Contents
Prologue
1. The Coal Boy
2. Tied with a Bow
3. Four Years Later
4. The Ball
5. Cruel to be Kind
6. The Next Morning
7. A Sawbones in Southwark
8. From the Vein
9. In the Light of Day
10. Warlords and Dragons
11. Invisible Wounds
12. Wild Beasts and Savages
13. Answering Thunder
14. An Enemy at the Gate
15. The Evening of
16. That Afternoon of
17. Dawn
18. The Long Road
Epilogue
Sneak Peek: Dancing With Danger
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Also by Kerrigan Byrne
About the Author
To my Anam Cara.
I recognized you instantly and never looked back.
Prologue
Chariton’s Dock, Southwark, London, 1880
As Honoria’s blood pooled onto the dock from the bullet wound, she felt oddly relieved.
She was ready to die.
Marriage to William Mosby, the Viscount Woodhaven, had first stripped her of any innocence she’d had left. Then of her joy. Her confidence. And finally, her decency.
To slake her unceasing misery—or perhaps in defiance of her tyrant of a husband—she’d taken a handful of lovers over the years. One of those lovers, George Hamby-Forsyth, the Earl of Sutherland, had offered to marry her younger sister Prudence when Honoria had ended their affair.
William had forbidden Nora to tell Prudence about her previous affair. He’d threatened to ruin her sister and to visit tortures upon her she hadn’t yet conceived of.
So she’d obeyed him.
She obeyed him!
How could she have been so stupid? So utterly selfish and blind? Her life was already a torment, and the ultimate torture was a marriage to the wrong man.
If Nora knew anything, it was that.
William had used her father’s shipping company to smuggle cocaine into the country. He had sought out her lovers and murdered them, framing Prudence for the deed.
Her sister might have hanged if not for the protection of her new husband, Chief Inspector Carlton Morley.
As Morley closed in on him, William had baited Prudence to use as a hostage to escape the city. But first, he’d stopped at her father’s Southwark warehouse to tear through stacks of crates, apparently searching for one full of money he’d had delivered.
Nora stood helpless as William held a gun to her precious younger sister’s head.
Morley perched above on the warehouse roof, aiming his rifle at William, his shot frustrated as the bastard used Pru as a human shield.
All this could have been avoided if she’d not been a selfish coward.
Honoria often read that people heard a rushing in their ears or felt their hearts pounding against their rib cages before they did something reckless or heroic.
But facing the consequences of her actions, of her husband’s treachery, tore her heart out of her chest. So, it didn’t beat faster. Her blood didn’t rush around.
She felt—numb. Detached. As if she no longer inhabited her body.
As if she’d died long ago.
And maybe she had.
Taking a breath, Honoria had stepped into the doorway and faced the man she hated most in this world. She’d taken in his thinning ashen hair, yellowed teeth, and expanding paunch, the consequence of a life devoted to vice and villainy. It was as if his viciousness and malevolence was beginning to seep from the insides and corrupt his physical body.
He’d taken the gun from her sister’s temple, and shot her, instead.
As she fell, she watched Morley avenge his wife, putting William down for good with one shot from his powerful rifle.
Somehow, Nora had made it outside…and was looking up at the sky when she heard Prudence scream her name. Then her dear sister’s face was hovering above her, dark eyes wild with fear.
With her last breaths, Nora tried to make things right. “I’m sorry. I should have told you…I…was afraid…”
“Shh. Shh. Shh,” Prudence soothed. “I didn’t know what he was. What he was doing to you. No wonder you strayed. I’m not angry about George. Please don’t blame yourself. Just—”
“I love you.” Nora forced the words through the burning pain. “We don’t say any of that, do we? We Goodes. But I do. I love you.”
“I love you too,” Pru sobbed, tears leaking from the tip of her nose. “I will for a long time, so don’t start saying that like you mean goodbye.”
“You are a wonderful sister. And I…I’m not…”
She began to fade then, unable to feel the warmth of the afternoon sun, even though it still alighted on her face.
And then she heard his name.
Titus Conleith.
It brought her back to life, if only for a moment. She clawed at Prudence, begging for him. Pleading. Knowing it was too late.
Yes, she deserved to die, and worse.
Because long ago, she’d broken a boy. A beautiful boy with a true heart and a pure soul.
That sin had been unforgivable.
And she’d spent the last decade paying the price.
The Coal Boy
London, November 1865
Titus Conleith had often fantasized about seeing Honoria Goode naked.
He’d been in an excruciating kind of love with her since he was a lad of ten. Now that he was undoubtedly a man at fourteen, his love had shifted.
Matured, he dared wager.
What he felt for her was a soft sort of reverence, a kind of awestruck incredulity at the sight of her each day. It was simply hard to believe a creature like her existed. That she moved about on this earth. In the house in which he lived.
That she was three years his senior at seventeen years of age was irrelevant, as was the fact that she stood three inches above him, more in her lace boots with the delicate heels. It mattered not that there existed no reality in which he could even approach her. That he could dare address her.
The idea of being with her in any capacity was so far beyond comprehension, it didn’t bear consideration. He was the household boy-of-all-work for her father, Clarence Goode, the Baron of Cresthaven. Lower, even, than the chambermaid. He swept chimneys and fetched things, mucked stables and cleaned up after dogs that ate better than he did.
When he and Honoria shared a room, he was beneath her feet, sometimes quite literally.
One of his favorite memories was perhaps a year prior when she’d scheduled to ride her horse in the country paddock and no mounting block could be found. Titus had been called to lace his hands together so Honoria might use them as a step up into her saddle.
He’d seen the top of her boot that day, and a flash of the lily-white stocking over her calf as he’d presumed to help slide her foot into the stirrup.
It was the first time she’d truly looked at him. The first time their eyes locked, as the sun had haloed around her midnight curls like one of those chipped, expensive paintings of the Madonna that hung in the Baron’s gallery.
In that moment, her features had been just as full of grace.
“You’re bleeding,” she’d remarked, flicking her gaze to a shallow wound on the flesh of his palm where a splinter on a shovel handle had gouged deep enough to draw blood. Her boot had ground a bit of dirt into the wound.
And he’d barely felt the pain.
Titus had balled his fist and hid it behind his back, lowering his gaze. “Inn’t nothing, miss.”
Reaching into her pocket, she’d drawn out a pressed white handkerchief and dangled it in
front of him. “I didn’t see it, or I’d not have—”
“Honoria!” her mother had reprimanded, eyeing him reprovingly as she trotted her own mare between them, obliging him to leap back lest he be trampled. “To dawdle with them is an unkindness, as you oblige them to interaction they are not trained for. Really, you know better.”
Honoria hadn’t said a word, nor did she look back as she’d obediently cantered away at her mother’s side.
But he’d retrieved her handkerchief from where it’d floated to the ground in her wake.
From that day on, it was her image painted on the backs of his eyelids when he closed them at night. Even when the scent of rose water had faded from his treasure.
Today, two of the three maids in the household had been too ill to work, and so the harried housekeeper tasked Titus with hauling the kindling into the east wing of the Mayfair manse to lay and light the fires before the family roused.
He’d done the master’s first, then the mistress’s, and had skipped Honoria’s room for the nursery where the seven-year-old twins, Mercy and Felicity, slept.
Felicity had been huddled in bed, her golden head bent over a book as she squinted in the early morning gloom. The sweet-natured girl had given him a shy little wave as he tiptoed in and lit her a warm fire.
Against the mores of propriety, she’d thanked him in a whisper, and blushed when he’d given her a two-fingered salute before shutting the door behind him with a barely audible click. After tending to the hearths of the governess and the second-eldest Goode sister, Prudence, Titus finally found himself at Honoria’s door.
He peered about the hall guiltily before admonishing himself for being ridiculous.
He was supposed to be here. It wouldn’t do to squander this stroke of luck and not take any opportunity he could to be near her.
Alone.
Balancing the burden of kindling against his side with one arm, he reached for the latch of her doorway, then paused, examining his hands with disgust. He flexed knuckles stained black from shoveling and hauling coal into the burner of the huge stove that heated steam for the first two floors of the estate. Filth from the stables and the gardens embedded beneath his fingernails and settled in the creases and calluses of his palm.
A familiar mortification welled within his chest as he smoothed the hand over his shirt, hoping to buff some of the dirt off like an apple before trying the latch and peering around the door.
Titus loved that—unlike the rest of her family—Honoria slept with all her drapes tied open and the window nearest the honeysuckle vines cracked to allow the scent of the gardens to waft inside. It didn’t seem to matter the season or the weather, he’d look up to her window to find it thusly open.
Sometimes he would sing while he worked outside. If he were lucky, the sound would draw her to the window, or at least he fancied it did, when she gazed out over the gardens.
Like the sun, he couldn’t look at her for too long.
And she barely ever glanced at him.
Titus told himself if she closed the casement against the sound, he’d never utter another note.
But she hadn’t.
It was as if she couldn’t bear to be completely shut in. As if she couldn’t bring herself to draw the drapes and close the world out.
On this morning, the November chill matched the slate grey of the predawn skies visible through her corner windows. Fingers of ice stole through his vest and thin shirt, prompting him to hurry and warm the room for her.
Shivering inside, he held his breath as he eased the door closed behind him, taking extra care against waking her as she’d been drawn and quiet for a few days and often complained of headaches.
In the dimness, she was little more than a slim outline beneath a mountain of arabesque silk bedclothes, curled with her back to him. Her braid an inky swath against the clean white pillow.
She occupied the second grandest bedroom, her being the eldest and all. The ceiling was tall enough to boast a crystal chandelier that matched the smaller sconces flanking her headboard. More than one wardrobe stood sentinel against the white wainscoting, containing her plethora of garments and gowns, each to be worn at different times of the day or for varied soirees, teas, and other such events unimaginable to someone like him.
She favored gem-bright hues over pastels, and silks over cottons and velvets. With her wealth of ebony hair and eyes so dark it was hard to distinguish pupil from iris, every cut and color flattered her endlessly.
But Titus knew red was her favorite. She wore it most often in every conceivable shade.
In the stillness of the morning, he could hear that her breaths were erratic and uneven, as if she were running in a dream, or struggling with some unseen foe.
On carpets as plush as hers, his feet made no sound as he tiptoed past the foot of a bed so cavernous that it would have swallowed his humble cot in the loft above the mews, three times over.
Was she having a nightmare?
Would it be a kindness to wake her?
Perhaps. But he’d expect to be summarily dismissed for even presuming to do such a thing.
He dawdled over the fire, laying the most perfect blaze ever constructed. Once the flames crackled and popped cheerfully in the hearth, he lingered still, content to simply share the air she breathed.
“Is it burning?”
Her hoarse words nearly startled him out of his own skin.
Titus jumped to his feet, upsetting his kindling basket, and dropping the poker on the stones with a thunderous clatter.
“The—the fire, miss? Aye. It’s burning proper now. It’ll warm your bones and no mistake.” Compared to her high-born dialect, his Yorkshire accent sounded like ripe gibberish, even to his own ears.
“It’s burning me,” she complained tightly, the words terse and graveled as if her throat closed over them.
“Miss?” His heart pounded as he approached her side of the bed, then sank at what he found.
Her braid was a tangle, escaped tendrils matted to her slick forehead and temples as if she’d done battle with it all night. Lines of pain crimped her brow and pinched the skin beside her lips thin and white.
She wasn’t simply curled against the cold but, more accurately, around herself. As if to protect her torso from pain. Though beads of sweat gathered at her hairline and her upper lip, she shivered intermittently.
It was her eyes, though, that terrified him. Open, but fixed on nothing, not even noting his approach.
“Miss Goode?” he whispered. “Can you—can you hear me?”
Suddenly her limbs became restless as she arched and flailed weakly, shoving her bedcovers away from her body, revealing that she’d clawed her nightdress off sometime during the night.
Honoria Goode was pale in the most normal of circumstances, but her lithe nude limbs were nearly indistinguishable from the white sheets, but for the feverish red flush creeping up her torso, over her breasts, and toward her clavicles.
“It’s burning my skin,” she croaked, levering herself up on shaking arms. “Everywhere. Put it out, boy, please.”
Boy. Later, the word would pierce him like a lance.
She made a plaintive sound that sliced his guts open, and made to roll off the bed.
“No, miss. You’re with fever. Lie still. I’ll wake the house.” Without thinking, he reached for her shoulders, meaning to keep her in place.
She stunned him by collapsing back to the pillow in a heap of bliss at his touch. “Yes,” she sighed, clutching at his hands. “So cold. So…better.”
The winter air was frigid and damp this morning and laying the fires had done next to nothing to slake the bone-deep chill from his fingers and toes.
Her skin did, indeed, feel as hot as any flame beneath his palms, leeching whatever comforting cold his hands could offer as she warmed him in kind.
Panic trilled through him, seizing his limbs. As an uneducated boy, he knew very little, but he understood the danger she was in all too well. Sh
e was burning from the inside out, and if something wasn’t done, she’d become just another ghost to haunt the void in his heart where his loved ones used to live.
Snatching up her sheets, he carefully swaddled her enough to keep her from doing herself any harm, before tearing out of the room.
He rang every bell, roused every adult from their beds with frantic intensity. The Baron immediately sent him for their doctor, Preston Alcott. Not wanting to waste the time it took for the old stable master to saddle a horse, Titus ran the several blocks to the doctor’s, arriving just as his lungs threatened to burst from the frigid coal-stained air.
Doctor Alcott was still punching his arms into his coat as Titus dragged him down his front stoop in a groggy heap of limbs, and shoved him into a hansom. To save time, he relayed all the details of his interaction with Honoria, noting her feverish behavior, appearance, and answering supplemental questions, such as what she’d had to eat the night before and where she’d traveled to in the past couple of days.
“You are a rather observant lad,” the doctor remarked, peering over the rims of his spectacles. It was difficult to distinguish beneath the man’s curly russet beard if he was being complimentary or condemning, until Alcott said, “Would that my nurses would be half as detailed as you.”
Even though it wasn’t his place, upon their arrival, Titus trailed the doctor up the grand staircase and lurked in the hallway, near an oriental vase almost as tall as he was, doing his best to blend with the shadows.
Through Honoria’s open door, he watched helplessly as Mrs. Mcgillicutty, the housekeeper, ran a cool cloth over Honoria’s face and throat. The Goodes hovered behind her, as if nursing their firstborn was still so beneath them, they needed a servant to do it.
Courting Trouble Page 1