A Study In Seduction

chapter Twenty-Nine




Commotion flooded St. Martin’s Hall—shouts, thundering footsteps, the shrill noise of constables’ whistles.

The throng from outside mobbed the foyer and lower floor, though whether the confusion started inside or out, Alexander didn’t know. A man yelled for order. Women shrieked. Windows cracked under the impact of thrown objects.

Alexander pushed Lydia and Jane into a corner of the darkened gallery and prayed they would be safe. “Stay here. Do not move until I return.”

Outside, police and a detachment of infantry swarmed the street, trying to restore order. Alexander helped pull the wounded out of the way, bile rising in his throat at the sight of a bleeding man lying amid the rubble. He grasped the man beneath the arms and dragged him to an empty doorstep.

“All right?” he asked. He yanked off his cravat and pressed it to the wound on the man’s head.

The man nodded, his eyes glazed. Alexander yelled for a constable, then went back into the hall. Crowds of people surged through the displays and sent them crashing to the floor. Bird feathers floated in the air, musical instruments lay shattered, the model schoolhouses smashed. Alexander’s heart plummeted at the sight of the destruction.

He pushed through the crowd to the globe display, where two constables stood over Cole’s prone body. Bits of paper tore and glass crunched beneath Alexander’s feet. He turned away from the congealed blood.

He searched the broken glass, the splintered wood. His fist closed around a piece of paper stuck beneath a globe of the stars. He shoved it into his pocket, then ran back out into the street.


They sat in silence amid the chaos. Shouts and noise flew upward from the lower floor. Several people ran past in the gallery, but Lydia and Jane remained concealed in the shadows of the hearth.

Lydia clasped Jane to her chest, Jane’s arms wrapped around her neck. Her small body rippled with tremors.

Memories flashed through Lydia’s mind of holding Jane as an infant, a toddler. All those years of watching her daughter grow and learn—her first steps, first words, her endless curiosity. Cherishing Jane’s smiles and laughter. Loving every moment of time spent together.

She pressed her lips to Jane’s cheek. How she wished her own mother had experienced such joy. And perhaps… perhaps in those first five years of Lydia’s life, she had.

“I love you,” Lydia whispered. “Whatever happens, please know that. I have and will always love you more with every beat of my heart. You are everything to me.”

Her daughter didn’t respond. Instead she sought Lydia’s hand with her own and curled their fingers together.


Alexander wiped sweat and grime from his forehead with the back of his hand. Beside him, Sebastian hauled a woman away from the crowded street. Somehow his brother had found him, and they worked through the commotion together. They brought people back into the hall offices, yelled at others to get inside, lock the doors, close the shutters.

Over the course of several hours, the mob dispersed. Destruction lay in its wake—shards of glass and wood littered the streets, and broken wagons lay among scattered rubbish. Darkness fell in a heavy sheet as the noise began to settle.

Alexander dragged a hand down his scratched face. He and Sebastian returned to St. Martin’s Hall. Fear tightened his chest as he went up the stairs to collect Jane and Lydia. They still sat huddled together near the hearth, pale but appearing unharmed.

Relief and gratitude streamed through Alexander, banishing his fatigue. He hauled Jane into his arms. Sebastian extended a hand to help Lydia to her feet, and they went downstairs.

“Oh, Alexander.” Lydia’s whisper of dismay cut through him as she saw the disaster that had once been the exhibition.

Outside, people still milled around the street, but the police had restored order and blocked off the entrance to the hall. Still holding Jane with one arm, Alexander pulled Lydia to him with the other. The tightness in his chest eased a little as her body pressed against his side.

“Lord Northwood.” Sir George Cooke of the Society council strode toward him, his expression grim. “The police inspector is heading to Mount Street now. You’d best meet him there. Hadley is on his way as well.”

With Sir George accompanying them, they returned to Alexander’s town house, where the servants rose in a bustle of activity. A doctor was summoned, warm water and clean clothes procured, tea and brandy offered. Lydia sent Jane upstairs with the housekeeper to look after her and wait for the doctor.

“Preliminary reports, Lord Northwood, indicate that you are responsible for causing the riot.” Police Inspector Denison peered at Alexander with a faint air of sympathy.

“Which,” Lord Hadley added, “destroyed the interior of the hall and the Society’s exhibition. We’ll have to send word to the lenders and the foreign commissioners.”

Alexander tried to muster up some concern at the ominous tone to the man’s voice, but he was too tired. He rubbed his burning eyes.

“And?”

“We’ve got to conduct an investigation, my lord,” Denison replied. “We’ve statements from several people who witnessed your altercation with Mr.”—he consulted his pad—“Cole. They saw you push him over the railing.”

“No.” Lydia’s voice sounded choked. “No, Inspector, that’s not correct. That man was after my… my sister. Lord Northwood was protecting us both. He was trying to—”

“Miss Kellaway, no need for a defense at the moment,” Denison interrupted. “More will come to light during the course of the investigation. However, I ought to warn you that the newspaper correspondents will be seeking people to give their account of events, and his lordship ain’t appeared to be cast in a favorable light.”

“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.”

“In a secret part of my heart, Alexander,” Lydia said, “I didn’t want you to.”

She stood, aching to touch him and knowing she could not. “But now you understand why a marriage between us can never be possible. I admit that for a brief moment, I believed it might work, but… well, that’s a fool’s errand, isn’t it? And never let anyone accuse either one of us of being a fool.”

Unable to help herself, she stepped to him and reached up to press her lips against his unshaven cheek. He turned his head, his mouth meeting hers in a kiss so light it almost didn’t exist. And yet a thousand regrets passed between them with that single touch.

Lydia turned away, her heart cracking.

“I love you,” Alexander said.

She made it through the door before the tears fell again.