by Rose Lerner
Nick immediately imagined himself in Sparks’s place. There was something seductively domestic about the idea of coming upstairs to one’s bed after a long day and being helped to undress by one’s wife.
That, and her position gave him a splendid view down the front of her dress.
“Brace him for me, will you?”
He started. “Of course.”
“He’s in love with the Tory MP’s daughter, that’s why.” She tugged the right boot off and set it on the floor with a snap. “He’s trying to appease Mr. Jessop.”
Nick was distracted by this extremely unwelcome intelligence. “But he’s one of the strongest supporters we have in the town.” His newspaper was influential too, in the whole district.
The left boot was proving difficult. She pulled and pulled, with no luck. “That’s why Mr. Jessop will never let them marry.” She yanked so violently that she and the boot tumbled backwards together. For a moment he could see the stripes on her stockings before she dragged the hem of her dress down. “I promised him we’d fix it, but I don’t see how. You should have heard how Mr. Jessop talked to us at the Tory supper.”
“How?” Nick demanded, feeling instantly protective. “Wait—you were at the Tory supper?” So that was why she was in her best dress, her hair a bewitching morass of tight braids he wanted to trace with his fingers to see where they ended. He rolled Sparks onto his side and stood.
She pulled a blanket over Sparks, not bothering to make it neat. “We were.” She sighed, brushing past him to take a bucket from the corner and set it by her brother-in-law. She had known where it was without searching.
If her husband were alive, she’d still be living here and Nick would be hounding the pair of them for their vote, or perhaps he’d be in London and altogether out of the picture. It was a disturbing idea.
“Can Sparks support a crippled wife without her dowry?”
“I didn’t think so.” She took off her gloves to lay a small fire on the andirons. Her hands were small and sure. “But maybe I’ve been narrow in my views. She might have some difficulties with the housekeeping, but Jack has a maid for that anyway. It’s the paper he needs help with. She probably even knows French and could translate some of the Continental news.”
“And how does Miss Jessop feel about all this?”
“She loves Jack. She says she doesn’t care about her money. But I’ve heard she stands to inherit five hundred pounds. That’s not something to turn one’s back on lightly.”
To Nick, five hundred pounds didn’t sound like much in the way of a dowry. But from the way Mrs. Sparks said it, it was a fortune to her. “If Sparks had five hundred pounds, would you still have to marry?”
The kindling caught, illuminating her face. He saw that she hadn’t even considered it—and that she was considering it now with a desperate wistfulness.
But she soon shrugged the thought away. “Even if Jessop agrees to the match, he won’t agree before Helen starts showing. The key thing is to keep him from shipping Miss Jessop off to some relative out of town or—oh, I’ll think about it tomorrow.” She set the screen before the fire and stood. “I’ve got to get back to Mr. Fairclough.”
“Who is Mr. Fairclough?”
She threw up her hands. “He’s the man the Tories want me to marry. I rather like him, and now I’ve abandoned him, and I’ve been gone an age. I have to go home first because there’s vomit on my dress, and he’ll want me to explain why I’m in different clothes than I was an hour ago and I’ll have to tell him, and he’ll think even worse of Jack than he does already.” It had been a long week for her. She sounded overset, her voice wobbling alarmingly. “He doesn’t even know about Helen.”
He wanted to put his arms around her. He wanted to kiss her again.
God, he wanted to kiss her again. With the low firelight wrapping her in shadows and warmth, she looked like everything in the world he couldn’t have, home and hearth and hot, simple pleasure. The shadow under her lower lip made his mouth go dry. His stomach tightened with the effort of holding still, holding back.
He pinched himself, hard, and jerked his gaze away to Sparks, lying on that magnificently painstaking quilt. It must have taken months. He wanted that too: a family that would lavish so much love and effort on him that a gift like that could be left behind.
But he had one, didn’t he? His mother had written him every day when he was in Spain, two or three closely written sheets, and he’d tossed most of them in the fire half-read. He’d rarely bothered with a reply, and still the letters came, every day for four years. Why didn’t he know how to be satisfied with that?
“You really don’t care about the quilt?”
She straightened her pelisse, brushed off her knees, picked specks of dust from her cuffs. He thought she was considering the effort of getting a different blanket. But when she spoke, she said, “A few years ago I lost a child I was carrying.”
She’d said something about that at Tony’s dinner last week. “Yes, I remember. I’m sorry.” But he felt a flame lick up the inside of his ribcage, that she was going to confide in him again.
“I didn’t take it well. It was as if a black fog had rolled over me and settled, expanding until it filled every crevice in the ceiling and crack in the floorboards.” She glanced at him, eyes crinkling. “I’m sorry, that was rather turgid prose, wasn’t it? But for days after I was physically well enough to walk, I couldn’t even drag myself downstairs for meals. It took a while for the feeling to lift. I lay in our bed for weeks looking at that quilt.” She took a breath. “Will died under that quilt. It meant hope to me, once. I didn’t want to take it with me. I should have, anyway. I think I hurt Helen’s feelings.”
“I’m sure she understands,” he said, because he couldn’t bring himself to say I understand. He couldn’t bring himself to admit that after he was well enough to walk, he’d lain in bed for months staring at the ceiling. “It must have hurt, to see the possibilities you’d counted on lost so quickly.”
She reached up to fidget with the soft curls that usually clustered at her neck, but they were all pinned into place. Her hand dropped. “It did. That was it exactly.” She shook her head as she led him back through the press room. “Poor Will couldn’t understand it at all. He cried and raged and got on with things while I just lay there, and it frustrated him no end. Jack took over all my work on the paper so Will wouldn’t nag me about it. Sometimes I could hear them shouting at each other because Jack had bungled some task of mine.”
“What got you through it in the end?” he asked, trying to sound as if the matter could have no personal bearing on him beyond his natural concern for her.
“Writing,” she said at once, shutting and locking the shop door behind them. “I hadn’t written much since I married, just a few incidental pieces for the paper. I loved the Intelligencer, and it consumed all my time and energy.”
He offered her his arm. The formality of the gesture felt out of place, but the way she tucked her hand into the crook of his elbow was—just right. “After I lost the baby, I lost that feeling about the paper too. One morning I was reading a collection of stories for children—a gift for the baby—and I thought, I wouldn’t have done it that way. I would have done it like this. And that was it. I wrote until I couldn’t hold the pen. I covered the margins of a week’s worth of unsold papers.”
“How did Will take it?”
“Not very well. I did go back to helping with the Intelligencer, but it was never the same and I think he knew it. We’d already been quarreling a little, but after that—” She sighed. “Jack told me tonight that he hates working on the paper alone. I abandoned him when Will died, just as I abandoned Helen after our father…”
She called herself selfish, but to his eyes she was painfully ready to make everyone’s well-being her responsibility. Who was fighting for her well-being? As far as he could tell, all she wanted was to not be married, and she couldn’t even have that.
She reached up
to massage her nape, stretching so that the graceful line of her neck, curving upwards to meet her ear, caught the light of a street-lamp.
The memory of their kiss surged up with disconcerting force. The inside of her elbow at the back of his neck, her breasts crushed against his coat, the way she’d stood on tiptoe and kissed him as if she couldn’t get enough. He remembered how close she had felt, how close he had felt to her, how much he had felt—
He wanted that again.
But when had Nick, in civilian life, ever taken responsibility for anyone’s well-being? She could lose everything by kissing him. “I’ll talk to Mr. Jessop,” he said, counting stones in the pavement until the moment passed. “Maybe we can come to some agreement about your brother-in-law’s suit.”
It wasn’t fair. She was trying so hard to be good and unselfish and get along with Mr. Moon and Mr. Fairclough. Why had the evil one sent Mr. Dymond to tempt her? They were alone in the near dark, had been for a good half hour, and all she could think about was that dratted kiss.
Sometimes it seemed simple, the way she wanted him, an animal hunger no different from her eyes lingering on a fat pink ham when there was only sixpence in her pocket. He smelled lovely and looked delicious and that was all.
But it wasn’t all, and it wasn’t simple. She hadn’t been tempted to confide in either of her suitors, and yet she kept telling Mr. Dymond things she’d never told anyone. The excuse that he was a stranger and so it was like shouting secrets into a hole in the ground was wearing thin. You couldn’t put your hand on a hole in the ground’s arm and feel muscle and heat through the fabric of its greatcoat. A hole in the ground didn’t have soft, spiky hair or the most adorable way of firming its mouth when it was determined about something.
Mr. Dymond had a beautiful mouth.
“You don’t have to walk me home,” she said. “It isn’t that late. The night watchman is around somewhere.”
“It wouldn’t be that late in London. Here I can only see a few houses with a candle burning. And the night watchman is seventy-five, isn’t he?”
“He may be seventy-five, but he was a prizefighter in his youth,” she said, though privately her dislike of walking alone on dark, empty streets was as much a reason for her support of a Police Act as her belief in the advance of modern life and the inefficacy and immorality of capital punishment as the sole deterrent of crime. “I don’t imagine there are many men in town who could best him even now.”
“Then if we meet him, he may walk you the rest of the way.”
He was concerned about her well-being, and tonight of all nights she couldn’t turn that away. Mr. Fairclough wanted to marry her, and he hadn’t tried to help her with Jack, or taken her part in front of Mr. Jessop.
Of course, Mr. Fairclough hadn’t been raised to treat women like hothouse flowers. He disliked Jack and relied on Mr. Jessop’s patronage. It was easy for Mr. Dymond to help. He was Mr. Jessop’s equal.
But he wasn’t family—she might not even be Orange-and-Purple, anymore—and he had helped her without hesitation. It had hurt him; he would never say so, but as they turned into Mrs. Pengilly’s back garden she could see that his limp had worsened.
“I’ll wait here while you change,” he said.
“You really don’t have to.”
He smiled at her. “I want to.” His warm tone said he couldn’t think of a thing he’d rather be doing than waiting in the chilly street to walk her to a Tory supper.
The house was dark. Mrs. Pengilly had been having trouble sleeping, so Phoebe tried to be quiet climbing the stairs. She didn’t bother to light a candle, just guessed which dress was which by feel and picked her second-best. By dint of some squirming she unbuttoned the blue dress and pulled it over her head.
She could smell Jack’s vomit turning sour. Had Mr. Dymond been able to smell it? She hated the idea of giving him the stinking bundle to carry to his valet, but she couldn’t have afforded to toss it out even if Helen hadn’t slaved over it. Reluctantly she folded the stain over itself and bundled the dress into her spare pillow tick.
Her second-best dress was a plain green one with no embroidery, but it fit her splendidly—by which she meant that when she wore it, even more men than usual stared at her bosom. No matter how she stretched, though, she could only do the top three buttons and the bottom one. The two in between were out of reach. Sukey had long since returned to the boarding house for the night, and it would be beyond rude to wake up poor Mrs. Pengilly. There was no help for it. She put her pelisse under one arm, took up the pillow tick and went downstairs.
It had started to drizzle, but Mr. Dymond’s smile was warm as ever as he pushed off the wall he’d been leaning against.
“I need you to do up a few of my buttons,” she blurted out and spun around, afraid of what she would do if she could see the expression on his face.
Chapter Thirteen
There was a pause, and then she heard him lean his cane against the wall. Even though she’d expected it—waited for it—anticipated it with eagerness and dread—she still gasped when the backs of his fingers brushed her shift. His hands stilled for a moment, and then he briskly did up her buttons and gave them a businesslike pat.
She yanked on her pelisse. “Thank you.”
“Think nothing of it,” he said a little too cheerily.
Her own laugh was high-pitched, almost giddy. “I’m trying not to,” she said, and then was astonished at her own boldness. He brought that out in her. She liked it, and wished she didn’t.
“Shall we?” He swiped up his walking stick from against the wall with his right hand and tossed it to the other. She’d noticed it was a habit he had, an airy gesture he saved for awkward moments. Was he trying to seem less affected than he really was? The idea warmed her further.
They walked the quarter mile to the Drunk St. Leonard in silence. She was getting to like walking with him, the characteristic little lurch in his step vibrating up her arm. She was getting to like him altogether too much.
Still, where was the harm? In two weeks she would be married and he would be in London, and even the prospect of missing him had a sharp, exquisite flavor. So when he said he’d bring the ham round the next day, she answered, “I’d like that, thank you.”
He smiled and nodded towards the tavern door. “Give ’em hell.”
When he looked at her like that, as if he thought she could do anything, she almost didn’t care about bad luck.
Nick eyed his cravat narrrowly. “Do I look all right for church?”
Toogood glanced up from where he was soaking the hem of Mrs. Sparks’s dress in a solution of hartshorn and soft soap. “Eminently respectable, sir.” The rest of the dress lay crumpled on the table. It didn’t lie entirely flat. The bodice in particular was still stretched, hinting very gently that it had last night contained the most splendid bosom in Sussex. The dark blue wool was soft, and worn at the cuffs. She was too poor to buy a new dress. She couldn’t even afford a ham. She was beneath him in every way—
Beneath him. Mmm. She’d look lovely and debauched beneath him, her breasts pulled wantonly to the sides by their own weight. If she held them up for him with her hands, plenty would spill over the ends of her fingers. How much darker would arousal make those eyes? Would she let him watch them go black, or would she shut them?
“Thank you, Toogood.” He smacked the door shut with his cane on his way out.
When he reached Tony and Ada’s room, his brother was engaged in sketching a bird on the windowsill in the margin of a closely written and heavily crossed-out page that was probably his speech.
He hastily covered the paper when he saw Nick. The movement frightened off the bird, and Tony’s shoulders slumped miserably.
“Was it a rare one?”
“I think so.” Tony gave up any pretense of working and hastened to complete his sketch while the details were fresh in his mind. “A warbler, but not a sort I’ve seen before. A migrant, probably.”
“You’
re not on about birds again, are you?” Ada asked from the dressing table, where she was adjusting the bow on her bonnet.
Nick looked down at the sketch. It was a lovely thing; the bird almost seemed to watch him with its bright dark eye. “Have you ever thought of doing this professionally?”
Tony laughed. “And be a mad naturalist who does nothing but lurk in fields all day? No, thank you. I’ll stick to the odd monograph.”
“Have you been going out birdwatching?”
“Yes, in the early mornings. It’s one of the few times of day when no one wants to talk to me.”
Nick had opened his mouth to ask if he could come along, but that stopped the question in his throat.
“I think he’s meeting a woman,” Ada said. “Don’t try to go along.”
“Oh, hell,” Tony said. “I didn’t mean—of course I’m happy to talk to you.”
Ada pressed her lips together and swept past them out of the room.
Hard to tell if Tony meant it. There was no reason for Tony to be glad to talk to him. “I’d like to come out with you some morning,” Nick said anyway. “I’d like us to—” He didn’t know how to finish that sentence.
To his relief, Tony looked pleased. “You’re really interested?”
Nick nodded.
Tony grinned. “And if I tell you to be silent or still—”
“I shall be a statue,” Nick said, elated at this minor victory.
Tony bit his lip, his eyes going to Nick’s cane. “It won’t be too hard on—that is to say—it’s very damp in the mornings, the air doth drizzle dew and all that. I don’t mean to imply that you—”
“I’ll be fine,” Nick said before Tony could tie himself into a complete knot. He wanted to say more: You can say the words, you know, or Don’t be afraid to talk to me. He was aware of the hypocrisy of the thought. He didn’t want to talk about it either.
“Splendid. Meet me here at six o’clock—let’s see, not tomorrow morning, I’ve a Fox Club dinner tonight and will be just crawling into bed at dawn. Let’s say Tuesday.”