“Why do you think that?”
“Because I caught up to him at that little alcove on the first landing and that’s where he gave me a wallop to the jaw.” His tongue found a loose tooth. He smiled broadly at Mercy. “Didn’t knock a tooth out, did he?”
“No. You’re as pretty as you ever were. We found you at the foot of the stairs.”
“Well, then, milord didn’t do me that much damage, then. Likely it was the tumble down the stairs. Good. That makes me glad. He might not even have known it was me before he took that swing. Mighta thought I was some blackguard up to no good. Best I give him the benefit of the doubt.” He sighed deeply. “I always liked Lord Nathaniel.”
“Reuben, stick to the main point—Lady Georgette. If milady is gone, it does stand to reason that she’s with him. Though why did he have to steal her away like that?”
“Maybe he thought she wouldn’t go willingly.” Reuben tried to focus on Mercy’s face, but the pull of the dark kept edging his vision with shadows. “But why wouldn’t she? Anyone can see she fancies him.”
“Probably because some people don’t know what they’ve got unless they almost lose it.” She leaned down and kissed his temple. “Well, lucky for you when you fell down the stairs, you landed on your head. No harm done.”
That sounded a bit meaner than she meant it to be too, he figured, but he wasn’t disposed to argue with her. Especially since she stayed close and kept pressing her lips to his forehead, his mouth, his closed eyes every other word or so. She was saying something about wondering how they were to proceed, since if they went back to Yorkingham House without Lady Georgette, there’d likely be trouble.
Reuben let her rattle on.
So long as he feigned sleep he didn’t have to stir from this delightful spot. If he never opened his eyes again, he’d die a happy man.
***
“Language, Nathaniel.” Georgette made tsking sounds over his unexpected profanity. Then she ran her fingertips down the indentation of his spine and stayed to dally at the small of his back. “After that perfectly lovely interlude, I can’t imagine why you feel the need to swear. What’s troubling you?”
Nathaniel’s lips pressed together in a tight line. “I lost control.”
“That seems to be going around. I wonder if passion is catching, like the measles,” she said with a chuckle.
“It’s no laughing matter. I should have withdrawn.” He did so now. “I promised not to cause you shame.”
“And you haven’t.” At least, Georgette hoped one slip wasn’t enough to result in an unexpected child. She knew it was possible, but she shoved the thought aside. Her insides were still sufficiently fizzy for her not to care about the consequences of their actions, especially not the sort that might take months to arrive. “I’m not a bit ashamed of what we have between us, Nate.”
“You would be if it became public knowledge.”
“I don’t expect to tell anyone.” She looked up at him sharply. “Do you?”
He hesitated for a couple heartbeats. “No.” Nathaniel rose and began tugging on his smallclothes and trousers. “What is it you think we have?”
“Love,” she said simply. “That is what you professed to me in your awkward yet charming way a while ago, isn’t it?”
“Love. Is that all?”
“Isn’t that everything there is?” Feeling unaccountably shy since he’d moved away from her, she sat up, tucking the sheets under her armpits. “There’s no need for us to complicate matters.”
“As in do anything that might upset your match with the royal duke?”
More specifically, do anything that might upset her parents. “The match with the Duke of Cambridge is not set in stone.”
He eyed her with the watchfulness of a lion near a watering hole. “Do you want it to be?”
She dropped her gaze to her lap. “No.”
“Then why don’t you simply refuse him?”
“And send my father into apoplexy and turn my mother into a social pariah?”
“I don’t believe that’s it for a moment,” he said testily. “You’re the most stubborn woman I know. You have no trouble risking your parents’ ire when it means you’re traipsing about the armpit of London doing your good works. Why do you hesitate when your own happiness is involved?”
It seemed to have escaped his notice that he hadn’t offered her a viable alternative. While Georgette wasn’t sanguine about life married to a royal, she was even more certain she wasn’t made for spinsterhood. The way her sensual nature had bloomed under Nate’s attentions proved that. The fact that he hadn’t offered her marriage stung, but perhaps he was working up to it, as clumsily as he’d finally managed his mangled declaration of love.
The real reason she wouldn’t refuse the royal duke was a darker one, however. She swallowed hard.
“Everything was so easy for Anne. She was the golden one, the apple of my parents’ eyes. I was an awkward girl, and I don’t know that I’ve outgrown it as a woman.” The small keening hurt inside that was never quite stilled throbbed afresh. “When Anne died, I always had the suspicion that my parents wished it had been she who survived the fever instead of me.”
“Surely they—”
“Oh, nothing was ever said outright,” Georgette assured him, trying to keep her voice bright. “But there are some things one knows without knowing how.”
Nate didn’t say anything and she was grateful for his silence. She blessed him even more when he took her wordlessly into his arms and rocked her slowly. It gave her the courage to finish what she feared putting into words.
“People make all sorts of bargains with God when eternity yawns before them. I know. I went several rounds with the Almighty during the worst of the fever,” she said. “I promised then to try to be the daughter my parents wanted, to make them proud.”
Nathaniel tightened his embrace. Georgette leaned into him, wishing she could keep her head resting on his shoulder forever.
“When I came to the attention of the royal duke, it was as if I’d finally made good on that promise,” she said. “Suddenly they did love me. They did want the best for me.” Her voice dropped to a whisper. “And they didn’t wish I was Anne.”
He kissed her neck once, a sweet brush of his lips. “I don’t wish you were Anne. I wouldn’t change you a bit.”
Her heart ached sweetly at the completeness of his acceptance of her.
“Except maybe to make you more cautious for your own safety,” he added.
She smiled at him. “That’s why I have you.”
“But if you marry Cambridge, how can you have me?”
Her face crumpled. “I don’t know. I don’t want to think about it. Please, Nate. Let’s not spoil now.”
He pressed a kiss on the crown of her head. “If we don’t want to spoil now, we need to think about returning you to Yorkingham House with as little fuss and fanfare as possible. Come. I’ll be your lady’s maid.”
Nathaniel pulled back the sheet and helped her dress, pausing to caress her in small ways before he covered her decently. Once he fastened the last button, she was more of a mind to let him start undoing them again, but he was right. They couldn’t afford to dally in Cheapside any longer.
“You haven’t told me what you learned at White’s this morning,” she said as she retrieved her scattered pins and began to do up her hair. The small shaving mirror mounted over a washstand wasn’t as conducive to the task as her large vanity mirror at home, but it was all she had to work with. “What about your Lord Gobberd?”
“I’m satisfied he had nothing to do with the murder of either Vesta or Mr. Bagley.” Nathaniel shrugged on his shirt and went in search of the wrist studs. He bent to retrieve one near the foot of the bed. “He seemed genuinely relieved to have lost the House of Sirens to me.”
In the mirror, Georgette caught him watching her as she fiddled with her long locks but made no move to help her dress her hair. Evidently his skills as a lady’s maid were
limited to robing and disrobing the female form.
“He did mention my former tenant as one who would be furious enough at the changes on Lackaday Lane to do something about it, though.” Nathaniel found the other stud and affixed it to his wrist. Then he pulled on his waistcoat.
“You mean Sadie O’Toole?”
“How do you know that name?”
“I wasn’t taking tea with the madam at the House of Pleasures for the sake of her crumpets, you know.” Georgette sighed at her reflection. Her coiffure was beyond help. She could only hope she didn’t encounter anyone she knew as they made their way back to St. James’s Park. “Madam Bouchard spoke of her. She wasn’t the type to suffer a slight, she said. Perhaps we should pay Mrs. O’Toole a visit.”
“I would if I knew where to find her.”
“I know,” Georgette said, delighted to bring some new bit of intelligence Nathaniel had not gleaned. “According to Madam Bouchard, she’s set up shop in Whitechapel.”
His brows shot up. “Very well. As soon as I take you home, I’ll—”
Georgette had studied her father’s maps of London often enough to know Whitechapel was in the East End of the city. “Wouldn’t it be more efficient if we simply went there from here? You’ll be backtracking quite a bit to take me to the West End and then—”
“Georgette, you must understand. You think you’ve seen the worst of London because you braved Lackaday Lane. Let me assure you, you haven’t. If Covent Garden is the armpit of London, then Whitechapel is its hairy unwiped backside.”
“That’s rather indelicate.”
“But it’s also rather accurate,” he said with a frown. “I would spare you.”
“You should know by now, Nate, I would not spare myself. Where has my bonnet got off to? Oh, there it is.” She picked up what had been a cunning little confection of lace and velvet. Now the brim was hopelessly bent. “Well, it’ll never be quite the same again, will it?”
“I’ve a feeling I never will either.” He came up behind her and put his arms around her waist. “What am I to do with you, woman?”
“Love me,” she suggested as she tied a jaunty bow beneath her chin. “You know I have to go with you. If there is a chance I can help someone, I do not fear to go where they are. Not as long as you are with me.”
He dropped a kiss on her neck, then crossed the room to the highboy. He opened a drawer and pulled out a pistol which he stashed in his jacket pocket.
“I’ll stay with you,” he promised as he came back to her side. “You’ll have to drive me away.”
He tugged her close and kissed her with thoroughness for several minutes. When he finally released her mouth and pulled back, his eyes were hooded.
“But you know, I’ve heard it said that love is like a garden. It needs tending and light and fresh air to thrive. It can’t stay hidden forever,” he said. “Love that keeps to the shadows isn’t love.”
“You’re right. Too much shade is a receipt for fungus.” She laughed, but he didn’t join her in it. “Come then, my toadstool prince. Let us see if there is any sunshine in Whitechapel.”
Twenty-nine
Georgette had thought herself prepared for Whitechapel.
She was not.
Lackaday Lane was dreary, but it seemed the sun had never shown here in Whitechapel. It would have had to fight its way into the twisting streets where the houses sagged against each other like drunkards, their facades tired and crumbling.
A brawl broke out before one of the taverns they passed, and a crowd gathered to shout encouragement to the combatants and lay wagers on the outcome. Even when one of the men lay battered on the cobbles, the other fellow continued to kick him with the viciousness of a mad horse and no one moved to interfere.
A woman huddled in the doorway of a shuttered-up storefront, tipping back a flask and wiping her mouth on her raggedy sleeve. She seemed to have no plans beyond her next drink. As their hackney moved along at a foot pace in the clogged streets, Georgette wondered at the hundreds of people wandering aimlessly.
“Haven’t they homes to go to?”
“No,” Nathaniel said. “Most of them live in common lodging. By night they’ll share a room with six or seven strangers, but by law, they must vacate it during the day. Thank God the last of winter is leaving us. Whitechapel on a gray January day is a special sort of hell.”
She glanced at him sharply. “How do you happen to know so much about it?”
“When I first returned from France, I didn’t want to tar my family with my disgrace,” he began.
“As I recall, you were not discharged from service with any sort of discommendation.”
“No, but only because the victory at Waterloo overshadowed the defeat of Maubeuge enough for some well-placed lords, my father among them, to hush it up.” He continued to stare at the foot traffic, but Georgette had the distinct impression he was seeing something else entirely. “Even so, I couldn’t go home. A little leaven makes the whole loaf rise. The whiff of scandal for one member is enough to taint an entire family. So I made Whitechapel my home. It was all I deserved.”
Georgette prided herself on her vivid imagination, but even she couldn’t imagine Nathaniel as one of the residents of Whitechapel. He was a man of fastidious habits. She’d never seen him less than splendidly turned out. Even a dash into dirty Lackaday Lane had never left so much as a smudge on his cuffs. How had he borne living in the squalor of Whitechapel for even a day, let alone months?
“What made you finally leave here?”
“Caroline,” he said. “My sister wouldn’t give up on me. She fretted my father into hiring an inquiry agent to find me and bring me, by force if necessary, back to the family country seat.”
“What makes me think force was necessary?”
One corner of his mouth turned up in a rueful grin. “If I hadn’t been the worse for drink he’d have never gotten the drop on me.”
Their carriage rumbled past a waif on the corner selling matches, her cloak whipping around her slight form. The fabric seemed far too thin to keep out the wind whistling down the narrow streets. Georgette hoped matches were all she was selling.
“I haven’t any money with me,” she said woodenly, wishing she could help the child.
“Even if you did, you’d dare not give her any but the smallest coin.”
“Anything more would make her a target for thieves?” Georgette guessed.
“Or her employer,” Nathaniel said. “The children in this neighborhood are little better than slaves to the ones who provide them with goods to sell.”
Georgette’s chest constricted. “I had no idea. Why is nothing done about this?”
“What would you do? Take the children from their families? Each penny they earn helps put bread on the table.”
“Surely the government could—”
“No doubt there are reforms that might help the lot of these poor, but with the Crown racking up debt to build follies at the royals’ country estates, it’s not likely anything more can be spared for Whitechapel.”
The needs were overwhelming, but surely if she were a royal duchess, she might—
“And lest you think once you’re married to Cambridge you can divert some funds in this direction, let me remind you that control of your considerable dowry will lie in your royal husband’s hands,” he said with bitterness. “You’ll be lucky if he gives you pin money.”
“How will we find Mrs. O’Toole?” Georgette asked, mostly because it irritated her that Nate knew the direction her thoughts traveled so well and she didn’t want the conversation to wander back to the duke.
“We ask. Or rather, I ask.” Nathaniel rapped on the ceiling of the carriage and it halted. “Stay here.”
He climbed out of the equipage and stopped the first man who trudged past. After a few moments’ conversation, Nathaniel returned, gave the driver new instructions, and rejoined Georgette.
“Sadie O’Toole has opened a new brothel in the next block
over,” he explained as the carriage moved forward. “She’s brought in a fresh stable of girls and is busy refurbishing a former common lodging house. The place has a red door, the fellow said.”
“Would you have said Sadie O’Toole had the means to do all that?” Georgette asked.
“No. When I repaid her for the rest of her lease, it was only a couple pounds. Even her girls’ debts didn’t amount to enough to open a new place. Not even here.” Nate eyed the foot traffic as if he were looking for someone in particular. “Clearly, she has a benefactor of some sort who is supporting her business.”
Someone who can’t satisfy their needs elsewhere. Someone who likes “gasping,” Georgette thought, remembering Madam Bouchard’s ghastly explanation of some of the House of Sirens’s more exotic specialties. Or someone who likes making other people gasp.
Vesta’s death by strangulation was enough like that aberrant behavior to make Georgette wonder if Sadie O’Toole’s mysterious investor and the person responsible for the murders on Lackaday Lane were one and the same.
The carriage stopped halfway down the block from a crumbling brick structure with a red door. The dentils beneath the cornice hadn’t seen a lick of paint in years. Several of them were black and decayed as a diseased mouth. Vibrant cerise curtains hung at the windows on either side of the red door, their bright pink all the more garish in contrast with their shabby surroundings.
Nathaniel made no move to climb out of the carriage.
“Aren’t we going in?” Georgette asked.
“No. We are reconnoitering. Sh!” He pulled the curtains on the carriage closed so no one could see in, but was careful to leave enough of a slit in the velvet for him to see the door clearly.
“Wouldn’t it be simpler to just go in?” Georgette asked. A gentleman in a theatrical black cape rapped on the red door and was admitted. “Other people are.”
“No, it wouldn’t be simpler. For one thing, I don’t know what’s on the other side of the door. I have no idea if I can protect you in there.”
Connie Mason & Mia Marlowe - [Royal Rakes 02] Page 21
