A Little Bit Wicked: what actually happens
Every beat, in order. The bargain, the ambush, and the conversation at a cold window that rearranges ten years.
Before the book opens
Judith, Lady Chester is widowed, thirty, and rich in her own name. She married at seventeen. Lucian was a poet and by all accounts a genius, and the marriage was brief, tempestuous and short. What she has told nobody, including her closest friend, is how it actually went: his world swallowed hers, her old friendships thinned out and died, her parents died, and by the end there was nobody left but him. He had a temper. Everyone excused it as artistic. In the last months of his life the incidents stopped being shouting and started being violence.
Then he died. And for ten years Judith has carried the certainty that she caused it.
What she built afterwards is a life engineered so nothing can ever take her apart again. Her own money, her own house, her own rules. She takes lovers. She chooses them, she sets the terms, she keeps count on one hand, and she does not get attached.
Act one: the terrace
They met properly at a Twelfth Night ball Judith hosted. A few casual words that should have meant nothing landed like a struck match, for both of them. Gideon, Viscount Warton, went home and could not put it down, and, being a man who has organized his entire life around control, found the whole thing suspicious enough to do nothing about it for weeks.
Susanna, Lady Dinsmore throws the kind of party where the company is excellent and the entertainment is punishment. Judith slips out to the terrace. Gideon follows. She tells him, without turning around, that she knew exactly who had joined her, and that he has been watching her all evening. It is a very good opening scene because she is running it.
What they negotiate is an affair on Judith’s standard terms, which is to say her terms. She sets the first meeting at her own house and calls it home court advantage. Gideon agrees to the arrangement and then, almost immediately, starts pushing at its edges: he wants to know her likes, her dislikes, the personal and the intimate. He tells her he intends to explore whatever this is. That is not what she agreed to.
Act two: the things neither of them says
Susanna’s verdict on Warton is that he is aloof, cold, superior, sarcastic, far too reserved, and no fun whatsoever. She has never met him. She has, however, heard the story, and she tells it to Judith: about a decade ago Warton was married for less than a day. An elopement, with a girl already engaged to another man. They were caught almost immediately after the ceremony, the marriage was annulled at once, and the girl went and married her fiancé. His behavior for a while afterwards was scandalous.
Judith listens to all of this while carefully not mentioning that she is already sleeping with him.
He takes her somewhere without telling her where, and when she demands to know, says he is stealing her away to Spain to live on a beach forever wearing almost nothing. She lets herself picture it for one second: white sand, impossible blue water, him in it looking like anything but an Englishman. It is the single most reckless thing she does in the book, because it is the first time she wants something she has not scheduled.
Susanna’s grandmother’s birthday, which nobody in that family would dare miss on the grounds that the old woman might leave everything to charity out of spite. Gideon is walked into a room containing what appears to be several hundred of Susanna’s relatives. He survives it. Worse, he enjoys it. Judith notices that he enjoys it, and files the observation somewhere she would rather not look at.
Act three: the guest list
An invitation arrives from Lady Braxton, a woman neither Gideon nor his friends have any real connection to. The guest list turns out to be the point. She has assembled, in one room, several of Judith’s former lovers, and arranged for Gideon to find himself standing among them with perfect manners on all sides.
She frames it privately as an attempt to show him the error of his ways regarding Judith. It is the coldest thing in the novel: a public humiliation delivered entirely through seating.
Gideon turns up at Lord Helmsley’s house in the small hours looking wrecked and, notably, completely sober. He has not had a drink since he left. Helmsley, who is married and settled and finds his friend’s disaster faintly hilarious, pours him one anyway and makes him say out loud what happened.
Act four: the window
Alexandra is Lucian’s sister. In a cold unlit room in a grim house, standing at a window with her back turned, she tells Judith what she has been sitting on for ten years.
Their father was cruel for the sake of it, violent and vicious, a man whose wife and children were possessions rather than family. Lucian grew up terrified of turning into him. He had cast Judith, at seventeen, as the person who would save him from that, which was never a job a seventeen-year-old could have done.
And Alexandra admits the rest: she let Judith believe Lucian’s death was her fault. Not once, in grief. For a decade. She encouraged it.
Judith has nothing to do with it and never did.
The ending
Judith does not wait around to be chosen. She arranges to leave the country, and the destination is the joke he made in the carriage turned back on him: she is going to the jungle to hunt orchids. The man who once told her he would never chase orchids in South America now has to watch her do exactly that without him.
Gideon is at his club with Cavendish, Sinclair and Norcroft when his aunt walks straight into a room no woman has ever entered. The steward is beside himself. Gideon, faced with a scandal in progress, notes mildly that his days at that particular club are probably numbered and that the lady is a force of nature rarely deterred from her goal.
Her goal is to tell him Judith is leaving. It is the funniest scene in the book and it is also the entire third act resolved by a relative who refused to be managed.
He goes after her. They marry. The book does not bring them home for a bow, which is the best decision it makes: the final scene is back at the club, with his friends raising a glass to Lord and Lady Warton, wherever they happen to be. Somewhere warm, presumably, looking for flowers.
Then Cavendish observes that one of them will be next, and they drink to the last man standing, whoever he turns out to be. Which is the next book.
What the book is actually doing
Two people arrive at an arrangement designed to protect them both from ever risking anything again. Hers was built after a marriage that took years to destroy her. His was built after a marriage that took a single day. Neither of them tells the other, for most of the book, and the novel never once points at the symmetry, which is why it works.
The cover sells froth. What is underneath is a woman getting back ten years she was never responsible for.
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