Anatomy: A Love Story(41)

“I’ve been sick. That’s all, Bernard.”

Bernard smiled, but the smile didn’t quite reach his eyes. They seemed to be spinning faster than the other dancers around them. “I’ve stopped by Hawthornden quite a few times, you know. To pay a visit. Your carriage was gone.”

“Was it?” Hazel said, hoping her voice was light. “How unusual. And what an unusual thing to notice.”

Without warning, Bernard wrapped his arm around Hazel’s waist and pulled her body against his into a waltz frame. She almost gasped at his presumption. “Visiting another suitor, were you?” he sneered.

Hazel almost laughed in his face. “No,” she said, stumbling as she tried to follow his lead on the dance floor. “I can quite assure you, there is no other suitor.”

Bernard’s eyes were flat and cold. He looked more like his father than Hazel had ever noticed before. “There were boots in your entry hall,” he said through clenched teeth. “A gentleman’s boots. Someone intimate enough to take his boots off in your home, although I can’t imagine who that might be. If it’s someone at the club, I assume I would have heard of it. I swear to God, Hazel”—he clenched Hazel’s hands so hard they ached—“if you’re humiliating me, I…” He released Hazel’s hands in lieu of finishing his thought. His hair, so neatly parted and pomaded, shook slightly with his emotion.

“Bernard,” Hazel said softly, “those were George’s old boots. I swear it. I wear them to walk in the gardens, and down to the stream, to not muddy my own.” She was relieved she could at least tell only part of a lie.

“Oh.” His face softened. “Well, then. Perhaps I can interest you in a stroll out to our winter garden? I assure you, it’s quite lovely in the fall, with the weather mild as it’s been.”

Hazel glanced around. No one was giving them more than a cursory look. Even Miss Hartwick-Ellis, usually so jealously observant of whatever Hazel happened to be doing, was cheerfully flirting with the son of the Danish ambassador, her eyes scarcely leaving the handsome blond for long enough to blink.

“Perhaps we should find a chaperone?” Hazel said.

“Oh, pishposh.” Bernard grabbed Hazel’s arm and guided her toward the door to the servants’ entrance. “You wanted to go to some dreadful surgery in the Old Town alone with me!”

They were standing in the servants’ entrance to the kitchen, a dank little passage with only a few flickering gas lamps. A footman strode by, carrying a tray of pastries, and politely averted his eyes.

Hazel tried to pull away, back toward the party. “Well, we wouldn’t have actually been alone at a surgical demonstration, but—”

Before she could finish her sentence, Bernard pressed his mouth to hers. The wet worm of his tongue slithered along her closed lips until it found purchase and pried her mouth open.

His lips were cold and strange, his tongue clammy. Some part of Hazel’s brain told her to slap him, to yank herself away. A thousand harsh words formulated themselves neatly, but she seemed completely unable to get them past her throat. Her body, likewise, was suffering from a strange paralysis. All she could do was stand there, eyes open like a fish, waiting for Bernard to finally pull away with a self-satisfied smack of his lips. He wiped the lower half of his face with his sleeve and waggled his eyebrows.

Hazel’s stomach flipped over itself, and she tried not to grimace looking at Bernard’s face—the ruddiness of it, the dead flatness in his eyes, his thin lips still glistening with sweat. So that was a kiss. That was the thing she had read about in novels and poems, that had inspired great artists. It was wetter than she had imagined, and colder.

Finally, Hazel’s voice returned to her and she pulled away from Bernard’s grip. “I don’t know what in heaven’s name you thought you were doing, but you’ll have us both ruined. If anyone saw what just happened—”

Bernard put his hands on his hips and puffed his chest forward. “What? A servant? You’re hardly ruined, Haze. I still want to marry you, so consider yourself quite set.”

For a moment, another life flashed before her, a life in which she begged on the streets, moved to Yorkshire, posed as George Hazleton forever. Maybe she could become a midwife, the mad lady in a tiny cottage in the woods with a stocked apothecary of roots and herbs and foul-smelling teas, who helped women in need. She would be a surgeon, a teacher, a witch—a cautionary tale told in threat to trembling debutantes before their coming-outs. A myth.

But the flash of an alternative life only lasted for a moment before it disappeared like powder in an open palm on a windy day. There was no life for her except to become the Viscountess Almont, to marry Bernard. His would be the first and final kiss she would ever know.

Bernard leaned forward and kissed Hazel again. “Come on,” he said, grabbing her arm once more. “Let’s go back to the party.”

Hazel let him escort her back through the servants’ entrance and into the golden din of the ballroom. She floated numbly, paying no mind to Bernard as he strode over to the band and whispered in the ear of the lead violinist, who then stopped the music.

The dancers stumbled for a beat and tripped over their skirts. Bernard held aloft a crystal goblet and struck the side a few times with a knife to get the room’s attention. Lord Almont stood nearby, beaming.