In Regency England, two brothers vie for Mabel's affections. Their passionate rivalry puts her reputation on the line and tests both her sense and sensibility to the maximum. On the verge of despair, she must cast the die: to decipher the most enigm...
She pulled on a fresh dress, suitable for an evening at home, or visiting a gentleman, though hardly in the middle of the night. Yet, some instinct told her that he couldn't have gone to bed either. With a candle held high into one hand to light her way, and the papers crinkling against her chest, she descended to the ground floor.
How easy it was for her! How difficult for Radcliffe!
She imagined he would be in his study, but the light there was off, though she could see it flooding from under the bedroom's door.
On the morrow then.
As if celebrating her surrender, something shattered deeper in his apartment, whence the light poured. A cascading sound of glass breaking. Spilling, spilling on a hard surface. Lots of broken glass.
"Radcliffe!" she cried, forgetting herself. "Radcliffe?"
A moment of dreadful silence, quieter for the sound of the crush just before it, fell. Then, "Don't come in. I broke the mirror," Radcliffe called back to her. "There is glass everywhere."
She opened the door.
He wasn't in the bedroom. "Radcliffe?"
She heard him expel a breath and followed the sound to the next room, a narrow one with only one awkward window squeezed in the corner, shelves of toiletries, a closet entrance and a trumeau with a large mirror. A gentleman's dressing room, hardly a place for a lady.
"Miss Walton... Mabel, you shouldn't be here."
Radcliffe stood barefoot next to the trumeau. The lamp wasn't lit, but a curtain that shadowed the long and skinny window was thrown back, allowing moonlight in. Its weak glow still set the white of his nightshirt off against the dark velvet of his housecoat.
"Fortunately, my reputation is already in tatters," she said, tugging her skirts tighter and edging inside. "What's one more sinful night with my lover?"
On the trumeau's polished wood, jars and toiletries mixed with wicked glass shards. On the floor they fanned out. He must have hit the mirror with his cane, full force, for it to explode like that. Then it flew out of his grip, as he must have cowered, shielded his head with his arms... to fall against the wall, out of his reach.
"Mabel, please..." he groaned.
She paid him no heed, picking her way toward the closet. There had to be shoes in there for him. And something to light the lamp. Her candle was burning low already, despite mixing with the starlight and the reflections. Spooky, that was too spooky. She had to light the lamp.
"Are you hurt?"
"No."
"Good. Don't move."
His laughs came in awfully impolite snorts.
"Sorry."
"Mabel, listen to me," he spluttered, as if this highly inopportune moment was the best one to talk the heart matters over. Or the only one. "I adored you from our first meeting. If I didn't pursue you, it was only because Everett mocked me and shared the details of your courtship so intimate, that I felt hopeless and unsure where to even start."
Mabel swallowed hard, stopping in her tracks. "Everett told you about the lake?"
Radcliffe nodded.
"Wh-what did he tell you?" It wasn't me, it was Hazel! she wanted to scream, suspecting the worst.
"Lies." Radcliffe gave her his one-shouldered shrug. "I doubted his motives even then. But once I knew you better, I wondered if, perhaps, he exaggerated your fondness for him, and if he only pursued you afterward to thwart me."
"He accuses you of the same thing," she whispered. "Of pursuing me to thwart his courtship."
"As ignoble as my argument would sound or, worse, pedantic... out of the two of us, Everett and I, I was not raised with the knowledge that I shall inherit everything only if my brother died childless."
"I can't, I won't believe this conclusion!" Mabel cried out. "Such motivation doesn't fit his nature."
The same consideration must have occurred to Radcliffe. What mask of false calm he'd managed to plaster over his features slipped right off. In the dancing shadows, his expression magnified to panic. "It vexes me to think that he'd changed that much since our childhood, but I couldn't ignore the facts. He came home profoundly changed from the war."
He needed her to believe it, she felt, but she just couldn't. "Your brother is a cad, but not a calculating one. Passions drive him toward madness."
"There isn't much I could offer to persuade you about his plotting." As Radcliffe went on, the words became reduced to mumbling. "Or that I love you."
Mabel grimaced. The two brothers couldn't have been more different than day and night, but their love confessions were remarkably similar: confounding and timed all wrong. "You are right. I don't believe you."
His lips flew open, eyes flung, nostrils flared. "When Mother wrote that you had refused Everett, I rejoiced. I raged at how he threatened you, and I rejoiced. I have never envisioned marriage for myself, but you... I couldn't put dreams out of my mind. A shred of hope that you might harbour a tender affection toward me, if not passion... The thinnest shred—that would have been enough for me."
"So your proud words about heart-felt love were a ruse? You would have settled for a shred?" She forgot about the closet, the lamp. Her heels grated on mirror shards as she advanced on him.
"No... listen!" Now that she was within his reach, he grabbed her hand and pressed it to his chest. His heart. "I would have stoked it, I decided. I would have nurtured it like a flower. They say men deflower women, but no, no! That wasn't what I wanted. I wanted you to blossom in my arms."
She would have smiled if his face didn't pinch. The words were so sweet; alas, the pang of premonition needled her chest, alas, there is more.
"Only I have learned too late that I couldn't make that happen. Nobody could. Nobody should ever wish for that kind of control over another's heart, no matter how pure the intentions," Radcliffe said.
"Radcliffe?" She wished for a passionate love confession, and she received it, but darkness twined it.
The determination flattened his lips. "Please, understand me, Mabel. For Heaven's sake, understand me! I was mad, madder than ever in my life. My father's tortures didn't make me so mad as what Mother wrote about Everett. How he all but forced himself on you. How he dared to presume you could want him. How he threatened you with infamy!"
Lady Catherine might have exaggerated the danger to her virtue, but it must have grown even worse for Radcliffe in his isolation. And yet somehow he still wrote her amusing letters, day after day, never mentioning Everett. Or would she have found this rage on the bottom of the stack if she had patience to read them all?
"Were I a better man, I would have challenged him to remove him forever as a threat to you. But I don't know how to fight with weapons." His face molded back to a stoney stillness.
He knew how to turn people's passions against them—or so Everett had said. A threat uttered in the moment of frustration, a helpless tantrum of a boy, something a man would have thought better of when his morality interfered... thrown back at him in all its ugliness. The mirror held up before Everett's face. Look, and be horrified. Don't hate the mirror. Run.
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