Unclaimed

by Courtney Milan

  Slowly, Mr. Parret set his daughter on the floor. “Belinda,” he said quietly, “go find your governess.”

  “But I want to hear about the lady.”

  “Go. Now.”

  He waited until she’d disappeared. Then he walked forward, slowly, and picked up the ring. He dangled it from its chain, turning it from side to side. “Well,” he said softly. “One of the complexions that could be put on the matter I observed in Shepton Mallet was…precisely this. I didn’t want to think it. After all, I don’t want to ruin Sir Mark’s reputation.”

  No. Jessica had thought long and hard about her options. There were only so many ways she could find money, and she wasn’t going to—she couldn’t—sell herself again. But even if she wasn’t selling her body, she could still sell her integrity.

  You have an odd sort of integrity to you, he’d told her once. Maybe…maybe after this was all said and done, she could have her security and her integrity, all at the same time.

  “I think,” Parret said, settling into a chair, “that you need to tell me your tale.”

  Jessica took a deep breath. “It began,” she said, “when I met Sir Mark in Shepton Mallet. I had come there, you see, with the express purpose of seducing him…” The story she conveyed was mostly truthful. It required only a few alterations to change the entire tenor of it. She spoke, and Parret listened, nodding intently. When she was done, he picked up the pages she’d scrawled that morning and read through them.

  “You write well,” he said in surprised tones, as he turned over the first page.

  “For a courtesan, you mean?”

  “For a woman.” He spoke absently, his fingers drumming against the table. He turned another page. “For that matter,” he said, “you write well for a man.”

  Jessica searched for an appropriate response. Her mind covered everything from sarcasm to outrage. Finally, she settled on the simplest reaction. “Thank you,” she said graciously.

  When Parret reached the end, he looked up. His mouth was set in a grim line beneath the ragged line of his mustache. “I don’t think this will work,” he told her.

  “Then I’ll have to take it to your competitors.” She tried not to hide her disappointment. She’d hoped that Parret would be able to give her enough to survive—enough that she wouldn’t have to think of money for a good long while yet.

  Parret scowled. “Oh, not the piece,” he explained. “I meant that we can’t call you a courtesan. It’s too risqué. Why don’t we call you a ‘fallen woman’ instead, and leave the precise circumstances of the fall a mystery? That way, the public will be free to imagine anything they wish.”

  Jessica took a staggering breath of relief.

  “Of course,” Parret continued, “I can offer you my normal rates—a shilling per column inch. It’s a fair offer—what I would give a man under the circumstances.”

  Jessica almost smiled. “My dear sir,” she said, “you must be joking. No man could possibly have told this story. We are talking about the most in cendiary article that London has seen in years. You can’t fob me off with a few shillings. This isn’t piecework. I want fifty percent of the proceeds.”

  His eyes narrowed. “All the expense of production is mine, and all the risk. Two pounds, no more.”

  “Forty-five percent. I can take my account to anyone else. I’ll have a share of the proceeds, or you’ll have nothing.”

  He slapped his hand on top of the papers, as if to ward off that threat. “Twenty-five.”

  “Thirty, and I get five pounds upfront.” Enough to clear the debts in her name. Enough to survive for months. Enough for the future to become suddenly possible, and not some grim, looming fate. Even the city street outside the window seemed to lighten.

  Mr. Parret cocked his head to the side. “Very well. I accept.” He reached out one hand.

  Jessica took it carefully. “You bargain well,” she told him. “For a man.”

  He pursed his lips ruefully and shook her hand. And apparently, that was all it took to turn a courtesan into a former courtesan. She’d just earned enough to survive for a good long while. Before this ran out, she would find a way to earn more. She wouldn’t need to sell her body ever again.

  “Sir Mark will be furious.” It was the worst part of this deal, knowing how much he hated private inquiry—and knowing that she would be thrusting him into the public eye with a vengeance.

  But Parret didn’t even shrug as he smoothed out the papers. “He usually is. I never let it bother me.”

  Maybe one day she’d be able to view Mark’s response with such equanimity. That day was a long way off.

  “I want to publish this one section each day, for five days—that will really get everyone interested, and we can charge double for the last printing. As for a title, I thought to call it ‘The Seduction of Sir Mark.’ That has a nice ring to it, doesn’t it?”

  “But what is he going to do, when he sees that?”

  “Hopefully,” Parret said, “he’ll get very angry. It will confirm everyone’s suspicions, and make us a great deal of money.”

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  TWO DAYS AFTER Mark arrived in Bristol, his brother suggested a walking trip.

  “My duties are reduced during the summers,” Smite said. “And Ghost could use some country air.” He’d said this with a gesture at the puppy, who gamboled about their feet.

  Mark had translated this as: Stop moping about.

  They’d sent a letter to Ash, informing him that they’d be gone a few days—eldest brothers did tend to worry, even over grown men—and Mark spent the remainder of that day losing himself in procuring supplies and planning the trip. He’d pored over maps and railway timetables, finally deciding to take the train to Reading, and from there, a meandering journey through country roads until they reached Basingstoke. It would be four or five days through tracks and lanes. Mark made note of a few smaller hostelries along the road where they might stay.

  “None of the big ones now,” Smite had said lazily. “I don’t know how they’ll take to a dog.”

  They’d have taken an entire menagerie from a duke’s brothers. But then, Mark didn’t need Smite to explain his peculiarities.

  It was good to have something else to think of. It was better still when they disembarked from the passenger car in Reading to a bright, sunny day. It was a day so glorious that Mark could almost forget that everything else in his life was far from perfect.

  The locomotive pulled away from the station in a cloud of smoke, leaving Mark and his brother pushed about on all sides by the crowd leaving the platform.

  Smite met Mark’s eyes and jerked his head toward the road. In this dry weather, the track was dusty with all the passing traffic. His brother would naturally prefer to choke on road-dust than spend time in a crowd. Mark shouldered his burden, happy to bear a little discomfort. It would get his mind off the interminable spiraling back, the uncomfortable thoughts of her…

  No need to speak, thankfully. They made their way out and started through the clouds of hanging dust, holding their breaths. The fields weren’t far beyond; once there, they might not need to speak to anyone until they reached their destination for the evening.

  The whole notion sounded lovely.

  “Oy!” A voice sounded behind them, recognizable and yet impossible at the same time.

  Smite paused, turning on the shoulder of the road. A man—tall, burly—was striding toward them. He moved quickly, without once seeming to hurry. He had a satchel thrown over his shoulder; he barely glanced down the road for traffic before darting across.

  “I had thought,” the man said without any additional greeting, “the two of you would be civilized enough to stop in the public house before sallying forth.”

  “That’s where you went wrong,” Smite said. “We didn’t intend to do anything so dramatic as sally. We had just planned to start.”

  Mark stared at the newcomer in dumb confusion. �
�Ash,” he finally said stupidly. “What are you doing here?”

  “Got Smite’s message about the trip late last night,” his eldest brother replied. “I can’t have the two of you haring off on your own, can I?”

  “We don’t hare, either. We walk. With dignity.”

  Beside them, Ghost gave the lie to that by jumping up on Ash, his paws leaving two dusty footprints on his trousers.

  Ash was protective, sometimes to an overbearing degree. Mark should have realized how suspicious it was that he’d not responded to their letter with a lecture on walking safely. In his normal course of events, he would have offered them an armed guard…or…or whatever other ridiculous thing he might have dreamed up.

  He must have spent the entirety of the morning riding here. All that, just to meet them for an hour?

  His eldest brother showed no sign of fatigue, however. Instead, he simply shifted the satchel he carried.

  “Well.” Smite spoke first. “I suppose we could set aside our haring and sallying long enough for a brief repast.”

  “Not at all. There’s no need to make the slightest alteration in your plans on my account.” Ash grinned. “I can keep up with the lot of you.”

  Smite glanced at Mark, his eyes widening. That slight entreaty was as good as a plea on bended knee for him.

  “Keep up?”

  “I’m coming with you,” Ash said. His jaw set as he spoke, and he looked away from them. “Unless—”

  “Can you neglect your business affairs so long?” Mark asked.

  “Can you neglect your wife so long?” Smite asked, perhaps a little more slyly.

  Ash let out a sigh. “Margaret suggested, in very strong terms, that I should come along.”

  Mark exchanged another glance with Smite. Ash and Margaret had been happily married for five years; Mark couldn’t imagine Margaret sending him away.

  He was trying to work out a way to politely ask what might have happened, when Smite broke in, no politeness at all. “Good Lord, Ash, what did you do?”

  “Nothing!” Ash said. “Or—at least—nothing I shouldn’t be doing.”

  The track across the field, this close to town, was wide enough that they could all three walk abreast, and so they started down the path.

  “Nothing?”

  “If you must know,” Ash said in patronizing tones, “she is increasing.”

  “Oh, congratulations!” Mark clapped his brother on the back.

  Smite shook his hand, and Ash’s smile broadened, as if he’d done something very clever.

  “But now I’m doubly astonished,” Mark continued. “I wouldn’t have thought you could be pried from her side under those circumstances, not with a full harness of oxen.”

  His eldest brother stiffened. “She says,” Ash muttered, “that I hover.”

  Mark stifled a laugh, just as Smite hid his face.

  “I don’t hover,” Ash said. “Do I hover?”

  “Surely not!” Mark said, overly polite.

  Smite grinned. “Never.”

  “I couldn’t imagine such a thing.”

  “Never in a million years.”

  “Hovering,” Mark said, “puts me in mind of a butterfly—a light creature, flitting about from flower to flower, delicate as you please, vanishing at the first sudden movement.”

  “And that,” Smite said, completing Mark’s thought, “seems rather too circumspect for you. My guess is that you were circling overhead, like some kind of obscene vulture.”

  “Waiting to pounce on any weakness.”

  Ash put on hands on a hip. “You unholy pack of ruffians,” he said in amusement. “I do not—”

  “Only to give aid, of course,” Mark said. “You are perhaps the most benevolent vulture I have ever met.”

  Smite sniggered. “Albeit not the most polite.”

  “You two are the most captious lot of ingrates ever to walk the face of Britain.” Even though Ash’s words were harsh, his tone was playful. And for the first time since Jessica had rejected his proposal, Mark realized that he was smiling. The future no longer seemed quite so bleak and barren. His brothers were together; and whatever waited could not be so impossible. “In all seriousness.” Ash took a deep breath. “Will I be in the way?”

  It wasn’t Mark’s place to answer that question. He looked to Smite, who looked away.

  He’d told Jessica that it was hard for Smite to make friends. That wasn’t even the half of it. Smite didn’t keep overnight servants. He wouldn’t stay at a hotel where they might be bothered in the evening. He wouldn’t even stay in Ash’s townhouse in London; he had a flat he kept there for precisely that purpose. There were maybe three people in the world who understood why. Ash wasn’t one of them.

  Smite’s lips thinned. He took a deep breath. “Don’t worry, Ash,” he said. “We’re an unholy pack of ruffians here. You should fit right in.”

  A walking trip. Nothing to do but move and talk with his brothers. He’d not have to see a thing that reminded him of Jessica for close to a week. Mark smiled. Why, by the time he got back to London, he would have forgotten Jessica entirely.

  THE HEADLINE on the London paper read: Sir Mark: Seduced?!

  Jessica could read the words from across the square. The post-boy was already mobbed by a crowd, eager to fork over their coins for this news—and this was only the first issue to be printed. In a week or two, she would be able to collect the remainder of her earnings from Nigel Parret, and she could leave London. What she would do thereafter, she didn’t yet know.

  But she had one last piece of business to conduct. She ducked into the taproom where she’d seen Sir Mark for the first time. She had put off this interview as long as she could. She needed to tell George Weston what she should have told him months ago. She needed to tell him to go to the devil.

  He was waiting for her at a table in the back. He wasn’t unpleasant to look at—brown hair, brown eyes and an indistinct nose. Still, as she smoothed her skirts away and sat down before him, her teeth gritted. Every inch of her skin remembered what he’d done, recalled it in a visceral way that she could not forget. She felt faintly nauseous. The very air around him felt like a punch to the stomach.

  Not that he had ever hit her. If anyone had asked, she wouldn’t have said that he was a bad man. He went to church service regularly. Back when he’d been her protector, he’d even been…well, she couldn’t call him kind. But he’d never beaten her. Up until the end, she would have said that he seemed like a decent fellow.

  But he’d set a bounty on Mark’s head in an attempt to ruin the man’s reputation. And there was the matter of what he’d done to her. He wasn’t bad. Still, she could never forgive him, and now that she knew what a good man was, she could recall precisely how awful he’d made her feel. She’d been steeling herself to endure his presence ever since she’d made the appointment.

  He smiled as she sat. “Congratulations, Jess. I knew you could do it—you just needed a little prodding on my part.”

  Jess again. Mark had called her Jessica. As if she were a full person, not a truncated portion of one. “That’s a bit premature, don’t you think? I’ve not yet given you my report.”

  “I can guess.” His smile stretched out, lazy, sure of itself. “Today, the first installment of a fallen woman’s account appeared in the London Social Mirror. It’s titled, ‘The Seduction of Sir Mark.’ The afternoon edition of every paper has picked up the refrain. I’m not an idiot, Jess. Well done. Everyone is already talking. And serializing the story? That was brilliant. Nobody will ever forget this. When Lefevre retires, I’ll take his place.”

  Jessica thought of Mark’s ring. It hung on a chain from her neck. What would he do, if she showed it to him? “I admit, I don’t understand the ambition. You never struck me as one who cared about the poor.”

  He shrugged. “What, and pass up the chance to determine which of my acquaintances can harness the product of the workhouses?
The Commission decides who gets the contracts for the food, the blankets. They decide what the workhouse produces, and who benefits from it. A man who has that kind of power can get a great many favors. And it will undoubtedly serve as a stepping-stone to other, greater, callings.”

  Jessica felt her lip curl a little.

  “The opportunity would have been wasted on Sir Mark,” Weston said. “He has no head for politics or organization—just philosophy and ethics. You’ve not just done me a favor—you’ve done a favor to all of England.”

  Jessica shook her head. “You are still making a great many assumptions. I came here because—”