Blackstone's Bride by Kate Moore

that reminded her of the moment of breaking the skin of an orange. His shoulder was inches from hers. His long legs stretched out towards Frank’s trunk.
    “Where have you been?” She clasped her hands in her lap and twisted the ring on her finger. Her hands had done no wicked thing in five years, and now she wanted to touch him.
    “Did you wonder?”
    “I never thought of you.”
    “Liar. You were angry for months. You invented a thousand set-downs to give me. You burned all your keepsakes.”
    “I had none.”
    Undeterred by her denial, he went on. “You turned to your estimable friend Augusta Lowndes, who abused me thoroughly and told you that you were lucky to be rid of me and all such titled blackguards.”
    Violet glanced at his profile. His lids veiled his eyes. His dark hair fell slightly unruly over his collar.
    He had exactly described her efforts to forget him. Except for the part where she berated herself and called herself an idiot a hundred times a day, and the part where she curled in a ball under piles of covers to muffle her sobs. After weeks Augusta had dragged her out of her fetid bed, combed the hopeless tangles from her hair, and set her on her feet again.
    In the beginning, every step forward had felt as if she plowed into a gale, a howling wind of loss and humiliation and self-loathing. She’d kept at it, kept her head bent down pushing forward, kept herself endlessly occupied, turned her thoughts away from him, and now when she’d made such progress in forgetting, he had returned to say
us
and
we
and take away all the ground she’d gained. Well, she would not let him know he had cost her an ounce of effort.
    She stood, pulling her shawl about her and moving to stand beyond the circle of light next to Frank’s writing table. “Augusta suggested that I’d had a narrow escape and should count my blessings.”
    “I knew you could rely on her.” He seemed to be regarding his black evening pumps with undivided attention.
    “Ridiculous to have been so young,” she told Frank’s writing table.
    “Unavoidable, however. So what have you been doing with yourself since those black days?”
    Violet moved from the little table to the cold hearth. “Me? I am a formidable philanthropist. There is hardly a need for succor among the destitute of our great city to which I have not responded. I founded sewing schools for women where the silk trade declined and provided boats for fishermen. I promoted housing schemes for workers pouring into London and removed pauper boys from the prisons and workhouses to train for the merchant service. I am president of the British Beekeepers Association, as you shall see, because the prince is interested in my bee work.”
    Her catalogue of good works sounded paltry. What did it matter all the good she’d done, if he could come back and make her clasp her hands together to keep from touching him. What did it matter who she’d tried to save in London, if she had not saved herself. She wished she could say—
I fell in love and married
—that would have been an answer, but she could not claim such a complete recovery from their early attachment. She repositioned the pair of stone owls on the marble mantelpiece next to Frank’s black and red Greek urn. Her hand lingered on the urn in which Frank collected pennies. He picked them up wherever he went, working girls, he called them. Blackstone’s voice recalled her to the present.
    “You’ve employed the time better than I have.”
    She turned to study his back. He was hardly being forthcoming. “You didn’t answer my question about where you have been.”
    “Most recently? In Greece.”
    “Like Byron? Did you go to help them win their independence?”
    “Most assuredly not; a fool’s errand, that.”
    “You were ill there.” She noticed again how thin he was, gaunt even, and how his skin had a look of parchment under a fading tan.
    “No more than the ordinary complaints of travelers. It’s a rough