Her father read her expression. “That’s settled, then.” Rising from his chair, he brushed imaginary dust from the front of his clothes. “I’ll go see your husband released from custody directly.”
Honora blinked. “My husband? But…he isn’t my husband. Not yet, anyway.”
The Earl of Ormondy grinned. “By the time I get there, he will be, at least as far as the law is concerned.”
“But…how? And why?”
“Don’t think too much about how,” her father said with a chuckle. “It won’t be entirely above board.” Leaning down, he pressed a soft kiss to her forehead. “As to why, the answer is that while I have the power to ensure Mr. Delgado is never prosecuted on any of the charges against him, I cannot prevent him from being deported. Not unless I can provide an unassailable reason for his continued presence in this country, and marriage to a British citizen—and in particular, my daughter—is one of the few rationales I can present that are likely to hold sway.
“In order for my petition to succeed, however, you and Mr. Delgado must appear to be already be married, not merely engaged. Even a formal betrothal might not be sufficient to sway the court. And that means we shall all have to pretend you and he have been married for some time now, and you have only now made me aware of the fact.”
“And how will you make anyone believe that?” Honora asked, mystified. “As if I could get married without you and Mama being any the wiser!”
“I expect,” her mother said wryly, “your Uncle Walter is about to learn that not only did you visit his family this past Christmas-tide, but that they allowed you to gallivant off to Scotland for a few days and get yourself married.” The countess shot her husband a shrewd gaze. “Have I got that about right, Con?”
Straightening, the earl executed a quick bow in his wife’s direction before waggling his eyebrows. “It is truly remarkable how well you know me, my dear.”
“Indeed. After thirty-five years, I can still count on you to hang my brother out to dry.”
He shrugged, his eyes twinkling with merriment. “What is the use of having a vicar in the family if one cannot take advantage of his sterling character and reputation?” Turning back to his daughter, he said, “But you must be certain you want me to do this.”
Honora did her best to quell the sudden spike of alarm that assailed her. If her father succeeded in convincing the authorities she and Lucas had been married for nearly six months, there could be no going back. Should she agree to this course of action, she would be Lucas’s wife—for better or worse and until death parted them—without ever having spoken a single vow. The time to say no, then, was now. She would have no future opportunity.
Her stomach vaulted and rolled. Once this was done, Lucas would have complete control of every farthing she had ever and would ever earn. He could abandon or abuse her, and she would not be able to prevent him. Should he choose to commit adultery, whether once or a thousand times, the only response available to her would be forbearance. And if he decided he did not want her to work, did not want her to write, then she would have to abide by his wishes.
She closed her eyes and took a deep, calming breath. These were fears she might reasonably have about another man. But not Lucas. Not the man whose fair, insightful, and—above all—compassionate essays she had read and admired for years. Not the man who had made love to her with so much passion yet leavened with such tenderness and care, nor the one with whom she had exchanged those chapters of Persephone White that showed the heroine through the eyes of an utterly devoted hero. And certainly not the man who now risked imprisonment and deportation for her sake.
Opening her eyes, she met her father’s concerned gaze and nodded firmly. “Yes, Papa. I want you to do this.”
Chapter Seventeen
“Even in gaol, where every prisoner is extorted shamelessly for access to the barest of necessities, the rich man fares better than the poor regardless of the nature of his crime.” – Luke Evangelista
As Lucas mounted the stairs to the front door of 12 Clifford Street, he recalled standing on the pavement just weeks ago, staring at this house in forlorn certainty that he would never be worthy to enter its respectable if not-quite-hallowed halls. Never in his wildest imaginings had he considered the possibility that not only would he be invited within, but would do so as a member of the family. Yet here he was, walking a few steps behind the Earl of Ormondy, his father-in-law—and by all the gods and all the signs, how was that even possible?—on his way to join his wife.
Honora. His wife.
His head still swam with the implications.
The earl neither opened the door nor knocked upon it. Instead, he simply reached the portal and it opened for him so he barely had to break his stride. Once inside, the earl handed his hat over to the footman—who must have been watching from a nearby window for his master’s arrival—and beckoned Lucas to do the same.
With no small degree of chagrin, Lucas gave the servant his decidedly battered and, after nearly two days in Newgate, distinctly odoriferous hat. The footman evinced not the slightest disapproval of the condition of this or any other article of Lucas’s clothing, as though the Ormondys routinely welcomed recently released inmates into their home.
“Lewis,” the earl addressed the footman, “this is Mr. Delgado, Lady Honora’s husband.”
“Good evening, sir,” said the servant, as if Lucas did not look and smell a fright.
In the warm glow of the chandelier that lit the entrance hall, Lucas saw that a staircase leading upward to the first floor hugged the right wall and another long, narrow corridor led to the remainder of the ground floor, with one visible opening on the left. He glanced up, hoping Honora might appear at the top of the staircase and somehow make this whole exchange less awkward.
But he was not so blessed. He would just have to muddle through.
The footman gave Lucas’s hat a thoughtful look and asked, “Would you like me to have the hall boy clean this?”
Lucas half grinned, half grimaced. “I think we’d do better to burn it, don’t you, my lord?” The same could be said of his clothes. He doubted the smell could ever be got out.
His father-in-law chuckled good-naturedly. The earl was considerably less daunting a figure in person than he was made out to be in the press. “That would probably be for the best.” Then he gestured to the stairs. “The ladies will be waiting for us in the rear sitting room.”
Stifling the urge to ask how many sitting rooms one family required, Lucas nodded and took the lead as the earl apparently wished him to do. At the top of the flight of stairs, another well-lit corridor stretched in front of him with doors to his left. Since Ormondy had called it the rear sitting room, Lucas walked past the first of these doors without pausing to inquire, but slowed as he neared the second, the question unspoken but clearly understood when the earl said, “Not this one. The next.”
With a nod, Lucas continued to the third door—all of which had multiple recessed panels and were painted white with gilt trim that matched the white paneled and gilt-trimmed ceiling—and turned the knob. In other circumstances, he supposed he might have taken a few seconds to examine the decoration and furnishings, but he had eyes for only one occupant of the room.
As the door opened, Honora shot from a chaise longue as though she had been poised to do so even before their arrival. A dull thud heralded a book hitting the colorful rug—Turkish? Persian? Lucas was no judge of such things—and she flew toward him in a flutter of yards of silvery-white fabric, her hair hanging loose and long about her shoulders.
He hadn’t seen her in more than a month, and the sight of her practically stopped his heart. She was as lovely as he remembered—no, even more so. It wasn’t just the arrangement of her features that made her beautiful, but something more incandescent, more insubstantial. He wasn’t sure if he had forgot or failed to fully appreciate the overwhelming audacity of her, the way she threw herself into both the joys and the dangers of life.
The current danger being his ungodly stench.
But he had no opportunity to warn her off before she had wrapped him in a fervent embrace, her face buried in the junction of his neck and shoulder. He felt a dampness he suspected was tears and despite the certainty that he was ruining a very expensive dressing gown, he enfolded her in his arms.
“I’m all right, my love,” he whispered. “It’s over now.”
They stood this way for quite some time before she wriggled free and stepped away from him. Her eyes were a soft, gossamer gray, more like down than the steel he was accustomed to seeing there, but her wrinkled nose indicated she had gotten more than a whiff of his eau du prison—a combination, he knew, of human and rodent waste, rotting food, and fetid water. She looked from him to her father. “You could have warned me, you know.”
“Would it have made a difference?” the earl asked.
“No,” she admitted easily, returning her gaze to Lucas. Her eyes drank him in as if she were dying of thirst and he might turn out to be a mirage. “But I might have taken my favorite wrapper off first.”
The other occupant of the room rose from her chair, which faced away from the door, and turned to give the three of them—Lucas, Honora, and her father—an appraising once-over. The Countess of Ormondy stood no more than five feet tall and possessed a slender figure, but she was a compact person rather than a small one, for her presence and attention took up as much space in the room as her physically more imposing husband. Lucas could see the resemblance between her and her daughter in the shape of their eyes and the curve of their lips, as well as in the barely leashed vivacity that exuded from both his beloved and his mother-in-law.
“You could have warned me,” the countess said to her husband, in not-entirely-mock reproof. “I could have had the bath made ready before you arrived. Now the servants will have to be got out of bed, and our poor son-in-law will have to wait another thirty minutes or more before he can be got clean.” Her voice, Lucas noticed, was so similar in cadence and register to Honora’s that he could almost believe she had spoken rather than the elegant matron in front of him.
“My apologies, my love,” the earl responded, sounding genuinely contrite. “I thought they were still holding him at the police station in Holborn, which is considerably less putrid than Newgate. Had I known…”
She emitted a mollified huff, cutting off her husband’s apology in midsentence, and addressed herself to Lucas. “Welcome to the family, Mr. Delgado. I know the circumstances are irregular, but I suspect you will find us a most irregular bunch.”
Lucas arched his eyebrows. Even after everything the earl had told him before his release, Lucas could not quite credit his own ears. If he were not certain his own imagination would never concoct a scenario in which he not only married Lady Honora Pearce but was taken into the bosom of her family without resentment or recrimination, he would suspect he was dreaming. Even now, he had the nagging apprehension that he was being played for a fool in some way. It all just seemed too good to be true. “Thank you, my lady,” was all he could think to say, and the words came out tinged with a certain degree of wariness.
The countess smiled broadly, and this too he recognized as identical to his wife’s. His wife. Would he ever get used to that?
“I think you had best call me Freddie, at least in private. Otherwise, I shall feel like a terrible old stick in the mud.”
Lucas nodded and wondered how on earth he would manage such familiarity with this formidable, though plainly kind and good-humored, woman.
Now, to his relief, she turned her attention to Honora. “I’ll have Nicks bring one of your papa’s dressing gowns to your room so your husband can get out of those clothes before the bath is prepared.” She made a shooing motion with both hands. “One of the footmen will come up and knock on your door when the bathing chamber is ready.”
Honora, who had been following the conversation with obvious wonderment, if not open incredulity, blinked at her mother’s pronouncement. “You…you mean for me to take Lucas to my room? Alone?”
“He is your husband, my dear. If you don’t behave as if he is, there may be questions, and we can’t afford that.”
The first order of business when they arrived in Honora’s suite—which certainly could not be called her room, since there were fully three separate spaces: a sitting room, a dressing room, and the bedchamber itself—was to remove his stinking garments. This Lucas accomplished in the privacy of the dressing room while Honora waited in the sitting room for the delivery of the promised robe.
Once he was naked, he could almost bear to be in his own presence, but there was still an underlying reek that clung to his skin, as though Newgate had seeped not just into the fabric of his clothes but into his very pores. He shuddered as images—visual, auditory, and olfactory—of the time he’d spent behind bars rushed through his brain. Despite the fact that he had visited the prison on several occasions during the time he’d been training as a barrister, conditions at the prison were far worse than he had appreciated. This, he now understood, was because the clients he had visited, being wealthy enough to retain representation, were also wealthy enough to be housed in Newgate’s more genteel sections. Men of his modest means did not fare nearly so well. Poorer men likely fared even worse.
Yet another injustice for him to rail against although, thanks to his new station in life, his arguments might fall on ears with the actual power to effect change, not merely agitate for it.
A gentle knock sounded on the door before it opened, and Honora slipped into the small but exceptionally well-lit space. She had removed the diaphanous peignoir he’d undoubtedly sullied—hopefully not beyond saving—and wore only a white cotton nightgown. Given that it covered her from neck to ankles, the garment should have appeared demure, even chaste, but in the bright illumination, the fabric was all but transparent, displaying every sumptuous curve of her body.
The longing he’d managed to tamp down in her parents’ presence swelled to life, his cock stretching and thickening with pent-up arousal. She gazed back at him with undisguised heat in her eyes, studying his naked form with a hunger that matched his own. His first instinct was to close the short distance between them and kiss her. Then he remembered that not only did he need a bath, he had not been able to avail himself of a toothbrush for two full days, and his breath was probably even fouler than his skin. Also, he noticed the dark blue material that hung over her arm and realized this was the promised dressing gown.
As if she had also just recalled why she had come, Honora dragged her eyes back to his face and held out the robe to him.
Taking the proffered item from her grasp, he discovered that it was made of brocaded silk studded with golden threads. He raised his eyebrows. “Are you sure you want me to wear this?”
She shrugged. “It’s what Newsome, my father’s valet, sent. I’m sure he has a dozen others to choose from.”
And there again was the reminder of the chasm that lay between them. Lucas had not been raised in penury—to the contrary, his father’s position paid well, and his parents lived in solid middle-class comfort—but neither could he get his mind around the notion of having so many expensive garments that any of them could be considered disposable.
Even as he drew on the robe, he felt an oppressive weight compressing his chest. Honora might be the most unspoiled child of wealth and privilege he had ever known, but he did not know if she fully grasped what she had given up by marrying him. As the wife of a commoner—and a foreign one, to boot—she would never be accepted as a true member of the aristocratic circles she’d grown up in. Her immediate family would not cut her, of that he was sure, but her friends and more distant relations were unlikely to invite her to society functions, and some might go so far as to snub her directly. Of course, it was patronizing of him to think she didn’t understand these things—she was more conversant with the pretensions and prejudices of the Upper Ten Thousand than he would ever be—but he couldn’t he
lp but worry she might one day regret the change in her circumstances and come to resent him.
It was on the tip of his tongue to blurt out his fears, but what he said instead was, “Dare I hope there is an unused toothbrush and some toothpowder to be had?”
There was.
By the time he had finished thoroughly cleaning and rinsing his mouth, another servant had arrived to indicate that his bath was ready and waiting for him in the basement room reserved for this purpose. Honora led him down the front stairs and to the door off the ground-floor hallway that concealed the flight of steps to the lowest level of the house. The bathing chamber was located at the rear of the house, where another set of steps provided access to the basement from the kitchen.
Upon entering the room, which measured perhaps nine feet square, Lucas saw first a boat-shaped cast-iron tub in the center, from which steam curled in wispy tendrils, and then the side table upon which were laid multiple towels, a rack upon which to hang clothing, and a sturdy chair beside a freestanding oval mirror.
Honora followed him in and closed the door. “Get in,” she said and pulled her nightdress off over her head.
Chapter Eighteen
“Love was not blind, Persephone realized; it was the lens through which one finally apprehended truth.” – M. Honeywell
She’d managed to take him by surprise, Honora knew. Lucas blinked at her in mute astonishment for several seconds, as though the possibility that she would join him in the tub had never occurred to him. But she was not prepared to let this opportunity go to waste. Nor was she willing to wait one instant longer than absolutely necessary to touch him, to kiss him, to assure herself that he wanted her and this hastily effected lifelong bond as much as she did.
A Bit of Rough Page 14
