Sabine blinked and jerked her head, trying to keep his fingers out of her eye and ear. Finally, reverently, he moved his hand to her shoulder.
Now he will touch me, she thought, and he did touch her, but it was a slow, soft glancing sort of drag down her arm through the sleeve of her gown. He touched her the way a concerned mother might touch a child’s bruise. Not so much a caress as a gentle assessment.
Sabine tried to wiggle her hands free, to reach for him, but he held them firm against his chest. This spiked her irritation, and she jerked away, opening and closing her hands, wiggling fingers. She settled her hands on his shoulders, determined to knead the way around his neck, but it felt strange and out of balance for her to frantically paw at his body when he continued the glacial, measured smear of his hands up and down one fully explored arm.
She let her hands go limp around his neck and tried to focus on kissing him, but now she had begun to itch. Her hair was itching, and she could not seem to find the correct spot. Now her wrist itched. Her leg.
Next her foot fell asleep. Now she was hot, kicking off covers, and then cold, scrambling beneath them. Stoker bore it all patiently—although, was he sweating?—and she finally forced herself to flop onto her back and simply allow him to rub and mush-mouth kiss and devote considerable energy to holding any body part below his chest away from her.
When at last he moved to lift the hem of her gown and settle over her, she welcomed the weight of him, because at least it was strong and heavy and she could trace the muscles of his back with her hands, which she had fantasized about repeating since their very first kiss.
He entered her with the slow press of a dull spade digging into dry earth. Sabine winced, but accepted him, wondering how this could be satisfying for him in any way. It wasn’t unpleasant so much as a waste of their time in the bed. They could be tearing at each other’s bodies as they’d done in Denby House, burning with pleasure—they could be sleeping, for that matter—instead, they were refined.
When finally, he finished, rolling off her to breathe deeply at the ceiling, his hand sought out hers beneath the covers. It was, for Sabine, the high point. She had the idle thought that she would not mind asking for a piece of jewelry in trade for this experience. Or perhaps a new drafting kit. Or—
She drifted off to sleep before her wish list was complete and dreamt of their first time.
Chapter Twenty-Three
Stoker said the next day that he would simply apply to the Duke of Wrest’s front door and ask for an audience. Sabine was resistant to a security detail or even Stoker himself hounding her every step. He would not feel easy about her safety until the strange, unexplained threat posed by the duke was solved.
And he simply wanted to know. He’d been casual about the attack when he thought the duke was a desperate old man, wasting money on a mercenary in the madcap murder of a stranger. But now there were deeply personal layers of complication that made the murder attempt not only dangerous, but haunting, as well.
Stoker had to know.
Sabine, not surprisingly, insisted upon accompanying him to the duke’s home in Chelsea. They waited until afternoon, when they felt the hungover duke might be the clearest-headed, pounding on his peeling front door at two o’clock. They were admitted by an unhappy female servant, a woman-of-all-work by the looks of it, and led through a dingy vestibule to a dank parlor with water-stained walls and threadbare furnishings.
For half an hour they waited with no tea and no word. Sabine sat formally beside Stoker, beautiful in her yellow day dress, a gloved hand on his knee. With her other hand she held a handkerchief to her nose. The odor in the parlor was an eye-watering mix of chamber pot and unaired mildew. Twice Stoker asked Sabine if she would like to be taken home. She refused, and it was impossible to hide his relief.
Six weeks ago he could not have imagined relying on anyone to help him interrogate the man responsible for his half-dead arrival in a morgue—but to rely on Sabine Noble Stoker? The woman he held apart from anything dark or mean or haunted? It was unthinkable. But Sabine had made it very clear that he should not think on her behalf. If she wished to accompany him, he should not tell her that it was not really her wish. The problem with spending any time at all with a living, breathing person (rather than the idealized refuge built in your own mind) is that they thought for themselves.
Oh but her thoughts. She had asked a million questions about his boyhood association with the duke. She had hypothesized and speculated and helped Stoker anticipate any number of things the man might say. It had been useful. It had made Wrest seem less like a phantom and more like a nuisance, a problem to be solved.
Stoker had the urge to pluck her hand from his knee and kiss the small circle of exposed wrist below the pearl button of her glove. But who would welcome a kiss in a room the color of a scab that smelled like Newgate Prison? He was trying so very hard to be civilized.
“I was waiting for you to lose heart and go,” said a voice at the door, and they looked up. Sabine removed the kerchief from her nose.
Stoker stood. He didn’t know why. The old duke studied him.
“Little Johnny Stoker, all grown up,” the duke mused. “Made good.”
“Why were you waiting for us to lose heart and go?” Stoker asked. He felt odd standing while Sabine sat, and he reclaimed his seat. The duke swayed drunkenly in the doorway. His clothes were a better fit than the terrible formal suit from the ball, although he was again wrinkled and smudged. His watery eyes suggested drink, even in the middle of the day.
“I’m a very busy man,” the duke said dryly, an obvious joke. He appeared, in every way, idle.
“Last night you wished to speak to me.”
“Yes,” he said, “and we spoke. I wanted you to know you were sired by a duke.”
“That remains to be seen,” said Stoker. He studied the man, looking for resemblances in his ruddy, hunched form. Sabine said she’d seen it now that she knew his claim might be true. The green eyes, the expanse of their shoulders. The duke was hunched and thick, but the shape was the same. His nose, his hairline.
“And you wish to . . . claim me as your bastard and challenge the law that forbids inheritance by an illegitimate son, is that it?”
“That depends,” said the duke, stepping into the parlor. “How inclined are you to rescue me from my most current run of bad luck?”
Stoker and Sabine looked around the sagging room. Bad luck? Sabine brought the kerchief back to her nose.
“There will be no bailout,” Stoker drawled. “Not from me.”
The duke slapped his knee. “The devil you say! Well, we have nothing to discuss.”
“On the contrary,” said Stoker. “There are several more things I wish to know.”
The duke ignored him and made a show of stepping to the side to gesture down the corridor. “The butler has the day off, but you may show yourselves out.”
“Sit down, Sauly,” Stoker commanded.
The duke’s watery eyes expanded. “I’ll not take orders from a whoreson. Not in my own home.”
“If you do not sit down and answer my questions,” Stoker said menacingly, “I will twist your arm behind your humped back, and we will learn how far the bone will bend until it snaps.”
“You wish to speak?” asked the duke. “Fine. Speak. I cannot see what more there is to say.” He backed into the wall and began inching to the side. “Perhaps that that mother of yours was a nutte—”
“You will not speak of my mother in unkind terms.”
“Ha! Would that she had never spoken to me with unkindness! I was her best customer. I was pleasant to her brat—that’s you, by the by. I set her up in a little room in Blackhall, remember? And yet she tossed me out, time and again. She’d move me along for the next bloke without a backward glance—”
Stoker shoved up. “I said I would not hear insults against my mother.”
“And why not?” spat the duke. “You’ll not stand there with a straight face an
d claim she was more than a common whore, would you? And you, her silent, soulful boy. I don’t care how rich you’ve become. I’ve seen the pit from whence you came. I’ve seen you fight other whores for food.
“And now, here you are,” he continued, “with your pretty wife, casting smug glances around my house as if you are superior? You forget yourself, Johnny.” He made a sound of disgust.
To Sabine, he said, “Did you know that when Marie first showed him to me as an infant, he was so covered in flea bites, I thought he had the pox?”
Sabine rose to stand beside Stoker. He turned to her as if in a daze. They locked eyes. Let’s go, he wanted to say.
Take my hand, he begged in his head. Take any part of me. Deliver me.
Subjecting her to this man went against every wish he’d ever held for her, but he couldn’t have come without her. But perhaps that would have been a better plan. To simply release any thought or speculation or question from this part of his life and stay the bloody hell away.
He knew now why he’d been so ambivalent about the duke’s original overtures. He hadn’t wanted to remember any detail of his mother’s myriad men, real or imagined. He’d hated those men. He hated this man.
“Your Grace,” said Sabine levelly, “I think perhaps Jon wonders what has become of you. Clearly, you are . . . bitter and out of funds. What has happened, in thirty years?” She looked around.
“What’s happened?” he asked. “What’s happened? Bills and debts and money lenders have happened. The property and farmland that was meant to sustain me, sent me to debtor’s prison! I was brought up to believe a great fortune awaited me, but that money goes to repairs and tenants and blights and taxes, taxes, taxes—so many bloody taxes. My father installed an idiot manager who bankrupted our seat in Devon. I hired a steward who was a liar and a thief. I had a run of bad luck at the card table. Women require money. Horses require money. The obligations of a dukedom require clothes and carriages and staff. From where is it all meant to come, I ask you?”
“I see,” surmised Sabine. “It has all been someone else’s fault.”
Stoker looked at the duke. “What of your family?”
He waved the question away. “Wife—dead. No children, thank God. When I die, the title may go to a distant cousin in America.”
“Have you asked him for a loan?”
Another dismissive wave, Stoker said, “You have.”
But now Stoker wanted to be clear. “Did you really believe that I would deliver you? When you were such an unreliable figure in my mother’s life? When you knew you had a son, and yet allowed us to carry on living in a brothel?”
“But this is where whores and their spawn live,” said the duke. “In a brothel.”
Stoker lunged. The duke’s eyes bulged and he tried to slide right. Stoker grabbed him by the jacket and hauled him off the floor. Holding him eye to eye, he said, “My mother loved you. I’m glad I did not truly know you, because it would have taken no effort for me to love you, too. Whatever your financial woes, you had more than she ever did, and you gave her pennies and broke her heart. How dare you come after me for money now.”
“I will do as I please, and you’ll have no say in it,” the duke gurgled. “Put me down or I will call the authorities. You may not assault a peer of the realm. Rank still means something in this count—”
“You’ll report me?” scoffed Stoker. “You’ll report me.” He shoved him deeper into the wall. “I’ve a sworn statement, Your Grace, from a man called Roberto Giuseppina, who said you paid him £250 to stab me in the spleen and leave me for dead in Portugal.”
The duke’s cracked mouth fell open and his red face went purple. Stoker shoved once more and then released him, turning away as he slid down the wall.
“Now . . . now you’re making up slanderous lies!” blustered the duke.
“A sworn statement,” repeated Stoker, shouting now. “And a scar in my side and a month of doctor’s care to corroborate it. Tell me, where did you get £250? And why, when you are clearly living in penury, would you spend it on a mercenary? I had not thought of Sauly New in thirty years, and good riddance. Did you believe I named you in my will?”
“No,” spat the duke, “you could be named in mine!”
“Ha!” scoffed Stoker. “To inherit what? This squalor?” He threw out his arms.
“The title, you ungrateful, self-important gutter rat!”
“How can a bastard inherit a title?”
“And what if I say we were married for a time?”
“My mother never married,” stated Stoker. The thought of his mother as a duchess was a cruel joke.
“Think of what an enterprising young man could do with an ancient title!” the duke boomed. “Think of your wife. She could be a duchess. Your children would inherit piles of money from you, and from me, they would inherit entrée into the highest rungs of society.”
“You’re hobnobber with nothing higher than the privy pipe, Sauly, so spare us the suggestion of societal triumph. There was no marriage, and there is no deal. And if you ever threaten me or my family again—in person or with a hired man—I will turn in my evidence of the murder plot and then come back and kill you myself.”
“You’ll never see the marriage document if I’m dead!” Wrest threatened.
“You and your phantom license may rot in hell for all I care. Stay away from me and stay away from my wife. Do not mistake my seriousness, Your Grace.”
“Oh, why not simply kill me now?” the duke bellowed, rolling against the wall, turning his face to the plaster. “Run me through, see if I have a care. See if anyone in the world will care.”
“I won’t kill you,” said Stoker, reaching into his pocket for a £20 note, “for two reasons. First, I’m not a murderer, and second, I owe you one significant debt. You taught me the alphabet and gave me old newspapers, once upon a time. Literacy has made all the difference.” He flung the money at the old man.
“Eh?” asked the duke, craning around to swat the air for the fluttering money.
“That’s it, Wrest. No more, so do not make trouble for me, on threat of prison or the noose. I’m preparing my statement today and sealing it. It will go by private courier to the authorities if ever I hear so much as a gurgle in my direction.”
“Get out!” shouted the duke, and Sabine stepped forward, reaching for Stoker’s hand. He clasped it, and they wound their way out of the parlor, down the corridor, and out the front door into the sunny October afternoon.
Stoker was gasping for air, walking without direction, staring without seeing. He pulled Sabine along, keeping pace as if the duke might overcome forty years of bad habits and give a decent chase.
“Stoker, wait,” said Sabine, struggling to keep up on the uneven cobblestones.
He slowed down but did not stop. She wrapped her free hand around his wrist, trying to loosen his hold on her fingers, but he held her in a vise grip.
“Stoker, you are hurting me.”
He came to an abrupt halt and turned to her, taking both of her hands between his own. “That is not the worst of it,” he said, looking at every part of her face. Eyes, green, he thought, cataloging her features; nose, perfect; lips, pink; hair, ebony; skin, creamy.
“That is not the worst of it,” he repeated. “That interview was wretched and mean and an embarrassment, but I want you to be aware . . . before you take another step by my side . . . that Sauly New and his hateful memories and extortion scheme and ridiculous rants barely scratch the surface of what terrible things are part of me.”
“I do not see terrible as part of you, Jon. I see pain, survival, your love of your friends. I see you trying very hard to protect every part of me. There is no terrible.”
“It was all so bloody terrible,” he told her slowly.
“Yes, I’ve gathered that. I did discover you in a morgue. But it is not so terrible anymore. Is it?”
“There is no map for getting back from it.”
“Oh, but a
map can be made for any journey,” she said. “And I am an excellent cartographer.”
“I don’t need a cartographer. I need . . . I need . . .” He scanned the small, out-of-the-way road lined with modest houses and struggling shops. An alley opened behind the next block, and he strode to it, dragging her along. When they reached the alley, he whipped around the corner and pressed her up against the wall.
“I need,” he breathed, pouncing on her mouth, kissing her with all the fervor that he’d locked away in bed last night. “I need a wife,” he finally said, coming up for air.
“I am here, Jon,” she gasped, kissing him back with the same ferocity. “I am here.”
Chapter Twenty-Four
In its five years since completion, London’s showy Regent Street has distinguished itself as the city’s shopping centre. Arching from Piccadilly to Oxford Circus, the John Nash–designed thoroughfare boasts modern shops and exclusive craftsmen. Also new is the esteemed Royal Polytechnic Institution for Machinery and Mining.
Perhaps the greatest harmony of Regent Street is the road itself, which represents the boundary of affluent Mayfair to the west and working-class Soho to the east. This arrangement draws luxury shoppers from one side of the street and employs shop clerks from the other.
Polytechnic scientists, by and large, hail from outside the city.
Public street with shops open daily except Sundays, several with extended evening hours till five o’clock.
Royal Polytechnic Institution features a public exhibition hall with working models of machines and scales, a lecture theatre, museum shop, and tea room. Open daily, check postings for special presentations and frequent photography exhibits.
—From A Noble Guide to London by Sabine Noble
The fervent need and passionate kisses of the alleyway did not, Sabine was disappointed to discover, carry over to the remainder of the day or the night. They had kissed against the wall until children ran past, laughing and jumping in a puddle that splattered Stoker’s boots and Sabine’s hem. Sabine had giggled and Stoker had muttered something in French, but the moment was broken. They had straightened their clothes and emerged from the alley a little disoriented but arm in arm.
You May Kiss the Duke Page 25