by Baird Wells
After a few bars, he slouched in his chair, slipped his leg until his foot was beneath Hannah’s seat, beneath her hem, and pressed the thin instep of her shoe. She didn’t flinch, didn’t sigh, and his body pounded at her discipline and from a desire to breach it.
How long would they go on this way, now that they’d exchanged their truth? Hannah was no murderer, and he was no spy. Why were they still living as either one? Simon, of course. Cloak and dagger had added something to their first encounters, but she had made him selfish, gluttonous. To wake beside her, make love to her in the morning or in the darkness after moonset, and then to sleep in the comfort of her embrace; to sit unhurried in the park and bask in easy conversation without fear of Simon’s reprisals. His love and desire were an amnesia so that she was all that was and, for a long time, all that had been. Each time he looked at her, there was some touch, some new illicit act he conceived to share with her. They had each brought a sort of virginity to their affair; Hannah had never been the object of desire, and he had never been the victim of obsession. He wanted to share that in a space that belonged entirely to them. He wanted Simon’s interference, his scheming, out of the way.
The song ended, fraying into the last long strains of a violin. Hannah, stock still all the while, broke his study of her and leaned over, announcing to Margaret atop a general murmur that she’d forgotten her fan. She got up, slipped from her row out into the aisle, and passed by without sparing him a glance. He felt her distance, measured it with his back until the space tipped from eager to safe as she reached the vestibule. Tad looked over his shoulder then raised his brow, and James shrugged. Of the untrustworthy that peopled his world, Tad didn’t figure among them. That didn’t mean James would gamble with a plain confession, but he also didn’t have the fortitude to deceive everyone completely. He cut his losses and shrugged in answer.
The moment Mister Hilton leaned in to Margaret and captured her attention, James capitalized on the distraction and slid from his chair.
He strolled the aisle and stepped into the corridor outside the hall with feigned disregard, but when he glanced its length and saw her, moving closer to the cloak room, he dashed. He rushed her and grabbed an arm that she wrenched away.
“Sir, really!” She turned to face him, smiling a challenge and backing away a step at a time.
He grinned. “Forgive me, madam. Is my attention too forward?”
“It was more than –”
He circled her wrist and gripped, dragged her into the dark foyer of a stairwell, and delivered retribution against her mouth. Their bodies jarred in impact against the wall, and she stole his breath in a gasp. Cold plaster met his knuckles, pressed by the small of her back. She used his coat for leverage, and lashed their bodies together so close that they made love through their clothes. His patience crumbled to dust. “I love you. I can’t be apart from you,” he pleaded into her neck.
“I’m still tangled in Simon’s web,” she whispered back.
“Is money so important, or revenge?”
“No!” Now she tipped her face away and put the first space between them. “Not anymore. But even if I could get out, he would never let me go. I can’t prove my innocence and he can’t prove my guilt, but his life is built around it.” Her head fell to his shoulder. “I could give every bit of the estate to him tomorrow, and leave by the morning stage, and he would be on the one behind me.”
He cupped her chin and raised her face to meet his eyes. “What if I could promise you he wouldn’t?” he begged. “Could untangle you and disappear you?”
She laughed. “Like a magician? Or some dark sorcerer?”
“No.” It was his turn to laugh. “There’s already enough witchcraft in this affair.”
Her lips answered his, and then parted and took him inside with a slowness that opposed an inferno scorching him. Her gown became a few handfuls of fabric, her petticoats a ruffled interval. A grip, a gather and he could have her.
She batted back his attempts while he argued with his hands, and then she wriggled free from the vice of his hips, and laughed on a sigh at his pained expression.
“I only came out here for my fan,” she chided, flushed from her temples to her throat.
“When?” he whispered again, because it had become the only word in his vocabulary.
They danced forward and back, while he tried for her lips and she dodged, and then let him kiss her and sighed again. “Tonight,” she relented against his throat. “Margaret will be out late with Mister Hilton and Bethany will…” Her murmur trailed off, words fading across a grudging space she put between them. She disappeared into the hall, and leaned back in around the door and granted his wish. “Tonight.”
* * *
James followed her home at a half-hour’s distance and crept in at the servant’s door. He slipped up by the back stairs at the time she had told him to, a time she knew well because she’d had little to do but sit in the house and notice its workings during all her years under Margaret’s and Simon’s thumbs. It was the hour when Mrs. Delford took everyone into the kitchen and shared her battle map for the following day, a silver-polishing, mantle-dusting, tea-brewing topography of sameness that had to be memorized in case anything unpredictable attacked and threw her off.
He heard her murmured orders to the staff when he slipped onto the landing, a reassuringly continuous drone as he moved up through the house, and detected no pause to hint that his intrusion had been caught. He held at Hannah’s door with a hand on the knob and another against the clean white panel. It was such joy arriving that he could only feel the agony of leaving as far off thunder. He turned the knob and went in.
Shadows from the front room melded with her bedroom, and not a single lamp burned anywhere. If she called out or made a sound, he didn’t hear it over a roar of blood in his ears.
He stopped on the threshold and squinted into the dark. Hannah sitting up in the center of her bed drew his eyes, and he thought she’d been sleeping. Her fingers relaxed against the quilt at her chest, and it lost some of its resolve so that he could see the pale mounds of her breasts in the moonlight. Now he understood her being in the bed and came closer while wrestling free of his coat and waistcoat.
Hannah drew up her knees until she was half curtained by her hair. “Margaret won’t be out all night,” she warned, and scooted over to make space.
“I’m not interested in Margaret,” he answered, more piqued than usual at their having to sneak about ahead of Simon’s wrath. He sat and then stretched atop her bed, not bothering to remove his shoes. He gripped the quilt still clutched in her fists and took it away one pull at a time. His shirtsleeve felt coarse and common where it raked across her back as he circled her hips and tugged her. She stopped at his thigh, legs folded beneath her, and shook her head with a slow confusion. “I don’t…”
“You do,” he murmured, fingers insisting at the curve of her backside. He pressed until she raised a hesitant thigh, until he was cradled between her knees, and groaned when she was atop him. “I’m ashamed that no man before me acquitted my sex properly. It’s apparent that none ever touched you the way you deserve.”
“A matter you might regret, when I have this sorted out,” she promised sweetly.
He shifted against the mattress, against the heat of her through the light wool of his pants, and folded his hands behind his head. He made a study of her, reigning over him while her fingers brushed an idle rhythm at his shirt. “This is how you ought to be, when we make love.” He moved a hand to smooth her waist, relearning the path of her feminine lines. “It suits you, your merciless desire,” he teased. “And I think it will please you.”
She slid up his hips, by coincidence or design he couldn’t tell, and couldn’t begin to guess because he couldn’t think. “For shame, Doctor Grimshaw. Women don’t have sexual desires. We just lie there and arrange the week’s menu until you’ve finished.”
Her suggestive dissent aroused him like a touch. “That makes our
present arrangement even more agreeable, I think. Tonight, I’ll lie here and contemplate my needlework until you finish.” He chuckled with her and fought her for the front of his pants, groaning at the sweet interference of her thighs against his fingers. He won, eventually, because she let him, and got the buttons open with effort against her soft skin.
“I don’t see how this is any different,” she breathed, flinching when his knuckles grazed carelessly between her legs. He gripped her backside, urged her up. Their cries muffled in each other’s flesh, and when he’d panted enough to form thoughts into words, he wrapped fingers in her hair and drew her mouth down onto his, in imitation of her body. She parted her lips for him and allowed his tongue into the heat of her mouth, bent low over him so that her breasts seared through his shirt front. Then she withdrew her lips and sat back.
“Just so,” he managed, an effort of two words ragged like glass in his throat.
She cocked her head, wide eyes luminous in the moonlight.
He explained with palms at her hips, fingers digging like anxious punctuation into her buttocks when he dragged her up his body and back.
Her cry was sharp and pierced his low one; he laughed and cupped a hand over her mouth. “Now you understand. I’m not certain we men are as guilty of neglecting a woman’s pleasure as we are of misusing her anatomy.”
Hannah slumped, palms hard on his chest, and panted at his mouth, soft and wide-eyed. “Is it as good for you?”
“That’s the damnation of it,” he panted back, and darted his lips over hers. “Not a thing about it to put either of us off.”
His words hadn’t granted her power; it would be an insult imagining she hadn’t had it all along. But James recognized by a drawing up in the long muscles of her thighs, a sharp bite of her knees in the flesh above his hips, that he’d granted her permission to use it so, she did. He relinquished any hope of interfering, tucked his hands behind his head like the captive he was and raised into her onslaught. They used each other roughly, by harsh swears and moaned accusations, and a sweet aggression that must have bruised and stung her as it did him. She tipped the scales in their final moments and claimed pieces of him as her own. He snatched her arms and dragged her down onto his chest so that when she cried out it was against his heart, and when he begged her name, it was to her soul.
* * *
Hannah started awake, disoriented in the way of people who hadn’t intended to fall asleep, certain that it was much later than darkness beyond her windows promised. “James!” she hissed, and shook his shoulder with a hand pressed over his mouth. “Shh. You have to go.”
He jerked up onto his elbows and peered into the shadows of her room. “What time is it?”
“I’ve no idea. If Margaret isn’t home, she will be soon.” And Bethany, being attentive, might creep up even though she’d been asked not to, and find the doors locked. Hannah’s anxious thoughts began to invent danger, and she unconsciously pressed harder at James. She caught the muted jingle of a watch chain, and then a relieved sigh.
“We’ve only been lying here for half an hour, Hannah.” She heard a smile to his words. “You can calm yourself.” He leaned out and pecked her cheek before slipping from the bed. “Though I still should be going; haste keeps us safe.”
“I want you to know something,” Hannah whispered, his mentioning of safety feeding her nerve. “You accused me at the recital, teasingly, of not caring about your suffering, but there’s so much you don’t see. I visited Millicent. I told her I was leaving.”
His hands gripped her shoulders, pleading, and she loved him even more for it. “You can’t give up your cause, Hannah! I’ve seen how –”
“Not giving up; leaving. You and I are leaving, though I didn’t mention you because…” She shrugged. “It seemed dangerous, telling too much.”
James wrestled his shirt on like a frantic specter, making her giggle, and then rushed in a tiptoe to settle beside her on the bed. “You’re certain? If this is what you want to do, I’ll give anything to make it happen.”
“I’m certain, to my soul. We must try, and I’ve been thinking today about how. I think you should rewrite all of the bills for my treatment.”
“I don’t understand.”
“You don’t charge a quarter of a London physician’s fee. No one would think twice if you doubled the amounts. Alter them; create more of them, even.”
“Money,” he whispered, knowing.
“As many exams as possible. Treatments and medicines, no matter how ridiculous.”
“Done. It’s a simple thing, and one he’s already expecting of me.”
“Simon’s supposed to take Irena to Brighton on Friday. Only for two days, because that’s all he can stand before whatever might be happening here eats a hole through him, but two might be enough. If you send them over for payment Friday night, his secretary might issue the whole batch at once. Simon will never see how many or how often.”
James hurried to tuck in his shirt, looking more excited than rushed. “He’ll see the ones to come, though. We’ll have to be cautious from here on.”
She nodded, even though he probably couldn’t see her. “I’m trying to figure Mister Hilton into my schemes. He’s always around, thanks to Margaret, and looking to spend money. I considered the stud farm, but anything that has to be printed in the papers…” She chewed her lip. “Anyhow, any business I can do with Hilton, I will.”
“And once we’re settled financially?”
Hannah slipped from the bed and kissed him, then cracked the door and listened for any sound from the back stairs. Hearing only silence, she kissed him again. “Once we have money, means, we run.”
.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
On Saturday afternoon James stood in Simon’s hall, wringing his gloves and knowing full well why he’d been summoned. Simon’s being in the house at all meant that he had not taken Irena up to Brighton the previous day, and had now received a hastily scrawled stack of bills for Hannah’s treatment.
The butler left and then returned without urgency, and explained in matchstick language that Sir Simon was with a visitor and would called him in directly. Then he stalked past, his black jacket and trousers absorbing him into shadows at the landing, leaving James an empty space in which to contemplate their downfall.
It was during this contemplation, in looking for any object on which to rest his eyes and find the relief of distraction, that James spied a purse. It’s light and dark blue-striped herringbone huddled beside the silver tray for calling cards, trying to look innocuous atop the hall table. It could have belonged to Irena, been forgotten as she left the house or discarded when she’d returned home. There was no obvious reason to suspect otherwise, except that the purse was tame in color and sensible in construction, neither of which was a hallmark of the house’s mistress. It stood out like a chicken among swans, and his doctor’s curiosity and his heightened state caused James to take the small bag very seriously.
Glancing at the stairs for any sign of the butler and finding none, he claimed the treads one at a time to the first floor. There he held, clutching the rail and listened for anything over the beat of a pulse against his eardrums. He dared toward the study door by inches and saw halfway down that it was cracked a bare inch; not enough to see into the room beyond, but good enough for hearing what transpired within. James pressed his back to the wall opposite the small band of light, not daring to pass by it to the far side.
“…anything I’ve just said to you?”
Margaret. He recognized her voice wrapped around the demand and wished for all the world that he’d heard the first of what she’d said.
Something thudded, a chair’s legs striking the floor. “That’s the way of it with you women, isn’t it?” hissed Simon. “Haring off in any direction after the first man to rustle your skirts.”
A gasp. “Mister Hilton does not rustle my skirts!” A fist pounded the desk; Margaret’s, judging by a small impact. “I suffered
just as much at Gregory’s loss as you did, and I have done more than what’s reasonable to see him vindicated.”
“And now you betray me. And him!” sneered Simon. “You don’t bother to succeed; you just go traipsing off with Mister Hilton because it would require sacrifice to do the noble thing.”
Her slap cracked with a force that made James flinch. “I have done unspeakable things for you,” she hissed, voice more animated than he’d ever heard. “I am entitled to whatever happiness comes now.”
James braced for Simon to claim a blow of his own, but it didn’t come.
Margaret’s words were a wild scattering of emotion, but Simon’s were straight and tightly strung like a noose. “You will have happiness when I decide that you have earned it. You will stay in that house and watch that woman until she’s exposed, or she’s dead.”
Shoes scraping the rug were his only warning. James turned back to front and threw himself into the open door beside Simon’s study, and held his breath in its shadows.
The study door slammed, and Margaret hammered past in too much haste to notice him. He watched her back as she walked down the hall and to the staircase.
Her face had been set in the straight lines of a woman resolved to do something fearful for the sake of her fate. James weighed Simon’s conditions for ending her servitude, and shuddered at Margaret’s choices. Whatever Simon wanted with him, it would have to be quick; he had to warn Hannah.
He heard more footsteps on the stairs, no doubt the butler coming to summon him. It was too late to go back down, so instead he slipped into the hall, rapped at Simon’s door and hurried in.
Simon was seated, easy in his chair and scrawling at a letter in a steady hand. “Doctor Grimshaw.” He didn’t glance up or offer James a seat. “Hannah’s accounts have been sent over to me, for review.”
That hadn’t taken long, not as long as he’d expected and nowhere near as long as he’d hoped. “Sir.”
