This realization must have shown on my face, because Silas smiled and clapped me on the shoulder. “That’s the spirit! After all, what do you have to lose?”
If I had ever regretted not having a proper debut in town, I didn’t now. The last three weeks had been a flurry of afternoon teas, dinner parties that lasted well past midnight, and balls that lasted even longer than that. Not to mention the dress fittings, visits to the haberdasher and milliner and the endless hours I spent being prodded and primped by Esther’s staff of capable maids.
I’d tried to beg off. I was tired, I wasn’t feeling well, and I could barely hold a conversation longer than five minutes. But Esther was a formidable opponent, either ignoring my complaints or arguing with them until I was worn down—which admittedly wasn’t difficult. I’d felt so bled dry after ending the engagement, as if severing myself from Mr. Markham had in turn severed something essential in me. I was a machine that no longer worked properly, a watch without cogs, a compass without a magnet. Esther moved me from place to place and changed me from dress to dress like I was a doll, and I let her, because inside I felt just as vacant and inanimate.
When I had seen Silas two nights since, I had almost wept with relief. Talking to someone who knew Mr. Markham, who would see him again, who reminded me so much of him—it was cathartic. And awful. And wonderful.
So now, at whatever terrible ball Esther had brought me to tonight, I felt a similar feeling of relief and excitement when I saw Silas across the room, bracketed by the blond pillars of beauty that were Rhoda and Zona.
“…Which is precisely why Oxford is making a mistake letting the women in to study.” I realized the speaker of this sentence was talking to me, one of the foppish young men that seemed all to eager to seize onto Esther’s introductions. They seemed so soft—all striped pants and coiffed mustaches. The kind of men who, when married, would roll on top of their wives once a month and blindly poke for less than a minute before squirting and then falling asleep. My lip curled a little. These men were so unlike my Julian had been. I would never marry one.
Mustache mistook my expression as sympathetic disgust for his chosen conversational topic. “Exactly! You seem a reasonable woman, Miss Leavold. The fairer sex does not have the strength for that kind of rigorous study.” His chest swelled. “That is of course, why they should be shepherded into the care of a husband directly after leaving home. To leave home for school and then spend several unmarried years studying…it seems like such a dangerous undertaking.”
My eyes were following Silas from across the room. I had to go to him, I had to know if he had spoken to Mr. Markham since the other night. I was so hungry for any mention of him, even just his name would be a kind of psychic salve.
“Girls do it for boarding school, do they not?” I asked Mustache politely, my gaze still on Silas.
He smiled at me as if I were simple. “But a boarding school is not in such close proximity to a boys’ school, Miss Leavold. The collegiate scholars will all be on the same campus—it seems a risky proposition.”
“For what? For a girl’s virginity?”
Oh, if Thomas could see me now. He’d always hated how direct and tactless I could be with my words, and I could tell by Mustache’s slack jaw that I’d really outdone myself. Nobody ever even alluded to such things in polite company. But I didn’t care. I didn’t care about Mustache’s good impression or the good impression of anyone in this room. I just wanted to find Silas and fill my empty heart with crusts of memories and stale news.
“Miss Leavold—” Mustache stammered.
“Excuse me,” I said, leaving him to be shocked alone.
But when I pushed my way past a cluster of guests, expecting to see Silas on the other side, I found that someone else had come to the ball. Someone else stood, leaning against the wall, talking to Silas and the women and another clump of people I didn’t know.
His black evening jacket stretched across his broad shoulders, narrowing into tails that highlighted the slender torque of his waist. The matching trousers clung temptingly to his thighs, and his long fingers twitched at his sides—the only sign of restlessness that I could detect. His posture was easy, and I could hear his laugh booming across the floor—a sound that made my heart flip not once, but twice.
He hadn’t seen me, not yet, and while I should have been able to think rationally through this, I could not. All I could think about was getting away, fleeing for cover.
I backed up, eyes only on Mr. Markham, bumped into a matron and her half-blind husband, and then turned and fairly ran for the door. There was a terrace here, I knew, a small paved area that led out into a pleasant cluster of trees and flowers, and I needed to be outside. I needed to breathe.
Outside, the September air was cool and moist, a light fog rolling in from the river to fill in alleys and niches and the hidden spaces in between trees. There was hardly anyone out here, just a handful of women fanning themselves after an exerting dance and a couple trying to steal a moment away from their chaperones.
Mr. Markham was here. Here. With me.
But not for me. I chewed on my lip. He hadn’t come and found me, he hadn’t written ahead of time to tell me he was going to be present. In fact, it seemed almost as if he had just come to be with his friends. Had he?
Why was I so disappointed at that thought? I had been the one to walk away, to claim that we needed separate lives. So could I really be upset that he was indeed living a separate life?
Yes, I thought fiercely. Yes, because I had spent the last three weeks in torment, in agony, and it looked like he had barely thought of me at all.
Yes, because even though I kept telling myself I had done the right thing, the safe thing, I wasn’t sure that I had. In fact, I had the unnerving suspicion that I hadn’t done the right thing, for myself or for him.
But what could I do? How could I make myself feel okay with what he was—with what I was? No. As always, it was easier to run. Ea
sier to hide. And now I wanted to run from here altogether. I would find Esther and demand to go home, and then I would force myself to sleep and to forget that I had seen his face once again.
I turned to go back into the silk and noise of the ballroom, but there was someone in my way. Someone tall and lean and with green eyes that glowed like northern lights in the dark.
My breath left me at the same time a jolt of want shot through me, making my cunt pulse. My body knew what it wanted, my body had no reservations. It wanted to be taken roughly in hand, kneaded and licked and fucked. And just the thought of it drove out all other thoughts.
“Miss Leavold,” he said, inclining his head. His voice was formal and distant. I cringed inwardly at the sound of it, hating that we had this new distance between us.
“Mr. Markham,” I whispered.
