years before but the shadow of it had never lifted. Brokeby had tainted her with his vile reputation for perversion. Then, a year ago, an exhibition of nude paintings of her had dealt her reputation its final blow. Brokeby’s wretched paintings … A tremor shook Tess deep inside. She could never reveal the truth about those. Her throat closed with revulsion and she swallowed hard. It was best not to remember that night. It was best to lock those hideous memories away. Except that she had found over the years that she could not forget them. She carried them everywhere with her. They were imprinted on her mind just as she felt they were indelibly written on her body in all their lurid detail. Hateful images she would scrub away if only she could. But they never faded. She was haunted.
The breath hitched in her throat and she blinked to dispel the sting of tears in her eyes. Brokeby was dead and gone to the hell he deserved. She was free. Only, she never quite felt free. Somehow the shame and the horror were etched too deep on her soul to be forgotten.
And now here was Corwen, a man of a similar stamp, waiting for her to succumb to his blackmail. Very slowly Tess raised her gaze to his face. There was a gleam of amusement in his small eyes, the pleasure of a man who enjoyed enforcing his will and making others squirm. So very like Brokeby … But she was not a frightened girl anymore.
“Lord Corwen,” Tess said, “if you ever go near Lady Sybil or threaten her reputation, I will personally ensure that you are maimed sufficiently never to approach a woman again with your vile proposals.” She gave him a smile that dripped ice. “Now—at last—are we clear?”
Corwen made a sudden involuntary movement full of violence, and Tess’s mind splintered into terrifying images of Brokeby, brutal, vicious, utterly merciless. She closed her eyes for a second to banish the vile, vivid memories and when she opened them, Corwen was gone, slamming out of the room with a force that shook the mantelpiece and sent the invitation cards fluttering down to the floor.
Tess heaved a sigh and sank down rather heavily onto Joanna’s gold brocade sofa. The port decanter beckoned to her but she had had a bad night and her head was already aching, and she knew from bitter experience that trying to lose her memory in drink was a fool’s game. She had tried it after Brokeby’s death, tried to drown the past. These days she could not look a gin bottle in the eye without feeling sick. She had tried everything, including laudanum, from which she had sometimes thought she would never wake. Nothing helped, not sweetmeats, not even spending excessive amounts of money on clothes, shoes and accessories. In the end she had dragged herself out of the despair through sheer force of will, but by then it had been too late. The ton had seen the drinking and the gambling and the spending to excess, and now there were those hideous paintings. It was no wonder that her reputation was so damaged.
Tess drove her fist so hard into one of Joanna’s gold brocade cushions that the seams split. She hastily shoved the stuffing back inside and turned the cushion over so that the rent would not show. Her headache stabbed her temples. She had not been able to sleep after she had got back from the brothel the previous night. Lying in her bed, staring up at the canopy, she had come to the inevitable conclusion that the Jupiter Club was finished. It was too dangerous for them to meet again when government saboteurs had surely infiltrated the membership and were fomenting violence. Whoever was stirring up the rioters would be acting as an informer as well. It would only be a matter of time before the spy would unmask them all, not just her but her young political protégé Justin Brooke and his sister, Emma, too.
And now there was this, Corwen’s revolting attempt to blackmail her into serving up her stepdaughter, Sybil, like some virginal sacrifice to his jaded palate. The thought made the bile rise in Tess’s throat. She adored Sybil and her twin brother, Julius, and had done so from the moment she had first met them. It was intolerable to see both of them at the mercy of Lord Corwen.
Tess reached absent-mindedly for the chocolate-flavoured bonbons that Joanna kept in a silver box on the table nearby. The box was empty. With a sigh Tess replaced it. She had dismissed Corwen for the time being but she knew that he would be back, in one shape or form or another, with his greedy eyes and his repellent demands. He wanted Sybil and he would be determined to have her. And Tess understood all about the driving need a man like Corwen felt to take something so fresh and sweet as Sybil Darent and despoil it.
She could keep Sybil physically safe but she could not protect her reputation. Tess had no doubt that if Corwen could not have Sybil, then he would ruin her another way. And the hateful truth was that Corwen was right—a whisper of scandal could kill any debutante’s good name and future prospects regardless of whether or not it was based on truth. Sybil’s aunt was the most irreproachably respectable chaperone in the whole of London, but Tess was still the girl’s stepmother, and her own blemished reputation could do her stepdaughter nothing but damage. She wondered that she had not thought of it before. Corwen would drop a subtle word here and there, poisoning the ton against Sybil for no better reason than that he lusted after her and could not have her.
Tess shivered, her fingers digging into the richly embroidered arm of the sofa. Damn Corwen to hell and back for his callous determination to indulge his most base vices on the body of her stepdaughter. It was unbearable. And damn him to the next level of hell for threatening to foreclose on the loan as well, thereby forcing her to decimate Julius’s inheritance in order to pay him off.
She could stall him, but it was only a matter of time.
With a muffled cry of frustration she leapt to her feet and walked over to the window, where a grey cloud stretched from horizon to horizon now, spilling inky darkness over the city. The faint autumn sunlight had been banished and it was a cold, wintry scene.
There was no escape for Julius or Sybil, and yet she had to do something to help them. Their father had entrusted them to her care. She could not fail them.
There was no way out.
Unless …
Unless she married again….
The thought slid into her mind with all the sinuous temptation of the snake in Eden. Tess screwed her eyes up tightly. She had been widowed for two years and she had promised her sister Joanna that she would make no more marriages. Joanna, Tess suspected, was embarrassed to have a much-married marchioness as a sister. But Joanna had also forgotten quite how vulnerable a widow could be.
What she needed was a marriage in name only to a man who had sufficient power and authority to tell Corwen to go hang and to provide the protection of his name for both herself and her stepchildren. Then, once she was irreproachably wed, she would need to transform herself into a reputable matron. No more climbing out of brothel windows. No more gambling. No more Jupiter Club.
No more satirical cartoons.
It would undo all her good work to be clapped in gaol. That was a position from which there really was no return.
Tess pulled a face. The thought of denying her talent for art, of deliberately turning away from the cartoons, the one thing that gave her life such passionate meaning, was almost unbearable. She had been drawing since she was a child, pouring her feelings into her sketches as a means of expression and escape. Sorrow, joy, fear and frustration had all been expressed through her pen.
Yet she could see that now she had no choice. She would have to abandon political satire and choose something blameless like watercolours or sketching, perhaps. Ladies were forever setting up their easels and capturing some idyllic rural scene. She would do the same. Drawing and painting were amongst the few feminine accomplishments she possessed.
A respectable marriage would also offer her the camouflage she needed should Lord Sidmouth’s investigators prove efficient enough as to suspect her of sedition. She needed a smoke screen, an elderly, impotent smoke screen. She
