“Aye. I can think of no other reason that he would have stolen the rifle scope.”
She could feel her heart beat hard, doubling, tripling in pace. Her brain tried to keep up, to take in the facts. The man she’d corresponded with these last three years had deceived her, had lied to her for information and meant to use what she’d told him to workagainsteverything she believed in.
“I think you can help us,” Strathrannoch went on. “Write to this Belvoir’s. Find out what they know. And while we wait for their response—let me look at your letters and see what information Davis might have let slip.” He looked at her, his multihued eyes hard and direct on her face. “Please, lass. I need your help.”
Her heart clenched. Her throat constricted. Speech seemed suddenly beyond her, as absurd and impossible as flight.
She leapt to her feet. “No,” she got out. Her voice sounded strangled. “I’m sorry. No.”
Georgiana stood as well. “Lydia?”
She felt humiliation crawling across her skin as she looked at the three men who’d been so kind to her. Mr. Palmer, Mr. Trefor. Lord Strathrannoch.
She was going to let all of them down.
She could not change her life. This was what she was—a foolishspinster. A woman who wrote pamphlets instead of living. Who blushed and cried and fainted too easily, whose emotions swam through her body like physical things.
“I can’t,” she said. She felt almost frantic to get away. She wrestled with the blue-and-green plaid Mr. Palmer had given her, trying to pull it off her body while Bacon turned bemused circles at her feet. “I’m sorry. You don’t want me here. I’ll write to Belvoir’s. I promise I’ll write to them. I’ll tell them to send you whatever they know. But I cannot—I cannot—”
She couldn’t stay here.
She had imagined Strathrannoch Castle so many times—had pictured herself here,livinghere—a marriage of practicality and convenience, to be sure, but nonetheless a marriage. Her own off-kilter happily ever after.
Had she really thought she could change her life? Upon what basis would such a mad fancy have seemed possible?
She knew herself. She could scarcely manage the trials of a routine dinner party. Why had she thought she could succeed at something as outrageous as this?
She finally managed to get the plaid off her body, letting it fall onto the chaise behind her. “I’m sorry,” she said again.
There was no sense in trying to control the shaking of her hands or her voice, but she picked her way carefully across the floor, her letters clutched in her hands. At least this time she would not swoon.
“Miss Hope-Wallace,” Mr. Palmer said gently.
And at the same time, Strathrannoch’s voice rasped out from behind her: “Wait. Wait a moment.”
But she couldn’t wait. She couldn’t even turn back to look at him, or the burn at the backs of her eyes would turn into hot flooding tears of embarrassment.
That, Lydia felt, would be too far. The full cornucopia of indignity.
She could faint. She could vomit. She could make a perfect ninny of herself byproposingto a complete stranger.
But she would not cry in front of all of them, in front of their gentle sympathy and fresh-brewed tea.
Instead, she hiked up her skirts in one hand and ran.
Chapter 4
… The censures which may ensue from striking into a path of literature rarely trodden by my sex will not cause me to keep silent in the cause of liberty.
—from Lydia’s private copy of Catharine Macaulay’sTHE HISTORY OF ENGLAND FROM THE ACCESSION OF JAMES I, underlined thrice
Lydia could recall clearly the first time she’d seen one of her pamphlets in the hands of readers.
It had been 1816—a late July afternoon, hot and blue. Her lace petticoats had clung to her legs, and her heart had nearly stopped in her chest when she’d recognized the crisp printing. Two matrons, seated beside each other on a bench, had bent their heads together over Lydia’s words.
One of the women had looked around as if uncertain of her audience, and had cupped her hand protectively over the pamphlet. The other had hesitated, then folded the tract and tucked it away in her reticule, her expression caught somewhere between reticence and desperate, brilliant-edged hope.
That piece had argued for the expansion of the rights of women to sue for divorce. In Lydia’s lifetime, onlytwowomen had been successful in their divorce suits in England—a breathtaking double standard that Lydia had become determined to change. She’d worked the language over with Selina Kent, the duchess who ran Belvoir’s Library, again and again, and then Selina had commissioned a satirical print mocking the opponents of reform and their many paramours.
