Page 25 of My Lord Rogue (Wicked Widows’ League #34)
T he last evening of the house party sprawled itself over the drawing room like a fever.
The windows, thrown open against the thick midsummer dark, admitted only the slow, mineral ache of the lake.
Every lamp was lit, every candle pressed into service, but the glow was a sickly haze—the world as seen through the yellowed lens of an old tooth.
The guests, gorged on lamb and syllabub and enough sherry to float a sloop, bled across the divans and brocade chairs in loose, asymmetrical formations.
The women fanned themselves in desultory synchrony, their wrists limp with the effort of maintaining appearances, the men gathered in knots at the edges, collars loosened, the air between them sticky with tobacco and secrets.
Theo sat with Verity on the periphery of the conversation pit, her mourning locket a dark and uncompromising punctuation at her throat.
The night was hot enough to wilt the starch in her gown.
The house itself seemed to sweat, every stick of furniture exhaling generations of distress through the damp plaster.
At her left, Verity had fixed her gaze on the game of cards unfolding at the central table, but her hands betrayed her.
They worked at a lace handkerchief with the intensity of a surgeon prepping for a messy operation.
Across the room, Teddy was holding court among a small group of gentlemen, the Captain, whose laugh fell always a beat too late, Lord Jennington, with his brittle halo of white hair, and the youngest, a fox-eyed scion of the local village.
Teddy’s posture was impeccable—lounging, but with the tension of a coiled spring.
He wore his evening black as if it were a dare, and the open collar suggested a disregard for both decency and the damp.
Whenever he smiled, the room seemed to list toward him, as if every conversation, every glass, was magnetized by the prospect of disaster.
Theo tried not to watch him. She failed. Each time his head tipped back in laughter, each time his hand swept the air in some rhetorical feint, she felt the echo of that morning’s humiliation in her bones.
Lady Amelia sat perched on a stool near the fireplace, her fan held like a dueling pistol.
The feathers trailed in a slow arc, catching the candlelight and returning it with a blue-green vengeance.
She’d said little since supper, but her eyes took in everything, filing each exchange for later deployment.
The other women orbited her, their conversation a steady drip of anecdote and speculation.
The air was thick with the premonition of storm, whether from the weather or from the collective mood, Theo could not say.
She drew a shallow breath and focused on the small rituals of survival, the angle of her fan, the position of her feet beneath her hem, the feel of the locket’s chain biting at her collarbone.
She rehearsed, in her mind, every possible conversational gambit she might be called upon to make.
The odds of success, she calculated, hovered somewhere between catastrophe and farce.
It was during a lull, an infinitesimal hiccup in the flow of card play, laughter, and the plink of glass, that Lady Amelia made her move.
She rose, slowly, as if the effort might snap some hidden tendon. Her chair scraped against the wood with a noise just piercing enough to clear the fog of conversation. Her fan snapped open with a crack. The room stilled, in the way of a pond suddenly deprived of wind.
“My dear Lady St. Ervan,” she began, her voice pitched for the full circumference of the room, “I wonder if you might permit me an impertinence.”
A dozen heads swiveled in her direction. Even Verity, who had been constructing an elaborate pile of lace knots in her lap, looked up, eyebrows slightly arched.
“Always, Lady Amelia,” said Verity, with a tight smile. “What would a house party be without a dash of impertinence?”
Lady Amelia’s lips pursed, briefly, then relaxed into the practiced curve of her smile. “It is not my way to traffic in idle chatter, but it has reached my ears—through several unimpeachable sources—that there is a certain… misunderstanding circulating among the company.”
A collective shift, the air thickening further. A footman, passing with a tray of cordial, froze mid-step, the cut glass trembling in his grip.
Lady Amelia’s eyes flicked, with surgical precision, from Verity to Theo and then, for a lingering moment, to Teddy.
“I refer, of course, to the relationship—if it can be so named—between Lady Pattishall and Lord Teddington. The former, you may know, is a woman of unimpeachable reputation, the latter, a gentleman whose history is, shall we say, as much Continental as English.”
There was a brittle titter from the captain’s end of the room, quickly stifled. Teddy, for his part, let his lips curl upward in an expression so perfectly ambiguous it might have been amusement, or contempt, or simply the mask he wore when caught off-guard.
Theo felt her hands go cold. The locket, heavy and blunt against her skin, was suddenly the only thing tethering her to the moment.
“I mention this,” Lady Amelia continued, “because I am in receipt of a letter—several, in fact—that suggest the entire acquaintance is a fiction. That Lady Pattishall and the baron had not, in fact, met before their mutual arrival at this house party.”
A silence dropped, absolute and carnivorous. Even the card game stilled, Lord Jennington’s hand hovering over a heap of copper tokens.
“In short,” said Lady Amelia, fanning herself with a motion of calculated laziness, “it appears that Lady Pattishall has been… lying.”
Theo felt the world tilt. The sound of her own blood, a whine in her ears, drowned out everything.
She saw, in quick succession, Verity’s mouth, drawn to a hard line, the flush rising at the base of Teddy’s throat, the way the captain leaned forward, hungry for a spectacle.
She saw the faces of the other women—some avid, some aghast, some merely enjoying the prospect of a life more interesting than their own.
She wanted to speak, to protest, to laugh it off as an absurdity. But her tongue was glued to her teeth.
Verity broke the silence, her voice so even it sent a chill through the air. “Is there a question in there, Lady Amelia? Or merely an accusation?”
Lady Amelia shrugged. “Only this. If Lady Pattishall has nothing to hide, perhaps she will tell us herself. Did you, or did you not, manufacture the entirety of your ‘romance’ with the baron?”
The attention of the room coalesced on Theo. She felt as if she had been thrust, naked, into a pit. She met the gaze of each guest in turn. Teddy stood at the far side, the only man not staring. His gaze was fixed on the chessboard, or perhaps on some memory he could not shake.
Theo tried, once, to summon her voice, but the best she could manage was a dry click in the back of her throat.
The servants, immobilized in the doorways with their trays, looked everywhere but at her. The storm outside, until now only a distant murmur, announced itself with a single, sullen growl of thunder.
There it was, then, the end of everything. Exposed in full, before she had even chosen her next move.
She willed herself not to cry, not to faint, not to grant Lady Amelia the satisfaction of a scene.
But the silence held, and it was perfect.
And she understood, with sudden clarity, that this was how reputations ended—not with a scandal, or a duel, or a letter—but with the snap of a fan, and the slow, communal pleasure of watching a woman come undone.
She sat there, breathless, waiting for someone—anyone—to speak.
The answer came from Verity—not from her mouth, but from the staccato knock of her chair against the floor.
She stood, slow and deliberate, one pale hand braced on the armrest, the other coiling the handkerchief into a strangling noose.
She did not look at Theo, nor at Teddy, but fixed her eyes on Lady Amelia with the unblinking focus of a predator denied its meal.
“Lady Amelia,” Verity said, and her voice—so often sweet, so often lost in the shimmer of parties—was hard as struck glass. “You have a genius for distilling gossip to its bitterest form. But I must, for the sake of my own conscience, correct you.”
The guests, caught mid-breath, tilted as one toward the new speaker. Even the servants in the doorways seemed to lean, their trays tilting by degrees toward the source of conflict.
Verity took two measured steps forward, placing herself precisely between Theo and the majority of the room. The movement was as theatrical as anything Lady Amelia could have staged, but more dangerous for being entirely real.
Verity continued. “I have known from the first hour of Lady Pattishall’s arrival, that her association with the baron was not of the usual sort.
I have also known that she sought nothing more than a reprieve from the ceaseless and ghoulish parade of suitors that our kind inflicts upon a widow.
It is not a crime, in my household at least, to desire peace. ”
Lady Amelia’s fan fluttered, the feathers shuddering as if in response to some silent wind. “You mean to say, that you countenance the fabrication of entire relationships as a means of avoiding discomfort?”
Verity’s smile was thin and sharp. “I countenance the rights of my friend to her own dignity. If you wish to elevate yourself by tearing at another woman’s reputation, I suggest you do so elsewhere.”
A wave of murmurs swept the periphery of the room—some astonished, some delighted, all hungry for escalation. The captain made a small, awed sound in the back of his throat. Lady Jennington fanned herself with renewed vigor, eyes darting between the combatants.