“There is only one plausible explanation when a boy is climbing down from your balcony in the wee hours of the morning,” he said with a lethal calm, though his jowls trembled with a barely leashed anger. “A son dallying with the help is understandable, I’ve done it myself from time to time, but you know better!”
He whirled away from the window to stab an accusatory finger at her. “A woman’s worth is her virtue, as it says in the Good Book. And I don’t care to know how far you’ve carried on with this boy, but you’ve shamed me, Honoria, and you’ve disgraced yourself. I can barely stand to look at you.”
She swallowed the disgust his words brought forth in her, and squared her chin against him. “I have not dallied with Titus, Father, I truly care for him. I-I love him. He’s honest and kind and he’s endlessly good. He saved my life.”
“That doesn’t mean he gets to help himself to your body! I’d rather you had succumbed to fever than to a coal boy.”
She stepped forward, clasping her hands together in front of her wounded heart. “You don’t mean that.”
“Don’t I?” he fumed.
“Titus has done much more for our family and our household than shoveling coal. He is going to be a doctor, like Alcott, who you consider your friend and social equal. He can make a good living. He could be part of our family.”
He slammed the lid of the trunk closed hard enough to splinter it, causing her to jump. “Wake. Up. You stupid girl. Alcott is the fifth son of a very fortunate Viscount. Considering a street urchin like yours would ruin us all. Would you do that to your sisters? Would you soil Pru’s chances at happiness? I’ll have a hard enough time offloading the twins, what with Mercy’s relentless mouth and Felicity’s ridiculous mind. You will love whom I tell you to love, and that’s the end of it!”
“I will not!” Though lanced with guilt at the thought of her sisters surviving a scandal she’d created, she likewise shook with temper and fear, longing and loss. She’d never stood up to her father before. To anyone really. She’d been born biddable, but this she could not abide. “I’m of age, Father, I’ll leave with him. We’ll go far away and we’ll make it on our own. You’ll never have to see me again. No one ever need know what I’ve done. You can make up whatever fiction you wish. Tell people I’m dead if that helps the situation.”
He stunned her by throwing his head back and barking out a harsh and mirthless laugh, before striding to her and grasping her by the arm. “If you do anything of the sort, I’ll ruin that boy until he wishes he were dead. Do you hear me?” He shook her for emphasis, and she let out a gasp of pain as his fingers bit into her arm. “I’ll make certain he can find no work in this city. Worse. I’ll have him thrown into Newgate for molesting you. I have friends in the police and on the Queen’s Bench. You know what happens to lads handsome as he is, in prison?”
Her eyes widened. “You wouldn’t.”
“Furthermore, I’ll send you to Bedlam for being a disobedient wretch. They’ll shave off your pretty hair and electrocute you into submission. Is that what you want?” He stood over her like a wrathful god, eyes flashing with condemnation. His hair and beard, once handsomely fair, now threaded with shocks of silver, added to the effect.
A terror Nora had never known gripped her. This was her father, a man known to be as extravagant as he was insouciant. Certainly, he’d never been a warm parent, but she’d not thought him capable of such dire, horrid cruelty.
“Answer carefully, Honoria,” he spat. “Your next words will determine both of your futures. I can make certain that loving you will be the worst thing that ever happened to that boy.”
She had to swallow over a lump of fear cutting off her available supply of air. “What—what do you want me to do?”
“I want you to never see him again. And I want you out of this house so I don’t have to be reminded of your ungrateful wretchedness daily.”
That was a blessing, she thought. She couldn’t wait to leave.
“You’ll marry William Mosby, Viscount Woodhaven, at the month’s end. I’ll post the bans this morning.”
“Woodhaven?” Her breath hitched on the word as she shrank from him.
“Yes, the Cresthaven and Woodhaven titles were created by Richard III some four hundred years ago. Our families fought for the Yorks together. We’re distant cousins. This would be an excellent match, under the circumstances.”
Nora had danced with William Mosby at a function some months ago. There’d been a neediness in their interaction she didn’t at all like. A strange sense of possession. Something frenetic and frankly, sinister.
“I’ll have to rely on Pru’s sweet nature and secondary beauty to secure someone higher than an Earl,” he groused as if to himself.
“But, Papa,” she pleaded.
“I won’t hear it.” He released her with a rough shove toward the door. “Get out of my sight. The next time I lay eyes on you will be at your wedding.”
* * *
Honoria didn’t sleep for days. She sat on the edge of her bed, staring at her balcony door, knowing beyond the shadow of a doubt that Titus would find a way to her.
On the fourth night, the latch clicked at one in the morning, revealing a Titus who looked as haunted and haggard as she felt.
It took every ounce of her self-possession not to fling herself into his arms.
“Nora,” he breathed as he tumbled into her room, reaching for her. “Nora, are you all right?”
She stood and shoved his hands away from her, turning her back to him so she didn’t have to look. “You need to go, Titus. You need to go and not ever darken my door again.”
“No. Don’t speak like that.” His fingers gripped her arms and pulled her shoulder blades against his solid chest as he buried his cheek into her hair.
She wanted nothing so much as to turn into his embrace, which was why she kept her back as straight as steel, her every muscle coiled with tension.
Lord, but she was cold. It felt as though ice ran through her veins rather than blood.
How could she do this?
“Come away with me, Nora,” he implored, his hand cupping at her cheek and nudging to turn her toward him. “I know you’re frightened, but we can be together.”
“I don’t see how,” she mourned, soaking in his touch, in the hope his voice conveyed. Hope she was about to shatter.
“I’ve secured a position in Doctor Alcott’s service,” he told her urgently. “Next year I’m taking the medical exams. I’ve rooms to stay in and a steady income. We’ve a future, Nora. Just pack a case and we’ll leave now.”
“How could you even consider a future like that would appeal to me?” she bit out, her pain at least grating through her throat to lend her voice a harsh rasp that could have been convincing as cruelty.
His fingers tightened, and she was glad she didn’t have to face him just yet, as she could feel him resist the astonished implication that it might not just be her father that would keep them apart.
“What are you saying?” he asked carefully.
“You think I want to live in a dingy room over Doctor Alcott’s surgery?” she asked, summoning all the starched, imperious snobbery her upbringing had imparted to her. “You want me to malinger there while you earn pennies and ignore me for your studies? You want me to raise babies and scrub floors and cook your dinner whilst you toil away?”
She would have done it. Anything to be freed of this gilded prison. Of the walls that closed in nightly and the cage of her parents’ strictures and expectations.
She would have done anything but destroy him.
His hands fell away from her and the lack of warmth against her skin stung like the most unrelenting winter’s wind. “I—I know it’s not what you were raised to want.”
God, she could feel him searching, could sense the frantic scrambles of his thoughts as he tried to catch up with a situation that was unraveling in a way he never expected. She wanted to hold him. To tell him what was in her heart. In her so
ul. To make him understand what they were both up against.
But she knew him. Knew he would fight for her because he was so noble. So true.
He was the man she wanted. A future with him was exactly what she desired.
“You wouldn’t have to serve me, Nora,” he said gently. “I would keep you fed. I would keep you happy. If you’d just give me a little time, I’d find a way to keep some semblance of the life you—”
“Stop!” She whirled on him, hiding her sob with a slap to his cheek. “You don’t get to keep me at all.”
The expression in his eyes pierced her with more pain than any she could inflict on him. The sheer bewilderment laced with betrayal. The pain.
And then, the hardening of his features as he began to believe…
He’d never know. He’d never understand what this took from her. She might be stomping on his heart, but she was rending her very soul from her skin and casting it into the abyss. She was killing herself in slow increments, knowing that the years ahead would be nothing but torture. That she would be the shell of a woman, haunting a body that no longer belonged to her.
Because her heart would be wherever he was.
“It was me who had you sacked,” she lied. “Our dalliance was a bit of fun, to be sure, but I always credited you with enough sense to know nothing would come of it. And when we were found out due to your recklessness, it became more of a bother than it was a diversion. And so, I think it best we end things here.”
To her astonishment, he didn’t give up. “Nora, this isn’t you! Tell me what’s happened.”
“I’m getting married.”
Her words had more effect on him than her physical slap. He flinched, then froze, his body becoming unnaturally still.
“That’s right.” She notched her chin up higher. “I’m going to be a Viscountess, a small comfort, seeing as how you lost me a Marquess.”
His expression became thunderous. “You were glad when I stopped that—”
“Was I?” She shrugged. “Perhaps I didn’t feel ready then, to be a wife. But now…” Her gaze fell upon the bed where they’d made the sweetest love, so enraptured with each other it was easy to believe that no one else in the world existed. That they could overcome anything.
What fools they’d been.
And now they’d pay for it. She’d pay the most dearly.
His sharp intake of breath told her that her dagger had met its mark. That her sharp words had sawed through the invisible chord that seemed to link them together no matter where in the world they stood. All she had to do was make certain the link was severed forever.
That she smothered all hope.
“Don’t make a fool of yourself by doing something so pathetic as begging, Titus,” she said with all the frost threatening to harden her from the inside out. She was surprised she couldn’t see her breath as she uttered the cruel words she’d learned from her father. “I can no longer stand the sight of you.”
He stood looking at her as if she’d shot him, his features a mélange of denial and rage, before they, too, smoothed out into the cool lake of unrippled inscrutability she was used to.
“Goodnight, Nora,” he said crisply before he strode to her door.
As she watched him go, she remembered wondering before if that sparkling, incandescent obsession, that cocoon of bliss and warmth in which they’d been ensconced, had been what true love felt like.
And here was her answer.
No.
This was love.
Sacrifice. Regret. Pain.
Love, the purest love, was diving into the lake of brimstone and hellfire, and drowning in it willingly, if only to gain freedom for the one who owned your heart.
Titus would have the opportunity to go to medical college. He’d heal people and find fulfillment and satisfaction in the worthy life he built, free of a powerful enemy like her father. He’d—no doubt—find a girl who loved him and could provide him with fat, cooing babies and happy chaos.
The idea stole her breath, it was so painful.
This was love.
And she was one raw, bleeding wound he could never heal.
A Sawbones in Southwark
London, 1880
“If you don’t hold still, I’m going to have to restrain you,” Dr. Titus Conleith warned.
“Sorry, guv,” said Mr. Ludlow, the dock worker currently perched on his table, gesticulating wildly for a man with sutures only half stitched. “But I just never seen any’fing like it, ‘ave I? Sir Carlton Morley, the bloody Chief Inspector of Scotland bloody Yard, crawling about on a Southwark warehouse roof. Like a fucking spider he was, shooting his rifle into the windows. Glass shattered everywhere, and as I looks up, one sticks me right in me bloody ‘ead.”
“Morley, did this, you say?” he asked. “Here in Southwark?”
“As I live and breathe,” Ludlow vowed.
Titus had met Carlton Morley when they served together in the second Anglo-Afghan war. He’d picked a bullet from the Chief Inspector’s thigh once upon a time, and in the years since, they’d shared a bachelor’s meal out at their club now and again.
They sometimes reminisced over how they had lost Kandahar and what a blood-soaked ordeal it had been. Then they’d taken Kabul, which had been even worse.
Often in the throes of haunted insobriety, they’d share a hackney to their respective homes and part, only to do it again the next time their schedules permitted.
An unceasingly decent bloke was Morley.
These days, Titus avoided the chief inspector as the man had recently married none other than Prudence Goode under rather scandalous circumstances.
For such a large city, London was certainly a small world.
It brought Titus no little amount of pleasure that the Baron of Cresthaven’s second daughter went to a man like Morley, who had been raised in a Whitechapel gutter.
He’d someday have to get the story from the horse’s mouth, when he could trust himself to sit across from his old friend and keep from inquiring about—
As he always did, Titus firmly redirected his thoughts away from Morley’s new sister-in-law.
Nora.
“What I would have given to stay,” the man sighed, leaning in conspiratorially. “As Dorian Blackwell, his own self, showed up just as I was being drug ‘ere by me mate, Stodgy Tim. It seemed to me like he and Morley ’us after the same poor ponce in the warehouse.”
“You don’t say.” Titus tugged the suture clamps tight to make certain that if Ludlow moved again, they’d make him uncomfortable. He absorbed himself with stitching the wound so as not to reveal the odd amalgamation of tensions swirling within him.
The Chief Inspector of Scotland Yard and the king of the London underworld after the same enemy? There were certain to be casualties. He knew Morley from the army. He knew Blackwell from the streets.
How they knew each other was anyone’s guess.
By right of their professions, alone, they were natural adversaries.
Titus worried for Prudence. A fondness for all four of the Goode girls had developed during his tenure at Cresthaven. He truly hoped that Pru—a child he remembered as sweet and mischievous—was unharmed. That Ludlow had the story completely wrong.
Was a war between the police and the underworld here at his doorstep?
The very thought curdled his stomach. How the streets would run red with blood if Blackwell and Morley truly went to battle. There weren’t enough surgeons in the Empire to clean up after such a nightmare.
Titus exchanged a meaningful glance with his nurse, a battleax in her thirties by the name of Euphemia Higgins. Effie’s hands were almost as large as his, and twice as gentle. She could just as easily carry a two-hundred-pound man as she could swaddle a newborn, and he’d follow her level head into a battle before most officers he’d served with. Beneath her nurse’s cap and frizzy blond hair, was a brain with enviable computation capabilities. Were she the one with a medical degree from Cambridge, she’d
rule the world and then some.
“So, you’re not certain if anyone else was wounded?” he asked Mr. Ludlow with increasing urgency.
Any chance at a reply was squelched by a commotion outside.
Most people who called at Titus Conleith’s Southwark Surgery door also lurked on death’s doorstep. Therefore, patients or their loved ones rarely knocked politely. They pounded and screamed. Begged for help. Sometimes, they begged for death. He’d treated people who bled or leaked from every possible orifice, starting at the eyes and concluding at the other end.
Having his door splintered at the hinges with one kick, however, was entirely new.
A good surgeon trained himself not to startle. Titus had been educated with explosions rocking the earth beneath him, and bullets whizzing past his ears, so he was—luckily for Mr. Ludlow—more imperturbable than most.
“The door was unlocked,” he blithely reproached Dorian Blackwell, the Black Heart of Ben More, whose boots thundered like the devil’s on the rickety old floors of the clinic.
Doors didn’t close to a man like him.
Not even Newgate could hold Blackwell, or so the story went. His suit, hair, and one eye were as dark as his heart, the other eye covered by a patch that almost hid the evidence of a vicious slash from his brow to his nose. The scar made his grim expression sinister as he surveyed the surgery with a critical frown.
“Someone’s been shot, Conleith. Which table?”
Titus relinquished Ludlow’s final sutures to Nurse Higgins, before marching past the one other empty examination table to pull back the curtains of the clinic’s makeshift operation room. He’d done everything from delivering babies to removing ruptured spleens and appendixes here. Though, he usually dug bullets out of criminals after dark, and it was barely five in the evening.
“Tell me Morley’s not on your heels, Blackwell,” he demanded, glad to be one of the few men in the world tall enough to glare down at the Black Heart of Ben More as he marched past him to the sink to ruthlessly scrub his hands. “If there’s a clash between the law and the underworld in my surgery, then you can find someone else to stitch up your army of reprobates and degenerates in the middle of the night; do I make myself clear?”
Courting Trouble Page 6