He was smiling at her, obviously expecting her to laugh, but instead Margo felt sick. It was too close to what she had done to Matilda, what had driven Matilda to elope with Ashford and she—
Shame was a hot burning sensation in her face and her fingers, and regret tasted sour in her mouth.
“Margo? What’s the matter?”
Bollocks, Henry was so bloodyperceptive.It was as though he had a tuning fork that caught the shades of her moods.
“I’d rather not say,” she said, and now she was sitting as rigidly as Henry. Every bump of the carriage felt like it rattled her bones.
Henry didn’t say anything for a long moment.
She chanced a glance at him from underneath her lashes. He was scowling rather fiercely at his poor waistcoat.
“Margo,” he said finally, “I don’t mean to pry. But… has Ashford—that is, have you and Ashford—” He broke off, clenched his jaw, then tried again. “If Ashford has left you indisposed in some way, Margo, you can—”
“Good Lord!” Did Henry think she waspregnant? ByAshford? She wasn’t sure whether to laugh or vomit. “Thatwouldbe a tangle, but no. No. Ashford’s—bloody hell, Henry,I’vedone wrong here. Not Ashford. At least… I hardly know…”
She trailed off. God. She didn’t really want to share her shame with Henry—most especially not with Henry—but on the other hand, Henry probably ought to know what exactly Matilda had gotten entangled in.
Margobarely knew what Matilda had gotten entangled in.
“All right,” she said. “Fine. Henry, I’m so bloody humiliated over this. I know I’ve done wrong. All right? So please—do not make it worse.”
Henry didn’t say anything, only waited patiently for her to continue, which somehow made her feel both comforted and faintly resentful.
“I followed Matilda. We’d gone to one of Denham’s routs—not really our set, but Matilda had a burning desire to look at some sculpture in his gardens—and she’d all but vanished for half the night. It was peculiar, and then she started acting evenmorepeculiar—not telling me things. Holing up in her bedchamber and emerging with ink on her hands.”
It had been so strange, not to be in Matilda’s confidence. They did not always get along, but they were painfully intimate with one another, half in each other’s skin most of the time. It had come, Margo supposed, of how they’d clung to one another after their parents’ death, after they’d been sent to school and then, quite horribly, sent down less than a year after. Aunt Lavinia had despaired of their ever becoming ladies—recalcitrant hoydens, she had called them—and almost without realizing it, they had decided it was better to flout society’s rules than to fail at trying to follow them.
“It was peculiar,” she said again, “so one night I listened at the wall between our chambers, and when I heard her go out at one o’clock in the morning, I followed her. She walked straight out of Mayfair and into St. James’s Park—”
“Good Christ,” Henry said, “in the middle of the night?”
Margo waved a hand dismissively. “I carried a pistol.”
He made a choking noise.
“I didn’t need touseit.”
Henry did not look particularly reassured.
“In any case, I watched her walk straight up to Lord Ashford. I recognized him straightaway”—Ashford wore facial hair, which was startlingly out of the ordinary, almost as unexpected as the large white scar that knifed through his beard on the left side of his face—“and then I saw them embrace. He led her off into a darker part of the park, and I turned and fled back to Number Twelve.”
“That’s not so very bad,” Henry said. “Conversation probably would have been preferable to voyeurism, but not so terribly shameful.”
Margo made an inarticulate negation. “I haven’t even started on the bad part yet, Henry, believe me.”
He winced.
“The next day, we had plans to attend one of Lady Montmorency’s midnight card parties”—she heard Henry stifle a groan; the card parties occasionally verged on orgies—“and Matilda was dead set on our arriving separately. I knew—I justknewshe was planning to meet Ashford there. So I arrived ahead of her. I wore one of her favorite gowns, and I—” She forced the words past numb lips. “I pretended to be Matilda. I went right up to Ashford and acted as though I knew him intimately.”
She gave Henry a pleading glance, though she had not intended to try to defend herself. “I only meant to try to talk to him, Henry! I wanted to see what he said to her, whether there was anything in his manner beyond desire or madness. I hoped that perhaps he was different from what the rumors said, that he had atendrefor her, maybe that helovedher. But he—he—”
Her face was hot, and she pressed her fingers to her cheeks. “He thought I was Matilda, of course. He pulled me into an alcove and kissed me and told me that he wanted to see me—her—to seeMatildatied to his bed with the strings of her corset, and he wanted to—to—” Dear God, she was going to die of humiliation. “To use ariding cropon her. He probably realized it was me at that point, because I slapped his face and then ran home like an idiotic rabbit.”
Henry had not said a single word, but he was staring at her with an unreadable expression on his face.
“I know it was awful!” she said. “I know I shouldn’t have done it. I confronted Matilda as soon as she returned. I told her what Ashford had said, told her I was just trying to protect her, but she was furious. She told me after everything we’d done together, I had some nerve to cast judgment on her.”
