Oh, no. He hadn’t only heard about the suitors. He’d heard that she mistreated her servants, too. It couldn’t get more ironic, but once again, she couldn’t explain herself without revealing why she’d avoided marriage. Far better to stick to her reputation as a cold, temperamental witch.
“And apart from the nobs, other supposedly reputable people,” Matt said, his sarcasm making her cringe. “If you go to my mother, who is genuinely respectable, you’ll come out lilies and roses. She’s gently bred and a clergyman’s widow. Can’t get much more virtuous than that.”
“I can’t possibly go to your mother, not after tonight.”
“Of course you can,” Bird said. “Mrs. Worcester’s a great gun. She even puts up with me.”
“My mother will be delighted to see you again,” Matt said. “In any event, you don’t have a choice.”
This was mortification piled upon mortification, but unfortunately Matt was right. She had no place else to go. Mr. Brownley wouldn’t force her to sign the marriage settlements, but his was a bachelor household, so he couldn’t take her in.
“The wind has died down,” Matt said. “We may as well walk.” He opened the door. “You needn’t be frightened. People know me hereabouts, so we’re safe enough on the streets.”
“I’m not afraid.” Arabella gathered her cloak about her and went out, followed by Bird.
“Knew his mother well, did you?” Bird was the nosiest person Arabella had ever met.
“Matt and I were childhood friends,” she said glumly.
“Not merely friends, though.” He took her silence for assent and gestured dramatically. “Young lovers parted by cruel fate, but reunited in a daring rescue! That’s a better story than taking refuge with a respectable widow. People much prefer a stirring romance.”
“But it’s not true,” Matt said, closing the tavern door.
“Once you two are over your little tiff, it will be,” Bird said.
“It’s not a tiff,” Arabella snapped.
“Definitely not,” said Matt.
Bird narrowed his eyes. He shook a fist at Matt. “It was you! You stole my engraving.”
Matt shrugged.
Bird gave a crack of laughter. “You owe me, Worcester. A romance it is.” He waved a hand and strode away, whistling.
“What it is,” Matt said, “is a misunderstanding. I apologise, Bella. What I said was unforgivable. We both gave in to an attraction for a former lover, but that’s all it was.” Together, they crossed the street and headed north. “It won’t happen again.”
Never again. She was not going to burst into tears. “He’s going to lie about us.” Any story would be preferable to the one Bird had chosen. “Can’t you stop him?”
“I’d rather not. A sensational story like this means a great deal to Bird.”
“Which engraving was he talking about?” she asked.
“He drew a caricature of you several months ago. I stole the engraving before he could have any prints made.” He shrugged. “It was a bad likeness, because he’d never seen you except at a distance, but you would have been mortified by it regardless. Fortunately, he got distracted by a juicy scandal and never redid it.”
“Thank you,” she said. “That was exceptionally kind of you.”
“He won’t go too far with this one. He values his friendship with me, and I can tell he likes you. You’re nothing like he expected.” After a silence broken only by the night sounds of London, he added, “And you were right. No one will believe you’re interested in me.”
That’s because they’re idiots. She bit her lip hard, waiting until she could control her voice. “What did Bird mean about you living in the street?”
“Nothing,” he said. “Just talk.”
“I don’t believe you,” Bella said.
“Nothing worth talking about, then. It was years ago, and it doesn’t matter anymore.”
They turned a corner, passing a couple of grubby-looking men in a doorway. Matt exchanged cordial greetings with them, so Bella murmured, “Good evening,” as well. When they’d passed out of earshot, she said, “It matters to me. You’ve changed, Matt. You’re not the same as before.”
“Nor are you. We all change over the course of time.”
“I have not changed,” she said, but his skeptical lift of the brows told her he didn’t believe it.
She’d had enough. “Very well then, answer me this—one night seven years ago, we became lovers. The next day you left our village, never to return. Why did you abandon me?”
* * *
“Abandon you? I did no such thing.”
“You left, Matt. After that night, you left Surrey and never once returned.” Her voice thickened. “How do you suppose I felt?”
He didn’t know what to say. He’d worried about her, but he’d been so busy surviving he’d had no leisure to think of much else.
“If you regretted what we’d done, why didn’t you just say so?” she said. “You needn’t have run away.”
“I didn’t run away.” Bella’s hood had fallen back, and her spun-gold hair was coming out of its pins. It had been much later, when he’d had a decent place to sleep and fewer nightmares, that he’d dreamt of running his fingers through that hair, of tickling her breasts with its silkiness.
Had she dreamed of him, too? She was holding back tears; he was sure of it. “My father learned that I’d been playing at cards and dice. You know what he was like—he had a veritable hatred of gambling. He went into a violent rage, put me on the stage to London without a penny to my name and told me never to return. I was barely given time to bid my mother farewell. If she hadn’t managed to slip a guinea into my shoe, I might well have starved.”
“How could he do that to his own son?”
“Pride,” Matt said. He’d thought this through long ago. “He was a clergyman, and therefore his son must be an example to others. Once I was out of the way, he had no cause to fear that I would embarrass him, particularly with his richer parishioners, the ones that mattered most to him.”
“The nobs,” she said softly.
“Mama pleaded with him to allow me to at least keep in touch. Bella, I couldn’t risk seeing you. If I’d sneaked back to the village or even written to you, word would have reached my father, and he would have forbidden Mama and me to correspond. I couldn’t do that to her.”
“Of course not,” Bella said with the ready sympathy she’d always had as a child. Perhaps she hadn’t changed so very much.
But what about the tales he’d heard about her? They couldn’t all be lies.
“So that’s when you were on the streets, but not for long,” Bella said. “Your mother said that you had work with an East India merchant.”
He hesitated. He could lie to her and end this conversation now. In all the years of striving and planning, of hoping he might win her back some day, he’d been determined—absolutely—that she would never find out what he’d done and who he’d become.
He could give her a small piece of the truth. “No, that was a lie meant to reassure my mother. Everything turned out all right in the end, though, so you needn’t scowl at me like that.”
“How long were you on the streets?”
“A month or two at most, and I found sufficient shelter most nights.” This was a gross exaggeration, but she didn’t need to hear how he’d been robbed and beaten and survived the first few weeks through sheer luck.
“What happened after that? What kind of work did you do? How did you buy the tavern?”
Still, he hesitated. “It happened years ago, and much of it is unsuitable for a lady’s ears.”
She halted, glaring up at him in the night, her hair falling down her shoulders again. “What’s wrong with you? You never worried about my ‘lady’s ears’ when we were children.”
“Oh, very well.” Knowing Bella, she would pester him until she got her way. Might as well try to keep it light. “I started out with the obvious—became a thief. I hadn’t a n
otion how to pick pockets, not having been brought up to the trade.”
“You picked pockets?”
He shook his head. “Too hazardous, but I made a reasonably competent footpad.” He waited for her to shrink from him in shock.
She latched onto his arm and clung. “Good God, Matt! What if you’d been caught?”
“Well, I wasn’t.” He patted her hand and began walking again, praying she would continue to hold onto him. “Sometimes it was fun, particularly if I happened across a rich bastard who deserved a bit of punishment.”
She didn’t say anything to that. He hesitated again. No, she needed to understand. “You’ve never lived amongst the lower classes. You don’t know what they suffer at the hands of their so-called betters.”
“I know a little,” she said. “I know how much our servants dislike working for Uncle Wilbur.”
But not for her? By what he’d heard, she’d become a veritable termagant.
“I don’t know what I’ll do if I have to go to the Continent,” she said. “I won’t be able to take more than one of them with me. I should hate to lose my maid—we get on very comfortably—but I can’t desert Chalmers, our butler, because he’s elderly and would be destitute without me. And Ralph, my footman, is getting on in years, too.” She sighed. “I shall figure something out. What did you do after being a footpad?”
His mind was in such disarray that it took him several seconds to respond. “I found myself a partner and became a burglar for a couple of years.”
“You broke into people’s houses?” She clutched his arm tighter. “You could have been hanged!”
“Not likely if one plans things properly,” he said. “Why aren’t you berating me for resorting to crime?”
“I assume you didn’t have much choice,” she said.
“That’s how it seemed at the time.”
“I would never blame you for doing what you had to in order to survive,” she said.
She did understand. The more she spoke, the more he couldn’t reconcile this Bella with the one he’d heard about in recent years.
“As soon as I could afford it, I turned respectable and gambled for a living,” he said. “By then my father was dead.”
In the light of a streetlamp, he caught the glimmer of tears. “Oh, Matt.” Her voice caught. “You must have been so lonely. It must have been so hard.”
“Yes, but it doesn’t matter now.” A whole new vista of loneliness spread before him—or maybe not. “Eventually I had the money to buy my mother a house in town. She moved in just a month ago.”
For a while they walked in silence, Bella still clinging to his arm. Memories of Bella in mischief, Bella putting on an act, Bella stubbornly hiding her grief at her mother’s death behind an indifferent front…all tumbled into his mind. Maybe he did still know her after all. Maybe, just maybe, she’d had a reason for becoming so cold and aloof.
Not for the cruelty to servants, though… What reason could she have for that? He would have to think about it.
First things first: why was she so determined not to marry? Hope surged inside him, powerful and terrifying. He wasn’t going to lose her again, not without putting up a fight. For a man who’d executed flawless burglaries and won a fortune at cards, he was showing a remarkable lack of brilliance when it came to love. He needed to make a plan and follow it.
Step one: recover from the misfortunes of the past. “Not only did I not abandon you, I begged my mother to keep an eye on you in case I’d gotten you with child.”
She stared, clearly horrified. “You told your mother about us?”
“What choice did I have? Someone had to make sure you were all right. I had nightmares that you were pregnant and they wouldn’t let me near you.” He shrugged. “Which they probably wouldn’t have.” Might as well confess to all his folly. “I even made grand plans to abduct you if the worst happened.”
“Truly?” Her lips trembled into a smile. He wanted to sweep her off her feet and kiss her silly, but first he needed the truth. Knowing Bella, she wouldn’t surrender it easily.
“Yes, truly, but Mama wrote and reassured me that you were well and not increasing, thank God.”
Step two: get her riled up until she lost her composure. “You had such a good, safe life, a doting father, plenty of money. Unless I’d gotten you with child, everything was perfectly fine.”
* * *
Perfectly fine. Men could be such uncomprehending idiots.
“Then you went to London and had your first Season as planned, so I knew all was well,” he said.
“Yes,” she lied. “By then it was.”
He’d meant well. He’d thought of her and cared about her in the midst of terrible turmoil. For that she was thankful. But he didn’t love her now, or at least not enough to marry her. She took a deep breath and reassumed her armour. “I thought you were thriving in London, so I put the past out of my mind.”
“Practical of you,” he said, dry as dust.
“And a London Season takes all one’s concentration. I was wholly occupied with important things such as hats and gowns.”
“Important indeed,” he drawled.
Let him sound as revolted as he wished. “And vouchers for Almack’s, naturally.”
“Ah, yes, the Marriage Mart. Suitors in droves.” Now he sounded amused.
“Some, although the death of my father and later my aunt meant I didn’t go out much for a good while. It got far worse after my uncle started shoving them at me,” she said darkly, and then remembered to play her role. “So frightfully wearying, but I managed to stave them off.”
“By becoming an icicle.” Was that laughter lurking in his voice? “But surely amongst all those eligible fellows, you must have met one you liked.”
This wasn’t funny. It was torture! “How much farther is it to your mother’s house?”
“Not far,” he said. “Come now, Arabella. Not one man appealed to you?”
“Oh, I fancied quite a few of them,” she said airily, “but marry them? Heavens, no! One in particular was a most likeable man, and I had to go to great lengths to discourage him.” She paused. “Which was all for the best, as it chanced, because he can’t have really wished for a respectable woman. Almost immediately after I drove him away, he married a notorious one instead.” She gave a brittle little laugh.
That silenced him for a while. They turned onto a square with newly constructed houses, neither small nor large, but too big for an older lady of limited means. “How much longer?” She wished she didn’t sound so petulant. So spoiled. “I’m cold and tired.”
“Poor little flower. What was wrong with them, those unfortunate fellows? Ah, I have it! You were worried your husband would realize you’re not a virgin.” He slipped into the speech of the jarvey again. “You needn’t have been, ‘cause I’ve heard—not that I’ve any personal experience of it, mind—that it’s not that easy to tell, and there’s ways and ways to fool a man.”
“You needn’t be disgusting,” she said. “Such shifts never even occurred to me.”
“No?” In the light of a streetlamp, she caught the mocking glint in his eyes. He didn’t believe her. Ironic, since this at least was entirely true. “Then why?”
She ripped her hand from his arm, stuck her nose in the air and marched away. “I was waiting for a better offer. I still am.”
* * *
“Hold on,” he said. “We’ve arrived.” She stopped. Turned. Gazed up at the house before which they now stood—four elegant stories in cool stone. Look at her, as flummoxed as I was in the tavern.
“Your mother lives here?”
“No, I gave her the house next door. This place is mine.” He glanced up at his mother’s bedroom window. “I was hoping Mama would be awake—she doesn’t sleep well—but there’s no light in her window, and I don’t want to disturb her. We’ll go in here for now.”
Arabella said nothing, staring numbly from one house to the other. His mother’s was much smalle
r than his.
“Hard to believe, isn’t it?” He tried to keep his tone even. “I won often, invested wisely and I’m quite well off now.” Matt left her standing on the pavement and unlocked the front door. “I haven’t decided whether to stay here or sell the house. It may not be what I need.”
“It seems like a good house,” she said faintly.
“Yes, but what do I need with a place like this? I like the tavern. I like my friends.” He ushered her into the entrance hall, where his valet had left a lamp burning low. “On the other hand, this house is just right for raising a family. There’s a small garden in the back, and children can play ball in the square. Mama’s been pestering me to marry and give her some grandchildren, you see.”
“Oh.” She sounded awfully glum, but that wasn’t enough. Proud and stubborn as they come, his Bella. Always needed goading.
Very well, goad her he would. “It’s been a long struggle, but now I have the money to choose a gently bred bride. Thing is, I’m not sure I want to anymore.”
“No?” Her voice quavered. Excellent.
“Naw, she might expect me to get on with the nobs.” He paused. “Might expect me to talk like one of them. Might think she’s too good for my friends.” He paused again. “I’ll make us a spot of tea, shall I? You’ll have to put up with the kitchen. The kettle won’t take long to boil.”
She took a step forward, and he caught her sob, soft against the stillness of the night. Almost there. “Buck up, Arabella,” he said. “The ordeal is over. Everything will be fine.”
“No,” she said. “Oh, no.”
“What do you mean, ‘oh, no’?” It killed him not to take her in his arms. “Fine. If you can’t stomach the kitchen, then stay in the cold-as-hell drawing room where you belong.” He gestured with a sweep of the hand. “It’s over there.”
“I don’t mind the k-kitchen, Matt.” She hiccupped on a sob. “It’s that I’ve done everything wrong for seven whole years.”
To Rescue or Ravish? Page 5
