The Countess Conspiracy Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Chapter Twenty-six

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  Epilogue

  Thanks

  The Brothers Sinister Series: Excerpts

  Other Books by Courtney Milan

  Author’s Note

  Acknowledgements

  Copyright

  For Rosalind Franklin, whose name we know.

  For Anna Clausen, whom I discovered while writing this book.

  For every woman whose name has disappeared without recognition.

  This book is for you.

  Chapter One

  Cambridge, May 1867

  VIOLET WATERFIELD, THE COUNTESS OF CAMBURY, was always most comfortable in a crowd.

  Other women of her station might despise sitting in a lecture hall elbow-to-elbow with any person off the streets, no mark of distinction setting her apart from the old friend who sat on her left or the elderly man, no doubt living on a meager pension, who sat at her right. Other women might whisper amongst themselves about the smell of humanity, packed so close.

  But in a crowd, Violet could disappear. The odor of sour pipe smoke and unwashed flesh meant that nobody paid attention to her. Nobody glanced at her for approval or wanted her opinion on some fool thing she didn’t care about. In a crowd, Violet could dispose of all her pretenses and indulge in her one forbidden passion: Mr. Sebastian Malheur.

  Or—to be more accurate—his work.

  Sebastian was her oldest friend, and today, he was the one who addressed the throng. He had a deep voice and a mischievous smile, one he used to great effect in making the most commonplace scientific observations sound interesting. Wicked, even. The rest of him—his dark lustrous hair, that brilliant, impish smile that he always wore—she would leave to the blushing ladies of the ton who wished to make his intimate acquaintance.

  Violet had no use for his handsome good looks, his idle flirtations. But his work, now…

  “Thus far,” Sebastian was saying, “my research has focused on simple traits: the colors of flowers, the shapes of leaves. I’ve detailed several different mechanisms of inheritance. What I am going to present today is not further explanation, but a series of baffling questions.”

  She’d heard those words before. More than once. They’d traded them back and forth just this morning, trying to get them absolutely perfect.

  They’d succeeded.

  His gaze swept over the gathering, and even though he didn’t look in her direction, Violet found herself smiling in response. He was just getting to the good part.

  “Bafflement,” Sebastian said, “means there is something left to be discovered. So let me tell you what we don’t know.”

  In the dim recesses of her awareness, Violet realized that she was not the only one leaning forward in anticipation. Sebastian was a magnet. He drew people to him without even trying.

  Some of those in attendance were adoring young scientists who hung on his every word and dreamed of following in his footsteps. Others were followers of Darwin, like Huxley in the corner, watching the proceedings beneath thick eyebrows. There were a great many ladies present, too—Sebastian had always drawn ladies to him.

  But there were also people like those seated directly behind Violet. She couldn’t see them, but—despite her best efforts to ignore them—she was aware of them. These were the worst sort: interrupters.

  “Shameful,” muttered the man behind her, loudly enough to puncture even the resilient bubble of Violet’s enjoyment. “Utterly shameful.”

  There was nothing shameful about the figure Sebastian was pointing to, not unless one harbored an irrational hatred for bar charts. This one detailed only numbers—numbers collected with an arduous attention to detail, if Violet could say such a thing herself without being accused of hubris.

  She frowned, leaned forward an inch, and did her best to focus on Sebastian.

  “A complete disgrace,” the woman behind her responded. “That’s what it is.” Her voice, even in that whisper, carried. It was like a high-pitched trepanning drill, boring directly into Violet’s skull. “He’s flaunting his godless ways. He is the most dissolute reprobate. Talking in public about breeding and intercourse.”

  “There, there,” her companion whispered back. “Put your hands over your ears and I’ll let you know when it’s safe to listen again.”

  How was one to talk about the inheritance of traits without mentioning the act of propagation? Were people supposed to remain silent about basic biological facts for propriety’s sake? And knowing that Sebastian Malheur was going to discuss topics that were odious to them, why had this pair come?

  “Malheur must think of such things all the time!” the high-pitched voice continued. “The filth. The depravity of such a mind.”

  Violet did her best to ignore them, refusing to let her expression falter by so much as a half-smile. But inside she seethed. It wasn’t just that Sebastian was Violet’s dearest friend. Those words felt like a direct attack. As if they were saying such things about her.

  In a way, they were.

  “There’s a reason,” the husband retorted, “that all of these so-called natural philosophers are men. The female sex is too good to consider such disgusting thoughts.”

  That was it. Violet turned. She caught a glimpse of a surprised woman in pink-sprigged muslin situated next to a gentleman with gleaming mustachios. She gave them her grimmest stare.

  “Hush,” she admonished them. The woman’s mouth rounded in surprise. Violet gave her a firm nod and then turned back.

  Sebastian had begun to speak about the first puzzle.

  Oh, yes. This was one of her favorites. Slowly, she relaxed. She began to sink back into Sebastian’s talk, the ebb and flow of the argument. A well-constructed lecture was like a cat’s purr: hard to achieve, and yet so, so satisfying when it finally—

  “I believe,” Madame High-Pitch continued, as if Violet had demanded a half-minute of silence instead of basic respect, “that he must have actually signed a contract with the Devil. How else could one man have such force of presence, if not to mislead?”

  Her focus shattered again. Violet thought wistfully of the parasol she’d left in the cloakroom—the lovely purple parasol with its demure ribbons and its pointed end. Useful for poking rude people, and fashionable, too. Her mother would have approved.

  “I hear,” the woman continued, “that he ravishes a virtuous woman every night. Heavens, what will I do if his eye falls on me?”

  Violet rolled her own eyes and leaned forward.

  Up front, Sebastian gestured at the easel, and the young man who was with him changed the card to a painting of a cat. Violet knew the painting quite well.

  She knew the cat even better.

  “This pattern”—he gestured at the striped black-and-ginger cat—“is sometimes achieved when a ginger tabby mates with a dark cat.”

  “Good God. He said mate. He actually said
the word mate.”

  Violet steepled her fingers and concentrated intently on Sebastian, willing all the rest of the world away.

  He shifted his stance and glanced over the crowd. “It’s a long-standing truth that all cats look black at night.” Violet didn’t need to be able to make out his expression to imagine a wickedly raised eyebrow. “Still, during the day we must ask the question: Why are there so few tortoiseshell toms?”

  Another horrified gasp arose behind her. “Was he referring to—good heavens. That’s…that’s indecent!”

  Sebastian gestured. “The science of inheritance that I have outlined over the last few years explains why traits might have a fifty-percent chance of being inherited, or a quarter chance. But the chance that a male cat will show tortoiseshell coloring is so small we cannot calculate it—one in a thousand, perhaps. My theory provides no explanation for such smallness.”

  The woman’s voice was beginning to rise in pitch, something Violet would not have believed possible. “He just boasted of his size in public. William, you’re a constable. Do something.”

  In her mind’s eye, Violet saw herself whirling around. That Violet—the one who hadn’t a care in the world—would confront the lady in question.

  If you do not hold your tongue, she imagined herself saying, I will rip it out by the roots.

  But a lady did not make a scene in public. When you have nothing nice to say, she could hear her mother saying, keep your thoughts to yourself. And tell me everything later. It had been a long time since Violet had been able to talk to her mother about her annoyances, but it didn’t make the advice any less appropriate. Silence kept secrets.

  So Violet retreated into silence. She pushed away everything she didn’t want to hear. The rest of the world was swaddled in cotton, its sharp edges dulled so it couldn’t cut her.

  Some part of her mind was dimly aware that the couple’s conversation continued.

  “There, there,” the man was saying, “I must follow the laws myself. I have no warrant, and I am not certain one would issue in any event. Have a little patience, my dear.”

  It seemed like good advice.

  Have patience, Violet told herself. In a few minutes, they’ll be gone, and everything will be better.

  IN A FEW MINUTES, everything grew worse.

  At the end of the lecture, Violet maneuvered her way through the crowd, gently nudging other people aside. The crowds grew larger and more unruly at every passing event. The first few months of Sebastian’s career, he had been a curiosity—a man who wrote about inherited traits and occasionally defended Charles Darwin. There had been a few half-hearted complaints from bystanders, but nothing extravagant.

  Then he’d published that paper on the peppered moth, purporting to demonstrate Darwin’s theory of evolution in action.

  Violet sighed. He was respected by half the world and utterly despised by the rest. With every passing year, the ugly murmurs at his lectures grew. They buzzed angrily around her now, as if she’d landed in a wasps’ nest of ignorance.

  She found her way to the front. Oliver Marshall, the friend who had sat beside her earlier, had made his way up already. Sebastian was surrounded.

  Sebastian had always been surrounded by large groups, ever since he’d become an adult.

  Half the crowd around him was female—unusual at most scientific talks, but hardly out of the ordinary for him.

  Violet sometimes wondered if people thought of her that way—as a female who had been trying to attract Sebastian’s attention for years. As if she, too, waited for his eyes to fall on her, waiting for him to see her and only her. Her sister teased her on that score often enough.

  If matters had been otherwise, perhaps she might have been. But she was what she was, and there was no point crying over milk that had long since gone rancid. Instead, she pushed her way into his inner circle.

  From her seat near the middle of the hall, his features had been a comforting blur. Now she could make out his expression, and she felt subtly alarmed.

  He didn’t look well. His cheeks were flushed; his eyes, usually dark and sparkling with humor, had gone flat. The expressive tilt of his mouth had flattened to grave seriousness. He looked like he had a fever.

  “You’re wrong,” a big man was saying. He towered over Sebastian, his meaty fists curled at his sides like two ham hocks. “You’re a self-important bag of wind. Every natural philosopher since Newton has been damned. Damned, I tell you.”

  A few years ago, Sebastian would have laughed off such an outrageous statement. Now, he simply looked at the fellow. “Thank you very much,” he said, as if by rote. As if he’d memorized the words, and now threw them out like a false lure, hoping to distract the man long enough to make his way out. “That means so much to me.”

  “Why, you insolent cur!” The big man took a step forward.

  Violet let out a great breath and slid in front of the fellow, taking hold of Sebastian’s sleeve. Look at me. Look at me. It will all be better if you just look at me.

  He turned toward her, but as he did, the last trace of false humor slipped from his face.

  Violet had been friends with Sebastian a long time. She’d thought she knew him. That he cheerily waved off the public strain of constant criticism, that he thought nothing of that stream of insults and threats. She had to think that, or she’d never have put him under such a strain.

  In that instant, she realized how wrong she had been.

  Violet swallowed. “Sebastian,” she said, fumbling for words.

  “What?” he snarled.

  “You were brilliant.” She looked into his eyes, wishing she could make everything better. “Utterly bril—”

  Something flared in his eyes—something dark and furious.

  It had been the wrong thing to say. She knew it the moment the words came out of her mouth. How must she have sounded to him? Awful. Self-congratulatory.

  They were surrounded by a crowd. His knuckles grew white at his side, and he lifted his nose in the air.

  “Fuck you, Violet.” His voice was a low, savage growl. “Fuck. You.”

  They’d been in this conspiracy for so long that sometimes even Violet forgot the truth. She remembered it now. She felt it in every cell of her being.

  That sense of invisibility vanished. Violet sometimes thought that her position in society was something like a fallen log in the middle of a forest: She might not be picturesque, but at least she was accepted as part of the landscape. So long as she stayed still, nobody would discover the truth.

  Right now, Sebastian glared at her—utterly livid, as if he were about to take a hatchet to that log. To expose its rotten core to the world, to show them that inside, Violet was a dark, awful, filthy thing, infested by many-legged creatures. If he spoke one word more, everyone would know.

  She never would have thought that Sebastian would betray her. But this stranger glaring at her through Sebastian’s eyes? She had no idea what he might do.

  Her hands grew cold. She could almost see that nightmare playing out before them. He would spill out the truth in front of everyone. Newspapers would trumpet it within the day; she’d be ruined by noon tomorrow, cast out completely.

  The vast crowd seemed nothing but shadows around her. She could scarcely breathe. Filthy, she could hear people whispering. Reprobate. Her gorge rose. Violet would be ruined, and she would take her mother, her sister, her nieces and nephews with her.

  Sebastian’s nostrils flared, and he turned away from her to talk to another man, leaving everything he could have said hidden safely behind silence.

  Violet couldn’t help herself. She gasped in relief. She was safe. And so long as no one ever found out, she’d stay that way.

  THE MORNING SUN BEAT DOWN VICIOUSLY, slicing into Sebastian’s eyes as he looked out over the garden. The rose arbor caught those early rays of sunlight, and the beds of dew-spangled flowers glistened in response. It was damnably pretty. He might even have enjoyed it, were it not for the p
ersistent throb of his head.

  If he hadn’t known better, he’d have imagined he was suffering from the ill effects of drink. Except he hadn’t had anything stronger than tea in the last forty-eight hours. No, something else plagued him, and unlike a few bottles of wine, it could not be fixed by an efficacious potion.

  No apothecary on earth could cure reality.

  He’d known where he was heading from the beginning. Violet was in her greenhouse; when he rounded the shrubbery, he saw her sitting on a stool, peering at an array of little pots of soil. She’d hooked her boots around the legs of the stool. Even from here, he could hear her humming happily to herself.

  Sebastian felt sick to his stomach.

  That was no reason to flout proper procedure. The outer door to Violet’s greenhouse opened onto a glassed-in entryway. He took off his shoes and replaced his jacket with a gardening smock. He checked himself and the air thoroughly; no bees in sight.

  She didn’t look up when he opened the second door, nor when he pushed through the layers of gauze that kept insects out. She didn’t look up when he crossed over to her. She was concentrating so fiercely on those little clay pots in front of her, a magnifying glass in one hand, that she hadn’t even heard him come in.

  God. Even after what he’d said to her last night, the way he’d run off, leaving her in the lurch, she looked so cheerful sitting there. He was going to ruin it all.

  He’d agreed to this charade years ago, when he hadn’t understood what would happen. When it had just meant signing his name and listening to Violet talk, two things that had seemed like no effort at all.

  “Violet,” he said softly.

  No response.

  “Violet,” he repeated, this time a little louder.

  He could see her coming back into an awareness of herself—blinking rapidly, slowly setting down the glass she was holding before turning to him.

  “Sebastian!” she said. There was a pleased note in her voice. She’d forgiven him for last night, then. But the smile she gave him slowly died as she saw the look on his face. “Sebastian? Is everything all right?”