Behind the Courtesan

by Bronwyn Stuart

  “And you wouldn’t be in the position you are now.”

  “Heard that too did you, minx?”

  “Why aren’t you angry with me?” He should have been furious, but instead he sat with his ankle on his knee, his hands steepled before his chest and a thoughtful look on his face.

  Daemon shook his head, leaned forward and took one of her hands in his. “I’m not angry with you, because it is a wasted emotion. It is you who should be upset with me.”

  Sophie covered their clasped hands with her free one with a sinking stomach. She wouldn’t pretend she didn’t understand the tone in his voice. “I could never be upset with you. You have given me more than I deserved, more than I would have thought to ask for.”

  “What will you do now?” he asked.

  “I’ll wait for my niece or nephew to be born and then I’ll go back to the city and pack my things. I don’t belong there anymore and I suddenly find I want more than can be found in London.”

  “What about your friends and the infirmary. You enjoy working there.”

  Sophie shook her head. “In a way I always thought the clinic needed me but they only need my money. Well, our money. I can donate from anywhere in the country. I think in truth it was me who needed them. A way to stay connected with both the lives I lost. As for my friends, they only need to know that I’m safe and happy.” Safe and happy in Blakiston? She wondered if that were truly possible.

  “But will it be enough for you? Rotting away in the country?”

  Sophie laughed at the irony, at him using her own words. It felt like a lifetime ago since she’d spoken them, so much had changed. “I believe I shall cope. Violet will need help with the baby and if she lets me, I should like to be a real aunt, perhaps even a friend.”

  “I think she would like that.”

  “What about you? What will you do about Blake?”

  “I intend to set to rights the wrongs we have all wrought.”

  “How are you going to do that, when he so adamantly refuses to take the title?”

  “He can reject the name and title as much as he wants, but he will have to make an official decision. He isn’t aware of it yet, but he is already a duke. The King stripped Charles of the title last week, and is only giving him the time to flee. It’s why I purchased the horses with Crown money. Charles will have the funds to start again somewhere new rather than board a ship for his sins. Blake will have the means to save the Blakiston name and build the fortune he’ll need to run the estate with the King’s help. It’s going to take a great deal of hard work but if anyone can do it, he can.”

  “And if he still won’t take it? He is the most stubborn, pigheaded, irrational man I’ve ever met.”

  “It sounds to me as though you care for my brother.”

  Before she could decide one way or another which answer to give, a banging started on Daemon’s door and then it flew open to reveal Blake. A very, very angry Blake. “Well, well, well. Isn’t this cozy?”

  Sophie and Daemon stood at the same time, as though they’d been caught in the throes of passion. “What is the meaning of this, Blake?” Her voice came out much higher than she’d intended.

  “I warned you not to meddle in my affairs,” he roared as he stepped closer.

  “You will not talk to her like that, brother.”

  Sophie almost sighed with relief when Blake’s penetrating gaze switched from her own face to Daemon’s.

  “What did you tell her?” he demanded.

  “Nothing she didn’t already know,” Daemon replied. He half stepped in front of Sophie so she was protected from Blake if things got out of hand. But Sophie didn’t need that kind of protection, she never had.

  She placed an arm on Daemon’s shoulder and pushed until he once again stood beside her. “Get angry, Blake. Stomp and shout and accuse everyone else, but at the end, when the fury runs out and there’s only the truth of the matter left, you’ll see what a coward you are being.”

  He came at her, his nose level with her nose, his finger pointed at her chest, and she quailed. “I am the coward? You are the one who ran from here as fast as your legs could carry you and not once did you look back. Why do you care now? What do you care what happens to any of us when you won’t be here to endure the outcome?”

  “This used to be my home. One day it will be again. My brother lives here and my niece or nephew will too. How many times could you have helped the villagers with their problems? How many times could you have made life easier for your friends? My family? And I didn’t run from you. You pushed me away like you do with anyone who gets close enough.”

  “This will never be your home! Even now after living with us and creating the illusion of making friends, you still do not belong and you never will.”

  “Why do I not belong? Why did I run in the first place, Blake? If you had the power of being Blakiston’s heir, perhaps you could have saved me. Perhaps I would have stayed here for you had you any way to play the knight to my distress. But you didn’t. You hide behind your cowardice and blame dead men for all of your troubles.”

  “And you don’t? You flout the story that your father was going to sell you to cover for the fact that even then you were an ambitious slut. Me. I would have saved you, Sophie. I would have killed that man had there been one ounce of truth to your fears.”

  For a second she saw red. Her hand lifted, drew back, and then let loose, her palm connecting with his stubbled cheek with an echoing crack. But he didn’t cower, he didn’t show shame or remorse. His face was so close, she could see the raindrops that dripped from his clothes and hair and reminded her of their night of stupidity. How could she ever have thought he would make a difference? He could. But he wouldn’t. Not in her life and not in anyone else’s. “Fuck you,” she breathed.

  “You already did, Duchess. Did you smell the hint of possibility and decide to throw a free bedding my way just in case?”

  She staggered back, her hand on her chest, stinging with the urge to slap him again. Or worse.

  “You mongrel,” Daemon yelled as he came at Blake, fists swinging as the two went down. She’d almost forgotten he was even there.

  She should have seen that sleeping with a man who thought her no better than the mud he traipsed through would come back to haunt her. His derision went so much deeper than she could ever imagine possible. To think he claimed to have once loved her.

  Skirting the edge of the room, the two men pummeling each other, she gathered up her shawl and fled the inn. She needed to get out of there. She had to get back to London and her life and leave Blake and the village of her nightmares far, far behind.

  * * *

  “I should go and see if Sophie is all right,” Daemon wheezed. One hand held a steak against his eye while the other dabbed at a cut on his lip with a handkerchief.

  “She’ll be fine. She doesn’t need us to fuss. When she calms, she’ll return, pack her things and be off.”

  “You wouldn’t let her leave just like that, would you?” This question came from Matthew who’d arrived at precisely the right moment to break up his fight with Daemon. Blake had anger on his side, but his brother was a renowned fighter. There was never any doubt who the victor would be.

  Besides, Blake rather thought it about time he received a pummeling from one of the two men in the room. It was a surprise that Matthew hadn’t placed a few kicks of his own after discovering the source of their rage was his very own sister. Like it could have been anyone or anything else.

  “She doesn’t need to be here,” Blake sighed. “She’ll take one look at that babe and tear back to London anyway.”

  Matthew stood and glared. “You don’t know that. And I need her here. Violet needs her here. Her father hasn’t given a damn about her in years and her brother is busy with his own land. There are no other females in our lives, and my wife is convinced she will birth a girl. She will need her aunt.”

  “But will she need a frightened courtesan?”

 
It was Daemon who jumped to her defense once again. “Sophia is so much more than that. Why can’t you see her for who she is?”

  Blake stared long and hard at his brother before shaking his head. “She doesn’t even know who she is. What can she have to offer our village? She can’t return as the girl she was when she left. Too much has happened.”

  Matthew snorted and sat back down on the smooth floor timbers. “I wouldn’t expect her to return the girl she was. She is a woman now, as well you know. The rest of the village seems to have forgiven her life choices. Why can’t you?”

  “She’s just so damned stubborn and proud. What happened to her humility? Her gentleness and laughter? When I look at her, I don’t see any of that.”

  “You see what you want to see,” Daemon said from the foot of the bed. “When you look at her, you see a prostitute, a coward and a betrayer, but when I look at her, I see a beautiful woman. A woman, who, in the face of all the odds, is still alive and happy for the fact. Do you know what happens to girls when they arrive in London alone and terrified?”

  Blake shook his head. He had a fair idea, but he hadn’t witnessed any of it firsthand.

  “Well, most don’t even make it. The ones that do are vulnerable and naive and can be taken in by a kind word or plate of food. Greedy people take advantage of their desperation. Sophia is lucky she happened across good people, otherwise you may well have never heard from her again.”

  “Lucky? She should never have left in the first place!” Blake clenched his fists, the broken skin there already dried, stretched and uncomfortable over his knuckles. “She would have had a good life here.”

  “As Blakiston’s child bride? You must have rocks in your head.”

  “Matthew, is it true? Did your father truly think to trade Sophie for land?”

  Matthew sighed and nodded.

  Every muscle in his body tensed when the color drained from Daemon’s face at the same time his brother gave his head a shake in Matthew’s direction.

  “You knew about it?”

  Matthew inhaled, exhaled, twisted his fingers in the same way Sophie did when nervous. “First, believe me when I say I had no idea about any of it before she left. I only discovered it all from our father on his death bed. Sophie doesn’t even know how much I know.”

  “Get on with it,” Blake ground out.

  “I don’t know all the details, only those muttered by Father in his last moments. He asked for forgiveness, but then he also asked for the land he thought he was still entitled to.”

  “I know she was to be sold to Blakiston, I know she was terrified and thought we wouldn’t be able to help her so she left. What more is there?” said Blake.

  “It was all an act—Father’s tears, his panic, the search parties. All the time we searched high and low for her body, he knew she was at the estate with Blakiston. The deal had been signed and done.”

  “He actually delivered her there?”

  “Yes, and then walked away without wondering what would happen to her.”

  “Oh, God. There’s more then, isn’t there?” He didn’t want to know. He was sure he wouldn’t be any better off with the information burned into his brain.

  Daemon took over the story from there. “For three days she was locked in the lowest levels of the house where he beat and raped her. Maybe worse. Only he and she will ever know.”

  Emotions battered his already fragile thoughts. All this time he’d blamed her for leaving. Blamed her for overreacting, for never saying a word to him, for taking so long to write to Matthew and let him know she was alive. All that time, she would have been terrified the duke would find her and bring her back.

  “Why?”

  Blake’s question was rhetorical, but Daemon replied. “Before I was born, when my father paid no attention to his new bride, Blakiston fell in love with her. The fact that I stand here proves their affair. Blakiston fell in love and begged Mother to marry him, to be with him and live the kind of life she deserved but she said no. Mind, that’s only Blakiston’s side of the story. He kept journals in those days. All the dukes of Blakiston did. Instead of farming figures and weather facts, his were full of entries of despair about the child he would never get to claim, of the happiness he would never feel again. I think the fact that she rejected him cracked him in a way. Next came your mother and she reminded him of mine. The journal entries are sporadic for a time, sometimes ranting, sometimes coherent but all lead back to my mother.”

  “Did he love her? My mother?”

  “I don’t think he didn’t love her. He always had a temper difficult to leash and drinking fueled the fury. By the time he took Sophia, he was more often drunk than not. It is the only explanation for what he did.”

  Blake groaned again. “Do you think he took her to get back at me? Did he know how much I loved her?”

  Daemon didn’t react for a few moments. “I suppose that could have had something to do with it, but as far as I can tell, things only went so far wrong when she refused to say ‘I do.’”

  Blake’s intake of breath echoed in the room. “He wanted to marry her?”

  Daemon nodded again. “He looked for a bride who would make him happier than he thought my mother ever could. This was a way to get back at her.”

  “Did he write all of this down?” Blake asked. Did he need to burn that damned mansion to the ground to be rid of yet more evidence of depravity and betrayal?

  “Like I said earlier, he thought I was the vicar come to take his deathbed confession.”

  Sophie had already been a duchess. His mother had been the first, but by the time he did the same with Sophie, his mother was dead. Sophie was the dowager duchess of Blakiston. Now he almost wished he had the title.

  “Why didn’t you tell me any of this?” Blake asked his brother.

  “I did offer to tell you.”

  “Only yesterday.”

  “I guess sometimes the ugliness of the truth can hurt so many more people, you keep it to yourself and spin a pretty tale instead. She wouldn’t be the first and she won’t be the last.”

  What would life have been like for her? His own mother had fled the old duke after he’d wrapped his hands around her throat in a fit of rage. Would Sophie have been better off living on the streets in London than as the child bride of an angry drunkard? They would never know. He did know one thing. He would have been forced to watch from the sidelines as his childhood love swelled with another man’s child. His father’s child. If the man hadn’t killed her first.

  Suddenly her reactions made sense. When he touched her to remove the straw in her hair and she tensed as if he was going to throw her down on the floor then and there. It all made perfect sense. Why didn’t she despise him more for being the spawn of that man? How could she lie with him when she had been through so much?

  “You have to let it all go,” Daemon said. “You have to forget about the past and think to the future. Yours and hers.”

  “We have no future together.”

  “I never said together. You and Sophie are already entwined through Matthew, Violet and their child. You will always have to suffer her presence as long as you and Matthew are friends. She needs to be in contact with her family.”

  What had he done? Once again he’d let his out-of-control emotions rule the day rather than stepping back from the carnage-to-be to consider the angles. “Could I be more selfish or thoughtless?”

  His brother, the mind reader, said, “No, but you could start by apologizing and telling her what she means to you.”

  “I don’t know what she means to me.”

  “Well, I know how much you mean to her. For that woman to have shared your bed means she cares a great deal.”

  “How long has it been since she shared your bed?” Why had he asked that? He didn’t want to know, but he had to. He had to know if he could live with the knowledge that she liked Daemon more. Especially since he hadn’t called her an ambitious slut. This question had nothing to do with
titles at all.

  “Months. Several months. We are more friends than anything else.”

  “I don’t really think she would have me after everything that has happened.”

  “True, she turned me down,” Daemon helpfully pointed out.

  “I think she would still turn you down if you were to suddenly inherit the kingdom and become a prince,” Matthew said.

  “I will have to convince her.”

  “How?” both men asked.

  “I will have to show her how much I need her and pray she believes me.”

  * * *

  A string of violent and extraordinarily vile curses dropped from Sophie’s lips as she trudged through the mud in her favorite boots, her shawl dripping from her shoulders and her hat dangling from numb fingertips. She directed another curse over her shoulder in the direction of the inn. If Blake had already been duke, the bridge would have been strong enough to carry the horse and carriage over safely and she would have already made it to Violet’s to say her goodbyes.

  For that’s what she was doing. Only she did it on foot with the rain still falling in sheets across the countryside. No sooner had she made it across the bridge on her own two feet, had there been a roar of water carrying half an uprooted tree in its current. She’d only just gotten to the slippery, grassy banks before the bridge had literally floated away before her eyes.

  She prayed Matthew had a good horse in his barn that she could borrow. She’d made it to London from the house once before in the dead of night, she was sure she could do it again. From the city she would send the horse back and have her things collected. She never wanted to lay eyes on Blake again as long as she lived. But before she could leave, she had to say goodbye and tell Violet all about Blake’s claim to the title so someone else could harass him in her stead. She had no doubt the women of the village could talk some sense into his thick head. Once Charles fled, they would be on their own until the land reverted back to the crown and a new man could either buy or earn the title.