A Lady’s Code of Misconduct

  “He could not have believed it,” she said, aghast.

  “I can’t know.” He spoke very slowly, as though the words took almost too much effort to push out. “But he refused to intercede for me. He had several friends in the corps. All I wanted to know was why I hadn’t been chosen. But he refused to ask. He told me I must make my own way. And once I realized what had truly gone wrong, the lie that Laura’s father had spread—why, I looked on my father’s refusal in a new light. He thought me deserving of the punishment.”

  They sat in silence for several long moments. The wheels rumbled over cobblestones, the brougham juddering and shaking, then passed onto smooth pavement again, settling them back into their seats.

  “Lord Sibley owes you a great apology.” Not only for his lack of faith, his betrayal of his fatherly duty to believe the best of his child, but also for this: for laying the groundwork from which the politician had sprung. What had Mr. Burke’s motto been? “Need no one, trust no one,” she said softly. Betrayed by his beloved and his family—“I can see why you once believed in that wisdom.”

  On a deep breath, Crispin sat straighter, as though shrugging off the weight of old memories. “Well. There you have it anyway. Instead of traveling the world and cleaning up politicians’ messes, I stayed here and made the messes myself. And you, Mrs. Burke? What aim did you have for yourself when you were young? I know you have a powerful desire to do good unto others, but what of yourself?”

  He wanted to change the subject. She tried her best to cast off the gloom, this frustrated tenderness that bade her to hold him, and the aching resentment for all who’d done him injury. “I also wanted to travel,” she said. “I had a dream of walking to the nearest quay and letting my destination be decided by the next departing ship.”

  “Dangerous,” he said. “What if it took you to Liverpool?”

  She burst into laughter. “Liverpool isn’t so bad. My father had several factories there. The people were very kind.”

  “Fair enough,” he said. “It was the journey you wanted, then, more than the destination?”

  “I liked . . . the idea of possibility.” She paused, puzzling it out. “Yes, I think the unboundedness of it—the unpredictability, the notion that anything, anywhere, might be possible. My parents were very good to me, Crispin. I had the same education they would have given a son. But I was still a girl. Their hopes for me, the happy tales they spun of my future—they always stopped at my great and glorious marriage. And I suppose I did not like the idea of my story ending at twenty-two, much less being so . . . predictable.”

  “It needn’t be.” The serious note in his voice brought her startled glance up to his. He touched her face very lightly. “Having a companion,” he said, “is no bar to making the journey.”

  Her chest felt full suddenly. Whether the weight was hope or foreboding, she could not say. But it gripped her into perfect immobility as she gazed up at him.

  It made the words so easy to speak. “You are incomparable, too, you know.”

  He kissed her as the carriage came to a halt.

  * * *

  “But this makes no sense,” said Jane. They stood at a long counter in the north wing of Somerset House, behind which rose, as far as the eye could see, shelves of records, overseen by harassed clerks, which contained the birth and marriage and death records of every man, woman, and child in Britain in the last thirty years. “Shufflebottom got married.”

  “Did he?” Crispin looked up from his own ledger. She’d been right: four hundred Thomas Clarks and counting. “Good for old Shufflebottom. It takes a brave woman to bear that name.”

  “No, he got married recently.” She shoved her ledger toward him, then grimaced as a nearby clerk hissed at her.

  “Have a care with those,” the clerk said. “Those are Her Majesty’s own books.”

  “Let us hope Her Majesty is fond of dust,” Jane muttered, and rubbed her nose again. She had been sneezing since her first step into the room.

  Crispin bit back a smile and offered a grave nod, masculine and conspiratorial, to the clerk, who looked mollified and turned back to his business. “Married when?” he asked quietly.

  Her finger guided him down the cramped lines of the page. “Six months ago,” she whispered. “By a Reverend Cleminger of Agar Town, St. Pancras.”

  “Perhaps the bridegroom is the original Shufflebottom’s son.”

  His wife shot him a speaking look. “Would you name your son after his father, if the name were Baggott Shufflebottom?”

  He could not contain his snort. The clerk, in the corner of his vision, scowled.

  “Agar Town,” he said. “Well, that’s one place to start. We’d spend the better part of a year tracking down all these Clarks.”

  “There’s something else.” She glanced into the gloomy depths of the record room. “Jebediah Smith. There were twenty-four of them. Most of them deceased. The others, born too recently, in the last ten years. Crispin, I don’t think these names have anything to do with—” She dropped her voice. “Elland.” She wrinkled her nose, widened her eyes at him in a mute look of desperation, then turned away to sneeze into her glove.

  “Poor Jane,” he said. “Come, let’s get out of here, shall we? For the sake of your nose.”

  “Oh yes,” she said gratefully. “Only I—” She glanced hesitantly toward the clerk. “There was one other thing I wished to look at. Shall I meet you outside?”

  “I’m glad to wait.”

  But a furtive look had fallen over her; she shifted her weight and carefully closed the ledger. “No, it won’t take but a moment. Do go send for the coach.”

  Yesterday, he might have bowed and walked away without hesitation. Yesterday, he’d been a better man. But he knew now a dark impulse to press her until she disclosed her intention. The effect of five years in which he’d practiced and perfected suspicion, and honed a talent for manipulation, held him rooted in place, battling himself as tension tightened her brow.

  Don’t ask me, her eyes pleaded.

  But the goal was to keep her. In that dark hallway, discovering himself again, remembering himself, he’d also uncovered this singular desire. And each secret between them would make it more difficult to bind her to him.

  He exhaled slowly. He was not ruled by his vices. This dark vein of possessive greed did not control him. “Of course,” he said evenly, and turned on his heel, making his way into the dim light of a murky afternoon.

  She emerged just as the coach was drawing up. “You seemed so certain about those names,” she said as he helped her inside. Whatever information she had requested did not seem to have distracted her from the main point. “So certain they were somehow important.”

  “Even the devil is fallible, I suppose.”

  Her startled glance told him that he had failed to keep the darkness from his voice. “You . . . weren’t the devil, Crispin.”

  Another way to cut through these lies would simply be to speak the truth. I remember it all, Jane. Or most of it, all I need to understand exactly who I was.

  Who I am.

  But in that last bit lay the catch, didn’t it? Who I am. A rock beneath the water might appear seamless and plain, but in the light, it would reveal itself cut through by black veins. So, too, with him. He had not been cleansed by his period of forgetting, simply . . . disguised by it.

  Instead, he might say: Tell me why we truly married.

  But he could not ask that question, either. Perhaps he was afraid to know. Or maybe it did not matter. They were married. And he meant never to let her go.

  Need no one, trust no one. Before the assault had addled him, he had believed this maxim. But now he understood differently. He needed her. Not to succeed at worldly aims, but to want to live in the world. To feel, on waking, that there was good reason to rise, and to smile, even, at what the day might hold. She had spoken of possibility, the precious sense of its wide scope. She was his sense of the possible. When he imagined the world witho
ut her, it calcified around him.

  Need no one, trust no one. He wanted to trust her. He trusted her in every matter not to do with himself. But he’d not been a man deserving of trust. What hope that she would feel differently, that she would trust him when he said, I remember—but I am different now, regardless?

  “We’ll pay a visit to Agar Town,” he said. “If Shufflebottom was married there, then the parish priest should be able to tell us something about him. At the least, it will settle the matter.”

  “Yes,” she said. “I suppose so.”

  “The man I was.” He had to let this go. His darker self knew it was futile. His darker self saw an easier way, in which he spoke the truth years from now, after she was so thoroughly bound to him that it could make no difference. A child in her lap, another standing beside her. A family and a life together, which she would have no choice but to honor. “Do you still look for him in me?”

  Her expression softened, her puzzlement clearing away. Large, brilliant eyes, filled with compassion. “No,” she said. “Of course not.”

  But the answer, which would have pleased him yesterday, sank like a knife into him now. “He was successful.” He told himself to stop. But the words would come, despite him. “Celebrated. With every promise of going higher yet. He would not have been counted a poor match by anyone.”

  “By anyone who did not know him,” she corrected instantly. She thought they were in a different argument; she was defending him against that man. “But I knew him, Crispin. And despite all you’ve forgotten, you are a better politician than he ever was. You proved that with your speech. You will continue to prove it. I have no doubt of you. The men yesterday—not Sutton, but Burghley and de Witt. They mean what they say. If you wish it, there is a place in their party for you. And perhaps you should take it, after all. You can still go very high, but this time, your efforts will be undertaken in partnership with honest men, for the greater good—not simply for personal glory.”

  “Perhaps that other man might have made the same choices.” Shut up. “All he lacked was proper guidance. Your guidance, say.”

  Her hand fell away from him. “That man wanted no guidance,” she said quietly.

  What rebuttal could he offer? None. He looked out the window. They were nearing Agar Town.

  “But I understand him better now,” came her tentative voice at last. “I see . . . why he became what he was. Oh, I don’t know . . . I don’t think he would have changed.” He felt her puzzled study of him. He had lost the ability to disguise his thoughts from her, it seemed. She sensed his mood. “I’m sorry,” she whispered. “But I will say it: your mother was right. Great, miraculous good can come of evil.”

  And so the judgment was cast. He felt flayed by it. He locked his jaw tightly. It was her right to judge him. That did not mean it felt pleasant. “For a woman who argued so ardently for the ticket-of-leave system,” he said, “you have a marvelous cynicism for the possibility of reform.”

  The bench creaked as she sat back. “Oh,” she said very softly. She sounded wounded.

  He felt the same. Like a desert had opened in his chest, barren and hopeless.

  * * *

  Agar Town barely deserved the name of a township, being a crowded collection of low huts and cottages growing organically around a ragged-edged road. In the yards, clotheslines held patched petticoats, and here and there, stinking sole skins left to dry in the weak sun. Their stench mingled with pungent notes of sewage and acrid smoke from some nearby manufactory.

  Crispin had wanted her to wait in the coach, which stood parked tight against the terminus of the Great Northern Railway, but Jane refused. Her mother had never scrupled to take her along into the poorest and most miserable neighborhoods. Jane’s only concern was that she came empty-handed, particularly when they discovered that the church in fact doubled as a school, and the reverend, sitting on a stool in the cramped entry, was handing out pairs of socks to a grubby line of children.

  “And you, Mary?” the reverend called to a little girl in a tattered dress who crouched some distance away from the line, walking her doll across the floor. “Don’t you want socks?”

  “Don’t need socks.”

  “Why is that?”

  “I’ve quite enough of ’em.”

  “Oh?” The reverend laughed. “How many do you have?”

  The girl looked up, scowling. “Why, the ones on my feet,” she said, and Jane laughed, too, the sound catching the reverend’s attention.

  “Goodness!” The reverend rose. “Forgive me, madam, I didn’t—” He paused. “Back again, are you?” This to Crispin, far less warmly. He dismissed the children with a wave. “Soup is waiting in the kitchen,” he told them. They scrambled off amid cheers, Mary grabbing up her doll and leading the way.

  Crispin cleared his throat. “I was here before?”

  The reverend busied himself with neatening the basket of socks. He was a young, lanky man, with a gaunt face and a tightly disciplined air that lent his movements a jerky, almost violent quality as he straightened. “You didn’t seem drunk,” he said. “I can’t imagine you’ve forgotten.”

  Judging by this cold welcome, Crispin had not impressed the reverend at their prior meeting. Jane stepped forward. “This is a church?” she asked. “And a school besides?”

  The tight line of the reverend’s shoulders eased a little. “Quite so,” he said to her. “And also a soup kitchen for the local residents. A pint of broth for threepence, and gruel for a penny, and barley water and lemonade to encourage temperance.”

  “What a fine undertaking,” she said. “I wonder if we might not support it.”

  His eyes narrowed as he looked over her wardrobe. She had dressed thoughtlessly this morning, in one of the ready-made gowns ordered in haste, and the silk and lace shone too finely for their surroundings. “If it’s charity you offer, very well,” he said. “But I have told the gentleman already that I have no interest in bribes.”

  “That’s very good of you,” she said with gentle care. “And a testament to your success here. When my family undertook the rebuilding of Palmer Corner, in Liverpool, we could not afford to distinguish between charity and bribes; every penny was welcome in that effort.”

  His jaw tightened; for a moment, she feared she had provoked him too sharply. And then, sitting back onto his stool, he laughed.

  “Touché, madam. Pride does go before the fall. Your family directed that reform? I have read of it. That corner of Liverpool is now thriving, I hear.”

  She was stealing credit from her mother. But she would make good on it. “It was a long and difficult process,” she said, “but the result made it well worthwhile. And it sounds as if your efforts go similarly. We found, in addition to a soup kitchen and a school, that a mother’s society and a day nursery proved very useful. The extra income, from allowing the women to work without worry for their little ones—”

  “Precisely! And a workingman’s institute as well. We are planning on it.” Some clatter came from deeper inside the building, and the reverend cast a worried look in that direction before rising again. “I should like very much to talk with you at length, madam. We could learn a great deal from the example of Palmer’s Corner. Do you have a card?”

  “I’m afraid not, but my . . . husband does.” She had never said that word before, and she felt a shifting of the very atmosphere, Crispin’s subtle movement at her side. She pushed onward quickly, ignoring the strange pleasure of the word. “Please, do take it.”

  “Ah.” The reverend looked skeptically at Crispin but accepted the card. Something in it caused him to smile unkindly. “You neglected to give your name when last you called.”

  Crispin clearly had not been courteous.

  “I wasn’t the man I am now,” Crispin said evenly.

  “Well. I—” A crash came from the distance, followed by shrieks, causing the reverend to sigh. “As you see, I’m rather busy. But . . .” He cleared his throat and looked at Jane. “I
f there is something I may do for you, Mrs. Burke?”

  “We were looking for a man whom you recently married,” she said. “A Mr. Baggott Shufflebottom.”

  His brows rose. “Do you truly not remember?” he asked Crispin. “Very well, just as I said before: you came too late. Mr. Shufflebottom was buried a month after his wedding.”

  Ice curled through Jane’s stomach. “How did he die, may I ask?”

  The reverend shook his head. “Mrs. Burke, this is Agar Town. A drunkard can find a thousand ways to meet his maker. I believe he drowned in a cesspool, but as I told your husband before, his widow may know more of it. You will find her at the end of the road, in the cottage with the red door.”

  * * *

  For all the ramshackle appearance of the hunched cottages to right and left, handsome lamplights flanked the road, and a new smooth pavement led them quickly toward Mrs. Shufflebottom’s house. Jane noted these to Crispin. “These must be the reverend’s improvements. I think I will meet with him; would you mind it?”

  “Of course not.” That was the truth, but inwardly Crispin still wrestled with himself. Perhaps her only mistake was to condemn the man he had been while sparing the man he was. They had stepped into the misery of that scene in the school—bony children queuing for socks like priceless gems—and he had inwardly grimaced. She had turned immediately, briskly, to plans for improvement.

  They had both been raised in a sheltered world. But in his parents’ circles, noblesse oblige meant showering coins down from a distance. Jane, on the other hand, had been raised to see herself as part of a whole. To put her hands to work as well as her purse.

  Hers, he saw, was the better way. It would be difficult, after working alongside the poor, to forget them in the halls of power. Impossible, too, to think of politics as a game, rather than the machinery through which real lives could be saved or squandered.