watch it now.
“I would like to see,” she declared.
A flicker of a cringe passed over his face. “I don’t think that’s a good idea.”
“It’s a popular event, clearly. What if your friends are there? What if Olympia’s inside?” At this point, who knew where their friends could be? Perhaps Olympia was also following crowds and searching for her, just as Prim was? “Should we not go simply to search for them? If for no other reason than that?”
He sighed and she heard the beginning of surrender in the sound. He was relenting. She needed to push just a little bit more.
“It can’t be that bad,” she reasoned. “Why else would so many people want to—”
“I still do not think it a good idea.”
She leveled a cajoling look at him. “You’re not going to attempt to direct me once more, are you? I thought we agreed there’d be no more judgments.”
He snorted. “Does this mean I must fall in with all your schemes and demands? What if I don’t wish to see it?”
“You can come here or anywhere whenever you want and not see it,” she pointed out. “Permit me this.” She would never come here again, after all. At least not any time soon.
“Is that going to be your argument for everything tonight?”
“Perhaps. Is it working?”
He groaned and looked with curled lips toward the rotunda again.
She released his arm. “You mustn’t do anything you do not wish, Jacob.” Lifting her chin, she advanced to the rotunda, leaving him behind . . . even as she hoped he would follow. She walked a straight line, refusing to look back. It was a gamble.
A moment later he was beside her. “You’re going to be the death of me, Prim. I haven’t known you a day and you seem able to twist me around your finger.”
She grinned. “I’m saving you from tedium.”
“And pushing me straight to Bedlam.”
She laughed, delighted, and wondered how she would ever return to her normal, monotonous life in Belgrave Square after this. Days stuck indoors, rereading the same books in their library whilst her family went about their many diversions. Without her.
How would she return to that after a night like this? After knowing him?
Spots on a lady’s face announce that she has no care for her complexion. Society might then wonder what else she holds in so little regard.
—Lady Druthers’s Guide to Perfect Deportment and Etiquette
Why must one’s outer beauty matter so much more than one’s mind and heart?
Chapter Eight
They passed through the building’s double doors and plunged into the darker interior that smelled overwhelmingly of body odor, cologne . . . and a horse’s stall? Animal musk and waste. She remembered them from the one time she had visited the countryside.
A few years ago, she and Aster had accompanied Papa to call on an old friend in Kent. The two men had ensconced themselves in the library with their brandy whilst she and Aster explored the farm. Of course they had found their way to the barn, where a stable lad had shown them a tabby cat and her litter of newborn kittens.
Aster discovered she was allergic to cats on that day. Red splotches erupted on her skin, and her eyes almost swelled shut. But Prim had settled onto a comfortable spot among the hay, petting kittens, with the tang of animal musk, the stink of manure, and the aroma of loamy earth filling her nostrils.
She recalled that day, that moment, so precisely because she remembered thinking country living might agree with her. She might be considered a Londoner, but she had reveled in the brief taste of her father’s youth.
She had wished to no avail that Papa had never sold his family estate, so that she could have lived in Kent. She would have had the vast countryside to roam and explore instead of being left on her own in their cramped town house so often.
Perhaps that memory reassured her, stirring something inside her while also comforting her as she and Jacob entered the building, bodies pressing on every side of them. She did not think she had ever been in such close confines with so many people before.
It grew only more crowded the farther they advanced up the narrow ramp. At the top of the incline, they came to a stop and peered down at a circular pit below. A pole was staked at the center of it, the dirt around it stained in what she could only surmise to be blood.
She looked up and