Three Nights with a Scoundrel

Page 23

“Come closer,” she said. “I want a proper look at you. I haven’t yet satisfied myself on the state of your health.”
He shook his head. Absolutely not. It had been proven to him, several times in the past few days, that he was incapable of resisting her whenever she came within reach. “I’m not injured. Just wet.”
“Wonderful. So now you’ll catch your death of pneumonia.” She slid the blanket from her shoulders. “At least take this.”
His teeth chattered. “You keep it.”
“Julian, I expect this conversation won’t be brief. I can’t watch you shiver through it. Unless”—she tipped her head—“you’d care to share the blanket.”
He accepted the thing with no small twinge of pride. He’d passed a damned cold night, and it wasn’t much warmer up here in the garret.
“So what happened?” she asked. “Weren’t you able to find them?”
“I found them. But they weren’t Leo’s killers.”
Julian sighed with fatigue. He’d followed those men for hours. Watched them drink, eat, piss in the alley, drink some more. Then take turns tupping the same apathetic whore. Finally he’d overheard enough to gather they’d only recently arrived in London. It was their first adventure in the fair city, as evidenced by the fact they’d lost their way in St. Giles, and only much later realized the apathetic whore had made off with their purses. He didn’t expect it would console the two Scots when they learned she’d left them with the clap in recompense.
So much for his hope of stumbling onto Leo’s murderers. He would have to return to the other plan: drawing out the man, or men, who hired them.
Lily shucked her slippers and curled her feet up, tucking them under her flimsy excuse for a skirt. Despite his chilled state, he knew a warm, buzzing current of desire. Parts of him heated beneath the rough blanket.
“Thank goodness,” she said. “I’m glad it wasn’t them.”
“Don’t you want your brother’s killers found?”
“I do, I do. But I don’t want you to find them. Not alone and unarmed in the dark. If the solution to Leo’s murder comes at the cost of your life, I don’t want it. I will live with the mystery, thank you very much.”
She looked close to tears. He hated the fact that he’d put her through another night of anxiety, but it thrilled him that she cared so much whether he lived or died.
“Now, then,” she said, sniffing. “Speaking of mysteries. What is this place? What do you mean, you grew up here? Why does Anna call you Jamie, and how do you know her sign language?”
“It’s a long story.”
“Then do begin.” She leaned forward, focusing intently on his mouth. “But slowly, please.”
“My mother …” He swallowed hard. “My mother was born completely deaf. She came from a very rural, isolated area of Kent where deafness is common. Her cousin was likewise without hearing.”
“How strange. All in one place? I wonder why that is.”
“You, and many scholars. It seems to pass through family lines. It’s so common, signing is like a second language there. For everyone, even the hearing.” He propped an elbow on the windowsill, relaxing into the tale. “Anyway, when my mother was a child, charity toward the deaf was all the rage. You’ve heard of Braidwood and his school?”
She nodded. “My own speech tutors were trained there.”
“His efforts were famous. He made it the fashionable thing to show charity toward the deaf and mute. My mother and her cousin were recruited for employment, offered posts in service here in Town as chambermaids to a wealthy lord’s family. The promised wages were an untold sum for two girls from the weald.”
“So they accepted?” Lily prompted.
“Yes. They took the posts. They were young and afraid, but they had each other’s company. At first. My mother’s cousin took ill and died within a few months of their arrival in London.”
“Oh, no. How tragic.”
“My mother’s lot was worse. She’d never learned to speak or write, knew no one in London. Her employers were older and decent enough, but there was a son and he … Well, he took advantage.” Bile rose in his throat. “Chambermaids are misused by their masters every day, but imagine her situation. She couldn’t fight him off. She couldn’t ask for help. Even if she had, it was doubtful she would have received it.”
Lily hugged herself. “What did she do?”
“She survived, as best she could. When the housekeeper finally saw she was pregnant, she was sacked without reference and tossed to the street. I came into the world a few months later. My mother gave birth to me in a vacant warehouse.”
“Alone?”
“She was afraid of asking for help. Thought her baby would be taken from her, and she’d end up in the workhouse or Bedlam. It wasn’t an unrealistic fear.”
“That was very brave of her.”
“Yes. Yes, it was.” He’d been a help to his mother when he grew older. But Julian knew at any time in his infancy, she could have made life a great deal easier on herself by dropping him on the doorstep of a foundling hospital. She hadn’t. They’d always had each other. Most times, that was all they’d had.
“Why didn’t she go home to her family?”
“She had no money, no means of travel. And she felt disgraced. Ashamed.” He took a slow, deep breath to calm himself. “That’s who I am, Lily. The product of fear, violence, and shame. The bastard son of a lecherous nobleman. Born on the wrong side of the blanket, on the wrong side of Town. Raised in conditions a gutter rat would fancy himself a cut above. We had nothing. No food. No home. No proper clothing. My mother worked when she could; I begged and stole when she couldn’t. The rest of the time, we starved.”
Like an ancient echo, hunger rumbled in his stomach. He’d eaten nothing since those few bites of beefsteak last night. Even before Leo’s murder, he’d done this often—skipping meals, sometimes for a day or more. He didn’t plan it so, but it was almost like he couldn’t allow himself to forget the sensation of hunger. That bitter, gnawing emptiness that had shadowed all his early years.
“When I was about nine years of age,” he went on, “I heard word of this place. A coffeehouse owned and entirely staffed by the deaf. I brought my mother around, and the owner—Anna’s late husband—gave her work as a scullery maid. I ran messages, shoveled coal.” His eyes went to the sloping ceiling. “They gave us this garret for our lodgings. I had a little cot, just there.” He pointed at the floorboards beneath her chair. “First real bed in my life. And at night, I lay down to it with a full belly. For the first time in years, my mother had steady work and friends with whom she could converse. She was happy. I was happy.
“It was only later, as I grew older, that I realized what advantages we should have had from the first, and what a toll those years of dire poverty had taken on my mother’s health. I finally came to understand the magnitude of suffering my fa—” He couldn’t use that word. “… the man who sired me had inflicted on her.”
“And on you, as well. Do you know who he was?”
He shook his head. “He’s dead. She told me that much, when I grew old enough to ask. The son died first, not long after I was born, leaving his father without an heir. When the old man died a few years later, the title passed to a distant relation. I gather my mother took me to the executor of the estate, hoping for a settlement.”
“I suppose she was denied one.”
He nodded.
“Julian …” Lily inched forward on her chair.
“Noblemen,” he said, ignoring her proffered sympathy, “came in to this coffeehouse every day. It was quite the fashionable meeting house, in its time. For years, I smoothed the creases from their newspapers, polished the buckles on their shoes, wiped their spit from the floor. And I watched my mother grow a little weaker every winter.”
“Until she died?”
With a curt nod, he slanted his gaze away.
“How old were you then?”
“Fourteen.” Fourteen. Half a man, and a total fool. “And I wasn’t even there for her. I was in jail when she fell ill.”
“In jail?” Her eyes widened. “At fourteen? For what?”
He shook his head. There was so much Lily didn’t know. Could never know. “I ran afoul of the wrong aristocrat. The details aren’t important now. What mattered was, I wasn’t there for my mother. There was no money saved. She was given an unmarked pauper’s grave.” Determined to prevent an outburst of emotion, he pressed a fist to his mouth. “She gave me life in a dusty storehouse, and I let her die alone.”
Beneath the blanket, he began to shake. Not with cold or hunger, but with fury. He’d been living with this anger all his days, like some sort of phantom twin. The fury had life of its own: guts and memory and corporeal strength. It made demands.
Lily rose from her chair and crossed to him, sinking to her knees before the crate. With a light, tentative motion, she curled her fingers over his trembling fist. At that first jolt of contact, he sucked in a gasp. He couldn’t bring himself to spurn her touch. So generous and warm.
Gently, she pulled his hand away from his mouth, so his lips—and his words—would not be concealed. “Please don’t hide,” she said. “I need to understand.”
The blanket slipped from his shoulders, and the room’s bracing chill gave him a moment of cold composure.
“After she was gone,” he said, “I found work here and there. Spent some time as a table monkey, cutting patterns in the back of a tailor’s shop. It was there I first glimpsed Beau Brummel. He’s the son of a secretary, do you know? And he had the cream of English society all clamoring to lighten his tea. One day, I decided, that would be me. I would have everything the lords had. Everything that should have been mine, by rights. I would take it from them. Their money. Their status. Their women. I would reverse the scales, make them envy me.” He swallowed a hot, bitter lump of rage. “I hated them so much, Lily. I hated them all.”
She moved closer still. He could smell the light fragrance of her hair. It smelled expensive, and far too refined for this humble place.
“Don’t pity me,” he said. “I’m talking about your friends. Your family, your peers. I’ve devoted all the years of my adulthood to taking what I could. I’ve joined their clubs, fleeced them of their gold, tupped their wives, mocked them to their faces. Forced them to dress in hideous colors. All out of spite and a thirst for revenge.”
“And you kept all this from Leo, and from me.”
“Yes. For years.”
Her bottom lip folded under her teeth, and her gaze sharpened with concentration. She had an aim in mind, and he didn’t know what it was.
Her hand slowly stretched toward his face. Julian held his breath. With her fingertip, she dabbed a spot high on his cheekbone, just beneath the corner of his eye. His eyelids fluttered, partly out of instinct and partly out of sheer, sweet torment at the sensation of her touch.
Then she drew back her hand, stared at it. He stared, too, and discerned something glistening on her fingertip.
Oh, devil take it. He was weeping?
She pinched her thumb against her forefinger, rubbing the evidence into her skin. There, it was gone. Just one tear. One tear wasn’t weeping. After a night of such extraordinary events, and a morning of such heartfelt confession, limiting himself to a single tear was a formidable display of restraint. Manful, even. Wasn’t it?
And really, this garret was dusty as hell. It might have been a case of simple ocular irritation. Anyway, it was over now. He blinked, and no more tears fell. Excellent.