that the vicarage also sat uncomfortably close to the Thames. “Well, I told Mother I would meet her, so I will. If she's nothing, at least I can say I tried.”

Christopher sighed, taking another sip of his drink.

Cary snorted.

“So, gentlemen, what do we have to look at today? Something…

intriguing?” he asked, changing the subject. “That 'newly discovered' work by Byron?”

“I read it. It was an utter fraud.” Cary dismissed it with a wave of his brandy

glass. “I suspect a barrister-in-training. It reads like legal documentation. No, no.

I have something we've never seen before.”

“What is it?” Christopher asked, leaning forward.

“The poet is called… Browning.”

“Elizabeth Barrett Browning?” Colin complained. “Her poetry is hardly

worth our time. A lot of girly sonnets to be used on susceptible young women.

I'm not trying to woo one of you.”

“No, idiot,” Cary rebuked his friend with a laugh, “her husband Robert. I've

never read any of his works before, but the title is promising.”

“And that is?” Colin pressed.

“‘Porphyria's Lover,’” James announced, lifting a folio from his side table and producing a crisp sheet of printed paper.

Christopher raised his eyebrows. “It does sound intriguing. Perhaps he'll be

the next Shelley. Who's reading?”

“I'll read,” Colin volunteered, grabbing the folio from James' hands. “‘The rain set early in tonight/ The sullen wind was soon awake,’” he began, and then

continued reading.

As he progressed through the poem, Cary raised his eyebrows in pleasure as

the young lady partially undressed and cuddled up to her lover. And then, the poem took an unexpected turn.

“‘I found/A thing to do, and all her hair/in one long yellow string I

wound/three times her little throat around/And strangled her.’”

Cary's eyebrows snapped together.

Christopher had to tighten his jaw to prevent it from dropping open. This is

no lascivious love poem.

Colin started at what he had just read but bravely continued to the end, as the

murderer embraced the corpse of the woman who had once loved him. “‘And yet

God has not said a word,’” he finished.

“Good Lord,” Cary said at last, dark eyebrows rolling like a ship on the sea

of his discomfort. “What the devil was that?”

“I don't know,” Colin replied. “I've never heard anything like it. How…

distasteful.”

They both looked at Christopher. The subject matter appalled him, and yet…

a new thought germinated, took root, and grew. “I think he was trying to make a

point rather than a beautiful poem,” Christopher said cautiously. “Social reform,

you know? Speaking out against violence towards women. Certainly, things like

this do happen.”

“Are you defending it?” Colin's disbelief hung heavy in his voice. “It's

terrible. It hardly rhymes. I'm going back to Tennyson. At least he's elegant.

Besides, any girl stupid enough to trust such a madman must know the risk.”

“I don’t think so,” Christopher said without thinking, his mind preoccupied

with trying to understand what he felt—let alone thought—about all the new ideas the poem had generated.

“You’ve been talking to your mother too much,” Cary said, breaking the

tension with a laugh.

The teasing bark shook Christopher's mind back to the present.

“It's only a poem, Bennett,” Cary added. “Don't read so much into it. As for

me, I've had enough for one evening. Shall we go get some dinner at the club?”