A Lady’s Code of Misconduct

  “He thinks me an incompetent schemer,” he said easily. “But for once, he may approve of my plans. Lambert and Culver are the key waverers, and Atticus went to school with Culver; he can lend a hand in the persuasion.”

  “It must be done with subtlety.” She paused, thinking. “Privately done—not in a club where others might see and eavesdrop and talk afterward. And not at their homes, either; they would feel too comfortable there, and once they realized what you were proposing, they could manufacture some reason to take their leave. You’ll want them as a captive audience—unable to stir until you’ve persuaded them.”

  He lifted a brow. “A dinner party?”

  “Yes, that could work.” She knew from firsthand experience at Marylebigh that many great matters of state were decided over a six-course meal.

  “Lambert and Culver, then.” Crispin counted the names on his fingers. “Their wives, and Atticus and Elise. You and I—eight of us, a fine number. What do you say? I know the staff’s in shambles. Can we manage it?”

  To defeat that dreadful bill? “Without doubt,” Jane said. She would make certain of it.

  He grinned at her. “My secret weapon,” he said, and she flushed.

  * * *

  Atticus glanced up from his microscope. “This is your idea of a joke, I take it.”

  “Not in the least.” Crispin glanced around again, still battling astonishment. When Atticus’s butler had given him the address of the laboratory, Crispin imagined his brother holed up in some cramped, dark room full of rotting leaves.

  Instead, Atticus had purchased a proper house, gutted the interior, and created a room as large as any exhibition hall in the British Museum. Large windows and skylights illuminated several gleaming counters, glass cases filled with specimens, and towering shelves filled with polished tools.

  The expense must have been staggering. Atticus had no degree in botany; there would be no point to it, since he would one day inherit the estates and responsibilities of their father. But every scientific society of note welcomed him. And it seemed that the allowance he drew from their father funded the hobby as handsomely as it did his lifestyle in the mansion on Park Lane.

  Crispin took a deep breath. He had come today with an eye to the future. He would not linger on old grudges. But after his school days at Harrow, he had never been offered a penny of their father’s money. A trust from his mother’s late brother had paid for his tuition and lodgings at Cambridge. He’d needed to count every penny.

  Atticus was adjusting the glass slide that pinned a leaf beneath his microscope. Fussy, precise little movements. The task would have annoyed Crispin unbearably, but Atticus looked calm, intent, and satisfied.

  To be firstborn was not an unqualified blessing. Once he became the viscount, Atticus would no longer have time for such research.

  “Do you ever regret,” Crispin said, “that you could not become a scientist?”

  Atticus looked up, scowling. “I am a man of science.”

  “Right.” The air held a faint chemical smell that seemed to swim straight into Crispin’s brain. With his luck, it would trigger a bout of dizziness, and he’d turn the wrong way for the door when it came time to leave. He glanced at it, trying to fix its location in his mind. He would rather stand here until midnight than risk his brother witnessing his confusion.

  “Bedford College,” he said lightly, “is in need of lecturers. I’m sure they would be honored to have you, if you offered.”

  Atticus scoffed. “The women’s college? Waste of time.”

  Crispin scoffed back. “Your wife has never struck me as slow. Nor has our sister. Do you mean to call them brainless?”

  Atticus’s jaw worked as he turned the dial of his microscope. “Women have brains, I will not deny it. In nature, one finds the female sex is often the sharper witted. But civilization requires a different role. A woman’s place is in the home, with her children.”

  Crispin thought of Jane’s radical and intriguing notion, that women might one day be professors as well. But he doubted Atticus would find the idea as compelling as he did. “And would her children not profit from their mother’s learning?” he said instead.

  Atticus glanced up. “A reasonable point.” He sounded mildly surprised that Crispin had managed as much. “Curious to hear it from you. Has that knock to your head made you a revolutionary?”

  Crispin shrugged. “My wife is the one to thank. She takes an interest in the place.”

  “And what of you?”

  “My interest lies in the matter of the penal bill.”

  “Mm.” Atticus turned back to his microscope, his indifference patent, and Crispin’s patience fractured.

  “Might you pause a moment so we can discuss it?”

  With a long-suffering sigh, Atticus straightened and wiped his hands clean on a rag. “Make it quick. I am speaking at the Linnean Society next week, and I haven’t yet finished the analysis.”

  “This bill cannot pass,” Crispin said. “It is a miscarriage of justice, a step backward. I want to defeat it.”

  Atticus took a seat on a nearby stool. There was none other, so Crispin remained standing. “Defeat the bill you authored, do you mean?”

  “I do not remember writing it. I cannot account for why I did so. But—”

  “I’ll tell you why—it’s your ticket to take down Palmerston,” Atticus said. “The glorious prime ministership. Never say you lost your appetite for power along with your wits.”

  “I have my wits,” Crispin said through his teeth. No, no—easy, now. He would not let Atticus provoke him. “The ticket-of-leave system ensures that petty criminals will not be left to rot alongside murderers. I cannot support its abolishment.”

  “I see.” Atticus’s smile was unreadable. “What changed your mind, may I ask?”

  Crispin cast another quick glance toward the door. Yes, he still knew where it was.

  “And there’s the shifty look of a man preparing to lie,” Atticus said.

  Crispin allowed himself a small smile. “I have never required any thought to formulate a lie, and well you know it.”

  His brother blinked, then sat back a little, as though to see him better. “True enough—though I am amazed to hear you admit it.”

  As though Crispin had just confessed to blackest depravity!

  He bit back a sigh. In the distribution at birth of familial talents, Atticus had inherited some mysterious ancestor’s Puritan inflexibility. He had not an ounce of humor in him. “The bill relies on public hysteria. Even if there is an epidemic of violent crime, revoking the ticket-of-leave system will do nothing to better it. I will not take power by exploiting panic, Atticus. I mean to prevent it from going to a vote.”

  “Oh, but it will go.” Atticus drummed his fingers lightly on the grain of the tabletop. “You assured that.”

  “Not in my memory.”

  “What matter? The rest of the world remembers. I saw Culver yesterday, by the way, driving down Pall Mall. Very fine pair of matched grays in the harness.” Atticus’s eyes narrowed. “High-flying for a man with pockets to let, eh? I hailed him, but he looked frightened as a hare and hurried onward. Guilty conscience, no doubt.”

  The tacit accusation of bribery rankled. But Crispin thought of the accounts in his name, so mysteriously fattened . . .

  Well, he would not allow himself to be driven off course. “Culver put up a solid fight, according to Noyes. If you would speak to him now—”

  “Noyes—there’s another fine specimen of integrity,” Atticus muttered. “The man would vote to hand our government to the Germans if they paid enough.”

  “Culver may still be swayed back to our side,” Crispin said forcefully. “That is the main point.”

  “Our side!” Atticus slipped the specimen slide from the microscope, holding it up to the light with a squint. “You and I do not share a side, Crispin. I think we never did.”

  “But we might now. Do you hear me? I am offering an olive branch.?
??

  Atticus sat back, a peculiar smile on his lips. He did not look like a man in his prime. Too many indulgent meals had padded him out. His jaw was slack and soft, and the high color in his cheeks was not simply an effect of his mood. The signet ring on his finger looked too tight to be removed.

  “It might be . . . very good,” Crispin said hesitantly. “To forge a truce, Atticus. What point to remaining at odds with each other? We are brothers, and I . . .” I could use a brother. He had woken to a strange new world in which he seemed to have no friends. Apart from his wife, he could not tell whom to trust.

  His wife. There was another gnawing concern. Once we had control of my fortune, she’d told him, we intended to divide it and go separate ways. He could not believe that he’d intended to use her so mercilessly—that her wit, her humor, her wild hair and lambent eyes, had somehow left him so unmoved.

  But he had seen her, more than once now, studying the newspapers, poring over the schedules of departing ships. She had never planned to remain with the man she’d married. Crispin was a different man now, but how to persuade her of it? He could be a partner to her. Defeating this bill was his best chance of showing her so.

  And showing himself so, for that matter. He could be a man of true integrity.

  Time, however, was running out.

  “I would like to be a brother to you,” Crispin said.

  Atticus rolled his lips together into a tight, disciplined line. “Another change of heart, is it?”

  “Yes.” He pushed forward. “Your essays are greatly respected. You have great sway as a thinker. Working together will gain us a good deal of attention besides. We can defeat this bill together.”

  Atticus made a gruff noise. “Newspapers would have a field day with that.”

  “And we’d need that attention,” Crispin said readily. “The public has only seen Mason’s story till now. He has been feeding the editorialists with tall tales.”

  “And you?”

  “What of me?”

  Atticus tipped his head, an affectation copied straight from their father. “You can’t imagine that the reformers will receive you with open arms. If you go against the bill, you’ll be finished. No prime ministership for you.”

  Crispin’s gut tightened. Was that so? Would he end up destroying everything he’d worked for?

  “There is nothing so unusual in a man breaking with his party,” he said uneasily. “It happens all the time.”

  “Certainly. But you’re no ordinary man, Crispin. You’ve burned your bridges. You’re a tyrant. And tyrants . . .” Atticus offered a cold smile. “Well, I know you were no hand at history as a boy, but surely even you recall what happened to Cromwell. Tyrants do not live to fight another day. When toppled, they generally lose their heads.”

  There was a malice in his brother’s voice that he had never expected. He paused, oddly shaken. Had his methods been so brutal that there could be no rehabilitation for him?

  “Would you be among that mob?” he asked. “Did something happen in these last few years that you found so unforgivable that you would wish me ill?”

  His brother had not been prepared for plain speaking. With a frown, he looked down at his specimen slide, inched it straight with his forefinger. “Of course I do not wish you ill,” he said gruffly, “save in matters directly bearing on the nation. What a buffle-headed question.”

  Crispin let out the breath he’d been holding. “I am glad to hear it,” he said. “For, while we were never cut from the same cloth, I always looked up to you. I hope you know that.”

  Now Atticus’s hand suddenly curled into a fist, the startled reflex of a man threatened. “Don’t mock me.”

  “Mock you? I—” Crispin frowned. “Atticus, you have always been everything I could not be.” As a boy, Atticus had spent his holidays holed up in the library. Crispin, in desperate want of a playmate, would cajole and wheedle him, but on the days when Atticus stubbornly refused to abandon his reading, Crispin would stomp off in a huff. It was not possible to sit so still, to concentrate on a single book, for so long! Atticus was pretending to do so to spite him, he’d thought.

  But once he’d joined Atticus at Harrow, he’d realized his mistake. Many boys could concentrate for hours. The fault lay in him.

  “I don’t think,” Atticus said, “you ever much wanted to follow in my footsteps. Let us not revise history, Crispin. You may have forgotten it, but I haven’t.”

  “I haven’t forgotten that much,” Crispin muttered. He remembered very well his tutors’ irritation with him. So unlike his brother. Such a disappointment. Master Crispin shows no want of talent, they told his father. But he suffers a grievous want of discipline.

  In some subjects, he’d managed to prove he had a brain. He excelled in rhetoric, where one must think on one’s feet and foresee all the possible twists to an argument. He pulled off dazzling marks in mathematics, which made intuitive sense. He thrived on the playing fields, where he was praised for his unwavering good sportsmanship even in his rare defeats.

  But in quiet, contemplative, sustained efforts, he was hopeless. Atticus spoke Latin and Greek like an ancient native; Crispin could barely conjugate a sentence. He jumbled his history, unable to retain what he’d read.

  Look at your brother, Crispin! So their father had urged him, time and again. He does not give up after half an hour. You must apply yourself if you wish to achieve!

  “You were the ideal,” Crispin said. But their minds had been fashioned differently. Atticus’s mind was like a knife, amenable to slow, steady sharpening. Crispin’s, on the other hand, had always felt like clay. Fresh and wet, it took any impression. But given a little time, it began to harden. He would try to discipline himself, try to pay attention. But once hardened, clay could not be imprinted.

  “You did not bother to try,” Atticus said.

  “I stopped trying. That’s true.” Gradually, he had come to resent his brother. Their father might revere Atticus, but nobody at school did. He had few friends. Crispin had dozens. This was possible because people were like math: they had a logic to them, a patterned consistency. Once Crispin figured that out, it was easy to make a person feel good about himself, to keep him amused and entertained.

  Crispin was popular. But popularity was not an achievement prized by their father—not in him, at least. He would need to earn his living. He needed practical skills. No, his father told him, you cannot go on holiday with John Darby; you must catch up on your studies. Atticus, why have the Darbys not invited you home for the holidays? Their northern estates adjourn ours; that would prove a useful connection for you. Crispin, ask the Darby boy if he would not like Atticus to stay with him instead.

  Nobody had ever wanted Atticus for company. Who wished a guest who would spend every day in the library, ransacking bookshelves?

  But while Atticus’s serious disposition had never altered, he had grown, over the years, into a man of great learning. His opinion held weight in rarefied circles, among gentlemen scholars, members of the royal societies, men who traveled to study glaciers or chronicle exotic plants and rare breeds of bird life.

  Meanwhile, Crispin had found a use for his own talents. Perhaps his brand of politicking had required bribery; he could not say. But he would not have burned bridges. He would not have been a tyrant. Would he have done?

  “I will survive a turncoat showing,” he said uneasily. Perhaps he was mistaken. Perhaps he had been a monster, and he would now destroy his last chance at greatness.

  But Jane did not see him as a monster. She knew him best now, and she had promised to help him. He would defeat this bill, and prove to her—and to Atticus and the world—what kind of man he was.

  And then, if his bridges were indeed destroyed, he would build some bloody new ones.

  He stepped forward, flattening his palms on the cool laboratory table. “All I ask is one evening. I am having a dinner for the men who held out longest against the bill, Culver included. He’s your friend.
You can persuade him.”

  Atticus hesitated. “Culver was my friend. But then you purchased him. Now he is your friend, Crispin, and your friends like me no better than you do.”

  Damn it. “Atticus, I am your brother,” he snapped. “Whether or not we meet each week to play whist makes no bloody difference. We are blood, and I am asking you to help me fight for what you believe. You are a learned man, and your alliance with me will prove that I am serious. If I am such a tyrant as you say, then I will make them fall in line. But I must have a man beside me who is able to feed them the arguments they will use to then seed dissent among their followers. I’m certain Jane could do it, but if my friends are as rotten as you say, what hope they will listen to a woman?”

  Atticus exhaled. “Well,” he said, and then, “Well, your wife could even do it, could she? How flattered I am by your need for me.”

  Crispin gritted his teeth. “If you mean to take that as an insult, then you will insult me in the process. She is the daughter and niece of politicians, and she has a fine, educated mind—and a better grasp on Parliament than I do at present.”

  “That, I believe.” But Atticus cracked a thin smile, and his shoulders seemed to loosen. “All right,” he said. “Perhaps I will make an appearance. But I promise you, if you mean to ambush me—”

  “I mean,” Crispin said in exasperation, “to feed you dinner.”

  * * *

  Jane stared at herself in the pier glass. She looked faintly green. It was not an effect of the gaslight.

  What had she been thinking? She had never organized a dinner party, much less one intended to double as a campaign for the guests’ hearts and minds. To be a political hostess, so Jane’s aunt had often said with a long-suffering air, required years of training, a cool head tempered by deep experience. One must know how to steer the conversation, to keep every guest at his ease, and to ensure, above all, that when the conversation turned contentious, they found themselves, either from sated pleasure or sodden heads, unable to bolt from the table.

  All that, with a poorly trained staff—half of whom had been hired in the last three days!