The Countess Conspiracy

  His throat tightened.

  He’d been imagining this moment ever since he saw her in the park earlier. It had been weeks since they’d argued with each other in Cambridge. He’d missed her, missed her so much that he’d wanted to find her and apologize for everything, to just put all his uncomfortable emotions back where they had come from, ignoring them for another six months. It wouldn’t do any good, though; they’d only return.

  He was used to feeling more than Violet did. He was resigned to it, in fact. Possibly even at peace with it. But he didn’t know what to do with a world where she felt nothing at all.

  He’d missed her madly, and he wasn’t even sure that she had noticed he’d been gone. She hadn’t noticed his arrival, after all.

  He came up behind her. He knew better than to interrupt her in the middle of her work, so he stood back and watched.

  It would be odd to say that Violet was a mystery to him. He knew her better than he knew anyone. When she smiled, he usually knew the joke that had tickled her imagination. When she bit her lip, he knew what she wasn’t saying. And yet there were some things—so many things—that he couldn’t make sense of.

  She reached to her side, picked up a little bag made of parchment paper, and slipped this over the head of the flower. She tied this all in place with a silk thread, picked up her pen, and made a notation in her book.

  AX212: cross of BD114 with TR718.

  She’d made ten thousand such notations over the years: crossing plants one with the other, transferring pollen by hand, noting parentage, covering the fertilized flowers with parchment bags so as to make sure that she gathered all resulting seed.

  She folded her arms and stared off into the distance. Sebastian didn’t know what she was seeing or why her brows furrowed the way they did. He didn’t even know if she was aware of his presence. Sometimes, she wasn’t.

  Finally she spoke. “My sister thinks I’m difficult.”

  He took a step forward to stand next to her, letting his hands trail in the soil. It was loose and friable, a perfect blend of black dirt and decaying woodchips, slightly moist against his fingers. It smelled of earth and humus.

  “Your sister is right,” he finally said.

  “I’m not difficult,” Violet said. “I’m simple. I like good books and clever conversation and being left alone much of the time.” She took the needle she’d used and set it in a bucket—one overflowing with a dozen other such needles. She unwrapped gauze from the next needle and bent over a new plant. “How does that make me difficult? I make sense. I don’t talk about my feelings, of course, but then, I don’t want to.” She shrugged. “So that’s reasonable.”

  Sebastian smiled despite himself, a smile that felt bitter even to him. “God, no,” he said, looking up at the ceiling of the greenhouse. “Not feelings. Heaven forbid that you have anything so messy.”

  Her face was bowed to the plant and her shoulders stilled. “I have feelings.” She spoke stiffly. “I just don’t talk about them. What’s the point? Talking never changes them.”

  It was an oblique message, one he understood all too well.

  Don’t ask what I want.

  “I take it all back,” Sebastian said. “You’re not difficult.”

  She huffed.

  “Some people are like a blacksmith’s puzzle—intricate loops of iron fitted together in some convoluted manner. You can play and pry at them over and over, but if you don’t know their secret, you’ll never take them apart. Those people are difficult until you know their secret. Then they’re easy.”

  Her nose wrinkled, and she turned to the flower next in line, carefully separating its petals. He wondered, offhand, if she realized how erotic the action was—Violet calmly fertilizing flowers, spreading their petals wide and sliding the pollenated needle in. The analogy made itself. She spent half her life in this clinical, insect-free structure, functioning as both birds and bees. As she leaned over, her hips shifted against her smock.

  He could steady her with his hand. One hand, right there on her hip…

  He didn’t move.

  “I see.” Violet straightened from the task and slipped this needle into the discard bucket with the others. There was a touch of scorn in her voice. “You know the secret of me. Is that what you’re saying?”

  “No,” he said. “I don’t think you have a secret. It’s like you were made by some fiend of a blacksmith. You’re a puzzle without a solution. There is no way to undo you. All I can do is learn to avoid the razors.”

  She breathed out slowly and picked up her pen. “Yes,” she said softly. “That’s me. Good for nothing but cutting. Made by an insane blacksmith.”

  While she made the notation, he picked up the parchment sack and bagged the flower head. Sometimes, he knew her so well. Compliments made her freeze. Touches—even the lightest, least suggestive of touches—made her back away. But say something like this and she slipped into stony silence. There were no safe paths with Violet, only lions all the way.

  “Thank you, Sebastian,” she said. “I shall have warnings embroidered on all my handkerchiefs. ‘Sharp blades ahead. Watch your tongue.’”

  “I didn’t mean it as an insult.”

  She looked up. “No? Then maybe you should listen to your words. ‘Oh, that Violet—never showing any feelings! It’s like she keeps her true self hidden from the entire world.’ Why would that be, do you think?” One hand gravitated to her hip, right where he’d wanted to slide his hand. “You, of all people, should understand. I keep everything hidden because there’s nothing about my true self that anyone likes. I’m not difficult, Sebastian. I’m the easiest person around. I don’t belong, and I spend all my time pretending I do. Sometimes I get weary of it, and that makes me angry.”

  Violet sighed, set aside her pen, and turned back to her flower bed. She reached for another gauze-wrapped needle, and then shook her head and turned to him.

  “It’s not fair to the people around me when I lose my temper.” Her jaw squared. “I say awful things when I’m angry. But it’s not fair to me, either, that I was made this way. You think it’s hard spending time with me? Imagine being a blacksmith puzzle made by a madman. You’re unable to perform the basic functions of your existence. You never bring anyone joy. You learn not to hope when someone picks you up. Because no matter how high their anticipation runs upon starting, you know what will happen in the end: They’ll throw you away in disgust.”

  Disgust. Was that what she thought he’d expressed? “Violet,” he said softly. “I wasn’t—I’m not disgusted by you. That’s the last thing I am.”

  She stared straight ahead. “It comes out to the same thing, whatever name you give it.” Her voice was as stiff as her arms at her side. “Don’t worry about your conscience, Sebastian. Everyone tires of me eventually. Lay me aside and walk away.”

  He let out a frustrated sigh. “You’re being ridiculous. You’re acting as if there’s nothing to you but your work—as if once I walk away from that, I stop caring for you at all. It doesn’t work like that.”

  Her lip twitched in dismay at his words—right on caring for you—and Sebastian sighed and pressed his fingers to his forehead. “There is more to you than your work.”

  She turned away. “Do you remember when you first submitted my paper?”

  It had been before her husband passed away. She’d written up her work and asked Sebastian for advice—which he’d been unable to deliver at first, as he’d never read a scientific paper, either. They’d studied a number of them together, Violet writing and rewriting until they were both satisfied.

  The first time she submitted it to a journal, it had been sent back to her with a note that perhaps a ladies’ journal on home gardening might prefer her modest contribution. The next publication hadn’t bothered to explain its rejection, nor the one after that nor the one after that.

  “That’s bollocks,” Sebastian had told her when that last slip had come in the mail. “They aren’t even reading it.”
>
  Violet had been sick at the time. She had never told him what ailed her. He’d only known that she’d become weaker and weaker. Her skin had been like wax, and she’d been given to fainting spells.

  She’d refused to talk about that, too.

  She’d simply sat in her chair, unable to even stand, and refused to look in his direction. “It must not be very good. Likely they have all sorts of excellent submissions, and this didn’t make the cut.”

  “If I were the one submitting—a man with a university education—they’d give it a second look,” Sebastian had said in a fury. “And a third one too, I’d wager.”

  So she’d put his name on the paper. “Go ahead and try,” she’d told him.

  Sebastian had ridden into Cambridge the next day and handed it to a former professor for advice. The man had read it in stunned silence and then looked at Sebastian. “Malheur,” he’d said in a strangled voice, “this is brilliant.”

  Several months later, it had been accepted for publication and Sebastian’s first lecture had been scheduled.

  At that lecture, Violet had smiled raptly for the first time in nine months. That smile of hers—the color that had come temporarily to her cheeks—was the only reason he’d agreed to keep doing it.

  But she wasn’t smiling any more. She was glaring at the dirt in front of her, and Sebastian wished he could make this right again.

  “Just as well that Violet Waterfield never got her start publishing scientific works,” Violet said. “I’d be a pariah. A nothing. My sister would hate me.” She picked up another needle, but didn’t use it. She brandished it instead as if it were a sword. “My mother already does. Nobody would have paid the least attention to my work. So it’s just as well. This way, at least I’m someone, even if nobody knows who I am.”

  “That’s heartbreaking,” Sebastian said.

  She looked over at him, her lips compressed. “My heart’s not broken.” She jabbed the needle into the soil. “I’ve never needed recognition for myself. Recognition is the last thing I want. It’s just that…awful as it makes me, this is the thing that I do. I wake up thinking about it. I dream of it when I sleep. The thought of doing all this and having it evaporate into nothing is more than I can bear. I want to do something, and have someone notice.” She swallowed, and then reached out and touched the leaf of a bean sprout, ever so gently. “This is as close as I will ever come to having children.”

  She had never talked about children before. Sebastian knew only that she had been married eleven years without bearing one, and that her husband had wanted an heir very, very badly. So badly that at the end, he’d encouraged Sebastian to spend untold hours with his wife—giving his implicit approval to a cuckoo in his nest. Better that, apparently, than an empty one.

  One didn’t have to have much intelligence to figure out that something had gone wrong. Whatever it was, he suspected it had soured more than just a marriage.

  He wondered if she was recalling any of that. What those events had looked like from her eyes, colored by her emotions. But Violet rarely admitted to having emotion.

  “There is more to you,” he insisted.

  She looked up at him. “You’re only saying that because you don’t know how little there is in my life.”

  She said there was nothing in her life the way someone else might state that there was nothing in his cup: as if it were a matter of a minute’s worry.

  And that’s when he made a mistake: He reached out and touched her hand.

  He hadn’t meant anything by it. He’d have touched anyone he cared about who said something that bleak, and when that person was Violet… He didn’t have it in him to hear a thing like that and not respond, to not want to make it better in whatever way he could.

  But Violet froze, every muscle tensing. All the color rushed from her cheeks. And before he could apologize, she snatched her hand away, cradling it to her chest as if he’d burned it.

  Sebastian considered himself something of an expert on female response. Often, quickened breath suggested a heart that raced in anticipation. But not when it came in sharp bursts. Violet’s gasping respiration did not suggest anything other than panic.

  He knew better than to touch her. Not even in friendship.

  Sebastian put his offending hand in his pocket and bit back a curse, trying for nonchalance in his tone.

  “Violet,” he said, “we’re friends.”

  She started to open her mouth but he waved her into silence.

  “I know you’ll say you don’t know what that means, but I do. Just because I won’t present your work any longer doesn’t mean I no longer…”

  Care, he had been about to say. But she wouldn’t want to hear that word.

  “…have an interest in your happiness. This matters to you. Things have changed since you wrote your first paper. I can introduce you, if you’d like. Your work would be read. They’d listen to you now. If I told them to do so.”

  For a moment, her entire expression changed. Her eyes widened. Her hands clenched into fists, and her lips parted. She turned to him—and then just as swiftly, all that hope drained from her. That light dissipated from her features, leaving her eyes nothing more than dark, dull orbs.

  “No,” Violet said. “Almost nobody cares about me now. I’d hate to see it become nobody at all.”

  “Then…” Sebastian paused. “I don’t know how to proceed, how to find a new balance that will work for both of us. But I’ve been thinking since we spoke a few weeks ago. It’s not as simple as me or nothing. I have another idea.”

  She looked over at him quizzically.

  “Let me talk to someone. Get a little advice on how best to proceed.”

  She blinked, considering this. “Telling secrets only creates trouble.” But her gaze slid away from his. “Who did you have in mind?”

  “Simon Bollingall,” Sebastian said. “He’s been my mentor for these last years. I trust him as much as I trust anyone. I wouldn’t tell him your name. I would tell him…a little of the surrounding circumstances. Maybe he’d have some idea of how we can both be happy.”

  She stared fixedly at the dirt. “Do you think he might help?”

  “Maybe.”

  She didn’t say anything for a long while. “I like his wife,” she finally said. “Alice Bollingall. We’ve met at your lectures. She’s a photographer by hobby. She takes pictures of the countryside.” She set her needle down. “She offered to have me sit for one of her photographs. I think she develops the pictures herself. She’s a very clever woman, and he…treats her with respect.”

  “May I talk to him?”

  “My mother would kill me.” Her lips compressed. “But then… it’s not as if she wants to know. It’s awful to even think of it. Awful and selfish. To want this, even knowing what I’m risking.”

  “So that’s a yes, then.”

  She turned and looked at him. And then, because Sebastian had nothing to lose, he winked at her.

  “God.” She waved a hand at him in dismissal, but he could see a hint of a smile tilting the corner of her lip.

  So long as he could still make her smile, he hadn’t lost yet.

  “You,” she said with a shake of her head. “Yes, then.”

  SEBASTIAN BOARDED A TRAIN for Cambridge the morning after he talked to Violet. The familiar journey had calmed his cycling worries. He left the station, walked along the riverbanks, and then made his way up the cobbled streets wending up through the market, all the while telling himself that this was his usual journey, that he need not think of his mission. He made his way from there to his friend’s office, where he was greeted and ushered in with good grace.

  Five years ago, Sebastian had sat on this precise chair, in this precise position, watching Professor Simon Bollingall read a paper he hadn’t written. In those first years, he’d provided advice. He’d helped Sebastian at every step of the way.

  Since that time, Professor Bollingall had become a friend. Nowadays, he listened intently
to Sebastian’s every word. And today, Sebastian needed his help to end the career he’d helped to start.

  The man sat on his chair, his attention fixed attentively on Sebastian, his lips forming a too-eager smile. All that smiling attention was an illusion.

  Sebastian glanced around the room. “Is that a photograph of your family?” he asked, gesturing to a frame that stood on a side table. It showed a grouping of five—man, woman, and three children in that awkward, spotty stage just before adulthood. Sitting for a photograph didn’t make them look any better; the children stared blankly ahead, no expressions on their faces whatsoever.

  “Yes,” Bollingall said. “Alice made that one—you know she’s made quite a hobby of her photography. She’s become quite good. That one there is also hers—Trinity College from the backs in winter.”

  Sebastian nodded, glancing politely at the other framed photograph.

  “So, Malheur,” Bollingall said, “what have you come up with this time?”

  Sebastian leaned back in his chair. “I’m giving this up.”

  That eager smile faded into blank confusion. Bollingall leaned back in his chair. “Giving what up?”

  “Scientific discovery.”

  Instead of looking startled, though, the professor laughed. “Ah, you’re at that stage of your career, are you? We all feel that way from time to time. When the work isn’t going well. When we’re feeling overwhelmed.” He leaned forward. “You work too hard—that’s your problem. When was the last time you took a holiday? Go to the shore. Engage in a little sea-bathing. Relax for a week or two, and you’ll feel like a new man.”

  Sebastian bit his lip. “It’s a lovely idea, but my problem is not that I work too hard. It’s that I do not work enough.”

  Bollingall nodded compassionately. “That’s typical, too. There’s always something else to do, some other idea to explore. You can’t put the work down. You think of it all the time and feel guilty every minute you’re away. I only repeat my recommendation: Take a little time for yourself, and you’ll soon feel better.”

  Sebastian had been afraid it would come to this. He trusted Bollingall implicitly. But he felt a little sick. He was about to expose himself his secret to a man who had put his own reputation on the line for Sebastian several times over.