Free Bound by Your Touch by Meredith Duran Page B

into the dressing room, taking a seat at the window as he struggled to wake.
    He had been out too late. First the Novelty, where Dalton had found a brace of undepressed beauties— a couple of dancers and a receiving-house clerk, who spoke as elliptically as the telegrams she handled. Tilney had proposed taking them to the Cholomondleys' for a lark. It turned out that Michael and Melisande were entertaining, but their guests were Parisian, and easily amused. Champagne was opened. The opera dancers did a can-can on the dining room table, to great response. The clerk, not to be outdone, clambered onto the piano to belt out a rousing version of "The Boy I Love Is Up in the Gallery." But the liquor had toyed with her balance. In the final verse, she'd fallen onto and shattered a very nice vase. The Parisians had applauded, but the Cholomondleys proved less tolerant. James couldnt much blame them. The clerk had an awful voice, like a cat being tortured.
    Expelled into the night, the party had transferred to Barnes's, where James had slouched on a plush red bench, comfortably drunk, and listened to the girls giggle as they drank Moet and Chandon from the botde. Easy enough. One more night marked off the calendar. But tedious, all the same. "Do you have another suggestion, then?" Dalton had asked. Indeed, he didn't. And afterward, he'd slept well—a deep, dreamless sleep. But not for long. His head still ached.
    The sun slid over his face, making him wince and scrub a hand across his eyes. He reached for a stack of correspondence on the escritoire. The most recent accounts from his factories in Manchester. A letter from Elizabeth, barely decipherable. Written while drunk, no doubt, for Nello had been with her; he'd added his regards in a postscript. The last envelope bore no return address. The script, at least, was clear. Return the Tears, or face their Curse.
    Right-o. The third he'd received this week. It was amazing, the number of lunatics drawn from the woodwork whenever his name made the papers. He balled it up and shot it into the rubbish, then turned back to the window.
    Belgravia's lanes were empty. Unfashionable hour to stir. In two hours, though, the road would be choked with phaetons. Adventurous ladies would take the reins in hand, leaving their nervous grooms to clutch for dear life in the tiger seat. Five hours hence, these same women would not be caught dead driving themselves. For their second trip to the park, only carriages or open barouches would do. God, but he was sick of Mayfair. It operated like a tedious piece of Swiss clockwork, and its thousands-strong flock of cuckoo birds moved so predictably to its beat that he could call their actions to the second. His understanding did not please him. If only he could scrub his brain clean of such trivia. Surely there were better uses for it than remembering a massive lot of nonsense.
    But there lay the rub. Unlike a clock, this little world could not be smashed, and these idiotic trivia were not, in fact, so trivial. Much like the bars in a prison cell, they laid the outlines for the rest of his whole damned life. Phin's too, though he hadn't realized it yet. He thought inheriting the title had freed him, when in fact this storybook ending only marked his enclosure in another sort of cage.
    "They are only customs," Stella had said once. "They don't have to be logical. They do no one any harm."
    "Tell that to the Americans and South Africans," James had replied. "They feel the harm when they appear in a tim-whisky at three o'clock, and are sneered at by all of your friends."
    She had smiled and patted his cheek. She was younger by a year, but liked to behave as if he were a child. "That's the point, silly. If they didn't give themselves away as foreigners, how would we know whom to cut?"
    The image of her was so clear in his mind. She took after Moreland; bright blue eyes, hair of wheaten gold. But her face never appeared to him, now, without the bruises. God, how