My Scandalous Viscount by Gaelen Foley

Author:Gaelen Foley
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Romance, Historical, Fiction
ISBN: 9780062075932
Publisher: Avon
Published: 2012-09-24T21:00:00+00:00

Chapter 15

Meanwhile, Carissa sat in her splendid carriage as it rumbled along toward a particular bookshop in Russell Square known to be a haunt of Radicals. If the Select Committee was going to investigate her husband, she thought it a fine time to do a little investigating of them on his behalf.

What Beau had told her about Ezra Green and his former mentor, the disgraced professor, sounded altogether suspicious. Fortunately for him, he had married an accomplished snoop.

To be sure, her inquiry was taking her as far away from the shallow waters of fashionable ton circles as she’d ever been, into the strange and somewhat topsy-turvy world of London’s intellectuals and artists.

As if she hadn’t already had enough of poets, she thought dryly. Indeed, the quirky little bookshop a stone’s throw from the British Museum must have seemed an odd place to find a viscountess and her maid on a sunny spring day.

Nevertheless, she had contrived to be there, for she had read in the paper that Professor Culvert would be giving a lecture there that afternoon to hawk his latest volume.

As they neared the bookshop, she called to Jamison, her driver, not to stop quite yet but to go a little farther down the street.

If they halted right outside the bookshop, her rather ostentatious carriage, Beau’s wedding gift, would be visible through the front window, and she did not wish to draw the notice of all those self-righteous, modern-day Puritans inside.

She knew the type. Of course, they reveled in sin and venality, but in financial matters, they became strangely holier-than-thou. Dilettantes who condemned material possessions, and yet, strangely, always expected others to pay for their bohemian lives—railing against the same aristocratic patrons who kept the duns from their doors.

Carissa shook her head to herself. It was Roger Benton all over again. For the sake of following “truth and beauty,” he could justify all manner of lies and ugliness—seduction, blackmail—and yet, he went on blindly writing his nauseating love poems. And wondering why nobody wanted to publish them.

She shuddered with suppressed anger. In reality, that cad did not know the first thing about love. Beau had more poetry in his laughter than Roger Benton had in all his grubby chapbooks.

Gritting her teeth at the thought of her ruiner, she accepted her driver’s hand and stepped down from the jewel box of her carriage. With her maid, Margaret, trailing, she walked the short distance to the bookshop.

Heart pounding, she paused to look up at the sign and briefly hoped this wasn’t a bad idea. But she was simply being herself—a lady of information—and a loyal wife.

She squared her shoulders and strode in to see all the strange people she and Beau had joked about: the commune folk, the free lovers, the closet revolutionaries. She might have been a little nervous to go among such oddities, but after all, it was only a bookshop.

The lecture had already begun—or rather, the ranting. She entered quietly while an old, white-haired man with a drunkard’s red nose and a rumpled tweed coat was tearing into those who’d passed the Corn Laws.

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