“I wouldn’t go flashing that around if I were you,” Silas said, appearing from nowhere. He had a cigarette in one hand and a full champagne glass in the other. “This is for you,” he said. “You were looking a little flushed dancing with Markham out there. I thought maybe you were thirsty.”
I accepted the drink, although I didn’t tell him that the flush was from arousal and not exertion. He probably already knew.
He leaned against the railing, still smoking. “If people see you with that envelope, mark my words: there will be gossip. Not that everyone isn’t gossiping about you right now anyway, but it’s all good gossip so far. With that envelope, you will create a reputation that will be hard to undo.”
“Is the Baron that reviled?”
Silas nearly choked on his cigarette smoke. “Reviled? Hardly. The Baron’s parties are the most exclusive parties in London. Everyone is dying to get in, and so of course those that don’t get invited are bitter beyond belief. But it’s the bitterness of the jealous. Those same people pander to the Baron and his friends constantly in order to be included in one of his fetes.”
“Even though they know the parties he throws are not quite…proper?”
“It’s because of that. It’s London, Ivy, in the most exciting century to be alive. Why wouldn’t people want to have a little fun? And the Baron guards his parties and his guests’ privacy very carefully, so you can be assured that you can sit before the rector on Sunday without sweating.”
I tucked the envelope into my dress, still undecided about whether I would go or not. I wasn’t worried about my reputation so much as myself. If I went, would I find myself drawn to all the things I’d been trying to avoid? I knew I would.
Such temptation.
I turned to Silas. “What is Mr. Markham doing?”
“I beg your pardon?”
“Why is he being so…” I searched for the right word. “Well-behaved?”
“Are you complaining?”
My cunt still hummed with the need to be fucked, but my mind was mostly clear. Mr. Markham wanted me, but he was willing to do it on my terms. He was willing to keep himself apart from me. I could barely stand it, so I knew it had to be next to impossible for him. “I’m not complaining.”
“He loves you.”
“And I love him. But that doesn’t make us right for each other.”
“What does that even mean?”
I stared into the garden. “We don’t bring out the best in each other. And he has a lot of ‘not the best’ inside of him.”
“I suggest you examine your definition of ‘best,’ Ivy. Are you holding your relationship to your rubric or to the rubric you think you should have?”
I frowned.
“How fully do you want to live your life? With all parts of yourself awake and feeling? Or with only the parts that some people think are decent? Jules woke you up—all of you—and now you’re trying to go back to sleep. Do you really think that’s the wisest?” Silas took a final pull off his cigarette and then flicked it onto the ground. “I hope to see you at the Baron’s.”
“I’ll think about it,” I said faintly, turning his words over in my mind.
Was I really trying to go back to sleep?
The envelope burned a hole through my dress as Esther and I rode home. I was wrestling with this massive, planet-like question as we rolled through the London streets. Had Julian really woken me up? Was this a part of me that had always been around, simply waiting dormant for the right stimulus?
And if so, was it even possible to disown that part of myself?
“I heard the best gossip about your ex-fiancé today,” Esther confided.
My ears perked up, but my mind was still fumbling with these questions that Silas had raised, all while I felt impossibly conscious of the envelope poking my corset through my dress. The choice to embrace the wild, sensuous Ivy. It was literally pricking at me.
“Well, it’s not so much about him as about his first wife, Arabella Whitefield. Do you know of her?”
I thought of her sad-eyed miniature in the library. “Yes, I know of her.”
“One of the wealthiest families in Yorkshire. Anyway, apparently, her father Josiah Whitefield was quite the philanderer. Bastards sprinkled all over the North. And before he died, he was raising one of them in his house. Can you imagine? Poor Arabella. Growing up next to a bastard.”
