young sister first, then the widowed Mrs. Ramsey. Tristan Ramsey himself was rapidly disappearing down a path hemmed in by rhododendrons and lilacs. “Excuse me, sir,” said Sebastian before the Prime Minister had a chance to launch into an impassioned defense of his much-maligned Orders in Council.
By striking a diagonal course through the shrubbery, Sebastian came out onto the path leading toward the distant pond just as Ramsey was casting an anxious glance back over his shoulder.
“If I didn’t know better, Ramsey, I’d suspect you of trying to avoid me,” said Sebastian, stepping out from behind a cascading wisteria in full bloom.
Ramsey’s head snapped back around, his weak jaw sagging. “Of course I’m trying to avoid you. The last time I saw you, you nearly broke my nose. Any sane man would try to avoid you.”
Sebastian smiled. “If you didn’t want to risk having your cork drawn again, you shouldn’t have left the ladies.”
Ramsey threw a wild glance around, his mouth opening and shutting soundlessly as he realized the shrubbery effectively hid them from the view of the others.
Sebastian crossed his arms at his chest and said, “Tell me about the quarrel you had last summer with Rachel Fairchild.”
“Quarrel? We didn’t—”
“You did, Ramsey. Tell me. What was it about?”
The man’s shoulders sagged, the air leaving his chest in a long ragged exhalation. “Someone told her things about me. I don’t know who. She wouldn’t say.”
“Told her . . . what?”
Ramsey’s jaw tightened mulishly. “A man has appetites.”
“She discovered you kept a mistress.”
“A mistress? No.” The man seemed indignant at the thought. “Nothing like that. Just every once in a while . . . You know what it’s like. I can’t imagine what she expected. She was always so skittish. Never wanting me to do more than kiss her hand, even after we were betrothed. What was I supposed to do? A man needs some relief.”
“Someone told her you were in the habit of picking up prostitutes?”
Righteous indignation flared in Ramsey’s eyes. “She followed me. Can you imagine such a thing? She followed me and watched me pick up some strumpet in the Haymarket.”
“She confronted you?”
“Not there on the street, thank God. But the next day, when I came to take her for a drive. She said the most outlandish things, about how she’d thought I was different from other men.” He gave a ragged laugh. “Like I was supposed to be a monk or something.”
Sebastian stared out over a hillside covered with Turkish hazel and American sweet gum, and tried very, very hard to control his temper.
“I was pretty indignant, I can tell you.” Ramsey’s chest swelled with remembered pique. “I told her all men had appetites, and while I might be content to leave her alone while we were betrothed, I expected things to be different after the wedding.”
Sebastian considered how a young woman like Rachel Fairchild, already traumatized by years of her father’s unwanted attentions, must have reacted to a speech such as that. “And so she ran away,” he said softly.
Ramsey bit his lip and nodded. “I went back the next day to try to reason with her—maybe moderate some of the things I’d said. But she was gone.”
“When you saw her later, in Orchard Street, did she tell you how she had ended up there?”
Ramsey swallowed hard enough to bob his Adam’s apple up and down. “She said she met an old woman who was kind to her—or at least that’s what she thought at first. Turned out the old hag was a procuress.”
It was an all too familiar story. Young women fallen on hard times or newly arrived from the country, befriended by helpful old women whose business it was to keep the brothels and whoremasters of the city supplied with fresh goods. Sebastian said, “But she had family—friends. She could have escaped.”
Ramsey sniffed. “I asked her why she didn’t leave.”
“And?”
“She said the strangest thing. She said she’d spent the last ten years of her life fighting it, only now she realized there was no use. I didn’t understand. It made no sense. But when I asked what she meant . . . that’s when she told me I only had three minutes left.”
His body swept by raw fury, Sebastian felt his hands curl into fists at his sides.
Tristan Ramsey’s eyes widened and he took a prudent step back, his arms thrust out in front as if to ward off a malevolent spirit. “I told you everything. You’ve no call to hit me again!”
It wasn’t the fear in Ramsey’s eyes that gave Sebastian pause. What stopped him was the sweetness of that rush of anger, the ease with which the old familiar bloodlust of the battlefield could return to beguile a man. He’d seen where the seductive power of violence could lead a man.
Taking a deep breath, and then another, he forced himself to uncurl his fists and walk away.
Pleading a headache she didn’t have, Hero begged off from accompanying her mother to Lady Melbourne’s picnic and spent the afternoon curled up on the window seat in her room with a book open on her lap.
The irony of Hero Jarvis, determined spinster, succumbing to the lures of the flesh in a moment of frightened weakness was not lost on her. She kept telling herself that, with time, she would come to terms with the cascade of embarrassment and consternation in which she now floundered. Resolutely putting all thought of the incident out
