InsaneJournal

Louisa Wogan had always preferred the company of men, as did Diana Villiers. Their likeness was often commented upon: the same colouring, graceful, free manners, and questionable pasts, on these beauties of the old Empire's extremities.

Diana was much like a man – less inclined to flattery, but fearless, witty and quite without hypocrisy. Louisa had loved her like no other woman, and felt some modicum of her affection returned. Other women, those peripheral flowers of their world, shrank before Diana. They quivered, the silly geese, before this force of nature. Sometimes Louisa wished they were simply gay wives without husbands; that they could share a house and entertain as they wished; but that freedom was reserved for greater heiresses than they. Money was the reason she left her coded notes on Diana's bedside table and swore her to their safe and secret delivery, even as she left her Judas kiss on her lips.

Men were a twelve a dozen, easily forgotten. Diana, alone among women her lover, proved harder to forget. Even years later, dining with their keepers, Louisa's hand itched to reach for her leg under the table-cloth in a silent, futile request to grasp a long gone past.