“Don’t talk to me about emotions!” she said, her voice like ice. “It’s Olivia, isn’t it? You don’t want her to be a killer, you don’t want all that poetry to come out of darkness and hate. Those damned poems blind you, and everybody else. Olivia was a witch, she had a withered leg, and yet she was able to take Nicholas down with her into depression and death! She could kill her own sister and her own half brother, and give an overdose of laudanum to her mother, and still you want to see her as saint! Her sufferings are just another part of the myth, her writing something you wrestle with because she’s a woman and respect because you once thought it was a man’s, and women shouldn’t write about lying in bed with a lover or standing knee-deep in your own ordure in a trench, or how near we all are to hell! But you wonder, don’t you, what kind of lover she’d have been, and where she might have learned the tricks that mattered. Well, ask Cormac. Maybe he’ll tell you what she was like!”

Stung, he let her go, dropping his hand from her arm, and she turned, walking down the stairs with her head high and her shoulders straight with anger. Fighting for breath and control even while she still seethed with the fury consuming her.

At the foot of the steps she turned to look back up at him and said, “Now you know how I felt in Olivia’s bedroom! I’ve given you a taste of your own poison, and you found it hard to swallow, didn’t you? I don’t know if a word of what I’ve just said is true, and I don’t really care. But now you can see for yourself what lies a twisted imagination might come up with. How easily you can twist the truth to debase other people’s emotions. I loved Nicholas, and I mourn the man he was. And I won’t believe your lies about him. You can think what you like about Olivia. I’m going back to London, if I can find Cormac and ask him to take me. But I promise you this: I’ll ruin you if you ruin Nicholas.”

“Rachel, listen to me—”

“No. I’ve already listened to you, and I think it’s all hog-wash. What you think is your own business. What you do about what you think is very much my business. Consider yourself warned.” She walked to the door.

“Wait!” he commanded, already on his way down the stairs.

“Why? To be insulted again? Or worse still, hurt? I can’t think how you could have been Peter Ashford’s friend. He was such a gentle, good man.”

“I’ll make a bargain with you.”

She laughed. “I don’t bargain with the devil.”