Slightly Sinful

by Mary Balogh

  Damn it, it ought never to have happened. What had possessed him? It was a rhetorical question if ever he had heard one, of course. It was obvious what had possessed him—lust.

  “I wish I could pay them back everything,” she said passionately. “I wish I could restore their dream. But I cannot. I will not inherit my jewels until I am twenty-five. Three years is an awfully long time to wait. I could have them before then, of course, if I were to marry with my uncle’s approval, but I do not believe that is going to happen. It will be a long, long time before I trust any other man.”

  “Ah,” he said, “Crawley’s motive becomes clear. I suppose you told him about this condition of your inheritance?”

  “Yes.” She looked at him with a frown. “It was dreadfully stupid and gullible of me, was it not?”

  “Dreadfully,” he agreed, shifting position again.

  “You are in pain,” she said, frowning and focusing fully on him.

  “A little discomfort,” he admitted. “I have been engaging in the wrong sort of sport for my physical condition, I suppose. One might say that I am being served my just deserts.”

  “Your leg is hurting?” She jumped to her feet. “I will go and fetch fresh water and cleanse it and apply more salve and clean bandages. Let me see. Is it bleeding?”

  But he held up a firm staying hand as she approached the bed.

  “I think it would be altogether better for my peace of mind if you kept your distance, Miss York,” he said. “Since we both seem agreed that what happened here between us tonight was a great mistake, and since it would appear that we were a disappointment to each other, it would be as well if we avoided any possibility of a repetition.”

  She stared at him wide-eyed for a few moments while color mounted in her cheeks. Then she turned and made for the door with almost ungainly haste, fumbled clumsily with the lock before it scraped back, and dashed from the room, closing the door none too quietly behind her.

  Well, deuce take it, that had not been a very gentlemanly speech, had it? He had just informed a lady after her first sexual encounter that it had been a great mistake and that she had been a disappointment to him.

  He was going to have some humble pie to eat tomorrow.

  He dreaded the very thought of tomorrow.

  CHAPTER VIII

  ALLEYNE MIGHT HAVE THOUGHT HE HAD NOT slept all night if he had not woken in a panic early in the morning and tried to get out of bed before he remembered that he could not.

  He had to reach the Namur Gates. She was waiting for him there, and he was terrified that she might be in grave danger.

  Pain served the dual function of banishing the remnants of sleep and cutting off the dream—if it had been just a dream. He lay very still, one hand cupped over the throbbing wound in his thigh, the other gripping the bedcovers, and tried desperately to recapture it. Who was waiting for him? And why? What was the danger?

  Was it just a dream?

  Or was it a memory?

  He gave up after a few minutes and tried for perhaps the hundredth time to piece together what had happened to him before he regained consciousness here in this house. He had been riding away from the Battle of Waterloo toward Brussels. At least, that was the direction he must assume he had been taking, since it must have been at the battle where he had been shot. There had been a letter. And there had been a woman waiting for him at the city gates.

  But try as he would—and he tried until his face was wet with perspiration and his head began to throb—he could bring nothing more into focus. And there seemed no connection among the random details that might be real memories or might just as likely be mere dreams. If he had been fighting in the Battle of Waterloo, why would he have been riding north to keep a rendezvous with some woman? And why was the letter so important? Was it something she had written to him, summoning him to protect her from some danger? In the middle of a battle?

  No, it made no sense whatsoever.

  It was a relief to hear a knock on his door, though he did turn his head warily as it opened, half expecting that it would be Rachel York. He was not ready to face her yet. But it was Sergeant Strickland instead, shaving gear in his hands, a pair of crutches tucked under one arm, a broad grin on his face despite the bandages that still swathed one side of it.

  “You are going to be up and mobile today, sir,” he said after bidding Alleyne a cheerful good morning. He set down the shaving gear and propped the crutches against the foot of the bed. “Those will cheer you up. I’ll give you a hand with them later.”

  “I will be even happier when I get some clothes,” Alleyne told him. “I have been helpless and dependent for too long. I am eager to get out and about. I need to find out who I am and reclaim my old life.”

  “If it is all the same to you, sir,” Strickland was saying, “I’m going to shave you myself today. I’m getting used to seeing things one-eyed.”

  Alleyne looked at him dubiously.

  “You really do have ambitions to be a valet, then, do you?” he asked.

  “I’ve got to do something,” the other man said, rubbing soap on the shaving brush. “I’ve only ever known soldiering. I took the king’s shilling when I was little more than a nipper. It were either that or take to thieving and as like as not hang for it. I never did fancy thieving—or a hanging. I have to find something other than soldiering now, though. And why not valeting? I been taking orders from gentlemen and humoring their whims for six years since I made sergeant. I can dress you and shave you and look after your clothes with one eye the same as two.”

  “There is still the problem of my total poverty, though,” Alleyne reminded him. But he let the sergeant soap his face and prepared to have his throat cut.

  “I do have a bit of money, though, you see, sir,” Strickland told him. “Not much to a gentleman’s way of looking at things, I reckon, but enough to keep me going for a while. It’s not so much money I need, sir, as a sense of belonging and being useful, at least for a little while till I get my feet under me.”

  “I know exactly how you feel,” Alleyne said ruefully. “But you might do better than me, you know. We cannot even be sure that I am a gentleman, can we?”

  “Oh, we certainly can be that,” the sergeant assured him. “Never doubt it for a moment, sir. I have known men what are gentlemen and men what are not and men what pretend to be. You are one of the first kind and no doubt about it. I don’t know who you are—you weren’t in my regiment and I never set eyes on you till I saw you in the forest. But I know what you are.”

  Alleyne lay still as the razor scraped away stubble and the sergeant’s face hovered over his own, bandaged and bruised and fierce as he frowned in concentration.

  “Do you ever feel frightened, Strickland?” he asked.

  “I reckon you are the one what should be feeling that,” the sergeant said, grinning and revealing large, widely spaced teeth. “This is the first time I ever shaved another man. And I only got one eye to see out of so’s I get it right.”

  “Frightened at losing your old way of life so abruptly, I mean,” Alleyne explained, “and having to create a new one for yourself.”

  Sergeant Strickland straightened up, having completed one side of Alleyne’s face.

  “Frightened?” he said. “I never been frightened in my life, sir. Leastways I’ve never called it fright. It seems unmanly, don’t it? Or maybe it’s not the fright so much as what a fellow does with it. P’raps I do feel some fear, sir, but there’s no point in letting it get a grip on, is there? There’s a whole other world out there apart from the army. I’ll go and find what there is. Maybe I’ll like it better than what went before. Or maybe I won’t. But if I don’t, then I’ll go looking for something else again. There’s nothing to stop me, only my death, which will come when it comes whatever I do in the meanwhile.”

  He bent over Alleyne to tackle the other side of his face.

  “In actual, honest fact,” he continued, “it’s not cowardly to be frightened. It’s
what I always said to my boys before a battle, especially the raw recruits fresh from England and their mothers’ sides. If you was never frightened, sir, you would never find out what you was made of and what you was capable of doing. You would never become a better man than what you started out being. P’raps that is what you will discover—what you are made of and what you are capable of. And when you finally do remember who you are, p’raps you will find that you have become a better man than he ever was. P’raps he was a man who never ever grew any more once he reached manhood. P’raps he needed to do something drastic like losing his memory so that he could get his life unstuck. Begging your pardon for saying so, sir. Sometimes I talk too much.”

  “I perceive that you are a philosopher, Strickland,” Alleyne said. “I wonder if I will have the strength of character to fulfill your expectations of me. Have you cut me yet?”

  “That I have not,” the sergeant said, straightening up again and examining his finished handiwork before wiping Alleyne’s face with a clean towel. “I figure you lost enough blood for one month.”

  “Thank you,” Alleyne said, running a hand over the smoothness of his jaw and thinking about the sergeant’s words. He was, of course, desperately frightened, though it seemed shameful to admit it. It was surely one of the most dreadful of fates—to lose oneself, to have no memory of any of the twenty-five years or so of one’s life. Did he have the courage and strength of character to build a new identity and a new life, perhaps better than the ones that went before them?

  But even the sergeant was not quite as courageous as his words suggested. He was still at the brothel, even though he was mobile enough to have left anytime during the past several days. And he was willing to attach himself to a man who had not a penny with which to pay him—just so that he would not have to step out into the world alone just yet.

  Stepping out into the world alone—it was a truly terrifying thought. Eager as he was to leave here, Alleyne realized suddenly, he was just as anxious to stay, to find some excuse to postpone the inevitable moment.

  Sergeant Strickland was taking his time over washing out the brush and razor in the washbowl. He cleared his throat and spoke without looking at Alleyne.

  “I like the ladies here, sir,” he said. “I even manned the door for them last night so they would be free to entertain their gentlemen and feel safe if any of the gents decided to get rough. It don’t matter to me what they do to earn their victuals. But I do wonder what Miss York is doing living here with them. She ain’t one of them. Is she?”

  Alleyne looked sharply at him.

  “My understanding,” he said, “is that she is a lady.”

  “I knew it, sir,” the sergeant said. “From the first moment, when she was yelling out that you was her man and you was hurt bad, I knew she was a lady. But there is always the danger that her good name might be soiled on account of she is living in a brothel. We don’t want to make it worse for her, if you get my drift, sir, do we? What do you want me to do with them hairpins on the table here? I wouldn’t want the other ladies to see them there when they bring your breakfast, and get the wrong idea.”

  For a moment Alleyne felt like a private soldier cringing under the sergeant’s gentle but unmistakable tongue lashing. Deuce take it, he had forgotten about the hairpins. He fervently wished that that had all been a dream. But there were the hairpins as incontrovertible proof that it had not been.

  “Gather them up if you will, Strickland,” he said, “and put them in the top drawer of the chest over there. She had a headache when she was sitting in here last evening keeping me company and removed the pins to reduce some of the tension.”

  What a purely asinine explanation!

  “Quite so, sir,” the sergeant said agreeably, scooping the pins into one large hand. “I would protect that little lady with my life if anyone tried to harm her—as I am sure you would yourself, sir. I’ll always remember the way she was sobbing over you even though as it turned out you was not her man. A tenderhearted lady she is, sir.”

  “I am well aware that I owe her my life, sergeant, and a great deal more even than that,” Alleyne assured him.

  Sergeant Strickland did not labor the point. He picked up the shaving things and took them from the room. Without even waiting for his breakfast to arrive, Alleyne flung back the bedcovers, swung his legs carefully over the side of the bed, and drew the crutches toward him.

  He was feeling restless, weak, irritable, guilty—and downright sinful. He could do something to alleviate the first two conditions, at least. And the others? He was going to have to think of some way of making his peace with Rachel York. But a simple apology would not do it, he sensed.

  He would have to think of something.

  He tucked the crutches firmly beneath his arms and hoisted himself up onto his right foot.

  RACHEL BUSIED HERSELF IN THE KITCHEN FOR MUCH of the morning, helping Phyllis bake bread and cakes and peel potatoes and chop vegetables. The other ladies did not leave their beds until late, a fact for which she was very thankful. She was amazed that Phyllis appeared to notice no difference in her. She felt as if last night’s activities must be written all over her face and person.

  She was also very thankful that Sergeant Strickland had firmly established himself as Mr. Smith’s valet and catered to all his needs during the morning.

  Before noon she volunteered to do some shopping and hurried away from the house. She had avoided going out much following her return to Brussels, lest she be seen by some of Lady Flatley’s acquaintances and be accused of being Mr. Crawley’s accomplice, even though she realized that it was unlikely any of them would be aware of his villainy yet. Indeed, it was possible that most of them never would unless they checked up on the charities to which they thought they had contributed. But today she was desperate for air and exercise and did not much care whom she met. It did not even occur to her that in London before her father’s death she had not been allowed to set foot outdoors unchaperoned.

  She walked farther than her errand made necessary. She even strolled for a while in the Parc de Bruxelles and watched the swans on the lake and soaked up sunshine and warmth. It was the middle of the afternoon before she returned to the house, and even then she dreaded doing so. She was going to have to confront Mr. Smith again, and she shrank from the prospect. How ever would she be able even to look at him after what had happened between them last night? She would take a cup of tea into the sitting room and compose herself first, she decided, hearing the sound of voices and laughter coming from that direction.

  She opened the door gingerly and peered around it, fearful that perhaps her friends were entertaining clients, though they did not often do so during the daytime. And indeed she almost jerked back her head when she saw that there was indeed a gentleman in the room with them—an extraordinarily handsome gentleman. For a split second she did not recognize him. But there was a pair of crutches propped against the chair beside him.

  “Rachel!” Bridget called. “Come in, my love, and meet our gentleman caller.”

  “Isn’t he gorgeous?” Phyllis asked gleefully.

  Geraldine was standing by the window, her hands on her hips. “He dresses up well enough, I must admit,” she said. “It’s just a pity those pockets are empty.”

  “I am not sure I care, Gerry,” Phyllis said.

  “We will be putting the poor man to the blush,” Flossie said as Rachel came unwillingly into the room and shut the door behind her. “But he is enough to make any self-respecting girl squabble with her closest friends.”

  They were all joking and flirting as usual, and Mr. Smith was grinning and taking it all in good part. But he busied himself with his crutches and hauled himself out of his chair at the sight of Rachel. He made her a surprisingly graceful bow.

  “Miss York,” he said.

  He looked very directly at her, some of the laughter gone from his eyes. Rachel hoped fervently that she was not blushing. It was almost impossible, seeing him now, to
realize that less than twenty-four hours ago they had been naked and intimate together. But since it was not quite impossible, she felt she could cheerfully die of mortification.

  . . . since it would appear that we were a disappointment to each other . . .

  She could hear him speak those words as clearly as if he were saying them now.

  She had not realized quite how tall he was. His clothes had not been fashioned by the most exclusive of tailors, she guessed, but his shirt was dazzling white, his cravat crisp and neatly knotted about his neck, his blue coat well fitting enough to show off the breadth of his shoulders and chest, and his gray pantaloons tight and creaseless about shapely, well-muscled legs—if one discounted the outline of the bandage about his left thigh. He wore leather shoes rather than the Hessian boots that might have been more usual with such an outfit, but altogether Phyllis was quite right. He looked gorgeous. His hair had even been freshly washed. One dark lock had fallen forward invitingly over his right eyebrow.

  “Your new clothes all fit well, then, Mr. Smith?” she asked him, concentrating hard upon keeping her manner casual and amiable.

  “All except for one coat,” he said. “And, alas, it is the one I most fancy. But even with all of Sergeant Strickland’s strength thrown into the effort, I could not be squeezed inside it.”

  “We miscalculated, Floss,” Geraldine said mournfully. “That chest is even broader than we supposed.”

  “The shoulders too, Gerry,” Flossie said, looking him over frankly. “We paid too much attention to that handsome face and the roguish smile that goes with it. I would not make the same mistake again.”

  “You might have asked for my measurements, ladies,” Mr. Smith said, lowering himself carefully to his chair again after Rachel had seated herself.

  “But they were afraid you would not remember and I would have all the pleasure of going at you with my measuring tape,” Phyllis said. “This will teach them never to leave home again without theirs.”