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“You’ll tell someone,” he vowed. “If not me, you’ll start with the justice in Mawbyn.”
“And end up at the court of assizes, like Joan Traymayne?” She managed a bitter smile. No, she couldn’t melt into the greenery. More shame awaited her.
“Lavinia what?” He repeated the question, and she blazed back at him, her sudden anger hot and welcome, a source of strength. Self-pity didn’t stiffen her spine, not like rage. She needed this fit of temper.
“Just Lavinia.” She let the clod of worms drop and balled her other hand, concentrating on the small sharp point of the hook pricking into her palm as she glared full in his face. “Or must a woman bear always the name of her father or her husband? What if the woman has come to regret both of those men with all her heart?”
Yardley. Cranbrook. Those names were bondage, brought her nothing but humiliation.
She twisted her lips. “You approve women rejecting all sorts of normal things if they’re intellectual about it. How’s this? I am just Lavinia, because that’s my way of participating in the querelle des femmes. Are you satisfied? Does that meet the standard of your snobbery?”
“It does not.” He sounded deadly calm, but she could see the bright fury in his eyes.
“You’re a hypocrite, then,” she muttered, but her gaze faltered under his.
His fury was justified. He’d discovered himself deceived, discovered the world to be other than what he’d imagined. She knew from experience how that felt.
Dizzying. Sickeningly so. It turned you inside out.
“And I am empty-headed as you please,” she added, voice hoarse. “I didn’t have an education that I could put to use. But I hardly made the most of marriage. In fact, I made the worst of it.”
She turned from him abruptly. She didn’t want him to see her expression.
“You have a husband.”
Despite herself, she looked back in his direction. He stood motionless, a breeze riffling his hair. Behind him the river slipped by, water running toward the sea.
He exhaled. “Alive, I gather?”
This time, her silence was answer enough. He tipped his head, allowing the breeze access to his muscled throat, as though he needed cooling.
She was the one who’d been sweating like a pig, gasping, overheated by their deranged dashing up and down the countryside. He’d looked almost languorous in comparison, barely exercising his lean strength.
“Your husband.” He lowered his chin, gave her an unpleasant smile. “The showy specimen.”
She stared. But of course, of course that was what he thought. Ah, what a muddle it was. She’d been a liar to him, but she couldn’t make a clean breast of it now. The details were too damning.
I am the daughter of that disgraced Robert Yardley, the warped Robin Hood who stole from a duke so he could live like a king. He kept me in egret-feather tiaras bought with his ill-gotten gains, and I never thought twice, not about the money or the egrets.
And that man I described? The showy specimen? He was my lover, not my husband.
As of last week, I do have a husband—I married him for his fortune—but he wants to deflower a virgin. You understand my dilemma.
How sordid it sounded.
She slipped hook and line into the pocket of her skirt, rubbed the dirt from her fingers, and linked her hands at her waist. The posture steadied her. Until she remembered how she used to trip along beside her papa, clinging to his pinky. How she used to grasp George’s hand whenever she sensed him stirring to slip away.
She had only her own hands to hold on to. Perhaps forever.
The loneliness she’d experienced in the village returned with such force she felt it like a physical sensation. Her skin prickled. The air was mellow, but clammy gooseflesh was breaking out along her arms.
“The scapegrace,” Neal continued. “The rake with the penchant for gambling and gin.”
She had thought his sharply cut lips fashioned for smiles, kisses. That was before she’d seen his sneers.
He narrowed his eyes. “Did his debts drive you to a life of crime?”
She made a small surprised movement of denial.
