatures. If he spoke one word more, everyone would know.
She never would have thought that Sebastian would betray her. But this stranger glaring at her through Sebastian’s eyes? She had no idea what he might do.
Her hands grew cold. She could almost see that nightmare playing out before them. He would spill out the truth in front of everyone. Newspapers would trumpet it within the day; she’d be ruined by noon tomorrow, cast out completely.
The vast crowd seemed nothing but shadows around her. She could scarcely breathe. Filthy, she could hear people whispering. Reprobate. Her gorge rose. Violet would be ruined, and she would take her mother, her sister, her nieces and nephews with her.
Sebastian’s nostrils flared, and he turned away from her to talk to another man, leaving everything he could have said hidden safely behind silence.
Violet couldn’t help herself. She gasped in relief. She was safe. And so long as no one ever found out, she’d stay that way.
THE MORNING SUN BEAT DOWN VICIOUSLY, slicing into Sebastian’s eyes as he looked out over the garden. The rose arbor caught those early rays of sunlight, and the beds of dew-spangled flowers glistened in response. It was damnably pretty. He might even have enjoyed it, were it not for the persistent throb of his head.
If he hadn’t known better, he’d have imagined he was suffering from the ill effects of drink. Except he hadn’t had anything stronger than tea in the last forty-eight hours. No, something else plagued him, and unlike a few bottles of wine, it could not be fixed by an efficacious potion.