“Let me find a hack,” Lou says gently. “We can go home.”
“But you had all those pamphlets printed,” I say, though it’s a watery protest. I feel rotten—this whole day, this whole great plan, ruined because I yet again could not pull myself together. But good God, it’s such a relief to think I could be at home, in bed, undressed and under the covers with the curtains closed, within the hour. I’ll likely be awake all night reliving every embarrassing thing I said or did today, and over the past weeks, months, years, maybe my whole life. But at least I’ll be home and out of this too-small coat.
“I’m sure I’ll find a use for them.” Louisa shuffles the stack against her leg so the edges sit evenly. “Or Edward will.”
My throat goes dry. “Has he read it?”
“Not this one, no. Do you want me to ask him to?”
“Maybe. I don’t know. He’ll probably think it’s amateur.” Aside from Louisa, there is no one on God’s green earth whose opinion I value as highly as Edward Davies’s, rabble-rouser in the House of Commons and one of London’s most notorious social reformers. I know Lou gave him the first of my John Everyman pamphlets, and though she didn’t tell him who the author was, I still broke out in hives at the thought of him reading it. And though this new one is leagues better than that first attempt over a year ago, it’s also the least satirical and most pointed I’ve yet penned, and the chance that Edward may read my sincere attempts at political writing and find them wanting is mortifying.
Louisa does a quick tally of her remaining pamphlets, minus the stack she took from me. “I’ve only got six left. Let me give these out, then we’ll get a carriage and take you home. Stay here. I’ll be quick.”
As she starts down the path, scarlet cloak flapping behind her, I collapse onto a nearby bench and try to breathe and not obsess about how take you home makes me feel like a child she’s minding. My muscles are shaking. My hands are shaking. What is wrong with me that my body has registered the prospect of offering a single piece of political writing to a stranger as something close to a near-death experience? In spite of how passionate I find my own heart on the subject of reform, and in spite of the privileged position I will one way or another find myself in someday as a member of the House of Lords, I suspect I’m a man better suited to living in a folly on a nobleman’s grounds.
Adrian Montague, professional hermit. It’s not an uappealing idea.
A wind whips down the park path, strong enough to shake ice from the branches above me. I feel the crystals melt against my neck and drip down my back. I must be steaming. If my mother were here, she would tell me to breathe. That’s always the first thing—breath. She was the only other person I knew who understood how literally I meant it when I said I couldn’t breathe. The only time I tried the line on my father, he bellowed back at me, “Well, obviously you’re breathing or else you’d be dead!” And I thought, That would probably be better for all of us, really.
But my mother would sit quietly with me, sometimes breathing slowly and encouraging me to match her speed, sometimes taking my hand and rubbing her thumbs into my palms. Louisa saw her do it once, and has taken up the same practice, whenever she can feel the walls beginning to close in around me. I want her here, now, warm at my side as she huddles into my shoulder and tucks her face against the wind. Suddenly I’m certain she’s gotten her own carriage to take her home without me and is so embarrassed by my failure that she’ll never speak to me again. I look up, trying not to feel frantic as I scan the park, searching the trees for that bright wing of scarlet, trying to get my breath back, trying not to panic, trying not to think of ways this day could get worse.
Until one sits down next to me.
“Adrian Montague!”
Richard Peele, Viscount of Parkgate, nearly lands in my lap as he collapses onto the bench at my side, sitting unbearably close and reeking of boozy sweat. His valet—a man far too blond and handsome for a life in service—stands over his shoulder, smirking at me in the way that men who have no personality beyond being too blond and handsome do. Peele swings an arm over my shoulder like we’re school chums, and my muscles tense. I think of the crabs Lou and I caught one summer in Penzance—when we picked them up, their whole bodies would flinch before they tucked themselves inside their shell and out of sight. I wish I could hide that easily. I wish I had a shell. I wish I were a crab on a Penzance beach who didn’t know what a Richard Peele was.
“How are you? And what the hell are you wearing?” He slaps my chest with a flat palm that knocks what little breath I have straight out of me. “You look like a beggar.” I open my mouth to respond but he keeps talking, and I’m reminded that the only good thing about a conversation with Richard Peele is that one is not required to contribute anything. Every time he has cornered me at a ball or party or dinner—his unrequited affection toward me as baffling as it is unwanted—that has been my only comfort. “Are you walking alone? Poor thing, you just can’t make any friends, can you? It would be easier to like you if you weren’t so shy and odd, you know.”
Then he looks at me like he expects me to thank him for the advice. Either that or he’s trying to give me some sort of visual cue that he’s granting me permission to speak.
“I’m . . . waiting.” It is a Herculean effort to get those two words out of my constricted throat. I do not like how close he is sitting. I do not like him touching me. I do not like the way that every smell clinging to him feels like an assault on my senses. His presence is aggressive: from the light glinting off the greasy spot on his nose to the slick of his hair to the too-many-colors of his suit. “Waiting for someone,” I finally manage to finish.
“Well then, I’ll wait with you!” Somehow, Peele scoots even closer to me, his arm a lead weight on my shoulders. His valet is still staring at me, still smirking at me in a way that makes me check my shirtfront for sweat stains. “I’ve been meaning to call on you since you arrived. How’s your father? Will he be coming for the next vote, or is he sending you to the House to face the wolves?” He clamps his hands on my shoulders and shakes me in a way that is likely meant to be conspiratorial but instead makes my teeth feel loose. “Don’t worry, I won’t let them bully you any more than you deserve. What have you got there, Mortimer?”
Peele’s valet has chased a crumpled piece of paper caught in the wind, and as he retrieves it off the ground, I realize with horror he’s holding one of my pamphlets. Louisa must have dropped one. Or I did. Probably it was me. My vision spots with panic as he smooths it out across his knee and squints at it.
Peele holds out a hand. “Give it here.”
There is, of course, no conceivable way Richard Peele would know it’s my writing—or even any reason he should guess at such—but the idea of that suddenly becomes a load-bearing anxiety in the already precarious architecture of my mind. I stop breathing as I watch him read the title.
He’s going to know I wrote it. Somehow. Maybe I left my name on it or he saw me drop it or maybe he’ll just know. He’s going to know I’m a radical trying to get my father’s workhouse shut down. He’s going to tell my father, who will then bar me from taking over his seat in Parliament and I’ll be disgraced and Louisa will be disgraced and any children we may have will be disgraced and I will die a disgraced death having not done a goddamn thing except worry for all my odd, friendless days.