Page 15 of More or Less a Countess
Lady Chase’s face darkened to an ominous shade of red. “Shame on you, Violet! I vow you’re the most stubborn, willful, and headstrong chit—”
Violet didn’t stay to hear the rest, but turned on her heel, escaped into the hallway, and hurried up the stairs until her grandmother’s scolds faded to silence behind her.
She had, after all, heard it all before.
* * * *
Four hours later, Violet tossed aside the paper in her hand with a sigh. She’d been staring at her list for the better part of the afternoon, and she’d yet to come up with a plan to get the sketches she needed to complete her book.
As with everything else, it was a question of access. Through a combination of stealth and wiliness she’d managed to get a sketch of the gallows at Tyburn, and one of Newgate Prison. She’d coaxed Iris’s coachman into lingering on St. James’s Street in front of the bow window at White’s for long enough to get a rough drawing of it, but there were a half dozen locations still on her list, each more unlikely than the last. A respectable young lady didn’t just happen to stumble upon Cockpit Steps after dark, or suddenly find herself standing at Execution Dock with her sketchbook in hand. She didn’t dig about in the dirt at Bunhill Fields Burial Ground on a hunt for the stray bones of plague victims, either.
Violet shuffled some papers about on the long table she’d dragged into the middle of the old schoolroom, and laid out a blank page at the end of the chapter she’d entitled, “The Black Death: London Overrun with Corpses.”
She stood back, her arms crossed, and surveyed the array of papers.
No, it wouldn’t do. She must have the burial grounds.
She ran a critical eye over her finished sketches, and a colored drawing she’d begun the day after Lord Derrick’s dinner party caught her eye. She’d finished it last night, and now she plucked it from the pile, a quiet laugh escaping her as she studied it.
Oh, she’d done him justice, hadn’t she? She’d spent hours on the rakish tilt of his head, the bored, sulky twist of his full lips, the heaviness of his eyelids over his sleepy gray eyes, as if they were weighed down by that thick, dark fringe of eyelashes.
The Selfish Rake.
Violet ran a finger over the title she’d scrawled across the top of the sketch, her grin widening. There was no denying Lord Dare was exquisitely handsome. Rakes and scoundrels generally were, but he was a shining example of the type, and she’d gotten a good, long look at him while he’d had Lady Uplands pinned against Lord Derrick’s bookshelf. Her view had been limited mostly to his back, of course, but one would never know it to look at the sketch.
It was flawless.
How lovely of Lord Dare to appear in London just in time to serve as the model for her “Gentlemen, Rakes, and Rakes who Pose as Gentlemen” chapter. It was rather thin on content—so thin she’d been on the verge of scrapping it altogether—but she’d done a truly lovely drawing of Lord Derrick entitled “The Ideal Gentleman,” and now that she had Lord Dare as her rake, she’d decided the two drawings taken together more than made up for any other shortcomings.
Still, as spectacular as the sketch of Lord Dare was, a dozen drawings of selfish rakes wouldn’t make up for the lack of ghosts and burial grounds.
Violet set the drawing of Lord Dare aside and tapped her quill against her chin, considering. She didn’t like it, but perhaps she could manage without the sketch of Cockpit Steps. But she couldn’t part with the burial grounds—not on any account. If she didn’t get that sketch, she’d have to scrap the pages she’d so painstakingly written on the plague epidemic, and it was one of her best. No self-respecting scholar would include a chapter on a deadly London epidemic and then leave out a drawing of a purported gravesite, but when she’d ventured to suggest to her grandmother she’d like to take some sketches of the burial grounds, Lady Chase had refused her permission, because “corpses weren’t ladylike.”
It was utter nonsense, of course—it wasn’t as if dozens of old corpses were piled on top of each other in plain sight—but she was afraid if she insisted, her grandmother might ask questions Violet would rather not answer.
No, she’d simply have to get the sketches she needed without her grandmother’s knowledge. She could try and wheedle Iris into taking her, but her sister had developed a troubling habit of confiding everything to her husband, and—
Violet froze at the quiet tread of footsteps on the stairs leading up to the schoolroom, then scrambled to her feet and dove for the table. Her grandmother rarely ventured to the third floor, but there was no telling what the old lady might take it into her head to do if she was still in a temper over the modiste.
Violet’s fingers scrabbled frantically over the wood as she shoved her papers into an untidy pile and stuffed them under the cushion of an old chair she’d placed beside the table for just this purpose. Once the papers were secure, she threw herself on top of the cushion, reached under the chair to snatch a piece of embroidery with a dusty, faded image of a vase of roses stretched over the hoop, and pasted what she hoped was an innocent look on her face.
“It’s only me.”
Hyacinth’s face appeared at the top of the stairs, and Violet sagged against the cushion with a sigh of relief. “Oh, thank goodness. I thought for certain it was Grandmother. She’s been threatening to come up here and find out what ‘foolish nonsense’ has me so occupied.”
“She nearly did come this time, but I reminded her how difficult the stairs were with her cane and offered to come myself.” Hyacinth leaned against the edge of the table. “How does the book come on?”
Violet tossed aside her embroidery, leapt up from the chair, and dragged the loose sheaf of papers out from under the cushion.
She ran a careful hand over the title page to smooth it.
A Treatise on London for Bluestockings and Adventuresses.
Her beloved book. She’d written every word herself. It was, from beginning to end, her own creation. She’d even drawn the frontispiece—a lady seated in front of a fire with an open book in her hands and a serious, learned expression on her face.
She’d never shown the book to anyone. Iris and Hyacinth knew of its existence, and they’d both seen a page here or there, but only Violet knew every page by heart.
“The book comes on, but I must have the sketches, Hyacinth. It simply won’t do to leave them out. One can’t have a chapter entitled “Haunted London: Ghosts and Specters Run Amok in the Capital” without even one sketch of a haunted alleyway, or a chapter on the plague without a drawing of the pit at Bunhill Fields Burial Ground.”
