His assistant tensed, like a lad who had been called to the blackboard unprepared. Sometimes, Lucian forgot that at age thirty, Matthews was one year his senior. He felt decades older than the man on a good day.
“I recommended you reveal your name behind your charitable activities,” Matthews said. “The hospital in York, for example, would cease to exist without your financial support—we should make it known you are the benefactor before the season is over.”
Lucian grunted. “Charity fares better without my name blackening it.”
“Precisely why I carefully selected appropriate causes—since the hospital is frequented by only the destitute, how could anyone of consequence object?”
They wouldn’t, because no one of consequence cared about a hospital treating the dregs of society.
“All right,” he said. “Reveal my name.”
Matthews looked pleased; his list must have been much reduced in length after taking off gallery visits and such. He’d probably withdraw to his quarters as soon as they arrived in Belgravia and play the same song on his traverse flute over and over as he always did to soothe his nerves.
It wasn’t that Matthews’s approach was foolish—not entirely—but Lucian suspected it was ineffective and, as such, not worth the trouble. He had already changed his ways during the past months: he had sold a few debts into hands less villainous than his and forgiven one debt entirely—unprecedented behavior on his part. Thus far, it had failed to yield results—such as, say, an invitation to the back rooms of the exchequer.
“Sir, there is one thing you could do that would have an immediate and advantageous effect on your reputation,” Matthews said.
“I’m all ears.”
His assistant was looking at a spot next to his shoulder rather than into his eyes. “You could stop tormenting the Earl of Rutland.”
Ice coated his chest at the sound of the infernal name. “Never,” he said, his voice soft.
Matthews’s lips paled, and Lucian looked back out the dirty window. Milksoppery grated on his nerves. But he wagered Matthews disliked him, too. The man was the fourth son of a baron—low in the hierarchy of the peerage and afflicted by genteel poverty—but he’d still consider himself a better breed of man. He doggedly upheld his upper-class ways and wore his waistcoat, jacket, and trousers all in different colors, with his coat of arms prominently on display on his scarves. He made comments in softly murmured Latin, and his fingers were long and white and had never exerted themselves much beyond playing the bloody flute or holding a deck of losing cards. Yes, he’d loathe taking orders from a man like Lucian. Even if that man had lifted him from a stinking cell in the debtors’ prison.
With much delay, they arrived at his Belgravia residence. His house welcomed him with cool quiet, a side effect of having every window bricked shut. The gas lamps along the walls guttered to life and bathed the cavernous room in sooty yellow light. It leached the colors from the Persian rugs on the floor and the various stacks of science and trade journals that were gradually growing toward the ceiling. Gaslight was bad light, dim and sooty. He had to stand close to the large business map covering the east wall in this light just to discern the different colors of the threads that visualized financial flows in Europe and to the American East Coast. And he was ruining his eyesight studying his tightly written notes and clippings on British fiscal policies, which he had pinned to the wall behind his desk. As soon as Edison’s new bulbs and electric wiring had proven themselves safe for indoor use, he’d retire the gas pipes in his houses.
For now, his most pressing issue was Greenfield’s daughter.
He leaned back against the edge of his desk. On the business map across from him, dozens of threads representing loans, equity, and revenue flows fanned out from a pin with the Greenfield name to various countries, institutions, and industries. The picture confirmed that Greenfield was on shaky ground in Spain. Without a majority share in one of the railway companies, he stood to be delegated to the back bench in that market. And men like Greenfield didn’t care for second place.
Save the soft howl of stale air coming through the ventilation shaft, a heavy silence filled the room. He could sell Greenfield his shares. But the moment the transaction was completed, the banker would lose interest in him. Business relations were fickle bonds: reliable only as long as one could expect return favors in the foreseeable future. It was why he had ignored the lunch invites—they were, potentially, rare tickets for a place at the table, but he wasn’t yet certain how to leverage them. And he wanted that place at the table. It had taken him long enough to understand that his wealth wouldn’t buy him the changes he wanted to effect. Money, he had learned, was a wholly different beast from power. Power was held by polite society within the hermetically sealed fortress of shared experiences at Eton, Oxford, and Cambridge, strategic marriages, and inheritance laws. Politics was made in private back rooms, after dinners, during grand tours. Their crumbling castles and unproductive estates notwithstanding, these inbred circles still ranked money below name and connections. But Julien Greenfield had a foot in the door. A century after his family had settled in Britain, their money wasn’t quite new money anymore and his landholdings didn’t count as flash gentry.
He returned to his desk and took up his pen, because an altogether different avenue into these hallowed circles existed. The specifics of his plan were unclear, but his muscles were tense with the purposeful impatience he knew from spotting a winning investment. He would put his money on Miss Jones.
Chapter 4
Ruskin was right: Persephone looked lovely.
The realization struck Hattie not two minutes into her class, and she backed away, her gaze flitting erratically across the painting. The soft scratch of chalk and brushes on canvas and Ruskin’s footsteps among the easels faded into a white roar. How had she not seen it before? Here was Persephone, in the process of being dragged from her flower field into the underworld by a muscular arm around her waist, and while her expression was horrified, it was … politely horrified. The dynamic of her body as she twisted away from Hades, god of the underworld, was, at second glance, restrained. This was probably not how one would resist an abduction.
She wiped her damp palms on her apron. Disaster. Without intending to do so, she must have focused on preserving Persephone’s poise throughout her ordeal; now her heroine looked as though she was conscious of her coiffure while fighting her attacker. Where was the passion, the fury, the truth? An Artemisia Gentileschi she was not. In fact, this had to be the most tepid interpretation of the abduction since Walter Crane …. At her plaintive whimper, the collective attention of the all male students in the University Galleries shifted onto her with an audible whoosh, and she quickly shrank back behind her canvas. To her right, Lord Skeffington had ceased sketching and was watching her curiously. “Is anything the matter, Miss Greenfield?” he murmured.
Where to begin? The warmth in her cheeks said her face was red as a beetroot. She pasted on a smile. “No. Not at all.”
She dabbed her dry paintbrush aimlessly at a bit of sky, pretending to be immersed. Soon, the attention was drifting away from her. Her distress lingered. Her work, five weeks in the making, was soulless, dead.