The Countess Conspiracy (39 page)

All this time, in her secret heart, she’d believed that if the truth came out, everyone would despise her. She’d believed her true self was dark and desperate, that her friends only tolerated her out of an excess of amiability.

But she wasn’t a monster.

Victory wasn’t sweet; it was devastating and incomprehensible. It reduced her to rubble when she could have withstood harsh words.

She kept crying, leaking like a cracked ink-bottle.

“It’s just—they washed my cell with some chemical,” she explained. “To kill the lice. And wouldn’t you know? I think the absence of fumes is bothering my eyes.”

Jane handed her a bright green handkerchief, and nobody contradicted this statement even though it was patently absurd. They held her until she managed to stop embarrassing herself.

“Amanda,” Violet finally asked. “How is it that you are…that you have come…” She couldn’t finish her sentence, couldn’t ask if Lily had changed her mind.

“Grandmama took me,” Amanda said. “Mama said…” There was a longer pause. “Mama said to tell you that if I wish to…” But Amanda couldn’t quite finish her sentence either. She choked back the words and looked away.

Violet wondered if all victories were so bittersweet. She’d won, but at the cost of those she’d loved. Lily, Sebastian… Her heart ached.

“So you’ll be staying with me,” Violet managed calmly.

“For a few years.” Amanda looked away. “Mama told me to tell you that she had to think of the other children. For their sake, she couldn’t…have us any longer. But she told me that when she had the chance, she would…”

Violet swallowed a lump in her throat. “Right,” she said. “Right.” And they spoke no more of it.

There were crowds at the train station they eventually reached, and an even larger mass of people at the London terminal when they arrived three hours later. Someone must have cabled ahead with the news.

Her mother somehow managed to bring her through it all.

Violet did not ask the question that ate at her until she arrived at her home, until they’d made their way through the throng outside her door and shut themselves in a room with the curtains drawn.

“Mama,” she whispered, “where is Sebastian?”

Her mother glanced at her. “Waiting to see if you’ll talk to him.”

She felt her nose wrinkle. “
If
I’ll talk to him? Why would he wonder about that? Is he
stupid?”

“Probably,” her mother said. “Should I send for him?”

“Yes,” she said. And then: “No. I have to take a bath first.”

Her mother looked at her carefully. “Violet, I suspect he won’t care if you smell.”

Violet bowed her head, inhaling. She couldn’t smell herself anymore, and that was a bad sign. If she’d smelled clean, she would have noticed. “I care.”

And so it was almost an hour before Violet walked into her downstairs library and found Sebastian pacing the floor at the far end. They both froze as she entered the door—Sebastian halted mid-step, his body turned half toward her, his eyes lighting, the corners of his mouth curling up in a smile.

And she… Oh, she hadn’t been able to think of Sebastian at all these last days. She would have missed him too much. He’d been mussing his hair as he paced; he looked tired. But then that brilliant smile that she knew all too well took over his face, and all that weariness seemed to flee.

“Violet,” he breathed.

“Sebastian.” She wanted to rush across the room to him, but she still wasn’t sure how he felt. How badly had she hurt him, walking away when he’d begged her not to do so?

He stared at her a moment longer, as if trying to figure out where to start. “I come,” he finally said, “bearing gifts.”

“Gifts?”

“Paperwork, actually. I’ve been acting as your social secretary this last week and a half.”

“Oh.” She felt as if her head was spinning. “Have I been invited to many balls?”

“No, strangely,” he said with good cheer. “Not a one. But King’s College here in London says—well, a great many things, but first, that they’ll waive the residential requirements for receipt of a doctorate, although they will require you to defend a dissertation. Modified versions of your old papers will do.”

She blinked in confusion. Of all the things she had imagined, this was the furthest from her understanding. “Why would they do that?”

“So they can offer you a position.”

“A position! What kinds of fools want to offer me a position?”

“The sort of fools who are trying to build a world-renowned faculty,” Sebastian said with a wink. “Cambridge has also made overtures, although they’ve got a few internal matters to sort out before they can do anything with a woman. It will take them years to figure it out. But there are other choices. Professor Benoit—you know him, he’s from the University of Paris—took a steamer over three days after the news came out. He brought quite a dossier with him, along with an extremely kind letter from the French ambassador promising that in France, the land of liberty, you would never be barbarically jailed for your genius.”

Violet sat down heavily. “He did
not
say that.”

Sebastian strode to a table and shuffled through a handful of papers. He held one out to her, pointing. “Look. Barbaric. Genius. I don’t need to exaggerate that one. If you don’t like France, Harvard—that’s in America—cabled, and—”

“I know where Harvard is,” Violet said dizzily. “Stop. I can’t understand any of this. I was in prison this morning.” She looked up at her ceiling. “It was so peaceful.”

“Do you want to go back?”

“It was quiet. Nobody wanted anything of me. To go from that to…” She spread her hands. “I don’t know what to do, Sebastian.”

He grew quiet. “Well, if you like, I can hide you in my garret. I’ll slide a bowl of gruel through a slot early in the morning, and we can pretend to have you serve out your sentence.”

She choked back a laugh.

“There, there,” he said. “Isn’t that better?”

“Success is bewildering.” She let out a breath. “Sebastian… About you…”

He looked away uncomfortably, and she felt her heart sink. That was her answer. Of course he was still her friend. Of course he’d fielded the offers. But more than that… A man did not make the kind of plea that Sebastian had and then forgive it when the woman he loved threw it back in his face.

But what he said was, “I’m sorry I couldn’t go out to meet you this morning. I wanted to. But—I’ve been busy—and Benedict…”

Of course. His brother was ill, in addition to all the work that Violet had made for him.

“He’s come around, then?” Violet asked carefully.

“Well.” Sebastian didn’t look at her. “We’re talking. I’m making him laugh. And it doesn’t do any good to bother him about Harry or anything else, so I thought…”

Violet found herself standing. “This world.” She threw her hands in the air. “It is utterly mad. Crazy. Stupid. Backward and inside out.”

He was staring at her with a strange look on his face. “Violet? Is something wrong?”

“Yes,” Violet said. “Everything is wrong. Am I raving? I have earned the right to rave.” She pointed at Sebastian. “Sit there. You have earned the right to sit there.”

He looked even more confused.

“Are you leaving?” he asked in disbelief.

“Temporarily,” Violet said. “Just…wait. Wait here.”

Chapter Twenty-six

V
IOLET’S HOME WAS SURROUNDED
; a quick peek through the window sufficed to show that there would be no way to sneak past the crowd.

At least… There was no way to sneak out the front.

She retrieved her bag and crept outside, down the servants’ stair and into her garden. The gate behind the ivy opened at her touch, and she slid into the gap between the walls. The roar of the crowd faded, bit by bit, as she inched her way along the passage. By the time she came to his property, she heard only a muted buzz.

The crowds didn’t know the properties were connected, then.

Excellent. There was nothing to do now but for Violet to brazen it out.

She marched around to the side yard where Sebastian kept his mews. His driver stood near a side door, smoking and talking to a footman. They looked up at Violet’s approach. The footman dropped his cigarillo as she approached.

“Your Ladyship!” The driver straightened, tapping the ashes in his pipe out onto the gravel underfoot. “Er… What brings you here?”

They’d undoubtedly heard the whole sordid tale of her imprisonment, but if that was the case, they knew their own master’s involvement in the affair. And they were too well-trained to blurt out anything like
What are you doing here?
or
Are you an escaped convict?

“Mr. Malheur sent me,” Violet lied shamelessly. “I have an errand to run and my street is a little crowded at the moment.”

“Ah, most likely it is.”

“He offered up your services. If it would please you?”

“Of course, my lady.” The driver frowned. “Where to?”

She’d told Sebastian to wait in her library. Obviously she hadn’t thought this through. The afternoon was more than half over, and her destination was ten miles away. He was going to be waiting a very long time.

Nothing to be done about that.

“To Mr. Benedict Malheur’s house,” Violet said. “Of course.”

They didn’t complain or ask questions. They simply hitched the horses, handed her into the carriage, and then left.

Violet had brought her bag with her; that meant she had knitting. She pulled out the mass of yarn—a thing she hadn’t worked on in weeks now—and stared at it. A scarf. A scarf of green and gray stripes. That’s what she’d been making. She counted the rows of green to remind herself where she’d left off—five more before she switched—and started to knit once more.

“H
E’S NOT RECEIVING VISITORS
,” the butler told Violet.

She stood on the wide front steps, Sebastian’s carriage behind her, and blinked at the man in front of her.

She’d been in prison this morning. She’d traveled almost a hundred miles, had heard thousands of voices scream her name. The sunlight was failing, and if she turned around now, she’d have nothing to show for her journey—nothing but Sebastian’s baffled questions.

She was not about to be turned away by a solitary butler on a point of etiquette.

Still, there was no reason to be rude. Yet.

“Naturally,” Violet said. “But I’m not a visitor.”

The man squinted at her.

“I grew up practically next door,” she said as sweetly as she could manage under the circumstances. “When I was five, Benedict Malheur saved me from a plague of frogs brought on by the Jimmesons half a mile away. I came as soon as I heard he was ill. Under the circumstances, I hardly count as a visitor.”

The man frowned at her. “Here,” she said, handing over a card. “Take this to him. Let him decide.”

He took the thick paper in his hands. Not a flicker of expression showed as he glanced at her name.

Maybe he didn’t know who she was. Although that seemed unlikely. More likely, he knew that Violet’s name had been linked with Sebastian’s, and he’d understood the connection.

In either case, he could not leave the Countess of Cambury waiting on the doorstep. So he ushered her inside.

“You may wait in the parlor,” he said. “I’ll go see if the master’s awake and well enough to talk.”

This, she understood, was the polite way to say “I’ll pretend to ask before sending you away.”

Still, she nodded pleasantly. “Thank you,” Violet said, and settled herself into a comfortable chair. To set him at ease, she took her knitting from her bag and started on the next row.

Knitting makes even the most conniving soul look innocent.
Her mother had it right. For some reason, butlers rarely suspected that a woman who had started knitting would stop and sneak about a house. Idiocy on their part; they were knitting needles, not shackles.

Violet focused on her needles, purling as if she had nothing on her mind except the flow of yarn between her fingers. Out of the corner of her eye, she watched the man go up the stairs. He turned around a bend and disappeared from her sight.

She dumped her needles in her bag and carefully crept after him.