by Lynne Barron
In that time, in that miniscule snippet of time measured by a single beat of his heart, Harry’s fingers slipped from his.
“Oh, do get up, Phineas,” she said, tucking her hand behind her back as if to hide the proof of his aborted proposal. It was that gesture, rather than the words spoken around a faintly sardonic laugh, that got him moving, springing to his feet only to realize he hadn’t a clue what to do or what to say next.
Harry, bless her or curse her, had no such difficulty. “I cannot fault you for the attempt,” she began, only to blow out a breath that lifted a wayward strand of hair from the corner of her lips. “No, I can fault you for the attempt. Honestly, for a man who claims to find me intelligent, frighteningly intelligent even, you seem quite determined to take me for a fool.”
“I have never taken you for a fool.”
“If you don’t take me for the biggest fool to ever grace God’s green earth, then how is it you imagine I will marry you?”
“I imagine you will marry me because I love you,” Phin replied, baffled by the speed with which she’d gone from promising him forever with her kisses to punishing him for his presumption with her scorn. “And you love me.”
Harry’s only response was a derisive snort, and Phin’s bafflement gave way to frustration. “By your own admission, you wanted to marry me only two days ago.”
“As I recall, it wasn’t marriage you offered, Lord Knighton,” Harry drawled, her voice laced with all the mockery he saw glittering in her eyes. “You proposed, bold as brass, to set me up as your mistress while you went about courting an heiress to make your wife.”
Phin knew he should not make the obvious argument, but there was no getting around it. “And now you are an heiress.”
“And thus the perfect woman to make your wife?” Harry waved her hand before her face in a gesture that struck Phin as dismissive. Of him and his poor timing, of his pursuit and his proposal.
“Yes, damn it,” Phin snapped, his temper sparking even as he realized she meant only to dislodge the curl now clinging to her chin. “Yes to all of it. Yes, my timing is suspect. Yes, I offered to make you my mistress while I courted another to make my wife. And yes, Harry, I would propose marriage to you even if I did not love you madly. But I do love you madly. You know I do, else you would never have gifted me with your virginity.”
Emotions flickered across Harry’s face too quickly for Phin to decipher. Surprise perhaps. Maybe sorrow or even rage. Whatever she was feeling, it leached the color from her cheeks and pulled her lips into a thin, white line.
“I love you, Harry, and you love me,” Phin said. “We can be happy together, for Christ sake.”
“Today, but what of tomorrow?” Harry all but screamed, madly batting at that stubborn strand of hair. “What of next year and the year after that?”
Ah, not sorrow or anger, then.
As quickly as Phin’s temper had flared, it was extinguished by Harry’s fear.
Lifting his hand slowly and carefully, he tucked the offending lock of hair behind her ear. “I will love you always.”
“You say that now,” she replied on a queer little hiccup. “And maybe it’s even true, but love alone will not ensure your fidelity. In two years or ten, you will be out carousing with the other rakes and reprobates, bedding this actress or that bored widow.”
“I am not your father.” Phin hated to cause her more pain or fear, but the words needed to be said, the secrets put behind them once and for all. “I am not the Earl of Dunaway.”
Harry stumbled back, her hip bumping the desk. China rattled, and the cat hissed from the corner where he’d taken refuge. “No, no, you don’t…you can’t…”
“I will be faithful to you for all the days of my life, Harry.”
“It would only take a single transgression, a single promise carelessly shattered,” she said, her voice breaking. “But by then it would be too late for me to regret the choices I had made. I am not my mother. I could not walk away from my marriage and any children we might have together. I would be trapped, Phineas. Trapped with no way out.”
Phin gently grasped her upper arms and held her gaze. “I swear to you I will never give you cause to doubt my love or fidelity, to feel trapped by your decision to marry me.”
“I would come to hate you.” Her softly spoken words were an arrow, piercing his heart with deadly aim. “I know myself, Phineas, I know my capacity to hate, and it is boundless. I have spent more than a decade hating a man for his broken promises. I am weary of it, so very exhausted from the effort.”
Phin could see the weariness pinching her features even now, and the terror lurking in her eyes, and wanted to howl with anger and sorrow. Damn Dunaway to hell.
“I do love you, Phineas,” Harry whispered, her eyes filling until tears hovered on her lashes. “I knew you for a fortune-hunting rogue before you’d taken three steps into Dunaway’s ballroom, but I believed you to be that rarest of treasures: a reformed rake. I honestly imagined my love had transformed you into a man of honor and integrity, a man determined to make his way in the world, to sacrifice for what he wanted rather than settle for the simplest solution presented to him. God, how naïve and silly I sound.”
“You sound neither naïve nor silly.” Phin slid his hands down her arms, feeling the fragility of her bones and the softness of her skin and knowing they were no match for her bruised and tender heart. “I am reformed, transformed by your love.”
“If it were just my heart at stake, I would gladly give it into your keeping, even knowing the odds it would be broken. But how can I marry you now, knowing I have become the simplest solution presented to you? How can I give you control of my fortune, my freedom and my future to do with as you please, with whomever you desire?”
“I desire only you,” Phin replied, knowing it to be the truth and wondering why she could not recognize the sincerity in his words. “I will never be untrue to you, my love. You’ve only to have faith in me.”
“Have faith in you?” Harry repeated with a harsh laugh. “Have faith that you will not set up a mistress and allow your wife to pay for the privilege and pleasure of her company?”
Phin drew in a ragged breath that scraped his throat raw and formed a heavy weight in his chest, so weighty it seemed it might crush his heart.
Look to the bigger picture, my lord. Odds change. Unexpected losses occur. One can only mitigate the damages, make up for one loss with the next two wins. But there is no making up for an accusation of duplicity.
Chapter Twenty-Three
In the days following Phineas’s stoic acceptance of her rejection of his marriage proposal, Harry’s life took on a peculiar rhythm perfectly suited to the tight schedule she set for herself, yet entirely at odds with her feelings.
Surely one’s life shouldn’t continue on effortlessly when one’s emotions were a twisted tangle of sorrow and rage, with treads of confusion and frustration thrown in to tighten the knot that sat heavy and hard beneath her heart.
Alas, despite the tears she shed over the no-good rake—clearly he didn’t love her as madly as he’d claimed for, with no more than a jerky nod of his head, he’d retreated to the bedchamber, dressed and departed without a word—and the nights she alternated between staring out the window at the empty park and tossing restlessly in her equally empty bed, Harry’s life did continue on effortlessly.
The newsboys whistled to herald her arrival beneath the awning each morning.
Precious Pincushion came and went as he chose, accepting Harry’s devotion as his due.
Prudence tidied Harry’s flat and fussed about her person, prodding her to eat and prattling on about rising wheat prices.
Peggy Sholes and the other children scampered across the green, screeching and laughing and carrying on as children were wont to do.
The scent of lemon tarts—slightly scorched on account of a secondhand oven Mrs. French had purchased but not yet mastered—filled the air.
When Harry made her usu
al rounds along St. Sebastian Place, merchants and residents alike called out greetings and invitations to tea.
The latest book to be published by the sisters Mallory set all-time high sales records. But with the arrival of seven crates of books—old tomes Mr. Preston believed to be rare and valuable treasures—the bookshop was more cramped than cozy, the press of bodies a hostile invasion of her privacy.
Harry traveled to Winchester and Wimbledon, Blackfriars and Bloomsbury, and everywhere betwixt in an exceedingly well-sprung new carriage Ned added to the fleet of the Prince Hackney and Transport Company.
Madame Broussard’s shop remained Harry’s best source of gossip, even if none of it pertained to a certain viscount, and the spill of brightly-colored fabric pained her eyes a tad.
Monsieur Delacroix proclaimed Harry magnifique when she properly conjugated the many tenses of aimer, which struck her as ironic, all things considered.
When she met Giancarlo for her fencing lesson, she finally managed to best him with an unexpected display of fancy footwork.
Not surprisingly, the penniless rogues crowded into Alabaster’s box were now more interested in ascertaining her net worth than engaging her in conversation, or even ogling her bosom, as meager as it was.
Traffic was light everywhere she ventured. The people she encountered were unfailingly polite. The sun blazed a path across the cloudless sky all day, every day, which seemed a personal affront, seeing as she would have preferred weather to match her mood.
And so it went, each day much like the one that had preceded it the previous week, but for the additional appointments she squeezed into her schedule to dispense with a variety of baubles, business interests and boons in order to pay off the Earl of Dunaway’s debts.
Apart from Mr. Peeble’s staunch adherence to propriety, protocol and precepts—specifically the precepts set down in the bylaws of the British Consolidated Mining Corporation which barred her from selling even a few measly shares—Harry met with extraordinary success.
When she popped into Castaway’s Secondhand Mercantile, Mrs. Tinsley haggled for all she was worth before paying a favorable price for every trinket Harry sought to pawn, right down to the last earbob. A small portion of which Harry parted with for a necklace of topaz gems the precise color of Phineas’s eyes.
Ale flowed like water and perfect five-to-one odds squared the take twice over when Mr. Tyson demanded a rematch against the current champion, and Mr. Dooley proceeded to jab and feint his way through six rounds before knocking him to the ground with a left hook in the seventh.
Teddy Luther put aside his propensity to flirt with every woman in the pub, old or young, pretty or plain, to settle up accounts for various outstanding debts and favors at fairer terms than Harry had been prepared to agree to.
After delivering a long-winded recitation regarding the fortuitous timing of Harry’s need for ready capital—fortuitous in that he had just received an influx of funds from a gentleman eager to invest in Mr. Prince’s myriad enterprises—Steven Simms opened his safe and produced three heavy purses in exchange for a promise of repayment when rents next came due.
The ease with which Harry dispensed with the treasures she’d been hoarding might have given her pause, were she not adamantly opposed to pausing for fear it would lead to all sorts of maudlin thoughts and impossible expectations.
Even so, such mawkish sentiments crept into her consciousness from time to time. So often, in fact, that she spent two pounds, three shillings she didn’t necessarily have to spare on the bonnet displayed in Josie Hathaway’s window—a frilly concoction of bright blue straw, yellow ribbons and violet feathers with a brim so wide it cast her red, swollen eyes into shadow.
Still, as puffy as her eyes were, the moment she stepped from the shop, she spotted the handsome scoundrel sprawled in an elegant slouch on a bench in the green. Sunlight glinted off his golden hair, creating a halo any angel would envy. Even one fallen so far from heaven he had long since become quite comfortable walking in Lucifer’s shadow.
The Earl of Dunaway watched Harry’s approach with an odd sort of wariness tightening his features. When she reached him, he started to rise to his feet, but Harry waved away the gesture and took a seat beside him. They sat just so for a minute, then two, the silence between them awkward and uncomfortable.
“Why did you do it?” Dunaway finally asked, his voice faintly rough. “Damn it all, Hesperia, why did you pay my debts?”
Harry shrugged one shoulder. “I miscalculated.”
“You miscalculated?” Dunaway repeated, his voice rising. “You’ve never miscalculated a damn thing.”
“I didn’t take into account that by laying waste to all you hold dear, I would also be laying waste to all I hold dear.”
“Your sisters?” Dunaway asked on a strangled laugh. “You imagined your sisters would turn away from you simply because you beggared me?”
“You beggared yourself,” Harry retorted. “Honestly, Dunaway, what were you thinking to risk your last hope for a financially sound future on a man whom you had never met? A man who doesn’t even exist?”
“I was desperate,” Dunaway answered readily. “Desperate men do desperate things.”
“You were foolish,” Harry chided. “But no more foolish than me. I was so busy plotting to ensure my sisters’ future happiness that it never occurred to me they might be plotting to ensure mine.”
“Never say you saw right through the scheme?”
“Well, of course I saw right through it,” Harry replied, insulted by the suggestion she was so dimwitted as to miss such an obvious a maneuver. “Lilith and Annalise left the ball early, and Sissy is…well, Sissy. But Kate and Madeline avoided me the entire night.”
“Right, the scheme to keep a safe distance from you in order to preserve the fiction that Withy is your father.” Dunaway’s voice shook with repressed amusement. “You’re too clever, Hesperia.”
“What scheme were you referring to?” As the words tripped off Harry’s lips, the entirety of the devious man’s machinations fell into place in her mind like the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle neatly fitting together to reveal the hidden picture. “Oh, for mercy sake, you never meant to marry Annalise to Mr. King at all.”
“I would hardly marry my daughter to a fat old lecher,” Dunaway replied, laughing outright. “Leastwise, not one with a wart the size of Wales on his nose.”
“You truly thought Withy was… No, you couldn’t possibly…” Harry stammered. “I was only jesting with Kate…about Mr. King…the wart…and the rest of it… How could you know what I said?”
“Kate is currently my favorite daughter.” Dunaway reached over and patted Harry’s hand. “Though I do like to rotate the position from time to time if you should care to wade out beyond the shallows.”
“You and Kate made the whole thing up?”
“We let Lilith and Sissy in on it once you’d taken the bait.”
“But not Annalise and Madeline?”
“Annalise can’t play at subterfuge to save her life, any more than Madeline can keep a secret to save hers.”
“Mad might surprise you one day.”
“I’ve no doubt of it,” Dunaway answered with a fond smile. “All of my daughters have surprised me in the best possible ways, and will keep doing so, I should hope.”
“Why did you do it?” It did not escape Harry that she was giving him back his words.
“I deserved the comeuppance, and you needed to be the one to dish it up to me.”
“But if I hadn’t decided the loss of my sisters was too high a price to pay, you would have been ruined.”
“Ah, Hesperia, have you not yet realized that I started down the path of ruin long ago?” Dunaway asked. “Your life is only just beginning, and I could not bear to watch you squander another day of it plotting and planning for an eventuality I’m perfectly capable of seeing to on my own.”
Silence settled between them once more. It wasn’t altogether awkward, but neit
her was it companionable. Harry brushed at her skirts and fiddled with the ribbons of her bonnet. Dunaway shifted and stretched out his legs, his fingers tapping out a beat on the bench between them.
When he finally spoke, his voice was barely above a whisper. “Hesperia, daughter of the evening, so named because you were born at sunset.”
It took Harry a moment to comprehend his meaning, and when she did, she huffed out an exasperated laugh. “I doubt you know the date of my birth, let alone the time of day.”
“Eris because you came into the world squalling, took one look around and promptly began to giggle. I knew then you would be trouble, in the best sense of the word.”
“How could you possibly know I giggled?”
“I was there, pacing the halls of Radcliff Manor until the physician put you in my arms.”
“I was born in Shropshire,” Harry protested. “Arabella ran off and married Jimmy when she was three months along.”
“Arabella married Jimmy when she was three months along, it’s true,” he agreed. “But you were born at Runnymede, as befits the granddaughter of a duke. It wasn’t until four months after your birth that Arabella and Jimmy fled into the night like a pair of thieves.”
“Why would Monty and Bathsheba have kept it from me?” Harry asked. “What difference could it possibly make?”
“Perhaps they could not bear to admit that they had not protected you as they ought to have done,” Dunaway murmured. “It is one thing to lose a grown woman due to her own spiteful pride and misguided decisions, but to lose a beloved child due to one’s own carelessness?”
“Surely Monty and Bathsheba weren’t careless with me.”
“They were at a masquerade, the event of the Season, dancing and carrying on when they should have been keeping you safe from Arabella’s foolish whims.”
“You were at the masquerade as well.” Of course he would have been at the event of the Season.
“I was making merry with a—well, the less said about that the better,” Dunaway replied. “Your grandparents returned at dawn to find the household in an uproar and your cradle empty.”
