The Nobleman's Guide to Scandal and Shipwrecks: Montague Siblings, Book 3

by Mackenzi Lee

Genres: Young Adult

Synopsis

Return to the enchanting world of the Montague siblings in the finale to the New York Times best-selling and Stonewall Honor-winning series, featuring a teenage Adrian Montague as he desperately seeks the now adult Monty and Felicity - the older siblings he never knew he had.

Adrian Montague has a bright future. The sole heir to his father’s estate, he is an up and coming political writer and engaged to an activist who challenges and inspires him. But most young Lords aren’t battling the debilitating anxiety Adrian secretly lives with, or the growing fear that it might consume him and all he hopes to accomplish. In the wake of his mother’s unexpected death, Adrian is also concerned people will find out that he has the mental illness she struggled with for years.

When a newly found keepsake of hers - a piece of a broken spyglass - comes into Adrian’s possession, he’s thrust into the past and finds himself face-to-face with an older brother he never knew he had. Henry “Monty” Montague has been living quietly in London for years, and his sudden appearance sends Adrian on a quest to unravel family secrets that only the spyglass can answer. 

In pursuit of answers about the relic, the brothers chart a course to locate their sister Felicity. But as they travel between the pirate courts of Rabat, Portuguese islands, the canals of Amsterdam, and into unknown Artic waters, the Montague siblings are thrown into one final adventure as they face a ghostly legend that threatens their whole family.

 

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Release date: November 16, 2021

Publisher: HarperAudio

Sample

 1 

In my defense, I did not intend to punch Richard Peele in the face.

I cannot imagine any scenario in which I would intentionally swing at a fellow member of the peerage, face or otherwise. I am not my soon-to-be brother-in-law Edward Davies, who just last month was expelled from the Kit-Kat Club for boxing Lord Dennyson in the nose when he suggested that whores should be publicly flogged more often as punishment for solicitation.

I would have wanted to do the same, but because I am Adrian Montague, not Edward Davies, notorious affable radical, I would have sat on my hands and kept my mouth shut as I composed a reply in my head that I could later put in a pamphlet. I would then write and rewrite and edit and rewrite and edit more and scrutinize the language until it no longer sounded like English and I had convinced myself I was illiterate and no one had ever had the heart to tell me.

Copies of the most recent of my certainly unreadable pamphlets are currently being foisted by Louisa Davies upon every pedestrian crossing the Hyde Park mall with the confidence usually only carried off by white rich men. Meanwhile I—said white rich man—lurk on the edges of the lawn, smudging the ink on my own stack with how much my palms are sweating. Even though I’ve now written four printed treatises on reform, I still don’t like seeing my words in print. It makes me want to reach for a pen and start striking things out. Anyone who says they enjoy my writing is clearly either lying or has terrible taste.

“We’re going to be arrested,” I say for at least the sixth time as Louisa returns to me, her stack noticeably thinner while mine remains robust.

And for the sixth time—perhaps the seventh, for she has a knack for speaking to my fears before I can voice them—Louisa replies, “We are not going to be arrested. There is nothing illegal about offering gratis literature in a public park.”

I tug down my knit cap, though I’m sweating so much it seems likely to slip from my head like I’ve been greased. “It’s going to rain.”

“It’s not going to rain,” Louisa replies, though with less conviction and a glance upward. The sky is gray, and the thin clouds leach all color from the world. The park around us looks like a charcoal drawing, the skeletal tree branches smudgy from the London fog. We could have picked a fairer day, one with more ramblers out along these trails, feeding the ducks or playing lawn games, so that every approach didn’t feel like such an event. Though were the park more crowded, my anxiety would easily rearrange itself into a fear of being recognized. Even though my father is currently at our home in Cheshire, all gossip, like the proverbial roads to Rome, finds its way back to him. The news that his only son was handing out a radical leaflet calling for the closure of his primary charitable cause, the Saint James Workhouse, will reach him before the week’s end.

A tall man with a greatcoat pulled tight around him passes us. He’s walking quickly, head down, but Louisa still thrusts a pamphlet at him. “Support the closure of the Saint James Workhouse, sir!”

He spits at her. She manages to dodge, and it lands on the path at her feet, foamy and yellow like an uncooked egg.

“Arsehole!” Louisa shouts at the man’s back.

“Bitch,” he returns, throwing a lewd gesture over his shoulder without turning.

“Very creative!” She shoves a strand of hair from her eyes, then, like nothing happened, steps into the path of the next pedestrian. “Support the closure of the Saint James Workhouse? I have a pamphlet.”

This man pauses. “You want money for it?”

“No, sir,” she replies. “It’s yours to take, free of charge. A plea for reform from a new and exciting writer who goes by the name John Everyman.”

He takes it, and as he starts again on his way, Louisa whirls on me with a triumphant smile. “See, it’s not so bad!”

“You were just spit at.”

“Spit is easy to wash out. And he missed!” She gestures victoriously at her still-clean skirt. She’s dressed much plainer than I’m accustomed to seeing her—her usual silk day dress has been swapped for a neckerchief and a rough-cloth short gown pinned over a gray wool skirt. Her cardinal cloak feels almost violently red. It puts the ruby stone on the ring I gave her for our engagement to shame.

My own attire is driving me mad. After months of wearing nothing but mourning clothes in black and gray, any sort of color—even the unobtrusive browns and olive green I’m currently sporting—feels garish. The collar of my shirt is so tight I can’t breathe right. Or maybe it’s the buttons on the waistcoat. Or maybe it’s the fact that I’m wearing clothes at all. It all feels too small on me, and every spot on my body where the cloth touches my skin itches. The day is chilly and damp in the way London is always damp, even when it’s not raining, but I can’t stop sweating. How does sweat actually work? Does it leak out of every pore simultaneously? Because that feels like what’s happening to me. Is there a point at which I will have expelled all the sweat from my body and start dripping blood instead? I try to resist checking the front of my shirt, but if I don’t, it will be all I can think of, and maybe I am bleeding, in which case I really need to know—

“Adrian.”

I look up, and Louisa is watching me. I expect she’ll scold me for not doing my part—though I don’t know why I think that, for Louisa has never scolded me for anything. But I’ve been scolding myself the entire time we’ve been here for my limp participation, so I assume she’s thinking the same.

“Are you cold?” she asks, then arches a skeptical eyebrow when I shake my head. “Really?”

I’m always cold. I’m cold in the middle of summer. I’m cold even though I’ve sweated through my shirt. Since I was young, my father has told me I’m too thin, my appetite overly affected by my moods. After my mother died, I almost stopped entirely, gripped with a fear that whatever I ate would make me sick and I too would meet a sudden end like she had. That fear would quickly tumble into its most refined form, panic, and that panic would have me gagging up anything I tried to swallow, terrified of death by pheasant or porridge or lukewarm tea. It made no matter that her stepping off a cliff into the sea was entirely unrelated to my own hypothetical demise. It was the unanticipated nature, death as a sudden impact without even a warning fall to precede it.

While before it has only ever been my father who commented on my weight, in the eight months since Mum died, I have crossed whatever threshold makes strangers feel entitled to comment upon my body and its failings. And though Lou has been heaping sugar into my tea and slicking everything she makes for me in so much butter even toast feels slippery, I still haven’t taken the stitching out of the waistband of my breeches, and I can feel the jut of my hipbones in a way that makes me too aware of my own frame.

Lou thumbs the edges of her stack like a card dealer in a casino, and I catch sight of the title and attribution. Even the fake name under which I write Whig literature, John Everyman, makes me queasy. It’s such a stupid name; why did I ever think it was funny or clever? I can’t even come up with a decent nom de plume; what made me think I was smart enough to write an entire pamphlet on workhouse reform?

“We can go,” Louisa says. “We needn’t stay if you’re struggling.”

I resist the urge to pull my collar up over my face and retreat into my clothes like a miserable turtle. “Is it that obvious?”

She fans herself with her stack of leaflets, and the fine hairs that have come loose from her plait flutter against her forehead. “Well, you have yet to make eye contact with any passersby, and you’re making a face like someone’s pulling out your fingernails. So call it an educated guess.”

“Sorry.” I shake out my coat—borrowed from one of Edward’s clerks and too short in the cuffs by inches—and try to stand up straight. I can almost feel my father poking me in the back, hissing “Don’t slouch!” like he does at every society party, but I am so much taller than almost everyone I know, the urge to make myself as small as possible often overtakes me before I’ve realized it.

“I can do this,” I tell her.

“I know you can,” she says.

“I want to.”

“But you don’t have to. I know Edward and I like to shout from the turnpikes and throw rocks at Newgate, but you know I’ll still marry you whether or not you join in on those particular family outings.” She grins at me, though it fades when I don’t offer her one back. “It also doesn’t mean that you’re not helping the cause. For God’s sake, you wrote this.” She holds the pamphlet up, and I almost resist the urge to shush her, like my father might suddenly pop up from the bushes, hidden all this time in the guise of a judgmental gardener. “If you keep writing treatises like this, I’m happy to do the handing out in the park.”

And the copying out of my drafts because I’m terrified someone might recognize my handwriting, and the checking of my spelling, and the handling of the printers, and the distribution to salons and bookshops and at rallies across London, and how much longer before she grows weary of my inability to take ownership of my political beliefs?

What good is a desire to stand up for the poor if you never actually do the standing? Where will you hide once you take your seat in Parliament and have to start publicly voting on these subjects? What sort of coward hides behind a false name and a satirical style?

I squeeze my eyes shut for a moment, then say to Lou, “I should do more.”

She waves that away with a casual sincerity I covet like filigreed gold. “So you aren’t as shameless as I am and find it stressful to walk up to strangers and shove your politics down their throat? So what? There are other ways to advocate for reform.”

My posture starts to slope again. She likely didn’t mean it as a reminder of the fact that I had the chance to take up exactly that advocacy in Parliament—my father sought approval for a writ of acceleration, advancing me to the House of Lords before his seat officially passed to me on the back of his subsidiary title as Viscount of Disley. His hope was I’d add another critical vote against Edward Davies’s bill on workhouse reform that would soon be coming up from the Commons. Edward, in contrast, hoped I might be a vote in favor of it, my radical politics hidden from my father until after the ink of the king’s signature had already dried and my premature summons to the Lords was official.

Instead, I panicked and refused the acceleration entirely. My father had tried fruitlessly to bully me into changing my mind, though my mother’s death stopped him shouting at me about it daily. Or at least distracted him for a time—I suspect that, when he joins me in London at the end of the summer for the vote, grief will no longer be a sufficient excuse for the delay.

Lou stands on her tiptoes and presses her lips to mine, then smiles. It feels like the first bloom of spring opening in the middle of that gray walk. I want to be the sun it turns its face toward to drink in the light. I want to be everything someone as fierce and bright as Lou deserves in a partner and lover and friend and husband. My chest tightens.

“Let’s go home,” she urges, but I shake my head.

“I can do this. I want to do this,” I say, though the conviction behind the words is weak as milky tea.

“You can and you do!” Louisa repeats with sincere enthusiasm, then wiggles her hands in front of her in a little cheer.

“I can. Right.” I resist the urge to pull on the front of my shirt, afraid of the suctioning sound it may make because of all the sweat—maybe blood?—adhering it to my chest, and straighten. My hands are shaking, which somehow seems both an embarrassing overreaction and an insufficient expression of my fear.

There’s a man coming down the path toward us, dark skinned and tall, with an instrument case tucked under one arm. He looks kind. He’s probably kind. Most people are kind, aren’t they?

He’s going to laugh at me. So what if he does? He’s going to think I look strange or sound strange or that I am just plain strange. So what? He won’t say that to my face. But he’ll go home to his wife and tell her about this odd maypole of a man in a too-small coat who tried to give him a piece of poorly written propaganda on his way to the office, and they’ll have a good laugh at me.

So. What?

It doesn’t matter what this stranger thinks of me. It does. It doesn’t. I wish it didn’t. Why does it? It doesn’t. It shouldn’t. It does.

All you have to do, I tell myself, is walk up to that most likely kind gentleman and ask him if he wants a leaflet. You don’t have to look him in the eye or say anything more than that. He won’t know you wrote it. He won’t tell your father. Most likely he’ll simply say no and you’ll say all right, thank you, carry on, and you’ll both move on with your days.

He’s getting closer. Louisa gives me an encouraging thump on the shoulder.

He’s not going to laugh at you. He’s not going to think you’re strange-looking. He’s not going to demand to know the authorship of the pamphlet. He’s not going to tell you you’re too thin. He’s not going to think you so odd he’ll pull his hypothetical monetary support from the Whig party because of the oddness of its members. He’s not going to remember this interaction for more than five minutes, but you will be dissecting it for the rest of your goddamn life.

I have forgotten every word I know. I have lost any command of the English language I may have once possessed. I could not muster a three-word sentence were I standing on the gallows with a noose around my neck and asked to choose between a single utterance and death.

The man passes by us without glancing our way, and I don’t say a word.

Louisa looks from me to the man’s retreating back, and I can tell she is debating whether to run after him and offer what I failed to. “I’ll . . . ,” she starts, then holds up a finger to me. “I’ll be right back.” I watch her jog after the man until she’s near enough to touch his shoulder, watch him turn and take the offered pamphlet with a word of thanks, and oh my God it would have been so easy. What is the matter with me? I stare down at my hands, white-knuckled around my stack of pamphlets. My head is spinning and I’m breathing too fast.

Grow a goddamn backbone, Adrian. Jesus Christ, you’re pathetic.

When Louisa returns, she pries my fingers from around my pamphlets and adds mine to her own waning pile, then takes my hand. She rolls my wrists gently, and I try—I really try—to release the tension I’ve been bottling up in my joints, but God, my palms are so sweaty, that must be all she’s thinking of. And then wondering why she has agreed to marry such a sweaty lunatic.

“Let me find a hack,” Lou says gently. “We can go home.”

“But you had all those pamphlets printed,” I say, though it’s a watery protest. I feel rotten—this whole day, this whole great plan, ruined because I yet again could not pull myself together. But good God, it’s such a relief to think I could be at home, in bed, undressed and under the covers with the curtains closed, within the hour. I’ll likely be awake all night reliving every embarrassing thing I said or did today, and over the past weeks, months, years, maybe my whole life. But at least I’ll be home and out of this too-small coat.

“I’m sure I’ll find a use for them.” Louisa shuffles the stack against her leg so the edges sit evenly. “Or Edward will.”

My throat goes dry. “Has he read it?”

“Not this one, no. Do you want me to ask him to?”

“Maybe. I don’t know. He’ll probably think it’s amateur.” Aside from Louisa, there is no one on God’s green earth whose opinion I value as highly as Edward Davies’s, rabble-rouser in the House of Commons and one of London’s most notorious social reformers. I know Lou gave him the first of my John Everyman pamphlets, and though she didn’t tell him who the author was, I still broke out in hives at the thought of him reading it. And though this new one is leagues better than that first attempt over a year ago, it’s also the least satirical and most pointed I’ve yet penned, and the chance that Edward may read my sincere attempts at political writing and find them wanting is mortifying.

Louisa does a quick tally of her remaining pamphlets, minus the stack she took from me. “I’ve only got six left. Let me give these out, then we’ll get a carriage and take you home. Stay here. I’ll be quick.”

As she starts down the path, scarlet cloak flapping behind her, I collapse onto a nearby bench and try to breathe and not obsess about how take you home makes me feel like a child she’s minding. My muscles are shaking. My hands are shaking. What is wrong with me that my body has registered the prospect of offering a single piece of political writing to a stranger as something close to a near-death experience? In spite of how passionate I find my own heart on the subject of reform, and in spite of the privileged position I will one way or another find myself in someday as a member of the House of Lords, I suspect I’m a man better suited to living in a folly on a nobleman’s grounds.

Adrian Montague, professional hermit. It’s not an uappealing idea.

A wind whips down the park path, strong enough to shake ice from the branches above me. I feel the crystals melt against my neck and drip down my back. I must be steaming. If my mother were here, she would tell me to breathe. That’s always the first thing—breath. She was the only other person I knew who understood how literally I meant it when I said I couldn’t breathe. The only time I tried the line on my father, he bellowed back at me, “Well, obviously you’re breathing or else you’d be dead!” And I thought, That would probably be better for all of us, really.

But my mother would sit quietly with me, sometimes breathing slowly and encouraging me to match her speed, sometimes taking my hand and rubbing her thumbs into my palms. Louisa saw her do it once, and has taken up the same practice, whenever she can feel the walls beginning to close in around me. I want her here, now, warm at my side as she huddles into my shoulder and tucks her face against the wind. Suddenly I’m certain she’s gotten her own carriage to take her home without me and is so embarrassed by my failure that she’ll never speak to me again. I look up, trying not to feel frantic as I scan the park, searching the trees for that bright wing of scarlet, trying to get my breath back, trying not to panic, trying not to think of ways this day could get worse.

Until one sits down next to me.

“Adrian Montague!”

Richard Peele, Viscount of Parkgate, nearly lands in my lap as he collapses onto the bench at my side, sitting unbearably close and reeking of boozy sweat. His valet—a man far too blond and handsome for a life in service—stands over his shoulder, smirking at me in the way that men who have no personality beyond being too blond and handsome do. Peele swings an arm over my shoulder like we’re school chums, and my muscles tense. I think of the crabs Lou and I caught one summer in Penzance—when we picked them up, their whole bodies would flinch before they tucked themselves inside their shell and out of sight. I wish I could hide that easily. I wish I had a shell. I wish I were a crab on a Penzance beach who didn’t know what a Richard Peele was.

“How are you? And what the hell are you wearing?” He slaps my chest with a flat palm that knocks what little breath I have straight out of me. “You look like a beggar.” I open my mouth to respond but he keeps talking, and I’m reminded that the only good thing about a conversation with Richard Peele is that one is not required to contribute anything. Every time he has cornered me at a ball or party or dinner—his unrequited affection toward me as baffling as it is unwanted—that has been my only comfort. “Are you walking alone? Poor thing, you just can’t make any friends, can you? It would be easier to like you if you weren’t so shy and odd, you know.”

Then he looks at me like he expects me to thank him for the advice. Either that or he’s trying to give me some sort of visual cue that he’s granting me permission to speak.

“I’m . . . waiting.” It is a Herculean effort to get those two words out of my constricted throat. I do not like how close he is sitting. I do not like him touching me. I do not like the way that every smell clinging to him feels like an assault on my senses. His presence is aggressive: from the light glinting off the greasy spot on his nose to the slick of his hair to the too-many-colors of his suit. “Waiting for someone,” I finally manage to finish.

“Well then, I’ll wait with you!” Somehow, Peele scoots even closer to me, his arm a lead weight on my shoulders. His valet is still staring at me, still smirking at me in a way that makes me check my shirtfront for sweat stains. “I’ve been meaning to call on you since you arrived. How’s your father? Will he be coming for the next vote, or is he sending you to the House to face the wolves?” He clamps his hands on my shoulders and shakes me in a way that is likely meant to be conspiratorial but instead makes my teeth feel loose. “Don’t worry, I won’t let them bully you any more than you deserve. What have you got there, Mortimer?”

Peele’s valet has chased a crumpled piece of paper caught in the wind, and as he retrieves it off the ground, I realize with horror he’s holding one of my pamphlets. Louisa must have dropped one. Or I did. Probably it was me. My vision spots with panic as he smooths it out across his knee and squints at it.

Peele holds out a hand. “Give it here.”

There is, of course, no conceivable way Richard Peele would know it’s my writing—or even any reason he should guess at such—but the idea of that suddenly becomes a load-bearing anxiety in the already precarious architecture of my mind. I stop breathing as I watch him read the title.

He’s going to know I wrote it. Somehow. Maybe I left my name on it or he saw me drop it or maybe he’ll just know. He’s going to know I’m a radical trying to get my father’s workhouse shut down. He’s going to tell my father, who will then bar me from taking over his seat in Parliament and I’ll be disgraced and Louisa will be disgraced and any children we may have will be disgraced and I will die a disgraced death having not done a goddamn thing except worry for all my odd, friendless days.

Peele snorts, then holds the pamphlet out for my inspection. “They’re coming for your father’s workhouse, Montague. Bloody radicals—what sort of idiots make a charity the subject of their ire? And look there, they haven’t even spelled impoverished correctly—it’s got two p’s.”

I’m almost sure it hasn’t, but hearing him say it makes me doubt my own mind. If I spelled it wrong, surely the printer would have caught that error. For God’s sake, Louisa would have. She’s a tyrant about spelling. Also, how is it that I could not possibly think less of this man, and yet his opinion of me immediately weighs heavier in my mind than my own sense of self?

Peele makes a show of skimming the pamphlet, though I’m sure he’s not reading a word. “Falsehoods, slander, lies, more slander, more lies, that’s all it is.” He runs a dramatic finger under each line, tracing them in mimicry of reading, then taps the final line and declares, “All a pile of Whig shite. Your poor father puts up with so much nonsense from these dunces who don’t have a notion what they’re talking of.”

In actuality, my father puts up with very little. He has an army of secretaries and clerks who do it for him. And the Saint James Workhouse is the furthest thing from a charity.

I should say that. I should say that to him. Or at least defend my spelling of impoverished,which I’m sure is correct. Almost sure. I should not be this completely paralyzed. My heart should not be beating so hard it feels about to explode.

“Adrian,” someone calls, and Peele and I both look up.

Louisa is crossing the path toward us at a quick trot.

“Ah.” Peele folds the pamphlet in half and flicks it in her direction. “Speaking of Whig shite.”

“Good morning, Lord Parkgate.” Louisa stops in front of us, smoothing the front of her work skirt like it’s brocade. “You’re looking pickled. How’s your wife?”

“How’s your brother?” Peele counters. “I haven’t seen him since he brutalized poor Lord Dennyson.”

“Yes, well, we all try our best to avoid you.” Lou’s eyes dart to the pamphlet on the ground, like she’s trying to calculate the likelihood that I offered it to him. Low. The likelihood is very, very low. Subterraneanly so. She must realize that, based only on the fact that I’m breathing as though I’m trying to climb a mountain and my lungs are full of porridge. Is that an actual medical condition? Porridge lungs? It’s not even real and suddenly I’m sure that’s what I’m afflicted with. I might be dying. There seems about a fifty percent chance I’m dying.

“Were you enjoying your reading?” Louisa asks Peele.

“Oh yes.” Peele snickers, obscenely proud of the joke he hasn’t yet made. “I love a good piece of fiction.”

Louisa purses her lips, thin as a thread.

“You do know, Miss Davies,” Peele continues, and his grip tightens on my shoulders. My flesh feels raw and tender, like an overripe fruit, and for a moment I’m concerned he’s grasping me so tight he broke through it. The sweat pooling along my back starts to feel like blood again. “That your dear fiancé’s father is one of the patrons of the Saint James Workhouse.”

Louisa folds her arms. “I don’t believe a personal relationship to someone who supports the exploitation of the poor is reason enough not to speak up against it.”

Peele laughs with his mouth so wide I can see bits of his lunch stuck in his back teeth as he turns to me. “It’s admirable to try and tame a bitch, Montague,” he says, like Louisa isn’t here. “But no one would blame you if you tossed this one out in a sack.”

“Those workhouses,” Louisa pushes on, unmoved as ever by the names men call her, “exploit their occupants for free labor without providing the sanitary, safe living conditions promised in return.”

“Are you going to let her tell stories like that when you’re married?” Parkgate asks me, still ignoring her. “Were she my wife, I’d buy her a Bible and an education in manners before I permit her out in public.”

“Good job I’m not your wife, then,” Louisa says. Mortimer is staring at Louisa like she’s an animal in a zoo, his hungry gaze dipping from her face to the neckline of her dress.

Louisa’s eyes meet mine, a silent plea to say something to the effect that not only will I never try to control her movements, but woe be to those upon whom she unleashes her brilliant self? Or at the very least, tell Parkgate’s lackey that it’s polite to look a lady in the face when speaking to her, and if he continues to make eye contact with her breasts instead, perhaps he and I should take a walk so that I can give him a basic anatomy lesson. I’d like to be the kind of man who says any of that—what sort of selfish, cowardly fool am I that I can’t advocate for the woman I love, to say nothing of the fact that I am putting my own bodily comfort above the actual human souls trapped in workhouses across the country? I have the audacity to keep my mouth shut when asked to step to the defense of those who cannot defend themselves? I am pinned by the anvils on the end of Peele’s arms, swallowing and gasping like he’s holding me underwater.

Louisa’s mouth turns down with what I assume is disappointment and I want to say, Yes! I know! I am also deeply disappointed with who I am! We are in agreement on that subject!But then she tips her chin back toward the entrance to the park. “Let’s go, Adrian,” she says.

“I would suggest you try a less demanding tone with your soon-to-be husband,” Peele says. I swear to God, he’s pushing me into the earth.

“I’m not demanding,” Louisa says evenly.

“Just because you want to walk away from an argument you know you can’t win, doesn’t mean Adrian has to come with you,” Peele says.

Louisa cocks her head, eyes narrowing. “I am not walking away because I am wrong, I am walking away because this is a conversation that will be entirely unproductive and I’d rather waste my time elsewhere.”

“Well then.” At last—at last!—Peele releases me. I swear I hear my ribs crack as they slot back into place. “Please, don’t let me waste any more of your time, Miss Davies.” He bends down to retrieve the pamphlet from the dirt, and Louisa extends her hand to me.

“Adrian.”

And then a series of things happens all at once.

As Louisa reaches out, Peele straightens and thrusts the discarded pamphlet into my chest, knocking her hand out of the way. At the same time, his valet steps forward for God knows what purpose, but his shadow falls over me. And suddenly I feel trapped. I feel surrounded. Peele has batted Louisa from me and I am about to be squashed between these two vile men and their terrible breath and their conservatism. Peele is going to grab my shoulders again, and this time my arms will break off in his hands. He’s going to look at the pamphlet and realize I wrote it and find more spelling errors and I’m never going to take a proper breath again in my whole goddamn life and I have nowhere to run.

And, like any animal cornered, my instinct takes over.

So when Peele thrusts the pamphlet at me, I punch him in the face.

He screams. Actually screams, a sound whose closest kin is the wails the foxes make when they smell the dogs closing in. That noise used to make my mother cover her ears, and I almost do the same thing now.

Peele tumbles off the bench and curls into a ball on the ground, his fingers pressed to his face as blood seeps between them.

“Good Lord!” Mortimer drops to his knees at Peele’s side and cradles him in his arms, like this is a valiant death upon the battlefield. “What the hell is the matter with you?” he shouts at me.

I don’t know! I want to shout in return. Peele is keening in Mortimer’s arms and I have just broken his nose without meaning to and can’t even protest it was an accident because all three of them saw there was nothing accidental about it. The handful of passersby likely saw it as well—I hear a woman on the next path over gasp, and her companion says, “Good gracious, is he all right?”

“Adrian, we need to go.” Louisa pulls me to my feet, trying to drag me down the trail and away from the carnage, but I stumble, unable to find my footing. My head spins. I’m breathing too fast. Panic over nothing and also everything is clawing at my chest, filling it up like a boat sinking slowly into the ocean, and am I dying? I may, truly, be dying this time. Now I’m once again panicked that I’m dying—I’m at least seventy-five percent sure I am. I cannot get a breath to eke its way through my porridgy lungs and my heart feels as though it’s about to burst and I can still feel Richard Peele shaking me by the shoulders like a dog with a pigeon in its mouth.

“Get back here!” Mortimer shouts after us, but Louisa keeps pulling me toward the gate leading out to the street.

“Ignore them,” she says, though her pace is quicker than I feel it should be if I were entirely without fault. She clasps my hand suddenly in both of hers and presses it to her chest. “That was the greatest thing I’ve ever seen.” She kisses my knuckles, breathless for an entirely different reason than I am. “Is your hand all right?”

“Yes—yes,” I manage to stammer. I may have been as surprised as anyone by my attack, but I wasn’t stupid enough to tuck my thumb into my fist or some other amateur mistake like that. I doubt my knuckles will even bruise. “I didn’t hit him that hard.”

“I know. Try to get some more momentum before you swing next time.”

“How are you joking about this?” I ask, my voice coming out in a squeak.

“You’ve killed him!” I hear Mortimer wail behind us, and I start to turn back.

“Oh God, have I?”

Louisa nearly wrenches my shoulder trying to keep me from going back.

“You absolutely haven’t. He just wants attention.”

“I think I’d better—” I glance backward, and catch a glimpse of the small crowd forming. Mortimer is still holding Peele like they’re Achilles and Patroclus at Hector’s feet. There seems to be some debate among the congregation of what to do next, and whether or not this is a rehearsal for a new tragedy playing in Covent Garden.

“He’s fine,” Louisa says again, stepping on my untied bootlace and nearly tripping us both.

“Then why are we making a run for it?”

“We are not running!”

“An overly fast walk for it.”

“Because in spite of being blameless, no one is going to side with the young radicals punching noblemen of a certain age. Hurry up!”

We are nearly to the park entrance when a man on horseback veers suddenly from the street, blocking our path. Louisa and I both skid to a stop to avoid being trampled, as he pulls on the reins to avoid doing any trampling.

“What’s going on here?” he calls, and I recognize his blue coat, marking him a member of the Bow Street Runners.

Louisa glances over her shoulder, like she hadn’t noticed the commotion until he pointed it out. “Oh, I think a gentleman took a fall.”

“That man attacked us!” Mortimer screams, and when Louisa and I turn, he has forsaken his pietà to stand and point an accusatory finger at me. “They were trying to force their Whig puffery upon us, and when we politely declined, he attacked Lord Parkgate!”

And though only the barest foundations of that story are anything near to true, I feel so truly and deeply that I have done something wrong, I almost start to cry.

“We did no such thing!” Louisa protests, and the constable looks from Peele and his valet to us and Dear Lord, ...