The Last Days of a Rake

girl could not understand. He helped her evade her chaperone and took her for a stroll after dinner in the garden of the London house, awaiting the fireworks that had been promised as a part of the hideous Regency celebrations.
    The night air was sweet, honeyed by the perfume of attraction and the sublime enchantment of youthful allure. She shivered, and he, chivalrous in his attempt to attach her, pulled off his jacket and gently drew it around her shoulders.
    “Better?” he asked.
    She nodded and looked up at him with shining eyes as blue as a summer sky. “You are very kind,” she murmured.
    “And you are very lovely,” he countered, watching as she blushed. The urge to kiss her became a thrum of eagerness in his veins, like blood coursing in a rapid pulse. But as he attempted to draw her into the shadows, she pulled away.
    “Mr. Lankin, you know we cannot disappear into the dark like that,” she said.
    No sweet talk would convince her, for she was well raised and morally sound. They talked, after that, and watched the fireworks, but her reserve was the impetus for wretched desire in his breast. He, like countless men of his position and wealth, had experienced a woman’s charms many times from his youth to his manhood. Oxford, that vaunted center of learning and academia, was also a town of bar maids, chambermaids, the whole legion of “maids” who serve the lusts of men as well as their need for clean linens and ale. Lankin had had his share of maidservants and barmaids in his time, “knowing” them in the biblical sense.
    So it was not for want of carnal satisfaction that his diabolical plan arose; any random pair of lips, breasts and legs would have slaked such lust. But Susan Bailey’s demure withdrawal left him curious. It was a challenge, doubly urged by his attraction to her and his pique at her sweet, sensible morality.
    When they parted that evening, it was with food for innocent dreams on her part, and, for him, the knowledge in his breast that he was going to attempt the unfathomable. He was attracted to her both for her beauty and some element of youthful promise within her. But he felt himself above the common trap of falling in love, whatever that much-bandied word meant, and he certainly was not about to marry at such a young age. Therefore, what was left to do with the young lady?
    Only one thing, to his mind; he began, that evening, to plot Miss Susan Bailey’s downfall, her complete surrender to him and, thus, her ruination. How could a man of previous spotty but not completely shocking reputation plan such a thing? Had he no perturbations of the spirit, no misgivings, given her innocence and the complete lack of her having done anything to invite such ruin?
    Lankin was one of those pitiable souls void of conscience when it came to lives other than his own. He was invited to proceed by the sheer audacity of the scheme. It was a tricky thing to do—given how guarded young ladies were in those times and still are—but it was possible. Edgar Lankin was determined, and Miss Bailey was oblivious.

    One month later, he had made little progress toward achieving his goal beyond a bet set up among new friends at his club. He had bragged so openly of his plan (only among those he knew receptive, of course, not among the older, more staid members of the society, and not naming the object of his intentions) that one gambling fellow had bet him he would not succeed. And so the betting book was laid open, and the bet, couched in suitably obscure phrases, was confirmed. But now it looked like he may have boasted too precipitously.
    His fellow clubmen, who did not know the young woman in question beyond her initials, S. B., had begun to taunt him with his failure. Fetes, balls, breakfasts and dinners were the only places he had been able to see Miss Bailey. Lankin recognized he was being led, by Susan and her chaperone, down a path that had forked from the one he had intended to firmly tread. Ahead, gleaming in the distance at the end of the path, was a church and Susan, guarded by the dragon, at a flower-decked altar.
    The vision horrified him. He needed to either scuttle away from the beautiful girl, or make his final assault on the fortress of her virtue.
    But in life, so much is chance. He was undecided which path he would take—defection or seduction—because despite his despicable intentions, he liked Susan Bailey. She was sweet and gentle, but not vacuous, nor thoughtless. There was